Martin Seurat finished his solitary supper and carried his coffee through into the comfortable sitting room. He stood by the window, looking out at the plane trees in the square across the street. It was high summer now and in Paris the days were breathlessly hot – hot enough to brown the foliage unseasonably – but now, as evening came on, a cooling breeze had sprung up, gently rustling the dry leaves. He stood watching the diners at the outside tables of Madame Roget’s small restaurant and realised with a sudden feeling of surprise that the melancholy that had been his companion in recent years had lifted. He felt light-hearted and hopeful, thinking happily of the weekend he was about to spend with Liz Carlyle.
How his life had changed since they had first met! He’d had no inkling then that the attractive woman who had walked into his office that day barely a year ago, to question him about his former colleague, would have such an impact on it. When he thought of his ex-wife now, it was still with regret for the failure of their marriage, but without any of the lacerating sense of loss and betrayal that had afflicted him for so long. Now, not only could he imagine life without her, he could imagine life with someone else. The more he saw Liz, the more he wanted to be with her.
He remembered their last time together, the weekend when she had taken him to meet her mother at her childhood home in the country. As they’d driven down to Dorset on the Saturday morning, Liz had told him something of her family background. Her father had been the land agent for the Bowerbridge estate, and with his job had come a tied house, the gatehouse of the estate. He had died while Liz was still at school and she and her mother had been allowed to stay on in the house.
Then the estate had been sold and turned into a nursery garden, which her mother managed for the new owners; she had also been able to purchase the freehold of the house. Her mother had hoped for years that Liz would give up what she always called her ‘dangerous job’ in London, and nagged her constantly to come back home and settle down in the country with some ‘nice safe young man’. But a few years ago Susan Carlyle had herself met a nice man, an ex-army officer who now ran a charity: Edward Treglown. Now that she was herself contented and happy, she seemed to have accepted that a safe life in the country was the last thing her daughter wanted.
Martin had been surprised to find himself as nervous as a teenager meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. He hadn’t known what to expect and his heart had sunk a little as he’d thought of what might lie ahead. He sensed it would certainly be deeply English. The chairs would be covered in chintz; the garden would be ordered, full of flowers and rose bushes – there would be a lot of rose bushes, all neatly pruned. Liz’s mother would be a tidy woman with tidy views, reserved and with a lurking suspicion of foreigners, particularly any foreign man attached to her daughter. They would have separate bedrooms, and the food would be heavy and stodgy.
Of course, he’d been quite wrong. Susan Carlyle was immediately welcoming, beaming at Martin and greeting him with a kiss on both cheeks. She was shorter than Liz, with a round pleasant face but without her daughter’s striking eyes. There had been none of Liz’s reserve about her; indeed there was an endearing warmth and openness instead. They’d found her in the kitchen of the small Georgian gatehouse, setting out a lunch not even a Frenchman could fault – homemade pâté, a tomato and basil salad, both French and English cheese, and freshly baked bread.
Susan’s friend Edward had been a surprise too. Liz had explained that, like Martin, he’d been in the military, as a Gurkha officer. So Martin had expected a hearty, opinionated character, with firm views delivered in staccato bursts.
Instead, a tall, slightly rumpled-looking man had appeared, ducking down to avoid hitting his head on the lintel of the kitchen doorway. He was wearing a darned sweater and corduroys, and though his bearing was military, there was nothing remotely staccato about him. If anything he seemed a little shy. Having poured out two stiff gin and tonics, he led Martin out into the garden, leaving Liz and her mother to catch up with the gossip. There, in the garden, through a wicket gate, Martin saw row after row of the dreaded rose bushes, all neatly pruned and bristling with flowers. He pointed at them politely. ‘ Formidable,’ he said.
‘Do you think so?’ said Edward. ‘Can’t say I’m keen on roses myself – and Susan can’t stand them. Thankfully, they belong to the nursery garden.’
Martin laughed in relief and the ice was broken; by the time they’d gone in for lunch a bond had developed between them, two ex-soldiers who had seen their share of terrible things. But Edward’s stories about his army days were light-hearted – a cache of plum brandy en route to the Falklands that gave his whole regiment a hangover for two days; a travelling circus, composed predominantly of dwarves, that had appeared out of nowhere during a patrol on the Northern Ireland border.
That evening they went to a village near Bowerbridge for a concert of chamber music, held in a primary school assembly hall. They’d sat on metal folding chairs and listened politely as Schubert’s Trout Quintet was played with excruciating slowness. At the interval, as they stood up, Edward said firmly, ‘I think we’ve earned a reward for that,’ and led them adroitly past the tables offering apple juice, then across the street for more robust refreshment in the pub.
Later, back at Bowerbridge, they’d all sat up talking until after midnight. At one point Edward described two weeks he’d spent on manoeuvres in the Arctic, where he and his men were stalked by a polar bear. ‘But, you know, we were never very cold there – thermal blankets work wonders. In fact, the coldest I have ever been was a winter in Kosovo…’
‘I was in Kosovo’, said Martin. And they discovered they had actually overlapped in their visits to that strife-torn country, had even known a few of the same UN monitors based there at the time. Then it turned out that Edward and Susan had recently taken a holiday in the Quercy, not far from Cahors, where until their divorce Martin and his ex-wife had owned a small cottage on the river. By the time they’d all retired to bed, he’d felt as if he were among old friends. He could see Liz was pleased by how easily they had all got on, and how much they’d laughed.
That was what he remembered most about the weekend – the laughter, and then the walk he and Liz had taken along the banks of the River Nadder on Sunday afternoon. She’d shown him her favourite spots, and where she used to sit as a girl to watch her father fish. Neither of them said much, but Martin sensed that Liz was letting him in to her past – and to her most private memories.
For the whole weekend they’d left their professional lives behind them – though there had been one moment when work fleetingly made its presence felt. On Sunday morning they had sat out on the small terrace, and while Liz and her mother read the papers, Edward had talked to Martin about his work for a charity which provided operations to improve the sight of blind people in the Third World. When he mentioned the staff in Mombasa, Liz looked up sharply from the Sunday Times Magazine. ‘Did you ever have anything to do with a charity called UCSO?’ she asked.
Edward shook his head. ‘Not professionally. I used to know its Director. Chap called Blakey. His wife was friends with mine, years ago – he was posted in Germany when we were there.’
‘You’ve not kept in touch?’
‘I have with his wife, but they’re not together any more. Bit of a bad show.’
Susan Carlyle interjected, ‘What Edward means is that David Blakey behaved appallingly.’
‘Now, now, Susan. Always two sides to that kind of story. Anyway, sun’s past the yardarm, at least in France. Who’d like a glass of wine?’
But that had been the sole remotely work-related moment of the weekend, and it was only as Liz and he drove back to London that Martin Seurat had felt his thoughts return to the job. He could sense that happening with Liz too, as they sat stuck in the traffic returning on the M4. Her face assumed a pensive, abstracted air, and he felt a momentary flash of sadness that she had drifted out of the weekend’s mood of relaxed intimacy.
Standing now in front of his window, as night came down in a dark blanket over Paris, he remembered how his ex-wife had complained about the same thing. She’d say, ‘You’re always drifting away from me. Always thinking of something else.’ That’s how Liz had seemed as they’d returned to London and their respective problems. But Martin couldn’t resent her for it; he understood it only too well.