The Impatient Virgin

by Anne Weale

  ‘Would the museums pay for the clothes, or would they expect to be given them?’

  ‘They have funds to buy for their collections, but whether they’d offer as much as auction buyers might...who can say?’

  That afternoon Anny opened a long cotton bag and found inside it a dress of such irresistible glamour that she couldn’t resist trying it on although only to see what it did for her. By this time she had discovered that, at an earlier stage of her life, the contessa must have had a lady’s-maid who had put little numbered tags on all the hangers with the same number on boxes containing shoes and other accessories.

  The dress was made of sea-green dévoré velvet. Anny wouldn’t have recognised it if she hadn’t browsed through a copy of Vogue in a paper shop while they were in Spain. The magazine had included a feature on the velvet and the costly process which removed the pile from the silk backing, leaving only the design in velvet. On the contessa’s dress the design was of long swirling leaves, their fluid shapes defined by crystal beads, tiny silver spangles and rhinestones. The dress itself was of the utmost simplicity, sleeveless with a low neckline and an even lower back.

  Wearing only her briefs, Anny slipped it over her head and let it slither into place, clinging to her body from breast to knee before flaring to a hem which lay in a pool round her feet until she put on the shoes made from the same material with high heels of silver kid. There was also a matching envelope-shaped evening bag lined with silver kid.

  Walking carefully on the elegant heels, she went in search of Van, hoping the sophisticated dress would make him see her from a new perspective.

  She found him in one of the corridors leading from the main staircase to rooms which for several decades had only had their shutters opened two or three times a year.

  ‘I’ve found the key to this cupboard. It’s full of old photograph albums,’ he said, without looking up from the album he was studying.

  It surprised her a little that although he knew it wasn’t Elena—she had painful feet and shuffled around in slippers—he didn’t register the difference between Anny’s leather-soled Greek sandals and the click of high heels on marble.

  ‘Perhaps, somewhere, there’s a picture of the cantessa in this dress.’ She struck a pose: one knee forward, a hand on her hip, the other holding aloft the evening purse. ‘How do I look?’

  His expression abstracted, he glanced at her. Then, as he took in the dress, the album was thrust aside and he rose to his feet.

  ‘You look fantastic. Where did you find that outfit?’

  ‘Hidden away in a bag. Isn’t it fabulous? It must have been made for a very special occasion. I wish I knew what.’ She turned to display the back, watching him over her shoulder.

  For a minute, before he masked it, the look on his face was what she had hoped to see. But as she revolved to face him the revealing glimpse disappeared.

  ‘Perhaps we can find that out. The costume experts should be able to pinpoint the year it was made. That will give you a lead.’

  ‘Somewhere around there are records of all the parties the contessa gave and went to,’ said Anny. ‘Hostesses kept “accounts” of what “chops” they owed and to whom. She told me about it one day when she was reminiscing.’

  ‘Anyway that’s one dress that won’t be going to auction or into a museum,’ said Van. ‘You must keep it for when you’re reporting a gala occasion.’

  ‘No, no, I couldn’t. That’s not why I put it on...as a hint that I’d like to keep it. I only wanted to...’ She realised she couldn’t explain her real motive.

  ‘I know you didn’t, but you must. It makes you look like a mermaid coming out of the sea. I expect Theodora had forgotten she had it. If she had remembered, she would have wanted you to have it.’ He snapped his fingers, struck by something he had forgotten. ‘There’s a letter for you.’

  From the back pocket of his jeans he produced a long white envelope.

  Anny took it, recognising it as one of the self-addressed, stamped envelopes she had sent with her job applications. It was postmarked Paris. Before she opened it, she had a premonition it was going to change her life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ANNY’S first job wasn’t the one she wanted, but it was a start.

  She was taken on as a junior assistant in the editorial department of a news magazine. This meant that she was a gofer who did whatever menial tasks were required of her, including going out to buy sandwiches for editors lunching at their desks.

  She learnt a lot by listening and watching and the personnel director who hired her had said that if she proved useful, after a year, if a junior vacancy occurred on the editorial staff, she would be considered for it.

  Anny saw Van more often than she had expected. He had contacts in Paris. He seemed to have contacts everywhere, people he’d got to know in news-groups on the Internet.

  On one of his visits he brought her a modem for her laptop computer so that they could E-mail each other instead of communicating by fax or telephone. She was happy that he wanted to keep in close touch with her, although the tone of his letters was too ‘elder brother’ for her liking.

  She also saw a lot of Maddy, who had organised her accommodation. It was a room in an apartment with two American girls, both of them personal assistants to executives on the Paris staff of American corporations. They had a lot of friends and gave frequent parties at which Anny found herself blandished by a cosmopolitan selection of attractive men.

  Not that they were attractive to her. Only one man was that. But she accepted some of their invitations, solely in order to describe where they took her to Van. One of her dates was a young American architect, in Paris on a scholarship.

