Empress Bianca

by Lady Colin Campbell

  Gradually Manolito found himself falling in love with Leila, and she with him. It was not sudden, but, when it happened, it quickly became earth shattering for both of them. Within a month of first sleeping together, Manolito proposed one night as Leila snuggled in his arms after making love.

  ‘But Manolito, we’re so young,’ Leila observed, looking up at the strong line of his jaw.

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’ he laughed, peering down at her with the quiet and relaxed intensity so characteristic of his personality.

  ‘I suppose a…yes,’ she teased.

  ‘I’d better ask your father for his permission.’

  ‘I think you’d better meet him before you do that,’ Leila joked.

  ‘True. Shall we tell Mummy?’

  ‘Will she approve? I mean, I am Libyan and…’

  ‘Listen, Leila, just because your country has a leader who’s unpopular in the West doesn’t mean you have to slink around apologizing for who you are. The Libyan people are from an ancient culture. Think of Carthage and all the Roman ruins, and it puts the newness of Western civilization into perspective.’

  ‘But wouldn’t your mother prefer a nice blonde English girl?’

  ‘Not my mother. She won’t give a toss as long as she thinks you’re a decent person and you have a good character and will make me happy.’

  ‘I find that difficult to believe, knowing how prejudiced the English can be against Arabs.’

  ‘Trust me. My mother is not like that.’

  ‘What about your stepmother?’

  ‘She’ll be OK too. She’s half-Palestinian herself, her husband is Iraqi, and my stepsister is married to a Lebanese. So we’ve already got quite a Middle Eastern cabal in our family.’

  As Manolito had envisaged, neither Amanda nor Bianca objected when he telephoned and told them he had met the girl he wished to marry, although both of them cautioned him against making such a commitment too soon. Manolito, however, was firmly convinced that he had met the right girl and foresaw a lifetime of happiness and adventure with Leila, especially as he knew for a fact that she had no idea of how rich he was. Indeed, her first hint of the family’s extensive wealth only came when she stepped into the entrance hall of Amanda Piedraplata’s house in Cadogan Place in Chelsea. Although Manolito did not know it at the time, his money was the one thing Leila did not want. Indeed, she was bowled over in the most negative sense possible by the sumptuousness of the place, despite the fact that Amanda was in relative terms the poor relation in the both Piedraplata and Mahfud families. As Leila’s eyes swept the entrance hall and the adjoining passage, lined with ancestral portraits on the walls and fine console tables beneath them, she could see that this was patently the house of a lady of means and taste. The portraits were a titled roll call of Amanda’s aristocratic forebears. And when Leila walked into the first of the two reception rooms off the passage it was impossible to sit upon a chair that was less than two hundred years, while the sofas were all overstuffed Colefax and Fowler, their very contemporaneousness adding to the aura of wealth and elegance.

  Leila took one look at the grandeur that was her future mother-in-law’s way of life and promptly recoiled. ‘Can I fit into this world?’ she immediately asked herself and experienced a palpable feeling of relief once the visit was over, and she stepped back out onto the street with Manolito.

  ‘I had no idea your family was so rich,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Manolito laughed. ‘You know, I’ve spent years hiding the amount of money my family has so that people will want me for myself,’ he said, hugging Leila and kissing her lovingly on the back of her neck, ‘and when I finally meet someone who does, she thinks it’s a problem that we have too much money. In fact, you’d probably like me if I even had less.’

  Leila smiled and nodded, but the fact was that if she married Manolito, she would be entering a world whose rarefied air she had no wish to breathe.

  It took Manolito two months to convince Leila that she could be happy as the wife of a rich man. He also made a clean breast of the degree of his family’s wealth, rightly figuring that she deserved to know what she was getting into. What he did not tell her - at least not then - were the stories circulating about his father’s death. However, he did take her to L’Alexandrine to present her to Bianca, who endeared herself to Leila by being as lavishly welcoming as only Bianca could be and by referring to her at all times as ‘cherie’.

