by Anne Weale
With the coffee, Van brought a bar of chocolate. ‘My cousin Kate has a saying “When men are unbearable, take a double dose of choc”.’
Anny managed a shaky laugh. She liked the sound of his cousin and hoped one day they might meet. Snapping the bar in two, she handed half back to him.
‘Let’s both have a dose. Girls are unbearable sometimes... like me last night. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I knew what you said made sense.’
‘What happened just now...was it happenstance?’ Van asked. ‘Were you on deck and he came by?’
‘He followed us back last night. I think he is interested in boats. Kissing me was...an impulse.’
‘An impulse which a lot of young guys are going to feel when they’re with you. Maybe no one’s explained to you that males between sixteen and twenty have a problem controlling themselves if girls lead them on, or seem to be leading them on,’ Van added, as she opened her mouth to protest. ‘You’re growing very pretty, Anny, and you’re a natural blonde which is always an extra switch in countries where most girls have dark hair.’
‘Is it? I’d rather have dark hair, or lovely red hair like Maddy’s.’
Van gave a theatrical groan. ‘Why are women never satisfied with the way they are? Even the ones who look great are always worrying about the size of their breasts or their backsides or whether their nose needs reshaping. There must be millions of bottle-blondes who would give a year’s salary to have hair your colour, especially when it’s combined with dark eyebrows and eyelashes. Most girls as fair-skinned as you have to have them tinted.’
That he had noticed these details sent her spirits soaring. He must have studied her more closely than she had realised.
‘Did you read that or did one of your girlfriends tell you?’
‘I must have read it somewhere. You’re the only blonde in my life,’ he said teasingly.
‘Does that mean you personally don’t find blondes attractive?’
‘I don’t classify women that way,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘A thing you should know about guys is that up to a certain age, or stage of development, they’re likely to be attracted to any passable female. Basically all they want is a girl they can take to bed. Then, if they have any brains, they begin to see women as people they can talk to and have a good time with out of the sack as well as in it.’
He reached out to take her half of the chocolate wrapper, scnmch both halves together and put them in his pocket until he was near a waste bin.
‘In a few years from now I’ll be looking for someone to marry and it won’t be her hair or her legs that will draw me to her,’ he went on. ‘It will be her character. If you’re going to spend your life with someone, you need to enjoy the same things, laugh at the same jokes, have the same goals on your life list.’
‘What are the goals on your list?’
‘The big one is making my fortune. My best chance of doing that is to dream up a great piece of software millions of people will buy.’
‘I don’t want to make a fortune. Only to earn enough money so that Bart can always keep Sea Dreams, even if she’s permanently berthed. I don’t want him, when he’s old, to be stuck in a room with a lot of other old men and a TV switched on all day. I know how much he’d hate that.’
‘If my plans work out, I’d like to help,’ said Van. ‘Bart means a lot to me too. Including Theodora, the four of us are like family. We aren’t always together, but there’s a close link between us.’
Did he mean he thought of her as an unofficial sister? Anny wondered, downcast. It was not how she wanted him to see her.
Perhaps her dismay was visible. He said kindly, ‘Are you still upset by that young dolt making a hash of your first kiss?’
‘What makes you think it was my first kiss?’
The way you’ve been raised plus your reaction,’ he said dryly. ‘Not going to school, you haven’t had a chance to mix with boys the way most girls do. Was I wrong?’
Anny shook her head. ‘If that’s what I’ve missed, I’m glad,’ she said vehemently.
There was a hint of a smile at the corners of Van’s mouth as he said, ‘Don’t decide you don’t like it on the basis of one bad experience. There are kisses and kisses. It sounds as if that young jerk went too far too fast. What he should have done—’
Because of the limited deck space, their chairs were not far apart. He leaned towards her, taking her chin in his hand and tilting her face.
‘Is this,’ he concluded, before brushing her lips with a kiss which only lasted a moment but was the most thrilling sensation she had ever experienced.
For a few seconds afterwards he kept his hand under her chin and there was an expression in his eyes she had never seen before and hoped might mean that his feelings were not, after all, as fraternal as she had feared.
Swept by an overwhelming impulse, she said, ‘Van, will you make love to me?’
The silence that followed her question seemed to last for ages. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking and she couldn’t think what had impelled her to ignore conventional constraints and say what was in her mind.
Yet, strangely, she didn’t feel embarrassed. It was what she wanted. Why not say it? If she couldn’t speak freely to Van, whom she loved, who could she open her heart to?
He let his hand fall and sat back, his expression withdrawn and unreadable.
‘No way,’ was his slightly curt answer.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re too young and Bart trusts me not to get out of line.’
‘I’m not a child any more. I can decide for myself now.’
‘No, you’re not a child, but you’re not quite a woman yet.’
‘I shan’t be a woman till someone makes love to me. I’d like it to be you.’
‘I’m flattered you feel that way, Anny. But as you’ve had an unusual life so far, why not keep it that way? Why not be really unusual and save making love for later? There’s no law that you have to do it before you get out of your teens: if not there’s something wrong with you.’
