She turned and smiled, her face clear in the moonlight. “Well, are you going to make an honest woman of me?”
“As always, you have a gift for the difficult question,” he said.
“A plain yes or no would do. I’m reasonably civilised.”
“A word no woman is entitled to use,” he said solemnly, and lit a cigarette. “Life is seldom as simple as yes or no, Fiona.”
“I don’t agree,” she said. “It’s people who make it com-plicated. My father likes you, if that’s got anything to do with it, and I can’t see what they’d have to complain about at your end. After all, I could pass for French.”
Tm quite sure my mother would adore you. On the other hand, we Bretons are very old-fashioned in certain matters. She would never allow me to marry a girl who couldn’t bring a sizable dowry with her.”
“Would eleven thousand pounds do?” Fiona said. “My favourite uncle died last March.”
Tm sureMaman would be most impressed,” Guyon told her.
She squirmed against him, laying her head on his chest. “In any case, why should we worry about money? I know most artists have to struggle, but how many of them paint like you?”
“A good point.”
And she was right. Already he had sold many paintings, working between assignments on the family farm near Loudeac that his mother still managed so competently. Mornings on the banks of the Oust with leaves drifting from the beech trees into the river and the smell of wet earth. Country that he had grown up in and loved. He was aware, with a strange wonderment, that he wanted to take this girl there, to see again with her the old grey farmhouse rooted into its hollow amongst the trees, walk with her over the familiar country that he loved so much.
“Of course, there could always be someone else,” she said.
Her voice was light and yet there was a poignancy there. It was as if she was aware of how near to hurt she might be, and he pulled her close instinctively.
“There was a girl once, Fiona, in Algiers a long time ago. She gave me peace when I needed it more than anything else on earth. She paid for that gift with her life. A high price. I’ve been trying to escape from her ever since.”
There was a short silence, and then she said gently: “Have you ever considered that it might be Algeria that you’re run-ning from? That somehow this girl has come to symbolise everything that ever happened there?”
In that single instant he knew that what she had said was true. That by some strange perception she had struck right to the very heart of things.
“I know I’m young, Raoul,” she continued, “and on the whole I’ve only seen the lighter side, but I know this: the war in Algeria wasn’t the first to send men home with blood on their hands and it won’t be the last. But that’s life. There wouldn’t be any sweet without sour. People get by.”
“At a guess I’d say you must be about a thousand years old.”
He kissed her passionately and she linked her arms be-hind his neck and pressed her body against him. After a while she rolled away and layon her back, breathless, eyes sparkling.
“And now do you think I might get to see that farm in Brittany?”
He pulled her to her feet and held her at arm’s length. “Did I ever have a choice?”
She reached up to kiss him and then turned and ran away down the hill. Guyon gave her a start of perhaps twenty yards and then went after her, laughter bubbling up spontaneously inside him for the first time in years.
The bar at the hotel was a long, pleasant room with white-washed walls, its windows facing out to sea. Two large oil lamps were suspended from one of the oak beams that sup-ported the low roof.
Jacaud and two other men sat at a table in a corner and played cards. Owen Morgan leaned on the bar beside them, watching the play, a small, greying man with hot Welsh eyes and a face hardened by a lifetime of the sea.