  One night, without advance warning, Van turned up at the flat. The others were out and Anny had been working on an article she hoped to sell to a travel magazine. She had already had a snack supper and Van had eaten on the plane. While she was making coffee, he said, ‘You seem to be seeing a lot of this architect.’

  ‘Tom is showing me the city...places I wouldn’t find by myself.’

  ‘I expect you would if you bought yourself a good guide book.’

  ‘Plodding round with a guide book wouldn’t be as much fun. We have a good time together.’

  ‘Has he made a pass at you yet?’

  She opened a carton of milk. ‘I don’t know how you define a pass,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Has he tried to get you into bed?’

  ‘That’s classified information. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if your girlfriends disclosed intimate details of your behaviour to all and sundry.’

  Van’s jawline hardened as if he were clenching his teeth with exasperation.

  ‘I’m not “all and sundry”. In Bart’s absence, I’m the nearest you have to a family.’

  ‘Bart wouldn’t cross-examine me about my friends.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t tell him how often you’re seeing this guy? Are your letters to Bart the same as your E-mails to me?’

  One of the advantages of using a word processor was that the same basic letter could be adapted to suit different recipients. Anny did copy the news she had written to Van in her regular bulletins to her uncle. But then she deleted all the bits she had put in hoping that, if they didn’t succeed in making Van jealous, they would at least remind him that she was someone other men took an interest in.

  ‘Not entirely. You and Bart are interested in different things.’

  ‘We’re both concerned that you don’t have the same family back-up as other girls. I know more about the hazards of big city life for a girl your age than he does. In Bart’s day the rules were different. Dates didn’t end in bed. All the pressure came from parents, not from peer groups.’

  The coffee tray being ready, he stepped forward to carry it through to the living room for her.

  ‘I’ve never had a peer group, or not until recently. If I listened to Fran and Julie, I’d never go to bed with anyone. Hearing them talk about their exper
iences isn’t encouraging. Most of the men they’ve slept with have been pathetic in bed.’

  This was an exaggeration. When they were her age, both her flatmates had had some disappointing experiences which they’d described to Anny with wry amusement, in the hope of discouraging her from similar acts of misjudgement. Now, in their middle twenties, both were involved in serious relationships with men they wanted to marry but who, having been married before and divorced, were reluctant to risk a second commitment.

  Their advice to Anny was to concentrate on her career and stay clear of emotional entanglements until she was securely established. For her, this was easy, but she hadn’t revealed to them that her heart was already engaged. Her feelings about Van went too deep to be discussable with anyone.

  While he was pouring the coffee, Van picked up her last remark.

  ‘Perhaps they had unreasonable expectations,’ he said dryly. ‘Sex is like ballroom dancing. Both partners need to know the steps to put on a dazzling performance.’

  ‘I’m sure Fran and Julie do. It was the men who didn’t. According to them, great lovers are in short supply.’

  She thought he might be annoyed by this aspersion, but he only shrugged. ‘They may be right. If I were you, I should assume they are and stay out of close relationships. In a few years’ time you’ll find yourself liking someone for all the other reasons that form rock-solid bonding.’

  ‘Which are...?’

  ‘You know them as well as I do. A similar background... common interests...the same sense of humour... shared aspirations.’

  ‘I have those with Tom,’ said Anny. ‘Not the similar background, but all the others.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘He’s too young to be serious about any girl.’

  ‘Oh, come off it: lots of people are married with children at his age.’

  ‘And lots of people have split by the time they’re twenty-five or twenty-six. You want to stay married, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. So does everyone. But sometimes it doesn’t work out.’

  ‘It stands a better chance of working out if people get their own lives organised before they take on the responsibility of making someone else happy.’

  ‘I expect so, but falling in love doesn’t always happen at the most suitable moment. I can’t see myself saying “no, thanks” to the love of my life because he happens along a year or two early,’ Anny said, copying her tone from the most flippant of the magazine’s staff reporters.

  ‘If you’re the great love of his life, he won’t go away.’ Van sounded irritated. ‘Falling in love is an illusion anyway. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it doesn’t last. I sometimes run into guys I knew at college who can’t remember the names of girls they were crazy about ten years ago.’

  Anny heaved a long-suffering sigh. ‘Van, you’re lecturing. I don’t need all these instructions about how to run my life. I’m a big girl now. I support myself...just! I pay tax. I have a career plan. I’m not about to foul that up by getting myself pregnant or doing anything stupid. Why can’t we talk about something really constructive—’ she gave him a mischievous smile ‘—like computers?’

  An unwilling grin relaxed the strong, raw-boned face which seemed to become more attractive each time she saw him. After his last visit, she had overheard Fran and Julie talking about him, agreeing that if they hadn’t been committed already they would have been madly attracted.

  ‘He’s one of those men,’ Fran had said, ‘who behaves like a perfect gentleman, but you feel that somewhere inside there’s a gene handed down from someone lawless and wild. Perhaps it won’t ever surface, but you have the feeling it might.’

  They were in the kitchen when this conversation took place. Anny, in the living room, hadn’t seen Fran’s expression, but she had heard Julie’s reply.

