The Kiss of Paris

Chapter One ~ 1952-2

“Do you really want me to tell you the story of my life so soon on our acquaintance?”

There was an expression on his face that she did not understand.

“You must forgive me if I sound curious,” he said. “But we have all been wondering what you would be like. The Pelayo children have had a large number of Governesses.”

“We?” Sheena enquired.

“The Embassy staff. Perhaps I should explain. I am one of them and my proper title is, I believe, Financial and Confidential Adviser to His Excellency the Ambassador.”

“It sounds very grand,” she remarked quietly, “but why should the Ambassador require an English adviser?”

“I am only half-English,” was the reply. “My mother was a Mariposan and I have lived in Mariposa for a great many years of my life, in fact I have estates out there.”

“You will be shocked when I tell you that I had never heard of Mariposa until a few weeks ago,” Sheena said.

“It is a very undeveloped country – ” he began, but Sheena was no longer listening.

She was thinking of that moment when Patrick O’Donovan had come down into the kitchen when she was washing up and said,

“I’ve news for you, Mavourneen.”

“News, Uncle Patrick?” she asked, glancing at him over her shoulder.

“Yes, news. You are going to Paris.”

“Paris!”

Sheena had very nearly dropped a plate and then, with a dexterity that almost twisted her arm, managed to save it.

“What on Earth are we going there for?”

“Not we. You.”

She had turned at that to look at him in surprise.

“Uncle Patrick, you have been drinking again.”

“As I stand in the sight of Heaven itself, me darling, not a drop has passed me lips this day. No, it’s news for you I have. You are to go to Paris.”

“And why and how should I be travelling to a foreign place?” Sheena enquired, still thinking that he must be joking.

“You are going, me dear, as English Governess to the two children of Don Veremundo Pelayo, the Ambassador of Mariposa.”

“Are you mad?” Sheena had enquired.

“No, sane.”

“But why should I be taking a job as a Governess? You know as well as I do that I have no qualifications for teaching.”

“Ah, but you have. The Ambassador himself has approved them and you have been spoken for by no less a personage than the Comtesse de Beaufleur.”

“Uncle Patrick, if you are not drunk – I am dreaming.”

But she had not been dreaming and gradually the story had unfolded. His friends, those strange friends of whom she had never approved and of whom she knew little and the little she knew disliked, had planned this for her. It was these same friends who had brought them over from Ireland.

“Why should we go to England?” she had asked then. “You hate England, you have always said so.”

“Sure, I loathe the guts of every Englishman,” Patrick O’Donovan answered. “But we must visit the damned island, Mavourneen. What must be, must be.”

That was the answer she always received, ‘what must be, must be’ and now she must be off to Paris as Governess to the children of some unknown Ambassador. And a nice mess she was likely to make of it.

Mariposa indeed! She had gone to the free library to read up about it. It was a small State, she learned, situated between Uruguay and Brazil. Its population consisted of Spaniards, Indians and the Mariposans themselves, a race deep-rooted in tradition and filled with a fierce pride in their long history of fighting each other and their neighbours.

*

“This is the Place de L’Opera.”

The quiet deep voice beside Sheena jerked her back to the realities of the moment.

“And this is the Rue de la Paix. And now we are coming into the Place Vendôme.”

“It is so beautiful!” Sheena exclaimed.

She said the same thing a few minutes later as they passed the Tuileries Gardens and drove around the Place de la Concorde.

Then the car was passing down a quiet street with high-walled gardens until it came to rest in front of an imposing mansion with a flight of steps leading up to the front door. Liveried servants came hurrying from the house to help Sheena from the car and bring in her luggage.

She walked into the hall. It was of marble with huge impressive oil paintings on the damask-covered walls.

Feeling wide-eyed and impressed, she followed a footman up the stairs to the first floor.

“Is Her Excellency in the drawing room?” her companion asked in French.

“Oui, monsieur.”

A pair of double doors were flung open. Sheena had an impression of grey walls, glittering chandeliers of gilt and brocade-covered furniture, of huge bowls of exotic hothouse flowers and, rising from a sofa, one of the loveliest women she had ever seen in her life.

Madame Pelayo was delicately made and small-boned, but at the same time comparatively tall. She had small classical features with a skin like alabaster, which seemed in almost violent contrast to the raven’s wing darkness of her hair.

There were diamonds flashing in her tiny ears and great ropes of elaborate pearls round her throat and, as she held out her hand to Sheena, there was a fragrance of an exotic perfume that was both tantalising and seductive.

“Ah, Mrs. Lawson, you have arrived safely I see. The Colonel found you at the Station. I was not afraid that he would miss you, he is so very reliable. Is that not true, mon Colonel?”

“Your Excellency flatters me.”

“Could I possibly do that?”

Madame Pelayo gazed up into the grey eyes looking down into hers and for a moment it seemed to Sheena that there was something vibrant and yet magnetic in the atmosphere.

Almost simultaneously they both turned again to her.

“Colonel Mansfield has told you about my children?” Madame Pelayo asked.

“I left you to do that,” Lucien Mansfield interposed before Sheena could answer.

“I am glad. I want no tale-telling. I want Mrs. Lawson to judge for herself how charming and how very sweet they both are.”

Madame Pelayo paused for a moment and then looked at Sheena.

“You are young,” she observed critically. “Far younger than I expected.”

“I am afraid looks are deceptive, madame. I am older than I appear,” Sheena replied.

