‘Be a guest?’ she said. ‘In your home?’
Belatedly, my common sense began to rumble into gear as I imagined what Hugh would make of me sending strangers – nay, foreigners – to live in his house while I was out of it.
‘Can you sew?’ I said. ‘Or anything? You could help my maid, Grant. She’d love to quiz an honest-to-goodness Frenchwoman on the subject of clothes.’
Miss Beauclerc drew herself up a little and her voice shook as she answered me.
‘You think of me as a servant?’ she said. ‘Or worse, possibly a servant, if I can tell you that I am able to sew?’
‘You’re a working woman,’ I protested. ‘I don’t see why you should take it that way.’
‘My family,’ said Miss Beauclerc, ‘is of the most ancient and exalted line. The Beauclercs have been in the Dauphiné since-’
‘But they, my dear mademoiselle, have disowned you,’ I said. ‘And you were a schoolteacher, which is not so different from a governess, who is almost a servant. I’m sorry my suggestion offended you and I withdraw it.’
‘I am a scholar,’ she said. ‘I have a degree, from Grenoble. I wrote an article published in the-’
‘I am offering refuge, Miss Beauclerc,’ I said. ‘If you cannot sew then my maid and my husband will both wonder what you are doing there. I’ve done it myself before now, you know. Pretended to be a servant to earn my place in a household where I needed to be.’
She stared at me and breathed rather hard while she thought it through.
‘I can sew,’ she said at last. ‘And I can embroider too and even make lace, if I have to. Thank you.’
One did not wear much in the way of embroidery any more, thankfully, but if that was her handiwork pegged out in the farmhouse garden then her place in Grant’s heart was assured, for my maid deplored modern, factory-sewn underclothes above all things and her distress at my thrift in banning the beautiful garments I used to order by the dozen before the war had been piercing. They had been made by silent nuns somewhere in the Alps, and if my geography were not deserting me Grenoble was near enough the Alps to put a smile on Grant’s face that might last until Christmas.
‘I shall return after nightfall with your luggage,’ I said, ‘if you’ll tell me where you think it might be.’
On my way back to St Columba’s again I stopped at the harbour and shook my head in shame to see the little hut with its painted sign: Fishing & touring boats for hire. By the hour & by the day. Enquire within.
Knocking on the door, I roused an ancient mariner with a leathery purple complexion and a demeanour which made the driver of the railway station dog-cart appear like the doorman at the Savoy.
‘Aye?’ he barked at me from around his pipe, glaring out of small, red, swimming eyes. ‘What do ye want? I’m in no mood for women today.’
‘A question for you,’ I said, taking a step back away from the combined exhalation of tobacco and whisky. ‘Did you rent a boat to a young lady on Saturday past?’
‘Aye!’ he bellowed, bridging the distance between my nose and the fumes. ‘And if you’ve come wi’ a pack o’ excuses fae the besom, ye’ll can get straight back and tell ’er fae me that she’s a wee b-’
‘Before you say something you might come to regret,’ I said, ‘let me assure you I have no idea where the lady went to and I had no advance notice that she was going to steal your boat.’ My plain speaking mollified him somewhat, and his next speech was grunted rather than boomed.
‘One pound ten shillings and sixpence she paid me,’ he said. ‘And she owes me another fifteen guineas b’now.’
‘That seems a little steep for a week’s boat rental,’ I said.
‘That’s a fine, no’ the rent,’ he said.
‘Have you reported the matter to the police?’ I asked. ‘Or the coastguard?’
‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘Well, no’ just yet, like.’ Which I took to mean that he feared a report would lead to a return and the mounting fine would then stop accruing. He preferred, I surmised, to fester and whinge and think of the total growing greater every day.
‘I take it you had a proper contract?’ I said. He nodded. ‘Might I see it?’ He nodded again and, reaching behind him into the hut, he unhooked a board from a nail beside the door and showed it to me.
There on the yellow form, as large as life, was her signature: F.D. Lipscott. While I stared at it, a crabbed and yellowed finger threaded in under my arm and tapped the form, the thick black nail – hideous to behold – like a scarab.
‘Late fees,’ he said. ‘All set oot there and she’s got a copy o’ it.’
‘Nevertheless I think you should tell the coastguard,’ I said. ‘And the local bobbies too.’ I thrilled to think of Sergeant Turner’s blush when he realised as I had that Fleur had got clean away from under our noses and that all the jostling boats in the harbour, their chugging engines, the snap of the dinghies’ sails and the clink of the painters had not jogged our brains at all in two long days.
8
‘You are a brick, Miss Gilver,’ said a guileless child by the name of Jessie or Tessie or possibly Bessie, over dinner. ‘I’ve had the most enormous crush on Rob Roy Macgregor since I was a tiny child.’
‘How can you have a crush on someone in a book?’ said another. There were general snorts of derision from all around her and one dainty little miss went as far as to roll up a piece of bread into a missile and throw it at her.
‘Petra lives for chemistry,’ one of them explained to me. ‘She’d only have a pash for-’
‘Mendel,’ said a child at the end of the table, provoking gales of laughter. Petra was unperturbed.
‘Gregor Mendel was a biologist,’ she said. ‘You mean Mendeleev. Now, the fascinating thing about Mendeleev-’
‘Oh, shut up!’ said Bessie or Nessie, as Petra underwent another hail of bread pellets.
‘Girls, really,’ I said, a little too mildly and a little too late. I was watching out of the corner of my eye in case one of the real mistresses were about to storm over and effect a coup.
I had decided I could not justify more time spent on the sixth formers, who had told me all they were ever going to, and I had swapped places with Miss Christopher. These little ones, however, were so much more boisterous at table than they had been in the classroom and so very much more boisterous than Stella and her crew, unfettered as they were by any desire to be thought languid, that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. And we were only at the soup.
‘I like David Copperfield,’ said another.
‘Or George IV,’ said the first bread thrower. ‘From that history book The Maid used to use. He always seemed like great fun.’
‘Ugh! Angela, you’re horrid even to say it as a joke. George IV with all that clay in his hair and never bathing. You’d be sick.’
‘Girls, really, please,’ I said. ‘No more talk of pashes and crushes.’ Was I ever this frivolous, I wondered? Certainly not in front of grown-ups.
‘Oh, Miss Gilver, don’t get like Juliet!’ said Petra. ‘All that great sweep of literature and she wouldn’t let us read a word that would give her broken heart a pang.’
‘Silly little girls,’ I said. I drank some soup and while I did their words caught up with me. ‘What broken heart?’
‘Oh Romeo, Romeo!’ said a pair of them in chorus. ‘Of course she had a broken heart. She displayed all the symptoms – solitary walks, pale cheeks, endless trips to church even when there wasn’t a service. We think he must have died, don’t we, girls? She was too woebegone for someone who’d been jilted.’
‘Stop it, you dreadful children,’ I said. Of course, the exasperation was all an act; I could not wait for dinner to be over and for Alec’s expected telephone call to ask him what he thought of the theory. Slowly, I became aware that the girls were giggling in that stifled way which only produces more giggling than if they had let their laughter go. Clearly they could tell that I was thinking over their words in a most undignified way.