Stooping, Van sniffed. “Mmm... that scent suits you.” Letter to Reader Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Author’s Note Copyright

Stooping, Van sniffed. “Mmm... that scent suits you.”

As they moved on, Anny noticed that French women of all ages, from teenage girls to women with matronly figures, looked with interest at the man strolling beside her.

She basked in the pleasure of knowing that this evening she looked like other girls of seventeen and was out for the evening with a man who might be considered a bit too old for her now, but wouldn’t always be. Each year the age gap between them would become less important. She just had to pray that he wouldn’t fall in love with anyone else before she was ready for love. Seventeen was too young. She knew that. But eighteen was officially grown-up, and nineteen was old enough for anything...even marriage.

Dear Reader,

If the name of one of the people in this story rings a bell, it’s because you have met her before...as a child in one of my longer books, Summer’s Awakening, published by Worldwide in 1984.

The hero of that story was a computer tycoon, as is the hero of this one. Remembering my introduction to the excting world of computers during a winter in America in the early eighties, I also remembered the people in Summer’s Awakening and the letters from readers suggesting a sequel.

This book is not a sequel, but it answers some of the questions about what happened to Emily.

The Impatient Virgin
Anne Weale

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

THEY were walking briskly across the park, a tall, fair-haired couple who might have been brother and sister, when Jon reached for her hand and laced his fingers through hers.

Until that moment, Anny had been relaxed and carefree, one of the many Londoners enjoying the sunshine in Hyde Park on a spring afternoon after a long cold winter. As his fingers tightened, intuition told her the gesture was more than a friendly impulse.

She had thought that if, some time in the future, he proposed to her, it would be at a secluded table in a quiet restaurant after a candle-lit dinner. Jon was that kind of man: romantic, conventional, predictable but also totally reliable. Everyone who knew him liked him. But even though they had known each other for some time, she was still uncertain how she would answer him, if and when the time came.

Now, in quite different circumstances from the way she had imagined, she sensed that any second now he was going to pop the question.

They had left the path and were cutting across the grass in the direction of the lake. There was nobody near them. He drew her to a halt, released her fingers and took her face between his hands. Big hands, but always gentle.

Her hair tossed about by the breeze which had rosied her winter-pale cheeks, Anny looked into his eyes and longed to say, ‘No, Jon...not yet. I’m not ready.’ At the same time she shrank from hurting him.

As he opened his mouth to speak, her cellphone started to ring in the pocket of her red fleece squall jacket.

Jon growled something which, translated, would probably be a taboo word in English. He had learnt to speak Turkish for his work as a plant conservationist, and had smatterings of other languages. She had never heard him swear in his own. He had a placid temperament. It took a lot to rile him.

‘I’ll say I’m busy.’ She took the telephone out of her pocket and extended the aerial. ‘Hello?’

‘Greg here...got a job for you.’ The caller was the editor of the colour magazine of a Sunday newspaper. ‘All the morning flights from Gatwick and Heathrow are booked solid, so you’ll have to fly from Stansted. The flight number...’

Anny had been a journalist in London for five years. She never went anywhere without a pencil and small pad in her pocket. Holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, she wrote down the details. Air UK Flight 910 Business Class 15 April 1120 hours Destination Nice.

Nice, on the Bay of Angels, on the French Riviera. She could see it in her mind’s eye. Fountains sparkling in the sun. Palm trees and beds of green grass dividing the three lanes of traffic along the Promenade des Anglais, named after the English who had invented the concept of wintering in the sun. A blue sea lapping the beach and, nearby, in the old quarter, the stalls of the flower market bright with fluffy golden mimosa, symbol of the mild climate. A city she had known well, but would never willingly go back to, or to any part of that coast.

‘Why Nice?’ she asked.

‘Because I’ve set up an interview with Giovanni Carlisle. His place is not far from Nice, just the other side of the Italian border. You can pick up a car at the airport and be there in less than an hour.’

Anny felt as if she were having a heart attack. There was a pain in her chest. She felt sick and giddy.

‘It’ll be the scoop of your career... the first time the King of Cyberspace has talked to a journalist. I hope you realise how lucky you are,’ said Greg.

‘Why send me? Why not someone who understands all that stuff?’

‘Because it’s the private man we’re interested in, not the computer whiz. There’ll be a file of clippings from the computer press waiting for you at the check-in. You can bone up on the technical background during the flight. This is your big break, Anny. You’ll never get a better one. Go for it.’ Greg rang off.

‘What was all that about?’ asked Jon, as she put the cellphone back in one pocket and the notepad in the other.

‘An assignment to fly to Nice tomorrow...to interview Giovanni Carlisle.’

He looked relieved. ‘That won’t take long. You’ll be back by tomorrow night. Until you said “Why Nice?” I thought it might be one of your editors sending you off to the back of beyond for a month. That would have been tough...just when I’m back for a spell.’ As they began to walk on, he said, ‘I thought Carlisle was famous for his hatred of the popular press and only ever talked to computer journalists on strictly technical matters.’

‘Up to now, yes. But that makes him all the more desirable in the eyes of people like Greg. Most of the world’s celebrities fall over themselves to get coverage. Those that don’t—the ones who employ PR people to keep them out of the limelight—are the biggest quarries of all, from an editor’s point of view.’

‘I wonder why Carlisle has changed his mind?’

‘I can’t imagine,’ said Anny. She thought, but didn’t say, And he may change it back double-quick when I turn up on his doorstep.

‘I can give you a little bit of gen about him,’ said Jon.

‘You can?’ Her eyebrows rose in surprise.

Jon had a degree in horticulture and now worked for Fauna and Flora International, an organisation dedicated to preserving natural species in their native habitats. He used a notebook computer and was sufficiently alert to what was going on in the world to have heard of Giovanni Carlisle, the genius behind Cyberscout. But she wouldn’t have expected Carlisle to be more than a famous name to him.

‘He lives at the Palazzo Orengo near Ventimiglia,’ said Jon. ‘From there to Cannes that whole coast is dotted with famous gardens planted when the Côte d’Azur was the smart place to go in the winter. Nobody went in summer. It was considered too hot. Orengo was one of the legendary gardens of the Edwardian era. Then its owner died and it began to decline... until Carlisle bought it. With the cost of labour sky-high now, only a billionaire could restore a place that size. But even the top brass at the Royal Society of Horticulture aren’t allowed in to see what he’s done to it. A guy I know who writes for their journal, The Garden, wanted to do a piece. He wrote to Carlisle, giving a string of influential references. He was turned down flat.’

‘So why has he suddenly succumbed to Greg’s blandishments?’ Anny said, half to herself.

Jon could see she was totally preoccupied with the assignment. If she had had an inkling of what he was about to say before the telephone call, it had been driven from her mind. She was a dedicated journalist whose career, up to now, had come before everything. He accepted that. In some ways it was a bonus. It made her more understanding when his work took him away and kept her from being bored in his absence. Previous girlfriends had been less tolerant.

‘I should think there’s a lot of material about Orengo in its heyday in the RHS archives. I’ve got nothing to do tomorrow. If you like I’ll go and dredge it out for you.’

‘Sweet of you, Jon, but it could be a waste of time. Leave it till I get back. This whole thing could fizzle out if the so-called King of Cyberspace doesn’t like my face.’

‘Of course he’ll like your face. It’s a beautiful face,’ he said fondly.

