“There,” she said, making a sweeping gesture with one hand. “Did I lie to you?”
“You were right,” he said. “Absolutely magnificent.”
“I’ll expect to See you up here with your easel first thing in the morning.”
“You’ll be disappointed. I always work from preliminary sketches, never from life.”
She had moved a few feet away, stooping to pick up a flower, and now she turned quickly. “Fraud.”
He took a small sketch-pad and pencil from the pocket of his corduroy jacket and dropped to the ground. “Stay where you are, but look out to sea.”
She obeyed him at once. “All right, but this had better be good.”
“Don’t chatter,” he said. “It distracts me.”
The sun glinted on her straw-coloured hair and her image blurred so that in that one brief moment of time she might have been a painting by Renoir. She looked incredibly young and innocent and yet the wind from the sea moulded the thin cotton dress to her firm young figure with a disturbing sensuousness.
Guyon grunted and pocketed his pencil. “All right.”
She dropped beside him and snatched the pad from his hand. In the same moment her smile died and colour stained her cheeks. Inescapably caught in a few brief strokes of the pencil for all eternity, she stood gazing out to sea, and by some strange genius all that was good in her, all the innocence and longing of youth, were there also.
She looked up at him in wonderment. “It’s beautiful.”
“But you are,” he said calmly. “Has no one ever told you this before?”
“I learned rather early in life that it’s dangerous to let them.” She smiled ruefully. “Until my mother died four years ago we lived in a villa near St. Tropez. You know it?”
“Extremely well.”
“In St. Tropez, in season, anything female is in demand and fourteen-year-old girls seem to have a strong appeal for some men.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said gravely.
“Yes, life had its difficulties, but then the General bought this little island and I went to school for a couple of years. I didn’t like that at all.”
“What did you do, run away?”
She pushed her long hair back from her face and laughed. “Persuaded the General to send me to a finishing school in Paris. Now that was really something.”
Guyon grinned and lit a cigarette. “Tell me, why do you always call him General?”
She shrugged. “Everyone does – except for Anne, of course. She’s special. When she married my brother Angus she was only my age. He was killed in Korea.”
She paused, a few wild flowers held to her face as she stared pensively into the past, and Guyon lay back, gazing up at the sky, sadness sweeping through him as he remembered another time, another girl.
Algiers, 1958. After five months chasing fellaghas in the cork forests of die Grande Kabylie he had found himself in that city of fear, leading his men through the narrow streets of the Kasbah and Bab el Oued, locked in the life-or-death struggle that was the Battle of Algiers.
And then Nerida had come into his life, a young Moorish girl fleeing from a mob after a bomb outrage on the Boulevard du Telemly. He closed his eyes and saw again her dark hair tumbling across a pillow, moonlight streaming through a latticed window. The long nights when they had tried to forget tomorrow.
But the morning had come, the cold grey morning when she had been found on the beach, stripped and defiled, head shaven, body mutilated. The proper ending for a woman who had betrayed her people for a Frangaoui. The sniper’s bullet of the following day which had sent him back to France on a stretcher had almost carried a welcome oblivion.
Nerida. The scent of her was strong in his nostrils and he reached out and pulled her down, crushing his lips against hers. Her body was soft and yielding and when she swung on to her back her mouth answered sweet as honey. He opened his eyes and Fiona Grant smiled lazily up at him.
“Now what brought that on?”
He leaned on one elbow for a moment and rubbed a hand across his eyes. Tut it down to the sea air. I’m sorry.”
Tin not.”
“Then you should be.” He pulled her to her feet. “Didn’t you tell me you were expected for lunch?”
She held on to his hand. “Come back with me. I’d like you to meet the General.”
“Some other time. I’ve arranged to eat at the hotel.”
She turned from him like a hurt child. He restrained a strong impulse to take her in his arms, reminded himself strongly that he had work to do – important work – and walked away. When he reached the top of the rise he hesitated and turned reluctantly.
She was standing where he had left her, head drooping, something touchingly despondent about her. The strong sunlight, streaming through the thin cotton of her dress, outlined her firm young thighs perfectly.
“Damn her!” he said softly to himself. “She might as well have nothing on.”
He sighed heavily and went back down the slope.
Mallory lay on his bunk in Foxhunter watching the blue smoke from his cigarette twist and swirl in the current from the air-conditioner. He’d had an excellent meal at the hotel in company with Owen Morgan, but there had been no sign of the Frenchman.
His mind went back again to his meeting with Hamish Grant at the house on the cliffs. There had been method behind the old man’s bullying, of that he was certain. He had been a soldier himself for too long to subscribe to the opinion that all generals were rather stupid, dull-witted blimps who spent their time either needlessly sending men to their deaths or over-indulging at the table.
Behind the worn, leather-coloured face, the half-blind eyes, was a will of iron and a first-rate brain. Iron Grant, who had force-marched his division through the hell that was the Qattara Depression rather than surrender to Rommel, who had led the way down the ramp of the first landing craft to hit Sword Beach on D-Day, was an adversary to be reckoned with by any standards.
And then there was his daughter-in-law. Mallory closed his eyes, trying to picture her face. There was a calmness about her, a sureness that he found disturbing. Even on the wharf at Southampton she had not seemed afraid. It was as if life had done its worst, could do no more. As if nothing could ever really hurt her again. It came to him quite suddenly that she must have loved her husband very much and he was aware of a vague, irrational jealousy.
He heard no sound and yet it was as if a wind had passed over his face and every muscle came alive and singing, ready for instant action. The lower step of the companionway creaked and he reached for the butt of the revolver under his pillow.
“No need, my friend,” Raoul Guyon said quietly.
As Mallory opened his eyes, the young Frenchman dropped on to the opposite bunk and produced a packet of cigarettes.
“We missed you at lunch,” Mallory said. “What happened?”
Guyon shrugged. “Something came up. You know how it is?”
“I certainly do. There’s grass on your jacket.”
“A fine day for lying on one’s back and contemplating heaven,” Guyon said brazenly.
“Not when there’s a job to be done.” Mallory opened a cupboard under the bunk, took out a bottle of whisky and two glasses and set them on the table. “Business and pleasure don’t mix.”
“On occasion, I’m happy to say that they do. Am I not supposed to be a fun-loving young artist on vacation?” Guyon poured himself a generous measure of whisky and raised his glass. “Sante.”
Slim-hipped, lean and sinewy, Raoul Guyon possessed that strange quality to be found in the airborne troops of every country, a kind of arrogant self-sufficiency bred of the hazards of the calling. While unaware of this in himself, he recognised it at once in the Englishman, but there was more than that. Much more. Mallory was the same strange mixture of soldier and monk, of man-of-action and mystic, that he had seen in the great paratroop colonels in Algiers. Men like Philippe de Beaumont. Strange, wild, half-mad fanatics, marred by their experiences in the Viet prison camps, for the time controlling the destiny of a great nation.