She had explained to him why she couldn’t go and, to be fair to him, it touched something in Timothy, since he too lived under the weight of a cold mother’s strict mores and unreasonable expectations. He thought he felt love stirring, so he made a rare exception for her. He cancelled his own lunch appointment and took her instead down to the office canteen, somewhere Timothy had never even visited before.
She was too nervous to eat – and he liked that. She was too nervous to look up at him across the table, and he liked that too. He felt protective. Or something. Perhaps it was a little more sinister than that.
So he booked her to stay for another three months, and they lunched together in the canteen at least twice a week, whenever Timothy’s schedule allowed. She never did look up at him across the table; she just answered the questions he put to her, and fell in love:
No, she had no other relations. Only her mother.
Yes, her father was dead.
No, she had no friends from school, not really. Her mother forbade it.
Yes, she was lonely sometimes…
She’d been sitting opposite him, crying over her canteen sandwich, miserable at the prospect of a life without him. It was on the day that her three-month booking was due to end. He waited until then; let her weep while he munched on his bread and cold pasta salad. He though it was sweet, the way she cried. No one had ever cried at leaving him. Never before. So he allowed himself to enjoy it; watched the way her little lip trembled and she wiped the tear-snot with the back of her hand. He arranged his bread crumbs into a little pile in front of him and finally he fished a small box out of his pocket.
‘Dear Dawn,’ he said. (Quite quietly, in case secretaries on neighbouring tables overheard.) ‘I think you’re – really – a splendid girl. Very sweet. And I’m convinced you could make me very happy…’ He opened the box, revealed a mean little ring; a diamond so small you could hardly see it. That’s how confident he was. ‘Would you kindly do me the service of becoming my wife?’
Very quick and quiet, the wedding was. Timothy wanted to do some work on her before he introduced her to his friends. And when he did finally get around to it, he introduced her as Daphne. It was as simple as that. ‘This is my wife, Daphne. Mrs Daphne Duff Fielding.’
He never asked her if she minded the new name, and in a way she didn’t. She was young and rootless – and dazzled by the attention of her rich, worldly, older husband. She would have done anything to please him.
For the first year or two of their marriage, the knotty task of ridding Dawn Bigg of any embarrassing traces of Dawn Biggness became Timothy Duff Fielding’s favourite project. Even more fun than wine-tasting. He changed her name, of course, and the way she spoke. He changed the way she dressed and sat and waved and blinked; the way she nodded and chewed, and the way she held her knife. Until suddenly, almost immediately after his son was born, he grew tired of it all. However much she changed for him, and she did, it seemed that something about her would never be quite right. ‘You can take the girl out of Croydon,’ he would sigh to his older sister, ‘but you can’t take the Croydon out of a girl.’ Today, ten years on, there is really nothing left of the Croydon Dawn he met and married. There is nothing much left of anyone at all.
Daffy had never travelled alone before. But two days after that first conversation, she took the plane ticket her husband handed her and flew to Bordeaux. She took a taxi, just as he instructed, from Bordeaux airport to Lady Emma Rankin’s château, nearly an hour away. Timothy’s secretary, Lucy (Lovely Lucy), had printed out David and Emma Rankins’ address on a sheet of bank-headed paper, and Daffy handed the paper to the driver with a helpless smile, and the words, ‘pardon, s’il vous plaît…’ They drove the journey in silence.
Fortunately for Daffy, Lady Emma Rankin, caught on an empty day, turned out to be as helpful as Timothy had promised. She provided Daffy with delicious thick black coffee, in her outrageously elegant drawing room, and a large glass of the local pineau, which Daffy glugged back eagerly though it was still only eleven o’clock. She felt intimidated by Emma’s grace and watchfulness. She had never seen anyone so seamless, so exquisite, so poised, so perfectly charming. Few people ever have.
Meanwhile, Emma watched, as is her wont, and smiled, and confided, and decided on one of her whims to tell Daffy about the Hotel Marronnier, which had been for sale in the local village for so long.
‘Golly-gosh,’ said Daffy, eyes watering from the pineau, nose and throat threatening to explode into alcoholic flames. ‘You mean run a hotel?…Don’t know. Sounds pretty diffif—diciff—Pretty difficult.’ (After half a glass she had trouble getting her tongue round the word.) ‘I’m not sure what Timothy would say.’ She giggled. ‘Seeing as how I pan’t even seak French.’
Emma smiled again, a lovely smile that wrinkled her nose. ‘Sweetheart, you can always learn French,’ she said. ‘And don’t you think it would be fun for us to be neighbours?’
‘I…Fun?’
‘Intelligent, interesting, unusual women like you, Daffy Duff Fielding, are a rare find in this neighbourhood. We need people like you to come and liven things up for us.’
Daffy wasn’t sure what to say to that. How could someone like Emma Rankin possibly think it would be ‘fun’ to have someone like her as a neighbour? How could anyone? Daffy lifted her empty coffee cup and held it to her mouth for an absurd length of time while she tried to collect herself. Nobody, except possibly her son James, had ever said anything so lovely to her. Never. Behind the coffee cup, her lips were trembling.
Emma looked on, curious and not entirely unmoved. She didn’t think she’d ever met a woman with so little self-esteem. It was odd, she thought. Manifestly, Daffy was neither intelligent nor very interesting. Of course not. Emma had just said that because that’s what she said. It’s what she always said to everyone, because they liked it. Nevertheless, without those awful Bond Street lady-clothes, and the helmet of tidy dyed-blonde hair, and the immaculate mask of ageing, orangebased make-up, Emma could clearly see that Daffy was at least a lovely-looking woman. Which was half the battle.
Emma smiled, quite kindly for Emma, for whom kindness has never been a priority.
‘Wait there, Daffy,’ she said, patting her knee just like Timothy did. ‘I’m going to call the Marronnier owners, and we’re going to go over and tour the place right now. This minute! And you’re going to fall in love with the place. I know you will.’
And sure enough that’s just what Daffy did. It was love at first sight. It was the first time Daffy ever experienced love so passionate, except with James, her son, who’d been so harshly taken from her.
At the end of the tour she thanked Emma Rankin and Monsieur Paul, the bar owner. She thanked them profusely, with tears of gratitude in her lonely, love-starved eyes. Then she took a taxi from Montmaur village directly to the airport and returned home.
Two months have passed. Timothy, without discussing it with his wife, sent a private consultant to look over the Hotel Marronnier, a consultant who specialises in finding property abroad for rich men’s wives, and who is, as Timothy would put it, ‘fully cognizant’ of all those subtle requirements such a property search entails. He was sent a report, very thorough, which told him exactly what he needed to know: namely that for a relatively small investment Hotel Marronnier could be made to operate at a perfectly supportable loss for many years to come: a loss which Timothy was more than willing to absorb, having calculated that running a small, inefficient hotel/bar in the Charente Maritime would cost a great deal less than running a wife in London. For