He was seeing her with the eyes of a man in love, but even people with clearer vision thought Anny Howard good-looking. In fact her eyes were her only truly beautiful feature; large grey eyes with dark-rimmed irises and long lashes. Men admired her slim figure and long legs. Women envied her style. Somewhere she had learnt the knack of wearing very simple clothes in a way that made them look better than expensive designer outfits on other women. But it was the warmth of her expression, the humorous curve of her lips, her attractive voice which drew people to her and made them confide in her.

Jon had wanted to marry her for months. Sensing that she was less sure of her feelings, he had been biding his time. In the event he had chosen his moment badly. That damned telephone call had come at the worst possible moment.

Now, with Giovanni Carlisle on her mind, it might be better to wait until she came back from France before broaching the subject again.

Late that night while, in London, Anny was checking that everything was in readiness for her early start tomorrow, in the balmier air of Monaco on the Riviera, a tall, dark-haired man in a dinner jacket was looking at the sculptured body of a naked girl with her forearms resting lightly on the shoulders of a naked man and her hands crossed behind his neck.

Giovanni Carlisle—known to his father’s side of his family and to most of his intimates as Van—had seen the bronze before, but not by moonlight. It was by a sculptor called Kerkade who had called it Invitation. It reminded Carlisle of an incident in his own life.

The Principality of Monaco was not a place Carlisle liked. He never normally came here. But it would have been churlish to refuse the invitation to tonight’s dinner party given by a woman who, like himself, was half-American. They had something else in common. They had both made serious mistakes in their personal lives, although his had happened in private, not in the glare of public attention which had surrounded her high-profile divorce.

Carlisle could never enjoy complete anonymity, but his life was as private as he could make it. Although rich and famous himself, he disliked the society of other people in that category. Most of the time he stayed inside the boundaries of his own smaller kingdom along the coast.

While Monaco’s economy depended on the tourists who arrived by the coach-load to gawp at the soldiers from the Principality’s minuscule army changing the guard outside the palace, Carlisle had no intention of allowing anyone to penetrate his seclusion except by invitation.

Thinking about the woman bidden to Orengo tomorrow, a cynical smile curled his well-cut mouth.

Was there a possibility that Anny Howard might put her pride before her career? Knowing her, he thought not. Much as she might dislike having to confront him, nothing would make her pass up an important scoop.

Teeth-gritted, she would come. But she wouldn’t get what she wanted. He had made sure of that

There was little traffic in the West End at ten minutes to seven next morning when Anny took a taxi from her flat to Liverpool Street Station where the seven-thirty Stansted Express would take her to the small airport thirty miles north of London.

The airport shuttle train took her to the final departure lounge where there were complimentary newspapers and a small quiet café serving Stansted’s habitués. She needed a cup of coffee to pull her together after a disturbed night. Then she would look through the file on Giovanni Carlisle, the man whose brainchild, Cyberscout, had simplified public access to the vast resources of cyberspace and, in so doing, made him a fortune.

It was he, even more than Jon, who had kept her awake in the small hours and given her troubled dreams. She did not want to be here, on her way to Orengo. She had tried to forget the past and had thought she’d succeeded. Last night had proved that she hadn’t.

Time, it was said, healed all wounds. What ailed her was like malaria in days gone by, a persistent infection which might recur for a lifetime. To know that in a few hours she would see Van again made her head ache, her body shiver.

She should have refused the assignment, made some excuse to get out of it. Why hadn’t she?

Charlene Moore had been PA to Giovanni Carlisle for three years, since her predecessor, also American, had married a Frenchman from nearby Menton.

Charlene left the palazzo by the side door and walked down sloping paths and flights of steps to the swimming pool.

The extra-long pool had been sited where it could not be seen from the house. It was filled with sea water pumped up from the secluded bay at the bottom of the huge garden. Every morning Mr Carlisle swam fifty lengths before breakfast, although sometimes he didn’t have breakfast until ten or eleven, having worked most of the night.

As Charlene had discovered in her first week at Orengo, Mr Carlisle was a man who, as a poet had put it, ‘marched to a different drummer’. Other people’s ways of living and codes of behaviour meant little to him. He could afford to do as he pleased, and did.

Although she lived on the premises, there were areas of his life which even she didn’t know about. It was rumoured he had a beautiful mistress in Nice but, if so, it was a discreet relationship. They were never seen together in public.

In some ways she felt sorry for him. He had a brilliant mind, was phenomenally rich and also very good-looking. But he would never know if a woman loved him for himself or was only going through the motions for what she could get out of him.

When she reached the clay-flagged terrace surrounding the pool, he was sitting at the far end, drinking coffee and reading some papers.

Even at this early hour the sun was quite hot. The breakfast table was shaded by a large square green sunbrella. Her employer, wearing a white towelling robe and navy cotton espadrilles, was sitting outside its shadow, long suntanned legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. In addition to the thick black hair and olive skin handed down from his mother’s forebears, it seemed he had also inherited a Latin liking for hot weather. Even in the grilling heat of summer he never looked hot or fatigued.

He saw her coming and stood up. He was always punctiliously polite, especially to his subordinates.

‘Good morning, Charlene.’ At the outset he had asked her permission to use her first name, but had never suggested she should be informal with him, even in private.

‘Good morning, Mr Carlisle.’

He gestured for her to sit down in a canvas director’s chair under the sunbrella. ‘Did you enjoy your day off?’

‘Yes, thank you. I went to Èze.’ She was an amateur artist and spent her free time sketching the picturesque hill villages on both sides of the border.

As she took out her notebook in readiness for his instructions, he said, ‘Later today we shall have a house guest...Anny Howard.’

He did not need to explain who Anny Howard was. One of Charlene’s duties was to file all the British journalist’s articles, sent in monthly batches by a London press clippings agency.

There had been several files full of clippings when Charlene started working here, and she had filled a couple more. Why Mr Carlisle was interested in Miss Howard was a mystery she had yet to fathom.

‘Put her in the tower room, will you? Tonight have them use the round table, not the long one. I want Miss Howard opposite me.’

‘That will make thirteen people. I know you are not superstitious, but it might worry some of your guests...and it would mean putting two women next to each other.’

‘That would never do,’ he said sardonically. ‘In that case invite General Foster. He won’t mind being asked at short notice.’

Charlene made a note to call the octogenarian Englishman who lived in a flat in Menton, a town once thronged by English winter sun-seekers. Even Queen Victoria had wintered there, renting one of the hotels.

‘What time is Miss Howard arriving? You’ll want Carlo to meet her, I presume?’

Her employer removed his sunglasses. Someone meeting him for the first time would expect his eyes to be brown to match the rest of his colouring. In fact they were blue, the vivid dark blue of a bed of echiums she had passed on her way to the pool.

‘Her flight lands at four. There’s no need to send the car for her. She’s an experienced traveller and I’m sure the papers she writes for don’t quibble about her expenses. We’ll let her find her own way here.’

He spoke in his usual quiet voice, but it seemed to Charlene that his eyes had the steely gleam she had seen once or twice before when he was annoyed about something.

She had never incurred his displeasure and didn’t expect to because she was very efficient. But she’d heard his wrath could be devastating. Other members of the household had told her, with graphic gestures, that when he was angry—Dio mio!—it was like a volcano.

Probably they were exaggerating. The Italian housekeeper and cleaners and the French chef were all inclined to make dramas out of minor incidents. They had more emotional temperaments than Americans and the British. But as Mr Carlisle was only half-American, perhaps he could be provoked into fiery eruptions.