  ‘I know what you mean. Yes, if someone drove him too far, I think Van could become very uncivilised. I’m glad Don’s not like that. A man who looks dangerous can be very exciting, but what would he be like to live with? I’d rather have someone tamer and less unpredictable.’

  Recalling that conversation, while sitting opposite its subject, Anny knew what they meant. With her knowledge of his background, it was easy to visualise someone closely resembling the tall, rangy man on the sofa as the leader of bandits in the mountains of Italy, or an outlaw riding alone through the American West in the days when only rough, tough men could survive there.

  While these thoughts were in her mind, Van rose and went to the black nylon-canvas case he had left on a chair by the door. Unclipping one of the side pockets, he took out some floppy disks.

  ‘These are some programs which might be useful to you. Fetch your laptop, will you? I’ll install them for you.’

  Anny felt her pulses quicken. Sitting close to Van while he did what he called ‘housekeeping’ on her computer was one of her life’s secret pleasures.

  She would have preferred to join him on the sofa, but when she came back from her room, Van had moved to the dining table. As he took the laptop from her, their fingers touched. He would never guess that slight contact had far more effect on her senses than other men’s kisses.

  ‘What’s your password?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t changed it. The chances of anyone guessing it’s Sea Dreams are pretty remote, don’t you think?’

  ‘I guess so.’ His long square-tipped fingers were light and expert on the laptop’s keyboard. Unlike Bart, he was not what was jokingly known as a biblical typist, meaning someone who used two fingers while searching the keyboard on the ‘seek and ye shall find’ principle. Van had leamt touch-typing from a program he had later passed on to Anny.

  The laptop’s small screen gave her a good excuse to shift her chair as close to his as it would go and then to lean even closer. Being near to him made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, but she knew that she must or he might ask her a question she wouldn’t be able to answer.

  Having installed the new programs, Van gave short demonstrations of how they could be useful to her. He was an excellent teacher, expert himself but able to simplify things which might baffle anyone less knowledgeable.

  ‘You’ve changed your perfume,’ he said suddenly. “That isn’t Rêve de Grasse.’

  She had dabbed some behind her ears while fetching the laptop. It pleased her that he remembered the original name of the scent the contessa had given her. ‘This is Loulou. D’you like it?’

  ‘Not as much as the other.’

  Rebuffed, she said, ‘Tom gave it to me.’

  In fact it was from a sample given away with some eye make-up. As soon as the words were out she regretted the fabrication. As a rule she was never untruthful and couldn’t understand why she had lied to him now. But then being with Van always had strange effects on her. It made her intensely happy and, at the same time, unhappy because his visits were brief and as soon as he’d gone away she was tormented by thoughts of all the alluring women, of the right age, he must meet when he wasn’t with her.

  Van made no comment, perhaps because he was concentrating, or perhaps because he was irritated. If only she could read his mind and find out what he thought about her. Was she just a girl he felt responsible for? Or did his avuncular manner mask feelings he chose to ignore?

  ‘How is Project X going?’ she asked.

  It was how he always referred to the project he was working on.

  ‘Still a few bugs to iron out.’ He had never discussed it in detail.

  The next time he came to Paris it was May. The end of her probationary year was on the horizon and she was impatient for the promised editorial vacancy to materialise.

  ‘When can you get some time off?’ Van asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. Why?’

  ‘Cousin Kate’s getting married in September. She’d like you to be there. I’ll take care of your travel expenses.’

  Anny didn’t attempt to hide the surge of joy
inside her. A trip to America to meet Van’s family was a treat beyond all expectations.

  ‘I’ll talk to the personnel director. Who is Kate marrying?’

  ‘Her boss. He’s a widower with two young children. Kate’s loved him for years, since before he married someone else. She was resigned to staying single, then his wife became seriously ill and died just over a year ago. How Robert feels about Kate is hard to say. His primary reason may be that his children need someone in place of their mother.’

  ‘Would she marry him on that basis?’

  ‘I imagine she’d consider it a better option than going through the same thing again. There are plenty of women around who would jump at him.’

  ‘Poor Kate: it must have been agony for her the first time. I can’t imagine anything worse than seeing the man you love marry someone else.’

  Van said, ‘I think Kate would tell you a worse thing is watching someone you love losing the person they love. How about some more coffee?’

  In the weeks that followed Van’s visit, Anny spent a lot of time thinking over his comment about his cousin. Clearly he admired her very much. Equally clearly she deserved his admiration. By comparison Anny felt very young and inadequate. Why should Van love her? she asked herself. What qualities did she have to make her lovable? The answer seemed to be none.

  She made up her mind to change that; to make some space in her life for helping other people as well as enjoying herself. While she was finding out about the various organisations set up to help the poor, the sick and the old, something happened almost on her own doorstep, making further enquiries unnecessary.

  On a Saturday, when it was her turn to re-stock the fridge and buy fruit and salad ingredients, which was what all three girls lived on when not eating out, she was walking home with two laden carriers when an old man shuffling ahead of her tripped on an uneven paving slab and fell down.