Solitaire

Solitaire

Sara Craven

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

ENDPAGE

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

AS she got down from the small country bus, the heat seemed to strike her like a blow. A glance at her watch told Marty Langton that it was already past noon, and that, of course, explained why the small square seemed almost deserted. She had been in France for less than a week, but already she had become accustomed to the way everything seemed to grind to a complete halt at lunchtime so that the French could give le déjeuner their full and serious attention.

She put her case down at her feet, flexing her shoulder muscles wearily. In spite of the breeze from the open window she had managed to station herself beside, it had been a long hot journey, but now it was over at last. She had finally arrived in Les Sables des Pins.

Behind her the bus, having discharged the remainder of its passengers, started on its way again with a roar and a whiff of exhaust fumes. As it passed Marty, the driver leaned out of his seat and called something to her. She didn’t catch the words—at school she’d always been considered good at French, but her experiences so far had soon disabused her of that notion; no one had told her about regional accents or that people spoke so fast—but the tone was friendly and encouraging as if he had discerned there was something a little forlorn about the slender figure standing looking round the square, with all her worldly goods packed into the elderly leather suitcase at her feet. She smiled rather shyly and lifted a hand in response as the battered vehicle clattered and swayed over the cobbles and around the corner out of sight.

When it had finally disappeared altogether, and even the raucous note of its engine was becoming a memory, Marty felt a faint quiver of apprehension run through her. She had been lonely before many times during her short life, but she had never felt so completely alone as she did at that moment. And all she had to sustain her was the promise of Uncle Jim’s letter, reposing safely in her handbag.

‘You’re not alone,’ she told herself fiercely and silently. ‘Uncle Jim is waiting for you as he said he would be all those years ago. There’s nothing to worry about. You’re going to have a proper home at last.’

A proper home! Even though she had actually arrived, she could still hardly believe it. Only a month ago she had been working at her secure boring job in a solicitor’s office, going home in the evenings to help Aunt Mary with the housework and the gardening at the big rather ugly Edwardian villa on the edge of the small town where they lived, and listen to her accounts of the day’s events in the faintly complaining tone she habitually used. Aunt Mary had always had a grudge against the world in general, but this had been intensified fourteen years earlier when she had been forced to offer a home to her small orphaned niece. This had been a burden and an encumbrance she had never desired, and she had made Marty, five years old and shocked to the core of her being by the sudden death of her mother from virus pneumonia, fully aware of the fact.

All her young life she’d heard the recital of the various grievances—the difficulties of supporting a growing girl on a fixed income, the wish to travel, thwarted by Marty’s presence—and it was only as she grew older that Marty began to realise that she was the excuse and not the cause for the shortcomings in her aunt’s life. That Miss Barton was an indolent woman who preferred grumbling to exerting herself in any way. But by then it was too late. The idea that she was a nuisance and a burden to her aunt was firmly fixed in Marty’s mind, and there could never be any real affection between them.

That was why Uncle Jim had come to assume such importance to her, she supposed. He had made the fact of his caring, his anxiety for her so clear from the outset. He wasn’t in the strict sense of the word an uncle at all, of course, but a distant and much older cousin of her late father’s, and many of Marty’s earliest memories were connected with him. There was never any pattern to Uncle Jim’s visits—he just arrived, and there were always presents when he did come, and a lot of laughter.

Marty smiled a little as she picked up her case and started determinedly across the square. Even her mother, whose eyes had never really lost their sadness after her young husband had been killed in a works accident, laughed when Uncle Jim came. Only Aunt Mary had disapproved, her openly voiced opinion that her young sister had married beneath her never more evident than when Uncle Jim was in the vicinity.

‘Really, Tina,’ Marty had overheard her say impatiently, ‘I can’t imagine why you encourage that man to come here. There’s bound to be talk whether he was a relation of Frank’s or not. And he’s a most unsuitable influence to have on an impressionable child. Why, he’s little better than a nomad. He’s never had a settled job or a respectable home in his life.’

