“A game park?” Edouard’s eyebrows rose, and Isobel nodded solemnly.
“Absolutely. A game park. Lions and giraffes and wildebeest. Roaming over the parkland. And as a matter of fact, mad as it sounds, it was rather a good idea.” She smiled impishly. “They look rather sweet. Capability Brown would have approved, I’m sure. And they don’t seem to mind the rain—which surprised me. And Papa adores them. He goes out and talks to the lions every morning from the back of a Land-Rover, and they all have names, just the way the dairy herd had when we were children. Only not Daisy and Posy and Rose, of course, but African names—Ngumbe, Banda, things like that. Papa spent weeks researching it.”
“And do the people come to see the lions?”
“In droves. Absolute droves. Much more fun than the Rubenses, and I must say I rather agree. So. There you are. I went off to Kenya to buy lions. It turned out to be the most useful thing I could do.” The green eyes flicked up at him teasingly, but also a little apprehensively, as if she were afraid he might mock her. Edouard, who knew she was most vulnerable when she seemed most frivolous, pressed her hand. She snatched it away with a sudden quick anger.
“Oh, Edouard, don’t. Don’t be kind. I know it’s ridiculous. I despise myself. I wish sometimes—oh, God, I don’t know…I just wish I had been a man, that’s all. Then—”
He took her hand back and raised it gently to his lips. “You are the most beautiful woman I know. Also one of the cleverest, however much you pretend not to be. I’m very very glad you are not a man. Now.” He stood up. “Come back to St. Cloud with me.”
It was late when they reached the great house, but the moon was full, and the night air was warm and still. Edouard, at Isobel’s suggestion, took her on a grand tour. They walked through the wild informal gardens, then through the allées of clipped hornbeam, then yew, to the rose garden, and on to the parterre, which had been planted with herbs and—for the spring—wallflowers. Isobel sighed.
“Gilly flowers—that’s the old English name. I love them. I love their scent.” She picked one, and held it to her face, and in the lights which shone from the long windows of the house, Edouard saw that the color of the flower, that rich deep red shot through with gold, was the color of her hair. There was a little silence between them, then they moved on.
He showed her the stables, and one of the old mares nuzzled Isobel’s hand with a mouth as soft as velvet. Then he took her into a long flat-roofed building like a small aircraft hangar. He flicked the light switch, and Isobel gave a cry of delight. There were twenty cars—no, more, thirty at least—each one of them perfect, each the finest example of its marque. She moved along the rows in delight: a Bugatti, a Jensen, a Bristol, one of the great Mulliner Bentleys, the legendary Porsche 356, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost with running boards.
Isobel ran from one to another, touching the gleaming coach work, the shining chrome. Edouard stood back by the doors, watching her, his face oddly closed. Isobel turned back to him.
“Edouard—they’re beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. The Bugatti must be unique—only seven were built, weren’t they? I thought there was none left…” She mused. “I didn’t know you liked cars so much.”
He shrugged. “I like driving fast. Alone. I do that sometimes at night, when I need to think.”
“But so many…”
“Yes.” He shrugged. “I bought them really for someone else. Someone I knew who was interested in cars.” He turned to the door. “I suppose it’s a little absurd to keep them all now.”
He switched off the light and began to walk away. Isobel looked after him. She had heard about the little boy Grégoire, Jean-Paul’s son, so people said. She had heard about Edouard’s attachment to him. She felt a stab of pity: was that what the cars were for? A priceless collection, for a little boy?
She ran after Edouard, and put her arm through his. Later, after looking at the rest of the house, they returned to Edouard’s study on the first floor. A quietly efficient English manservant brought them coffee and Armagnac, and then withdrew. Isobel moved restlessly around the room. It was like Edouard, she thought, a room that contrived to be both French—with its delicate painted paneling—and also English in the severity of the furnishings. A room that was restrained, masculine, and formal. Bookcases of leather-bound volumes; some exceptionally fine eighteenth-century watercolors; a Chippendale writing desk; chairs covered in exquisitely faded Spitalfield’s silk. Each object in the room was perfect of its kind; each spoke of taste and discernment, and unlimited means, and also of loneliness. Like the rest of the house, the room felt cared-for and curiously empty.
