A Rather Curious Engagement (2 page)

We’d been keenly watching the auctioneer deftly manipulate the audience. He was a consummate actor with expert timing— switching seamlessly from joy to sorrow, sympathy to contempt—and he was part-magician, too, for he could bend a moment so that it lasted longer than it should, or he could snap it back like a rubber band. He had only stepped up to the platform about ten items ago, replacing the previous auctioneer just as the crowd was getting used to her, effectively changing horses in midstream, as casinos do with blackjack dealers.

Was this to make sure that no one was cheating? Well, antiques can at times come accompanied by a fair share of shady goings-on. Paintings that aren’t entirely authenticated but “thought to be” a master’s work. Golden goblets being auctioned on behalf of an anonymous collector who’d “found” them in an attic. Cases of venerable old wines that may or may not have been cellared properly; golf clubs studded with emeralds thought to have once belonged to an English earl (what caddy would you trust with that?); and even a baby horse whose lineage was purportedly of good racehorse stock. At the moment, people were bidding on a garish pearl and yellow-diamond brooch set in gold, shaped like a giant bug. After that, there were about ten more items to go—before we got to the big one that Jeremy and I had come here for.

“One million euros!” someone shouted, leapfrogging ahead of the other bidders to make sure nobody beat him to it. I gasped at how high the stakes could easily become.

“One million, going once . . . ?” said the auctioneer. This time, the bidding reps shook their heads in defeat. “Going twice . . . going three times . . .” moaned the auctioneer in ecstasy. Bang! The gavel finally came down with such finality that some people physically jumped in their seats. “SOLD to the man in the third row! Please pay the cashier on your way out.”

I glanced apprehensively at Jeremy, who was waiting patiently, with his usual calm English poise. When we’d first arrived, I had seen more than a few women, both old and young, glance up speculatively at his handsome face with his blue eyes and dark, wavy brown hair; and some of these women actually gave him a wide, inviting smile, which, in his usual preoccupied way, Jeremy failed to notice. He sat quietly, his auction catalog all rolled up in one hand. His bidding paddle—which looked like a table-tennis paddle except that it had a three-digit number on it, indicating that he’d pre-registered to be a bidder—was lying in his lap. Nothing in his manner betrayed his feelings; unless you were in love with him and were learning, day by day, to read the subtle signals in his expressions.

You know you really love a guy when you suddenly feel a little sorry for him for loving
you
so much that he’s now doing something he might not ordinarily do. I felt a bit guilty; I’d pestered and badgered him until I finally got him to tell me the one item in the world he’d actually care to splurge a chunk of his inheritance on.

Jeremy must have felt me looking at him, because he glanced at me and gave me a reassuring smile. The sweet guy. I fervently made a wish that, whatever happened—whether we won or lost—it would turn out to be a good thing, and not a bad thing. I felt a clutch of excitement in my stomach, and my mouth was dry. After all, I’d soon have a dog in this race.

But to understand how a couple of dogs like us ended up on the Riviera ready to bet a flock of euros on a dream, you’d have to know about a few things that happened to us, not so very long ago.

You get a rather odd feeling when you spot something in the newspaper about yourself. The news was always about other people in the world-at-large; now suddenly it’s you that they’re dissecting. Then you actually read the darned thing, and it’s not entirely wrong but it’s definitely not right. It’s a small shock, this aura of unreality, so your mind does something weird, thinking that it must be someone else they’re talking about. You peer at the accompanying photograph. There you are, all right. But if that’s really you in there, well, since you can’t be in two places at once, then maybe you aren’t really here, right? That’s how my mind dealt with it, at first.

This article appeared months ago, as a feature profile in the Money section of a big London newspaper, and it got picked up all around the world, even on some TV news. To this day, it still pops up in a magazine or news bit. And people believe it, too, because if it weren’t true then they wouldn’t print it, right? Humph. Life isn’t all black-and-white.

Let’s start with that headline, for instance. I think it makes me sound like a St. Bernard dog who sniffed out a pot of gold under an avalanche in the Alps, especially with that business about my “digging up” some extremely rare Renaissance art. Yes, I had to do considerable research to find that little painting. Great-Aunt Penelope didn’t leave it out in plain sight. Actually, she hid it in the door of her antique car, and smuggled it out of Italy in the 1940s, so the Nazis wouldn’t get it. But she had all the proper paperwork of ownership. And then, just before she died, fearing that the family “vultures” would get their talons on it, she put it back in its hiding place in her old auto, which was housed in a dilapidated garage at her villa in Antibes; and she wrote a letter which the judge deemed an airtight will, leaving it to me.

You’d never know it, to read the newspaper story. You’d think I’d pulled a fast one and nabbed it away from the French and the English, who think all works of antiquity are best kept in their hands. The English especially harbor the dire expectation that American girls come to London specifically to carry out their dastardly gold-digging, outrageously buccaneering, socially interloping schemes to get their mitts on helpless English bigwigs and their money.

Yes, I work in TV movies, but not as an actress, even with my ridiculously theatrical name. My French/American father couldn’t help giving me that last name, and my English mother blithely named me after her eccentric Aunt Pen. When I was a kid I actually met Great-Aunt Penelope, and she seemed like a marvellous old lady; but it wasn’t until after her death that I found out astonishing things about her. She was indeed a fabulous flapper, although I do believe that Aunt Pen would have objected to the words “consort to some of the biggest names.” She was, er, a mistress to
one
financier, but that was before she met the great love of her life, who died in the second World War, so she never married.

