Robert Goddard - Borrowed Time

One other encouraging sign came in a telephone call which occupied Rowena for a whispered ten minutes in the hall. A boyfriend called Paul, she later admitted. “It’s nothing serious,” she added. But I couldn’t help suspecting her blushes told me more than her words.

I’d studied a framed photograph that stood on the mantelpiece while she was out of the room. It was of her and Sarah with their mother and couldn’t have been more than two or three years old. An unremarkable snapshot, casually posed. But even there, in Louise Paxton’s distant half-quizzical smile, you could read the tentative beginnings of her enigmatic end. From the shadow of which Rowena was at last emerging.

What shall I give my daughter the younger

More than will keep her from cold and hunger?

I shall not give her anything.

By June, I’d had a bellyful of Timariot & Small’s intractable problems and was in need of a break. To my surprise, Bella offered me one, in the form of an invitation to visit her and Sir Keith in Biarritz. I’d been too preoccupied to book any kind of a holiday for myself, so I accepted with well-disguised alacrity.

I went out as soon as I could arrange a fortnight’s leave and found the resort still hanging back from the tumult of high summer. Its white façades and terracotta roofs lined three miles of surf, sand and crumbling rock with dilapidated but undeniable dignity. Torquay with a Gallic swagger, if you like. And like it I did. Its empty dawn beaches. Its stinging salt winds. Its dazzling afternoons and languorous evenings. Its never obsequious air of being every man’s haven. And every woman’s too.

L’Hivernance was at the northern end of the town, where the Pointe St.-Martin and its lighthouse stood guard over the Plage Miramar. The villa had been built in the twenties for an exiled Chilean politician. Its site was sheltered but panoramic, its design plain yet boldly curvaceous, all peach-washed bays and balconies, with wide arched windows like the heavy-lidded eyes of some bosomy dowager. It was easy to imagine its first owner glaring out at the Atlantic as he’d once glared out at the Pacific, ruminating on the rights and wrongs of the latest coup in Santiago. Perhaps because he’d been afraid of political enemies sending agents in search of him, there was no entrance visible from the street. Just a doorless frontage commanding a prospect of the ocean, flanked by the sub-tropical foliage of the garden. A driveway, leading in by one gate and out by another, curved round to the rear, where access could be discreetly obtained. Or not, as the case might be.

The interior was altogether less discreet. High ceilings and broad staircases suggested a larger and grander residence than it actually was. Dudley Paxton had loaded its conventional comforts with assorted ethnographia collected during his African postings. His son assured me most of it was now mouldering in a museum basement in Bayonne, but plenty of ivory, beaten copper and bolt-eyed statuary remained, along with leopard-skin antimacassars and elephant-foot wastepaper bins.

What Louise had made of this gruesome clutter I couldn’t begin to conjecture. She’d evidently thought better of trying to impose her personality on the villa, however, contenting herself with converting just a couple of rooms to her vision of what it should have been. An airy pale-curtained boudoir with its own south-facing balcony. And a gallery at the back of the house devoted to a dozen or so Expressionist paintings. Not the best, of course. They’d always stayed in England. Latterly in a bank vault, Sir Keith told me. There were a couple of Ensors in the vault. And a Rouault, Louise had always believed, though it still awaited accreditation. The pictures left at L’Hivernance were strictly second division. Which was where the critical establishment had placed Oscar Bantock. So it was no surprise to find him represented by a pair of vividly tempestuous works. The Drowning Clown and Face at the Window . With an empty patch of wall between them where Black Widow may have been destined to hang. But about that Sir Keith was saying nothing.

Staying at the villa focused my mind on Sarah’s all too plausible theory of what had happened there in July 1990. I couldn’t ask whether it was true, of course. Bella and I had struck an unspoken bargain when I accepted her invitation. Her side of it was to avoid cross-questioning me about the Viburna fiasco. Mine was to play the part of a cultured but reticent relative whose presence reassured her new friends that her background in England wasn’t a discreditable blank. Hence, I assumed, the hectic round of dinner parties she arranged while I was with them. And hence the embargo on any expressions of curiosity by me about the first Lady Paxton-and the circumstances of her last departure from L’Hivernance.

But that didn’t stop me thinking. Or imagining. Slammed doors and raised voices echoing through the sea-lit rooms. Louise standing on the beach at sunrise, slipping a ring from her finger and hurling it towards the cream-topped breakers. Or sitting on the boudoir balcony, writing a farewell note to her absent husband. By the time you read this, Keith … I looked at him often when he didn’t realize he was being observed and wondered just what her message had been. If Sarah was right, you couldn’t blame him for destroying it. It made no difference, after all. Nothing could bring Louise back to life. Certainly not the missing jigsaw-pieces of the truth about how she’d died. Even if I found them, I could never find her. She was gone for ever. Though sometimes-when a curtain moved or a silence fell-you could believe she wasn’t quite out of reach.

My fortnight in Biarritz was half done when Rowena telephoned her father with news that clearly took him aback. She’d got engaged and wanted to come out straightaway to introduce him and Bella to her fiancé. His name was Paul, as I could have predicted. Not a student, apparently, but a risk analyst for Metropolitan Mutual, an insurance company with headquarters in Bristol. In a separate call, Sarah explained that Rowena had met him through her. She and Paul Bryant had been a year apart at King’s College, Cambridge. He’d looked her up on realizing they were both living in Bristol and had instantly fallen for Rowena. As she had for him. Sarah reckoned Sir Keith couldn’t fail to like him.

She was spot on. Rowena and Paul arrived a few days later and were hardly through the door before their compatibility and affection for each other-as well as Paul’s suitability as a son-in-law-became abundantly obvious. He was a young man of charm, humour and evident sincerity. Dark-haired and handsome in a fashion-poster style that clearly appealed to Bella every bit as much as Rowena, he also possessed a keen and probing intellect. Along with a disarming facility for drawing people out about their achievements and ambitions while saying remarkably little about his own. I couldn’t decide whether this was a deliberate technique or a personality trait. Nor whether it was as apparent to others as it was to me. But, strangely, it didn’t make him any less likeable. Quite the reverse. Especially where women were concerned. He was, according to Bella, “ the least vain good-looking man I’ve ever met. ” Which, coming from her, was quite a compliment. Though where it left me I didn’t like to speculate.

Something else about Paul Bryant puzzled me from the first. His amiability-his lack of the slightest hint of sarcasm-was as intriguing as it was endearing. There was either more or less to him than met the eye. But which? His manner deflected any attempt to decide. He could be naïve as well as profound, gauche as well as sensitive. He could be, it sometimes seemed, anything he judged you wanted him to be.