She could not hear her mother’s soft-voiced reply, but Marty heard Aunt Mary’s scandalised snort in response.

‘You can’t be serious, Tina! Isn’t one mistake enough for you? A man like that—and he must be at least twenty years older than you. Have some sense before it’s too late!’

Years later, Marty could still remember her mother’s laugh, warm and almost carefree, with another underlying note that she was too young to understand then. Yet only a few weeks later, a neighbour had come to fetch her from school, telling her soothingly that her mummy didn’t feel too grand, and before twenty-four hours had passed Tina Langton had died in hospital.

Marty’s eyes misted suddenly as she sank down on one of the wrought iron chairs set outside the café under a striped awning. Uncle Jim had been off on his travels again, so there had been no way to tell him her mother had died—not that Aunt Mary would probably have done so even if there had been a forwarding address, she thought. So he had missed the funeral, and she had travelled south with Aunt Mary, thin-lipped and brooding beside her at this unexpected turn in her affairs.

At first the bewildered child she had been had thought she would never see Uncle Jim again, but she had been wrong, because he had turned up about six months later—‘like the proverbial bad penny’, Aunt Mary had remarked caustically, but she had not prevented Marty from seeing him, either then or on the few subsequent visits, and Marty supposed she should be grateful to her for that.

She had been nine the last time he came, she remembered, and breaking her heart because she had been asked to take part in a play at school and Aunt Mary had refused point blank to make her the necessary costume. He had noticed her red eyes and subdued manner at once and taken her on to his knee while Aunt Mary, rigid with resentment, had gone to the kitchen to make the pot of tea she considered sufficient to fulfil the laws of hospitality.

‘What is it, lass?’ He had smoothed her thick bob of chestnut hair with a massive but infinitely gentle hand. ‘Aren’t you happy here? It’s a grand house, and I’m sure your aunt does her best for you.’

‘I don’t want her best.’ Marty had wound her arms round his neck. ‘I want you, Uncle Jim.’

He was very silent for a long time, then he said quietly, ‘So be it, Tina. I can’t take you with me now, because I don’t know where I’m bound for and that’s no life for a child. But one day, my chick, I’ll find a place to settle down in and then I’ll send for you—just as I’d meant . . .’ He’d stopped then, but Marty had known with an odd instinct that he’d been going to say, ‘just as I’d meant to send for your mother’, and she thought rather sadly that maybe if he’d just taken her with him four years earlier, her mother might still be alive and happy. And it didn’t matter that he’d called her Tina either, because she knew that in some strange way in Uncle Jim’s eyes, she and her mother were the same person.

He’d gone then, after drinking his tea and wishing Miss Barton ‘Good afternoon’ with more civility than sincerity, and Marty had not seen him again. Occasionally there had been a letter, and even more rarely a parcel, but none of them ever contained the hoped-for summons, and after a while the demands of school had begun to blur his image in her mind, and when she thought of him at all it was in the terms of a childhood fantasy.

A young woman emerged from the café to take her order and Marty asked her for an Orangina. Her throat was parched from the dust and heat of travelling. She was hungry too, and when she glanced through the beaded curtain that hung over the open doorway she saw that the adjoining room to the bar was a restaurant, and that there were menus posted on a small board at the side. She felt in her handbag for her wallet and counted her remaining francs. She had enough for a meal, if it wasn’t too expensive, and then she would set about finding her way to Uncle Jim’s house. Les Sables des Pins didn’t look a very big town, and she was sure she would have little difficulty in finding her way to Solitaire, as he’d told her it was called.

She got out his creased and much folded letter and read it again. It was not the letter of a man who had ever had much to do with words, but it was hardly the illiterate scrawl that Aunt Mary had derisively dismissed it as.

It had not been a long letter either, but it told Marty all that was necessary.

