Grace had been so much looking forward to bringing Sigi here and watching him enjoy all the treats that she had overlooked the certain disapproval of Nanny.
‘Grace! I’m surprised to hear you say such a thing! Think of the Peter Pan monument, and the Dell! Goodness knows what he’ll pick up from all these children. Anyway there’s to be no question of him going inside that filthy-looking theatre, or whatever it is. I hope that’s quite understood, dear.’
‘Of course, Nan, just as you say.’
Nanny took Grace’s arm and said in a low voice, ‘Isn’t that Mrs Dexter over there?’
‘Grace!’
‘Carolyn!’
‘I was just going to ring up your house and see if you were back. We’ve come to live here, isn’t it lovely! I spoke to your papa on the telephone on our way through London and he gave me your number, but we’ve been so busy flat-hunting. Yes, now we’ve found a lovely one – only miles from you I’m afraid – up by the Parc Monceau. Is this Sigi? Seven, I suppose – he looks more. Poor little Foss will be rather young for him, but Nanny will be pleased to see you, Nanny, it will make all the difference. Which day can you come to tea? Then we must get together, Grace, and meet each other’s husbands! Isn’t it exciting?’
Carolyn Broadman was a lifelong friend of Grace. Their fathers had been friends and they had been at the same school. Carolyn was a little older and much cleverer, she was the head girl at school, revered by the others, many of whom had been passionately in love with her. She was tall, with curly, auburn hair and particularly piercing bright blue eyes. This colouring constituted her claim to beauty; her features were not very good, though her figure was excellent. She moved with more than the hint of a swagger, and Sir Conrad always called her Don Juan. She had certainly been one at school, coldly gathering up the poor little hearts laid at her feet and throwing them over her shoulder. Grace had not seen her since the war, but knew that she had married an enormously rich, important American whom she had met in Italy. As was to be expected she had become a female General in the war – were there such things as female Marshals she would, no doubt, have been one.
‘Come back to tea now,’ said Grace, ‘and meet Charles-Edouard.’
‘Darling I can’t. I’m just off to our Embassy where they’ve got a cocktail party for some Senators – I must pick up Hector at his office and then go home and change for it. I promised I’d go early and help.’
So they chatted for a few minutes more and then parted with many plans for meeting again soon.
‘Nice to see a clean English skin,’ said Nanny, as they wandered back across the Pont de Solferino.
Charles-Edouard was in the hall, evidently on his way out.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are the news?’
‘I took Sigi and Nan – run along up darling, it’s tea-time – to the Tuileries Gardens and who d’you think we met? An old friend of mine called Carolyn Dexter. Wasn’t it funny?’
‘Beautiful?’
‘I don’t know if you’d think so. Beautiful colouring.’
‘That means red hair I suppose. Not my type.’
‘And a wonderful figure, and she’s terribly clever. She’s married to a very important American called Hector Dexter.’
‘So, go on. What did she tell you?’
‘Well, they live up by the Parc Monceau. We must all meet some day soon.’
‘Go on. What else?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘Ha! So you stood together in the Tuileries gazing into each other’s eyes without a word?’
‘You do tease me. We chattered like magpies.’
‘But what about?’
‘She was just off to a cocktail party at the American Embassy.’
‘This is all very dull.’
‘Don’t be such a bully, Charles-Edouard.’
‘You must tell me stories about what happens during your day, to amuse me. Do go on.’
‘They have a little boy, but younger than Sigi, and Nanny is longing to go and meet their English nanny –’
Charles-Edouard’s attention was wandering. ‘Quand un Vicomte rencontre un autre Vicomte,’ he sang, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’ils se racontent? Des histoires de Vicomtes.’ He picked up his hat.
‘Are you going out?’
‘Yes.’
‘Back to tea?’
‘No.’
Grace had her tea in the nursery, that day and subsequently. Charles-Edouard was never in at tea-time because he now resumed an afternoon habit of many years’ standing, he visited Albertine Marel-Desboulles. She was one of the little friends, all brought up together, about whom Madame de Valhubert had wanted to warn Grace, and quite the most dangerous of them. She and Charles-Edouard had had the same nurse as children (passed on to Charles-Edouard’s mother by Albertine’s, since Albertine was older). When he was eighteen and she a young married woman they had had a short but enthusiastic love affair; this had simmered down to a sentimental friendship in which love, physical love at any rate, still played a part. Charles-Edouard found her more entertaining than anybody; she was certainly quite the reverse of dull, always having something to recount. Not plain slices of life served up on a thick white plate, but wonderful confections embellished with the aromatic and exotic fruits of her own sugary imagination, presented in just such a way as to tempt the appetite of such sophisticated admirers as he. She had endless tales to spin around their mutual friends, could discuss art and objects of art with his own collector’s enthusiasm as well as with imaginative knowledge, and, what specially appealed to Charles-Edouard, would talk by the hour, also with imaginative knowledge and with collector’s enthusiasm, about himself. She was an accomplished fortune-teller. Like a child who knows where the sweets are kept, Charles-Edouard always went straight to the Japanese lacquer commode, in the right-hand corner of whose top drawer lay packs of cards.
‘How many years since I have done this?’ she said, shuffling and dealing, her long, spidery fingers bright with diamonds.
‘You said I would
