‘You mean you wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself.’ Pierre laughed and stripped off his bottoms. ‘Believe me, I don’t embarrass easily and certainly not when it comes to getting undressed in front of a woman. That’s the joys of being brought up in a boarding school. You lose hang-ups about nudity pretty quickly.’ But it still felt as if he were performing a striptease, although her face was pointedly averted and her hands were fisted at her sides.
He went into the shower, turned it on and kept the door open, pretty much expecting her to scuttle off the minute his back was turned, but instead when she spoke he discovered that she had pulled the dressing-table chair by the door and, although she couldn’t see what he was doing, she would certainly be able to hear well enough.
Her prudishness amused and surprised him at the same time. The woman was in her twenties! He wondered, for the first time, what sexual experience she had. Any? In her own way, she was quirkily pretty and there must be one or two eligible men in the village, fellow teachers on the lookout for suitable wife material…
‘I finally had a chat with your mother a couple of days ago!’ Georgie had to all but shout to drown out the sound of the shower. ‘I asked her about the bridge business and she finally came out with it…’
‘Came out with what?’ Pierre turned off the shower and stepped outside, wrapping a towel round his waist and proceeding to fill the sink with warm water for a shave.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#
Now she could see him. Or at least the back of him. When he looked in the mirror, he could actually meet her eyes.
‘Ever since she had that minor stroke, she’s been depressed. She said that it started off with not really being interested in anything, then she began finding it too much of a bother to get out of bed. Sometimes she would just stay put until lunchtime, and then she would only get out because she knew that there was a chance that I would pop in later in the afternoon on my way home from school.’
‘She never mentioned a word of any of this to me.’ Pierre paused and looked at her in the mirror. ‘No, don’t tell me. It’s because she’s scared of me.’ He was very still but he could feel the little tic in his jaw.
‘Of course she’s not scared of you!’ Georgie wondered whether her voice sounded a little brittle. Didi would never have been critical of her son behind his back, but it was so easy to read between the lines. Pierre and his mother did not enjoy a comfortable relationship and over the years she had accepted the blame for that, much to Georgie’s dismay. She blamed herself for sending him to boarding school because Charlie had boarded, as had his father and his father before him, because it had been the tradition. Then she blamed herself for not living up to what he had wanted, for being selfish and pursuing an eccentric lifestyle which she and Charlie had loved but which had mortified and appalled their son. She was ridiculously proud of him but whenever he was around she felt as though she were walking on eggshells and that, she confessed, had probably put him off wanting to return to Devon to visit as often as she would have liked.
And then there was the matter of the women he had brought to meet her.
‘Although,’ Georgie was compelled to admit, ‘you can be a little off-putting.’
Pierre dropped the razor and washed his face without bothering to shave at all. He strolled out of the bathroom and towered over her, arms folded, his mouth drawn into a thin line.
‘Meaning?’
‘You have a very abrupt way of dealing with people.’
‘I’m not woolly-headed, if that’s what you mean. I realise my mother might rather I ended up running a holistic centre on a farm somewhere in Devon, but she just has to accept that that will never happen.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Georgie stared at his stomach, which was very flat and very hard. The top of that towel was slung rather low round his waist for comfort. Her eyes skittered upwards. ‘But she’s getting older. I think…no, I know that her depression is tied in with the fact that she thinks she’s lost you. Lost you to London and big business.’
‘London and big business are what made sure that my father’s debts could be settled and a place bought for my mother—’
‘Yes, I know that, but…’
‘But what?’
‘Didi’s in a slump,’ Georgie said flatly. ‘I went to see Dr Thompson a few days ago about it and he was quite frank with me. He said that she’s at an age where psychologically she could literally think herself into an early grave. Apparently it happens particularly to people left on their own after their partners have died. They become depressed and over time it eats away at them until they literally lose the will to live. He’s against giving her antidepressants because he says that they can become addictive and end up being as much of a problem as the original depression, and Didi is totally against taking them.’ She had his full attention. He raked his fingers through his hair and walked across to the huge, deep chair by the window, which he proceeded to swivel in her direction so that he could continue looking at her.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#