Something was vexing him now. He was looking down towards the sea where the translucent blue-green water lapped against ochre rocks at either end of a scimitar-shaped pebble beach. The sight didn’t seem to please him. His black brows were drawn together, his mouth set in a harsh line.

If Miss Howard’s arrival was causing that grim expression, Charlene wondered why he was allowing her to come. Many well-known journalists had approached him for interviews, but all had been refused.

Why was he making an exception of Anny Howard?

Aboard Flight 910 to Nice, the cabin staff had taken their places for take-off.

Only five other people besides Anny were flying in the forward section. She put her tote on the aisle seat and the file on the seat next to hers. On her way to see anyone else, she would have been eager to start researching her subject. In this instance she wanted to postpone the study of Van’s achievements since the last time she had seen him.

Instead she opened the in-flight magazine, but found herself reading paragraphs without taking in what they meant. She leaned back and closed her eyes, memories crowding her mind, the old pain lancing her heart.

That she was now five years older and far more sure of herself didn’t make her confident that she would be able to handle him. She knew her defences would still be flimsy, her weapons feeble when matched with his formidable powers.

Van wasn’t like Jon, kind and sensitive. In his field, Van was a genius, and like all such men he had a ruthless streak. What he wanted he got. But he hadn’t got her, or not on the terms he required.

That would have rankled for a long time. He might have forgotten her since then, but what if seeing her again rekindled his ire? Wasn’t it better to avoid that possibility? When they landed at Nice, she could fly straight back to London. But if she did that what would it do to her prospects as a freelance journalist? Greg couldn’t blame her for being thrown out by Van, but he would if she chickened out. She could say goodbye to any more assignments from him, and he might spread the word to other editors. Journalism was a competitive profession in which, so far, she had done well. That could change if she blotted her copybook with Greg.

Lunch was served. Anny had a good appetite and maintained her svelte shape with an energetic life rather than by counting calories. Today she did less than justice to an excellent meal.

With forty minutes to landing time, she broached the file, reading with practised swiftness clippings from the American and British computer press. Some of them carried the only photograph of Van ever released by his PR department. It showed him sitting in a swivel desk chair, a monitor screen behind him. His face was as she remembered it, not the way he would look now.

Replacing the clippings in the file, she took from her bag an envelope sealed five years ago and never opened until now. Her fingers weren’t perfectly steady as she shook out the contents; several snapshots and various sentimental mementoes. It pained her to see them again. Greg, if he knew she had them, would badger her to let him publish them. Despite being taken by an amateur, they were valuable for the light they threw on the time before Van became famous.

Like Stansted, the airport at Nice was ultra-modern, built as close to the sea as it was possible to be. In the final minutes of the flight, Anny looked down at the familiar coastline, feeling a mixture of terror and joy.

Once these shimmering waters reflecting the blue of the sky had been her natural habitat. ‘The nearest thing to a mermaid you’ll ever see,’ someone had said of her.

But that was long ago, when her skin had been almost always sticky from constant dunkings in the sea and her sun-streaked hair, when not hanging in dripping rats’ tails, had been tucked up inside the straw hat she was made to wear out of the water.

Once through the airport formalities, which didn’t take long these days, she looked around for a quiet corner from which to call Greg on her cellphone.

He was at his desk and took her call straight away. ‘Hello, Anny. What’s the problem?’

‘No problems yet, but your briefing yesterday wasn’t very informative. I’d like to know how you persuaded Carlisle to relax his embargo on journos?’

There was a pause before he answered. ‘OK, I’ll level with you. I didn’t persuade him. He suggested it to me, but only on certain conditions.’

‘Which were?’

‘First, that I sent Anny Howard. It seems he’s read some of your interviews and thought they were good.’

‘What else?’

‘He wanted a written assurance that he would be shown your copy before publication, with the right to make cuts...in fact to veto the whole thing if he didn’t like it.’

‘You didn’t go along with that!’ she expostulated.

‘I didn’t have any option. Anyway I’m sure he will like whatever you write. People always do. You’re good at telling the truth in a way that doesn’t upset them.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on that in this case.’ Hot-tempered when she was younger, at twenty-five Anny had learnt not to fly off the handle even when raging inwardly.

‘The fact that he specifically asked for you gives you a big edge,’ said Greg.

That’s all you know, she thought. Aloud, she said, ‘Maybe...maybe not. I’ll call you later.’

The girl at the car rental desk took her for a compatriot till Anny explained she was a foreigner. Her fluent French and Italian had been a help to her career, but she hadn’t had to work at them like Jon with his Turkish. She had picked them up as a child, with some Spanish and Catalan learned in harbours and boatyards up and down the coast of Spain.

The fastest route from the airport to Orengo was by the coast road known as the Moyenne Comiche. But Anny didn’t want to join that shuttle of high-speed drivers and long-distance coaches. After Greg’s revelation of who had really set up the interview, she needed time to re-think her plan of action.

All along the city’s famous Promenade des Anglais people in warm-weather clothes were walking their dogs, jogging, or strolling with friends while teenagers on roller-blades glided past them. The palms, the tubs of geraniums, the awnings shading the windows of the hotels made her realise how much, subconsciously, she had missed this Mediterranean atmosphere.

Once this had been her world...

CHAPTER TWO

SINCE the first time Sea Dreams dropped anchor in the quiet bay at the foot of the hill dominated by the dilapidated mansion called Palazzo Orengo, Anny had explored every corner of its neglected garden.

The last remaining gardener, an old Italian, had told Anny’s uncle, the skipper of Sea Dreams, that the garden covered forty-five hectares. There had been a lot to explore. Of all its special places, her favourite was the belvedere with its views of the coasts of two countries, the Italian Riviera to the east and the French Riviera to the west.

The roof of the belvedere was supported by columns of carved rose-pink marble entwined by an old wisteria, veiling the building with its drooping clusters of pale purple flowers.

One hot afternoon, while Uncle Bart was napping in his cabin, Anny sat on the belvedere’s balustrade, interviewing Dona Sofia, the Queen of Spain.

In her imagination, she had interviewed many of the world’s leading women in preparation for the time when she herself would be one of the world’s leading journalists. She had always known what she wanted to be. Journalism was in her blood. Her grandfather had edited a weekly newspaper, her father had been killed reporting a war in Africa and her uncle wrote for the yachting press.

There being no one to hear her except the small lizards which scuttled up and down the columns, she was asking her questions aloud.

‘If you hadn’t been born a princess, Your Majesty, what career would you have chosen?’

Before she could invent the Queen’s reply, from behind her someone said, ‘Who are you?’

The voice gave Anny such a start that she almost fell off the balustrade.

Standing in the entrance to the belvedere was a tall young man she had never set eyes on before. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and dark blue jeans with brown deck shoes, the kind with a leather thong threaded round the sides. He had the same colouring as the youths in the nearby village, but their eyes were black and his were as blue as his jeans.

‘I’m Anny Howard. Who are you?’

‘Van Carlisle...hi...how’re you doing?’

As she slid off the sun-warmed stone ledge, he came towards her.

As they shook hands, he said, ‘Sorry I startled you. You must be the girl from the schooner down in the bay. Lucio told me about you.’

‘Are you related to Lucio?’

‘No, I’m related to the old lady who lives in the palazzo. She’s my great-grandmother.’

‘I’ve never seen her,’ said Anny. ‘Lucio calls her la contessa. Is she really a countess or is that just his name for her?’

‘It’s her official title, but she was born an American like me. The reason you’ve never seen her is because she’s eighty-three years old and very frail. She stays in bed most of the time.’