  It was a combination of love for Manolito and the open arms with which Amanda and Bianca greeted Leila, together with the way they took their way of life for granted, that finally convinced Leila that she could marry Manolito without losing her ability to function in the real world as well.

  Once Leila made that decision, she and Manolito boarded Concorde and flew to New York, where they caught a connecting flight to Boston and turned up on her parents’ doorstep, unannounced, to seek their approval for the marriage, which they gave without reservation. The young couple then flew back to the United Kingdom two days later to plan their wedding in London three months hence.

  Once more Manolito showed the basic soundness and maturity of his character, as well as how the influences in his life were changing, when he took his mother’s advice and appointed Lady Katharine Anderton, one of the Queen’s cousins, to arrange the entire wedding, from the sending out of the invitations to the decoration of the going-away car. This choice removed the financial responsibility from a family that could not afford such an affair while removing all possibility of the wedding being arranged by Bianca, who would never have resisted the temptation to turn the proceedings into anything but a spectacle for the amusement of her international friends.

  Kate Anderton had the simplest of briefs: send out two hundred invitations to the wedding, which would take place at the Catholic Church in Mayfair’s Farm Street, decorate the church on the day and organize a champagne reception and dinner dance at Mossiman’s in Belgravia. It was the sort of arrangement any experienced party planner could do with her eyes shut.

  The wisdom of appointing an outsider to organize the wedding became apparent during the reception at Mossiman’s. Pedro was standing talking to Amanda and Dolores upstairs when Bianca walked in with Antonia and Moussey. Dolores, seeing Antonia, walked straight up to her and said: ‘Isn’t Biancita coming?’

  ‘Oh, hello, Dolores,’ Bianca said before Antonia could reply. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’ve asked you a question, and I want an answer,’ Dolores said, ignoring Bianca.

  ‘Darling girl,’ Bianca said, sweetness itself, as a relieved-looking Antonia stood back and left her mother to deal with this awkward situation. ‘Biancita has school. One can’t disrupt a child’s education for the convenience of the adults.’

  ‘So she’s not coming,’ Dolores said, crestfallen.

  ‘It would appear not,’ Bianca said in her most honeyed tones.

  ‘One of these days you’re going to get your comeuppance, you poisonous bitch,’ Dolores hissed, ‘and I only hope I’m around to see you squirm when that day comes,’ Then she spat squarely in Bianca’s face.

  ‘You snivelling little whore,’ Bianca responded angrily, grabbing a damask napkin from the arm of a passing waiter and wiping her face with it before throwing it onto the floor at Dolores’ feet. ‘I’m going to make sure that my granddaughter never catches sight of your perverted face again, if it’s the last thing I do.’ With that, she stormed off in search of the ladies’ room to clean herself up and retouch her makeup.

  Dolores ran back to Pedro and Amanda, who had been observing all that had happened. ‘Good shot,’ Pedro laughed. ‘What did the bitch say to you to make you hit her full in the face like that?’

  ‘No,’ Amanda said, reaching for Dolores’ hands and cupping them in her own. ‘Don’t tell us. It will only upset you, and we don’t want to blight Manolito’s big day any more than it already has been by that woman’s presence.�
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  Dolores, however, was too keyed up not to recount what had happened, and she had just finished doing so when Bianca rejoined Antonia across the room.

  ‘Wait here,’ Pedro said. ‘I’ll only be a minute or two.’

  With that, he headed towards his mother and sister, who had each taken a flute of champagne from a passing waiter. ‘Hello, Mama. Hi, Antonia,’ he said, leaning in to peck his sister on her cheek.

  ‘To what do we owe this honour?’ Bianca inquired archly.

  ‘Hi, Peds,’ Antonia said fondly, glad, despite herself, that her brother had come over to speak to her.

  ‘How long are you here for?’ Pedro asked his sister.

  ‘We leave tomorrow.’

  ‘Where for?’