But these tabloid facts just don’t begin to do justice to her personality and life. To read the papers, you’d never know about her warmth, her compassion, her sparkle, and her generous heart, which had room even for her shady nephew, Rollo; and for me, her little namesake; and Jeremy, for whom she had a special affection because he’s a direct descendant of the man she’d loved.

For the record, I didn’t “swoop” or “scoop”—I was formally invited to the reading of the will, to represent my mother. And frankly, her cousin Rollo made out quite all right, inheriting all Aunt Pen’s English bank assets plus lots of fancy, expensive furniture from France. But, Rollo’s mother, Great-Aunt Dorothy (otherwise known as the Head Vulture, and no doubt the “detractor” the news story alluded to) convinced Rollo to contest the will for a bigger share, and he fought dirty.

In the end, however, we all cut a deal: He quit fighting to get more than he was supposed to, and the rest of us didn’t press charges for the shameless shenanigans he pulled—including breaking and entering, theft, and transporting stolen goods across the border, which could have resulted in him being chucked into the Bastille. (The French do not take kindly to the pilfering of priceless art.)

Now, about that “Belgravia bolt hole” I’m living in, technically, my mother was the one who inherited Aunt Pen’s London apartment, but Mom said she “had no use for it” and therefore gave it to me (and if you saw the New York City crackerbox I’d been living in, you’d understand why. Also, my folks are happily ensconced in Connecticut, and they winter in Florida, so nobody will ever convince them to move away and live somewhere else, ever again. They come to Europe once a year to see me.)

It’s astonishingly true that Jeremy and I, together, inherited millions of euros, though, all totalled, it was closer to half the amount the newspaper said we did. Maybe it wasn’t so astonishing for Jeremy, who was pretty much born to be rich—he’s the stepson of Uncle Peter, my mother’s brother, and his mum’s family is quite wealthy, too. Anyway, Aunt Pen left him the villa in Antibes. I got the garage . . . and the car inside the garage . . . and the painting inside the car.

The photograph in the newspaper was snapped on the day I sold the painting to a fine little museum in Italy that I knew would take proper care of it. The photo shows the museum director, an alert-eyed, slightly balding but very dignified man, standing to the right of the beautiful little painting of a Madonna and Child, done by a female student of Leonardo. Yup, da Vinci. To the left of the painting is Jeremy, standing protectively beside me, with just a hint of mistrust in his eyes as he gazes at the photographer. And then there’s me, looking slightly dazed.

I still can’t quite believe it, even now. I keep expecting to wake up back in New York, scraping by as an historical researcher for romantic bio-pics shown on cable-TV movies-of-the-week. I continue to do some consulting for my friends at Pentathlon Productions, but it’s different now. (I can’t be the first to notice that work is more fun when you aren’t threatened with starvation if they fire you.) Sometimes I even have dreams that gremlins or police or my old grammar school principal is chasing after me for impersonating an heiress, telling me I’m now in big trouble and will be punished for it. Yet day by day, waking up in the dramatic big canopied four-poster bed in Great-Aunt Penelope’s London townhouse, I am discovering that this new life of mine is, after all, very real.

Thanks a lot, boys. To this day I still get weird calls in the night from strange men who would love to “share my world” and help me handle all that “cashola.” Jeremy, too, has been constantly buttonholed (over at the watercooler in his law firm) by females who seldom before had reason to talk to him, but, upon hearing of his “windfall”, suddenly announced, abruptly and without prelude, that they wished to “bear his child.” (And these women are law partners. The secretaries just want him to either marry them or else buy them a car.)

Now, as for that ridiculous bit about space tourism, well, believe me, there is just no way that either one of us would blow off any part of the inheritance on a trip to the moon. What happened was, I was sitting in a restaurant minding my own business when some hyper-friendly salesman actually plunked himself in the empty chair opposite me and unceremoniously proceeded to make his pitch to sell me a ticket to the moon. I politely declined, insisting I’d feel claustrophobic in a space capsule, so he bowed, got up and left, and I thought that would be an end to it. Instead, he told the press that I was on his list of upcoming space tourists, and so they printed it. This then opened the floodgates to all manner of salesmen and phony investors. I thought I had junk mail and telemarketing problems before. Phew! My parents still get surprise visits (at dinnertime) from people who claim that they went to school with me (they didn’t) and loaned me money that was never reimbursed (no way).

Money really can do odd things to people, and Jeremy and I are trying to make sure that it doesn’t do strange things to us. Yet, obviously, the games have already begun. In a way, it’s like winning a lottery; if you’re not careful, pretty soon you only know two kinds of people in the world: 1) those who want to take your money away from you, and 2) those who say they want to help you get more money . . . and guess what? More often than not, those two types of people are actually one-in-the-same.

But, much more important than all that finance stuff, I’d like to clear up one other little personal matter in that news story. I don’t care for the insinuations that I’m some kind of homewrecker. Jeremy was divorced long before I came on the scene, and before the inheritance. Also, technically, he’s not my cousin. His stepfather is my Uncle Peter (Mom’s brother) but there’s no blood connection to my family at all. None of us knew this until Great-Aunt Penelope’s will brought the whole thing to light. As kids, Jeremy and I had simply thought of each other as distant relatives, because he lived in England and I grew up in America. The inheritance brought us together as adults, amid wild circumstances that made it necessary for us to team up just to figure it all out. We rode that roller coaster together . . . and discovered how we really felt about each other.