‘You don’t sound like an American.’

‘That’s because when I was little my sister and I had an English nanny. My mother is Italian, my father’s American and we lived in Rome until I was about your age. Tell me about you.’

‘I’m an orphan,’ said Anny. ‘But I’m not unhappy like the orphans in books. If I had parents like other people, I’d have to live in a house. I’d much rather live on Sea Dreams with Uncle Bart.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s almost time for his tea. Would you like to come down and meet him? He’s a very interesting man. He’s sailed all over the world. I’ve only sailed round the Mediterranean a few times.’

‘I’ve never had much to do with sailing people. Lucio says this isn’t the first time you’ve moored in the bay.’

‘We come here every year. The berthing fees in the marinas keep going up and we can’t afford them,’ Anny confided. ‘So we try to find moorings which are free. There’s a fresh-water tap and a lavatory in the beach house which Lucio says the contessa wouldn’t mind us using. We help him in the garden for as long as we’re here.’

In fact it was only she who helped the aged gardener in his vain attempts to keep Nature under control.

‘How long do you stay?’ Van asked.

‘Two or three weeks, then we’ll sail to Corsica. How long are you here for?’

‘The whole summer vacation. I’m at college in the States. Where do you go to school?’

They had set out down the long path which, bisected by many other paths, wound its way to the beach.

‘I don’t,’ said Anny. ‘Uncle Bart teaches me. We’re doing a special course to make sure I’ll know enough to pass some exams later on. At the moment I’m two years ahead of my age group.’

Van was as tall as her uncle. Looking down at her, he said, ‘How old are you?’

‘Nine and a quarter. How old are you?’

Her answer made him grin. ‘Going on nineteen. What happened to your parents?’

‘My father was a television reporter. He and his cameraman were ambushed by a group of rebels during a war in Africa. That was before I was born. My mother died two years later. I don’t remember her. There was no one else to look after me so Uncle Bart adopted me. The first thing he had to do was to drown-proof me so that if I fell overboard I wouldn’t sink. Are you drown-proof?’

‘I learnt to swim at school. I can’t say I was crazy about it...or anything, except computers. Is your uncle teaching you computer skills?’

When Anny shook her head, Van said, ‘You won’t get far unless you’re computer literate. Maybe I’ll give you some lessons...get you started.’

‘What is the child like?’ asked the old lady propped up by pillows in the great carved and gilded bed. ‘Is she pretty?’

‘Not pretty, but very intelligent. More like thirteen than nine in her conversation. When they go to Corsica, maybe I’ll sail over with them and come back on the ferry.’

‘A splendid idea,’ said the contessa, watching Van wolf down a large helping of pasta. ‘It’s not good to spend all your time riveted to your computer. I’m sure it’s bad for you...hour after hour gazing at a screen.’

His mouth full, her great-grandson gave her a smile with his eyes. Although he was inches taller than her long-dead husband, and still far too thin for his height, there were moments when he reminded her of Giovanni, the irresistibly attractive Italian aristocrat who had come to New York looking for a rich bride to help him restore his ancestral home to its former glory.

Now, sixty-five years later, Orengo was again in decline. Very soon, like other once-great houses, it would be demolished and the site redeveloped as a hotel or blocks of holiday apartments. The thought of it tore at her heart but she could see no alternative.

Van was the only member of the family who ever came here and he was too young to rescue Orengo from the fate of all white elephants. Although several of his American forebears had made fortunes, he was unlikely ever to emulate them. He had a good brain but at present seemed unable to focus on anything but his computer.

Perhaps in twenty years’ time he would be successful at something, but by then it would be too late.

On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Anny was cooking breakfast in the galley when she heard someone hailing the schooner and went on deck to see Van standing on the beach with a knapsack slung on one shoulder.

Her heart leapt with pleasure. She hadn’t known he was coming and having him to share her birthday celebrations was better than a stack of expensive presents.

‘Watch the pan, will you, Bart?’ she called to her uncle. ‘I’m going to pick up Van.’

By the time the rubber dinghy nudged the shingle at the water’s edge, Van had taken off his shoes in readiness to step aboard.

In the seven years since their first meeting he had changed as much as Anny had. The lanky youth, built like a half-starved dog, all ribs and prominent shoulder bones, had matured into a man with a lean but powerful physique.

Bart claimed some of the credit for this transformation. He had taught Van to crew for him and introduced him to the pleasures of snorkelling and wind-surfing. From being bookish and sedentary, he had changed, at least part of the time, to being an active outdoorsman.

‘Hi! How’s it going?’ he greeted her.

‘Fine. What a great surprise. When did you get here?’

‘Too late last night to come down and say hello. Theodora says you were up at the house yesterday, writing letters for her.’

‘Her hands are so twisted now it hurts her to hold a pen. But I thought she seemed less depressed. Did she know you were coming?’

He shook his head. ‘I saw a special offer on trips to Paris. I have to be back there Thursday so I’ll only be here two nights.’

‘It’s a long way to come for two nights.’

‘I had a special reason. Bart...how are you?’ Looking up from the dinghy as it came alongside, he gave his warm smile to her uncle who had come up on deck to greet him.

It wasn’t till they were aboard and the two men had greeted each other that Van turned back to Anny. ‘Happy birthday.’ He bent his tall head to kiss her lightly on both cheeks.

Anny felt herself blushing. Kisses weren’t part of her life. Bart was kind, but he wasn’t demonstrative. Even when she was little he had never kissed her goodnight. Affectionate pats on the head or shoulder and, occasionally, a brief cuddle if she had hurt herself was his limit on physical expressions of the close bond between them.

Immediately after kissing her, Van started to delve in his knapsack, missing her reaction to the touch of his lips.

‘A little something for the skipper...’ he handed over a bottle in an airline bag ‘...and some bits and pieces for the first mate.’

The parcels he handed to her were all beautifully wrapped. Some of the ribbon adornments had become crushed in transit but were soon tweaked back into shape by Anny’s appreciative fingers.

While Bart went below for a glass to sample his present, she began to unwrap hers, carefully peeling away the bits of sticky tape so as not to damage the lovely paper.

Members of Van’s family whom she knew only by name had sent a swimsuit, a calculator, a backpack-style bag, a pen as thick as a cigar, a belt with a silver buckle and a couple of cassettes for the head-set he had given her for her thirteenth birthday. All the presents had cards attached to them with messages like—To Giovanni’s mermaid with birthday wishes from Cousin Kate.

The parcel tagged with his handwriting she kept till last. It looked and felt like a heavy book, perhaps an anthology of American poetry. He knew she loved poetry.

‘You’ll have to give me the addresses of all these kind people. I must write and thank them.’

‘Postcards will do. You can buy some in Nice this afternoon.’

‘Why are we going to Nice?’

‘Wait and see.’

When Van looked at her with that glint of laughter in his eyes, it gave Anny a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had felt it a few times before, like a butterfly fluttering inside her. Today it was stronger, more disturbing.

She read the card on his parcel. The message was short and factual. To Anny from Giovanni. With the date.

‘Why not “from Van”?’ she asked.

‘Because that’s my proper name. When I’m rich and famous I’ll be Giovanni Carlisle to the world and Van to my family and friends. You won’t use Anny for your byline, will you? I thought when you started your career you’d change to Annette Howard.’

‘I like Anny better. It’s what I’ve always been—’ She broke off as, instead of the expected book jacket, she exposed a grey plastic box.

‘What’s that you’ve brought her?’ asked Bart, reappearing with a bottle of whisky in one hand and two tumblers in the other. ‘Will you join me?’

