Lady Grylls shook her head. ‘Don’t tell me that anyone can put idiocies like that on the internet.’
‘Anyone can – and they do it all the time. Why don’t you try it sometime, darling? We are already connected. Who knows, you may even be able to get a good price for Chalfont on eBay.’ Peverel winked at his cousin. He reached out, took a piece of cake from the cake stand and started munching lazily. ‘Do you think I might have a cup of tea? Thank you, Antonia. You are the only one here who cares about me… Incidentally, Corinne Coreille also plays a part in the metrosexuality phenomenon.’
‘What is metrosexuality?’ Lady Grylls asked.
‘That, darling, is a subject you could introduce when you preside over the next session of your local Women’s Institute. Metrosexuality,’ Peverel explained, ‘is where straight men do things that are decidedly gay, like wearing salmon-pink shirts, putting on fake tan, having their eyebrows “done” and their nails buffed – as well as listening to songs from musicals and to Corinne Coreille. This last applies mostly, though not exclusively, to the Continent.’
There was a pause. ‘That all?’ Payne said.
Peverel took a sip of tea. ‘You want the extreme trivia as well? Corinne is allergic to cats. Detective stories frighten her. When she was a girl, she was passionate about playing poker with her grandmother. She displayed a distinct gambling streak, though in later life she was too busy to ever visit a casino. Her favourite toy was a glove puppet called Miss Mountjoy, a rather bossy governess-y character in a turban. Miss Mountjoy was forever telling people what to do or not to do.’
‘I remember Miss Mountjoy.’ Lady Grylls nodded. ‘I was staying with them in Paris once and Corinne followed me around the house with that damned puppet on her hand, saying, “You smoke too much. Smoking is bad for you. You must stop at once.” Earlier on Miss Mountjoy had told Ruse off for putting too much make-up on! Corinne was driving everybody potty. She was seven or eight. Long time ago.’
So Corinne does have an authoritarian streak, Antonia thought. ‘What about her more recent activities?’ she asked.
‘Well, in 1990 Corinne Coreille started slowing down and then there was a sudden five-year hiatus, when she simply disappeared from view,’ Peverel said. ‘That was in 1997, a month after she had the Legion d’honneur bestowed on her.’
‘I imagine her disappearance unleashed more rumours?’ Payne said.
‘It did. Hope this is not getting too tedious. That she’d become a lay nun in Jerusalem, that she’d got married to a lion tamer, that she’d died and been buried secretly, that she’d opened a florist’s shop in Dieppe, that she’d married a transsexual illusionist, that she was paralysed after a car crash and could only breathe with an oxygen mask, that she’d renounced all her wealth and become a nurse in a leper colony in Zanzibar.’ Peverel paused. ‘Well, Corinne Coreille resurfaced with a triumphant concert in Osaka, Japan, last November. Here are some pictures from the concert.’
‘What did I tell you? Unchanged,’ Lady Grylls wheezed. ‘And she’s wearing a Chanel dress.’
‘Are you sure this is a recent picture?’ Major Payne asked his cousin.
‘Well, yes.’ Peverel tapped the sheet. ‘Telephoto 2002.’
‘She looks no more than twenty-eight, thirty at the most. Look at her jaw-line,’ Antonia said.
‘One of my scouts does believe she’s had something major done at a Swiss clinic, though there’s been no confirmation of plastic surgery.’
‘Excuse me, m’lady.’ Provost’s voice was heard from the doorway.
‘I’m running out of cigarettes,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘Provost, would you be good enough to tell that boy of yours to hop on his bike, pedal to the village and get me the usual?’
‘Very good, m’lady.’ Provost lingered. ’Excuse me, m‘lady. Mr Jonson has arrived.’
9
Towards Zero
Having checked for any text messages from Griff, Eleanor Merchant switched off her mobile phone. It is only a question of time, she murmured.
So Chalfont Park belonged to Lady Grylls… Eleanor slowly ran her tongue across her upper lip. She was thinking about the call she had made minutes before the train had arrived at Waterloo. It was Lady Grylls’s butler who had answered. It was good to know the exact set-up. Lady Grylls. Fancy Corinne having such grand friends. Wrong number, Eleanor had said and rung off. Well, the more she knew about Chalfont Park, the better. Forewarned is fore-armed. She had heard her uncle, the General, say that on a great number of occasions. Eleanor had decided to conduct the whole thing like a military operation in a manner that would have made her uncle proud… Dear Uncle Nat. Ninety-six last fall but still going strong at his luxurious nursing home in Palm Beach.
Suddenly Eleanor Merchant had the feeling of having lived that moment before. She experienced a strong sense of deja vu… She was standing outside W.H. Smith’s at Waterloo, the grubby stole around her shoulders, her picture hat set at an even sharper angle, her yellow gloves on her hands, her brocade overnight bag at her side. She felt sure there was something French about her appearance. Well, when she had spoken to the butler earlier on, she nearly introduced herself as Madame la Duchesse de Saverini, an intimate friend of la chanteuse Corinne. That would have suggested that Corinne Coreille was on familiar terms with the highest echelons of French society, with personages whose ancestors went back to the halcyon pre-revolutionary days – to the ancien regime, no less! (Wasn’t The Laboratory’s subtitle L’ancien regime? Of course it was!)
Eleanor had no doubt she’d have been terribly convincing as a French noblewoman, but she had had second thoughts about it. She needed to be careful. The library at Chalfont Park almost certainly contained a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, and they might have wanted to check on her. They would have seen it was a bogus title and then they would have called the police. Eleanor nodded to herself in a satisfied manner. What a fine logical mind she had! How could anyone have ever suggested there was anything wrong with her?
Eleanor had a headache and just a touch of vertigo. Some twenty-five minutes before they had reached London, she had started counting telegraph posts and got to fifty-six. If I make it to sixty, Corinne will die, she had said to herself. As it happened, she failed to make it to sixty, but the physical effort of pinning her eyes on an object from a moving carriage, of swivelling her body round each time, had made her giddy.
What was that in her hand? A plastic cup filled with something the English called coffee. Eleanor had no recollection of buying the coffee and she wondered whether she might have picked up somebody else’s abandoned cup. This is a risk I am going to take, she thought solemnly as she placed four Solpadols on her tongue and washed them down with the coffee. She must have bought the Solpadol at the pharmacy called Boots, though again she couldn’t remember doing so. Boots, boots, boots, she recited. Old Kipling, of course. She had always preferred English poetry to American, Master Poe and Miss Emily Dickinson being the only exception…
There was something else she had to do. A map, yes. She was going to buy a map. She needed a map. She couldn’t proceed without a map. Then – a hotel. A hot bath followed by a little drink – a malt – no, nothing to eat – then a four-poster bed. A four-poster, Griff had said once, was the only bed worth sleeping in. Her original idea had been to get a room for the night at some unostentatious place in Bloomsbury, where she wouldn’t be noticed, but now that she had become la Duchesse de Saverini, nothing but the London Ritz would be good enough for her.
I am a woman of many parts, Eleanor thought. As she entered W.H. Smith‘s, she imagined she saw Griff standing beside one of the magazine racks, engrossed in a copy of Newsweek, but she was mistaken. It was somebody else – a stranger, but his hair, like Griff’s, was the colour of autumn leaves. How the poor boy started when she impulsively went up to him, placed her hand on his neck and tried to give him a kiss! Eleanor apologized at once and said she had taken him for her son.