A Sudden Change of Heart
Barbara Taylor Bradford
For Bob, with my love
Table of Contents
Two paintings described in this novel do not exist in real life. Tahitian Dreams, by Paul Gauguin, is part of the imaginary collection of Sigmund and Ursula Westheim, fictional characters from my novel The Women in his Life, who were victims of the Holocaust in that novel. Sir Maximilian West, their son and heir, and claimant of the invented painting, is another fictional character from the same book. Moroccan Girl in a Red Caftan Holding A Mandolin, by Henri Matisse, is part of the imaginary collection of Maurice Duval, a fictional character in this novel. I took literary licence and invented the two paintings for the dramatic purpose of the story, and because I did not want to name real paintings by Gauguin and Matisse. I have no wish to make it appear that actual paintings by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse are under any kind of dispute, or in jeopardy.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
New York 1998
Summer
1972
The girl was tall for seven, dark haired, with vivid blue eyes in an alert, intelligent face. Thin, almost wiry, there was a tomboy look about her, perhaps because of her slimness, short hair, restless energy and the clothes she wore. They were her favourite pieces of clothing; her uniform, her grandmother said, but she loved her blue jeans, white T shirt and white sneakers. The sneakers and T shirt were her two vanities. They must always be pristine, whiter than white, and so they were constantly in the washing machine or being replaced.
The seven-year-old’s name was Laura Valiant, and she was dressed thus this morning as she slipped out of the white clapboard colonial house on the hill, raced across the lawns and down to the river flowing through her grandparents’ property. This was a long wide green valley surrounded by soaring hills near Kent, a small rural town in the northwestern corner of Connecticut. Her grandparents had come to America from Wales many years ago, in the 1920s, and after they had bought this wonderful verdant valley they had given it the Welsh name of Rhondda Fach…the little Rhondda, it meant.
Once she reached the river Laura slowed her pace as she usually did, meandering along the edge, walking