The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

discreet to leave anything like that. He always carried a portable electric razor and a clean shirt.”
    “I would not trust that type,” Clothilde sniffed. “Always ready for adventure. And that, in my view, is a woman’s prerogative.”

    At the Savoy Grill, which Major Manners said was the only place he really knew for lunch in London apart from his club, Lydia solemnly handed him a company check for ten thousand pounds with her apologies for the loss of his possession.
    “That is the value I placed on it. That is what our insurance therefore pays out, or will if they know what’s good for them, even though the rock was not placed in our storeroom,” she said, and sipped her champagne.
    “I therefore owe you two thousand pounds,” he said, smiling. “Under the terms of our agreement.” He was wearing a town suit today, a good one in dark blue, a striped shirt, a tie that looked regimental. His handkerchief was still in his cuff. She could detect no aftershave, which pleased her. There was an awful lot of male cologne in the art world, and she did not care for it.
    “No,” she said firmly. “That was contingent on my doing some work that resulted in the sale of your rock, or at least its amicable disposal in a way that left you with no further obligations to France or anyone else. That is hardly the case now,” she said, thinking of the band of journalists and TV cameras thronging the street outside the salesrooms. “But there is one thing that troubles me. You barely mentioned your father’s service in wartime France when we spoke. Now I find that the President of France makes a private visit to his funeral. You must have known France was very important to him.”
    “Naturally I did, but not from my father,” Manners said easily. The question did not seem to embarrass him in the least. “His reminiscences were all about the Middle East and North Africa, a bit of India. He hardly spoke of France at all. Nor did we visit it much when I was growing up. It was always Austria or Switzerland for the skiing, and summers in Scotland. He took me fishing, taught me to shoot. That kind of thing. Never much of a one for beaches or casinos. The south of France was never his style.”
    “Did he never go back to Périgord?”
    “Not that I know. But I can’t say I followed his movements closely,” he said. She did not know him well enough even to guess whether this straightforward, rather bluff manner of the plain-speaking officer and gentleman was real, or just a surface skin he wore, like a uniform. She had never known any soldiers. Perhaps they were all this way; what you saw was what you got. But Manners had a quick mind, possibly even a subtle one. She suspected there was more to him than he wanted to display—at least, she cautioned herself, display to her .
    “What about Paris?” she asked him. “Catching up with his friend François Malrand, the rising political star. Did he keep up with his old comrade-in-arms, de Gaulle’s protégé?”
    “Maybe he went when I was at school or when he was serving in NATO. I think he was stationed there in some staff job when the HQ was still at Fontainebleau. before de Gaulle kicked them out to Brussels in the 1960s.” He shrugged and fell silent as the waiter came with their smoked salmon. “He went off to the races at Longchamps from time to time, I seem to recall. He won a lot of money once.”
    Remember his father, she told herself. There was obviously a lot more to old Colonel Manners than he had ever allowed to meet the eye. Working underground with the French Resistance, staying on the run from the Germans. That must have meant something to do with Intelligence, a skill at keeping secrets. Perhaps his son was the same way, hidden depths.
    “Fathers can have a lot of privacy in our kind of family,” he went on. “I was away at school, and he’d retired before I went to Sandhurst. Maybe they sometimes met in London. I wouldn’t know. But that friendship didn’t seem to play a big part in his life. He said nothing when Malrand won the election. I found no letters among his things, and I was as surprised as anyone else when the French ambassador rang to say that the President planned to come to the funeral. I’m slightly surprised you knew. It was kept very quiet.”
    “Until the newspapers got hold of it, you mean.”
    “Yes, until then.” He ate neatly, she noticed, without paying much attention to the food. Lydia was getting rather tired