Bitter Sweet

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Her love affair had been unhappy. In order to forget Clifford Culver, the beautiful and tempestuous Raine is sent to stay with her grandmother in the South of France, little realising that Clifford is a handsome philanderer playing a double game in order to get his hands on the fortune that she will one day inherit. His duplicity is discovered by a young Frenchman who has already fallen passionately in love with Raine, but the situation is to become even more tragic and involved before they find the love and happiness they both desire?

Release date: December 5, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 208

Sample

It was generally accepted that the Ball which Lady Oliventt gave for her débutante daughter, Jennifer Rose, was one of the big successes of Coronation Year. Society was there en masse; some of the loveliest girls in England. The dance took place in a famous hotel overlooking the river. The May night was cloudless and warm, and the light of the stars seemed to dip into the water. At times couples drifted outside to get away from the heat of the ballroom in which the scent of the flowers had become overpowering.

Jennifer was quite a pretty girl, although on the large side—tall, fair, and exceedingly amiable. She did a lot of laughing and everybody liked her. She looked really sweet tonight in her crinoline dress of pink spangled tulle.

Lady Oliventt stood beside Rose, her sister-in-law, looking every inch the proud pleased matron and said:

‘Well, I think Jennifer’s going to pull it off. I’m sure she’ll get married very quickly. She’s danced a great deal with that nice boy, Simon Corvell. I wouldn’t mind. He is charming and he will have a title one day.’

Mrs. Michael Oliventt looked round the glittering room, searching the dancers for her own daughter.

‘Have you seen Raine lately, Maud?’

Lady Oliventt had just at that moment noticed the fact that her niece had left the room with a young man named Clifford Culver. But she did not say so to poor dear Rose. She knew how Rose detested young Culver. Really, she was sorry these days for Rose, who was a conventional and wholly English type in her way. But she had, Lady Oliventt reminded herself, a French mother and Raine had inherited a great deal of her temperament from the Comtesse de Chagny. Well—what with the French blood, and an Irish grandmother on the other side, what could one expect?

When Raine had ‘come out’ last year she had been noted as one of the most beautiful débutantes presented at Court. Too emotional and artistic—her Ladyship was glad that her Jennifer was neither of these things. Talent seemed to go hand in hand with trouble. And poor Rose had so set her heart on Raine making a good marriage and settling down.

Rose Oliventt, left to herself, wandered around still searching for the truant Raine, whose grandmother said she had not seen her for some time. Rather bitterly, Rose regarded the Comtesse. At sixty-five she was still magnificently handsome, and charmed everybody with her wit and humour, and that touch of the grande dame which so distinguished her. She wore black lace (Balmain), the Chagny diamonds, long white kid gloves, and carried an ostrich feather fan. She made everybody else in the room look insignificant. Her daughter respected and admired her. But they had never really understood each other. Now, there was an armed truce between them, which had existed ever since Rose married Michael Oliventt and left France.

The Comtesse had only one great interest and love these days—her granddaughter. She adored Raine. In her own youth, Adrienne de Chagny had had scores of young men at her feet—she understood emotions. She had suffered greatly during the last war and been financially reduced, like so many members of the French nobility. But she was still a wealthy woman, and owned one of the most beautiful places in the South of France. Raine was her sole heiress.

Mrs. Oliventt reflected that although the Comtesse spoiled Raine, she would share at least one view with her daughter Rose. She would not want Raine to become entangled with Clifford Culver—who was unworthy of her.

It was so maddening that Clifford was asked everywhere, because he was an eligible bachelor and came of a good family. Clifford was nearing thirty. Recently, following the death of his father, he had become the head of his firm.

Mrs. Oliventt was never quite sure what Clifford did. … She only knew vaguely that the ‘business’ was connected with spare parts for cars and that Clifford owned a big factory on the Great West Road. But she had lately heard rumours that he was rapidly spending all the money his father had made and that ‘Culvers Ltd.’ were not too prosperous. She was positive, anyhow, that Clifford was after Raine for her money more than for her youth and beauty. That terrified the mother.

In addition, Clifford had been scandalously connected with one or two girls, and once with a married woman in a case in which he had narrowly escaped being cited as co-respondent. In other words, Mrs. Oliventt loathed him, and could not understand why Raine preferred him to any of the nice boys she had so far met.

She wished that Michael, her husband, had not died so young. He had been one of the youngest Members of Parliament. He had succumbed to a fatal operation while he was visiting the Far East. He might have helped control Raine; it was so difficult managing her alone, Rose Oliventt thought.

