The plan was to fly to Charles de Gaulle, to meet up with Luc in Paris, spend a night at the Bonnard apartment in St Germain and then to make the eight-hour journey by car to the villa in Mougins.
‘Everybody remembered their passports?’ Rosamund asked, zipping an Eximious washbag into her suitcase.
‘Passport, passage, pesetas,’ said Jacqueline.
‘You say that every time we go abroad,’ Xavier groaned.
The relationship between Xavier and his more conservative, less reckless younger sister had always been fraught. They bickered and griped, steering clear of one another’s friends, going to separate parties, favouring different parents. Xavier was close to his mother but fought constantly with his father. By the same token, Luc favoured Jacqueline, whom Rosamund treated no differently to Maria or the family dog; that is to say, politely and patiently, but without evident warmth. Kite put her indifference down to the steely, compassionless DNA of the English aristocracy. Rosamund was beautiful, well-educated and extremely rich. She wanted for nothing except two healthy children and a dutiful, faithful husband. On the latter count, Luc had most definitely let her down. Brought up to believe that emotions should be suppressed at all costs, Rosamund rarely complained but seldom seemed unequivocally happy. What was important to her was to present an ordered, graceful face to the world, to acknowledge her boundless natural gifts and privileges without feeling guilty about them and certainly without showing them off in a way that might be interpreted as vulgar.
‘Maria’s going to come with us to Paris then stay behind while we’re at the house. You’re going to have a little bit of a holiday, aren’t you, Maria?’
‘Yes, Lady Rosamund.’
‘Shall we go then?’ Xavier’s mother glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Golly, our plane leaves in three hours.’
There were no problems at either airport. A chauffeur met the Bonnards at Charles de Gaulle and they were driven at speed into the heart of Paris, a city Kite knew only from books and films and which he found spellbinding at first glance. The distant Eiffel Tower, the grandeur of Notre-Dame, the café crowds gathered at outdoor tables seemingly on every street, were like glimpses of a dream world. It felt as though he was passing into a different realm, a new phase of his life comprised of great luxury, of secrets and glamour. He had grown accustomed to the privileges enjoyed by Xavier’s family, staying regularly at Rosamund’s country pile in Gloucestershire and twice at Luc’s chalet in Verbier. Even so, Kite was astonished by the splendour of the Bonnard apartment, a vast penthouse in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with views of the Seine, Invalides and the Jardins de Luxembourg. Rosamund explained that Luc’s family had bought the property shortly after the war. Most of the time it lay empty, though Luc travelled to Paris for work at least once every two months. Kite knew that Xavier suspected his father of running a French mistress – indeed he claimed to have found a bra jammed down the back of a Louis Quinze day bed in the drawing room. Luc had denied the accusation, insisting that the bra must have been left by a guest but urging Xavier not to say anything to his mother in case she got the wrong impression.
Luc himself was a man whom Kite respected but had always struggled to like. Tall and immensely good-looking, he had inherited a fortune and tripled it through various opaque business activities which Xavier feigned not to understand. Strawson and Peele had said that there were ‘question marks’ surrounding Luc, though they had not elaborated on this and Kite had been too busy concentrating on his training to pursue the point. Besides, the source of Luc’s wealth was of less consequence to him than the manner in which he treated his son. Xavier fought with his father not because he was a confrontational, moody teenager – quite the opposite, in fact – but because Luc always seemed to be in a permanent state of competitive disappointment with him. Self-confident to the point of arrogance, he would accuse Xavier of laziness, even of lacking strength of character, rarely showing him any genuine affection. To make matters worse, Luc had always been friendly towards Kite, generous as much with his time as he was with his money. On more than one occasion, Xavier had said: ‘Dad would much prefer you as his son’, a remark to which Kite had no reasonable answer other than to say that his friend was talking nonsense.
They arrived in Paris in time for a late lunch at Brasserie Lipp. Afterwards they walked across the Seine, passing the Pompidou Centre en route to the Louvre where I.M. Pei’s pyramid, built to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Republic, had finally been opened to the public. Rosamund declared it a ‘monstrosity’ but, to Kite, it was one of the most extraordinary buildings he had ever seen. He took photographs of the Louvre complex with his doctored Olympus Trip 35, not just to familiarise the Bonnard family with his new-found passion for photography, but for the more honest and prosaic reason that he wanted to preserve his memories of such a beautiful place.
While the others went to Café de Flore for tea, Xavier and Kite holed up in the Marais, self-consciously smoking Gitanes Blondes and staring moodily at passing girls.
‘You OK?’ Xavier asked.
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. You seem a bit distracted.’
Kite’s heart skipped a beat. Was his excitement and anxiety about what lay ahead already so obvious? The entire day he had felt as though he was inhabiting two bodies: his old cheery self, the trusted family friend; and a new person, the cunning, artful
