Maybe that was my trouble! Patrick thought, his eyes moody. Maybe I was too eager to please; both her, and Laura. I never argued with either of them, let them ride roughshod over me. Did Laura come to despise me in the end? Stop thinking about her! he angrily told himself.
They left the Promenade, spun round a corner and then another; the sea breeze blew his brown hair across his face, and he raked it back with an impatient gesture, felt Rae giving him sideways glances, and sensed her trying to read his mind, which made his profile harden, resisting her.
‘Here we are,’ she said, pulling up outside his hotel.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said and managed a reluctant, apologetic smile. It wasn’t Rae’s fault that his engagement had been broken off, after all; and it had been very kind of her to drive all this way, across the Italian border, to come to the airport to meet him. He shouldn’t have been so surly with her.
‘I enjoyed the drive,’ she assured him, then put a hand on his arm. ‘Patrick...’
‘Yes?’ Not more questions! he thought, a little nerve twitching beside his mouth, while behind his sunglasses his blue eyes burnt fixedly on the bluer sky.
‘Will you at least come over to Bordighera for the weekend? Alex gives famous barbecue parties on the beach; he’s planning one for Saturday, and it will be terrific fun. Do come!’
‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he broke out, then his voice shook and he had to stop speaking. He felt her watching his averted face and wanted to scream at her, Stop staring! Will you just leave me alone? But he couldn’t; it would have been too much of a self-betrayal. He struggled to contain his rage, but felt as if his bones were pushing out through his tense skin. Then he caught sight of Rae’s small hands trembling on the wheel, her knuckles showing white. There was a silence for a few minutes and Patrick stared out of the window without seeing anything.
Why am I taking it out on her? he thought. She’s only a little thing, for all her bossiness and her self-assurance. It isn’t her fault.
‘OK,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll come for Saturday night, but just for the weekend, Rae!’
‘That’s fine,’ she said, breaking into a smile. ‘I’m so glad, Patrick; I’m sure you’ll have a great time, and you’re going to love Alex and Susan-Jane. They’ve got a terrific sense of humour.’
‘They’ll need it, if they’re to put up with me for a weekend,’ Patrick said with bitter humour.
Rae laughed, then said hurriedly, her voice husky and unsure, stammering so that it didn’t even sound like Rae talking, ‘Patrick, I know you said you don’t want to talk about it, but I have to ask...it wasn’t...Laura wasn’t...well, lately, I did wonder if...if she resented you being with me...being away so much, I mean? I remember she was upset when you had to change your plan to meet her in Amsterdam because I insisted we went back to Rome to do some more work there. That wasn’t what you quarrelled over, was it? She wasn’t...’ She broke off, very pink, then went on, ‘She wasn’t jealous over me, was she, Patrick? I’d hate to think I’d been the cause of you two breaking up.’
Patrick gave a curt bark of angry amusement. ‘Odd you should say that. Laura did make some stupid remark about you and me, hinting that I might be interested in you.’
Rae’s face turned scarlet. ‘Oh, no...’
‘There’s no need to look like that—that wasn’t why we split up! She was just using you as an excuse, and I told her she needn’t try to pretend she believed anything so crazy!’
Rae’s hot colour drained away, leaving her pale. ‘Yes, of course—it would be crazy,’ she said flatly.
Patrick was scowling up at the elegant white façade of the hotel, built during the Second Empire, with that faint trace of fantasy, of over-decoration.
‘She couldn’t possibly have believed it; she was only trying to use you as an excuse,’ he said grimly. ‘She wouldn’t have to feel guilty if she could kid herself I was interested in another woman.’
‘She must be out of her mind, preferring someone else to you!’ Rae broke out, and he laughed harshly.
‘I won’t argue with that!’
Rae watched him anxiously. ‘Patrick, I’m so—’
‘Don’t say sorry again!’ he snarled, and she flinched as if he had hit her.
The blare of a horn made them both look at the road. Nice was a parking nightmare, too many cars looking for too few parking spaces, and sometimes people double-parked, even triple-parked if they dared.
Rae’s car was blocking the narrow road, which was already crammed with parked cars. Another car wanted to get past—it was wider, and the driver was incensed.
Rae hurriedly dragged on the wheel, moving up on to the pavement to let the other car pass. The driver leaned over to bellow something very rude in French as he shot through, and Rae made apologetic gestures at him. Being a Frenchman, he mellowed enough to give her a forgiving wave and a shake of his head; she was, after all, chic and very female.
‘I’d better get out, before you get fined for parking on the pavement!’ Patrick said, opening the car door.
‘I’ll come and pick you up here, on Saturday morning, OK?’ Rae said as he collected his suitcase from the car. ‘Ten o’clock sharp? Then we can get to the villa in time for lunch. Make sure you have your passport.’
Patrick nodded and ran into the hotel. Minutes later he was in his room, which had a sideways view of the Baie des Anges through palm trees. He undressed and took a long, cooling shower, lay down on his bed wearing only a towel, and went to sleep with the shutters of his room closed, excluding the hot afternoon sun.
He had decided to go to the Côte d’Azur because it was not a place he knew well, and he had hoped he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. He was still trying to make sense of what had happened to him, but it was hard when he felt as if he had broken into pieces—little jagged, dagger-sharp pieces that hurt like hell whenever he tried to touch them or explore the damage that had been done to him.
All he knew so far was that nothing in his life would ever be the same again, especially himself, and that he needed to be alone for a long time, to come to terms with what had happened to him.
He ate dinner in a little restaurant near his hotel, which, like many small French hotels, did not have a restaurant, went for a stroll in white jeans and a thin T-shirt, sat at a terrace bar drinking a beer, then went to bed listening to the constant hum of Nice traffic.
In the morning he got up, ate croissants, drank coffee, went for a walk down to the beach, and sunbathed until lunchtime. He ate lunch on the beach at a busy restaurant—a salad niçoise and French bread, a glass or two of white wine, a coffee. Then he went back to his room and closed the shutters and took a shower and went to sleep on his bed again, got up as evening began, ate dinner at the same restaurant, went for a stroll to the same bar, drank a beer, went to bed.
The days passed in a dull routine which soothed the anger and the pain in him by sheer monotony, and then it was Saturday and Rae arrived, as she had promised, her short black hair windblown after her drive across the border, her eyes bright, her smile warm. She was wearing a light summer dress in white cotton printed with violets and soft green leaves.
She gave him a wary look which tried to assess his mood. ‘Ready?’
He had bought himself a new overnight bag, which he had packed with a few things. He threw them into the back of her car, nodding, climbed in beside her, and they set off. In a short time they were on the toll road, heading along the coast, towards the Italian border. Rae drove with skill and daring, talking all the time about her ideas for the illustrations to the next set of stories.