Payne said. ‘Jolly old-fashioned, even then. I mean, it took place between the swinging ’60s and the raucous ‘70s. It was a rather self-conscious throwback to a previous age – la belle epoque, no less. The Beatles or the Rolling Stones might not have existed – or for that matter Johnny Halliday. 1968 Paris might never have happened.’
‘After the concert we went to see Corinne in her dressing room,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘It was filled with flowers, remember, Hughie? Some of the bouquets were as tall as Corinne!’
Payne nodded. ‘There was a highly charismatic friendly giant sitting there with her, smoking a big black cigar. He gave us champagne. He couldn’t have been anything but American. That was the great Mr Lark.’
‘It was Mr Lark who groomed Corinne for stardom,’ Lady Grylls explained. ‘The urchin hairstyle by Elrhodes, which became her trademark, was his idea – the tricolour dresses too. He organized all Corinne’s domestic and foreign tours and, generally, took charge of her life.’
‘Corinne drank nothing but camomile tea sweetened with honey. She was eating caramelized almonds out of a cellophane bag,’ Major Payne went on. ‘She ate like a little bird…’
‘I think you must have fancied her,’ Antonia said.
‘She was wearing a high-collared blue dress with white cuffs and a red bow at the throat. She was bourgeois respectability and wholesomeness personified. She was perfectly polite, in a monosyllabic kind of way. Extremely shy. She kept leafing through a book called The Language of Flowers. No coquettish toss of the fringe, no calling eye, no provocative laugh. In fact there was more than a whiff of the convent girl about her. I keep telling you, my love – not my type.’
‘Quite unlike her mamma,’ Lady Grylls said with a frown. ‘Ruse, you see, couldn’t have been more different.’
There was a pause. Again, Antonia was aware of a tension.
‘Aunt Nellie and Corinne’s mamma went to school together,’ Payne explained chattily. ‘They were the greatest of chums.’
Lady Grylls said that they had been to two schools together. Lady Eden‘s, then St Mary’s Ascot. At one time they had been inseparable. ‘Heaven knows why. We had so little in common. A case of opposites attracting, I suppose. Consider. I was pink, podgy, plain and placid. Ruse – her real name was Rosamund – was strikingly beautiful, wildly temperamental and extravagantly romantic. She had almond-shaped eyes and a touch of the tar- brush about her. I believe I had a crush on her for a bit.’
‘Something of a rebel, weren’t you, darling?’
‘St Mary’s was a terrible place – impossibly moralistic and repressive – consequently I rebelled, yes. One of my schoolmistresses, I remember, called me a force for anarchy. Nobody would have thought it, looking at me.’ Lady Grylls paused. ‘I stole sulphur from the chemistry lab to make stink bombs. I read The Virgin and the Gypsy at night, by torchlight, under the sheets… You know the scene where Yvette meets the gypsy and he knows at once that she is a virgin?’
‘I know the scene.’ Antonia nodded. Her husband shot her a startled look.
‘Oh, I used to get such a kick out of it! I knew several Mae West songs by heart – some unspeakably dirty ones. I used to spread rumours concerning the proclivities of our gym mistress. Well, we were all sex-mad and impossibly knowing. Ruse was particularly keen on the chaps and she used to tell everybody she was having a tempestuous affair with a guardsman. She also claimed she had Ethiopian blood in her. She was an incorrigible fantasist – a terrible liar, in fact. But she almost always managed to be extremely convincing.’ Lady Grylls stubbed out her cigarette.
‘Is that why you called her Ruse?’ Payne asked. ‘Because of her penchant for porkies?’
‘I suppose so. She got the Ethiopian idea from a book – some legendary Ethiopian saga. Had a snake in the title. What was it? Cobra something?’
‘Kebra Nagast. The legendary Ethiopian saga.’
‘Yes. Goodness, Hughie, how do you find the time? You mustn’t allow him to read so much. Saps a man’s energy,’ Lady Grylls told Antonia. ‘That’s what Hughie’s uncle used to say. Rory never read a novel in his life. He started a Dornford Yates once and it nearly killed him… Incidentally, has Hughie taught you to ride yet?’
