A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “Why would someone go through your firm and not deal directly?”

  “Trust and anonymity.”

  “But if it’s really true about his father being kicked out of Italy for financial scandal, does it make sense for you and Marc to be associated with Philippe?”

  Christopher put his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck. “You say the most romantic things to me.”

  “Christopher, I’m being serious.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Please take me seriously.”

  “I do, I will. Look, neither you nor I know the real story. All we know is gossip. So I don’t think it’s fair to conflate Philippe with his father.” He looked at her and questioned her assumptions without saying anything. “I wouldn’t worry about Marc,” he said buttoning his shirt. “He always lands on his feet.”

  Helen knew that while Christopher always believed the best of someone, he never stopped being vigilant for contradictions, for any signs at variance with the way the person wished to be seen. But with Marc, he seemed to have stopped paying attention.

  During dinner, the phone rang and Marc stepped inside to take the call. A few minutes later, he returned to the table. “Hey, Willie, you know that trade—we just made six million quid.”

  “You just did?”

  “No, I mean we all did, everyone who was involved in the trade.”

  Marc and Ghislaine left the next day on a boat Philippe Pavesi had sent for them. He was meeting them at the Monte-Carlo Beach Hotel to celebrate.

  * * *

  Every Tuesday and Friday morning in August, vendors set up stands in the town square and sold everything from pistachio nuts to antique lace. Helen wove her way through the jumble of stalls shaded by geometric rows of old sycamore trees. The scents of the market—cheeses, roasted meats, spices, lavender—all tangled together in the heat and dust of the day. She stopped to watch a man selling chameleons cut from green-and-orange-striped Styrofoam and fastened to the end of a straightened wire coat hanger. He made the chameleon twist one way and then another to the delight of a little boy. She thought of Henry and Leonora. “Combien?” Helen asked. “Deux euros, et pour deux, trois euros,” he said. She handed him the coins and took the chameleons and let them dance for her all the way up the hill to La Mandala.

  Christopher and Willie had gone exploring. Willie had spent several weeks one summer with his aunt and uncle at a villa in Saint-Tropez. Armed with nothing more than childhood memories, he and Christopher had made a plan to look for the villa. They returned with news that the villa was found, or at least Willie announced it would “do.” But the gate was closed and a large German shepherd prowled the grounds. Willie had tried unsuccessfully to convince Christopher that the sign Cave Canem meant Ignore the Canine.

  One afternoon when they were lying together in their bedroom, Helen told Christopher what Willie had said about how he would be a good father. “Do you ever think about that? About having kids?”

  “Sure, don’t you?”

  “Why have you never brought it up?”

  “I don’t know, I guess because it depends on you, what you want. And both of us have been working long hours, I’ve been traveling a lot, it just doesn’t seem the best time now. When I don’t have to travel so much, it’ll be better. But how do you feel?”

  “I know, you’re right. Maybe I’m just anxious you’re never going to slow down.”

  “I understand. I will, though. But for now, the show must go on—at least for a bit longer.”

  * * *

  When Helen learned that her friend Peregrine had not organized any summer holiday plans, partly because his work was not going well but mostly for financial reasons, she sent him a ticket. The day he arrived, he pronounced himself Captain of Games. All the guests were lying around the pool, napping or reading crinkled newspapers or copies of water-waffled magazines, when Peregrine made his announcement: a backgammon tournament would take place the following day. Willie looked up, raised his hand, and offered to be in charge of house colors. Everyone was required to play. Peregrine, who often gave his friends titles because he thought they either deserved them or coveted them, revivified an extinct dukedom and conferred it on Willie, immediately addressing him as “Your Grace,” which delighted Willie.

  Christopher was surprised Helen did not know how to play. He would teach her. He set up the board and explained the rules. He was good at games. On each roll of the dice, he showed her the choices—the risky move and the safe move—because he knew she didn’t have any instinct for strategy. He would look up and ask her if she understood what he was doing.

  On the following day, she walked to the pool and found Christopher and Peregrine playing the finals. Christopher shook the dice in his cupped hands and rolled. He watched the pieces—it was almost as if by intensity and concentration he could will them where he wanted them to go. When he shook the dice, he had already calculated what he needed to move ahead. He would take chances, and when they went against him, he didn’t react, he just concentrated harder and watched with more intensity. Just as Christopher was about to win, fat raindrops fell on the board. A rain delay was declared and a draw was agreed.

  A few days before Willie left, he, Peregrine, and Helen walked into town to an art and antique fair she had seen advertised on a poster. Large canvas tents had been set up on the far side of the port. They paid the admission fee and walked down the aisles, looking carefully at what each dealer had to offer. Willie veered off to find the displays of the local artists, and Helen and Peregrine continued down the aisle of stalls selling china and jewelry and small pieces of furniture. As she was looking at a set of dessert knives and forks with cloisonné handles, Peregrine disappeared and then reappeared in a pea-green coat lined with fur.

  “Look what I found. There’re great vintage clothes over there,” he said pointing behind him.

  “Peregrine, it’s dreadful. Looks like someone has died.”

