The visit to the Gironde was a delight. The warm autumn sunshine glanced off the fading vine leaves, making their shades of bronze and gold more vivid; the waysides were fresh with new growth, the sky a rain-washed blue with small, white clouds moving rapidly in the breeze. Their tour of the vineyards was far more like a pleasurable outing than a necessary part of the job.

Clare enjoyed this new countryside, but what pleased her most as she stood again on the fringes of a vineyard, long harvested and now being pruned, was that the sadness of giving up Christian had faded away. She’d even been able to use all she’d learnt from Charles Moreau on that morning at Chirey without thinking yet once again about the events of the following day.

Among the proposed investors in this particular project were a number of Americans, quite unlike the slow-speaking and good-natured mid-Westerners she’d encountered so far. At times, she could almost imagine that this strangely assorted group with their briefcases and clipboards were deliberately trying to unnerve the château staff with their sharply aggressive questions. They didn’t seem to appreciate that those who made the wine knew perfectly well what they did and how they did it, but found great difficulty in explaining why they did it.

Clare worked hard to smooth over some of the difficulties and take the edge out of the hostile questions, but she made sure never to look at Robert while she was doing it. She knew he was enjoying himself hugely. Only when they were left to themselves did she berate him for trying to catch her eye when he knew she was taking considerable liberties with the translation.

‘At least now I can answer Keith Harvey’s question,’ she said, as they relaxed over coffee in their hotel.

‘Which particular question was that?’

‘He asked me if I always translated exactly and what I did if someone was rude or unpleasant.’

‘You may tell him from me that you always defend the less articulate. At the same time, you impose a considerable control over those who should know better. I quite enjoyed hearing everything twice this time round.’

‘Why do you think these Americans were so unfriendly? Particularly the tall one with the sharp face. Surely one can tell when people are competent by the quality of what they produce rather than by asking awkward technical questions.’

Robert poured himself more coffee and grunted.

‘I can’t answer that. Something about amour propre perhaps. If the Americans were trying to maintain face in an area where they’re not very knowledgeable, hostile questioning might be their way of doing it. Don’t forget you have a gift they certainly do not have. You know who you can trust. I think I’ve said that to you more than once before. Certainly I’ve had no cause to change my mind.’

‘What about Christian Moreau?’ she said, wryly.

‘Including Christian Moreau,’ he replied firmly. ‘That young man was perfectly trustworthy as far as your relationship went. Beyond that, you did not go. Your intuitions warned you something was wrong. So it does with these edgy Americans. Alternatively, it guides you with diffident Englishmen.’

‘Charles Langley?’

‘Yes. I told you at the time I was confused by him. You saw through his difficulty to the man himself.’

Clare smiled. ‘He’s a dear man, quite incapable of deceit, but he hasn’t begun to understand himself.’

‘So that is why you rejected him?’

‘Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly reject Charles Langley. He’s had too much of that already. No, I explained I wasn’t the right person for him. He wasn’t very happy about it, but at least it means we can be friends. We keep in touch and I shall certainly see him if he comes to Paris.’

Robert raised an eyebrow in a very Gallic manner.

‘Perhaps it’s a little early to speak of this, but our conversation makes it relevant. You have been a great success as a translator. But I think you might consider going beyond translation and moving to the financial side. Another year or so and you would be quite ready to take on some of the smaller accounts. I’d have to part with you, which would be a pity, but that has always been a possibility. You’d still be based in Paris, unless you wanted to move elsewhere.’

‘Robert!’

He stood up and smiled down at her.

‘There’s no need to make any sort of decision. Just think about it. And perhaps you ought also to think about going to bed. You want to be on form for the gentleman of the sharp face and sharp questions tomorrow morning, don’t you?’

 

When Clare arrived back in Paris, two days later, she was so glad to be home, weary after the intensity of the work and the long train journey, but buoyed up by the lovely autumn weather, the success of the negotiations and Robert’s unexpected suggestions about her future.

Sitting in the Metro with only a few stops to go, she closed her book, put it in her handbag and sat back in her seat with her eyes closed. ‘Could I be anywhere else in the world but Paris?’ she asked herself, with that glow of pleasure that came to her so often when she was in the city. She focused on the sounds all around her, the noise of the rackety doors as they closed, the chatter of students, the sharpness of children’s voices, the unfamiliar tones of two young Algerian men sitting opposite.