Despairingly, she abandoned the search through the ball-room for Raine, and told herself that she must insist upon the girl leaving London with her directly after the Coronation. They would accompany the Comtesse to France. There—in the de Chagny mountain retreat behind Cannes—Raine would be safe from that man (which was how Rose always alluded to Clifford Culver). She must stay there until she got him out of her blood. Thank heaven, the mother’s thoughts ran on, Raine was still under age. She could not marry anybody without her mother’s permission for another six months.

On the Embankment, a young girl wearing a fur coat over her evening dress, stood beside a tall good-looking man in ‘white tie and tails’; her hand clasping his. They leaned over the balustrade, watching the fascinating Neon lights glittering across the water. Now and again they turned and gazed at each other long and ardently.

‘Oh, it’s wonderful out here with you, Cliff,’ the girl said in a low voice. ‘If only we needn’t go back to all those other people. Why, why can’t we get into one of those little tugs, vanish down the river and never come back?’

‘You are exquisitely impracticable, my darling,’ Clifford Culver laughed, and lifted her hand to his lips.

She shivered as she felt the ardour of his kiss. She was madly in love with him. He knew it and played on her emotions as a musician plays upon the strings of a sensitive instrument.

He was in love with her, too, in his way. Looking at her, his pulses quickened. He remembered the supple grace of her while they had been dancing a few moments ago, Raine Oliventt was enchanting enough to go to any man’s head. She looked particularly angelic tonight in her crinoline dress which was a froth of white frilly lace under the fur coat she had slipped over her bare shoulders. Shoulders as smooth and pale as ivory. Her face, too, was pale. She rarely had any colour.

He was crazier about her than he had been about any of the ‘others’. Pretty girls attracted Clifford as light attracts a moth, but he was cleverer than the moth. It was never he who singed his wings. But Raine was different. He wanted to marry her. But he had to be cautious despite the deep underlying passions which he knew existed within her. She was reserved and fastidious—sometimes so serious about life and love that it frightened him. He, himself, was not serious-minded. Life for him was one long amusement. He was not even good at business. Too lazy; too fond of the ‘flesh pots’, and too selfish.

His prevailing passion was for expensive cars (and, of course, expensive women to drive in them with him). He had liked racing at Brooklands, and this year he had entered for the Monte Carlo Rally, but was not placed.

But the thing that Clifford needed most at the moment was—money. He was in love with Raine but even more so with the small fortune which she would inherit both from the old French grandmother, and her late father, once she came of age.

There was also that superb old monastery in St. Candelle, near Mougins, which the Comtesse’s ancestors had converted, and she was still restoring. Clifford would enjoy being part-owner of a property and a fortune near Cannes. Just the job!

A deep sigh from Raine.

‘I suppose I’ll have to go back. It was mad of me to run out here with you like this.’

‘It’s delicious to be mad, isn’t it, sweet?’ he murmured, and smiled down at her sideways in that whimsical fashion which always made her heart melt. She was so defenceless and lovely—the moonlight gleaming in her large dark grey eyes. He looked at the slenderness of her, the sculptured lines of the small head (dark hair cut short with a crisp curving wing brushed from the brow), and he found her irresistible.

‘I love you,’ he whispered. ‘I daren’t kiss you and smudge your lips, but … oh, my dear! … you don’t know what you do to me!’

‘You have the same effect on me,’ she said, and gave an excited little laugh. When she laughed Raine was immensely gay. Yet she could look too sad for her twenty years; as though all the sorrow and poetry of Ireland and the coquetry of her French ancestors mingled in her eyes.

He grumbled:

‘Why the heck does your mother have to dislike me?’

‘I just don’t know! I find it so hard to forgive her for it, darling. But I shall never give you up no matter what she says.’

‘Oh well—in a year’s time you can do what you like.’

‘Will you mind if she cuts me off without a shilling when I elope with you?’

‘Of course not!’ said Clifford heartily. (But he had taken pains to find out that most of the money that Michael Oliventt had left, was in trust for his only child so there was nothing Rose could do about that!) And there was nothing the old Comtesse could do, either. The old monastery of Candella, and all the de Chagny property, must eventually pass to Raine.

Raine gazed up at Clifford with her misty adoring gaze. She found him wonderful. Right from the start six months ago, when she had first danced with him, she had thought: ‘This is it! I’ve found the one I want!’

She had always admired tall fair men—perhaps because she, herself, was slight and dark. There was just a glint of red in Cliff’s thick bright hair. Because he spent most of his time in open cars he was deeply tanned, which made his eyes seem a light bright blue. He gave one the impression of being stronger and more muscular than he was, because of the width of his shoulders. He dressed with taste. Raine admired his suits and his choice of ties. And he was so amusing—so full of enthusiasms. She could see that other girls were always trying to attract his attention. He was utterly charming. At the end of his first dance he had tightened his hold of her and said:

‘So this is Raine! London’s loveliest débutante—well, none of the pictures I’ve seen of you in the Tatler could give one the least notion of how beautiful you are.’ Then he had added softly: ‘Raine. Just the perfect name! Those dark grey eyes hold the shadowy depths of some enchanted pool full of rain-water.’

