With trembling fingers, I scrolled down to find her number and dialled it. When her voicemail answered, I didn’t know what to say, other than a few garbled words asking her to call me back urgently. She was currently somewhere in the Scottish Highlands working at a centre for orphaned and sick wild deer.
As for the other sisters . . . I knew their reactions would vary, outwardly at least, from indifference to a dramatic outpouring of emotion.
Given that I wasn’t currently sure quite which way I would go on the scale of grief when I did speak to any of them, I decided to take the coward’s way out and texted them all, asking them to call me as soon as they could. Then I hurriedly packed my holdall and walked down the narrow stairs to the kitchen to write a note for Jenny explaining why I’d had to leave in such a hurry.
Deciding to take my chances hailing a black cab on the London streets, I left the house, walking briskly around the leafy Chelsea crescent just as any normal person would do on any normal day. I believe I actually said hello to someone walking a dog when I passed him in the street and managed a smile.
No one would know what had just happened to me, I thought, as I managed to find a taxi on the busy King’s Road and climbed inside, directing the driver to Heathrow.
No one would know.
Five hours later, just as the sun was making its leisurely descent over Lake Geneva, I arrived at our private pontoon on the shore, from where I would make the last leg of my journey home.
Christian was already waiting for me in our sleek Riva motor launch. And from the look on his face, I could see he’d heard the news.
‘How are you, Mademoiselle Maia?’ he asked, sympathy in his blue eyes as he helped me aboard.
‘I’m . . . glad I’m here,’ I answered neutrally as I walked to the back of the boat and sat down on the cushioned cream leather bench that curved around the stern. Usually, I would sit with Christian in the passenger seat at the front as we sped across the calm waters on the twenty-minute journey home. But today, I felt a need for privacy. As Christian started the powerful engine, the sun glinted off the windows of the fabulous houses that lined Lake Geneva’s shores. I’d often felt when I made this journey that it was the entrance to an ethereal world disconnected from reality.
The world of Pa Salt.
I noticed the first vague evidence of tears pricking at my eyes as I thought of my father’s pet name, which I’d coined when I was young. He’d always loved sailing and often when he returned to me at our lakeside home, he had smelt of fresh air and of the sea. Somehow, the name had stuck, and as my younger siblings had joined me, they’d called him that too.
As the launch picked up speed, the warm wind streaming through my hair, I thought of the hundreds of previous journeys I’d made to Atlantis, Pa Salt’s fairy-tale castle. Inaccessible by land, due to its position on a private promontory with a crescent of mountainous terrain rising up steeply behind it, the only method of reaching it was by boat. The nearest neighbours were miles away along the lake, so Atlantis was our own private kingdom, set apart from the rest of the world. Everything it contained was magical . . . as if Pa Salt and we – his daughters – had lived there under an enchantment.
Each one of us had been chosen by Pa Salt as a baby, adopted from the four corners of the globe and brought home to live under his protection. And each one of us, as Pa always liked to say, was special, different . . . we were his girls. He’d named us all after The Seven Sisters, his favourite star cluster. Maia being the first and eldest.
When I was young, he’d take me up to his glass-domed observatory perched on top of the house, lift me up with his big, strong hands and have me look through his telescope at the night sky.
‘There it is,’ he’d say as he aligned the lens. ‘Look, Maia, that’s the beautiful shining star you’re named after.’
And I would see. As he explained the legends that were the source of my own and my sisters’ names, I’d hardly listen, but simply enjoy his arms tight around me, fully aware of this rare, special moment when I had him all to myself.
I’d realised eventually that Marina, who I’d presumed as I grew up was my mother – I’d even shortened her name to ‘Ma’ – was a glorified nursemaid, employed by Pa to take care of me because he was away such a lot. But of course, Marina was so much more than that to all of us girls. She was the one who had wiped our tears, berated us for sloppy table manners and steered us calmly through the difficult transition from childhood to womanhood.
She had always been there, and I could not have loved Ma any more if she had given birth to me.
