"Well," said Raoul, "there's mine." He looked at me. "Do you drive?"
"No. But look, you mustn't think-I wouldn't dream-"
"You know," said Raoul to the ceiling, "she's pining to go. Aren't you?"
I gave up. "It would be heaven."
"Then take my car." He looked at his father. "You can spare Bernard to drive it?"
"Of course."
"Where is he?"
"Out. I sent him straight away to look for traces of this fool with the gun, but it's dusk now so he should be back. No doubt he'll be in soon to report… That's settled, then. Excellent. It only remains for me to wish you-what, Miss Martin? A pleasant evening, an evening to remember?"
I said, thinking of Philippe's face streaked with mud and tears: "I thought it was to be an evening to forget."
Léon de Valmy laughed.
Raoul crossed the room and opened the door for me.
"At eight, then?"
"Thank you. Yes."
"I'll see he's there. I-er, I gather we now speak French?"
I said, low-voiced: "I told him just now."
I didn't add that I was pretty sure my confession had been quite unnecessary. The Demon King had known already.
Punctually at eight the lights of the car raked the darkness beyond the balcony rail. Philippe was already sound asleep, and Berthe sat sewing beside the fire in my sitting-room. It was with a light step and a light heart that I ran downstairs towards mv unexpected evening of freedom.
The Cadillac was standing there, its engine running. The driver, a tall silhouette against the lights, waited by the off from door. I got in and he slammed it after me, walked round the front of the car, and slid into his seat beside me.
"You?" I said. "That wasn't in the bond, was it?"
The car glided forward, circled, and dived smoothly into the zigzag. Raoul de Valmy laughed.
"Shall we talk French?" he said in that language. "It's the language I always take girls out in. Construe."
"I only meant that I don't see why you should chauffeur me. Couldn't you find Bernard?"
"Yes, but I didn't ask him. Do you mind?"
"Of course not. It's very nice of you."
"To follow my own inclinations? I warn you," he said lightly, "I always do. It's my modus vivendi."
"Why 'warn'? Are they ever dangerous?"
"Sometimes." I expected him to smile on the word, but he didn't. The light mood seemed to have dropped from him, and he drove for a while in an abstracted, almost frowning silence. I sat there rather shyly, my hands in my lap, watching the road twist and swoop up to meet us.
The car dropped down the last arm of the zigzag, turned carefully off the bridge and gathered speed on the valley road.
He spoke at length in a formal, almost cool tone. "I'm sorry you should have had such a bad two days."
“Two days?"
"I was thinking about last night's episode on the bridge back there."
"Oh, that." I gave a little laugh. "D'you know, I'd almost forgotten it."
"I'm glad to hear it. But perhaps that's only because what happened this afternoon has overridden it. You seem to have got over your scare now." He threw me a quick glance and said abruptly: "Were you scared?"
"Today? Ye-es. Yes, I was. Not of being shot or anything, because that part was over before I knew anything about it, but somehow-just scared." I twisted my fingers together in my lap, thinking back to that heart-stopping point of time, trying to explain. "I think it was the moment when I heard the shot and there was Philippe flat on the path… the moment before I realised he wasn't hurt. It seemed to last for ever. Just the silence after the shot, and the world spinning round out of gear with no noise but the tops of the trees sweeping the air the way you hear a car's tyres when the engine's off."
We were sailing up the curve towards Belle Surprise. The trees streamed by, a moment drenched in our flowing gold, then livid, fleeing, gone. I said: "Have you ever thought, when something dreadful happens, 'a moment ago things were not like this; let it be then, not now, anything but now’? And you try and try to remake then, but you know you can't. So you try to hold the moment quite still and not let it move on and show itself. It was like that."
"I know. But it hadn't happened after all."
"No." I let out a long unsteady breath. "It was still then. I-I don't think I'll forget the moment when Philippe moved as long as I live."
Another of those quick glances. "And afterwards?"
"Afterwards I was angry. So blazing angry I could have killed someone."
"It takes people that way," he said.
"Because they've been scared? I know. But it wasn't only that, if you'd seen Philippe's face-". I was seeing it myself a little too clearly. I said, as if somehow I had to explain: "He's so quiet, Philippe. It's-it's all wrong that he should be so quiet. Little boys shouldn't be like that. And today was better; he was playing the fool in that silly maddening way children have, shouting rubbish and hopping about, only I was so pleased to see him like that that I didn't mind. And then… out of the blue… that beastliness. And there was mud on his face and he didn't want to stop to look at the trout and then he-he cried." I stopped then. I bit my lip and looked away from him out of the window.
"Don't talk about it any more if you'd rather not."
"It… gets me a bit. But I feel better now I've told someone." I managed a smile. "Let's forget it, shall we?"
“That's what we came out for." He smiled suddenly, and said with an abrupt, almost gay change of tone: "You'll feel quite different when you've had dinner. Have you got your passport?"
"What?"
"Your passport. I suppose you carry it?"
"Yes, it's-here it is. This sounds serious. What is it, a deportation?"
"Something like that." We were approaching the outskirts of Thonon now. Trees lined the road, and among them globed lamps as bland as melons made fantastic patterns of the boughs. "What d'you say," said Raoul, slowing a little and glancing at me, "shall we make a night of it? Go into Geneva and eat somewhere and then dance or go to a cinema or something like that?"
"Anything," I said, my mood lifting to meet his. "Everything. I leave it to you."
"You mean that?"
"Yes."
"Excellent," said Raoul, and the big car swept out into the light and bustle of Thonon's main square.
I am not going to describe that evening in detail though, as it happens, it was desperately important. It was then, simply, one of those wonderful evenings… We stopped in Thonon beside a stall where jonquils and wallflowers blazed under the gas-jets, and he bought me freesias which smelt like the Fortunate Isles and those red anemones that were once called the lilies of the field. Then we drove along in a clear night with stars aswarm and a waxing moon staring pale behind the poplars. By the time we reached Geneva-a city of fabulous glitter and strung lights whose reflections swayed and bobbed in the dark waters of the Lake-my spirits were rocketing sky-high; shock, loneliness, the breath of danger all forgotten.
Why had I thought him difficult to know? We talked as if we had known each other all our lives. He asked me about Paris and I found myself, for the first time, talking easily-as if memory were happiness and not regret-of Maman and Daddy and the Rue du Printemps. Even the years at the orphanage came gaily enough to hand, to be remembered with amusement, more, with affection.
And in his turn Raoul talked of his own Paris-so different from mine; of a London with which it seemed impossible that the Constance Butcher Home for Girls could have any connection; of the hot brilliance of Provence, where Bellevigne stood, a little jewel of a chateau quietly running down among its dusty vines…