Well—that had been the beginning—and the end—for her. Now they were openly, desperately in love. Oh, it was maddening that Mummy didn’t like him. Neither did Granny or Aunt Maud. Yet they all admitted he had looks and charm. But Mummy had said the other day:

‘He’s too old for you—and there’s something I don’t trust about him.’

‘Well, I don’t care about the women in his past,’ Raine had protested. ‘Any man as handsome as Cliff is bound to have had affairs. If he loves me now, that is all that matters.’

‘I still don’t trust him,’ had been the obstinate reply. ‘Anyhow, you are merely in the throes of a foolish infatuation. He isn’t any of the things you used to say you wanted; except in looks. You always declared you would marry somebody who understood music, or painting, or books. You aren’t the type to want to rush round in sports cars and sit on high stools, drinking at all the smart bars in Europe!’

It certainly wasn’t what Raine wanted, but she laughed this off. She thought—as hundreds of girls had thought before her—that even if a man hadn’t as much in common with you as you might wish … it didn’t matter so long as you were enough in love. (As she and Cliff were.) He was going to teach her to like racing, and he wouldn’t interfere if she wanted to listen to music or go to art exhibitions—or ballet—which was her favourite of all recreations.

She had row after row with Mummy over Cliff. Of course, she was sorry in a way, knowing how terribly conventional Mummy was. And that she, Raine, must be such a disappointment, because she had turned down dozens of proposals from the sort of young men Mummy adored. Yet they had all seemed so feeble and dull and characterless after Cliff. Once, when Mummy had declared that Cliff was just after her money, Raine had thrown a scene with every drop of her French blood to the fore. And when she had threatened to run away just to prove that Cliff would marry her even if she were penniless, Mummy had ‘piped down’. But she still forbade Cliff the house. And still nagged and complained if Raine met him at other people’s houses.

Suddenly Raine said:

‘I’ve got something else facing me now. …’

‘What, darling?’

‘Oh, some new protégé of Gammère’s to deal with.’ (Gammère was Raine’s own particular name for her French grandmother.)

‘What’s it got to do with you?’

‘He’s a young man whom Gammère thinks is wonderful. One of the impoverished aristocracy now working as an architect and helping Gammère restore the monastery. She says he is most attractive and also has the makings of a great painter, but hasn’t had the money with which to indulge his genius. She has invited him to London for the Coronation and Aunt Maud said he could look in at Jennifer’s Ball.’

‘But he hasn’t come, has he?’

‘He was going to be very late. Some business kept him in Paris and he was catching a plane later this evening. Gammère’s taken a room for him somewhere near us.’

‘Well, I shall be jealous if you give him one smile,’ said Clifford lazily.

‘If I do it will be a frozen one,’ she returned with a sudden giggle.

He liked Raine when she chose to be gay. The materialistic Clifford could ill appreciate the deeper, more sentimental, side of this young adolescent girl. But once they were married, he thought, he would soon mould her into his own ways. And, of course, he would marry her. He knew that that mother and the old grandma were trying to get her away from him. But he was incurably optimistic and he had secretly calmed down one or two creditors by hinting that his engagement to last year’s popular young débutante, Miss Raine Oliventt, would shortly be announced.

‘Try and meet me tomorrow, sweet,’ were his last words as they entered the hotel again. ‘I’ve got to go along to the factory in the morning but I’ll be in the London office about ten. Ring me there.’

He left her to return to the hotel alone so that they would not cause undue gossip. Raine entered the ballroom with a sinking sensation—that sick feeling that she always felt when she had to say good-bye to Clifford. When she was going to meet him it was all madly exciting and she felt able to brave anyone or anything for his sake. But to leave him was to suffer as only the very young and intense know how. The thoughts of these two as they parted were entirely and characteristically different. The young girl deeply in love—loving and suffering for love’s sake and with the highest ideals. The man, remembering with satisfaction the money she would inherit and how amusing it would be to see her, not in a conventional débutante’s ball-dress, but as a Bohemian—wearing gay tartan stove-pipe trousers, for instance, and a yellow sweater, strolling beside him along the Croisette in Cannes. She had the sort of figure a fellow wanted to show off. And it would be good to get her away from the stiff set in which her conventional mother moved. As his wife, she would be a mad success with his friends.

