‘Don’t get me wrong, Georgie. I still don’t approve of what you did and it is deceitful. On every level. You made me an accomplice to your scheme—’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call it a scheme.’
‘Too close to the knuckle for your liking?’ He stood up and began making himself a cup of coffee while Georgie watched him with a slight frown. ‘You led an old woman to believe a lie. In fact, worse than a lie because the idea is so utterly improbable.’
‘For the best intentions!’
‘Good intentions.’ He snorted scornfully. ‘The road to hell is paved with them. But that’s as may be. The fact is she believes the fiction and palming her off with girlish tales isn’t going to work.’
‘Why not? Didi just needs a pick-me-up. I know it’s all a charade, but it will get her out of the black hole and that’s all that counts.’
‘The means justifies the ends?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, we won’t go into the sheer naïvety of that concept. The fact is, Didi expects more that just vague reports from you about secret assignations Heaven only knows where. Service stations on a motorway somewhere, I dare say. She insists that I come down for a long weekend…something about doing some Christmas shopping for you…’
Georgie blanched and he noticed her expression of dismay with a cynical acknowledgment of what was going through her head. Quite frankly, it was typical of her. She had embarked on something for the best possible, if totally misguided, reasons, and now her plan had taken on a life of its own and was beginning to drag her along in its unbridled wake.
‘Come down?’
‘That’s right. And furthermore, she won’t be fobbed off with vague, agreeable noises. In fact, this was the most insistent I have ever known her to be with me.’
‘I can imagine.’ Didi, whose own life had been vastly different from Pierre’s, was in awe of her son’s giddy and meteoric rise through the world of high finance, something about which she had virtually zero interest or understanding. She was also well aware of his deep seated disapproval of what he considered his parents’ eccentric approach to money. Those two things combined had always meant that she tiptoed around him, solicitous but never quite relaxed enough for her to make demands.
‘I won’t bother to ask you what you mean by that. Suffice to say that my attempts to assure her that work is always at its most frantic in the time leading up to Christmas were ignored. In fact—’ he had been vaguely surprised and amused at this ‘—I believe she told me at one point to shut up and do as I was told.’#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#
‘Oh, dear. That must have been a first for you.’
Pierre picked up the sarcasm in her voice, but when he looked at her her green eyes were wide and innocent and her expression oozed sympathy.
‘The upshot is that a weekend is on the cards and you two, I gather, will be sharing secrets as you prepare a hot meal for the weary traveller when he arrives.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Beginning to see the downsides to your brilliant scheme? Oh, sorry. Forgot you don’t appreciate me referring to your idea as a scheme. Rubs in the deceptive element a little too strongly for your liking.’
‘Well, it’s a good sign that Didi’s actually taking an interest in cooking,’ Georgie said defensively. ‘Do you remember what a fantastic cook she used to be?’
‘Difficult for me to get a measure of that when I was at a boarding school,’ Pierre said without any inflexion in his voice. ‘At any rate, we’re going to have to at least tally our stories.’
‘I’m beginning to hate this,’ she said miserably. ‘It seemed just such an easy thing to say at the time. It was even kind of fun embellishing it! I never thought…tallying stories…I feel like a liar.’
‘You are a liar. Worse, one who’s prepared to drag other people into your lies…never mind there’s already a woman in my life.’
‘Sorry. And I’m sorry you cut short your evening because I landed on your doorstep.’
Pierre nodded curtly, although he was well aware that there had been no need to cut short anything. Jennifer, unwinding after a gruelling fortnight working on a deal that had been in the financial section of the newspapers off and on over the past month, had been prepared to enjoy the evening.
He, on the other hand, had found his mind drifting off to a certain slightly built, unruly, scatterbrained blonde waiting back at his house. He had barely been able to concentrate on a word Jennifer had been saying, even though some of the points she had been making about the intricate tax clauses she had had to revise had been quite interesting and pertinent to something he himself was currently working on. In fact, he had found his attention wandering to such an extent that he had finally succumbed and given up on the evening. To be resumed, he supposed, at a later date, when diaries had been consulted and schedules worked around.