“Yes it does,” Isabelle says. “The countess is gone. We keep the money. Everybody is happy.”
Yolande clears her throat. “Everyone except Mr. Woland in Antwerp, who has still not received the diamonds he purchased.”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it?” Isabelle retorts.
Jiri, who has been sitting with Odette on the couch, rises.
“I’ve had enough,” he announces. “I’m taking the girls back to Prague. When you’ve cleared up this mess, you can join us, or not.”
Isabelle’s eyes flash. “Oh, really? Is this too sordid for you? Let me ask you something, Mr. Sensitive Poet: What do you think we’ve been living on all these years?”
Jiri looks surprised. “What living? The big apartment? The vacations? I don’t need all that stuff….”
“That’s right, be superior!” she spits.
Jiri shrugs and starts to head for the door. “You can call it what you want.”
“You can’t take the girls, you—you philandering toad!”
He stops and turns around. “And what are you going to do with them?”
“I’m their mother!”
“You’re no mother,” Jiri says. I think it’s something all men know: that there’s nothing worse you can do to a woman than leave the room. Isabelle looks like someone just took food out of her mouth.
“Go with him,” Odette says. “Go,” she repeats. “Don’t be foolish.”
But Isabelle just stands in the middle of the floor, arms limp at her sides, a puzzled expression on her face. Maybe she thinks it’s a trick.
“We’ll take care of everything,” Odette coaxes, and all of a sudden, as if she’d uttered a magic word, Isabelle blinks.
“I don’t want to lose my children,” she says.
“Of course you don’t. Go with him. Everything will be fine.”
“It’s not good for a woman, all this stress,” Yolande pipes in, but Odette silences her with a gesture.
“Go ahead,” I say. “You can trust us.”
“Yes, I can, can’t I?” Isabelle says, already making for the door. Her footsteps sound on the stairs and, presently, muffled voices reach us from her bedroom above. They’ll probably just have sex again; it’s the way they’ve always worked things out. From outside we hear laughter and the sound of little feet running. The girls burst in all sandy and sticky, followed by Jim and Yves laden with towels and buckets and, Sophie announces excitedly, a whole net-ful of SEA URCHINS!
“Aren’t you clever!” Lucy exclaims. “We’ll have them for lunch.”
“YUCK!” the girls scream. Yves whispers something in Agnes’s ear. She scowls and moves forward, her hand balled into a fist. When she reaches Lucy, she opens it. Lying in her palm is a smooth green pebble.
“For you,” she says in her odd, toneless voice.
Lucy’s eyes widen. “Oh, sweetheart, it’s beautiful….” She reaches out her hand, gingerly, as if she were afraid to scare her away. Agnes squints with concentration, then, with a slow, precise movement, picks the stone up and gives it to Lucy.
“Oh, Yves,” Lucy murmurs, her eyes filling with tears.
“Non,” he says. “It was her idea.”
Yolande clears her throat. “About our little business …”
“You can have the money,” I say.
“Now, wait a minute—” Jane objects.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Marge expostulates, half rising from her seat.
I turn to them. “Look, the only thing that strikes me as clear in this whole mess is that it isn’t ours.”
Yolande presses her lips into a smile. “I always knew you were a sensible girl, Constance.”
“I believe we ought to have a voice in this too,” Jane says.
“Okay,” I say, “let’s say we keep the money. Do you think this Mr. Woland, if he exists, is just going to throw up his hands and take a loss? And what about the countess, and Eddie?”
“Frankly, I don’t see why we should trust her,” Jane says. Yolande looks like she’s going to take exception to this, but evidently decides it would be more productive to keep her mouth shut. She rearranges her expression into one of wounded dignity. Marge rolls her eyes.
“I don’t trust her, either,” I say, “but I feel even less like dealing with Lupa Romesco and whatever other characters she’s in bed with. Let Yolande duke it out with her.”
“I still think we could put the money to better use,” Jane insists with a glance at Marge, who makes a noncommittal snorting sound.
“Well,” I say, “I’m out. And keep in mind: Whatever you decide, you need both my signature and Isabelle’s.”
