‘I’ll see you in the lobby at nine forty-five.’
She carried a small duffel bag and wore jeans, a white shirt with a thin anorak looped around her shoulders, her blonde hair in a ponytail under the bill cap, confident without any make-up, and Jordan thought she looked good enough to eat and hoped he would be doing just that very shortly. He definitely wouldn’t be moving on soon. He’d ordered a hotel car rather than bother with the hired Renault, pleased to see that the previously tipped crew of two men and one woman were already waiting for their arrival, the catamaran open and ready to sail.
As they cleared the marina on engine Alyce said, ‘It’s time I knew where we’re going.’
‘To see the cell in which the man in the iron mask was actually held,’ announced Jordan. Her reaction was exactly the same as that of the two other women – one English, the other Australian ’ he’d taken on the same trip, hopefully this time with the same uncomplicated result of the previous two.
‘ What! ’
‘Alexander Dumas’s story is based on fact. One of the fictions was that the mask was iron. It wasn’t. It was black velvet.’
‘I can’t believe what you’re telling me!’
The catamaran cleared the immediate harbour and the sails billowed out above them. Jordan said, ‘Why don’t you relax in the webbing between the hulls?’
‘Because I want you to tell me what you’re talking about! It’s not really true, is it?’
‘Totally true. What no one has ever established is his real identity, although he’s buried as “M de Marshiel”. He was a state prisoner, of Louis XIV. For forty years he was held in jails all over France. He died in the Bastille in November, 1703. Whenever he was moved, from jail to jail, he had to wear the velvet mask to prevent anyone ever recognizing who he really was…’ Jordan waved his hand beyond her. ‘And one of those prisons was on the Ile St Marguerite, where we’re going.’
Alyce swivelled to look at the undulating smudge on the horizon. ‘We’re going to see the actual cell?’
‘The actual cell,’ echoed Jordan. It was going to work. It always had.
‘I don’t believe it!’ she said again.
‘You can use your schoolgirl French to read the memorial plaque. There’s a pamphlet, too.’
‘What horrendous crime did he commit, yet escape execution?’
‘No one knows that, either. There’s a lot of legends. One is that he was the Due de Vermandois, an illegitimate son of Louis, although on the face of it that’s an extreme way to treat your own son. In his book, if you remember, Dumas copied Voltaire in suggesting the man was an illegitimate elder brother of Louis, fathered by Cardinal Mazarin. There’s also a lot of historical insistence that he was a Count Mattiolo, a minister of the Duke of Mantua, who tried to trick Louis during diplomatic negotiations and was punished with a totally unknown and unrecognized living death.’
Alyce shuddered. ‘Kept locked up for forty years!’
‘A non person for forty years, someone whose face was never again seen except by his jailers: there’s even a story that he had to wear the mask before he was given food, so that even the jailers wouldn’t know what he looked like. If he defied them and refused to put it on, he wasn’t fed.’
Jordan thought she was remarkably agile, disembarking at the island, as she had been boarding the catamaran. She slowly read the memorial plaque and collected the pamphlet, and in the bare cell, which was very cold compared to the outside near midday heat, she shuddered again several times.
‘Whatever he did, he didn’t deserve what was done to him,’ she insisted.
‘It had to be bad.’
‘It doesn’t make any difference.’
By the time they returned to the anchored catamaran the crew had erected a sun awning. Alyce didn’t refuse the champagne but stopped at the second glass of Chablis and didn’t need any urging to eat the lobster with her fingers. They let the strongest heat go out of the day before swimming off the port fin, Jordan delaying his climb back on to the boat because of his momentary and too obvious excitement at seeing her, surprisingly unashamed, in the briefest of bikinis. When they got back to Cannes she said she wanted to walk back rather than call for the hotel car or a taxi, and did so almost immediately taking his hand, moving her fingers over his. She said she wasn’t hungry when he suggested dinner but that the sea air had tired her and that she thought she’d go directly to bed.
‘But not alone,’ she added.
Jordan thought it was far more exciting than Ghilane might have made it discovering that Alyce was indeed a natural blonde. And very eager and proud to prove it.
They checked out of the Carlton together the following morning, Alyce leaving the American Express office in Cannes as her forwarding address for any mail and, despite the inevitable traffic congestion on the meander to St Tropez, once they got off the autoroute they managed to get to the Residence de la Pinade and their comer tower room in perfect time for lunch on the sea-bordering terrace, even after he’d organized the necessary safe deposit box. Held by the excitement of discovery they spent the afternoon in bed in fresh exploration and decided they didn’t want the additional exertion of walking into the town in the evening. Nor to eat anything other than each other. She didn’t enjoy the following day’s bustle of the town or the clutter of polished Harley Davidson motorcycles looped like a necklace around the harbour edge so they escaped by taxi over the hill to Pampalon Plage, and the Tahiti restaurant, the first of several they visited over succeeding days – judging the Tahiti their favourite – except for the day Jordan chartered another yacht, traditionally hulled this time, to sail the coastline to the car-free lies de Porquerolles. That was the day – or rather the night, as they lay side by side, naked, recovering from their lovemaking – that Alyce suggested extending her vacation by another week and Jordan said he thought she should tell him about the status of her marriage.
‘There isn’t one,’ she replied. ‘Status or any longer a marriage. That day we met? The envelope? It was divorce papers I couldn’t wait to sign.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t…’
‘It’s not important,’ she said, dismissively. She looked steadily at him across their table. ‘Mad at me?’
Jordan hesitated, searching for the right response. ‘Tit for tat, to balance your betrayal?’
‘Something like that. In fact exactly that.’
‘Why should I be mad?’
‘I used you.’
‘You didn’t make any secret about being married.’
She smiled. ‘I started out feeling a shit, guilty I guess on several levels. I don’t any more. I feel great.’
‘So do I.’
‘No hang-ups, no regrets?’
‘No hang-ups, no regrets.’
‘What about my extending for an extra week?’
‘It sounds good.’
They made their way slowly back along the coast, stopping at Cagnes and Le Saint-Paul and on the night before her flight from Nice stayed at the Hermitage in Monte Carlo and gambled in the high stakes room in the casino, where Alyce won?1,200 to his?2,000.
As they left the caisse, Jordan carefully pocketing the French certificate recording his winnings, Alyce said, ‘What’s the benefit of that?’
‘In England gambling winnings aren’t taxable. This is proof of where the money came from.’
‘It makes you sound very rich.’
‘It’s the law. I always try to obey the law,’ said Jordan.
At the airport the following morning Alyce said, ‘It’s been great. You’ve been great. Everything’s great.’
‘There’s been a lot of times we’ve thought and spoken in echoes, like now.’
‘Best I don’t offer my New York address?’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Nor mine in London to you.’ He hadn’t intended to anyway. ‘Keep safe and stay happy.’
‘And you.’
They didn’t kiss goodbye. He stood watching her go through the departure gates. Alyce didn’t turn as she did so. Jordan stayed that night at the Negresco and the following day brought forward his return flight to London, deciding as the plane climbed out over the sea that it had been his best vacation yet. But that it was time to get back to work and briefly – although profitably – be someone other than Harvey Jordan.