  “I’m quite certain someone did. Why else would this be here? I reckon,” he said, “it dates to the nineteen thirties. Look how well made it is.” He held his arm out to show her the cuff. “I think it’s French. It’s very warm.”

  She started to laugh. “Take it off. It’s awful.”

  “Really? It’s bloody good value,” he said. “Look, it’s real fur.” The stall keeper had come to find him. “Je vais envisager de l’acheter,” Peregrine said, taking off the coat and handing it back.

  Helen, who was still laughing, shook her head. They found Willie, who was buying a small pencil drawing of three palm trees clustered on a point of land.

  * * *

  The evening before Willie left, Fiona and Adrian asked Christopher and Helen and all their guests down for drinks and a light dinner. Fiona had prepared a delicious supper of salad and lobster thermidor. Adrian served a rosé from a cousin’s vineyard. They had a nice life, Helen thought. They both took care of each other in their own way. Adrian gave Fiona financial security and social standing, and she loved planning and organizing his social gatherings and, as he pointed out, laughed at all his jokes. But Helen thought no one would ever accuse them of being in love. She doubted that they had ever raised their voices at one another.

  After dinner, Adrian insisted everyone stay for another drink. Willie excused himself—he was leaving early the next morning. Helen asked him to wait, she would go back with him. On the walk back up the hill, Willie began to invent new constellations. “Look over there. Without a question that has to be Samuel Beckett’s forehead. I saw George Bernard Shaw’s beard just the other night, and I’ve been told on very clear nights, such as this one, Marilyn Monroe’s lips can be seen in the northwest quadrant.” When Helen began to laugh, he said to her, “It’s all true. Really it is.” And then he said, “I’m going to miss you. I’m going to miss our talks at dinner. I’m going to miss a lot about you.”

  He waited for her to say something. And when she didn’t, he took a step back.

&n
bsp; The next morning, she drove him to the heliport. The air was cool, and she felt the end of summer with each deep breath she took. He kissed her good-bye, got out of her car, and then leaned back in. “Keep an eye on Christopher. He assumes everyone has his best interests at heart. Not all of us are so pure.”

  When she returned to the house, she walked to the front terrace and watched the seagulls find their own levels and drift across the sky. She listened for the sound of children’s voices from the beach below.

  Chapter Nineteen

  London

  While Marc was in Saint-Tropez, he had spoken to Christopher about getting larger space for their firm. With several high-profile successes, they had gained respect from the financial establishment in England. They had grown faster than they had anticipated, and Marc wanted to expand the trading and asset management businesses. He had followed his transaction for Anthony Wu with similar transactions for a few select clients, and young, successful entrepreneurs were beginning to come to him for investment advice.

  About the agency business, he was so full of conviction that Christopher did not try to oppose him. What worried Christopher was not the agency business, but Marc crossing over into proprietary trading. Given the size of their firm, one bad trade could wipe them out. It exposed them to a great deal of risk, and they did not have much of a capital base to support it. But Christopher knew that people like Marc did whatever they wanted, no matter the opposition. At the best investment firms, competence and independence were correlated. He would have to watch Marc—that’s all there was to it.

  They did not renew their lease on Birdcage Walk and instead found new office space in the City on Blackfriars Lane, a small street off Fleet Street. Helen liked the address, which was a block from Saint Paul’s Cathedral. She informed Christopher that the Black Friars were a Dominican order who wore black hooded capes over their white robes. Within the year, Marc had set up a small trading arm in Milan and traveled back and forth between London and the new location.

  As their business grew, Christopher continued to manage the advisory business, and he began to look at opportunities in private equity. He was well suited for both businesses; he was good at listening, and Europeans liked the young half-French, half-American, who, unlike his counterparts at large American banks, was not brash and yet every bit as smart and analytical. He was disciplined and rational—the romance of a vision or belief in what a business might become never slanted his judgment. The young associates in his firm liked working with him because he gave them a great deal of freedom and scope to find investment opportunities and allowed them to present them at the investment committee meeting each Monday morning. And in those meetings Christopher was never sarcastic or abrasive. His voice, in fact, was so uninflected that it almost seemed as if he were uninterested, and yet he could ask the one question that exposed multiple flaws in an associate’s proposal.

  When they returned from Saint-Tropez, Christopher talked to Helen about looking at houses. Their mews house would be too small if they had children. Most of the time, she went on her own. If she liked anything, she would make a second appointment for Christopher to come back with her. As she went on these house tours, they began to bother her. She found herself unable to stop analyzing the houses to guess who lived in them. Houses were like shells—the shapes of which defined their inhabitants, and rooms like fingerprints that identified a marriage. She had a theory that if the master bedroom was the room that had the most attention to detail, then it was the home of two people who loved each other. If the drawing room and dining room were the rooms most cared for, then the couple were more focused on their social life and less on themselves. Sometimes she thought about how she would analyze their mews house. What, if anything, would it reveal was missing from the life she shared with Christopher?