During the first three years of my childhood, Marina and I had lived alone together in our magical castle on the shores of Lake Geneva as Pa Salt travelled the seven seas to conduct his business. And then, one by one, my sisters began to arrive.
Usually, Pa would bring me a present when he returned home. I’d hear the motor launch arriving, run across the sweeping lawns and through the trees to the jetty to greet him. Like any child, I’d want to see what he had hidden inside his magical pockets to delight me. On one particular occasion, however, after he’d presented me with an exquisitely carved wooden reindeer, which he assured me came from St Nicholas’s workshop at the North Pole itself, a uniformed woman had stepped out from behind him, and in her arms was a bundle wrapped in a shawl. And the bundle was moving.
‘This time, Maia, I’ve brought you back the most special gift. You have a new sister.’ He’d smiled at me as he lifted me into his arms. ‘Now you’ll no longer be lonely when I have to go away.’
After that, life had changed. The maternity nurse that Pa had brought with him disappeared after a few weeks and Marina took over the care of my baby sister. I couldn’t understand how the red, squalling thing which often smelt and diverted attention from me could possibly be a gift. Until one morning, when Alcyone – named after the second star of The Seven Sisters – smiled at me from her high chair over breakfast.
‘She knows who I am,’ I said in wonder to Marina, who was feeding her.
‘Of course she does, Maia, dear. You’re her big sister, the one she’ll look up to. It’ll be up to you to teach her lots of things that you know and she doesn’t.’
And as she grew, she became my shadow, following me everywhere, which pleased and irritated me in equal measure.
‘Maia, wait me!’ she’d demand loudly as she tottered along behind me.
Even though Ally – as I’d nicknamed her – had originally been an unwanted addition to my dreamlike existence at Atlantis, I could not have asked for a sweeter, more loveable companion. She rarely, if ever, cried and there were none of the temper-tantrums associated with toddlers of her age. With her tumbling red-gold curls and her big blue eyes, Ally had a natural charm that drew people to her, including our father. On the occasions Pa Salt was home from one of his long trips abroad, I’d watch how his eyes lit up when he saw her, in a way I was sure they didn’t for me. And whereas I was shy and reticent with strangers, Ally had an openness and a readiness to trust that endeared her to everyone.
She was also one of those children who seemed to excel at everything – particularly music, and any sport to do with water. I remember Pa teaching her to swim in our vast pool and, whereas I had struggled to stay afloat and hated being underwater, my little sister took to it like a mermaid. And while I couldn’t find my sea legs even on the Titan, Pa’s huge and beautiful ocean-going yacht, when we were at home Ally would beg him to take her out in the small Laser he kept moored on our private lakeside jetty. I’d crouch in the cramped stern of the boat while Pa and Ally took control as we sped across the glassy waters. Their joint passion for sailing bonded them in a way I felt I could never replicate.
Although Ally had studied music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève and was a highly talented flautist who could have pursued a career with a professional orchestra, since leaving music school she had chosen the life of a full-time sailor. She now competed regularly in regattas, and had rep
resented Switzerland on a number of occasions.
When Ally was almost three, Pa arrived home with our next sibling, whom he named Asterope, after the third of The Seven Sisters.
‘But we will call her Star,’ Pa had said, smiling at Marina, Ally and me as we studied the newest addition to the family lying in the bassinet.
By now I was attending lessons every morning with a private tutor, so my newest sister’s arrival affected me less than Ally’s had. Then, only six months later, another baby joined us, a twelve-week-old girl named Celaeno, whose name Ally immediately shortened to CeCe.
There was only three months’ age difference between Star and CeCe, and from as far back as I can remember, the two of them forged a close bond. They were akin to twins, talking in their own private baby language, some of which the two of them still used to communicate to this day. They inhabited their own private world, to the exclusion of us other sisters. And even now in their twenties, nothing had changed. CeCe, the younger of the two, was always the boss, her stocky body and nut-brown skin in direct contrast to the pale, whippet-thin Star.
