The Millionaire Affair. Sophie Weston
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figure for the rent. Her new landlady had escorted her enthusiastically through the house—stuffed with an eclectic collection of furniture, ferns and objets d’art—the garden—as green and private as Lisa had imagined—and the local shops—everything from a late-night grocer’s to a bookshop which sold nothing except books about food and even smelled like a good kitchen. There was no doubt that Tatiana was delighted to welcome her. But she clearly thought anything to do with money was low and wouldn’t be pinned down on it.
‘Look,’ said Lisa, turning up at Tatiana’s door one evening with a bottle of expensive Rioja, some information from the local estate agent and an expression of determination, ‘this can’t go on. You need a contract and so do I.’
She threw down a printed document onto a walnut sofa table which gleamed softly under an art deco lamp.
‘That’s a standard form. I’ve signed it but run it past your solicitor before you sign.’ Something in Tatiana’s expression gave her pause. ‘You have got a solicitor?’
‘The family has,’ said Tatiana, without enthusiasm.
‘Fine. Call him tomorrow. The one thing that I haven’t put in is the amount of rent. Now, the agent gave me a range for one-bedroomed flats in this area.’ A handful of leaflets joined the contract. ‘Pick one.’
Tatiana wrinkled her nose disdainfully. ‘When I was your age, girls did not admit that they knew money existed. It was men’s business.’
Lisa was not deflected from her purpose, but she grinned.
‘Don’t wriggle. I’m not leaving until I’ve given you a cheque.’
Tatiana picked up one of the estate agent’s pages and looked at it with distaste. ‘That’s far too much. Anyway, that one’s got a separate entrance.’
Lisa had come prepared. ‘All right. There are monthly rentals for nine flats there. I’ve worked out the average.’ She magicked a slip of paper out of her jeans pocket.
Tatiana took it gingerly. Lisa laughed. She had seen her look at a snail on the garden path with much the same shrinking distaste.
‘Talk to your solicitor, or I’m moving out. And that would be a pity. This is a lovely place.’
The May evening was dark. From Tatiana’s first-floor window the shadowed sweep of trees and lawns looked like a magic landscape. Lisa sank into a 1920s chaise longue under the window and sighed with pleasure.
‘Wonderful,’ she said exuberantly. ‘I’ve never known anywhere like it.
Tatiana’s eyes were warm. ‘I’m glad.’ She opened the wine and poured them each a glass. ‘My family bought the house for me years ago. They thought if I could not, after all, make my living dancing, then at least I could rent out rooms.’
Lisa accepted the glass of ruby wine. ‘And did you?’
‘I’ve done both. Dancing is a hard life. Especially when you begin to age. These days I direct, but it was tough in my forties.’ Tatiana frowned. ‘My family still do an annual check-up, though.’
Lisa sipped wine, amused. ‘Who’s brave enough to do that?’
Tatiana sniffed. ‘Well, this year it will probably be my nephew, Nikolai. Couldn’t be more unsuitable. The last time I saw him he was wearing a beard and khaki camouflage gear. Still,’ she added grudgingly, ‘that was on television.’
‘What a glamorous family.’
‘Nikolai isn’t glamorous,’ corrected Tatiana. She had standards in the matter of glamour. ‘He’s an explorer. Writes books on the behaviour of primates.’
Lisa’s eyes danced. ‘A bit of a wild man, then?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ said his fond aunt. ‘Not a wild bone in his body. He’s always completely in control of himself.’
‘But?’ prompted Lisa, hearing the reservation in her voice.
‘He wants to control everyone else as well,’ announced Tatiana. ‘And then thinks you should be delighted that he has bothered to give you so much of his attention. Men.’
Lisa had no men in her family, but she had been battling her way through a man’s world ever since she first went to work for Napier Kraus. She could only sympathise.
‘Still,’ said Tatiana brightening, ‘he came over just before Christmas, so I should have another six months before he starts trying to interfere again.’
She was wrong.
Nikolai Ivanov was as reluctant to involve himself in his great-aunt’s affairs as she was to let him.
‘Oh, not London again,’ he told his grandfather.
They were walking up from the stables to the back of the château, gleaming like gold in the spring sunshine. The gentle slopes of the Tarn valley scrolled away like a medieval painting towards the river. The vine-clad landscape hadn’t changed since his ancestor had commissioned a picture of his home in the eighteenth century. It still hung in the gallery.
‘I hate London.’ Nikolai looked at the unchanging prospect and said with feeling, ‘Who’d be in a dirty, noisy city when they could be here?’
His grandfather smiled. ‘I thought London was where everyone wanted to be these days,’ he said mischievously. ‘I suspect Véronique Repiquet would have preferred to have her wedding there. She told me London was cool.’
Nikolai raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Véronique would! I, however, am thirty-six years old. I don’t chase fads any more.’
‘You seem to manage to have a pretty good time when you get there, however,’ Pauli said drily.
Nikolai did not pretend to misunderstand him. ‘Oops,’ he said, wincing.
More than one celebrity-watch magazine had published photographs of Nikolai at last year’s fashionable Christmas parties in London. He had been with a different woman in each picture, as his grandmother had pointed out acidly to her husband at the time. Pauli had just said it was nice to see that Nicki was getting over his brother’s death and enjoying himself again.
He had tactfully not told his wife about the picture which had fallen out of one of Nikolai’s Christmas cards last year. It had shown what looked like a student party in a cellar. The Countess would have been horrified by the sight of her grandson jamming at the piano, having discarded most of his clothes. Pauli, however, was more realistic, and even, as Nikolai knew, faintly envious.
‘There must be friends you would like to look up,’ Pauli pointed out now innocently. There had been a number of lively-looking girls in that picture.
Nikolai was dry. ‘Which particular friend did you have in mind?’
But his grandfather shook his head. ‘Matchmaking is your grandmother’s department, not mine,’ he said decisively. ‘All I want is to make sure that Tatiana isn’t being—er—unwise.’
‘My great-aunt Tatiana,’ said Nikolai, who had spent several strenuous hours with her and her accountant in December, and was not anxious to repeat the experience, ‘is a self-willed old woman. She has been barking for years. I should think it is a cast-iron certainty that she is being unwise.’
Pauli did not bother to deny it. ‘But you’re fond of her,’ he pointed out. ‘You wouldn’t want anyone to take advantage of her.’
Their eyes met in total mutual comprehension. Nikolai curbed his frustration.
‘You should have been in public relations,’ he said at last bitterly. ‘Or politics. All right, Pauli. I’ll go to London and check on Tatiana. What’s the story?’
Lisa did not see much of Tatiana over the next few weeks. She was busy all day; and in the evenings, proving to herself as much as her old friends that she had not left them behind