‘Not right now, thanks. It’s a laptop computer for Anny to write her stuff on,’ Van told him. ‘That’s a great old typewriter you use, but it’s a museum piece. This—’ he tapped the lid of the laptop ‘—isn’t state-of-the-art, but it’s OK for entry level.’

Anny was overwhelmed. Because it was important to Van, she had looked at computer equipment the last time they were in a place with a shop which sold it. The prices had seemed exorbitant.

Although Van’s father had an important job in the American foreign service and his mother’s second husband had factories near Milan connected with the booming Italian fashion industry, Van did not seem to share in his parents’ prosperity. He had been expensively educated, but from things he’d let drop, it sounded as if what he was paid for his job as a computer programmer didn’t leave him much spare cash after he had paid his overheads.

‘Look, here’s how you do it.’ He showed her.

Watching the screen inside the lid come to life, she said, ‘It’s wonderful, but you shouldn’t have given me such an expensive present.’

‘I got it cheap from a guy who was upgrading. Later I’ll give you a tutorial. Right now, how about breakfast?’

‘Oh, my goodness...the ham.’ She handed the laptop to him and hurried back to the galley.

Later they swam. Although here, in late April, the air temperature was already that of midsummer in northern Europe, when they dived from the deck, for the first few moments under water the sea felt breathtakingly cold. Bart never swam till June, sometimes not till July when the water was as warm as consommé.

Their bodies adjusting rapidly, they struck out to a group of rocks which offered places to sit.

‘Why does your cousin Kate call me “Giovanni’s mermaid”?’ Anny asked, twisting her hair into a skein and squeezing the water from it

‘Once, when we were watching you swimming, Bart said you were the nearest thing to a mermaid I’d ever see. I must have told Kate that. Aah, this feels good.’

As he stretched out on the warm rock, his olive-skinned torso beaded with bright crystal drops, Anny felt another secret flutter. This time his stay was too short for him to tan deeply as he had when crewing.

‘Will you come sailing this summer?’

‘I don’t think so.’

It hurt her that he didn’t sound as disappointed as she felt. ‘Why not?’

‘Lack of time mainly. My collegiate life is over.’

After graduating summa cum laude—the equivalent of a first-class honours degree—he had gone on to do two years of post-graduate work.

‘I’m part of the rat race now...as you will be pretty soon. Enjoy all this while you can. It won’t last for ever.’

‘I don’t want to stay here for ever. It gets boring going round the same places year after year. I want to see Paris and London. But I worry about leaving Bart. I’m not sure he’ll feed himself properly if I’m not around. He taught me to cook but he doesn’t do much himself now.’

Van pulled his shoulders off the rock with the stomach muscles developed while mastering wind-surfing.

‘You probably thought it wasn’t such a good idea to bring him a bottle of booze. But Scotch is better for his liver than cheap plonk full of chemicals.’

Anny sighed. ‘He drinks too much because he’s lonely. An adopted daughter isn’t the same as a wife. He was in love with someone a long time ago. But she wouldn’t live on a boat and he knew the sea was in his blood. Imagine having to choose between the person you love and the only thing you want to do. It must have been awful...for both of them.’

‘Forty years ago most women followed their men to wherever they had to go...darkest Africa... Patagonia...anywhere,’ said Van. ‘Sounds as if she wasn’t really in love with him.’

‘Or she may have known she couldn’t cope. I’ve never been used to anything else so it doesn’t seem strange to me. But it could be a difficult adjustment for someone brought up ashore.’

‘An adjustment you’ll have to make the other way round,’ said Van. ‘I wonder if you’ll like big cities as much as you think.’

‘Nice is a big city.’

‘Nice has the sea on its doorstep. It’s a village compared with Paris and London. Where I want to live is right here. But Orengo needs money spent on it...lots of money...the kind of money Theodora had when she came here.’

It was at his great-grandmother’s wish that he used her first name.

‘What happened to her money?’ Until now Anny had never liked to enquire.

‘The old boy blew most of it. They lived in tremendous style. There were fifteen gardeners and eighteen household staff. They entertained all the great names of their era, the Thirties.’

‘Will you do that when you live here?’ There was no doubt in Anny’s mind that one day Van would be rich and famous.

‘I shan’t have thirty-three people on my payroll, that’s for sure.’ He looked at his waterproof watch. ‘It’s time we were getting back. Theodora wants to see you.’

He sprang up, holding out a hand to give Anny a pull-up. Their hands were only clasped for a few seconds, but the strength in his fingers, and the bulge of muscle in his upper arm as he lifted her to her feet with no effort on her part, reanimated the feelings she had had earlier.

Poised on the edge of the rocks three metres above the pellucid sea, they both inhaled a deep breath. In the first year or two of their friendship, this was a game Anny had always won. In those days she could hold her breath longer and swim further without tiring. Now the propulsion of Van’s long, muscular thighs made him enter the water half a metre ahead of her, increasing his lead as they glided through the sunlit sea.

When Anny came up, gasping, he was still under the surface. She was swimming flat out when his dark head appeared, but he reached the schooner’s ladder lengths ahead of her.

‘It’s time you had a handicap,’ she said, as she stepped on deck with Van coming up behind her. ‘You may not get as much practice, but you’re so much taller and stronger.’

‘OK, next time I’ll give you a five-second start.’ For a moment his blue eyes appraised her slender body in the new American swimsuit which had higher-cut legs and a more revealing top than her old suit.

Brief as it was, the look made her heart do a flip. Then Van turned away to pick up the towel he’d brought rolled round his brief black bathing slip.

Theodora di Bachelli was not in bed but sitting in a chair on the bedroom’s awning-shaded balcony when Anny and Van entered her room.

‘Many, many happy returns of the day, my dear child,’ she said, holding out hands which now bore little resemblance to the bronze cast, made by an artist when she was twenty, on one of the tables in the shuttered salon.

‘Thank you.’ Anny bent to kiss the chamois-soft powdered cheeks.

‘It’s high time you had a dress,’ said the contessa. ‘As I can’t come to help you choose it, Van will deputise for me. You can wear it tonight when you and your uncle dine here.’

‘Uncle Bart hasn’t any formal clothes,’ said Anny. She had no intention of leaving him to eat alone.

‘Neither has Van. Only you and I will dress up. I haven’t dressed up for twenty years, but I shall tonight. A girl’s sixteenth birthday is a special occasion. Imagine, I was only two years older than you when I married. My husband was twenty-five, the same age as his great-grandson.’ After glancing at Van, she went on, ‘But in those days well-bred young men in their twenties spent their time sowing their wild oats. Do you understand that expression?’

‘It means having love affairs, doesn’t it?’ Anny replied.

‘Love affairs of a nature which might be condoned by their fathers but were not approved of by their mothers—if they knew about them,’ said the contessa. ‘Young men would also get drunk and, if they were very wild, smoke opium. As the French say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The only difference between my time and your time is that now many good girls do what once only bad girls did and drugs are on sale everywhere.’

Van said dryly, ‘We’re not all doing drugs, Theodora.’

‘I’m sure you have too much intelligence to jeopardise your future. Your only excess, that I know of, is straining your eyes, doing whatever it is that you do on that machine you installed in the tower room.’

She turned back to Anny. ‘You, my dear, have had the good luck not to be exposed to bad influences. I hope you will always stay as unspoiled and lovely as you are today. If I were your fairy godmother, I would use my magic to make sure that when you are a little older you will fall in love and stay in love for the rest of your life. It doesn’t happen very often, but it did to me and I hope it will to you.’