She’d loved this city since she was a little girl, far away in another country, listening to the wireless her father had reconditioned for Granda Scott. Now it was her home. What Robert said about moving to the financial side reminded her once more that it was Paris that spoke to her. However much she enjoyed travelling round this huge and varied country, however exciting the possibilities might be were she to move to a regional branch, she’d no intention of doing so. Paris was where she wanted to be.

‘It might be the right thing for me, it might not. What matters is that Robert thinks I have the option. I can make a life of my own,’ she said to herself, as she came up the steps of the Metro, put down her case and studied Madame Givrey’s flowers.

‘How are you, mam’selle? Where was it this time?’

‘Bordeaux and the Gironde.’

‘Oh, la la, so far away.’

‘Yes, Madame. I’m glad to be home. I have a few days’ holiday, so I shall be able to look after my flowers properly,’ she said, choosing a mixed bouquet of pink and mauve stocks with Shasta daisies and sprays of gypsophila and maidenhair fern.

‘These are lovely, Madame. They will keep me company when I sit by my window and read. I intend to be very lazy.’

Madame laughed heartily. Being lazy was not something she associated with this young woman who appeared early in the morning, often to return only late at night.

There was no sign of Madame Dubois as Clare let herself in to her apartment. To her surprise, there was an envelope face down on the carpet as she opened the door.

‘Good gracious,’ she said, amused that anyone could have managed to by-pass Madame.

She took her suitcase to the bedroom, changed and left her bouquet to soak in the kitchen before she came back into the sitting room to study the envelope. The writing looked familiar but she couldn’t place it. Clearly a late birthday card, but the postmark was London. With a sudden spurt of anxiety, she ripped it open, took out the pretty floral card and glanced at the signature. ‘Love, Ginny,’ it said, in large, bold handwriting.

A sheet of lined paper folded inside fell on the carpet. She picked it up, her fingers trembling as she tried to open it out.

‘My dearest Clare,’ she read aloud, still standing in the middle of the room.

‘Love, Ginny,’ Clare repeated, and promptly burst into tears.

 

In the days that followed, Clare read and reread Ginny’s letter many times. She knew perfectly well she was searching for something that wasn’t there. Only Ginny herself could answer the questions that came crowding into her mind.

She sat by her window, staring across the waters of the Seine, swollen after the autumn rains, and suddenly saw a deep, narrow river flowing alongside a narrow, overgrown track leading to the shores of Lough Neagh. She closed her eyes and went back to that lovely summer day. Four young people having a picnic. Ginny and Teddy, Clare and Andrew. She felt the tears spill out under her closed lids. Within the year Teddy was dead, Ginny’s face was scarred across her cheeks and forehead, and Clare and Andrew had parted, all their bright hopes ending in disappointment and despair.

She wept, longer and more bitterly than she had wept at the time. She wept for Teddy, for the boy he had been when she first knew him, for the hours they’d spent sitting by the tennis court talking history. She saw that pale, unmarked figure, unmoving on the high hospital bed, felt again Helen cling to her, knowing she was about to lose her only son.

‘Loss and more loss,’ she said, sobbing. ‘Is that all life is about?’ Losing those you love? Losing them to disease, like her parents, to age, like Robert, to accident, like Teddy, to circumstance, like Andrew. How could she bear to live with such a catalogue of loss?

‘All those hopes and dreams,’ she wept, shaking her head, thinking of the evening the four of them went up to the obelisk on Cannon Hill and sat in the dusk talking about their future. Teddy hadn’t even a year of future. She and Andrew only a few days more than he had.

‘And Jessie, too,’ she added, sniffing. ‘She’s never been the same since Andrew and I parted.’

She thought of the empty house on the Malone Road, the room where they kept the paint, the smell of ancient wallpaper when you soaked it before you scraped it off. She remembered the night they dined for the first time, the four of them, Jessie a few months’ pregnant and still her lively self.

‘All gone,’ she said. ‘All gone.’

