Марк Миллс – House of the Hanged (страница 8)
‘A good one?’
‘Good enough for Yevgeny and Fanya to take him on.’
‘That sounds suspiciously like a no.’
‘He’s of the wilfully modern school. You know the sort of thing . . . a bowl of fruit can’t be allowed to actually look like a bowl of fruit, it has to look like it’s been hurled to the floor, trampled by a battalion of the Welsh Guards, scooped up with a shovel and dumped back on the table.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Well, obviously Yevgeny and Fanya see something you don’t.’
‘Large profits, I suspect.’
Yevgeny and Fanya Martynov were an eccentric couple, White Russian émigrés who ran a thriving Left Bank art gallery in Paris devoted to the
‘They’ve put Walter in the cottage so that he can work in peace.’
‘Walter?’
‘He’s not as stuffy as he sounds, and he knows how to swing a tennis racquet.’
‘Have you played him?’
‘Four times now.’
‘Vital statistics?’
‘Won three, lost one.’
Lucy threw him a look.
‘Mid-twenties, although he looks older, probably because he’s on the portly side.’
‘Portly?’ said Lucy, unable to mask her disappointment.
‘Pleasingly so. Well-fed rather than fat. What else? He’s not tall, but you wouldn’t describe him as short . . . well, some might. And he still has most of his hair, which is dark and rather wiry.’
‘He sounds . . . intriguing.’
‘No he doesn’t, but he is. I’ve got to know him rather well over the past couple of weeks.’
Lucy brought the sloop about, falling in behind a forty-foot cruising ketch motoring towards the harbour mouth.
Beyond the breakwater, the wind piped up nicely, but Lucy seemed in no hurry to run up the mainsail. Her gaze was fixed on the ketch beating to windward at a fair lick, under full sail now.
‘I think that’s enough of a head start, don’t you?’
She cranked the winch, raising the mainsail.
The moment the ketch’s skipper saw them coming he began barking commands, not that it made any difference. The
‘Judging from his expression, I would say he hates you.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ grinned Lucy, her flushed face a picture of pure contentment. ‘The helm’s so balanced I could have tied off the tiller and taken a nap.’
They fell off, running dead before the wind to the eastward, making for Le Rayol. While Lucy put the sloop through its paces, getting to know its limits, Tom sat back and enjoyed the view.
There were any number of spots along the Riviera where the mountains collided with the sea, but for a short stretch east of Le Lavandou it seemed almost as if the two elements had struck some secret pact, Earth and Water conspiring together to create a place of wild, primitive beauty. The high hills backing the coast fell away sharply in a tumble of tree-shrouded spurs and valleys which were transformed on impact with the sea into a run of rocky headlands separated by looping bays. Dubbed the Côte des Maures – a reminder of a time when the Saracens had held sway over this small patch of France – the exoticism of the title seemed entirely appropriate. The beaches strung out along the shoreline, like pearls on a necklace, were of a sand so fine and white, the waters that washed them so unnaturally blue, that they might well have been transported here from some far-flung corner of the tropics.
‘Stand by to gybe!’ called Lucy.
‘Ready.’
‘Gybe ho!’
They both ducked the swinging boom as the stern moved through the wind, bringing them round on to a port tack run. Lucy steadied up the
It was a rhetorical question, and Tom smiled at her wonderment.
Only one thing was missing from the moment: Hector. He should have been there with them in the cockpit, or, as he often liked to do, standing steadfastly at the bow, snout into the wind like some canine figurehead.
Tom had spent the previous evening walking the twisting coast road either side of Le Rayol, checking the verges and ditches, sick with fear at what he might find. He pushed the memory from him, steering his thoughts towards a far more pleasing prospect: that Hector had finally found his way home, and that as they sailed into the cove below the villa he would come bounding out of the trees behind the boathouse on to the little crescent moon beach, barking delightedly.
It didn’t happen.
They tied up at the buoy where the rowboat was already tethered and waiting for them. The
‘So,’ he asked, ‘what do you make of her?’
‘What do you think I make of her! She’s the closest thing to perfection I’ve ever helmed.’
‘That’s good, because she’s yours.’
Lucy stared, unsure if she’d heard him correctly.
‘Your twenty-first birthday present. A week early, I know, but I couldn’t wait.’
Lucy was speechless.
‘She comes with free transport to England . . . I might even sail her back myself. Should ruffle a few feathers down at the Lymington Yacht Club,’ he added with a smile.
Lucy didn’t smile. In fact, her face creased suddenly and tears filled her eyes.
‘Hey . . .’ Tom moved to take a seat beside her, slipping a tentative arm around her shoulders. ‘What’s the matter?’
She shook her head as if to say that she couldn’t explain. He thought perhaps he’d made a big error, wildly misjudging the appropriateness of such a gift.
‘I don’t understand,’ choked Lucy. ‘Why me?’
‘Because I love you, of course.’
This set her off again, worse than before, and it was a while before she composed herself enough to ask, ‘How can
She was wrong. He had only ever spoken those words to one other person, a long time ago.
‘Does Mother . . .?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tom. ‘She knows.’
‘But she doesn’t approve.’
‘She thinks I spoil you.’
Lucy wiped at the tears with the back of her hand. ‘She’s right, you do.’
‘Godfather’s prerogative. Besides, I don’t have anyone else to spoil.’
He hadn’t intended it to sound so self-pitying, and her response threw him.
‘What about your lady friend?’
‘My lady friend?’
‘The one who lives in Hyères.’ He glimpsed the familiar spark of mischief behind the watery sheen of her eyes. ‘Leonard told me about her.’
‘That’s not like him.’
‘He was defending you. Someone at dinner said he thought you were a homosexual.’
‘Oh?’