“Do you mean that Daddy only put your names on the account?” Lucy blurts out.
“Yes.”
“Lucy,” Jane snaps, “it’s time you took your head out of the sand. Ross was a shit. He lied and stole and cheated. He took advantage of us and anybody else who ever crossed his path. Frankly, he’s better off dead.”
Yolande’s mouth opens and shuts like a fish. Lucy weighs the little green stone in her palm. “I know,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good father.”
“How little you understand him, Jane,” Odette says quietly. I’d forgotten she was in the room. Jim, who took the place vacated by Jiri, squeezes her hand, but she brushes him off. “Ross was like most people: He had good and bad sides. One does not cancel the other.”
“Typically French attitude,” Marge remarks. “That’s how they got off the hook for Vichy.”
“Save it Marge, will you?” I say.
She shrugs. “Sorry, Odette, cheap shot.”
“It’s nothing,” Odette says wearily.
“Why can’t we just pretend we never found the money,” Lucy cries. “It’s not like any of us need it!”
“Speak for yourself,” Yolande says.
“I’m serious, it’s like the tree falling in the woods—”
“She’s right, you know,” Marge says.
“Let Yolande have it if she wants it so badly!” Lucy continues, heated up now.
Yolande raises her hand as if to object, then catches herself. “Quand même …”
“I vote with Lucy,” Odette says.
“So do I,” I say.
“Well,” Jane allows after a pause, “I suppose you’re right. I still don’t trust her, but—”
“And what about your sister?” Yolande asks, a bit too hastily.
“I’ll deal with Isabelle,” I say—though, judging from the sounds that are coming through the ceiling, Isabelle right now has other things on her mind.
CHAPTER forty-four
I was bound to run into Philippe eventually; what I didn’t expect was that he would seek me out. He’s lying in wait when I head out for a run the next morning, the thrum of heat already in the air. Of course, I think, he gets up early. Now he stands before me and I’m having the dumbest thoughts, such as Did they have sex last night?
“It’s not what you think,” he says.
“Come on, you can do better than that,” I say harshly.
“It’s complicated,” he says.
“I know, you never actually said divorced.”
He holds his hand out, an honest man trying his best. “Will you at least believe that I was not expecting her?”
“What’s her name?” I ask.
“Fabienne.”
“Fabienne.” It sounds so sweet and old-fashioned.
“It doesn’t suit her, does it?” he says with a smile, but I won’t be bought so cheap.
“She’s very beautiful.” I say. “I can see why you married her.”
“Oh, Constance …” He reaches for my arm and I step back, banging my head into the Perettis’ wall. “Are you all right?”
I laugh. “I’m fine.”
“I thought you of all people would understand,” he says in a sad voice.
“Sure, your wife showed up: That really sucks.”
He reaches for me again and, backed up a
s I am against the wall, I can’t really shrug him off. “Look at me,” he wheedles.
All of a sudden I understand: It doesn’t have to end! Of course it’s complicated, but life is complicated, and we’re all adults, aren’t we? I am momentarily so seduced by the elegance of this logic that I almost let myself step forward, until he says, “She’ll only be here for a week,” and I see that it’s not the first time he’s done this.
“We have an arrangement,” he adds.
I laugh out loud. His eyes cloud with hurt.
“Is that what you used to say to your students?”
He gazes at me with disappointment. “Perhaps it was too much to expect you to understand.”
“Do you think I’m a moron?”
His eyes grow cold now. “I am sorry if I have hurt you.”
He turns to leave and I think, Sure, I’ll let you have that. It’s funny how you’re afraid you might cry and instead you just feel empty. I watch him walk away with a sort of detached curiosity, like a figure in a movie, and I ask myself once again if there’s something wrong with me, some genetic crimp that makes me unable to feel the way I ought to. I’m still pondering this when I feel a light tap on my arm. Lucy.
“I thought he might not be very nice,” she says.
“He’s not,” I say.
“Best to find out now, you know. You might have married him.”
“Not likely: His wife turned up.”