‘After all these years,’ he’d written. ‘I’ve finally found a place I can call home, and it’s yours too, Tina, if you still want it. I’ve no relative other than you in the world, so everything I have—the flower farm and the house—will be yours when I’ve gone. It’s very beautiful here in the spring, Tina, when the bulbs have bloomed, and each year in April there’s a flower festival in Les Sables des Pins. That’s the nearest town, and it’s just as it sounds with acres of pine forests running down to the longest beach you’ve ever seen. My house is by itself in the forest—I suppose that’s why the chap that built it called it Solitaire. A bit of a fancy name, but I like it, and I hope that you will too.’

He had enclosed a small coloured snapshot of the house, and as Marty studied it she felt her spirits rise perceptibly. Who couldn’t be cheered by the prospect of going to live in a long, low house, its red-tiled roof, and dark green shutters providing a dramatic contrast to the stark white of the exterior?

There was a man standing near the front door and at first glance she had assumed it was Uncle Jim, but when she looked more closely she saw that he was a much younger man, taller than Uncle Jim, and with dark almost black hair where Jim’s was fair turning to grey. Or had been when she saw him last. He was probably completely grey by now.

She’d looked through the letter, stirred by a vague inexplicable curiosity about the man in the photograph, but there had been no clue to his identity.

Marty drank her Orangina gratefully when it came, and then bestirred herself to look at the menu. As usual there was a choice of meals at various prices, and after some wistful lingering over the menus that offered grilled shrimps and moules marinières as starters, she decided to settle for the plat du jour—a thick slice of rare roast beef, accompanied by a steaming dish of pommes frites, and preceded by a delicious home-made terrine with a side-dish of tomato salad in an aromatic dressing.

In spite of some inner qualms of nervousness at the prospect of meeting Uncle Jim again after all these years her healthy young appetite would not be denied, and she sat back at last with a sigh of repletion, blinking her eyes sleepily in the sun as she drank her coffee and toyed with one of the nectarines that had been served as a dessert.

If the worst came to the worst, she told herself, and Uncle Jim had not received her letter in reply, telling him that she was on her way, or even if he was away, she had enough money to supply her with a night’s lodging here in Les Sables, or even two nights if it came to the pinch. There had been a generous amount of francs enclosed in Uncle Jim’s letter, and she had converted her own small savings into travellers cheques as well.

It was probably this more than anything, she thought, that had convinced Aunt Mary that she was really going to France.

‘You’ve closed your savings account?’ Her aunt had stared at her as if she had gone mad. ‘What on earth has possessed you, child? You surely haven’t been taken in by the boasts of that ridiculous old vagabond? You’ve no idea what kind of conditions he may be living in. He probably wants an unpaid housekeeper to look after him. A Frenchwoman would drive too hard a bargain for him, so he’s thought of you, after all these years without a word.’

Marty bit her lip, willing herself to be silent, while she flinched at the scathing nature of her aunt’s remarks. She had always known that Aunt Mary would not be pleased to hear of her plans, but she had not expected quite such a vitriolic reaction. And she could have replied hotly that she was little more than an unpaid housekeeper living where she was, Aunt Mary having dispensed with the daily woman she had employed for some years on economic grounds, leaving the bulk of the heavy work to Marty at weekends.

Aunt Mary was going on. ‘You’ll make the biggest mistake of your life, my child, if you throw up everything here. Your mother did exactly the same thing, and look what a disaster that was—marrying a man of that class, and then being widowed, left with a young child to bring up. I would have thought the example of her folly would have taught you a thing or two.’

‘And so it has,’ Marty said hotly, unable to restrain her anger any more at this slur on her mother. ‘It taught me that it’s love that matters in this world, and even you can’t deny that my mother and father were happy together. And Uncle Jim loves me, so even if this house in France is—a slum, I don’t care.’

