A Ghost in Monte Carlo

2-1

2Sir Robert Stanford shut the door of the Villa quietly behind him and stood for a moment looking out towards the sea.

It had been a brilliant night, but now the moon was but an echo of herself and already there was the first faint glow in the east which foretold that the dawn was not far away. The sea breeze was rising, too, and Sir Robert, feeling it on his face, drew a sudden deep breath as if its sharp astringency revived and invigorated him. He was in fact experiencing that acute sensibility which comes to a man in the very early hours of the morning when, having satiated his physical desires and exhausted his body, his spiritual needs stand revealed clearly and by an intuitive sixth sense.

Behind him in the quietness of the Villa des Roses was a warm scented darkness, exotic, clinging, enveloping, but out here the air, while sweet with the fragrance of mimosa and orange blossom, was curiously stimulating.

Sir Robert threw back his head and looked up at the sky, then again he looked at the garden before him, at the steps leading down from the villa amid a profusion of plants and shrubs, their colours, dimmed by the night, awaiting only the rising sun to reveal them in their almost oriental splendour.

Yet strangely enough, as he looked, Sir Robert saw not the loveliness of the Mediterranean landscape but the parkland and the smooth green lawns of his home in Northamptonshire. He could see it very clearly at this moment – the grey house set like a jewel in the midst of its terraces, its roofs and chimneys silhouetted against a clear sky, its architectural perfection reflected on one side by a lake over which one had to pass to reach the pillared portico. It was a magnificent house, a home of which any man might be proud, but why the dawn breeze blowing across the Mediterranean should remind him of Cheveron he did not know.

Yet it was as if it stood there in front of him, silently accusing him, wordlessly demanding from him an explanation, and as all men do in a moment of weakness, Sir Robert began to excuse himself.

Why, he argued, should he be tied to a house, to a name, a heritage, however noble, however fine? He would live his life his own way. Why not? He was old enough to know his own mind!

And as he argued, Sir Robert remembered that a letter lay waiting for him in his suite at the Hotel. It had arrived earlier in the evening, and having glanced at the handwriting he left it lying on the table unopened. It was yet another letter from his mother, and now it seemed to him that it was lying in wait for his return, somehow infinitely menacing in its very inefficacy.

Insistently the memory of his last interview with his mother came flooding back to him. He could remember every word, every inclination, every movement – the way the firelight had flickered on her pale face, the silent solemnity of the snow lying outside the windows of Cheveron, masking the familiar outlines of the landscape, but making it almost unbelievably beautiful.

‘So you are going to Monte Carlo?’ his mother had said, and he knew by the tone of her voice that she did not approve.

‘Yes, to Monte Carlo,’ he repeated. ‘It will be lovely at this time of the year. I wonder you never decide to go south, Mother. It is extremely good for one’s health.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ Lady Stanford replied, ‘but I have many duties and responsibilities which keep me here, Robert.’

There was no mistaking the inference in her voice, and her son smiled not too pleasantly in reply.

Then I hope you will also discharge mine for me, dear Mother.’

‘If I could do so, I would,’ Lady Stanford replied, ‘but unfortunately I am only a woman. You are the owner of this estate, Robert. You have inherited the proud position which your father held before you. You are the head of the family and the Stanfords have always been true to their traditions.’

Sir Robert had crossed the room to stand looking out on to the snow-covered lawns. Behind him there was silence for several minutes and then at last his mother, in a voice which seemed almost strangled in her throat, asked,

‘That – that woman – does she go with you?’

Sir Robert turned to face her.

‘I believe Lady Violet Featherstone – if that is to whom you refer – will be at her Villa in Monte Carlo.’

‘Oh, Robert, how can you go there with her? Can you not understand that she is ruining you, utterly ruining you?’

Sir Robert sauntered back to the fireplace.

‘In what way?’ he asked. ‘Financially, intellectually, physically? No! I am of course well aware of the correct answer. Socially – that is what you mean, isn’t it, Mother?’

In answer Lady Stanford held a black-edged handkerchief to her eyes. There was something in her tears, in her very helplessness which enraged her son so that he desired to hurt her still further.

‘Pray do not distress yourself, Mother,’ he said. ‘As you have just reminded me. I am the owner of a great estate and the happy possessor of a vast fortune. People will be ready to forgive my wife anything, yes, anything, rather than that the doors of Cheveron should be closed against them.’

If he had meant to wound his mother, he had succeeded.

‘Robert!’

Her enunciation of his name was a cry both of surprise and of horror.

‘Robert, you cannot mean – that you would – marry – this woman – and bring her here?’

‘And why not?’ Sir Robert enquired suavely. ‘have you forgotten, Mother, that Lady Violet is the daughter of a Duke?’

‘I have not forgotten that,’ Lady Stanford said, ‘but good breeding only makes her behaviour the more inexcusable. Besides, if you are to marry Lady Violet, she will have to obtain a divorce from her husband. Have you thought of that? A divorce, Robert!’