The following year, another baby arrived – Taygete, whom I nicknamed ‘Tiggy’ because her short dark hair sprouted out at strange angles on her tiny head and reminded me of the hedgehog in Beatrix Potter’s famous story.
I was by now seven years old, and I’d bonded with Tiggy from the first moment I set eyes on her. She was the most delicate of us all, suffering one childhood illness after another, but even as an infant, she was stoic and undemanding. When yet another baby girl, named Electra, was brought home by Pa a few months later, an exhausted Marina would often ask me if I would mind sitting with Tiggy, who continually had a fever or croup. Eventually diagnosed as asthmatic, she rarely left the nursery to be wheeled outside in the pram, in case the cold air and heavy fog of a Geneva winter affected her chest.
Electra was the youngest of my siblings and her name suited her perfectly. By now, I was used to little babies and their demands, but my youngest sister was without doubt the most challenging of them all. Everything about her was electric; her innate ability to switch in an instant from dark to light and vice versa meant that our previously calm home rang daily with high-pitched screams. Her temper-tantrums resonated through my childhood consciousness and as she grew older, her fiery personality did not mellow.
Privately, Ally, Tiggy and I had our own nickname for her; she was known among the three of us as ‘Tricky’. We all walked on eggshells around her, wishing to do nothing to set off a lightning change of mood. I can honestly say there were moments when I loathed her for the disruption she brought to Atlantis.
And yet, when Electra knew one of us was in trouble, she was the first to offer help and support. Just as she was capable of huge selfishness, her generosity on other occasions was equally pronounced.
After Electra, the entire household was expecting the arrival of the Seventh Sister. After all, we’d been named after Pa Salt’s favourite star cluster and we wouldn’t be complete without her. We even knew her name – Merope – and wondered who she would be. But a year went past, and then another, and another, and no more babies arrived home with our father.
I remember vividly standing with him once in his observatory. I was fourteen years old and just on the brink of womanhood. We were waiting for an eclipse, which he’d told me was a seminal moment for humankind and usually brought change with it.
‘Pa,’ I said, ‘will you ever bring home our seventh sister?’
At this, his strong, protective bulk had seemed to freeze for a few seconds. He’d looked suddenly as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Although he didn’t turn around, for he was still concentrating on training the telescope on the coming eclipse, I knew instinctively that what I’d said had distressed him.
‘No, Maia, I won’t. Because I have never found her.’
As the familiar thick hedge of spruce trees, which shielded our waterside home from prying eyes, came into view, I saw Marina standing on the jetty and the dreadful truth of losing Pa finally began to sink in.
And I realised that the man who had created the kingdom in which we had all been his princesses was no longer present to hold the enchantment in place.
2
Marina put her comforting arms gently around my shoulders as I stepped up onto the jetty from the launch. Wordlessly, we turned to walk together through the trees and across the wide, sloping lawns that led up to the house. In June, our home was at the height of its beauty. The ornate gardens were bursting into bloom, enticing their occupants to explore the hidden pathways and secret grottos.
The house itself, built in the late eighteenth century in the Louis XV style, was a vision of elegant grandeur. Four storeys high, its sturdy pale pink walls were punctuated by tall multi-paned windows, and topped by a steeply sloping red roof with turrets at each corner. Exquisitely furnished inside with every modern luxury, its thick carpets and plump sofas cocooned and comforted all who lived there. We girls had slept up on the top floor, which had superb, uninterrupted views of the lake over the treetops. Marina also occupied a suite of rooms upstairs with us.
I glanced at her now and thought how exhausted she looked. Her kind brown eyes were smudged with shadows of fatigue, and her normally smiling mouth looked pinched and tense. I supposed she must be in her mid-sixties, but she didn’t seem it. Tall, with strong aquiline features, she was an elegant, handsome woman, always immaculately attired, her effortless chic reflecting her French ancestry. When I was young, she used to wear her silky dark hair loose, but now she coiled it into a chignon at the nape of her neck.