‘I know that. But I can’t help being curious. Surely everyone is? I don’t want my first experience to be a huge disappointment like the way Salvador kissed me. When you kissed me, it was...lovely. I’d like you to teach me everything. Then I won’t be tempted to try it with someone who might be hopeless at it.’
Van clapped his hands on his head and screwed up his eyes. It was a gesture and grimace she had seen once or twice before when he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
A few seconds later, he resumed his previous posture. Speaking slowly and quietly, as he did when explaining something about computers to her, he said, ‘When you fall in love with someone, and he loves you, he won’t be hopeless at it, Anny. It’ll be great for both of you. The magic ingredient is love. Without that, sex is about as satisfying as a fast-food beefburger. Believe me: I’ve been there, done that and don’t recommend it, especially not for a girl.’
‘Why is it different for a girl? That’s a sexist attitude.’
‘It’s horse sense. However equal we are, we’re always going to be different. Men can have sex and walk away and forget it. Maybe a few women can, but mostly they can’t. They get hurt or they feel remorse. It does bad things to their psyche, leaves them all mixed up. Drink your coffee before it goes cold.’
She did as he told her, the euphoria induced by his kiss beginning to die down, making her regret her openness. Had it spoiled their friendship? Would he think less of her now?
‘Have you ever been in love, Van?’ she asked.
‘If I had, I’d be married. They say children of divorced parents have a hard time keeping their own relationships on track. Maybe... maybe not. There’ve been a lot of divorces in my family. I don’t plan to add to the total. When I marry it will be for keeps.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Marriage isn’t that difficult. People go into it for the wrong reasons. My father married my mother because s
he was beautiful. She married him to get away from her family.’
‘You told me your great-grandfather married the contessa for her money. Yet they were happy.’
‘The way she tells it, yes. I suspect she closed her eyes to a lot of extra-marital affairs a modern wife wouldn’t tolerate. Theodora has a Continental attitude to marriage. Over here they think marriage and the family is too important to allow it to fall apart because of temporary difficulties. The Americans and the British think everyone is entitled to be happy all the time, which is crazy. Anyway these are issues you don’t have to think about for several years yet. We’ll discuss them again when you’re older and have your career organised.’
‘But I’m interested now,’ she persisted. ‘There’s no one but you I can discuss these things with. The contessa doesn’t understand the way people live today. Bart’s not comfortable talking about emotional things. I’ve sometimes thought that might be one of the reasons why the girl he loved wouldn’t marry him. Apart from not wanting to live on a boat, she might have found him too reticent.’
‘Here he comes,’ said Van, looking along the quay.
‘Right, let’s be on our way,’ Bart said, as he came aboard.
The routine for leaving a berth differed from harbour to harbour. Anny knew them all, but waited for his instructions. While Van was on board she had much less to do than when there were just the two of them.
As they sailed out of Port Mahon’s vast harbour where once a great fleet of British sailing ships had sheltered and where, according to an unreliable legend, Admiral Lord Nelson had occupied an elegant house on the far side from the town, she wondered if this might be the last time they would come here as a threesome.
Although Van had said he felt linked to them, when the contessa died, which could happen any time, inevitably the link would be weakened. Once Anny was working, her holidays might not coincide with his.
The pattern of their lives was changing. Part of her was eager for the new experiences and wider horizons the changes would bring. Part of her longed for everything to stay the same.
As Sea Dreams left the shelter of the harbour for open water where a strong breeze was blowing and the surface of the sea was choppier, it seemed to symbolise the impending transition in her life.
But even if she never came to Port Mahon again, she would always remember it as the place where Van had kissed her.
The turn-around point of the voyage was Jávea, a town on the east coast of Spain. They had been to Jávea many times, but never with Van on board, and she was eager to show it to him; the fisherman’s church like an upturned boat, Polly’s Bookshop, the shingly cove called the priest’s beach at the foot of towering red cliffs and the walk along the top of the massive sea wall protecting the harbour.
It was while they were berthed there that Anny saw a side of Van which was new to her.
The day they arrived he bought a copy of an English-language newspaper published for the large community of American, British and other expatriates in the area. Reading it, he discovered the town had a club for English-speaking computer buffs. When he rang up the secretary to ask if he might attend a meeting, their conversation led to his being invited to stand in for a speaker who had been taken ill.
Anny went with him to the bar where the meetings were held. As there had been no time for him to prepare a presentation, she was nervous for him. While the chairman of the club was introducing him, her stage-fright was almost as intense as if she were speaking herself.
But when Van rose to his feet, relaxed and smiling, his vivid eyes scanning the faces of the much older men who were his audience—there were far fewer women present—she sensed it was going to be all right.
When, forty minutes later, he sat down, she was awestruck not only by his vision of the future but by the fluency with which he expressed it. Resounding applause was followed by many questions, but after the chairman had thanked him and others had made it clear they would like to buy him drinks and continue talking to him, Van excused himself.
‘Were you bored rigid?’ he asked her, as they started walking back to the harbour.
