Read Online Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan - Free Book Online Page A

There was the same clear, intense air coruscating a terrain that had not seen rain for months, and the same heartless expanse of enamel sky with scrub etched below, blanching to white in the dawn. There the similarities ended. Provence was languorous with scent: resin, crushed thyme, garlic and new bread, hot stone and hot earth. At night cicadas played until the sun slid round the corner of the Villa Lafayette and laid a finger of light on the turquoise swimming pool and the carved stone pot planted with geraniums.
    From his bedroom window, Kit stood naked and watched the sun and smoked his first cigarette of the day. It was five thirty in the morning and it had been too hot to sleep much that night. He stretched until his bones cracked, reached for his bathing costume and, towel over his shoulder, walked barefoot along the ‘boys’ wing’ and let himself out of the house.
    He padded along the terrace and looked up at Daisy’s window. Villa Lafayette was a two-storeyed house with shuttered windows which had been left to weather in peace for generations until the South of France began to be fashionable. Luckily, the original tiles and the archways had survived the frantic installation of new bathrooms, a billiard room, and the all-white decor so fashionable just now.
    There was a trace, the merest hint, of chill as Kit slid into the pool and struck out for the far end. Bubbles of light broke across his vision, and the water parted with a slap. At the end, he turned and began the second lap. When he surfaced Daisy was waiting.
    She had on a bathing robe of cornflower blue that exaggerated the colour of her eyes and emphasized her chestnut hair. ‘Shush.’ She placed a finger on her lips and then pointed at the house.
    He trod water and looked up. During a wakeful night he had visualized Daisy’s slender but full-bosomed body in detail, and wondered if anyone else found the combination of its voluptuousness and the suggestion of boyishness in her forthright manner as fascinating as he did. He hauled himself over the edge, sat down beside her, scraped back his hair and pinched his nose.
    ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Daisy leant back on her hands and let her feet dangle in the water.
    Kit smoothed the hairs on her goosefleshed forearm with a finger. ‘What are you doing up so early? I imagined you treasured the beauty sleep.’
    ‘I was waiting for you.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘It’s going to be hot again.’
    ‘Whenever is it not?’
    Daisy lifted her cooled feet onto the stone, and clasped her knees. ‘I love the heat. I love the smells. I love being here.’
    ‘ Nothing to complain of?’ Kit observed the bit of Daisy’s neck which ran up into her bobbed hair.
    ‘Why should there be?’ Daisy hesitated while she decided whether to be frank or not. ‘Except for the bad stomach when I arrived.’
    ‘I suffered in Constantinople, and there were no bathrooms to speak of.’
    She smiled uncertainly at the intimacy of the subject. ‘Will you go back?’
    ‘I’m tempted to spend my time travelling. But there is the house to think of.’
    Daisy surprised Kit with her next comment. ‘You need an anchor, Kit Dysart. Otherwise you are the sort that drifts for ever.’
    He sat up, intrigued by the novelty of her viewpoint, and considered it rather profound. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Am I right?’
    ‘I don’t know, Daisy.’
    ‘I am right,’ she said simply. Daisy was on territory that she understood. It was not a knack she was particularly proud of because it was no effort: the instinct to form these conclusions was something she happened to possess.
    ‘Perhaps,’ he said.
    The sun whitened the stone coping bordering the pool, and spread across their backs. A hush had fallen, the anticipatory moment before the sun gripped the day. Already brown, Kit’s skin was silky and warm-looking and Daisy wanted to touch it. She turned her head to look at him.
    ‘An anchor?’ he said, and Daisy suddenly shivered.
    ‘Shush,’