‘Thank you, Contessa...and thank you for the dress.’

It was the prospect of going shopping with Van, rather than the dress itself, that made Anny’s eyes sparkle.

‘Why do the rest of your family never come here?’ she asked, on the train which ran from a station near the palazzo to Nice, sometimes snaking into tunnels where the mountains came down to the sea and re-emerging into the sunlight above bays where the clear water showed where the sea-bed was sandy and where it was covered with dark green weed.

‘They couldn’t very well come here and not stay at Orengo. By their standards it’s falling to bits,’ Van told her. ‘Americans are accustomed to a higher level of comfort than any other nation. They had central heating and showers decades before Europeans. They don’t like insects and draughts and damp-smelling closets. Orengo is stuck in a time warp. It was the height of luxury in its day, but that was a long time ago.’

‘You like it. You’re American.’

‘Not really. Do you know the expression “a citizen of the world”?’

Anny shook her head. Bart had bought her a set of encyclopaedia, but it was out of date by twenty years. As they only ever saw newspapers and magazines which other people had discarded, sometimes there were embarrassing gaps in her general knowledge.

‘It means someone who feels they belong to the human race rather than to any one country,’ he explained. ‘I go a step further. I feel I belong to cyberspace. Right now it’s like the old Wild West...unexplored territory. But one day...’

As he explained his vision, Anny listened intently, as she did to everything Van said. But a lot of it was beyond her comprehension. She wondered if there was a book on the subject she could study before his next visit.

‘If this were New York we could go to Bloomie’s, but here I wouldn’t know which is the best store,’ said Van, on arrival at Nice.

‘That’s no problem,’ said Anny. ‘Let’s have a drink in one of the cafés and when I see someone going past who looks the way I’d like to look, I’ll ask her where she shops.’

The suggestion seemed to amuse him. ‘Do you really have the nerve to do that?’

‘Why not? It’s common sense. Who minds being told you like the way they look? Anyway I can’t afford to be shy if I’m going to be a journalist. I’ll have to persuade other people not to be shy with me.’

They chose a café in one of the pedestrianised shopping streets near the western end of the spacious Place Massena with its public gardens and fountains.

Presently, while she sipped a soft drink and Van had a beer, she saw a couple of girls a little older than herself whose style she wanted to emulate. Flattered by her explanation, they were only too ready to list their favourite shops.

‘There...you see? One easy movement,’ said Anny, returning to their table outside Le Paradis.

‘You should have offered to buy them a drink,’ said Van. ‘The one in blue had excellent legs.’

The remark sapped all Anny’s pleasure in the success of her strategy. She felt furious with him.

‘If you want to pick up girls, you’ll have to do it yourself.’

Van laughed, showing his white teeth and giving her another of those strange little internal tremors. She didn’t like the way his blue eyes were following another girl passing by, one closer to his age than the other two.

She knew that in a white shirt and much laundered jeans she was no match for the local girls, all of whom seemed to have that elusive quality called chic. Their figures weren’t better than hers, and not all were prettier. But they all had something she lacked and was eager to acquire, even though she couldn’t pin it down.

Van finished his beer. ‘When you’re ready, we’d better get started.’

While he paid the waiter, Anny finished her jus d’orange.

The girls to whom she had spoken had explained the location of the shops they recommended. Anny had half expected that Van would remain outside, perhaps suggest meeting her later. Her uncle had given her the impression that, except in places like a ship’s chandler, the male sex was not at ease in shops.

Van, it seemed, was an exception. He not only came inside the shop but suggested they should both trawl the racks and pick out what caught their eye.

‘What size are you?’

Anny consulted an assistant who looked her over and decided she was a 36. Having heard them speaking English, she added that this was the Continental equivalent of an American 8 or a British 10.

After looking at several price tags, Anny went back to Van. ‘These are all very expensive. I don’t think the contessa realises how much dresses cost now. If she’s short of money...’

‘She’s not that short of money,’ he said. ‘She’s a very old lady. She may not be around next year. Let her enjoy being generous.’

Of the three dresses she took to the fitting room, two were possibles and one impossible; but she couldn’t resist trying it on and then showing it to Van, hoping it might make him see her from a new perspective.

It was made of a clingy red fabric with a halter-necked glittery bodice cut in a way that made a bra unnecessary for anyone with firm breasts.

Barefoot, because her sandals spoiled the effect, she walked out of the fitting room, wondering how Van would react. While she was fastening the zip, she had heard the salesgirl practising her English on him.

Seeing Anny got up like a swinger gave Van a curious jolt. He had noticed that morning that she had a very good figure, but now, with every curve emphasised by a low décolletage and hip-hugging skirt, it was hard to believe that here, metamorphosed into a sexy young woman, was the androgynous child he had found acting out a daydream in the belvedere.

In a few years’ time she was going to be drop-dead gorgeous. Right now she was barely sixteen and although she already had a shape that would knock guys’ eyes out if they saw her in that red outfit, to anyone with a grain of intelligence it was obvious that she didn’t have the experience to handle the reactions the dress invited.

‘Uh-uh,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That little number would give Theodora heart failure. Try these two I picked out for you.’

Anny looked doubtfully at his choices, neither of which appealed to her. ‘I’ll show you my other two first.’

‘OK.’ He resumed his conversation with the salesgirl.

Anny had thought he was only interested in computers. But this afternoon he was behaving like what Bart called a skirt-chaser. She didn’t like it. She wanted him to concentrate on her.

When she appeared in the next dress, a more sedate style splashed with pale pink roses on a turquoise background, Van said, ‘That’s pretty, but the shoulders don’t fit and you’d need to replace that tacky plastic belt’

He was equally critical of her third choice, giving Anny the feeling she must have disastrous taste.

Trying on one of the dresses he thought suitable, she had to admit it looked much better on her than it had on the hanger. It was cream cotton, overchecked with white, with cream lace cuffs on the short sleeves and a triangle of lace sewn into the low V-neck. The waist was tight, the full hem almost down to her ankles. Reluctantly, she acknowledged that it was more becoming than any of the previous three.

‘Theodora will like that,’ said Van, when he saw it. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘It’s all right.’ She wasn’t going to enthuse after he’d been so stuffy about the red dress.

On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Anny took the dress from the hanging locker in her cabin where it had stayed, unworn, since the year before.

Tonight there would be no celebration. The contessa was in a private clinic, having tests. Bart had had to go to England for the funeral of his eldest sister. Anny hadn’t gone with him because they were short of money. Even one air fare had left their resources at a worryingly low ebb.

She was keeping her fingers crossed that an article she had sent to a French magazine would be accepted. They had taken a previous piece and paid her a useful fee. But she couldn’t count on it happening a second time.

She took the dress on deck to give it its fortnightly airing. When, if ever, would she wear it again? she wondered forlornly.

She hadn’t seen Van since last spring because, although he had been to Orengo in the interim, she and Bart had been away. At least when they were at sea Bart drank less, but to Anny it had been deeply frustrating to be somewhere else while Van was at the palazzo.

On one of his visits, he had left a portable printer for her. By then she had mastered the word processor and, with the addition of the printer, was able to produce professional-looking typescripts.

Bart wouldn’t hear of her leaving home before she was eighteen. Meanwhile she was working hard to build up a portfolio of freelance published work to show to prospective employers when she applied for staff jobs.

