16

‘More wine, Lydia?’

‘Thank you, Mr Parker.’

‘Do you think she should, Alfred? She’s only sixteen.’

‘Oh, Mama, I’m grown up now.’

‘Not as grown up as you think, darling.’

Alfred Parker smiled indulgently, his spectacles sparkling at Lydia in the candlelight. ‘I think just this once. Tonight is special, after all.’

‘Special?’ Valentina raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘In what way?’

‘Because this is our first meal together like this. The first of many, I trust, when I am honoured to be in the company of two such beautiful women.’ He lifted his glass briefly to Lydia and then to Valentina.

Valentina lowered her eyes for a moment, ran a finger slowly down the pale skin of her throat as if considering the suggestion, and then flashed her gaze up to his face. Like springing a trap, Lydia thought as she watched with interest the effect it had on Alfred Parker. He turned quite pink with pleasure. Her mother’s sensuous dark eyes and parted lips were churning up his brain and robbing him of far more than Lydia had ever tried to take from him.

‘Garçon,’ he called. ‘Another bottle of Burgundy, please.’

They were in a restaurant in the French Quarter and Lydia had ordered steak au poivre. The French maitre d’ had bowed to her as if she were someone important, someone who could afford a meal like this. In a restaurant like this. She was wearing the dress, of course, her apricot one from the concert, and she made a point of looking around the room at the other diners as indifferently as if she did this every day.

No one could guess this was a series of firsts. First time in a restaurant. First time eating steak. First time drinking wine.

‘Trust you to choose something fiery, darling,’ Valentina had laughed.

Lydia watched Parker closely, copied his table etiquette when it came to the startling array of silver cutlery on the stiff white tablecloth, and noticed the way he dabbed genteelly at the corner of his mouth with his napkin. She’d been surprised when her mother told her Alfred had invited her to join them for supper. Another first. No other man friend had ever included Lydia in their arrangements, and it sent alarm bells clanging through her head, but her desire to eat in a restaurant outweighed her instinct to keep as far away from Mr Parker as possible.

‘Very well,’ she’d said to her mother, ‘I’ll come. But only if he doesn’t lecture me.’

‘He won’t lecture you.’ She took Lydia’s chin in her hand and gave it an urgent little shake. ‘But be good. Be nice. Sugar and spice, even if it kills you. This is important to me, darling.’

‘But what about Antoine?’

‘Bugger Antoine.’

Everything had gone well so far. Only one little slipup. It happened when Parker kindly offered her one of his snails to taste and she had said without thinking, ‘No, thanks. I’ve eaten enough snails to last me a lifetime.’

Valentina had glared at Lydia. A sharp kick under the table.

‘Really?’ Parker looked surprised.

‘Oh yes,’ Lydia said quickly, ‘at my friend Polly’s house. Her mother is mad about them.’

‘I don’t blame her. Smothered in garlic and butter?’

‘Mmm, delicious.’ She laughed wickedly. ‘Aren’t they, Mama?’

Valentina rolled her eyes to the ceiling. She didn’t want to be reminded of the times they’d spent scrabbling around in the rain, rooting snails out from under bushes and off back lawns at night. Even the occasional worm or frog. The stink of them all in the cooking pot.

Lydia turned a sugar-and-spice smile on Alfred Parker. ‘Mama tells me you are a newspaperman, Mr Parker. That must be very interesting.’

She heard her mother’s little sigh of approval.

‘A journalist, yes, on the Daily Herald. This is a very disturbed period in China’s history but a very crucial one, with Chiang Kai-shek at last bringing some kind of sanity and order to this unhappy country, thank God. So yes, it is extremely interesting work.’ He beamed at her.

She beamed back.

‘Tell me, Lydia, do you read the newspaper?’

Lydia blinked. Didn’t this man realise that for the price of a newspaper you could buy two baos and have a full stomach?

‘I’m usually too busy doing my homework.’

‘Ah yes, of course, highly commendable. But it would do you good to read a newspaper now and then, to know what’s going on in this place. Broaden your young mind, you know, and give you the facts.’

‘My mind is broad enough, thank you. And I learn facts every day.’

Another kick.

‘Lydia is at the Willoughby Academy,’ Valentina said with a glare at her daughter. ‘She won a scholarship there.’

Parker looked impressed. ‘She must be very bright indeed.’ He turned back to Lydia. ‘I know your headmaster well. I shall mention you to him.’

‘No need.’

He laughed and patted her hand. ‘Don’t look so alarmed. I won’t mention how we met.’

Lydia picked up her glass, buried her nose in it, and wished him dead.

Valentina came to her rescue. ‘I think you are right about the newspaper, Alfred. It would do her good to widen her knowledge, and anyway,’ she gave him a slow smile, ‘it would amuse me to read what you write.’

‘Then I shall definitely make sure you receive the Daily Herald every day without fail, Valentina.’ He leaned closer to her, and Lydia was sure he was breathing in her perfume. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure.’

‘Mr Parker?’

Reluctantly he drew his gaze away from Valentina. ‘Yes, Lydia?’

‘Maybe I know more about what goes on in this place than you do.’

Parker sat back in his chair and studied her with a precision that made her wonder if she was underestimating him. ‘I am aware that your mother allows you a degree of freedom that means you get about more than most girls your age, but even so, that’s quite an assumption, Lydia, don’t you think? For a girl of sixteen.’

She should leave it there, she knew she should. Take another sip of the wonderful wine and let him carry on making sheep’s eyes at her mother. But she didn’t.

‘One thing I know is that your precious Chiang Kai-shek has tricked his followers,’ she said, ‘and betrayed the three principles on which the Republic of China was built by Sun Yat-sen.’

‘Chyort vosmi! Lydia!’

‘That’s absurd.’ Parker frowned at her. ‘Who’s been filling your head with such ridiculous lies?’

‘A friend.’ Was she out of her mind? ‘He’s Chinese.’

Valentina sat forward abruptly, her fingernails clicking on the stem of her glass. ‘And who exactly is this Chinese friend?’ Her voice was icy.

‘He saved my life.’

There was a shocked silence at the table, and then Valentina burst out laughing. ‘Darling, you are such a liar. Where did you really meet him?’

‘In the library.’

‘Ah, I see,’ Parker said. ‘That explains it. A left-wing intellectual. All talk and no action.’

‘You must stay away from him, darling. Look what the intellectuals did to Russia. Ideas are dangerous.’ She rapped her knuckles sharply on the table. ‘I absolutely forbid you to see this Chinese again.’

‘Oh, don’t fret, Mama. You needn’t worry. He might as well be dead for all I care.’

‘Miss Ivanova, I do believe. How very interesting to find you here of all places.’

Lydia had just left the ladies’ powder room and was threading her way back through the tables and the chatter when she heard the woman’s voice behind her. She turned and looked up into an amused cool pale blue stare.

‘Countess Serova,’ she said with surprise.

‘Still wearing that dress, I see.’

‘I like this dress.’

‘My dear, I like chocolate but I don’t eat it all the time. Let me introduce you to my son.’

She stepped to one side to give Lydia a full view of the young man behind her. He had a long face and was tall like his mother with her thick curling brown hair and the same haughty manner that made one side of his mouth curl up and his eyes half closed, as if the world weren’t worth the effort of opening them fully.