Moonlight Over Paris(15)

“Here you are,” she said, passing the hat to her friend. “I’m going to swim for a bit. Honoria—you will shout out if you see any pirates? Promise me you will.”

“I will,” the child said, giggling.

“Good. Don’t start the treasure hunt without me.”

The beach at La Garoupe was on the western side of Cap d’Antibes and oriented rather more to the north; as she paddled away from the shore, the view before her was of the smaller Baie des Anges, and not the great expanse of the Mediterranean. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, but here, in the sheltered bay, the water was shallow and nearly still, and it was easy to touch bottom and walk back to shore when she did grow tired.

It really was such a joy to swim in water such as this. The seasides she’d known at home, in Cornwall and Devon, had been beautiful places, but their water had rarely been so warm, and certainly never as calm. Swimming there—and she’d never gone very far, for fear of the tumbling waves—had been bracing rather than pleasurable, and she’d never been tempted to linger.

In her first weeks in Antibes, Helena had been able to swim for ten minutes at most before stumbling, utterly exhausted, back to the beach. Now she swam for half an hour, sometimes more, taking pleasure in the feeling of strength in her limbs as she carved through the water, letting her thoughts wheel and wander as freely as the gulls overhead. It was glorious to feel like herself again, to feel young and alive, and so hungry for every experience life could offer her. For so long she’d been starving, in body and in spirit, but a banquet awaited her now.

Honoria was waiting with a towel and robe, all but jumping up and down with excitement, when Helena emerged from the water. “Come, Ellie, do come! Mother says that as soon as we’ve eaten we may start the treasure hunt. But we can’t begin until you’ve had something, too.”

She followed Honoria back to the little encampment the Murphys had established, accepted a glass of lemonade, and sat down on an empty mat near the children.

“Mind if I join you?” Mr. Howard asked.

“Not at all. There’s room on the mat, or we could find you a chair . . .”

“The mat will do just fine. How was your swim?”

“Lovely. Very refreshing. You should go in. I’m sure Gerald has a swimming costume he can lend you.”

“I’m all right here on the beach,” he answered affably, and he did seem perfectly content, his long legs stretched out in front of him. His feet were bare, she noticed, and the cuffs of his khaki trousers were still rolled up. She flushed at the strangeness of sitting next to a man she hardly knew while looking at his bare feet and calves, so near to him that she could see the bright coppery gold of the hair on his legs.

Such a missish response to something entirely normal in this day and age. If she didn’t pull herself together, she’d be laughed out of art school come the autumn. Good heavens—what if she were asked to draw a nude? Only the worst sort of small-minded country bumpkin would balk at that.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t immediately notice that Mr. Howard was talking to her. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I wasn’t attending just now.”

“I was only saying that I’d give almost anything for a cold beer,” he answered, then looked ruefully at his glass of lemonade.

“You don’t care for sherry?” she teased, her sense of equilibrium beginning to return.

He shook his head. “On a day like this? No. What I want, right now, is a beer that’s cold enough to make my teeth hurt. That’s one of the things I miss most about home.”

“Isn’t it against the law to drink beer in America?”

“Ah, yes. Our delightful Eighteenth Amendment. A triumph of antediluvian legislation. Any American over the age of ten can walk into a corner drugstore and buy a bottle of patent medicine with enough laudanum in it to knock out a platoon of GIs, but it’s against the law for a grown man—or woman—to have a cold beer on a hot day.”

“Were you still living in America when it was enacted?”

“I was, but not for long. I’ve lived in France for a little more than four years.”

“Do you miss it? Home?”

“Apart from the beer I can’t legally buy? Sure I do. I miss my family, and my friends there. I miss being able to watch a baseball game, and I miss having a real winter—not months of rain and damp like they have in Paris. But I’m not sure I’ll go back, not for a while. What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you always lived here? Or is England still home?”

“I only have the one year here,” she admitted. “That is, my parents have been kind enough to let me come here for a year and study with Ma?tre Czerny. But it’s not a forever sort of thing. I can’t just stay here.”

“Can’t you?”

Flustered by his question, she took a sip of lemonade and considered how best to answer. “I could stay, I suppose. My aunt wouldn’t mind. But I said I would come home after a year. They . . . well, they worry, you see. As parents do.”

“Yes, but most parents let their children grow up. How old are you, anyway?”

“I beg your pardon!”

“I don’t mean to be rude. I just mean that you’re not a child like Honoria. Why can’t you decide where you’ll live and what you’ll do?” There was an edge to his voice as he spoke, as if her words had irritated or even offended him.