The first two sounded okay enough to me—I liked to eat, I liked theater—but as far as I was concerned, they could keep the last.
But still Annette moped.
“Oh,” she sighed wistfully, “once they come, life will be so grand.”
She sounded like someone much older, the kind of woman who says, “Oh, when I just lose these ten pounds, life will be perfect.”
The only time we saw the master in those first few days his guests were here was when he came home to change his clothes, which was fairly often. Well, a person did need to wear different things for lunch, for riding, for nights filled with art. But he had hardly a word for anyone as he bounded through the house, unless it was to shout orders to Mrs. Fairly about some forthcoming need of his guests.
“Where’s the tie to my tux?” he would call out.
“My riding boots need shining!”
“Where’s my favorite blue blazer? I still can’t find it!”
Well, I knew where that was. But I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.
God, it was amazing to me, how the entire household was expected to spin according to the whims of one very demanding male. It seemed to me that the only time a household should ever revolve around one person’s whims would be if that one person were me.
Well, that wasn’t going to ever happen.
“Miss Bell,” he asked pointedly, “have you seen my favorite blue blazer?”
He’d already asked everybody else, including Captain and Steinway. They all called him that now. Mrs. Fairly had told me that, before my arrival, they’d merely called him “Cat.”
I didn’t even bother looking up from my copy of the International Herald Tribune.
“What’s Paraguay up to now?” I muttered, pretending to be absorbed in Paraguay’s affairs.
“I asked,” he said, “have you—”
“And I heard you,” I said, still not looking up, “but I’m your daughter’s governess, not your valet. How should I know where your blue blazer is? Do you think I’m hiding it in the bottom of my closet?”
I don’t know what I would have said if, given the mood he was in, he’d demanded, “Well, are you?” But, thankfully, he didn’t do that. Rather, he just turned sharply on his heel and left the room to go hound Mrs. Fairly again, saying something about good help being hard to find.
“Not if you don’t expect them to do jobs you never hired them for in the first place!” I yelled after him.
Then, the day Annette had been so waiting for finally arrived.
“They’re going to be here tonight!” Mrs. Fairly crowed.
God, she sounded like a schoolgirl who’d just learned that some minor rock star had answered her plea to take her to the junior-high dance and while he couldn’t do that, he’d stopped by her house and pinned a corsage on her, singing a special rendition of one of his minor hits just for her before jetting off to Gstaad.
“That’s great,” I said, trying to force enthusiasm into my voice. “I’ll just eat dinner early with Annette and disappear afterward. I haven’t seen Britta and Gina in a long time. Perhaps I’ll—“
“Oh, no!” she interrupted me, clearly horrified. “That won’t do at all.”
“Not do?”
“No. The master has left explicit instructions—while he doesn’t expect you and Annette to join them for dinner—he doesn’t think Annette would like sitting still for such a long period of time—he most definitely expects you to bring her downstairs to meet his guests and for the entertainments afterward.”
“But why do I need to bring her down?” I couldn’t stop from whining. “Surely she can walk downstairs by herself. I’ve seen her do it before. She’s a very capable little girl.”
“Who cares about the why?” For once, she was out of patience with me. “He pays our wages. If he wants you to bring her downstairs, then you will. Maybe he’s worried she’ll be bored without you there. Or maybe he’s worried she’d be too much underfoot without you there. It doesn’t matter why. Just do it.”
I moved to leave.
“And be sure to wear your best dress!” she shouted after me. Suddenly, it seemed as though everyone was always shouting at everyone else as they were about to leave rooms.
I turned back.
“My best dress?”
“Yes. The party will be very formal and just because you’re not to be sitting with them at dinner, it doesn’t mean that you should wear one of those sweater outfits you’re forever wearing.”
Best dress?
The words mocked me as, that evening, preparing to go down, I stared dismally at my wardrobe. I only had one dress: the one I’d bought at the mall and worn downstairs the first night I met Edgar Rawlings. I supposed I’d thought it nice enough when I bought it, but it certainly wouldn’t qualify as a winner of “best” anything, unless I was going to a convention of grammar-school teachers, not when I was sure that all the other guests would be resplendent in all kinds of finery. I sighed, supposing further that I could have asked Mrs. Fairly that afternoon to watch Annette for an hour—it wasn’t like we were getting any schoolwork done anyway—so that I could go out and buy something more impressive. I had hardly spent any of my wages since coming here and could certainly afford it. But, I supposed finally, taking the now-detested garment from the hanger, a perverse part of my personality must have felt Edgar Rawlings and his guests should be forced to take me as I was. I was merely the governess. There was no point in trying to dress myself as a silk purse.
God, I thought, surveying the effect in the full-length mirror. What had I been thinking when I bought this thing? I looked like old photos of Marie Osmond. Sigh. Another fashion faux pas.
Annette clearly had no similar doubts about her own fashion sense, I saw clearly when we met at the top of the long flight of stairs. Earlier, she’d told me quite insistently that she didn’t want any help getting ready for “the big evening,” as she called it.