Even as she said the words she felt them stick in her throat. How she hated to lie and how hard it was to remember her lies!

“They have my birthday wrong,” she had said to Uncle Patrick when he handed her her passport made out in the name of ‘Sheena Lawson’.

“Why, it’s crazy,” she went on before he could answer. “They have made me eight years older than I am.”

“That is your age.”

“No, it isn’t,” she expostulated, and then, glancing up at his face, she understood. “But it is too ridiculous! I shall not be twenty-one until next month. No one is going to believe I am twenty-eight.”

“Sure, but they will believe it all right,” he answered. “No woman is going to make herself out older than she is, at least no woman they have ever heard of.”

“Perhaps they are not as stupid as you expect them to be,” Sheena pointed out.

“The Ambassadress wanted someone older still,” he explained. “And incidentally the last Governess was sacked for looking too attractive.”

“So I am to make myself ugly, am I?” Sheena asked ominously.

“You could never be ugly, me darling girl,” Patrick O’Donovan replied. “But you need not be shouting your attractions all over the place for all and sundry to hear and notice.”

It was because she loved him so much that Sheena had done what he wanted of her. Habitually she wore her pale gold hair loose, falling to her shoulders. Now she had pinned it into a neat roll at the back of her head.

It was only when she was actually leaving for Paris that she had thought about her clothes. She never had any money to spend anyway and it had not occurred to Patrick O’Donovan that she might want to buy anything new for the journey to Paris. Anyway, she knew only too well he had nothing to spare.

She had the greatest difficulty in getting a few shillings out of him to pay for food, let alone anything else and, when there was anything in the house, his so-called friends came and ate it.

She grudged them every mouthful they put into their lips, every bottle of beer and every glass of whiskey that was consumed upstairs in the front room during those long evenings when Uncle Patrick would leave her alone in the kitchen. He would stay with his friends, talking, smoking and drinking, until she was too tired to wait for him any longer and would let out the fire and go to her own room.

What did he and those strange men, whom she seldom saw, talk about for such hours on end she used to wonder, and then push the question away from her mind.

“I really meant to have a very much older Governess this time,” Madame Pelayo was saying. “But the Comtesse de Beaufleur spoke so very warmly of you and we all know that she is a difficult person to please.”

“Yes, of course,” Sheena murmured.

She realised with a sudden sense of dismay that she did not know if she was supposed to have met the Comtesse or not.

Fortunately Madame Pelayo turned to Colonel Mansfield.

“I am going to take Mrs. Lawson up to the nursery,” she said. “Will you wait and have a cup of tea with me when I return?”

“I am honoured, but, as you know, my desk is piled high with work.”

“And you prefer to return to it rather than to waste time with tea and me.”

“To refute such an accusation may I say I shall be delighted to stay for tea.”

There was a little twist on his lips that made Sheena question whether he was being sarcastic or not. But Madame Pelayo smiled at him delightedly, her lovely face seeming to light up.

“Will you order it then?” she suggested. “And the chocolate biscuits that you like better than anything else. See, I remember everything, even your penchant for biscuits.”

“You are too kind.”

Again Sheena felt that there was a touch of sarcasm behind his bow. A foreign bow, she thought, and she wondered now how she could have thought that he was entirely English. There was, in fact, something very foreign about him.

“Come upstairs, Mrs. Lawson,” the Ambassadress proposed.

She led the way as she spoke, her full-skirted dress of black faille rustling as she walked as if it rested on innumerable silk petticoats.

It was then, as she turned towards the door, that Sheena had a glimpse of herself in one of the long mirrors that decorated the grey walls. She saw reflected the lissom elegance of Madame Pelayo, the flash of her jewels and the lovely lines of her dress, and following her a small undistinguished figure in a. shabby badly cut suit of brown tweed.

The felt hat that Sheena wore pulled down over her fair hair had seen better days. Granted her white silk blouse was clean, but her heavy shoes with their low heels seemed to make an unconscionable noise as she followed the spindle-heeled toeless sandals of her hostess across the polished lobby outside the drawing room and up the wide staircase with its beautifully chased balustrade.

“I hope you will be comfortable here, Mrs. Lawson,” Madame Pelayo said as they climbed the stairs. “I am very anxious that the children should feel settled and we should have no more changes in the house. I wish them to learn English, in fact it is essential that they should speak English fluently.”

“Can they speak a little already?” Sheena asked her.

“Oh, yes, indeed, they know quite a lot. We have had two English Governesses, but they both had to leave for reasons that I need not enumerate to you now. Sufficient to say that I promised myself that never again would I have a young unmarried woman in the place. It is too much responsibility and too much trouble for everyone including me.”

“I understand,” Sheena murmured.

She was beginning to appreciate now why Uncle Patrick had insisted that she should be a widow.

“The children, of course, already speak French as well as Spanish. My husband talks to them in Spanish, which is his own language, and I in French, which is my native tongue.”

“They must be very talented,” Sheena suggested.

“On the contrary. You will find they know very little except how to get their own way,” Madame Pelayo said with a flash of humour that seemed to make her even lovelier. “And here they are, my little ones!”

She opened the door of a room as she spoke and there were cries of, “Mama! Mama!” from two children who were playing with bricks on the floor. They sprang to their feet and ran towards their mother, looking, Sheena thought, exactly like two expensive dolls that she had once seen in a shop window.