  ‘Cyprus. We’ve built this fabulous house on the beach, and we’re sitting out the civil war there, along with half of Lebanon, it has to be said. You should come and see us there some time.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  ‘Just make sure you don’t bring that whore along with you,’ Bianca spat out.

  ‘She’s not a whore,’ Pedro said to his mother. ‘I don’t know what you have against her, but it certainly doesn’t warrant you treating her the way you do.’

  ‘The only thing that can be said for you as opposed to your brothers,’ Bianca said, ‘is that you don’t marry your waifs and strays.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘It means precisely what I said. At least you don’t marry the waifs and strays you bed.’

  ‘But Julio and Manolito have?’ Pedro said, keen to see what worm lay under this particular rock.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I thought you liked Leila,’ Pedro said.

  ‘And why would you think that?’

  ‘Don’t you always refer to her as “cherie”?’

  ‘No, that’s “Sherry” as in Sheherezade, you idiot,’ Bianca retorted. ‘You know, the little Arab waif who kept her head and captured the Sultan’s attention with her inventiveness.’

  ‘It has to be said, Mama, that if anyone ever had an aptitude for spreading venom wherever she goes, it is you,’ Pedro said.

  ‘And I’m as pleased to see you too,’ Bianca answered sweetly.

  ‘Give me a ring in Mexico next week and let’s talk,’ Pedro said to Antonia, pecking her on the cheek before turning on his heel and returning to Dolores and Amanda.

  ‘Pedro,’ Amanda remarked after he related Bianca’s putdown of Leila to them, ‘your mother is such a snob that the only sort of wife she’d want for any of you is the daughter of a duke.’

  ‘I’m going to tell Manolito,’ Pedro said.

  ‘Wait until the end of the honeymoon,’ Dolores advised, echoing Amanda’s sentiments.

  Pedro consequently waited until the end of the honeymoon, when he was driving Manolito and Leila from Sintra to the airport for the return trip to London, to reveal the true meaning of Bianca’s supposed term of endearment. Manolito turned purple with embarrassment, but it was Leila’s reaction that showed Pedro how wise his brother was to have chosen a girl of such calibre.

  ‘I don’t see why you all put up with her bizarre conduct,’ she declared.

  Manolito waved his hand in a gesture as if to say: ‘What can we do?’

  ‘She’s my mother,’ Pedro said, coming to Manolito’s rescue. ‘I don’t like it, but I don’t see what choice I have but to accept it.’

  ‘She’s been a good stepmother to me,’ Manolito said. ‘And you have to take the rough with the smooth.‘

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Leila said. ‘If life has taught me one thing, it’s that you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. I don’t mean to cause you problems, Manolito, but as long as we’re married and I’m your wife, I don’t want that woman to set foot in our house. And I will never go to visit her in any of her homes.’

  ‘What about Sintra and Mexico City?’

  ‘Those are not her homes. They are your homes. So I’ll come to them as long as she’s not around.’

  Finally, someone in Bianca’s family had drawn the line with her, although it took several months before she got wind of Leila’s refusal to tolerate her presence any longer. Bianca’s reaction, however, showed why she was such a brilliant adversary. Instead of being upset, as everyone in her family had expected her to be, she responded with apparent indifference. While she was still fond of the boy, she was not about to let herself become upset because Manolito’s first loyalty would henceforth be, as Bianca put it, ‘to his penile satisfaction’. All the same, beneath that glib reaction, she was hurt that someone whom she had poured such love into over the years could take the side of an interloper over his ‘Mama’.

  What helped to make Manolito’s defection easier to take for Bianca was that it coincided with one of those worldly coups that had become such a feature of her existence. The reason why Bianca no longer needed Manolito was that his money was no longer the crucial part of the Mahfud financial empire it had once been. In monetary terms, he was just another client, and not a very important or powerful one at that. While his portfolio was a welcome addition to the Geneva Bank’s assets, in real terms it was a luxury, not a necessity, as Bianca and Philippe would soon be rich beyond their wildest ambitions.