Since the contessa’s admission to the clinic, Anny had been hoping that Van might come over to see her. Her relations in America knew where she was because she herself had called her younger sister in Boston to tell her about the tests. Anny had dialled the number for her on an old-fashioned daffodil telephone with the numbers in holes in a metal disc the contessa found awkward to use now that her knuckles were swollen.

Now, looking up towards the house with its flaking pink-washed walls and peeling dark green shutters, her attention was caught by a splash of coral-red on the long staircase which was the garden’s main axis. Lucio didn’t have a shirt that colour and anyway he wouldn’t be coming down the stairs two at a time. Only one person ran down them at that breakneck speed.

Anny leapt to her feet. He had come. In a few minutes he would be on the beach, waving to her.

Her life, which for twelve long months had been like a ship in the doldrums, the zone of calm weather along the equator where, in the days of sail, vessels had been becalmed, was suddenly back in motion.

CHAPTER THREE

‘YOU’VE cut off your hair!’ he exclaimed, as she cut the dinghy’s motor to glide the final few metres.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, stepping out of the dinghy.

Van bent down to beach it for her. ‘I don’t know...takes getting used to. You look different... not a mermaid any more.’

‘I couldn’t stay a mermaid for ever. It’s great to see you.’ She stepped forward, offering her cheek.

For a few seconds, his hands rested on her shoulders and she felt the masculine texture of his cheek against hers, once, twice and a third time. ‘Good to see you too, Anny.’

‘Have you seen the contessa yet?’

‘I stopped off at the clinic on my way through Nice. She’s enjoying being the centre of attention and all the comings and goings. It must be hellishly boring, cooped up in her bedroom here. Bart’s gone to England, I hear. How long will he be gone?’

‘Only a week.’

‘Why didn’t he take you with him to meet your other relations?’

‘Apart from the sister who has died, he doesn’t get on with the rest of them.’

‘I don’t think he should have left you here on your own,’ he said, frowning.

‘Why not? I’m a big girl now.’

‘That’s why. These days there are people around who, if they knew you were alone, might make trouble. You do bolt the main hatch at night?’

She nodded. ‘We do that even when Bart’s at home. It isn’t necessary here, but sometimes we berth in places where things get stolen even with the owners on board. Usually on boats where there’s been a party and everyone ended up stoned from drink or dope.’

He said, ‘Why not sleep at the house until he comes back? I would come and sleep in Bart’s cabin but he might not like that. Here—’ he indicated the palazzo ‘—there’s Elena to make it respectable.’

The thought of Van sleeping on board Sea Dreams had been in Anny’s mind many times. She had often fantasised about sailing somewhere, alone with him.

‘Why wouldn’t it be respectable without Elena?’ She knew why, but wanted to hear him explain it. ‘I’ve read that in New York and London young people often share houses. No one thinks anything of it.’

‘That’s different. There’s usually a group of them sharing to pay a high rent, and the girls aren’t as young as you are. I haven’t said happy birthday yet I left your presents on the terrace.’

‘It’s nice of you to remember.’ She sent him cards on his birthday, but up to now had never had enough money to mail a gift to the States.

‘Have you worn your dress since I last saw you?’

Anny shook her head.

‘You can wear it tonight. We’ll go to the clinic together, spend a while with Theodora and then have a seafood supper in the old part of town. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds wonderful.’

The contessa received them in a bed jacket of peach satin edged with swan’s-down over a nightgown trimmed with hand-made lace. Her white hair, as fine as spun sugar, was brushed into an aureole like the pale glow surrounding saints’ heads in mediaeval paintings.

‘Except when they stick needles in me, I am enjoying this experience,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Here is a little gift for your birthday, Anny. It’s time you began to wear make-up, but only a soupçon. Try not to overdo it. You have a lovely skin and beautiful eyes. A little colour on your lips and a touch of scent here and there is all that you need at present.’

The parcel she took from the night table and handed to Anny contained a lipstick and a small bottle of perfume.

‘The scent is Fragonard’s Rêve de Grasse which, as you know, means “Dream of Grasse”. One of the nurses lives at Grasse and I asked her to go to the Fragonard factory for me. I used to go there every year to buy scents and soaps and cosmetics. This scent is also sold by one of the most famous Paris couturiers, but he has re-named it Poison. I hope it will suit you. To smell exquisite, a woman must find a scent that combines with her natural aroma. Open the bottle and try it. How do you like Anny’s new hairstyle, Giovanni?’

‘I liked it long,’ he answered. ‘Shall I deal with that?’ He stretched out his hand for the scent bottle which had a sealed glass stopper.

Anny handed it over and Van produced a pocket knife. When he had removed the seal, he put his finger on the stopper, turned the bottle upside down and then, standing it on the tray-table at the foot of the bed, used one hand to lift Anny’s hair away from her ears and the other to touch the skin behind her lobes with the wet stopper.

‘And on her wrists...where the pulse beats,’ said the contessa.

Already quickened by the brush of Van’s fingers against her ears and neck, Anny’s pulse accelerated like a car competing in the Monte Carlo Grand Prix when he turned her hands palm upwards to do as the old lady bade him.

‘By the time you’ve tried out the lipstick, we shall know if you smell like a dream...or poisonous,’ he teased her.

The lipstick was the soft pinky-beige of weathered Roman-tiled roofs. It toned with the soft golden colour of Anny’s skin and, combined with the natural rosiness of her lips, emphasised the shape of her mouth and made her feel much more sophisticated.

They spent an hour at the clinic and then, suddenly, the contessa’s animation waned and in a matter of moments she had fallen into a doze. As her naps usually lasted some time, her visitors quietly withdrew. At the desk at the end of the corridor, Van left a message with a nurse that he would come back in the morning.

The clinic overlooked the Promenade des Anglais and had once been a hotel as grand as the Negresco.

‘I wonder what it costs to eat there?’ said Anny, as they walked past that imposing edifice, built in the style of a wedding cake with a pink fish-scaled dome from the top of which the French flag fluttered in the pleasant sea breeze of a fine spring evening.

‘A lot,’ said Van, ‘but you wouldn’t like it in there.’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not our sort of place.’

She was pleased by the implication that they were two of a kind with the same tastes and preferences. But the journalist in her made her ask, ‘How do you know? Have you been there?’

‘No, but you only have to look at that outfit the doorman’s wearing to know what it’s like inside. I prefer the simple fish restaurants near the flower market. Which reminds me...’ Van put his hand on her shoulder, mak ing her come to a standstill.

Stooping, he sniffed, ‘Mm...that scent suits you.’

As they moved on, Anny noticed that Frenchwomen of all ages from teenage girls to women with matronly figures looked with interest at the man strolling beside her. Most young Frenchmen were taller than their fathers and grandfathers, but few were as tall as Van or held themselves with his air of assurance.

She basked in the pleasure of knowing that this evening she looked like other girls of seventeen and was out for the evening with a man who might be considered a bit too old for her now, but wouldn’t always be. Each year the age gap between them would become less important. She just had to pray that he wouldn’t fall in love with anyone else before she was ready for love. Seventeen was too young. She knew that. But eighteen was officially grown-up and nineteen was old enough for anything...even marriage.

The thought that in two years from now they might be walking hand in hand, and before the evening was over Van might have proposed, led her thoughts into the future.

Noticing her pensive expression, Van said, ‘Rêve can also mean daydream, can’t it?’

‘Yes...or illusion. Why?’

‘A scent meaning daydream has to be right for you. You spend most of your time in a daydream.’

‘Not most of it...only some of it. Doesn’t everyone?’