“I know exactly what I want to wear!” she’d said. “I do not need your help tonight!”
How quickly they grow up.
Looking at her now, I had to say that what she had achieved amounted more to a well-intentioned effort than a resounding success. Funny, the longer I knew Annette, the more I felt we were somehow kindred spirits despite her dainty ways.
She had on a party dress in purple—of course—with frilly sleeves and hem. The bows placed at intervals along her pigtails, which she’d done herself and which were not quite, um, tight, were velvet in orange and teal and black, the latter of which I assumed to be a stab at precocious sophistication. Her frilled white socks with black patent-leather shoes were okay enough, but she’d done her own nails, I presumed using some of the polish that her father had once upon a time given her. The color chosen was more like what you might expect on a Paris hooker, being a shade close to pomegranate, and she’d been something less than accurate in her enthusiastic application of it, getting more on her skin than on her tiny nails.
“You look…very pretty, Miss Bell,” she said.
Well, at least her manners were good.
“Thank you.” I gave a slight curtsy.
“But what about me?” Her lip almost quivered. “How do I look?”
We were two of a kind. I was one step away from saying something jokey about how awful we looked, how out of place we would be in our two-of-a-kindness, which was true.
But then I saw how important this was to her. What else was there for me to do? I took her hand.
“There won’t be another woman there tonight—” I smiled “—who looks even remotely like you. You are an original, Annette.”
She liked that.
The music coming from downstairs was classical.
Great, I thought. This will be one stuffy evening.
I thought about how all those smart people would receive us. I had to admit that I was curious about Ambassador Rawlings’s guests. I wanted to see, I just didn’t necessarily want to be seen.
; “Let’s just sit here for a while,” I suggested, pulling Annette down on the top step beside me, “and prepare for our entrance.”
Wouldn’t it be better to just sit down on the top step and listen to everyone else having a good time?
I was about to suggest this when Annette, who’d been impatiently tapping her pretty little foot to something Beethoveny beside me, snatched her hand away and, rising, bolted down the stairs.
“Annette!” I called, racing down after her.
Never mind my earlier thoughts of us being two of a kind. Where I wanted to remain a wallflower for as long as possible, she wanted to be the centerpiece in the vase.
“Annette!” I screamed a little quieter, not wanting to be overheard sounding like a fishwife over the sounds of the increasingly loud music as I raced behind her down the hallway to the library, where all the activity was.
I entered just on her heels.
I entered just in time to run smack-dab into a waiter, entering from the opposite direction and bearing a tray of what once must have been half-filled glasses of red wine.
Half-filled, before the wine got all over my white dress, the glasses smashing against the library’s solid wood floor, the rugs having been rolled up, the furniture pushed back to allow room for dancing.
Everything except for the music—dancing, conversation—came to a crashing halt at our loud entrance. Even the tall blond woman who had obviously been dancing in the ambassador’s arms, her scarlet silk evening gown making a strong fashion statement against his tux, stopped talking.
But only for a moment. Then:
“I see what you meant about your daughter’s governess being…not the usual governess,” she said in an icy Icelandic accent. “Can’t she do a better job at keeping the little girl controlled?”
I drew back at the offense to me, at the offense to Annette—Annette was a very good child, if a bit exuberant at times—all the while pushing back that unexpected twinge I felt at seeing her in the ambassador’s arms.
I steeled myself for his reproach. He would undoubtedly tell me to watch over Annette better. He would undoubtedly tell me to change my soiled dress, which I refused to look down at, sure that I must look like the victim of a drive-by shooting, although I could feel the stickiness of the wine seeping through against my skin.
But he surprised me.
“What a delightful entrance!” he roared with laughter. “I was beginning to worry we might get drunk if we all drank much more. But now you, Miss Bell, have managed to expertly and inventively save us from ourselves.”
The icy blonde did not look pleased at his pleasure.
“Edgar,” she pouted, “you promised me a dance and we still haven’t completed this one.”
“Oh?” He looked unaccountably surprised to see her, still there in his arms. Then he smiled. “Of course, my dear.”
I grabbed Annette’s hand, trying not to meet the eyes of any of those assembled, and gently tugged her toward one of the sofas that had been pushed up against the walls.
“Come,” I whispered.
“But I want to meet everybody!” she resisted.
I tugged harder. “Come,” I said again. “You must wait until your father is ready to introduce you.” Then, looking back at the happily dancing couple, muttering under my breath, I added, “If he ever even notices us again.”
Once we were seated on the velvet sofa, Annette stopped squirming. I supposed that now, since she could observe everybody herself, it wasn’t half so frustrating as when she could not. For myself, as I looked round at all the men in their tuxes and the perfectly coiffed ladies in their couture dresses, I tried to remain as unobtrusive as possible, wishing I could disappear, counting off the seconds in my head in the hopes that this monotonous activity would bring me closer to the time when we could politely leave or the ambassador deemed it time for Annette to go off to bed.
Back when I had lived in Buster Keating’s household, I had longed for the day when I would be invited to an embassy party, imagining that when that day came it would be because I was attending as his wife; or, at the very least, openly as his companion. Well, now I was finally at an embassy party and all I wanted to do was leave it.
