One Way or Another(37)

“Well?” Ahmet was standing beside her, arms folded over his chest, watching her, an amused smile on his lips.

“Well, indeed!” Martha repeated, shaking her head.

“It’s worse than you thought, then?”

She had to laugh at his earnestness. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mr. Ghulbian.”

“Ahmet, please.”

“Ahmet, sir.” She suddenly did not quite know what to call her client. “But whoever did this spent a lot of money and very little time, and had absolutely no taste.”

Ahmet roared with sudden laughter and she swung round to look at him. Instead of being pissed off that she had dismissed his entire home as rubbish, he seemed to think it the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“Bloody hell,” he exclaimed through his laughter, “as you English would say, you do not mince words, woman.”

“I have found that a waste of time. A client hires me for my experience and my reputation, and my good taste. Whomever you took on to do this cheated you and I’m sorry because it obviously cost a lot of money. Far more,” she added, looking more carefully, taking in with her experienced eye the proportions, the ceiling height, the depth of the windows, “far more than I will charge you.” She turned to look at him again. “That is, if you hire me. I warn you, though it won’t be what you paid before, it still won’t be cheap.”

“Cheap is not what I’m after, Miss Patron.” Ahmet threw out his hands. “Oh, hell, I’m going to call you Martha. I think we are going to get to know each other very well, and I can’t keep up this formal business, calling you Miss Patron every time I get you on the phone. But anyhow, sometimes you get ‘cheap’ when you’ve paid a lot for it. That’s unfortunately what I got.”

“I’ll clear it all out, send it to the auction house, see you get fair value, though I’m not guaranteeing you’ll get what you paid.” She knew Ahmet had been overcharged, that was what happened to very rich people who somehow never seemed to know the true value of anything much, other than in a business deal, buying and selling property, shares, boats, Caribbean islands … then, they were on top. She did wonder, though, about the beautiful, creepy Mehitabel. Surely it was one of her jobs to keep checks on her employer’s purchases, see that he was billed what had been agreed, make sure he got receipts for the taxman.

“What I’m going to do is come back here with my assistant and measure every room in the house, every passageway and corridor and kitchen alcove. We may end up doing quite a bit of restructuring, Ahmet.” She threw in his name with a smile. He gave her that too-intimate smile back and, embarrassed, Martha turned away, adjusting her scarf so it floated over her breasts, over the sweater. Her jeans were tucked into flat black boots and she carried her coat, the waxed green English three-quarter-length jacket known as a Barbour, always seen at country events, or now even on London’s Knightsbridge. It had become ubiquitous, fitted all occasions, rain or shine, and that’s what a trip to the countryside always involved. Rain or shine.

Today she was lucky and had gotten the shine, something she thanked God for because in this low-slung land, under the looming clouds, this house needed all the help it could get.

“Tell me, Ahmet,” she said as he walked her back to the car. “What made you choose this part of the world? Was it simply the house? Or…” she flung out her arms, “do you like all this marsh?”

Ahmet was silent for a moment, thinking about it.

“Well,” he said finally, “since the house was already here, I obviously was not the first to find the place interesting. Exciting too, in a way. All this beautiful flat green meadowland—marshland really—it looks like one long, giant front lawn leading to the river, which you can just see from here, that glittering brown stripe across the horizon. To me, it has a unique beauty. I doubt you can find terrain like this anywhere else in the world, well, perhaps the Camargue in southeastern France, but still, not quite like this. Not with this … vividness … this remarkable greenness. Your Marco saw it so well, with his painter’s eyes, he understood why I’d fallen for the place. It’s the silence too, Marco said to me. And yes, he is right. Tell me, what do you hear, Martha? Only the sigh of the wind, the idle ripple of the water, the occasional flutter of wings, a heron in flight. There’s no roar of suburban trains in the distance, no flights low overhead, no autoroutes spewing fumes. No, oh no. All we have here is pure nature. And that is why I love it.”

His heartfelt speech took Martha’s breath away. “You did what you had to,” she agreed. “And now I shall do my best to make it even more perfect for you.”

Ahmet took her hand, bowing over it as she stepped into her car. “I am honored,” he told her. And it was true, he was.

He called after her as she took off. “Will you have an assistant then?”

“My sister, Lucy,” she flung over her shoulder with a goodbye wave.

Ahmet was smiling as he went back inside his house and shut the door.

Martha knew exactly what to do with Marshmallows: she would do a Syrie Maugham. Syrie was not only the wife of the famous author, Somerset Maugham, she was also a renowned interior designer of her era, one who’d created a new, modern look, away from the heavy old pieces and the dark beams, the red wallpapers that still reflected Victorian times. Syrie transformed houses with pale walls, infused them with white and light, with soft silken drapes and linen sofas, pale rugs and white-stained wooden floors, pleated lampshades lined with gold that cast a special glow, everything geared to make a woman look more beautiful in gentle light and soft colors.