“Yes, he is,” said Mr. Somerset. “And has always been.”
A declaration of fact on his part, rather than one of pride, as if he were stating Bennett’s age or height: This was a man who had a clear, unsentimental view of his son.
We fell back into small talk. Ten minutes later, coffee and pastry consumed, we were once again shaking hands, wishing each other safe and pleasant trips.
“Bennett is very lucky to have you,” said Mr. Somerset.
“Who knows, maybe I’m the luckier one here,” I answered. “I hope to see you again when we’re all back in the city.”
Mr. Somerset smiled. “Yes, I’d like that.”
BENNETT AND I HAD AN uneventful flight to London. At Heathrow Airport we were met by Mrs. Asquith’s man, Hobbs, who drove an old-fashioned sedan with a partition between the front and the back seats. Her house was forty minutes away, a small estate tucked into the Berkshire countryside—not far from Eton, according to Bennett.
“Did you like going to the school?”
“It was okay. I liked playing rugby—always thought American football too wimpy, all those helmets and paddings.”
My lips curved very slightly at that. “Why did your parents put you there, rather than somewhere nearby to keep a closer eye on you?”
“Two years before we met, Moira was arrested in London for being rowdy and in possession of narcotics, so she couldn’t enter Britain. My parents gave my passport to the master of my residence house, so I couldn’t leave. It was a pretty clever plan on their part.”
“So you visited another old lady instead.”
“Huh,” said Bennett.
He gave me a dirty look, but its effect was undercut by a smile. I found myself smiling back at him. And then we were looking at each other and not smiling.
I felt as if there were nothing solid underneath me, as if I might do something regrettable at any moment. Breaking off eye contact, I opened my purse and pretended to check inside. “Did Mrs. Asquith know about Moira?”
“She did after I told her.”
“How’d she take it?”
“With cautious delight. She loves a scandal, that one. I think at one point she almost started the process to get the Home Office’s ruling overturned, so Moira could visit. But in the end she became convinced I’d knock Moira up, and that would be a bigger scandal than even she could handle, especially if it came out that she had something to do with it.”
My head snapped up. “Jesus.”
“I know, as if we’d never heard of contraceptives.”
He was observing me again in that way of his, and I felt like a mechanical watch with its covers taken off, all the wheels and gears inside clearly visible.
“I was talking about Mrs. Asquith almost taking leave of her senses.”
“You wouldn’t want a nice young man to see his girlfriend, whom he missed desperately?”
“I’d rather buy you a hooker for your birthday.”
I almost winced at the hard edge to my answer: I was jealous of a dead woman, of the single-minded devotion she had once inspired in my lover.
He cast me a sidelong glance. “Interesting positions you take, Dr. Canterbury.”
I stared at him. I wanted him to touch me. To ignite and then annihilate me. I wanted the opportunity, even if it was only for a few minutes, to pretend that the fire of lust was something far more substantial and all-encompassing.
His eyes darkened. They lingered on my lips. Then he gazed back into my eyes, and I forgot how to breathe. When he looked at me like this, it was easy to believe that no other woman existed but me, that I was indeed the one he had been waiting for all along.
He tilted his head slightly. My heart beat ridiculously fast. My fingers dug into the supple leather of the seat.
The car door opened. “Here we are,” Hobbs said cheerfully. “Mind your step.”
AT FIRST GLANCE, MRS. ASQUITH didn’t seem like the kind of woman to help with a boy and his more-than-twice-his-age lover: the sharply tailored royal blue dress, the triple strand of pearls, the perfectly coiffed, snow-white hair—if she were to introduce herself as a dowager countess, nobody would blink an eye.
Then she smiled, a smile full of mischief and the-hell-with-it attitude, and suddenly I could see her as a coconspirator in all kinds of outrageous schemes. “Bennett, you scamp. And Evangeline, my dear, how wonderful to meet you at last.”
The skin of her hand was papery, but her handshake was strong. “And may I introduce Mr. Lawrence de Villiers?”