She tried to distract herself. Went for long walks, hardly noticing where she was going. Twice she found herself in parts of the city quite unknown to her, tired out and hungry, and had to find the nearest Metro to take her home. She went to the Louvre, determined to revisit pictures she’d not had time to enjoy when she went with Christian, and found herself standing looking at some tiny detail, a flower, or a tree, or some tangled grass, quite oblivious to the subject of the picture itself.

It was some time before she owned up to herself that she’d been thinking particularly about Andrew. His life had been disrupted too, just as her own had been. He’d lost a beloved cousin, inherited massive financial problems that she’d only just begun to grasp. He too had lost someone he’d loved and, with her, his hope of making a new life.

‘He’s better now,’ were the only words in Ginny’s letter to give her any comfort. And comfort was what she badly needed, for on top of Edward’s death there was now the unbearable heartache of knowing Andrew had been ‘sad and hurt’.

Time and time again, she went through the events of their last weeks together. She tried to see how anything could have been different. Whichever way she looked at it, she could see no alternative. Even so, she could not stop her tears whenever she thought of him facing up to the legal mess he’d inherited, disillusioned with the law and utterly distressed by her loss.

Only after Clare telephoned Marie-Claude to invite her to a long-delayed lunch, did she ask herself why she hadn’t rung her as soon as Ginny’s letter arrived. If she’d had the sense to talk to her wise friend, she might have fared much better these last, sad days.

‘You look wonderful, Marie-Claude. The academic life suits you,’ she said, greeting her friend under the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens. ‘Sometimes I’d just love to sit and read a book, not just search for the bits I need.’

Marie-Claude took a long look at her young friend. She seemed thinner and a little drawn, but her eyes were sparkling and she was beautifully dressed. She’d been a model pupil, but in learning to dress like a Frenchwoman she had brought to the enterprise something special of her own, a way of moving, a light and warmth in her eyes.

She was not beautiful, but there was a liveliness about her, a mobility of face, figure and mood, that was more appealing than beauty itself, a liveliness that did not wholly disappear even when she was sad.

‘Gerard sends you his love. He hasn’t asked how the lovers are since you turned down one of the most eligible young men in France. But he’ll get over it,’ she said wryly. ‘You seem to me to be quite content with your decision,’ she added, hugging her.

Clare smiled as they began to walk together, the gentle motion encouraging their thought processes as they strolled along, side by side.

‘My concierge despairs of me still,’ she began. ‘Not even the sign of a lover when she comes to collect my laundry. Christian never came to the apartment. Robert sometimes sends me flowers when we dine. I know she tries to see the card, but even when it shows, he never signs it,’ she said, laughing.

She fell silent, and they walked on a few paces while she brought herself to the point.

‘I need your advice, Marie-Claude. I need it badly.’

Clare then told her about Ginny’s letter and about the sad, distressed days she’d spent since it arrived.

‘I’ve thought and thought, Marie-Claude, and I don’t know what to do. I’m so grateful that Ginny’s written and I do so want to see her, but I can’t decide what to do about Andrew. I can’t get him out of my mind.’

‘Do I take it you still love him?’

‘I certainly care what happens to him,’ she said, resignedly. ‘Sometimes I think I don’t really know what loving someone is supposed to feel like. I know about desire, and that’s easy enough,’ she added lightly. ‘But that’s never been what I wanted.’

‘What do you want, chérie?’

‘To feel safe. To feel in command of my life and have a friend at my side,’ she said simply.

‘And with Andrew you did feel safe? A friend at your side?’

‘Yes. Most of the time. There was a kind of unspoken understanding between us. Even when he couldn’t explain himself, I often knew what he was feeling. And it worked the other way round as well …mostly.’

‘But not always?’

‘No, not always. Sometimes I felt a barrier come between us. I blamed it on his family and the way they’d treated him. That’s why we planned to go to Canada.’

‘You were going to run away?’

‘No, we were going to marry and go out and make a new life,’ Clare replied, seriously. ‘Like so many have done before us.’

Marie-Claude smiled at her. ‘You’re taking me very literally, Clare,’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure that making a life in Canada would have resolved the difficulties? Were you not perhaps hoping to leave behind problems that would have been waiting for you when you arrived?’

‘You may well be right,’ Clare agreed promptly. ‘I knew I had to get away from Ulster. Andrew was so relieved, so excited, when we decided on Canada.’