‘I think you will.’ Aunt Mary’s lips were so tightly compressed that they had almost vanished. ‘You are used to certain standards, my dear—standards that your father’s family, good people though they may be, probably don’t even know exist. And what kind of a life has Jim Langton been leading all these years? Heaven only knows, but it’s doubtful whether he’s ever been fit company for a young girl, especially someone with your upbringing. And you seriously intend to throw it all up and go to live in a country—where it’s not even safe to drink out of the taps,’ she added on a note of pure bathos.

Angry as she was, Marty could not help seeing the funny side of it all and a reluctant smile started to spread, but Aunt Mary had no sense of humour, and she reached forward and to Marty’s shock slapped her hard across her face.

‘This is no laughing matter,’ she rapped, her own face alarmingly red. ‘Understand this, if you leave here, if you go to that no-good tramp of a man, then I shall alter my will. Not a penny will you get, nor this house. And don’t imagine that Jim Langton will cushion you against the hard times. Money flows through his hands like water. He’s been totally improvident all his life, and it’s unlikely that age has changed him.’

Marty stood very straight, her large grey eyes fixed on her aunt’s furious face, the fingermarks standing out angrily on the pallor of her cheek.

‘It isn’t your money I want, Aunt Mary,’ she said quite gently. ‘It was always something that you couldn’t give me—or weren’t prepared to. Your love and your time. But there’ll be plenty of that where Uncle Jim is. I shall always be grateful for what you’ve done for me,’ she added, ‘but I really don’t want any more. You must do as you wish with your possessions. They’re really none of my business.’

There was a long and fulminating silence and then Aunt Mary turned precipitately and left the room.

The following week, up to the time that Marty left to board the Hovercraft at Ramsgate for the Channel crossing, was not an easy time, full of strained silences and edged and embittered remarks. Miss Barton made no attempt to come and see Marty off, and Marty herself did not suggest it. She had been hurt by her aunt’s assumption that she could be bought, and felt that any move towards a conventional leavetaking would be nothing short of hypocrisy. Her one tentative suggestion that she should write when she got to France and let her aunt know that she had arrived safely and that all was well was met with an icy ‘It won’t be necessary.’ And when the front door of The Poplars finally closed behind her, Marty knew that an era in her life had come irrevocably to its end.

She could not drive, but even if she had possessed a licence she felt she would have thought twice about driving in France. Even before she got out of Calais, she saw some near-accidents involving tourists who had not got the hang of the French priority from the right. Her own journey was to be rather more sedate, on public transport, so that she could see something of the countryside on her way to the Vendée region of France where Les Sables des Pins was situated.

It wasn’t a part of France that Marty really knew very much about, and her researches at the local library prior to her departure had not been very revealing, although she had discovered that La Rochelle was the nearest big town to Les Sables, and she knew that La Rochelle had played a major part in the tragic religious wars in France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Her journey down to Les Sables might not have been a totally straightforward one, but she felt she could have had no better introduction to France. The trip through Anjou had been particularly enjoyable, and she had stayed overnight in Angers, taking time off to visit the chateau with its odd decapitated turrets—another relic of the religious wars. She was fascinated by the acres of vineyards stretching away on both sides of the road, and the little stalls set up at intervals urging passers-by to stop and taste some of the famous wines of Anjou. Marty would have loved to have done so, but the bus she was travelling on never seemed to stop at a convenient place, and she had to promise herself that she would get Uncle Jim to bring her one day.

She paid the bill for her meal, and asked Madame rather haltingly if she knew the whereabouts of a house called Solitaire. Madame’s eyebrows rose a little, but her reply was immediate. But of course she knew of it. Who did not? Gladly she would direct Mademoiselle, but what did Mademoiselle seek there?

Marty hesitated, but only for a moment. After all, she told herself, there was no harm in telling this woman what the situation was.

‘I’m going there to see the owner. He’s my uncle,’ she said, and smiled.