“Oh, is that who that woman was…. Terribly smart, isn’t she? I wonder how French women do it—you know, look intimidating in jeans.”
“Lucy, has anyone ever told you how peculiar you are?”
She grins. “Oh yes, Richard was always going on about it. Yves, on the other hand, finds me quite normal—isn’t that interesting?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“That’s all right; it can actually work to one’s advantage, being perceived as a mental case. Poor Richard … Do you know he’s run off with Albertine?”
“I heard.”
“You don’t need to look embarrassed: I really don’t care. In a way they’re perfect for each other: grim and ghoulish and desperate for attention….” She laughs. “I don’t really mean that—she’s a sad sack, but so’s Richard. Maybe he’ll be nicer to her. She won’t intimidate him the way I did.”
“I’m surprised you realize that,” I say.
She shrugs. “I’m not stupid, it’s just that you can’t see as well from the inside, know what I mean?”
“Totally.”
“For instance, you’re sad, but you’ll get over it.”
“I’m not sure I can take all this wisdom right now, Lucy,” I say wearily.
“Oh, sorry. Anyway, I think you did the right thing, about the money. That’s what I really wanted to tell you. Let Yolande deal with it, the nasty old trout….” She makes a mock shudder.
“It’s not quite in the bag yet: I haven’t talked to Isabelle. Last time I checked, they still hadn’t come out of the bedroom.”
Lucy giggles. “I always thought Jiri would be sort of fabulous in bed, didn’t you?”
I stare at her. “Lucy, are you sure someone didn’t put something in your orange juice?”
“Oh, Constance, don’t be such a prude,” she says airily. “You know, it’s awful to say this, but I feel so happy—I feel like everything is going to work out. Are you going to take Jim back?”
I look at her with amazement. “In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s moved on.”
“Oh, Odette doesn’t want him…. I think he amused her at first, but now she’s wondering how to get out of it. It’s one thing to have a fling on vacation, but what on earth would she do with him in Paris?”
“Oh, well, no problem, I guess I’ll just take him back, then.”
“Think of it as his sentimental education,” Lucy says, “like Julien Sorel.”
“Doesn’t he get decapitated?”
“Only at the end—the French are so bloody-minded, aren’t they?”
“I guess you’d know,” I tease. She blushes a rosy pink. I never noticed she had freckles, a little pale dusting of them across her nose. Is it possible that Lucy has been out in the sun unprotected?
“Isn’t it awful? I actually caught myself thinking the other day that it’s a good thing Agnes is a bit slow: Maybe she won’t notice what a slut I’m being….” She titters a bit uncertainly.
“Lucy, you are not a slut. You and Richard were a disaster together.”
“I know, but he’s such a good father….”
“Where have I heard that before?”
She giggles again. “It sounds silly, but Yves just makes me so happy. He’s sweet, and thoughtful, and considerate—”
“And he restores furniture.”
“Yes, he does.” Her brow clouds. “Don’t think I haven’t wondered, if I’m pathetic enough to fall for the first person who’s nice to me …” She brightens up. “But we really do have so much in common: We like the same things. Everything was always such a struggle with Richard; he was so angry all the time, and I was too. I’m afraid we brought out the absolute worst in each other.” She fixes her big blue eyes intently on me. “But you see, I’ve always been good at ignoring things that don’t suit me. It’s how I cope.”
“I think I understand.”