She paused, aware of a sudden revealing thought. ‘Perhaps, after all, Canada meant different things for each of us.’

Marie-Claude looked at her, saw the familiar knitted eyebrows, the preoccupied look in her eyes. She decided to say nothing and wait and see what emerged.

‘You know, the very first time I flew, the weather was awful,’ Clare began. ‘We climbed very steeply and suddenly we came out above all the murk and it was magnificent, pure blue sky and great mountains of cloud towering up to the west of us, snowy white. It made me think of Canada and the Rockies, all that space and clear air. That was what kept me going, those last months before my Finals, the thought of Canada, and Andrew, and escaping …’

‘Escaping?’

Clare looked at her friend, saw the warmth and concern in her eyes, and took her hand.

‘You are so tactful. So wise. What you have just helped me see is that Canada was a country of the mind, not a reality. Neither Andrew nor anyone else could ever take me there,’ she said, suddenly weary. ‘So what do I do now?’

Marie-Claude squeezed her hand in reply. ‘You take me to lunch, and we celebrate your hard work. Separating reality from illusion is very hard work indeed. So hard, I have many friends twice your age who’ve never had the wisdom to attempt it. We shall need a very good lunch indeed. In a little while, you will begin to feel the rewards of your achievement.’

 

Late that afternoon, after the two friends had enjoyed each other’s company and parted in the best of spirits, Clare sat down and wrote to Ginny. It wasn’t really difficult at all, even after this amount of time. Clare wrote just as she would have spoken had Ginny been sitting on the other side of the table. Warmly and directly, she told her there was absolutely nothing to forgive. That she too had had things she’d not been able to cope with any better than she had.

She responded enthusiastically to the idea of a meeting in London, saying she was over quite often on business, though usually at rather short notice. She would certainly come to her wedding, and was already looking forward to meeting Daniel.

She told Ginny a bit about her own life, picking out what would entertain or interest her, describing the marvellous collection of horse pictures in her boss’s office, her first attempts at skiing back in March, and some of the funny things that happened when translation broke down. It was only as she came towards the end of a second large sheet that she realised she had a decision to make. To mention or not to mention Andrew.

She sat quite still for a long minute, staring at the bright eyes of the daisies in Madame Givrey’s bouquet. Yes, that was what they reminded her of. The ox-eye daisies outside the forge, growing up around the old reaping machine that no one ever came to collect, the one she’d driven across the Canadian prairies. She took up her pen again and finished the letter quickly.

‘I’m glad things are better for Andrew now,’ she wrote. ‘I think of him and would like to know how he is. I’ve been told that winding up estates can be a rotten job. I hope the worst is over and that all is well at The Lodge. Do let me know when you get a chance to write. With love and all the good wishes in the world for your engagement. Clare.’

She read it through once and changed nothing, folded it, and wrote the address on the envelope. The breeze had got up and was blowing little spatters of rain across her window. She pulled on a jacket and took the letter to the post box, a sense of excitement rising as she turned to come back and felt the wind begin to buffet her, blowing rain in her face and whirling leaves around her feet.

‘Life will always bring change, and unhappy change at that, but there will also be joy,’ she said to the empty quayside. ‘Like Aunt Sarah said, “All things pass, good and bad.” Perhaps what is really important is learning to make the best you can of the good bits and accept as well as you can the bad. That was what Emile used to say when he was looking at the state of a company.

‘It’s going to be a wild old night,’ she said to herself, as she stepped under the archway and climbed the steps to her own entrance. ‘A good night to be at home by the fire,’ she went on, ‘with the lamp lit and a book.’

She was pleased at the idea of Emile’s ‘dictum’, which had suddenly come to her. She could see him now, sitting so quietly at the boardroom table, his papers neatly lined up in front of him, suggesting to the prospective borrowers that perhaps they had resources that were not visible in their balance sheet, the resources that came from the experience they’d gained.

As she opened the door of her apartment and saw her writing materials where she’d left them, spread out on the table in a pool of light from the lamp, suddenly and unexpectedly her spirits soared. She felt just as if the sun had come out again from behind a cloud. Some darkness of spirit had passed away. Wouldn’t Emile say she had gained precious experience from the pain of all her sadness and loss?