She looked down at Edouard. He was sitting before the log fire, his Armagnac untouched, his face in repose, somber. As she looked at him, he suddenly turned and held out his hand to her.
Isobel took it, and he drew her down so she sat on the silk rug at his feet, on a pattern of birds and flowers, of blues and scarlets and browns. She rested her head against his knee, and he rested his hand against her hair.
“Now,” he said softly. “Tell me, Isobel.”
She turned her head to look up at him. With that intuitive understanding she had always had with him, she knew exactly what he meant.
“I was happy, Edouard. I did love him, you see. And I think he loved me, in his way. But he loved danger more.” She paused, surprised that her own voice should be steady. She had spoken of her marriage to no one, not during it, not since her husband’s death. “I knew what would happen all along. I’m sure he did. I think he almost wanted it. He wouldn’t have liked old age, even middle age. He wouldn’t have liked losing. So I think it ended the way he would have wanted it to end. Very quickly. One skid. The car exploded. I was watching.”
There was a silence. Then Edouard said, “You never had children.”
“No.” The green eyes clouded momentarily. “I wanted them, to begin with, wanted them very much. And then I realized it would be impossible. He couldn’t have attachments—not really. It would have made him unable to race.”
“Weren’t you an attachment?”
“Oh, no.” Isobel smiled. “I’m much too good an actress for that. He thought I liked the danger as much as he did. In fact, every race, I used to be sick. Before it, and after. And I used to pray, of course. All the time. On every single bend. But he never knew that.”
There was a little silence. Edouard stared into the fire, and eventually Isobel lifted her head once more. “And you?” she said gently. “Darling Edouard, tell me.”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“In eight years?” She smiled up at him, wishing she could will the tension out of his body, wishing she could make him relax that guard. “I’ve read about you,” she went on after a pause in which he did not answer her. “Lots of things. You’re very famous now, Edouard.”
“Anything you’ve read is sure to be lies.”
“That’s a shame. Some of it was rather poetic.” She smiled up at him wickedly. “Those presents. For your mistresses. Jewels to match the color of their eyes, or their hair, or their skin. Black pearls. Sapphires. Rubies. Never diamonds.” She paused. “I read all that, and I cheered. I thought: that’s my Edouard. It had style.” She reached for his hand. “Was it true?”
“Some of it.” He paused. “None of it mattered in the least.”
“Really?” Her eyes met his, and she began to smile.
“Really.”
They held each other’s gaze for a moment, a look of understanding and amusement, and then, both at once, they began to laugh. Isobel felt the tension leave his body, saw the amusement, and then the sudden seriousness in his eyes.
They stopped laughing; Edouard leaned forward, gathered her in his arms and kissed her. Then he drew back, looked down into her face, and said: “Will you marry me, Isobel?”
And Isobel rested her face against his arm, and sighed.
“Darling Edouard,” she said. “Of course I will. You know quite well that’s why I came back to
see you.”
Then Edouard took her into his bedroom, and they remained there for three days and three nights. On the fourth day, they drove out into the country, and were married by an extremely flustered official in a small mairie, some fifty kilometers outside Paris. No guests. No reporters.
Isobel had her wedding ring first. She chose her engagement ring belatedly in the de Chavigny Paris showrooms. She passed over the trays of sapphires, and rubies, and diamonds; she chose an emerald. When Edouard slipped it onto her finger, she looked up at him and smiled.
“This one has no superstitions attached to it, I hope.” Edouard put his arms around her.
“My darling, none. It’s very very lucky, I promise you.”
