Invitation to Provence(20)
She took Rufus with her on her next visit to the chateau, and the two of them occupied the big room in the East Tower, hardly venturing out except when hunger became too much or Rafaella sent Haigh up to complain that she needed company.
Juliette smiled, remembering how she and Rufus had glowed pink from their exertions. Their eyes had sent secret sexual messages, and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Love and sex had permeated the very air around them.
Then one day her husband showed up and there was a wham-bam knock-down, drag-out fight, with the husband confronting her with her indiscretions and she confronting him with his longtime mistress. Fortunately, Rafaella had managed to push Juliette out of the way before she could brain her husband with a raised wine bottle. “It’s a good vintage, chérie” Rafaella protested. “At least if you are going to hit him, do it with a table wine.” Then she’d sent Rufus out of the room and sat Juliette and the husband opposite each other. Because they were Catholic and divorce was out of the question, she’d brokered an almost-amicable separation with the appropriate financial settlement.
Meanwhile, Juliette and her children had moved in with Rafaella and her children. Rufus was a professional army man, as his father and his grandfather had been, but he was at the chateau as often as he got leave from his regiment. So, with Rafaella’s own long-abandoned husband permanently living in Paris, they had become one big, happy extended family at the chateau, with parties for the little ones as well as the grown-ups, and long, lazy summer days spent at the seaside villa at Cap d’Antibes with a myriad of friends to join in the fun.
Later, after her husband died, Juliette had finally married Rufus, daringly wearing white, with Rafaella as matron of honor, splendid as always in the red Dior chiffon. Juliette had followed Rufus around the world on his army postings, and they were never apart until the day he died ten years ago, breaking her heart forever.
Ever since then, the East Tower room had been known as Juliette’s room. “I wonder if Rafaella has forgotten that,” Juliette said to herself now. “If so, then I’m about to remind her!” And she laughed a great, booming, jolly laugh. “Oh, the times we had,” she said, delighted. “And now just think, it will happen all over again. In fact, it’ll be quite the little Agatha Christie mystery, with everyone gathered at the big country house for a grand reunion, except this time they’ll know for sure the butler didn’t do it.” She laughed again, thinking of Haigh, with his stiff upper lip, in the role of the killer. Still, she had wondered about the murder in the past, and if the killer was really Felix? Or was it Alain?
She picked up the phone and, regardless of the six-hour time difference, dialed the chateau’s number, which she remembered clearly even after all these years.
Haigh answered, and when she said who it was, he said of course he knew it was her, nobody else ever called in the middle of the night and nobody else talked that loud, either. Then he put Rafaella on.
“Are you coming then?” Rafaella said, just as though they had seen each other last week.
“Of course I’m coming. You can’t have a grand family reunion without me,” Juliette said, grinning. She heard Rafaella’s sigh of relief and added, “But I want my old room back, the one in the East Tower with the view of the lake, and you’d better have Haigh ice the good champagne and not try to palm me off with the nonvintage.”
And Rafaella laughed and then their voices dropped into the soft, intimate tones of women friends who have a lot to talk over. Which they did for a couple of hours, despite the cost.
13
FELIX MARTIN INHABITED the forty-fourth floor of the great glass-and-steel office tower that dominated the Hong Kong skyline. If you were crossing the choppy bay on the little Star Ferry that chugged back and forth between Kowloon and Central, the setting sun that glinted off all that bronze glass almost blinded you. But inside, of course, all was cool and there was no glare, only a muted bronze silence.
Felix wondered about that. How could silence be bronze? Still, it seemed tangible, a combination of light and the absence of sound. Everyone was gone for the night, and he was alone with only the dim whirr of the air-conditioning and the soft buzz of the bank of computers beating out the pulse of the world’s race for more money on the global stock markets. The computers flickered with a faint green glow, the tan leather sofas were hard-cushioned and uninviting for lounging, the steel lamps were sharp and angular and the light they cast was too dim to read by.
Who the hell had he paid to decorate this place, anyhow? Felix wondered, staring out at the ferries and at the hurrying businessmen, small as ants below, on their way to the Tycoon Bar at the Mandarin Oriental for an evening drink to loosen up after the stresses of the day. Soon they would head home to face a new set of stresses—their wives who complained they didn’t see enough of them, small children who tore up the peace and calm of the household, sullen teenagers who demanded more and more “things” they absolutely “needed.”
Felix did not have a wife, though there had been two possibilities in his earlier years, both of whom had followed the same “wife path” he’d described above. Except for one, the women he’d known had always wanted more. Grander houses, more designer clothes, bigger jewels. What they’d really wanted was more of him. They’d scrunched his soul until it felt so tight he’d wanted to kill them. And that was the end of any thoughts of marriage for him.