‘I have thought of it,’ Sir Robert replied.

Lady Stanford rose to her feet. Once she had been a beautiful woman. She still had remnants of that beauty and a grace which had grown rather than diminished with age. She looked very dignified now, although her face was ashen and there were traces of years on her cheeks.

‘Very well, Robert,’ she said quietly. ‘You are old enough to be your own master. If you choose to marry this woman, no one can stop you. She has a bad reputation and is ten years older than you are, but I know that nothing I or anyone else can say will alter your decision once you have made up your mind. However, on this I am determined. If you marry Violet Featherstone, I will not accept her. That is all I have to say.’

‘I understand.’

Lady Stanford turned towards the door. Sir Robert opened it for her, an angry ironical smile twisting his lips as he waited for his mother to leave the room. She looked at him for a moment, hoping perhaps for some softening in his expression, but when his eyes met hers, hostile, suspicious and resentful, she turned her head without another word and went from the room.

He had been cruel! Sir Robert knew that now, and yet at the time he had been angry with that bitter, burning anger which invariably rose within him when he could not get his own way and things could not he twisted and turned exactly as he wished them.

Why, he had asked himself then, as he had asked so often before, had he not met Violet when they were both younger? He ignored the fact that when she married he had been only a boy at Eton, and he remembered only that she was a lovely woman and that he desired her.

How different she was from any of those tongue-tied girls whom his mother considered would make him an eligible wife! How different from the other women with whom he had flirted or to whom he had made love, but who had invariably become boring with their importunate demands upon him, with their protestations of love, which grew all the more fervent as his diminished!

He was never quite sure of Violet. One moment she would be pliable, gentle, and he would believe that she was ready to surrender herself utterly to him, her body and her love his for the taking. Then even as he held her in his arms, she would elude him. She would mock his very ardency, laugh at his passion, and he would feel and know her elusiveness even before she spoke. She did not belong to him but to herself. She was a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing over a quagmire of emotion.

There was something in her very recklessness and defiance which drew him. Violet cared nothing about what the world said of her. She was well aware of how they talked, she knew that her relations and the majority of her friends sided openly with her husband, whom she had left a few months ago after eighteen years of marriage, because, she said, she knew all his stories and they had begun to bore her.

The gossips who had been talking about Lady Violet Featherstone for years with bated breath were not surprised, but what did surprise them was that Violet had not run away with anyone in particular. She had merely set up a separate establishment of her own and had continued to dance her way into the hearts of almost every young man she met.

It was then that Sir Robert had met her, and from the first moment of their meeting he thought and dreamt of no one else. He was not a boy to take the most serious step in his life without thought, without consideration. He was well aware that if he did propose marriage to Violet Featherstone, it would mean grave changes in the plans he had already made for his future.

He might appear defiant to his mother, he might outwardly pretend it was a simple thing to take Violet to Cheveron as his wife, but he knew in his heart of hearts that it would be both complicated and difficult. And yet when Violet smiled at him, when she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, when she teased him in that delicious, intimate manner which was one of her most engaging tricks, he felt that nothing in the world mattered beside the eventual conquest of this fascinating, unaccountable woman.

But now, as at other times when he was free of her, the beauty of Cheveron confronted him. He could hear his mother’s voice and he knew she did not plead alone. There were the tenants, the question of his entering the House of Commons, the position he held in the County, the part the Stanfords had always played in Court circles. How trivial they all appeared in themselves, yet they mounted one by one into a formidable opposition, a veritable mountain when one compared them with the tiny frailty of Violet herself – lovely, fascinating and alluring, and at times maddeningly elusive.

Robert was suddenly aware that he had stood a long time outside the Villa des Roses and that he felt cold. The breeze had been stronger than he thought. He began to walk down the garden. The path twisted, there were steps every few yards and he descended lower and lower until an iron gate, beautifully wrought, let him out on to a narrow road.

He did not turn down the road, but instead walked across it and entered by a gate on the other side into the public gardens, laid out but a few years previously by the industrious François Blanc when he built the new town of Monte Carlo.

They were not yet complete, but already they gave promise of great beauty. The path through them twisted and turned beneath olive and palm trees, beside hedges of choisya and banks of rosemary. There was the heavy fragrance of eucalyptus and the exotic sweetness of jasmine and myrtle. In the daytime, a passer-by would be entranced by the cascades of scarlet geraniums, the beds of purple violets and garlands of blue heliotrope. But in the stillness of the night and in the shadow of the trees even the flowers seemed asleep.

Sir Robert was not concerned with the beauty around him. He was still thinking of Cheveron. He was remembering the mornings when he had risen before breakfast to find the grass drenched with dew, a golden radiance in the sky and the air filled with the songs of birds. He was remembering long days of partridge shooting over the roots and stubbles of cornfields, a covey winging their way over the ploughed land, his spaniel coming back triumphantly with a fallen bird in its mouth. He was recalling the long ride home after a day’s hunting when the lights of Cheveron had blazed a welcome through the wintry darkness.