Chapter Twenty-Two #3
‘It’s not true,’ he said, his eyes fixed on mine. He jounced my hand a little. ‘Do you understand what I am saying? It is not true. I am not getting married to Caroline, so whatever she said to you this morning, it was not the truth.’
‘Why did she say it, then?’
‘I don’t know!’ Releasing me briefly, he ran his hands through his hair. Then slumping a little, he exhaled a heavy sigh. ‘No, okay, that’s not quite true either. I have known for some time, or rather, suspected, that she believed we were going somewhere.’
‘Why would she think that?’
‘We had a brief relationship, an affair if you like, earlier this year. It was just after my father died and she was… well, she was rather kind to me.’
Kind? Caroline de whatever-her-silly-name-was kind? Now I’d heard it all. Luc was watching me.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’d sooner call Vladimir Putin a humanitarian than Caroline kind.
More importantly, even without you telling me the grisly details, it doesn’t take much imagination for me to know what she said to you, and I bet it was foul.
But you see… I was foul to you too, Alix. ’
I frowned. ‘When?’
‘At the very beginning, when you arrived at the Villa Matisse, that first morning and for quite a bit after. It makes me literally cringe now to recall how horrible I was to you.’
‘Oh, that.’ I lifted my shoulders in a careless shrug. ‘It’s not important.’
He captured my hand again. ‘Yes, it is important, it’s vitally important. I’m deeply, deeply ashamed of my behaviour.’
‘Well,’ I said, slightly at a loss. ‘I expect my arriving out of the blue like that gave you a bit of a shock.’
He smiled. ‘You certainly gave me a shock, the biggest shock of my life.’
I stared at him. ‘I’m not sure I understand you.’
‘I’m not sure I understand it myself, why I treated you so badly, that is.
Yes, I was tired, under enormous stress and my mother driving me to distraction, but none of that excused my behaviour.
As for the thing with Caroline, it finished almost as soon as it started.
Afterwards, I just wanted us to be friends, and she seemed to be fine with that. I thought she understood the score.’
I looked away from him, watching a guard now tramping up and down the length of the train, slamming doors in a bad-tempered sort of way and looking as if he wished he had a whistle.
‘Is that what you want me to understand?’ I said distantly. ‘The score?’
‘No!’ He seized both my hands. ‘There isn’t a score with you, Alix.’
Hearing a note in his voice, a tiny frisson of hope leapt in my heart. Scarcely daring to breathe, I turned to look at him.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘That’s what I’m saying, and that’s the something I forgot to tell you last night. I forgot to say I love you.’
The train pulled out of the station.
‘How did you know where I was?’
We’d just come up for air after the longest kiss in history.
‘My good friend Matthew, your taxi driver, called me. He asked me if I was aware that he had collected a beautiful young woman from the Villa Matisse and dropped her off at the railway station where she was now in floods of tears.’
‘Well,’ I said, blushing. ‘There was a sad song playing on his cab radio.’
‘What song?’
I told him.
‘“The Power of Love”,’ he echoed. ‘How appropriate. Is that what made you cry?’
‘No.’ I gulped. ‘I mean, it did.’ For a second I felt so brimming with emotion I nearly passed out. ‘But it wasn’t the song. It was because I thought you didn’t love me.’
‘Now you know I do. I think – no, I know – I loved you from the first moment I saw you. You’re not only the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, you’re clever, you’re funny and you’re good.
You’re a good person, Alix, truly good. I don’t think you realise yourself how good you are. I’ve never met anyone like you.’
I gazed at him, seeing the blaze of love in his eyes and thinking how nearly I might have lost this. Even so, I could not stop myself blurting, ‘What about Esther?’
He held my eyes for a long moment. ‘I loved Esther,’ he said at last. ‘If only because she gave me Emma. And I wish she had not died. I wish that so powerfully and always will. But I didn’t love her the way I love you.
If she hadn’t died, I have no doubt we would have gone our separate ways and probably been happy.
But she did die, and I can’t change that. ’
‘No.’
‘What I can change is the here and now.’ He smiled.
‘Do you know how fed up with me my friend Matthew, the taxi driver, has been in the last few days? I kept asking him to go out for a drink and then boring his pants off with moaning about this amazing, gorgeous, fantastic young woman who’d come to work at the Villa Matisse and who I was desperate to make a pass at but didn’t dare. ’
I blinked. ‘Crumbs. Am I that scary?’
He laughed. ‘You have your moments. And I am very gauche and clumsy.’ Then he looked serious.
‘But in truth, I was on the point of gearing myself up to tell you how I felt – you know, that evening after you’d had lunch with Jess when she said she’d have Alphonse – when you showed me your Christmas present from Jules. ’
‘I didn’t show it to you. Your beady eyes spotted it on the kitchen table.’
He laughed again. ‘So they did. Well, whatever. I immediately assumed – wrongly, I hope – that you were doing a line with Jules.’
‘No, never. That is,’ I amended, ‘we had a couple of dates together, but there was never anything in it with Jules, or not for me at least.’
Luc looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I think he’s pretty keen on you, you know.’
I snorted. ‘He’ll survive.’
‘You’re right there.’ He pondered a moment.
‘He always does. In fact, do you know something, Alix? All the years I’ve been friends with Jules, I’ve never been able to suss him out.
There’s a side to the man that I just don’t understand.
’ The platform had emptied out, but we were still sitting jammed together on the bench.
‘I’m glad he likes you, though.’ Holding me away from him, he treated me to a teasing little smile.
‘Because maybe I could ask him to be my best man.’
‘You don’t mean—’ I caught my breath.
‘I do. Although, actually, that’s what I hope you’re going to say. I love you, Ms Alix Bailey.’ Taking both my hands as though he were making a pledge, he said, ‘How do you feel about becoming Mrs Alix Mandeville?’
I stared at him. ‘I… I don’t know.’
He paused, looking suddenly uncertain. ‘Do you want me to get down on one knee? I will if you like, but I warn you that with my forty-eight-year-old knees, you’ll probably have to help me up afterwards, which will mean the gesture loses something of its charm.’
I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t do charm.’
‘What?’
‘Giancarlo was all charm and I never loved him. I thought I did at the time and for quite a while afterwards, but I didn’t. I loved something called charm. So now I don’t do charm.’
He studied me a second or two before asking carefully, ‘Do you do me?’
I considered him equally carefully. ‘I do,’ I said.
‘Then that’s the answer I wanted.’ Pulling me to my feet, he threw his arms around me, holding me so close it felt like he’d never let me go. ‘Emma will be pleased, won’t she?’ he said happily. ‘And Jess, and I hope Carl too.’
‘He will. Carl really liked you.’
‘Let’s go home and make plans.’ He looked about him. ‘Where’s your suitcase?’ he said. I looked about me as well. And then I gasped.
‘Luc, I hate to tell you this but…’
‘But what? What do you hate to tell me?’
‘My suitcase has departed on the slow train to Milan.’
For a split second, he looked mystified, then suddenly he roared with laughter.
‘Oh, Alix, my dearest, dearest love,’ he croaked. ‘How ever did I exist without you?’
‘But it’s got all my clothes in it! That is, most of them.’
‘We’ll get you some more.’ He started kissing me again. ‘Although, on second thoughts, maybe you won’t be needing them…’