Madame’s eyebrows ascended almost into her hairline, and Marty found herself hoping devoutly that all Aunt Mary’s predictions about Uncle Jim’s probable life-style were totally unfounded.

‘Est-ce possible?’ Madame asked the world in general, and went back into the café shaking her head. A moment later Marty saw her talking excitedly to a man behind the bar, and saw necks being craned in her direction. She felt hot with embarrassment and stood up decisively to take her leave. Obviously in spite of its placid appearance, Les Sables des Pins was a hotbed of gossip, she thought, and she had just supplied the main item for the day.

She was just about to leave when the man from behind the bar emerged and stood looking at her, frowning a little. He said, ‘Mademoiselle desires to be directed to the Villa Solitaire, it is so?’

‘Yes, please.’ Marty set her case down rather resignedly.

He hesitated. ‘Is Mademoiselle sure that she has the correct destination?’

‘Quite sure.’ Marty did not want to be rude, but some of her weariness crept into her tone. ‘Please tell me where it is. I’ve been travelling for most of the week, and I’m very tired. The journey took longer than I originally expected and my uncle will be worried if I don’t arrive.’

His shrug seemed to be almost fatalistic. ‘Then there is nothing more to be said.’

He might have seemed reluctant to vouchsafe them, but his directions were clear and concise and he even drew her a little map. Watching her tuck it away safely in the pocket of her shoulder bag, he asked ‘Mademoiselle has a car? It is a fair distance.’

‘No, but I’m sure I can manage.’ Marty repressed a sigh as she looked up at the unclouded blue of the sky and felt the heat of the sun blazing down.

‘That will not be necessary. Jean-Paul!’ He gestured to someone sitting inside the café. He turned to Marty. ‘He will take you,’ he said rather abruptly.

‘Oh, no, really!’ Marty was appalled. ‘I don’t want to cause anyone any trouble.’

He shrugged again. ‘What trouble?’ he demanded. ‘Each day he passes the Villa on his way to the beach.’

When Jean-Paul finally emerged, he turned out to be not a great deal older than Marty herself, but, she suspected as he looked her over with lingering appreciation, a great deal more versed in the ways of the world. He seized her case and carried it over to a small and battered Citroën parked in the shade of the church which dominated the square.

‘You are English,’ he said with an air of amazed discovery as he climbed into the front seat beside her and started the engine. ‘Not many English come here to Les Sables. They prefer to visit Brittany, which is my own region where I was born.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Marty was glad to be asking the questions, determined to switch the focus of attention.

He was not in the least unwilling to reply. He was a student, she learned, working in the local boulangerie for the vacation, and he was fortunate that his shift worked at night so that he had the day for swimming and sunning himself. Judging by the deep tan he had already acquired, this must be how he spent the major part of each day, she surmised. She was just about to ask him about his studies, when he got in ahead of her with a question of his own.

‘And yourself? You have come here to lie in the sun?’

‘Perhaps,’ she allowed. ‘Actually I’m joining my uncle.’ She paused. ‘He owns the Villa Solitaire.’

Obviously startled, Jean Paul missed his gear change and swore under his breath.

‘Your uncle?’ he demanded. ‘But no one has heard of any niece from England.’

‘All the same he has written to me and asked me to join him,’ she said coolly.

‘Mon dieu,’ he murmured, a smile playing about his lips. ‘And how will Bernard respond to this, I ask myself?’

‘Bernard?’ Marty raised her brows interrogatively.

He slanted her an odd look. ‘Your cousin, ma petite. The only son of your uncle. Is it possible you did not know of his existence, hein?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Marty managed after a pause. ‘I—I didn’t even know my uncle had married.’

‘Well,’ he gave a slightly cynical shrug as he accelerated past an elderly cyclist, ‘I imagine he would not have been too eager to pass on the news. The marriage, from what I can gather, was not a success and they lived apart after the child was born. Bernard came to live with his father on the death of his mother just over a year ago.’