Alone In Paris Read online

  “I am afraid so – and I don’t know – quite what to do.”

  She looked round the messy dirty studio.

  “If I was to – live here – do you think I could – get some work?”

  “Live here alone?”

  “I have – nowhere else to go,” Una replied.

  She thought of the girls she had known at school. They had all gone home to their rich families.

  During the three years she had spent in Florence, her friends had sometimes taken her out to luncheon when they were visited by their parents, but they had never invited her to stay in their homes.

  She looked so distressed and so alone that Philippe Dubucheron surprised himself by saying,

  “Don’t worry for the moment. I will think of something.”

  Even as he spoke, he thought that he must be deranged. What would he do with a girl who had come straight from a Convent? Unsophisticated and, he was quite sure, innocent.

  She certainly must be that if she thought that she could live alone in a place like Montmartre and find employment.

  The only employment possible would be –

  He stopped.

  An idea had come to him, an idea that made him put his hand up to his chin as his eyes narrowed.

  “I tell you what we will do,” he said slowly. “We will talk this over. But in the meantime I have an appointment.”

  He smiled at her reassuringly.

  “I will come back and then we will think of a solution to your problems together.”

  He thought that her eyes lit up and she replied,

  “It is very kind of you – but are you quite certain – it is no trouble?”

  “None at all,” he answered. “But I have to leave you now because I am taking that picture of your father’s to show to somebody who bought another picture of his a year ago.”

  He saw the question that Una wanted to ask, without her having to say it.

  “Of course, the money will be yours, if the sale is concluded – after I have deducted my usual commission.”

  “Oh, I do hope you sell it!” Una cried. “I don’t want to worry you with my problems, but all I have left in my purse is twenty-five francs – the journey here was expensive.”

  “I am sure it was,” Philippe Dubucheron replied. “Now I must leave you.”

  He walked to the picture that hung on the wall and lifted it down from the nail where it was suspended.

  It was a picture of one of the roads in Montmartre in the moonlight.

  Patches of light that were characteristic of her father’s paintings seemed to make the whole picture stand out in a strange almost sinister fashion that was different from the way that any other artist would have seen it.

  As Philippe Dubucheron walked towards the door she looked forlorn and lost, standing all alone in the midst of that terrible mêlée of junk that Julius Thoreau had collected round him.

  ‘She is like a snowdrop on a dunghill,’ he thought to himself and was surprised that he could be so sentimental.

  “When I have gone,” he said firmly, “shut the door and lock it. You will not let anyone in until I return. Do you understand?”

  He saw the surprise on Una’s face.

  “Do you think – people might – come here?”

  He thought that if anyone did so and saw her there, it would be difficult to persuade them to go away.

  But aloud he said,

  “Now it is known that your father is dead and there are always people who will look for pickings they are not entitled to.”

  “I – understand,” Una said.

  “Then do as I say. Rest and wait for my return.”

  “You – you will – come back?”

  It was a child who asked him, a child who was suddenly nervous of being alone in the dark or a thunderstorm.

  It made the very level-headed, shrewd procurer both of human beings and anything else that fetched money feel suddenly protective.

  “I will come back,” he said with a smile, “and I assure you, I never break a promise! Just be a good girl and do as I told you and everything will be all right.”

  He smiled at her confidently and, as he went down the stairs, he heard the sound of a key turning in a lock that needed oiling.

  *

  The Duke of Wolstanton arrived at his house in Paris in a disagreeable mood.

  His Comptroller had wired the previous day to say that he was on his way, but even at such short notice everything was in readiness for him.

  It would have been difficult to find fault with the array of flunkeys in the Wolstanton livery, the flowers that decorated the salon and the pristine cleanliness that made the whole house seem polished like the silver that stood on the dining room table.

  However, the Duke scowled as he was greeted by the Clerk of the Chambers and, making only a monosyllabic reply, he walked into the salon and threw himself down in a comfortable chair.

  Two footmen hurried to his side with a bottle of champagne cooled to exactly the right temperature, and the Duke, taking a glass from the gold salver, sipped it without enthusiasm.

  He had left London on an impulse because he had suddenly made one of those momentous decisions in his life that only he could make with a ruthlessness and a lack of consideration for other people’s feelings that was inexcusable.

  Or rather it would have been inexcusable in any other man.

  But the Duke of Wolstanton was too important, too rich and too attractive for anyone to take umbrage for any length of time at anything he did.

  He was, however, quite certain that at this moment Rose Caversham was biting her fingernails with fury and he would doubtless receive in tomorrow’s post several pages of protest written when her anger was flaring.

  Lady Rose Caversham was noted for a temper that made people wonder what had hit them, but which usually subsided as quickly as it rose.

  He could hardly remember now what had started the quarrel, but it had ended as was inevitable, with Rose declaring that he was the most selfish man alive, that he had ruined her reputation and that the only way in which he could make reparation was to marry her immediately.

