The Charmers: A Novel(16)

Interesting, he thought, rechecking the number on the plate, which he had punched into his iPhone. He’d soon find out who that was, and what the Russian was up to.





12

Verity

Verity thought it was weird how fate took over and simply put you on a path, quite different from the one you’d expected to follow, meaning for her an angry divorce—a fight over money and a house, the stinging loss of love that had meant so much to her and so little to him. His name was Rancho.

“Like, Rancho?” she’d exclaimed, disbelieving, when he introduced himself at, of all places, a local horse event.

He was the most exotic creature she had ever met: Argentinian, he said, sitting astride a glossy little polo pony with too-thin ankles that did not look strong enough to carry his weight, yet which careened up and down the field in a whirlwind of hooves and clumps of turned-up sod, while he leaned dangerously from the saddle whacking at a minute ball with a mallet, which is what she found out they call the stick they hit the ball with in polo, a game that had never previously interested her. And boy, he did it well. And my, he looked good doing it.

It took only two months for there to be a wedding of sorts; not the floating-down-the-aisle event Verity had somehow always imagined in her future, but a runaway register-office affair in London, with only the cleaning lady and a passing delivery man for witnesses. As weddings go, it was about as anonymous as you can get. And after the first few hectic nights, all sex and wine, and sex and food, and sex and long walks in St. James Park, which was right next to the Ritz where they were staying—on her credit card as she later found out—she realized she bored him. Especially after he escorted her to her bank and asked her to withdraw her savings, which she did, then passed over to him. A couple of thousand was all, because she was not the trust-fund baby he’d believed. It was her birthday money from over the years—it added up by the time you got to your midtwenties, which is when godparents started to give up on you, thinking you were old enough to take care of yourself. And she was, just about, until she married him. Finally, she just bolted. Took off like the young polo ponies he loved more than her. In her rush to get out, to never see him again, she’d stupidly left whatever was in the bank, and her jewelry.

And now what? She had just survived a hair-raising, death-defying ride to a temporary stopover in a place she had never been before yet somehow knew, with a woman she did not know, and a future that was indecipherable from where she was sitting, gazing awestruck at the pink-stucco villa and the gardens with the low-clipped hedges enclosing flower beds heavy with the scent of jasmine, far better than any manufactured perfume. And the sky an endless blue. And a maniac on a Ducati Monster somewhere out there who had tried to kill them. Or tried to kill the woman whose car it was, whose house this was.

She turned to look at her. “Who the hell are you, really, anyway?” she asked. “And why do you wear those silly crochet gloves?”

Mirabella

Though I was not about to tell Verity, there is, of course, a valid reason I wear the gloves, crochet in summer, or in colder months, very soft, supple leather ones in various colors, sometimes even red because what the hell, if I have to wear them, why not make them gorgeous? And you are right, the crochet gloves are not gorgeous but they are cool on these warm days in the South of France. As I said, a neighbor makes them for me. She’s in her early nineties now and can barely see the crochet hook and the fine cotton she fashions them from, but she says cheerfully it’s all instinct by now anyway. “No need to look, my fingers just keep on doing it,” she explains, making me laugh. So of course I have a handy stack of them in my new home, in all colors and weights of thread, even cashmere, stashed in the third drawer of the bedroom chest on top of a pile of old love letters I still have not had the heart to get rid of. I’ve always believed that when love walks out then so should the memento mori—the now-dead love letters and the small, once-sweetly-thought-of gifts, the withered roses and old memories—but when it came time, I could never do it. I simply took them with me. Still, as I said, I was mostly instrumental in having the lovers leave. I was never cruel or even unkind. “Listen babe,” I’d say. “I reckon it’s time to move on. We had such fun, didn’t we?”

This was not always greeted with smiling acceptance, as you can imagine. Quite a lot of bad words were flung my way, along with the withered bunches of roses, but I kept my head, and my heart, and tried to move on without too much hurt going down between us, the feuding parties, the ex-lovers, the thank-God-never-marrieds. And I never, in my entire life, ever took another woman’s husband; not that the opportunity did not present itself, but I had enough responsibility keeping my own life together without taking on somebody else’s problem. And they were problems better kept away from.

So, now, here I am, forty-two years old and the new owner of this gorgeous villa overlooking the Mediterranean, bluer, as I said, than my eyes on a good day, and gray as the wind on a day when the mistral blows everything to bits. And also, to my surprise, “mother hen” you might call me, to a small canary bird, yellower than twenty-carat gold, named Sing.

Now, I’ve never been one for pets, never been one for owning a big house either, and certainly never owner of a Siamese cat like the one called Ming that seems to think it owns this villa and which has blue eyes and cream fur and chocolate-brown ear tips and tail, and on whose head the yellow canary perches to sing its song. To complete this nutty inherited household is the long rust-brown dog, obviously some remote relation of a dachshund with a lot of beagle thrown in, and that answers to the name of JonJon or to a piercing whistle. Now, never having learned the art as Lauren Bacall so succinctly put it in that old movie, of just putting your lips together and blowing, I bought a small silver whistle that hangs around my neck on a blue cord and nearly strangles me when I forget about it, but is useful for summoning JonJon, who I’ve refused to call by that ridiculous name and is now known as Sossy. Because he’s a “saucy little bugger,” you see. The word is the only one that fits his mercurial temperament. Oh, but he makes me laugh, and when the canary sings, she makes me smile, and when the cat slinks under my feet and gives me an affectionate little head-butt, I realize how empty my life was before them, and how fortunate I am to have inherited this small family, along with the big house. If it was the wonderful Jerusha that first brought the ancestors of these small creatures home to the Villa Romantica, then I owe her more than I can say.