“I’d love to know why they slung him out,” the General said. “Mind you, the War Office, God bless “em, do some pretty daft things these days.”

“I’d rather you didn’t raise the subject,” she said. “Promise?”

He frowned for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t see why not. After all, a man’s past is his own affair. Can he sail the boat, that’s the main thing?”

She nodded. “Perfectly.”

“Then what have we got to grumble about?” He squeezed her hand. “Get me a brandy and soda like a good girl and tell me some more about Foxhunter.”

She didn’t get the chance. As she was pouring his drink, Jagbir appeared at the top of the steps, Mallory a yard or two behind him.

The Gurkha was short and squat, no more than five feet tall, and wore a neat, sand-coloured linen jacket. He had the ageless, yellow-brown face of the Asiatic and limped heavily on his left foot, relic of a bad wound received at Cassino.

He spoke good English with the easy familiarity of the old servant. “Mr. Mallory’s here, General.”

The General sipped a little of his brandy and put the glass down again. “What’s on the stove?”

“Curried chicken. When would you like to have it?”

“Any time you like. Serve it out here.”

Mallory stood at the top of the steps waiting, cap in hand, and Anne smiled up at him. “Would you care to have lunch with us, Mr. Mallory?”

He shook his head. “It’s good of you to offer, but I’ve already arranged to eat at the hotel.”

She dismissed Jagbir with a quick nod, trying to hide her disappointment, and Mallory came down the steps.

“This is Mr. Mallory, General,” she said formally.

Hamish Grant turned towards Mallory, his head slightly to one side. “Come a bit closer, man. I don’t see very well.”

Mallory moved to the table and looked down into the cloudy, opalescent eyes. The General reached out and touched him gently on the chest. “My daughter-in-law tells me you’re a good sailor?”

“I hope so,” Mallory said.

“What was your last ship?”

“An oil-tanker. S.S. Pilar. Tampico to Southampton.”

The General turned to Anne. “Did you check his papers?” she shook her head and he looked up at Mallory again. “Let’s see them.”

Mallory took a wallet from his hip pocket, extracted a folded document and union card and tossed them on the table.

“See when he last paid off and check the union card. There should be a photo.”

She checked the documents quickly and nodded. “Paid off S.S. Pilar, Southampton, 1st September.” She smiled as she handed them back. “It isn’t a very good photo.”

Mallory didn’t reply and the General continued: “The terms Mrs. Grant agreed with you, you’re quite satisfied with them?”

“Perfectly.”

“There’ll be a bonus of one hundred pounds for you on top. Some token of my gratitude for the way you handled this Southampton business.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” Mallory said coolly.

Blood surged into the General’s face in an instant. “By God, sir, if I say it is necessary it is necessary. You’ll take orders like everyone else.”

Mallory adjusted his cap and turned to Anne. "You mentioned some diving equipment you wanted me to take down to the boat?”

She took a hurried glance at the General’s purple face and said quickly: “You’ll find a station wagon in the courtyard at the rear. Jabber’s already loaded it. I’ll be down later this afternoon.”

Til expect you.” Mallory turned to the General. “Anything else, sir?”

“No, damn your eyes!” the General exploded.

A smile tugged at the corner of Mallory’s mouth. His hand started upwards in an instinctive salute. He caught himself just in time, glanced once at Anne, turned, and ran lightly up the steps.

The General started to laugh. “Pour me another brandy.” Anne uncorked the bottle and reached for his glass. “Am I right in assuming all that was quite deliberate?”

“Of course/ Hamish Grant said, “and I’ll add to your mystery, my dear. There goes a man who once was used to command, and high command at that. I didn’t spend forty years in the army for nothing.”

High on the cliffs on the western side of the island Raoul Guyon and Fiona Grant topped a steep hill and paused. Before them the island seemed to tumble over the cliffs and the great jagged spine which joined them to St. Pierre was visible under the water.

“There,” she said, making a sweeping gesture with one hand. “Did I lie to you?”

“You were right,” he said. “Absolutely magnificent.”

“I’ll expect to See you up here with your easel first thing in the morning.”

“You’ll be disappointed. I always work from preliminary sketches, never from life.”

She had moved a few feet away, stooping to pick up a flower, and now she turned quickly. “Fraud.”

He took a small sketch-pad and pencil from the pocket of his corduroy jacket and dropped to the ground. “Stay where you are, but look out to sea.”

She obeyed him at once. “All right, but this had better be good.”

“Don’t chatter,” he said. “It distracts me.”

The sun glinted on her straw-coloured hair and her image blurred so that in that one brief moment of time she might have been a painting by Renoir. She looked incredibly young and innocent and yet the wind from the sea moulded the thin cotton dress to her firm young figure with a disturbing sensuousness.

Guyon grunted and pocketed his pencil. “All right.”

She dropped beside him and snatched the pad from his hand. In the same moment her smile died and colour stained her cheeks. Inescapably caught in a few brief strokes of the pencil for all eternity, she stood gazing out to sea, and by some strange genius all that was good in her, all the innocence and longing of youth, were there also.

She looked up at him in wonderment. “It’s beautiful.”

“But you are,” he said calmly. “Has no one ever told you this before?”

“I learned rather early in life that it’s dangerous to let them.” She smiled ruefully. “Until my mother died four years ago we lived in a villa near St. Tropez. You know it?”

“Extremely well.”

“In St. Tropez, in season, anything female is in demand and fourteen-year-old girls seem to have a strong appeal for some men.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said gravely.

“Yes, life had its difficulties, but then the General bought this little island and I went to school for a couple of years. I didn’t like that at all.”

“What did you do, run away?”

She pushed her long hair back from her face and laughed. “Persuaded the General to send me to a finishing school in Paris. Now that was really something.”

Guyon grinned and lit a cigarette. “Tell me, why do you always call him General?”

She shrugged. “Everyone does – except for Anne, of course. She’s special. When she married my brother Angus she was only my age. He was killed in Korea.”

She paused, a few wild flowers held to her face as she stared pensively into the past, and Guyon lay back, gazing up at the sky, sadness sweeping through him as he remembered another time, another girl.

Algiers, 1958. After five months chasing fellaghas in the cork forests of die Grande Kabylie he had found himself in that city of fear, leading his men through the narrow streets of the Kasbah and Bab el Oued, locked in the life-or-death struggle that was the Battle of Algiers.

And then Nerida had come into his life, a young Moorish girl fleeing from a mob after a bomb outrage on the Boulevard du Telemly. He closed his eyes and saw again her dark hair tumbling across a pillow, moonlight streaming through a latticed window. The long nights when they had tried to forget tomorrow.

But the morning had come, the cold grey morning when she had been found on the beach, stripped and defiled, head shaven, body mutilated. The proper ending for a woman who had betrayed her people for a Frangaoui. The sniper’s bullet of the following day which had sent him back to France on a stretcher had almost carried a welcome oblivion.