  This was an old argument that the Duke had always managed to sidestep extremely adroitly on a great many other occasions.

  He had supposed for some time that sooner or later he would marry Rose.

  After all he had to marry somebody and have an heir to take over the Wolstanton estates, which were the largest in the British Isles, but he had every intention of choosing the time and place when he was ready and not before.

  He was well aware that he and Rose were talked about, but then any woman whom he squired, even if only for one evening, immediately became the victim of not only the social gossips but also the yellow Press.

  There was nothing reporters enjoyed more than speculating whom the Duke of Wolstanton would marry and how soon the nuptials would take place.

  The quarrel between him and Rose might in fact have been made up with kisses in the inevitable manner of such wordy battles, but Rose, in losing her temper, had not only reproached the Duke for not marrying her but had threatened him.

  This was something he would not tolerate from anyone and, as Rose shrieked at him, he knew that for once she had gone too far.

  He walked out of her bedroom, slamming the door behind him and, while driving back home in his carriage drawn by two tired horses and driven by a tired coachman with a yawning footman beside him, he had decided that he would leave London.

  The Duke owned houses in various parts of the world, which were always ready for him to visit at a moment’s notice.

  There was a large villa in the South of France, another in Tangiers, a Castle in Scotland, a hunting lodge in Leicestershire and a mansion in Ireland, where he had not been for the past five years.

  He had chosen Paris simply because he thought that it would annoy Rose more, because she would be jealous of the very amusing times he spent with the notorious demi-mondaines in that de
lightful City.

  The Prince of Wales had in fact teased Rose only a few weeks ago, when he said,

  “I am thinking of taking Blaze with me the next time I visit Paris. I enjoy myself very much en garçon, but Blaze tells me that I am missing some very alluring haunts in which it is not considered respectable for me to be seen.”

  “If Blaze goes to Paris, sir, then I shall go with him!” Rose had said with a meaningful glance at the Duke.

  “That would indeed be taking ‘coals to Newcastle’!” the Prince of Wales had retorted and then laughed heartily at his own joke.

  The Duke had never had any intention of taking Rose with him to Paris and he knew that she would understand exactly why he had chosen to go there when he left England without their making up their quarrel.

  The Duke of Wolstanton was in fact a very intelligent man, but because he found time heavy on his hands, he spent a great deal of it, as did the majority of his contemporaries, making love to attractive women without really considering if there was any alternative.

  Life had always been too easy for the Duke together with the fact that he was so rich and of such social consequence, it had really been unnecessary that he should also be so handsome.

  Women were bowled over at the sight of him and by the time he had left Oxford University he was aware that they were ready to fall into his arms even before he knew their Christian names.

  It was, he had thought to himself once, like eating too much pâté de foie gras. Taken occasionally it was delicious, but a surfeit of it became boring.

  It was because he was surfeited too easily with the women who clustered round him wherever he went and whatever he was doing that the Duke had managed so far, by sheer strength of will, to remain unmarried.

  He was nearly thirty-five and all his friends had succumbed a long time ago to the pressure of their parents and the women who were determined to trap them into being led meekly up the aisle.

  But that did not prevent them from indulging, like the Prince of Wales, in a continuous stream of love affairs, while their wives either pretended ignorance or became immune.

  Sometimes when the Duke was alone, which was not often, he wondered if his life in the years ahead held anything but a monotonous series of women, each lovely, alluring, seductive and fascinating passing through his arms and his bed and from there into oblivion.

  It was a depressing thought and it made him move from one of his houses to another. But his followers always arrived post-haste within a few hours of his attempt to find solitude.

  “I sometimes feel like a hunted stag,” he said once to one of his friends.

  “Doubtless a stag, but a Royal or an Imperial,” his friend replied and the Duke had to laugh.

  Now he told himself that he would enjoy Paris without the usual crowd of hangers-on, who ate his food and drank his wine and expected him to accommodate them in the style to which they had become accustomed wherever he might be.

  As his Comptroller came into the salon, he put down his glass of champagne and said,

  “You quite understand, Beaumont, that I want nobody to stay and I want no arrangements made for me.”

  “Of course, Your Grace,” Mr. Beaumont replied.

  He had not only controlled the Duke’s households but also befriended the Duke himself over many years.

  The Duke said now half-angrily,

  “Dammit, Beaumont, I know you are thinking that this mood will not last more than twenty-four hours, but you are mistaken!”

  “I hope I am,” Mr. Beaumont answered.

  “Why should you say that?” the Duke asked curiously.

  “Because I think a change of environment is just what you need at the moment.”

  “And you think that Paris will provide it?”

  “If you are not cluttered by the usual chorus who echo everything you say and what they think you think.”

  The Duke laughed.

  For the first time since he had left London it was a genuine sound of amusement.

  “I employ you as a Comptroller not as a doctor,” he said. “But what is your prescription?”

  “I should imagine a little of the Moulin Rouge, a soupçon of the Théâtre des Variétés and, of course, some new and entrancing voice, preferably with a French accent, to tell you how wonderful you are.”

