We'll Meet Again by Philippa Carr Read Free Book Online Page B

I began to see how it was between us. To me it was more than a passing flirtation. It was arranged that I should go along to the inn to see him. Of course, if anyone observed my going to his room, there would be a good deal of talk. It seemed an added excitement to plan my visits and seek an opportunity to slip up to his room unseen.
    The outcome was inevitable. In a short time we were lovers. And what an exciting lover he was! How different from Dermot!
    I knew how shocked my family would have been if they had known, and that included Violetta. She had always been rather conventional. I could not imagine her straying from the path of virtue. I think I was more apprehensive of her discovering than I was of Dermot.
    I have always been the sort of person who lives in the present. Violetta calls it the “butterfly existence.”
    “Fluttering hither and thither,” she said, “round the candle until you scorch your wings.”
    It could not last, of course. Though I made myself believe it would. Jacques would not stay forever and then I would return to my old, dull existence.
    Then one day Jacques said: “Why not come with me? You’d like Paris.”
    I said: “How wonderful!” and let myself believe it was possible.
    I suppose Jacques’s nature is really like mine. We started to plan. I love planning. I think up the wildest ideas, which I make myself believe in while they last. In the past Violetta had been there with her common sense. “How absurd you are being!” “How could you possibly do that? You’re not being logical.” And she would have shown me right from the beginning how stupid I was. But she was not there and Jacques and I used to lie in the bed in the inn where there was scarcely room for us both, and float into that world of fantasy. We made plans and deluded ourselves into thinking they were not impossible.
    “I have it!” I cried. “The feud.”
    Jacques’s eyes sparkled. He was enjoying these plans as much as I was. They certainly helped me to evade the unpleasant fact that parting could not be far off.
    I said, “In the feud … this Jermyn girl—I can’t remember her name, so I’ll call her Juliet—was so heartbroken because they wouldn’t let her marry the man she wanted to that she went down to the beach and walked into the sea. Dermot’s first wife was also drowned in that way. Suppose I arranged a ‘drowning accident’? I know. I’ll go down to the beach every morning to have a bathe, and one day they’ll find my bathrobe and shoes and I shall have disappeared.”
    Jacques laughed. It was a brilliant idea. His eyes sparkled and he started to plan how we would do it.
    We made the wildest suggestions. It was not impossible. They would think I was drowned. I did not want poor Dermot to know I was tired of him. That would hurt him too much. We would fix it all beautifully. I would simply have gone bathing and not come back. Just as Juliet Jermyn had done, and as Dermot’s first wife had done.
    We had to make sure that the truth about my departure was never discovered.
    We planned and planned. We were caught up in the idea—and then somehow it became a reality. Jacques said: “You can bring a few things with you. Not much, or they’ll get suspicious. There’s a snag. You’ll want your passport.”
    We were thoughtful.
    “Why should they think to look for a passport?” I asked.
    “They might not immediately. But sometime perhaps somebody will.”
    “We can’t worry about a detail like that. They’d think I’d lost it. I do lose things.”
    So the plan was that I should slip a few things out of the house while Jacques would be waiting for me in the car Hans Fleisch had hired. He would lend it to Jacques without demur. And so we should be ready for the day of departure. I had to make a habit of taking a bathe in the early morning just for a few days before we left. Then on the night we were to get away, I would slip out of the house and join Jacques. First I would put my