The Millionaire Affair

But her dreaming eyes told a different story. Tatiana took a decision.

‘Move in on Monday.’

Lisa did.

It was a blustery day that blew the cherry blossom off the trees in a snowstorm of petals. Fortunately she didn’t have much to move. She installed her boxes in the sitting room of Tatiana’s garden flat, paid the movers and took a cab to work. She was at her desk by eleven.

She was greeted by a teasing cheer.

‘Hey, hey, half a day’s work today?’ said Rob, her second in command.

‘I moved house,’ Lisa answered briefly. She settled behind her desk and tapped in her access code.

Rob’s eyebrows climbed. Lisa had told him, raging, about her lecture from Sam on Friday afternoon.

‘You don’t hang about, do you?’

She was scrolling through the position pages on the screen but she looked up at that. Her wicked grin flashed.

‘No sooner the word than the deed, me.’

‘Sam will be impressed.’

Lisa chuckled naughtily. ‘I know. But I can’t help that.’

‘I bet he checks up,’ Rob mused. ‘Just to make sure you’ve got a proper up-market place this time.’

Her laughter died. ‘He wouldn’t dare.’

‘Want to bet?’

‘If he does,’ said Lisa with grim satisfaction, ‘he’s in for a surprise.’

For Lisa, too, the move turned out to have its surprises. For one thing she had the greatest difficulty in getting Tatiana to name a figure for the rent. Her new landlady had escorted her enthusiastically through the house—stuffed with an eclectic collection of furniture, ferns and objets d’art—the garden—as green and private as Lisa had imagined—and the local shops—everything from a late-night grocer’s to a bookshop which sold nothing except books about food and even smelled like a good kitchen. There was no doubt that Tatiana was delighted to welcome her. But she clearly thought anything to do with money was low and wouldn’t be pinned down on it.

‘Look,’ said Lisa, turning up at Tatiana’s door one evening with a bottle of expensive Rioja, some information from the local estate agent and an expression of determination, ‘this can’t go on. You need a contract and so do I.’

She threw down a printed document onto a walnut sofa table which gleamed softly under an art deco lamp.

‘That’s a standard form. I’ve signed it but run it past your solicitor before you sign.’ Something in Tatiana’s expression gave her pause. ‘You have got a solicitor?’

‘The family has,’ said Tatiana, without enthusiasm.

‘Fine. Call him tomorrow. The one thing that I haven’t put in is the amount of rent. Now, the agent gave me a range for one-bedroomed flats in this area.’ A handful of leaflets joined the contract. ‘Pick one.’

Tatiana wrinkled her nose disdainfully. ‘When I was your age, girls did not admit that they knew money existed. It was men’s business.’

Lisa was not deflected from her purpose, but she grinned.

‘Don’t wriggle. I’m not leaving until I’ve given you a cheque.’

Tatiana picked up one of the estate agent’s pages and looked at it with distaste. ‘That’s far too much. Anyway, that one’s got a separate entrance.’

Lisa had come prepared. ‘All right. There are monthly rentals for nine flats there. I’ve worked out the average.’ She magicked a slip of paper out of her jeans pocket.

Tatiana took it gingerly. Lisa laughed. She had seen her look at a snail on the garden path with much the same shrinking distaste.

‘Talk to your solicitor, or I’m moving out. And that would be a pity. This is a lovely place.’

The May evening was dark. From Tatiana’s first-floor window the shadowed sweep of trees and lawns looked like a magic landscape. Lisa sank into a 1920s chaise longue under the window and sighed with pleasure.

‘Wonderful,’ she said exuberantly. ‘I’ve never known anywhere like it.

Tatiana’s eyes were warm. ‘I’m glad.’ She opened the wine and poured them each a glass. ‘My family bought the house for me years ago. They thought if I could not, after all, make my living dancing, then at least I could rent out rooms.’

Lisa accepted the glass of ruby wine. ‘And did you?’

‘I’ve done both. Dancing is a hard life. Especially when you begin to age. These days I direct, but it was tough in my forties.’ Tatiana frowned. ‘My family still do an annual check-up, though.’

Lisa sipped wine, amused. ‘Who’s brave enough to do that?’

Tatiana sniffed. ‘Well, this year it will probably be my nephew, Nikolai. Couldn’t be more unsuitable. The last time I saw him he was wearing a beard and khaki camouflage gear. Still,’ she added grudgingly, ‘that was on television.’

‘What a glamorous family.’

‘Nikolai isn’t glamorous,’ corrected Tatiana. She had standards in the matter of glamour. ‘He’s an explorer. Writes books on the behaviour of primates.’

Lisa’s eyes danced. ‘A bit of a wild man, then?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said his fond aunt. ‘Not a wild bone in his body. He’s always completely in control of himself.’

‘But?’ prompted Lisa, hearing the reservation in her voice.

‘He wants to control everyone else as well,’ announced Tatiana. ‘And then thinks you should be delighted that he has bothered to give you so much of his attention. Men.’

Lisa had no men in her family, but she had been battling her way through a man’s world ever since she first went to work for Napier Kraus. She could only sympathise.

‘Still,’ said Tatiana brightening, ‘he came over just before Christmas, so I should have another six months before he starts trying to interfere again.’

She was wrong.

Nikolai Ivanov was as reluctant to involve himself in his great-aunt’s affairs as she was to let him.

‘Oh, not London again,’ he told his grandfather.

They were walking up from the stables to the back of the château, gleaming like gold in the spring sunshine. The gentle slopes of the Tarn valley scrolled away like a medieval painting towards the river. The vine-clad landscape hadn’t changed since his ancestor had commissioned a picture of his home in the eighteenth century. It still hung in the gallery.

‘I hate London.’ Nikolai looked at the unchanging prospect and said with feeling, ‘Who’d be in a dirty, noisy city when they could be here?’