I’d noticed the man to her side the moment we entered the room. He was in his late fifties, with the look of an older Mr. Darcy—he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Colin Firth.
“I rang up Mrs. Asquith a few days ago, and when she said you were going to be here, I asked if I could join you,” Mr. de Villiers said to me. “Zelda and I knew each other from before she emigrated to America.”
He was Zelda’s old boyfriend, the one who left. I’d hoped to learn something more about him from Mrs. Asquith. But here he was in the flesh, a clear-eyed, handsome man to whom Zelda obviously still mattered, or he wouldn’t have invited himself to meet her former stepdaughter.
“Very nice to meet you,” I said.
We sat down to a late lunch of piping-hot soup and warm sandwiches—steak with caramelized onions on ciabatta for the meat eaters and a toasted Camembert sandwich for the vegetarian.
Bennett teased Mrs. Asquith, who had probably never turned on a stove in her life, on her much improved culinary skills.
She harrumphed. “As if I would have given you anything more than tea and plain toast, when you were always using my telephone to ring your girlfriend in America.”
Bennett slanted her an I’m-disappointed-in-you look. “Aren’t you going to tell the full story?”
“All right, so you did pay for a new central heating system and better plumbing. And a new roof. And solar cells. But that was years later. For the better part of a decade I had only my own kindness for consolation.”
“Huh,” said Bennett. “You used to listen in on my calls.”
Mrs. Asquith grinned, entirely unrepentant. “They were my telephone and my telephone line.” She turned to me. “He was a very naughty boy.”
“I’ve reformed,” Bennett protested. “I’m respectable now.”
Mrs. Asquith scoffed. “You are still a scamp. All your respectability is in this young lady here.”
Bennett glanced at me. “Are you really that respectable, Evangeline?”
I put down my sandwich. “Please. At Buckingham Palace they ask themselves, ‘What would Dr. Canterbury do?’”
Mrs. Asquith cackled. “When Bennett said you two were seeing each other, I dug up old snaps Zelda had sent of you and said to myself, ‘Lovely girl, but maybe too sweet and gentle for him.’ I see now I needn’t have worried.”
“I keep him on a short leash,” I said. “He’s gone the moment he shows his true colors.”
“Didn’t I tell you I’m afraid of her?” said Bennett to Mrs. Asquith. “Always looking to kick me to the curb, this one.”
“What can I say?” I dipped my fork into the minted pea puree on my plate. “Zelda raised no fool.”
Mr. de Villiers, who had been quietly listening to our exchange, reached for his water glass. “When Zelda was younger, she was convinced she could never handle children.”
I looked at him full on. “She did very well when the time came. She was the best part of my childhood.”
He shook his head slightly. “I couldn’t have imagined. Or perhaps I should say, I didn’t quite trust my imagination.”
“No one can predict the future,” Mrs. Asquith told him. “You made rational choices, Larry. No need to second-guess them after almost thirty years.”
“No, I suppose not,” he said.
But he didn’t sound convinced. We fell silent, and ate for a minute or so without talking. Mrs. Asquith restarted the conversation by making Mr. de Villier
s tell us about his work in television: He had produced several iconic shows and been involved in a score more in one capacity or another.
“I was a junior second assistant producer, on my third show ever, when I was assigned to find a composer for the theme music. And that was when dear Maggie here”—he nodded toward Mrs. Asquith—”introduced me to Zelda, in the hope that her connections in the music industry might help me.
“She actually composed the music herself. But the show was never broadcast, so she put some lyrics to the song, gave it to Polygram, and they made a moderate hit out of it.”
“I believe she paid for new insulation on our house a few years ago with royalties from that song,” I said.
“Did she? That’s lovely to hear.”
There was a yearning in his voice, a hunger for such small, mundane news. Did Zelda feel likewise? When she thought of him, did she wonder whether he still liked his morning toast the way she remembered, and whether he had kept using the same soap and shampoo?
“Now, now, Larry,” said Mrs. Asquith. “I agreed you could come on condition that you reveal all about the next season of Bowyer Grange. I’m old and I’m impatient, so you’d best start right now.”
