Page 21 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)

Tata reached up quickly and laid her fingers on his lips.

‘Don’t say it!’ She looked around, to see if anyone was near enough to hear.

‘I should not have told you. Forget it, please. I am foolish and talk nonsense. It was just nonsense. Oh, look!’ Her change of tone was blatant, and she seized his arm in what looked like excitement, but which hurt in an admonitory way.

‘Look, there’s Vera, just arriving! Come and meet her. ’

He recognised the film star from her motion pictures – the pale, classical face, clouds of black hair and soulful dark eyes.

She was wearing a flowing gown of black with a large, swirling, many-coloured pattern.

Her hair was decorated with jewelled turkey-quills, and large earrings dangling from her lobes.

Her slightly slanting eyes were outlined with kohl, and her full lips matched the blood red of her nails.

Despite the heat in the room, a long black crêpe scarf was wound around her neck up to her chin.

She looked as though she expected to be looked at – James would have known, even if he didn’t know, that she was a film star.

‘This is Shems, Vera,’ Tata said.

She held out her hand automatically, and he thought she might like a little homage, so he bowed over it and lifted it to his lips in the continental style. ‘ Enchanté, Madame ,’ he said. ‘ Vraiment enchanté .’

She examined his face quickly and sharply, like, he thought, a policeman or a border official used to making rapid assessments.

Close to, he realised she was considerably older than she appeared at a distance, or on the screen.

He guessed – though he was no expert – that she must be about forty.

In the Hollywood world where, for a woman, youth was everything, he thought it must be rather frightening to hear Time’s chariot wheels behind you.

Still, he couldn’t help being excited. This was Vera Bergdorf, whom he had seen only days ago on a giant screen at the Grand Rex, closing her enormous eyes and pouting her luscious lips for Marcel André’s kiss.

This was the same her , here, in the flesh.

For the first time he felt the awe celebrity engenders.

‘I saw you in Le Deuxième , Madame,’ he said. ‘I thought you were wonderful.’

Now she smiled, and her whole face changed. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Tata says you are English. I am going to London on Friday. Do you live in London?’

‘I live in Paris now, but I come from Yorkshire. My father had an estate there.’

‘Ah, Yorkshire. I was told it is a very beautiful place. I must visit it some time. How do you know Natalie?’

‘Tata introduced me. She is teaching me Russian.’

‘And how do you know Tata?’

‘I was recommended to her by the Maison de l’évangile.’

‘Ah, yes. Mrs Richardson’s mission.’ This seemed to satisfy all the great lady’s curiosity, and she bowed her head slightly to James and moved away.

Tata took hold of his arm and said breathlessly, ‘She liked you, Shems! Isn’t she wonderful?’

‘It’s the first time I’ve met a real movie star,’ he said, and she seemed pleased.

‘We are all so proud of her. And Natalie likes you, too. I knew she would. Lots of people have been talking to me about you.’

‘There’s nothing to say about me,’ he said. ‘I’m nobody important.’

‘Nina Berberov thought you might be in the movies too, because you’re so handsome,’ Tata said.

He laughed. ‘Now that’s enough of that, or I shall be embarrassed.’ He glanced around. ‘Would anyone be offended if we left now? The noise is rather overwhelming when you’re not used to it. Would you like to go somewhere for a quiet supper?’

‘I’d love to,’ Tata said.

When they were out in the street, she slipped her hand through his arm, and he pressed it affectionately against his ribs. ‘Shems,’ she said in English, ‘I must say something serious to you.’

He stopped and looked down at her. She gazed up into his face earnestly. ‘Are you really going to Russia?’

‘You know I am.’

‘Then, listen, Shems. You must be careful. The Soviets are bad, crazy people. They watch you all the time . You will be followed and spied on. They listen to everything you say. And if they don’t like you, they come in the middle of the night and take you away, and you’re never seen again.’

‘But that won’t happen to us,’ he said indulgently. ‘Charlie was invited to go. We’ll be there on a government accreditation.’

She shook her head, and gave his arm a little shake, too, for attention. ‘You can’t trust them. Trust nobody, Shems. Say nothing but yes, no and thank you. I am so worried that you won’t come back.’

‘I’ll come back,’ he promised. She still looked troubled. ‘I promise,’ he said.