  The Duke laughed again and then he said,

  “You are sacked! I cannot employ anyone who treats me with so little respect.”

  “I respect you enough to want you to be happy,” Mr. Beaumont said.

  “And what is happiness?” the Duke asked.

  “I suppose only each of us can answer that for ourselves,” Mr. Beaumont replied, “but I can tell you one thing it is not, and that is being cynical!”

  “Are you suggesting that I am cynical?”

  “I have watched you getting more and more cynical these past five years. I have watched you becoming blasé and I have watched you finding little pleasure in anything except perhaps your horses and I think it is a pity.”

  “That is certainly straight-speaking,” the Duke said ruefully.

  “It is something I have wanted to say for a long time,” Mr. Beaumont replied, “and quite frankly, and you may hate me for saying this, I think you are wasting your life.”

  The Duke looked startled and sat up in his chair.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I would hardly say it otherwise.”

  “No, I don’t think you would,” the Duke answered.

  He waited for a moment and then he said,

  “I suppose in some ways I have been closer to you, Beaumont, than anyone else in my whole life. I hated my father. I have a great number of friends, but I have never wanted to be particularly intimate with them. I suppose you are the only man to whom I speak the truth and from whom I expect to hear it.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Beaumont said. “I am five years older than you, but I think on the whole I enjoy myself a great deal more than you do in spite of all your possessions and the assets you seldom consider.”

  “What are they?” the Duke asked curiously.

  “Your brains, for one thing,” Mr. Beaumont replied.

  The Duke rose from his chair and walked across the room.

  He stood looking out at the beautifully kept formal garden, which stood at the back of the house in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré.

  “This brain business,” he said after a moment. “Do you really use a brain or do you only need it to acquire money? I have all the money I can possibly want, not only in my lifetime but in half-a-dozen others. Then what use is it to me, except to make me discontented?”

  “That is the most encouraging thing I have ever heard you say,” Mr. Beaumont remarked.

  “What the devil do you mean by that?” the Duke asked.

  “Do you not remember that Napoleon spoke of ‘divine discontent’? That is what we all need, discontent, with conditions when they are not perfect, with people who are not up to what is required of them and with yourself, because you cannot reach your highest aspirations.”

  “Good God!” the Duke exclaimed. “I had no idea you felt like this. Why have you not told me before?”

  Mr. Beaumont smiled.

  “I thought of it, but there did not seem to be an opportunity and you did not ask me.”

  He looked at the Duke and his eyes were very understanding.

  “I have a feeling, although I may be wrong, that you have reached a crossroads in your life. It is up to you which way you take.”

  “That sounds slightly dramatic,” the Duke said. “The only thing is I have not the slightest idea which way to go, whether I should turn left or right seems quite immaterial.”

  “I doubt it,” Mr. Beaumont answered. “In the years to come you will look back at this moment and remember I had told you that you had reached a crossroads.”

  “Well, I thought I was doing something unusual in coming to Paris in such a hurry,” the Duke said, “but I had no ide
a that I was letting myself in for a lot of sermonising from you!”

  “You can always ignore it,” Mr. Beaumont said, “and that, I suspect, is exactly what you will do.”

  “Go away!” the Duke shouted. “Go away and leave me to my bad temper and depression. You make things worse, much worse than I even imagined them to be!”

  “I am delighted,” Mr. Beaumont said. “And now would you like to tell me what theatre seats I should book for you and where you would like to dine tonight?”

  As he finished speaking, the door opened and a footman announced,

  “Monsieur Philippe Dubucheron, Your Grace!”

  Chapter Two

  As soon as Philippe Dubucheron entered the room, Mr. Beaumont left it.

  He realised that he had not had time to give the servants the Duke’s instructions that he would see nobody and His Grace’s solitude had therefore been interrupted.

  Dubucheron was the type of hanger-on whom Mr. Beaumont most disliked, although he told himself that there was some excuse for the French dealer because he had something to sell.

  At the same time he thought that the manner in which he was prepared to procure women for his patrons and to introduce them to the more seamy cabarets and every other low type of entertainment in Paris was extremely undesirable.

  The Duke was old enough to look after himself.

  Equally men like Dubucheron only pandered to the tastes that Mr. Beaumont deplored and, he was quite certain, added to the Duke’s air of cynicism.

  He had surprised himself in the way he had been so outspoken. But he genuinely believed that the Duke was drifting in a manner that did no credit to his personality and character and certainly damaged his reputation.

  Mr. Beaumont admired the man he served for his many fine qualities and, unlike all the other people who surrounded the Duke, he was not in the least impressed by his wealth and possessions.

  He had actually, although the Duke had no idea of it, been offered several very interesting posts in the City since he had become the Duke’s Comptroller.

  They would have given him the opportunity of making much more money than the salary he earned from the Duke and might have led later to a seat in Parliament for which he was actually extremely well suited.