Encounters. Barbara Erskine
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more certain I was right.
We sat at a long elegant table lit with candles in silver candelabra, waited on by the villa servants. Beside me Nigel Godson was attentive. Without his glasses he was also very attractive for his eyes were a warm hazel and they were without doubt fixed exclusively on me.
At the other end of the table my sister was dressed in white which against her tan looked quite stunning and she in her turn had eyes for no one but my husband.
He was studying her. I knew that look; I had seen it often and in the beginning I had resented it bitterly as beauty after beauty disappeared into his studio; I still found it hard to believe he was studying his subjects dispassionately and that he treated men to the same intense scrutiny. Davina had sensed his interest at once and was responding with an arch awareness which bordered on flirtation, looking up at him under her eyelashes as her fingers toyed with her wine glass. I felt a quick surge of hurt anger at her as I watched.
I dragged my attention away from the cameo at the end of the table to find that Nigel Godson was speaking to me again. ‘Perhaps if your husband is going to work while he’s here you would allow me to drive you down to the city to explore a little?’ He smiled and I saw Maggie Farquer watching us through the candlelight from across bowls of stracciatella. On my left, sitting at the head of the table was Simon, a large florid man in his early forties. He was busy eating and did not appear to be listening. Nor had he noticed his wife flirting with my husband.
Maggie caught my eye and smiled. ‘That’s a splendid idea,’ she murmured. ‘I shall beg a lift down with you, Nigel. No –’ she made a deprecatory gesture with her hands. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to play gooseberry. I want you to drop me off somewhere on your way. A dear friend of mine has rented a house there for the summer and I’ve been dying for the opportunity to look her up. More than a friend actually, my erstwhile partner in crime.’ Her smile had not faltered but I sensed she was no longer speaking to Nigel and myself any more; she was watching Simon. I glanced at him as well. He had laid down his soup spoon and was sipping from his glass. ‘I believe you know her, Simon sweetie.’ She was speaking to him directly now. ‘It’s Sarah. Sarah Cummins.’
Later we took our coffee and liqueurs out onto the terrace. An enormous orange moon hung above the cypress trees and the darkness had the quality of rich stifling velvet. I felt lost and a little miserable. Tim was still talking to Davina. They were sitting on the rim of the fountain together and she was stroking the still water at its edge into gentle ripples with the tip of her finger. Jocelyn and Simon were talking together as they wandered up and down the garden smoking cigars, tiny points of burning light in the night. Whatever reaction Maggie had expected from her host at her announcement at dinner, Simon had obviously disappointed her. His bland face had remained unruffled and he had merely smiled, rather bored, at her disclosure. She was talking now to Nigel, discussing people I did not know, laughing, touching his arm. I was sitting with them but I was an outsider, an observer who did not even speak their language and before long I rose with murmured excuses and tiptoed up to bed. I must have been asleep when Tim came up, for I never heard him.
When I awoke the room was cool and silvery with early morning light. Tim was already up and dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt. He grinned when he saw me awake and came to sit on the bed beside me.
‘Hi. Did you sleep well?’
I stretched in the soft silky sheets, my forebodings of the previous night forgotten, and nodded, holding out my arms as he bent to kiss me. But a moment later he was sitting up again. ‘I’m going down to the cottage, Celia. I want to begin work at once. You don’t mind, do you? Make the most of the sun and get a lovely tan beside their pool.’ He ran his finger slowly down my breast.
I felt my nerves tighten. ‘You’re going to do a head of Davina?’
It wasn’t really a question. I already knew the answer.
He nodded. ‘She says Simon will pay for it for their anniversary and she can spare me a bit of time later this morning for a preliminary sitting so I thought I’d get straight to it.’
‘Tim …’ I reached out again and he caught my hands gently. Last night had been the first time we had not made love since our reconciliation, but what was the use of saying anything? It had all been said so often in the past. I just smiled at him, reached up to give him a kiss and lay back to watch him as he slung his denim jacket over his shoulder, winked at me and was gone.
Nigel Godson drove a British registration Lancia. I sat beside him in the front with Maggie Farquer, resplendent in a magenta jumpsuit, behind us, leaning forward with her forearms across the back of the seats as she directed us. She smelled faintly of gardenias.
We found it at last, a fourteenth-century farmhouse converted into a luxury holiday home. Sarah Cummins was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Elegant, ash blonde and charming she ushered us into the main room of the house and produced coffee and ricciarelli – delicious little almond biscuits – and it was only two minutes before I discovered that she knew Nigel as well as Maggie. It was an hour before Nigel and I could extricate ourselves from her hospitality and leave. I had not liked her; she was hard and I suspected clever, but with a hint of ice in her which touched us all. Even Maggie, who was effusive and voluble as she sat back on the Louis XVI sofa seemed a little uncomfortable.
Florence was hot and dusty and by mutual consent Nigel and I agreed to forgo a trip to the Uffizi which we had planned and wander instead around San Lorenzo and down the Via Calzaioli towards the Ponte Vecchio. I had begun to like Nigel. He owned a smart gallery in Chelsea dabbling in art and antiques and was exactly the sort of man Tim resented, but he was also kind – a quality conspicuously lacking at the villa – strong and quiet and nobody’s fool. And I sensed that his interest in me was real.
‘How well do you know your brother-in-law?’ Nigel asked suddenly as we examined some of the gilded leather-work on a stall. I glanced at him, but he had retreated once more behind those dark glasses.
‘I don’t,’ I said shortly. ‘I’ve only met him twice in my life before and one of those times was the wedding.’
He said nothing for a moment, distracted as we wandered on through piles of intricately woven straw baskets, passed silver shops, silks and linens, antiques … Then he returned to his probing. ‘Have you had a chance to speak to your sister at all?’
‘What about?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘Nothing special. I just wondered how she seemed to you.’
I looked at him. ‘I think she seems very tense,’ I said cautiously. I was thinking of the last I had seen of her, wandering barefoot across the lawns after breakfast in the direction of the cottage, dressed in a simple Saint Laurent floating dress with a chiffon scarf draped over her hair like a 1920s film star.
He had taken off his glasses and I could see his face now in the blinding sunlight of the hot street. ‘She’s not happy, Celia. I don’t think it’s women – you gathered I suppose that Sarah used to live with him – I think it has something to do with his business activities.’
‘You mean they’re questionable?’ I had a quick vision of Simon in close conversation with Jocelyn Farquer, the man who had not, since I had arrived in the villa, addressed as much as one word to me directly.
Nigel shrugged. ‘It’s not my field of course, but I used to know old Simon pretty well and I get the impression he’s up to something. Jocelyn and he are brokers of some sort in the City. Davina hates the Farquers, you know.’
I stared at him. ‘I got the impression that Maggie was something of a bitch,’ I said – I had also got the impression that Nigel disliked her intensely, ‘but I haven’t spoken to her husband. Not once.’
He laughed grimly. ‘You wouldn’t. He has no time for social niceties. He is one of those people who doesn’t want to know you unless you are useful to him.’
‘Touché!’ I laughed. ‘Why did they ask Tim and me to come do you think?’
Nigel looked down at me.