‘You can’t be serious. I was riveted. They all were. I’m sure now you will make your fortune. I had no idea you could be so...dynamic.’
He laughed. ‘People with obsessions can be worldclass bores, so I try to keep quiet about mine except when I know I’m with people who share it.’
‘I don’t think anyone there had a fraction of your expertise.’
‘They haven’t grown up with computers the way we have. But they’re proving it’s not a technology only the young can understand.’
Nothing untoward happened on the homeward run, but when they got back to Orengo, Lucio, who had seen them approaching, was waiting on the beach to tell them the contessa had died in her sleep the night before.
Most of her friends having died before her, she had left instructions for a small private funeral. She was buried in the family vault with her husband and his forebears in the presence of her great-grandson, the Howards and her surviving retainers. By the time they heard of her death, it was too late for any of her Italian and American relations to attend, if indeed they would have made the effort except in the expectation of receiving a legacy.
The contessa’s will was short and straightforward. Apart from bequests to her servants, everything she possessed had been left to Van. But the generous legacies to Elena and Lucio had exhausted her financial resources. Van had become the owner of a once-magnificent house and vast garden with no means to maintain them.
Word of her death spread quickly. With unseemly speed Van was besieged by offers from developers. He could have become rich overnight for the land surrounding the palazzo was the finest site on the Riviera di Ponente.
Bart thought him mad to refuse the offers.
‘What’s the point of hanging onto the old place? You’re never going to live here,’ he said.
‘I shall live here and so will my children and their children,’ Van said, with conviction. ‘Anyway property values are subject to booms and busts like everything else, but they always go up in the long term. If the garden becomes a jungle, it doesn’t matter. One day I shall have the money to put it back in order.’
Bart thought he was talking nonsense. At increasingly infrequent intervals Bart was writing his yachting articles on an antiquated typewriter, pecking at the keys with two fingers. He refused to learn how to use Anny’s laptop and would never adapt to the computer age or grasp the exciting concepts Van had outlined in his talk to the club in Jávea.
Before the palazzo could be closed up, decisions had to be made about all its contents. Most of the furniture, including many valuable antiques, was already under dust covers. Van felt the risk of theft was outweighed by the high cost of storage in a repository. The sale of one or two of the least desirable pieces would finance the installation of electronic eyes monitored by a local security firm catering to the many rich people with valuable possessions in the area. These devices were thought to be more of a deterrent to thieves than complicated locks and iron grilles.
He asked Anny to help him sort out the contessa’s personal possessions. While he worked his way through the old lady’s cluttered writing desk, every pigeon hole and drawer stuffed with papers, Anny sorted out a chest of drawers, finding exquisite underwear which had never been worn and boxes bearing the names of shops in London, Paris and Venice, containing fans, gloves, embroidered handkerchiefs and scarves.
In her will the contessa had expressed the wish that if there were things in her wardrobe Anny liked and could make use of, she was to keep them as an inadequate reward for her many kindnesses to an old lady.
One morning, before she had started to tackle the wardrobes, all of them, like the drawers, lined with sandalwood so that it had never been necessary to put old-fashioned moth balls, with their pervasive reek, among the contessa’s clothes, Anny arrived at the house to find that Van had already made a selection.
/> ‘You’re going to need a lot of clothes when you start work. Last night I picked out some I think will suit you. They may need a few alternations, but the quality of the materials and the finish is better than anything in the shops today. Even some of the styles are back in fashion,’ he told her.
She wondered how he knew that, but was more curious to see his idea of what would suit her.
‘Try this on for size. It looks as if it would fit you.’ Van lifted down a hanger he had hooked over the top of one of the wardrobe’s doors. On it was a close-fitting short-waisted pale grey jacket made of a fine wool cloth whose name Anny didn’t know.
She buttoned it over her T-shirt. It might have been made for her.
‘You could wear it with this black skirt,’ said Van, taking down another hanger.
She unzipped her jeans, stepped out of them and took the hanger from him. The skirt was lined with black silk. It had a caressing softness against her bare legs as she fastened the waistband.
When she looked up, Van said, ‘Don’t strip off as casually as that in front of other guys, will you? They might get the wrong idea.’
She felt herself starting to blush under his quizzical scrutiny. Her briefs being no more revealing than the bottom half of her swimsuit, she had acted without thinking.
‘I wasn’t showing anything you haven’t seen a million times when we’re swimming.’
‘But this isn’t the beach,’ he said dryly. ‘Try the rest on. I’ll leave you to it.’ He walked out of the room.
Bart came ashore to join them for lunch on the terrace.
‘It will seem strange, coming here and finding the old place closed up,’ he said, with a sigh.
‘I’ll be back as often as I can,’ said Van. ‘I’m fixing up the rooms in the tower. Elena will have a key. She’ll come in to open the windows so the place doesn’t get too musty.’
He turned to Anny. ‘I’ve E-mailed some people for advice on what to do about Theodora’s clothes. It seems we have two options. All the top auction houses have offices in Monte Carlo. We can ask them for expert valuations. Or we can contact museums which hold big collections of period costumes. What do you think?’