‘At seventeen, yes, I guess so. By the way I’ve asked another friend to join us. She lives in Nice. I met her last time I was here. Her name’s Francine.’

Anny felt her happiness evaporate as if it had been a balloon and he had deliberately punctured it.

‘Where did you meet her?’

‘I needed to buy some disks. Her father owns a computer store. Francine was filling in for her mother who works there. She’s at college, studying computer graphics for a career in magazines. She could be a useful contact for you.’

As soon as they met, Anny knew that Francine felt the same way about her as she did about the glamorous French girl. It amazed her that Van didn’t sense the antipathy between them, but he seemed unaware of it, his mind focused on the menu and wine list with the same serious attention the locals gave to their food.

Because the evening was so mild they were able to sit outside, under the restaurant’s awning. The two girls sat opposite each other with Van next to Francine. This made Anny feel even more of an interloper.

The meal was delicious but she would have enjoyed it far more had she and Van been à deux. First they had a thick fish chowder with large chunks of crusty bread. The waiter left the silver tureen and its ladle on the table. Francine had one helping, Anny two and Van three.

Then came a silver dish like a cakestand supporting a mound of crushed ice on which was arranged a variety of sea food.

Van and Francine were drinking wine, but for Anny, to her chagrin, he had ordered jus de pomme.

At least Francine had the grace to wish her a happy birthday. Perhaps if they had met in different circumstances they might have found things in common apart from the company of a man neither wished to share with another female.

It was clear that from Francine’s viewpoint the evening ended too early. She lived on the outskirts of Nice. Van put her into a taxi and discreetly paid the fare. Then he and Anny went home by train.

Van was not at Orengo for her eighteenth birthday, but she wasn’t too disappointed because he had already arranged to join them on board Sea Dreams when they sailed from the Riviera to Port Mahon, the capital of Minorca, the most northerly of Spain’s Balearic Islands.

Anny was overjoyed that he would be spending his vacation on the schooner. She hoped it would be a repetition of the good times they’d had among the Greek islands when he was at college and she was a carefree child.

Now the time was near when she would have to leave Bart and go ashore to earn her living, she was less carefree. The contessa’s health was another worry.

‘It’s time I was gone,’ she would say, several times a week. Then, reaching for Anny’s hand, forgetting she had expressed the same thought many times before, she would say, ‘I have had the best of my life. It’s such a bore, being old. How I envy you, dearest child...all the excitements ahead of you...falling in love...getting married... having babies.’

Anny did not say so but, in her opinion, while love and marriage and children were still extremely important, for her own generation of women another ingredient was needed to make up a happy life. Without a successful career, and the independence and fulfilment resulting from it, how could a woman feel she had justified her existence?

She wished she had someone with whom to discuss her career plans. Bart refused to accept that she was old enough to leave home. He regarded big cities as sinks of iniquity and thought eighteen was too young for her to be exposed to the hazards of life in Paris.

Anny hoped that while Van was with them he would back her desire for independence. She knew Bart’s opposition was partly because he would be lonely without her and loneliness would make him drink more.

But common sense told her she shouldn’t put off her departure because of Bart’s dependence on her and the bottle. He had been both father and mother to her and she loved him and worried about him. But he was not yet an old man. The only way she could care for him when he was old was by establishing herself in a well-paid profession.

A fortnight before Van’s arrival, she received payment for French syndication rights to an article. The money paid for various urgent necessities with enough over for Anny to feel justified in buying herself a denim skirt and a Sunday-best T-shirt with printed cotton appliqués on the front and back.

Two days before Van was due to arrive, he telephoned the palazzo and left a message with Elena that he would be bringing a girlfriend.

Anny was furious. ‘What cheek! He should have asked your permission, not taken it for granted.’

‘He knows we have room for her,’ said Bart.

‘If she’s anything like Francine, she’ll be nothing but a nuisance,’ said Anny. ‘I don’t know what he saw in her. I thought she was a pain.’

‘Maybe this one will be better. Maybe this time it’s serious,’ said her uncle. ‘How is he to know the sort of girl he prefers if he doesn’t try a selection? All the time he was at college, he concentrated on his studies. For several years after that he was obsessed with computers. They’re still his primary interest. But he’s a fine, virile young chap. He’s not going to stay a bachelor for the rest of his life.’

His words plunged her into gloom. If it turned out that Van was in love with this girl he was bringing, how could she bear to watch them being all lovey-dovey?

Instead of counting the days to his arrival, she began to dread the confirmation that Van’s heart was given to someone else.

Right at the back of her mind where she didn’t have to acknowledge it, even to herself, she had believed Van was hers...had always been hers. They might even have been together in some previous existence, although she wasn’t sure she believed in that possibility.

What she was certain about was that she and Van belonged together and it had been destiny, not chance, which had brought him to Orengo at a time when Sea Dreams was moored in the bay below the palazzo.

When Van and his friend arrived, Anny was in the contessa’ s bedroom, reading aloud to her. Voices and footsteps on the stairs made her pause. Moments later there was a familiar knock at the door and Van walked in accompanied by a red-haired girl whom Anny would have liked to dislike on sight but had to admit was strikingly attractive.

As he crossed the room to embrace his great-grandmother, Van gave Anny a smile. After greeting the old lady with his usual warmth, he introduced his companion.

‘Theodora, this is Maddy Forrester. She’s the great-granddaughter of a friend of yours, Virginia Forrester... Virginia Ferguson as she was when you knew her.’

The discovery that Van and the redhead had links going back to the time when the contessa was young made Anny’s spirits sink even lower. But when it was her turn to be introduced, she forced herself to behave as if she was delighted to meet Maddy.

Two days later, most of which Van had spent in the old lady’s company, leaving Maddy to get to know the Howards, Sea Dreams left her anchorage on a southwest course for the Balearics.

‘Thanks for looking after Maddy for me,’ said Van, following Anny below decks while Bart was letting the American girl take the helm for a short time. ‘I wanted to spend as much time as possible with Theodora. She’s aged a lot, hasn’t she?’

Anny nodded. ‘I don’t think she’s going to be here very much longer,’ she said sadly.

‘When I saw how things stood I wanted to cancel the trip and stay with her,’ said Van. ‘Maddy wouldn’t have minded. But Theodora wouldn’t hear of it. She became quite distressed.’

Anny knew, but perhaps he might not, that Theodora’s husband had proposed to her when they had both been guests on a large and extremely luxurious American yacht. Perhaps she hoped history would repeat itself and by the time they returned Van and Maddy would have sealed their relationship on board the schooner.

‘When you said you were bringing a friend, we assumed she was coming with you from America,’ she said, starting preparations for lunch. ‘Then Maddy explained she lives in Paris. I’m hoping she’ll convince Bart that if I get a job there I won’t be risking my neck every time I go out of the door.’

Van stationed himself where he wouldn’t be in her way. In the confined space between decks he seemed even larger than usual.

‘Maddy’s been there a couple of years. I expect she’s told you she works for the Paris bureau of CNN. Her brother and I were at college together so we go back a long way. But there was a break of a few years before we ran into each other while she was back in New York. D’you like her?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ said Anny, rinsing lettuce.

‘How’s the writing going? What have you sold since I last saw you?’

She told him, adding, ‘Van, would you look at my CV...tell me how to improve it?’

‘Maddy’s your best advisor. We’ll both look at it for you.’

‘Thanks.’

But Anny didn’t want their combined opinion. She wanted to recapture, if only briefly, the close companionship of previous voyages.

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