Raine, walking across the ballroom, came face to face with her mother, smiling and nodding at her friends. Her heart sank as she saw the frozen and deeply disapproving look on Mrs. Oliventt’s delicately made-up face. Raine was the first to think how handsome her mother looked—always so chic and poised. So correct. Yet sometimes she wondered why her father, who had been so Irish and charming and gay, had ever fallen in love with Rose de Chagny. Perhaps because in her young days, Mummy had been less cold and difficult and, of course, she had always had good looks. Perhaps, Raine had sometimes thought whimsically, Daddy—like everyone else—had ‘fallen’ for Gammère, who had infinitely more charm and understanding. All young men adored her—except Cliff. But Mummy and Gammère had not been nice to Cliff. No, even beloved Gammère had turned the cold shoulder when she met Cliff—primed, of course, by Mummy; which Raine found hard to forgive.

‘Where have you been?’ Mrs. Oliventt shot at her daughter.

Raine grew suddenly reckless and decided not to lie. Her grey eyes—they looked enormous when she was being emotionée, and wonderfully luminous under the black long lashes—answered:

‘Having a few words alone with Clifford. Do you mind?’

Rose Oliventt felt herself go taut with anger. Her very love for this only child of hers who so resembled her father (and Rose had truly loved Michael Oliventt) seemed to breed a disapproval of everything that Raine did.

‘You’re mad—determined to ruin your reputation!’ she breathed.

Raine’s wide sweet mouth drew inwards into a tight line. It was only her mother who ever saw the hardening of that naturally tender mouth.

‘Oh, Mummy, you get so het up about Cliff. It’s just ridiculous. You’ve so little really against him and you make up what isn’t there.’

‘On the contrary—any time I ever mention his name—I am informed that he has done something which I find objectionable. I’ve told you a dozen times, and I tell you again—he’s a fortune hunter and …’

‘A wicked flirt—a villain—and a wolf …’ Raine finished, and laughed, digging her teeth into her lower lip. ‘How sick I am of this, Mummy!’

‘And so am I. But your behaviour this evening ends it,’ said Rose Oliventt darkly. ‘I’ve spoken to your grandmother, and we all three leave for Mougins directly after the Coronation.’

Raine’s small heart-shaped face grew pale rather than flushed when she was most upset. She turned so white now that her mother seized her arm and shook her a little.

‘Don’t look like that—I won’t have you feeling this way about Clifford Culver.’

‘Then drag me to France and keep me there, locked up in Candella, and see if it makes the slightest difference,’ said Raine, her breath coming quickly and jerkily. ‘I don’t care. I shall go on loving him just the same. A thousand miles between us won’t make any difference. You’ll see. And you’ll find out how much he loves me—me and not my money. …’

She dragged her wrist from her mother and left her standing there. Rose, who was flushed and thoroughly upset, almost wept in public.

Raine was off her head! Rose had heard of young girls going mad about men—this was awful—her own well-brought-up daughter to be capable of such abandon!

At that moment, Clifford sauntered back into the ballroom. Raine saw him and the sun broke through the darkness for her again. Once more her heart sang to the stars. It was frightening to know that she was to be forced to leave London, and she knew that even Gammère would show her little sympathy. But so confident was she that Cliff would go on loving her, and that once she was twenty-one, he would take her away even though they disinherited her—she could not be downcast for long.

Then she saw a young man standing beside her grandmother’s chair at the far end of the room and her grandmother beckoning to her. She walked across the room to them. She saw a slimly built man, not as tall as Clifford but by no means short, watching her approach. His slenderness of build gave him a youthful look. She guessed at once that he was Armand de Rougement—Gammère’s architect—and that he must be about twenty-four or twenty-five.

The Comtesse said:

‘Ah! Here comes my granddaughter, Armand. You must dance together, and you may take her in to supper.’

Raine extended a hand. Armand bent over it, and touched it with his lips. He spoke in good English with a slightly clipped accent.

‘I’m delighted to meet you, Mademoiselle Oliventt.’

‘How do you do,’ said Raine coldly.

The Comtesse beamed on them. Lightly she touched Armand’s shoulder with the ebony stick which she used on account of her sciatica, which made walking painful.

‘Here you see a very clever boy, my dear Raine,’ she said. ‘He knows more about old buildings and the history of France than anybody I have met of his age. And he paints portraits in his spare time, exceedingly well, too. He shall paint you when we are at Candella.’

‘If I may be permitted,’ murmured Armand.

‘It sounds most exciting,’ said Raine in that small cold voice which struck the young man as being a paradox—like the cool remote way in which she looked at him.

‘Mon . . .