  In the months after Manolito’s honeymoon and before Bianca discovered that she had been shelved by Leila, Philippe had been working on a deal which the Wall Street Journal would subsequently label as ‘classic’.

  He had finalized plans to sell Banco Imperiale New York to Continental Express for $2.7 billion: a phenomenal amount of money for that time. The sheer magnitude of it was enough to put Manolito and Leila’s actions into perfect perspective for Bianca. Why concern herself with small fry, Bianca reasoned, when she need only think of the influence that she would acquire once the world awoke to the fact that Philippe Mahfud had sold his bank to Continental Express for one of the largest sums of money ever exchanged between two financial institutions of their kind and that she was now the consort of one of the richest men in the world? Everyone knew that money was power. And money brought influence in its wake. And so it was, within days of discovering that Leila Piedraplata had banished her from her life, that Bianca woke up in her Louis XVI bed in her Fifth Avenue apartment to discover that she and Philippe were the new financial stars of the international firmament. The Wall Street Journal, spread out beside her breakfast tray, told of ‘the deal of a lifetime’ with a photograph of Philippe and the glamorous Mrs Mahfud beside him in all her exotic glory.

  In further confirmation of the fact that Mr and Mrs Philippe Mahfud were now the luminaries portrayed by the Wall Street Journal, by midday, several newspapers and magazines had telephoned asking for interviews with Bianca as well as with Philippe. Although she would dearly have loved to oblige them, her husband refused to allow any, stating, in that age-old refrain of his: ‘For people like us, publicity can only be detrimental. No interviews.’

  Disappointed though Bianca was to miss yet another opportunity to make her mark on the world, she was not surprised by Philippe’s interdict. As friend after high-calibre friend, such as Stella Minckus, Ruth Fargo Huron, and Graziella Oldenburg, telephoned to congratulate her on this latest step up the ladder, she convinced herself that her husband’s approach to publicity was the right one, and the way this exclusive circle was conducting itself was far superior to the grubby attention of journalists. But if she were honest with herself, oh, how she still yearned for the widespread recognition that newspaper and television fame would bring. She could see herself walking down Fifth Avenue, turning heads the way she now did but with the important difference that people would now stop and look, saying ‘There goes Bianca Mahfud,’ instead of simply wondering who was this superbly elegant woman. Recognition was a powerful motivator, especially to someone who had everything else.

  But rather than dwell on yet another series of wasted opportunities for real fame, Bianca pushed the wonderful image of herself as a household name to
the back of her mind. Even the limited amount of publicity from the Wall Street Journal would advance her ambitions; and, she had to admit, she was getting where she wanted to be on life’s ladder. This afternoon, for instance, she was due to have lunch at the Minckus apartment on Fifth Avenue. The guest of honour was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom Dolphie and Stella were courting, in the hope that she would one day allow Belmont’s to sell her artefacts the way Christie’s had sold the Duchess of Windsor’s. Although Bianca had met the fabled former First Lady once before, it had only been in passing - Philippe had stopped to speak to Maurice Tempelsman, Jackie’s boyfriend, whom he had recently met through business, as he and Bianca were leaving Elaine’s after dinner one night. Bianca hoped that this second meeting through Stella Minckus would be the beginning of a more enduring relationship. Bianca was still struggling to rise above the glass ceiling separating the grandest dames from the merely grande dames in International Society. The real International Empresses were Jackie and Brooke Astor in the US, and Diana and Queen Elizabeth II across the Atlantic. Everyone else was in another, less stellar, category. Bianca needed to look no further than Brooke Astor to see that one only needed vast wealth, a good name and good connections to be right up there with the best of them. And if Bianca had learned one thing in the years she had been living in New York, it was that the power of determination allied to the power of wealth created an unstoppable momentum, once you were allowed to initiate the process. This, unfortunately, was something Philippe had not permitted her to do.