But not Annette.
“Do you know who any of these people are, Miss Bell?” she asked, bouncing on the seat beside me, eyes all aglow.
“How should I?” I asked with more terseness than I was accustomed to using when dealing with her. “Do you?” I countered.
“No, but I wish I did.” She scanned the room. “Well, except for that man over there.” She pointed.
Automatically, gently, I pressed her pointing finger downward.
“Not polite,” I said. Then curiosity got the better of me. “Which man?”
“That one over there,” she tried to whisper, this time pointing with her chin, but with her exuberant way of speaking, it came out more like a mini-shout. This was okay since general conversation had long since resumed and we were relatively far from the main action. “The one who is not dressed like anybody else.”
I saw who she meant. He was standing a little apart from the rest and looked to be in his early forties, medium height, medium build, brown hair, brown eyes, dressed in a cheap suit that made him look like a fed on a pension. Why hadn’t I noticed him before? I wondered. Then I realized that his sore-thumbness hadn’t been apparent because he was so innocuous, he simply blended into the background, like a waiter who’d forgotten his uniform or something.
Then Annette looked from the man to me.
“He looks like he could be your date,” she decided.
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
The man in question must have had X-ray hearing, or been bored senseless, because I suddenly saw that he was making a beeline for us.
Oh no! I thought. I’m not going to actually have to talk to somebody, am I?
“What are you two fine ladies doing over here all by your lonesomes?” he asked, surprising me with his American accent.
How painful—he wanted to make awkward small talk with us!
“Miss Bell will not let me generally mingle, Mr. Miller,” Annette sniffed. “And I would so like to mingle.”
“I’ve heard a lot about the indomitable Miss Bell.” The man smiled.
“You have?”
“Yes, Edgar has spoken of you, if not often—” he paused “—then energetically.”
“He has? What has he said?”
He suddenly appeared reticent. “Only that Annette is thriving under your care.” He paused again, as though trying to think. “Oh, and that you saved his life.”
“He told you that?”
“Well—” he smiled ruefully “—he did say that he could have burned to death because you used a toothbrush glass instead of something more substantial, but he was damn grateful.”
I looked sharply at Annette, concerned that she might be upset at first learning of the danger her father had been in and concerned she’d pick up bad words from this crass man that I’d later somehow get blamed for, but I saw that I might not have bothered. He, in all his boring lack of finery, was of no interest to her; her eyes were glued on all the peacocks and hens in the room.
“I’m Robert Miller,” he said, offering his hand.
“Mr. Miller,” I asked, “tell me, how do you know the ambassador?”
“Why, you could say he works for me,” he said.
“Really?” I was surprised. “I didn’t think ambassadors worked for anybody, unless of course the president. You must be joking.”
“If you like,” he said indulgently. “But ambassadors do generally work for the people, so I guess you could say he works for me. Come to that, he works for you, too.”
Now, there was a thought I’d never had before. I liked that thought.
“Mr. Miller always knows who everybody is,” Annette suddenly interrupted. “Tell us who everybody is, please.”
But as he went through the list of people before us, it was of
far more interest to Annette than it was to me. I found myself, curiously, only interested in learning the identity of one person there.
“Bebe Iversdottir,” he said of the Icelandic beauty who was now seated at the piano, her red skirts spread about her on the bench as she prepared to play for the ambassador.
Bestowing a possessive look upon him, she lowered her fingers to the keys, proceeding to whip off some impressive classical piece with the same ease with which I put on my socks. She smiled that possessive smile throughout and I felt a sharp pain inside when I saw him smiling back at her. Apparently, he did not mind being possessed.
“Who is she?” I finally asked.
“The daughter of a dignitary,” said Robert Miller. “They make quite a lovely couple, don’t they?”
I wondered that Annette did not seem to mind seeing her father with this woman. And then I wondered at my own reaction. Surely I could never compete with a woman like that. Bebe Iversdottir was everything I wasn’t. Cool. Self-assured. Poised. Beautiful.
It made my heart hurt to look at them.
Oh, well, I told myself. It’s probably indigestion.
I saw that Annette was so enraptured by what she was looking at, she was no longer paying attention to what must seem to her our boring adult conversation.
As Bebe’s fingers moved into a round of Broadway show tunes, perhaps in tribute to her American host, I turned to Robert.
“Should they really be doing this so…openly?” I asked.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“This public display of obvious affection,” I said.
“Are you jealous, Miss Bell?”
“No, of course not,” I lied to him, lied to myself.
Now that the moment was here, and I could ask someone about the ambassador’s wife, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“I guess I just think a man in his position should be more careful,” I finally said. “Plus, I don’t think it would do him any harm to consider how this might be affecting Annette.”
Robert looked down at the charge at my side: she was clapping her hands in time to some song from Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz and laughing with glee.
“Isn’t Miss Iversdottir the most amazingly beautiful creature you’ve ever seen?” she asked.
How Nancy Drew Saved My Life Page 14