A thousand questions were pushing for precedence in my mind, but only one demanded to be asked immediately.
‘Why didn’t you let me know as soon as Pa had the heart attack?’ I asked as we entered the house and walked into the high-ceilinged drawing room that overlooked a sweeping stone terrace, lined with urns full of vivid red and gold nasturtiums.
‘Maia, believe me, I begged him to let me tell you, to tell all you girls, but he became so distressed when I mentioned it that I had to do as he wished.’
And I understood that if Pa had told her not to contact us, she could have done little else. He was the king and Marina was at best his most trusted courtier, at worst his servant who must do exactly as he bade her.
‘Where is he now?’ I asked her. ‘Still upstairs in his bedroom? Should I go and see him?’
‘No, chérie, he isn’t upstairs. Would you like some tea before I tell you more?’ she asked.
‘To be quite honest, I think I could do with a strong gin and tonic,’ I admitted as I sat down heavily on one of the huge sofas.
‘I’ll ask Claudia to make it. And I think that, on this occasion, I may join you myself.’
I watched as Marina left the room to find Claudia, our housekeeper, who had been at Atlantis as long as Marina. She was German, her outward dourness hiding a heart of gold. Like all of us, she’d adored her master. I wondered suddenly what would become of her and Marina. And, in fact, what would happen to Atlantis itself now that Pa had gone.
The words still seemed incongruous in this context. Pa was always ‘gone’ – off somewhere, doing something, although none of his staff or family had any specific idea of what he actually did to make his living. I’d asked him once, when my friend Jenny had come to stay with us during the school holidays and been noticeably awed by the opulence of the way we lived.
‘Your father must be fabulously wealthy,’ she’d whispered as we stepped off Pa’s private jet which had just landed at La Môle airport near St Tropez. The chauffeur was waiting on the tarmac to take us down to the harbour, where we’d board our magnificent ten-berth yacht, the Titan, and sail off for our annual Mediterranean cruise to whichever destination Pa Salt fancied taking us.
Like any child, rich or poor, given that I had grown up knowing no different, the way we lived had never really struck me as unusual. All of us girls had taken lessons wit
h tutors at home when we were younger, and it was only when I went to boarding school at the age of thirteen that I began to realise how removed our life was from most other people’s.
When I asked Pa once what exactly it was he did to provide our family with every luxury imaginable, he looked at me in that secretive way he had and smiled. ‘I am a magician of sorts.’
Which, as he’d intended, told me nothing.
As I grew older, I began to realise that Pa Salt was the master illusionist and nothing was as it first seemed.
When Marina came back into the drawing room carrying two gin and tonics on a tray, it occurred to me that, after thirty-three years, I had no real idea who my father had been in the world outside Atlantis. And I wondered whether I would finally begin to find out now.
‘There we go,’ Marina said, setting the glass in front of me. ‘Here’s to your father,’ she said as she raised hers. ‘May God rest his soul.’
‘Yes, here’s to Pa Salt. May he rest in peace.’
Marina took a hefty gulp before replacing the glass on the table and taking my hands in hers. ‘Maia, before we discuss anything else, I feel I must tell you one thing.’
‘What?’ I asked, looking at her weary brow, furrowed with anxiety.
‘You asked me earlier if your father was still here in the house. The answer is that he has already been laid to rest. It was his wish that the burial happen immediately and that none of you girls be present.’
I stared at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses. ‘But Ma, you told me only a few hours ago that he died in the early hours of this morning! How is it possible that a burial could have been arranged so soon? And why?’
‘Maia, your father was adamant that as soon as he passed away, his body was to be flown on his jet to his yacht. Once on board, he was to be placed in a lead coffin, which had apparently sat in the hold of the Titan for many years in preparation for such an event. From there he was to be sailed out to sea. Naturally, given his love for the water, he wanted to be laid to rest in the ocean. And he did not wish to cause his daughters the distress of . . . watching the event.’
The Olive Tree Page 44