FOR THE REST OF LUNCH, Mr. de Villiers answered Mrs. Asquith’s questions about upcoming plot twists of the hugely popular show. When we rose from the table, Mrs. Asquith asked if I’d like a tour of the grounds. I said yes, and Mr. de Villiers was volunteered to be my guide.
We bundled up and went outside. My companion dutifully pointed out features of interest. When he mentioned that the house was built in the 1880s, I expressed my surprise at its relatively recent origin.
“What’s the term one uses for those big new houses in America?” asked Mr. de Villiers.
“McMansions, you mean?”
“Yes, that. This is an example of its Victorian counterpart—a prosperous man of business building a country retreat for himself and his family. Thousands of these were torn down in the postwar years—too costly to maintain and too new for the state to consider them of historical value. Fortunately for Maggie, hers is small enough that the upkeep falls within her means.
“Or almost, that is. Out of respect, we tend to look the other way when faced with signs of a house’s dilapidation. But Dr. Somerset was just American enough to make the necessary arrangements for workers to show up, so Maggie could harangue them with her demands.”
This unlikely yet enduring friendship between Bennett and Mrs. Asquith was making me like him all too much. I sighed inwardly.
We were inspecting a large, bare plane tree, planted in memory of a son of the house who had died in the Battle of the Somme, when Mr. de Villiers said, “I don’t suppose Zelda has ever mentioned me.”
At last. What we had come to talk about. I glanced at him, imagining the dashing young man he must have been thirty years ago. “No. It was Bennett who first told me about you—he’d heard a bit of the story from Mrs. Asquith.”
Mr. de Villiers wrapped his muffler more tightly about his neck—the cold of the day was the kind that seeped in slowly. “We were seriously involved for a while, and it was the most marvelous time of my life. When I made up my mind to propose to her, I commissioned a specially designed ring. Are you familiar with Tolkien’s works?”
I smiled to myself. “Very.”
“Then you’ll know what I mean when I say I wanted the ring to look like Nenya.”
I nodded, a sharp pinch at my heart. There were three rings of power the Elves had kept for themselves. Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, was wielded by Lady Galadriel.
Zelda would have loved that engagement ring.
“Finally the ring came back from the jeweler. I booked a holiday for us.” He looked up at the sky, heavy with the promise of snow. “But before we went, she had an episode.”
I’d expected those exact words. Still my stomach lurched.
“I knew she had a therapist and a prescription for her condition. But since I had no experience with mental illness—not up close, in any case—at first I didn’t understand what was going on. She had boundless energy, she couldn’t get enough of me, and she became tremendously confident—which was very gratifying, as I’d been telling her for months that she was too modest in her self-belief.
“I began to grow alarmed when I realized she was hardly sleeping. When I woke up at night she’d be on the telephone, talking to friends in America, Australia, or anywhere people were awake. During the day she brought back groceries by the car bootful, morning and afternoon. And she washed all the curtains, sheets, and tablecloths—again and again.
“And then it swung the other way and…” He took a deep breath. “You probably don’t need me to describe what it’s like.”
I shivered, my fingers ice-cold inside my gloves.
“I was a very capable young man who believed that everything was within my power to influence and change. I focused like a laser beam on her condition. We visited the best psychiatrists, the best nutritionists, the best everything. I was convinced that with proper medication, a well-calibrated diet, a rigorously adhered-to schedule, her illness could be controlled like type-one diabetes—still an annoying problem to have, but one that shouldn’t interfere with living a normal life in this day and age.”
My brows knitted. This kind of micromanaging was so different from Pater’s we-just-have-to-be-here philosophy that I didn’t know what to think of it.
“It didn’t quite work out that way. In hindsight, that I’d put so much pressure on her to become well and remain well was probably one of the reasons she was ill again a few months later. And that was a terrible episode—she had to be hospitalized for several weeks.”