“Or how I used to cope, anyway. This is going to sound crazy, but I’ve come to realize that I’ve spent huge swaths of my life as a spectator of myself. You know, you’re standing there wondering, Oh, who’s that dreadful person freaking out? —and it’s you, but it doesn’t altogether register because you’re just watching. It’s like when Elec—Agnes was a baby, I knew that something was wrong, but it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t my daughter, she was the child of this curious out-of-control woman I was observing. … When Mum sees her, she gets this Oh dear, she can’t possibly be related to us look—which she covers up immediately, of course, but it’s there, always, that tinge of dismay, and the scary thing is that I understand, I don’t despise her for it: Mother love isn’t automatic, it’s not like someone flips a switch inside you. You have to work at it just like anything else, and Elec—oh hell, Agnes, I mean—doesn’t exactly make it easy. She’s not pretty like Sophie and Olga, and she can be quite rude. And she’s fat, and there’s something wrong with her brain—nobody really knows what, I’ve been to every specialist in England; the best they can come up with is that she’s somewhere along the autistic continuum—isn’t that a stupid expression? And yet, I do love her—it hasn’t come easily, but perhaps it’s the stronger for that. Do you know how I was dreading this vacation? I was terrified the girls would be mean to her—they’re not babies anymore, and nothing escapes them. But look how they’ve accepted her: They think she’s the most fab thing they’ve ever met! So if she really wants to be called Agnes, well, so be it—it probably does suit her better. I find that I quite respect her spunk actually…. Oh, Constance, don’t look so sad.”
“I am sad,” I say helplessly.
She rushes forward and folds her arms around me. It’s such an unfamiliar sensation that we sort of butt against each other, like storks, and then all the parts lock together and I realize with a shock that I’m crying, which I don’t think I’ve done since I was five years old. Lucy makes a clucking sound: “Sshhhh, just let go….”
When I look up, Madame Peretti is standing there, hose in hand, watching us—not in an unfriendly way, just perplexed, as if for a second she couldn’t quite place us. The water comes on, and with a brisk nod she turns and aims the jet at her patio. A tingling chlorine smell rises, wiping out the scent of Robusta that had just begun to insinuate itself into the air.
“Bleach and coffee,” Lucy says dreamily. “The smell of a Santerran morning.” And all of a sudden something clears inside me, or maybe I just feel dizzy, and I believe that it’s true, that love can change you.
CHAPTER forty-five
The summer I turned twelve, we went to Mallor
ca. Ross’s divorce from Daphne was just about to go through, and I think it was his way of making amends. Lucy was already at Harvard, but Jane, who was only fourteen, would be going back to London with Daphne. She was miserable about it. She’d gotten used to New York and American schools, and she felt like her whole life was being turned upside down. I didn’t care about Daphne leaving—I never could quite shake the feeling that she couldn’t remember my name—but I hated her for taking Jane away, which seemed all the more cruel since Lucy was her favorite. The only consolation was that we would spend the summers together, beginning with this one, family togetherness being something Ross set deep store by, as strange as that may seem in one who changed wives so often. Isabelle was even going to fly in from Prague, minus Jiri, who was afraid they wouldn’t let him back into the country.
When Ross did things, he did them with flair. Our hotel, a sixteenth-century palace that had once belonged to an Austrian archduke, sat high up in the Tramontana Mountains north of Palma, far from the beachfront high rises of Lucy’s nightmares but equipped with a limpid swimming pool that overlooked the sea. Years later, when we first came to Borgolano, I was reminded of Mallorca, not only because of the rugged topography—though Santerre is even more forbidding—but by the resinous scent of the air that I breathed the first night from the balcony of the room I shared with Jane. She’d just found out that she’d be going to boarding school in the fall, another incomprehensible twist in Daphne’s logic, and was apprehensive about it—though, as she confessed to me, she thought it would be more fun than living with Daphne in London. I never really understood the loyalty that caused Jane to feel guilty about not liking her mother. Maybe, having only known a stepmother, I was just incapable of that kind of attachment.
Jane had been assigned a load of books to read over the summer—I guess they were afraid her brain had been addled by American education—one of which was the Odyssey. It sounded boring as hell but, out of sympathy, I offered to read it to her out loud, which I thought would make it go faster. In the end we decided to take turns. Every night, as we lay on our beds waiting for dinner, one of us would pick it up and tackle a few pages. At first the corny verbosity made us giggle, the way Homer couldn’t just say The sun rose but always went on about young dawn with her rose-red fingers, and never introduced a character without listing all his relatives and ancestors, but after a while, I found myself looking forward to it. Perched on our rocky crag, it was easy to picture Odysseus and his men plying the very waters that fanned out blue and endless from our window, longing for home even as they kept ruining their chances of ever getting there by bringing upon themselves the wrath of the gods.
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