Her little face was turned up to his, and it came to him that those full, beautiful lips were wanting to be kissed. So he kissed them. Lightly, briefly, but still it was a kiss, and he knew even as he straightened that by kissing her he had changed something.

She looked up at him urgently. ‘Come home with me,’ she said.

He hesitated. There was no mistaking the message in her eyes. A sweet enchantment was here, a dream into which he could sink. Was he ready to be entangled? He felt instinctively she was someone who would take a soft but implacable hold on his soul. ‘We were going to supper.’

‘I don’t want supper,’ she said. And she seemed to have seen an answer in his face, because she slipped her hand through his arm and turned away, drawing him with her. A taxi cruised by, and he hailed it, the quicker to get home. Like a willing bee to the nectar, he hastened to his fate.

In bed, as out of it, she moved like a dancer.

Her body was supple, her skin smooth and honey-coloured; her hair smelt of almonds.

Her long fingers caressed him, her full soft lips were more than ready for his.

He sank into her with a sensory delight he had never known before, a pleasure that was so piercing it was almost pain.

And when she whispered his name in a little, broken breath – the ridiculous ‘Shems!’ – his heart convulsed with tenderness for her.

‘My love,’ he whispered back; and his climax almost turned him inside out.

Afterwards she lay on his shoulder and made patterns on his chest with her fingers. ‘Your skin is so smooth,’ she said. ‘I like that. Russian men are very hairy, like bears.’

‘Have you known a lot of men?’ he asked idly. He saw he had hurt her, and was sorry. He hadn’t meant anything by it.

‘Not like this,’ she said. ‘One sees them in the fields at harvest time.’ He kissed her contritely.

After a moment she said seriously, ‘I am not vierge , Shems. I expect you know that by now.’

‘You don’t need to tell me. I had no right to ask.’

‘But now we are lovers you should know. There was a man. I was in love – I was seventeen. He was a Romanian officer. His name was Karol. He had to go away to fight the Bolsheviks, and I could not bear to let him go without – without loving him completely. We were going to get married when he came back, so what did it matter if it was frowned upon? It was only a question of timing. But he never came back. He was shot in the neck by a revolutionary and died. And now – now after all that has happened, it seems foolish not to take happiness while one can. Don’t you think? ’

‘I think,’ he said. He kissed her again to signify his agreement and, if she wanted it, absolution, and she turned so readily towards him that there was no more talking for a while.

At last she sighed – a contented sigh – and said, ‘Have you had many lovers?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘One or two encounters when I was very young. And I was in love once. But that was purely platonic. I have never had this with anyone. I have never known anyone like you.’ He asked something that he had meant to ask many times: ‘Were you a ballet dancer?’

‘Not on the stage,’ she said, ‘but in Russia all girls learn the ballet a little. I should have liked to dance professionally, but with the war coming there was no opportunity.’

‘In England, it is not considered respectable for a girl to be a ballet dancer. Girls from nice families wouldn’t do it.’

She laughed. ‘But the English are barbarians, everyone knows that.’ She kissed him, to show how much she liked barbarians.

‘In Russia, the dance is the highest calling. All the rich men have ballerinas for their mistresses. The Tsar himself had the great Kschessinska. They say he would have married her.’

‘Is that something else “everybody knows”?’ he teased.

‘In Russia,’ she said leaning over him and punctuating her words with kisses, ‘one does not care if a story is true, only that it is a good story. Kschessinska was a great dancer and very beautiful.’

‘ You are very beautiful,’ he said, rolling her over and leaning above her. ‘A dark princess. My Scheherazade.’

‘And you are my beloved barbarian,’ she said, as he lowered his face to kiss her.

March and April were the busiest time, with lambing at its peak, not to mention cows calving, but Polly still kept an eye on the newspapers for the announcement of the exhibition.

So far there had been nothing, and she was beginning to worry irrationally that she had missed it, that Erich had been and gone and she had lost the opportunity that had become more important to her as time passed.

With James gone and Lennie not coming, she’d had no-one to think about but Erich.

She was looking through the paper in the Steward’s Room one morning when her cousin Jeremy, one of the dependants she had inherited from her father, appeared in the doorway.

‘What are you doing up so early?’ she said.