Zelda’s first episode in the States, when I was six, had led to a hospital stay. The one in the wake of the ball also required institutional care. But each time she was back home in days. To need several weeks of hospitalization—I didn’t even dare to imagine the severity of that episode.
“She recovered eventually. But I felt I’d lost control over every aspect of my life. A complete failure of a man. So I told her I couldn’t do it anymore, that it was time for us to stop being a couple.” Mr. de Villiers sighed. Before me he seemed to grow smaller. “Six months later I was married. Two months after that she married your father and moved to America.”
Pater had been on a business trip to London when he’d met Zelda. Theirs had been a whirlwind romance, at most six weeks from introduction to wedding. Ever since Bennett first brought up the topic of her old boyfriend, I’d suspected that she might have married Pater on the rebound. What Mr. de Villiers said pretty much confirmed that.
“Have you seen her since?”
“Once at a party in London—she’d divorced your father the year before. We sat together and talked for hours. But when the party ended, we went our separate ways.” He glanced up at the sky again. Tiny snowflakes meandered down, disappearing the moment they touched ground. “My marriage was already an entity in name only, but I was still unwilling to face everything that a relationship with Zelda would entail. I couldn’t handle it as a young man; it seemed impossible I’d do any better as a man of middle age.”
We left our spot before the commemorative plane tree and resumed walking. At the far end of the garden I said, “But?”
“But I never stopped thinking about her. My ex-wife and I decided we simply didn’t have enough stiff upper lip to preserve our marriage solely for the sake of not having a divorce on the CV. The divorce became final in July of last year. I was about to purchase a ticket to New York when I heard that Zelda was ill again.
“Then she recovered and came to see Maggie in December. Twice I drove out here. But I was…too ashamed, I suppose, to call on her when she was healthy, when I stayed away during her illness. So I stood in front of the house and looked up at the window of the room where she always stayed, like a character from Bowyer Grange. Each time I drove away without seeing her.”
A snowflake fell on my face, the c
hill from the tiny chip of ice drilling deep beneath my skin. I should have known. I should have guessed from the moment I saw him that he wanted to be together with her again, this man who had “managed” her into the worst episode of her life.
“If you’d like to know whether Zelda would welcome you back into her life,” I said stiffly, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you one way or the other.”
“Nobody can tell me that except Zelda, and that isn’t why I invited myself here today. Today I only wanted to meet you. She spoke a great deal of you last time we met, and I’ve long wished to see the young woman who stuck by her through sickness and health.”
People persisted in misreading my character. When the Somersets looked at me, they saw nothing but reassuring good sense—as if I could ever bear to appear anything but even-keeled and pulled-together. To be otherwise was to feel the seams of my world breaking apart, to sense the distant rumble that would make the whole house of cards come tumbling down.
To Mr. de Villiers, I stood for all that was selfless and courageous—when there was and had only ever been a stark fear of losing the one person who loved me unconditionally.
Usually I shrug off such mistaken praise—giving false impressions wasn’t my intention, merely a by-product of protecting myself. But now, as we stopped walking again next to a stone sundial at the center of Mrs. Asquith’s garden, I realized that Mr. de Villiers hadn’t just wanted to meet me.
He was hoping for my blessing.
“May I ask you a question, Mr. de Villiers?”
“Of course. And please call me Larry.”
“Does Zelda know about the holiday you’d booked?”
The seemingly inconsequential nature of my question surprised Larry. “I never mentioned it to her, but I believe Maggie did a few years ago. Zelda was visiting and they were looking through some travel magazines together, and according to Maggie, when she came across a picture of La Figlia del Mare, she said, ‘Oh, look, that’s the hotel where Larry meant to propose to you.’”
The wildly romantic La Figlia del Mare, which Zelda had been recommending to everyone since.
I placed my hand on the sundial, feeling nothing but a searing cold. “Obviously my opinion doesn’t count. But since you sought me out, Larry, I’m going to assume that it does matter to some extent: I believe you’ll make a wonderful companion for someone, somewhere, but that someone isn’t Zelda.”
The One in My Heart Page 14