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“Cold-blooded? Boring? Allergic to fun?”
“No. That’s not how I would describe you. But…serious. I feel like you don’t know how to put duty down and just live. For yourself. Just…be Leo.”
Leo said nothing. He leant down again and stroked Kipper, who sagged contentedly onto her side. One of her ears flopped inside out, and he smoothed it back again gently.
“What about Peony?” his aunt said.
Leo’s hand stilled.
“You’ve known each other a while. She’s very pretty. Lively.Fun. Have you ever thought—”
“Absolutely not. She’s my best friend’s sister.”
“I hardly see how that matters. But if she weren’t?”
“We are completely incompatible.”
A pause, during which Leo watched the rise and fall of Kipper’s tan and white side.
“Well, that’s a pity,” sighed his aunt. “I could almost have forgiven you for giving her my orangery if you’dlikedthe girl. As it is, I have no ideawhyyou did it.”
Pea
On the day after her argument with the Count, Peony woke in the biggest, softest, whitest bed she had ever lain in. The fresh light of a fine August morning came through the open window—she always slept with a window open and seldom closed the curtains—and highlighted in a shimmering haze all the items and furnishings that gave the room its feeling of natural serenity, from the stripped wooden floor to the antique pine furniture, to the Berber inspired fabrics and the vases of flowers and just, oh, everything that was lovely and in harmony with the world.
Peony knew she had the Count’s aunt to thank for the beautiful furnishings, but it was the man who invaded her thoughts, and made her sigh, despite her surroundings.
He was wrong. Of course he was wrong. But that was just because he didn’t understand the importance of art. He had never felt the world the way she felt it—the music of the wind in the trees and the simple elegance of a blade of grass and the hidden colours found in a river-wet stone…
Or maybe that was just ‘wishes and moonbeams’. She scowled and got up. Still in her pyjama vest and shorts, she went downstairs and through to the orangery where she stood for a moment, hands on hips, surveying her current painting.
It was a large canvas, about three foot wide and almost as tall, supported on a heavy wooden easel, with reference sketches and colour photos scattered on the floor all around. There were several large blocks of bright colour in the right-hand foreground of the painting and some suggestions of more muted shades taking shape behind.
Like most of Peony’s work, it was in the abstract impressionist style, a still life of a bowl of papaya and lemon and mango, with the Grumechen hills of Tanzania seen through a window in the background. It had been a hazy sepia-toned morning, two days before Pea left for Zanzibar where she would subsequently meet André.
Pea dragged her tray of paints towards her. Pastel pink hollyhocks swayed beyond the orangery’s glass walls. English songbirds called, their music coming loud through the windows the Count had opened yesterday. She had forgotten to close them. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained. What time was it? Seven, eight? He had probably already eaten his porridge. Had probably already gone for the run he went on every morning. Edward had always complained when the two men lived together at Cambridge that the Count had often completed his run before Edward even crawled into bed after a night out.
They were very different people. She and the Count were very different people too. For example, he was anarse.
She jabbed her brush into her paint. He was a pedantic killjoy. He was sarcastic and superior. And he thought she was a stupid child.
It’s a complicated situation…
She pushed his voice and his implacable gaze out of her mind and bent her head to her work, trying to bring a little of east Africa to the English Lakes. But the doorbell rang.
She put her brush to soak and went to answer it, forgetting she was in her skimpy pyjamas until she opened the door to the Count. His attention flickered over her with something like dismay, then he addressed the doormat at her feet.
“I made a list,” he said, with his usual disregard for greetings. “These are venues within a ten-mile radius that might be suitable for your exhibition.”
He handed her a piece of paper and now fixed his attention on an apparently interesting piece of wall roughly level with her head. “I can’t host an AFA fundraising event on my property without appearing biased to their cause. I hope you understand.”
Pea wanted to smile—for many reasons, not least the slight flush on his cheekbones, or the fact he was, as predicted, already dressed and wearing a crisp white shirt before eight in the morning. Mostly, she wanted to smile because they were still friends.
“Thank you, Count. I do appreciate it.”
He nodded and turned to go.
“The thing about art,” she called after him, “is that it is made to move people, to touch their hearts. By the end of my stay here, Count, I will have opened your eyes and touched your heart, I promise!”
