The long summer days went by, slowly at first and then gathering speed, as days do which are filled from dawn to dusk with idleness. Grace spent most of the morning on the terrace outside her bedroom sewing away at her carpet. Charles-Edouard liked to see her doing it; her fair, bent head and flashing, white hands made such a pretty picture, but he decided that the day the carpet was finished it would have to be overtaken by some rather fearful accident, a pot of spilt indelible ink, or a spreading burn. Charles-Edouard was not one to cherish an object, especially so large and ugly an object as this was going to be, for reasons of sentiment.
After luncheon there was the siesta, and then Charles-Edouard and she would often drive down to the sea for a bathe. He had countless friends and acquaintances on the coast to whose villas they could go and from whose rocks they could swim, but Grace’s complete lack of suitable clothes protected her from a really social life, from dinner parties, and visits to the Riviera. For this she was thankful. She liked the sleepy existence at Bellandargues, though Charles-Edouard complained of its dullness. His crony there was Madame Rocher, who poured into his ears an endless saga, her own version of all that had happened to all his friends since he had last seen them in 1939. It sounded simply terrific to Grace, whenever she overheard any of it. Madame Rocher was bored herself, longing to be off to yachts and palazzos and villas at which various impatient hosts and hostesses were said to be awaiting her. But this year she had decided to obey her doctor, and to stay quietly at Bellandargues for at least a month. She kept herself amused by the overwhelming interest she took in all that happened in house, village, and neighbourhood. When Grace and Charles-Edouard went off on their bathing expeditions she was able to tell them a great deal about their hosts, and what they were likely to find in the way of a household.
‘Is it today you go to the English Lesbians? The nephew of the old one is there, I believe – if he is her nephew. They’ve just bought a refrigerator, what extravagance!’
‘The Italian ménage à trois? Have you explained to Grace that she only like boys of sixteen and they get them for her? An excellent cook, I hear, this year.’
‘Those two pederasts? Poor people, they are being horribly blackmailed by an ex-convict who lives in the village. But their rocks have never been nicer.’
And so on.
‘Your aunt sees life through a veil of sex,’ Grace said to Charles-Edouard when, for the third or fourth time, the company, represented to her by Madame Rocher as steeped in lurid vice, had turned out to be an ordinary, jolly house party.
‘And who’s to say she’s wrong?’
‘Well, I do think to call Mrs Browne and Lady Adela the English Lesbians is going rather too far. Anybody can see they’ve never heard of such a thing, poor darlings.’
‘Then it’s time somebody told them. More fun for them, if they know.’
‘Charles-Edouard! And that dear old Italian lady with her two nice friends and all their grandchildren. I can’t believe it!’
‘One must never entirely discount Tante Régine’s information on these subjects.’
One day when they were going to see an intensely pompous French duke and his wife, Madame Rocher hissed through the window of the motor at Grace, ‘Reds.’
‘Dear Tante Régine, come now!’ Even Charles-Edouard was laughing.
‘That family have always been Orleanists, my dear boy, and you very well know it. Impossible to be more to the Left.’
As they drove back in the beautiful evening light Charles-Edouard said, ‘Shall we go to Venice? You could buy some clothes in Cannes on our way.’
Grace’s heart sank. ‘I’m happy here – aren’t you, Charles-Edouard?’
‘The evenings here are so terrible,’ he said. ‘I can get through the day, but the evenings –!’
‘I love them,’ she said, ‘they must have been exactly the same for hundreds of years.’
She dreaded leaving Bellandargues, she felt she could cope with life there. The world that awaited them outside its walls was so infinitely complicated, according to Madame Rocher.
‘Very well,’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘if you like it so much we’ll stay until we go to Paris. I like it all right except for after dinner.’
Certainly the evenings were not very gay. The party repaired for coffee and tisane to a small salon where they chatted or played bridge until bedtime. Hot night noises floated in through the open windows. ‘Why do French ducks quack all night?’ Grace had asked. ‘Those are frogs, my dearest, our staple diet you know.’ Sometimes Madame Rocher played Chopin. It really was rather dull. Then Charles-Edouard discovered that she knew how to tell fortunes by cards, after which there was no more Chopin and no more gossiping. Grace was left at the bridge table while Charles-Edouard bullied Madame Rocher in a corner.
‘Come on, Tante Régine, to work, to work!’
‘But I’ve told you all I can.’
‘That was yesterday. Today some new and hitherto unknown factor may have changed the whole course of my existence. Come, come!’
Madame Rocher, completely good-natured, would take up the cards and go on to the end of her invention. ‘No wonder those five fortune-tellers said you would be killed in the war – they simply had to, to get rid of you.’
‘Once more, Tante Régine – do I cut in three this time?’
‘That’s it, flog the poor old horse till it drops.’
‘I passed by Madame André’s cottage this afternoon, and made her tell the cards. She is much more dramatic than you, Tante Régine – dark ladies and fair ladies – wicked ladies