They had six months of unclouded happiness. They made love a disproportionate amount, Isobel told him, in the certain knowledge that Edouard would then make love to her again. He was the best lover she had ever had: the most skillful, the most understanding, the most gentle, the most fierce. He took her body, and he made it come alive. They were inseparable. In six months that included many business trips, they were never apart for one night. Other women ceased to exist for Edouard; he gently terminated his affair with Clara Delluc, and Isobel, knowing this woman had meant more to him than any of the others, asked if she might meet her; she did, and the two women became friends.
Isobel found herself fascinated by the diversity and challenge of Edouard’s work; she also quickly found that she could be of help to him. Not simply as a hostess—“the only task I was ever trained for,” she said to him wryly—but also as an advisor. Like her husband, she had sharp and brilliantly intuitive instincts for people; she knew at once whom Edouard could trust. But she was more patient and more sympathetic than he, and so colleagues and advisors Edouard might have overlooked, Isobel drew out, and nurtured. Being English, she knew little about wine—that had been her father’s province. There, she was content to let Edouard educate her. Being a woman, and coming from the background she did, she knew a great deal about jewelry. There, Edouard discovered, she could educate him. Her taste, which had never been for understatement, influenced his, which had always been a little austere.
“I adore these.” She held up a heavy necklace of cabochon rubies intertwined with emeralds and pearls.
“Thank you. They’re Bulgari.”
“Don’t sulk. They’re wonderful. Pagan. A little barbaric. Jewelry ought to be like that. It ought to be flamboyantly seductive. To show off a little. Diamonds seem to me totally pointless if they’re discreet.”
It was Isobel who found Edouard his designer of genius, succeeding by chance where his headhunters, in years of patient searching, had failed.
She had a friend from finishing school, Maria, who came from a rich Hungarian family, and who had fled her country for Paris in 1956, at the time of the Russian invasion. Maria had brought out no money, but she had smuggled out some of her jewels. Isobel helped her friend to settle in Paris and find work; one day Maria asked her if de Chavigny might be interested in buying her jewelry.
“It seems pointless to me now.” She smiled at Isobel. “I can’t think how I ever cared for the things. But the money would be useful.” She laid the jewels out on the bed in the small atelier she was renting. Isobel took one look at them, and telephoned Edouard.
They had been made for Maria by a Polish emigré, Floryan Wyspianski, a man in his early thirties who had settled in Budapest after the war. He was skillful, Maria said—she and his mother had always loved his work—but he was not very successful. He had only a small shop; it was difficult, in Budapest, for a Pole.
Edouard examined the jewelry carefully, standing in the north light of the atelier’s large window. He looked at the pieces with the naked eye, then with his glass, while behind him Isobel held her breath.
What he saw was incredible to him: imperfect stones, yes, flawed, sometimes of poor coloration, but cut and set with such skill and ingenuity that their imperfections were disguised. Dazzlingly accomplished workmanship. Some of the most original and beautiful designs he had seen in thirty years.
He could trace the influences, he thought; this man had used scholarship as well as talent. One of the necklaces—a collar of Byzantine magnificence—had clearly been influenced by the classical revivalist designs of Fortunato Castellani, and his pupil Giuliano, whom Edouard’s great-grandfather had once tried to woo into working for him in London. The use of enamel, the brilliant understanding of color, yes, that piece reminded him of Giuliano, though the design was more subtle, less heavy. That necklace was one of Wyspianski’s early pieces, Maria said. Later, he had moved away from these classic designs; he had become interested in Arab jewelry, she said, and in their techniques of wiring jewels so delicately and invisibly that they moved with their wearer. This necklace, she said, picking up another, this was the last piece she had bought from him. It showed the Arab influence, she thought.
Edouard held the necklace reverently. It was the finest of the pieces Maria had bought: the work of a master. A delicate circlet of gold wired with pearls and diamonds, the diamonds shaped like flowers, the pearls suspended like dew from their petals. Alexander Reza, at the turn of the century, had done work resembling this, but never anything so fragile.
