Free Remember by Barbara Taylor Bradford

look, Nick. Take my word for it.”
    She had looked at herself in a mirror, and had had to admit that Arch was right. When she had examined her face, she had decided that he had actually understated the facts. She looked positively ill. Her face was unusually pale, even haggard, she had dark rings under her eyes and her hair was lifeless. Much to her alarm, her eyes, always so clear and vividly blue, had seemed dull, faded almost, as if they were losing their color, if such a thing were possible.
    Nicky was aware that cosmetics could camouflage a number of flaws for the benefit of the camera, and that she could continue to hide the telltale signs of fatigue with clever makeup tricks. But she had also recognized that afternoon that it would be foolish not to take a rest, especially since the network owed her so much time off. She had felt debilitated and emotionally drained, and apparently now the signs were all too evident to others. And so she had put her mirror away, phoned Clee at his Paris office, and told him she would like to accept his offer of the farmhouse in Provence if it was still open. He had been thrilled.
    “That’s great, Nick,” he had said, his energy and excitement echoing down the wire. “I’m leaving for Moscow tomorrow, to photograph Gorbachev for Paris Match, but JeanClaude will make arrangements for you to be met in Marseilles, and then driven up to the farm. All you have to do is get yourself to Marseilles, via either Paris or Nice.
    Just let JeanClaude know the day you’ll be arriving, and the time.
    I’ll call you from Moscow, to find out how you’re doing, after you’ve settled in.”
    Within forty-eight hours she was zooming across the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound, a passenger on board the French Concorde, and landed in Paris a short three hours and forty-five minutes later.
    After spending the night at the Plaza-Athenee, her favorite hotel, she had taken a plane from Orly Airport to Marseilles the following morning.
    JeanClaude, Clee’s office manager, had explained to her that a chauffeur from the car company they used would be waiting for her at the airport. “You won’t be able to miss him. He’ll be holding up a card with your name written on it in bold letters,” JeanClaude had said on the telephone.
    True to JeanClaude’s promise, the chauffeur had been there when she had alighted from the plane and gone to the baggage area. He had introduced himself as Etienne, and he was a pleasant, chatty and informative Provencal, who throughout the drive inland had kept her entertained with rather fantastic folkloric tales of the region. He had also recited more facts about Air and Arles than she could possibly absorb at one time.
    Although she spoke French well, having spent part of her youth in Paris with her globe-trotting parents, Nicky had found the Provincial accent a bit difficult to understand at first. But relatively quickly she had realized that Etienne was adding the letter to many words, so that bien became bieng, and so forth.
    Once she got the hang of this adjustment of the French language and attuned her ear to the rich and throaty cadence of his speech as well as to his rapid delivery, she had discovered that she had no problem grasping everything he said.
    On the way to Air-en-Provence from Marseilles, Nicky had 66 6’
    begun to notice that the landscape was completely different from that of the Cate d’Azur, which was the part of southern France she knew so intimately. Her parents were Francophiles, and as a child she had been taken by them to many of the renowned coastal resorts for annual holidays and shorter stays. In particular, her mother and father had favored Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Cannes and Monte Carlo. And then in October of 1986 she had spent those two extraordinary weeks in Cap d’Antibes with Charles Devereaux, after which he had disappeared from her life altogether and forever.
    But Clee’s area of Provence was entirely new to her and, as such,