Antonia answered that he had – but she had been hopeless.
‘You weren’t too bad.’ Payne kissed her. He turned towards his aunt. ‘Tell us more about Ruse, darling.’
‘Well, her people were frightfully conventional. Her father was a stockbroker, her mother played bridge. They lived in a mock-Tudor house in Kettering. Extremely well off – her father had made a fortune on the Stock Exchange – but frightfully conventional. Ruse despised them, rather. I became Ruse’s confidante when she fell in love with le falcon noir. That was the name we had for the Frenchman who was eventually to become Corinne’s father. Franglais, you know.’
Lady Grylls paused and her eyes narrowed. ‘His name was Francois-Enrique. He was much older than us, at least twenty years older. Tall, terribly good-looking, in a dark, brooding way. Yellow-grey eyes. His nose did resemble a beak and he wore a long, black coat with a scarlet silk lining. He was a prosperous French businessman who had divorced his English wife. I was there when Ruse first met him, you see.’
‘Where did you meet?’
‘At an Ascot tea shop. He chatted her up. Started talking about the difference between French patisserie, English cakes and American cookies – of all the unpromising chat-up lines! Ruse was smitten. She went very white. They started meeting regularly and she dragged me along with her, as some sort of chaperone. We used to play truant, so that we could go and meet him. One weekend, I remember – light, Hughie.’ Lady Grylls had taken another cigarette from the pack. Her cheeks had turned pink. ‘One weekend he got us on a plane and flew us to Paris where he gave us dinner at Maxim’s and took us back later that same night. It was a magical experience.’ She inhaled deeply and shut her eyes. ‘Extraordinary man.’
Payne gave her a sly look. ‘You were in love with him too, weren’t you?’
Lady Grylls’s eyes remained inscrutable behind the thick lenses. ‘As a matter of fact I was. I too was smitten… Le falcon carried a whiff of danger about him. There was something indefinably wrong about him. The kind of man my father called “a bad hat” and warned me against. That only added to his attraction. I remember being consumed with jealousy for quite a bit, resenting Ruse’s success, really hating her. Anyhow. He courted her and we were snapped by photographers at all sorts of places. I mean they -’ Lady Grylls corrected herself with a laugh. ‘Wishful thinking^! They were snapped by photographers. Ruse and le falcon were so glamorous, so photogenic. The photos appeared in the Illustrated London News – in the Tatler and so on. I used to cut them out and paste them in my scrapbooks.’
‘Golly. I used to love Aunt Nellie’s scrapbooks.’ Payne smiled reminiscently. ‘The Aga Khan and a mystery blonde. Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend. The Duchess of Argyll and a mystery man. The young Queen and a horse.’
‘Ruse and le falcon got married and went to live in Paris,’ Lady Grylls went on. ‘They had Corinne in 1948. They discovered common ground in gambling. Both were inveterate gamblers. They went to places like Monte Carlo. They became regulars at the casinos. They played roulette, blackjack and chemin de fer. They made pots of money, but the tide turned and they lost what amounted to a fortune. Le falcon then landed in the soup – had a brush with the law, a pretty serious one, I dare say. He was suspected of what they call financial impropriety – of embezzlement on a large scale – of having cheated his firm’s clients out of millions and millions of francs. Something on those lines – though they could prove nothing. Ruse adored him and she stuck with him. They were made for one another.’
‘Did they love Corinne?’
‘Hard to say. Well, they didn’t make any fuss over her. They went picnicking en famille at the Bois de Boulogne, though I suspect their hearts weren’t in it. They were infinitely happier inventing systems for winning at roulette. I didn’t mind a flutter every now and then myself, but with them it was an obsession. They talked about little else at dinner.’ Lady Grylls paused. ‘Lethal gamblers – the term might have been coined with them in mind. I found that quite tedious, eventually. Still, I was quite shocked when they died… They died together, you know.’
Antonia looked at her. ‘They… died together? What happened?’