Edouard looked back at the collection. What excited him most of all was that these pieces, each so different, each showing a restless determination to experiment, all had the signature of Wyspianski. They bore the unmistakable stamp of one man’s genius: to anyone who knew anything about jewelry, that was immediately obvious. Looking at them, he knew at once that his long search was over. He turned around slowly.
“Yes?” Isobel was trembling with excitement.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
There was a silence. Isobel and Maria exchanged glances.
“There is a problem,” Isobel admitted finally, with reluctance. “Wyspianski is still in Hungary. With his family. He would like to leave, but he cannot.”
“That is no problem. I shall get him out.”
Maria sighed. She did not know Edouard very well. “Alas—it is impossible. Two years ago—yes. A year ago—maybe. Now the Russian hold is very tight. It cannot be done.”
“I shall do it.”
He flew, with Isobel, to Moscow the following week. One month later, the young wife of a senior member of the Politburo was astonishing her friends with a necklace, earrings, and bracelets of positively Czarist splendor. The Pole, Floryan Wyspianski, and his wife and young daughter had exit visas from Hungary.
“Bribery and corruption,” Isobel said tartly as she drew her sables more tightly around her, and they mounted the steps to Edouard’s plane for the flight back to Paris. Edouard looked injured.
“I tried pleas first. Rational arguments. Commercial incentives. Bribery and corruption were a last resort.”
“Have you tried them before?” Isobel looked up at him curiously.
“Of course. When I had to.” Edouard scowled suddenly. “It was one of the things I hated most. Discovering there was no one—almost no one—who could not be bought.”
That had been one month before. Wyspianski and his family were due in Paris the next week. Isobel, thinking of that as she walked in the gardens at St. Cloud in the autumn sunshine, hugged herself with secret joy. That afternoon she had been to see her doctor in Paris. He had finally been able to confirm what she had believed and prayed for these past six weeks. She was going to have a baby. A baby—and the designer Edouard had been searching for so long. Both at once. Isobel danced for sheer happiness.
Now, she thought, now Edouard will have what I know he wants so desperately, what I want for him. A child. An heir. A family. And that darkness, that sadness she still sometimes glimpsed in his eyes, will be banished forever.
She lifted her arms up to the warmth of the sun, filled with a sudden wild joy. It shone on the falling leaves, on the burnished red-gold of her hair. She turned her face to the light, and silently, incoherently, not knowing which de
ity she addressed, she thanked the gods, who had been so kind to her, and to the husband she loved so much. Tonight, she thought; this evening, as soon as he comes home, I shall run to meet him, and I shall tell him.
A day later, Edouard still did not know about the baby.
Isobel had heard the wheels of his car on the gravel. She ran quickly around to the front of the house, just as she had planned. The driver was already pulling away in the Rolls, and Edouard already striding toward the house. Isobel took one look at his face, and kept silent. They went into the small drawing room they always used when they were alone in the house. Edouard kissed her, but absentmindedly. He began pacing up and down the room. He poured himself a drink. Isobel refused one, and watched him, knowing something was wrong, longing to speak, to burst out with her news, and knowing she must make herself wait. Eventually he sat down, and passed his hand tiredly across his brow.
“My darling, I’m sorry. I thought you would have seen the newspapers. Heard the news. You obviously haven’t?”
“No. I went into Paris—for some fittings.” Isobel hesitated, then sat down. “Then I was in the gardens…”
“I warned him.” He put down his glass angrily. “I told Jean-Paul this would happen—nearly two years ago now. I knew this was inevitable.” He paused. “The Front de Libération Nationale blew up the second largest gendarmerie in Algiers this morning. Thirteen men died. Two others were shot by snipers. Fifteen men—in one day. And of course, nine French policemen have already been killed during the past month. Reprisals, they say, for those raids that were made on the Casbah.” He shrugged wearily. “I spoke to Mendès-France briefly, this evening. It’s going to get worse, Isobel, much worse.”
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