  The house she liked the most had a small conservatory with lemon and lime trees. It had a book-lined dining room and the master bedroom was painted a soft blue gray. It was owned by a developer whose artist wife had decorated it for themselves, but her husband had decided to sell it. Helen was in love with it and she called Christopher almost immediately, but when he came to see it, he saw where the ceiling had been painted recently and he suspected a bad water leak. He thought the developer was asking too much. Christopher made an offer, but it was too low, and the house was sold to someone else. The estate agent called Helen to tell her the bad news. On hearing her disappointment, the estate agent wanted to know what sort of place Christopher had lived in before they were married, and Helen could not answer. Christopher’s indifference to where and how they lived eroded her sense of hope. She began to feel that her enthusiasm for looking at houses was a manufactured one that had no basis.

  After that summer in Saint-Tropez, they had dinner only once with Marc and Ghislaine, to celebrate the opening of the new office. Christopher had felt the chill between the two women. He figured it had something to do with Ghislaine only being interested in women who could help her get where she wanted to be. He also knew—he had seen it before—the way Helen reacted to women like Ghislaine. Their system of values—power and social status always trumping love—offended her. She would retreat into a position of observation that had a hint of disdain about it. But it was Marc, not Ghislaine, who was bothered by her attitude—Ghislaine was too much of a survivor to notice subtleties or slights. Helen didn’t allow Marc, who was from Rochester but who wanted everyone to believe he was from Rome, enough room to recalibrate and re-create himself. When she complained and criticized Marc, Christopher told her that she was underestimating what it was like to be on the outside of something. She had never experienced it, and even though she could try to imagine it, unless she had felt it, she would never understand.

  Marc and Ghislaine slipped away one weekend and were married in Rome. Christopher told Helen that Ghislaine was four months pregnant. Helen was surprised they had not been invited, and she said something to Christopher.

  “Why? Would you have wanted to go? I thought you didn’t particularly like either one of them.” She was annoyed by how his cold rationality overrode any objection to disloyalty.

  “I still think you—we—should have been invited.”

  “He said it was just family and close friends in Rome.”

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Helen was assigned to write a short piece on the items Christie’s regarded as the highlights of the upcoming auctions. As she was leaving the St. James showrooms, she ran into Ghislaine, who explained that she was going to view The Collection of a Roman Nobleman. Marc had given her a flat in Milan as a wedding gift and she needed to find one or two important pieces for it. Helen sensed that Ghislaine was becoming one of those women whose ability to acquire expensive objects created a sense of superiority.

  “Did you know they bought a flat in Milan?”

  “Marc said he was looking for something as an investment.”

  “Ghislaine was shopping for furniture at Christie’s.”

  Christopher shrugged. “Marc is in the Milan office quite a bit. Maybe Ghislaine wants to live there.” He didn’t say anything more, even though he knew she wanted him to, but he did think to himself that he should check on the Milan office. He was scheduled to fly to Hong Kong to meet with the founder of an up-and-coming private company who wanted to speak to him about finding European investors. He decided to fly to Milan on the way back to see for himself what was going on.

  * * *

  Solange Bolton wrote Helen with news that William Pauling had agreed to see her. He did not have a computer and only corresponded by post. She should write to him and suggest a date, and he would write back to confirm. She suggested if Helen had time, she should bring her husband and take a tour of the desert. But if they only had a few days they should go to the charming Riad Madani in Marrakech, which had once been the home of Grand Vizier El Glaoui. The idea of a weekend with Christopher at a small hotel in an exotic location thrilled Helen. She hoped they might have time to t
ake a guide into the desert. Christopher might be exhausted and prefer to relax around the pool. She didn’t care what they did as long as they were together.

  Chapter Twenty

  Tangier

  The week before Helen was scheduled to interview William Pauling, the controversy about the statue was resolved privately with both sides committing not to speak about the agreement. Without quotes from the Chinese officials or William Pauling or the auction house, an article on the controversy would be too weak. David still wanted her to write a profile of Pauling—he was an interesting man—but he cut the article to a quarter of the original size. The third son of an earl, an aging aesthete who had spent his life in Tangier, an impresario of sorts, Helen felt it was all well-trodden ground. And it was. The only thing that interested her about him now was his response to her formal letter asking for an interview. He sent her letter back with a weary “Come” sprawled diagonally across the sheet of paper. His gesture revealed his sense of superiority in the world of manners. A few days later a postcard arrived with the typed address and time she should arrive.

  Helen checked with her doctor about travel to Morocco. He recommended the hepatitis A vaccine as a precaution and warned her about contaminated water. She told her doctor that Christopher was planning to join her for a few days. He would be coming from Asia, and she doubted they would do much more than relax around the pool at the hotel. Her doctor said Christopher would be well advised to get the vaccine, too.

  * * *

  The day Christopher left for Hong Kong, he received a breathless call from Charlotte announcing that she and Eric had bought Eastthorpe. It was, according to her, in dire need of everything new, but they were having one house party in December before the restoration began the following year, a “bon voyage” to the past, and Charlotte had called Christopher first. She wanted to make certain her “favorite cousin and his charming wife” could come before she set the date. Christopher understood that Charlotte had phrased the invitation in such a way as to give him little choice. He assumed Eric would invite as many successful businessmen as possible. It would be smart for him to attend, though it was not something he was looking forward to. But he knew it was always best to meet future clients in settings unrelated to business, where neither party needed or wanted anything.