A Rather Curious Engagement (23 page)

At this point, she turned to look at me directly for the first and only time on this visit, and she widened her eyes when she said, “You’ve been
so
nice. I’d like to offer you my services to redecorate your villa in Antibes—for
free
,” she declared, grasping my forearm with her long-nailed hand. “Bertie and I just drove over there today, and already I have so many great ideas! You won’t believe how terrific we can make that place look—and when we’re done, I can arrange to have my friend, who edits a decorating magazine, come down and shoot the whole villa for a multiple-page spread in her magazine, you know, ‘a makeover for your second home on the Riviera!’ It will be great publicity, and it could help my new business really take off! And your villa will be the talk of the Riviera. Won’t that be
fun
?”

She said all this girl-to-girl, as if we were old sorority sisters or something. But even though most of her face was smiling widely, her eyes were hard and cold, so angry, in fact, that I fought off the urge to shrink from her. And suddenly, the thought that she had, this very day, gone traipsing around Great-Aunt Penelope’s villa, freely poking her nose in all the rooms because the distracted workmen wouldn’t know enough to stop her as she went about plotting with her mental measuring tape . . . well, it made my blood run cold. Something fierce and protective rose up in me, some instinct I didn’t even know I had, when it came to defending, not only Aunt Pen’s memory, but the legacy she’d given to me and Jeremy, and the sweet future we were trying to carve out for ourselves.

I said firmly, “Thanks very much, but we have already hired someone else.”

“Oh, you can always tell ‘whoever’ that you’ve had a change of heart. Think it over,” Lydia said, to Jeremy, not me.

I shot a warning look at Jeremy, as if to say,
There is no way in high heaven that I will let this broad get her mitts on my Great-Aunt’s villa, you can take that to the bank
.

And Jeremy gave me an imploring look, as if to say,
Whatever we do, please let’s not have a scene, I know these people are jackasses but they’re old friends and well-connected so if we ever show our faces in London again we may need them someday
.

And my face said,
Then that makes this your party, Bub. Get them out of here.

Mercifully, Bertie’s slightly fogged-out brain cleared a little as he remembered something, looked at his watch and said, “Hang on. We’re going to miss our plane if we don’t skedattle.”

“How long have you been down here?” Jeremy asked.

“Took a long weekend,” Bertie said. From the look on his face, and Jeremy’s, I could tell that we all simultaneously realized that Lydia had deliberately dragged him all around the coast looking for Jeremy. Thankfully we’d been at Lake Como.

Lydia turned to Jeremy now and said, “Darling, Bertie is having a great big party in London next week to celebrate, and you know how much he adores you, and now that we’re all dear friends again, and everyone’s finally happy ever after, you
must
come! Bertie will call and give you all the details!”

“Right,” Bertie said, unexpectedly serious with Jeremy. “You’ve got to come. No more excuses. I’ll telephone you straight away, once I have all the particulars.” And they all hugged one another, and then Lydia went tripping off with Bertie into their Rover, which roared away, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.

I just stared at Jeremy.

“What? What?” he said defensively. “I didn’t promise them anything. And I never gave her our address down here, nor the harbor where we were, nothing. I don’t know how she tracked us down. Unless, I suppose, she got Bertie to do it. I mean, Rupert knows him, so . . . But, look on the bright side,” he said cheerfully. “At least I’m off the hook! She’s finally found a husband who wants to watch over her. He really does. And Bertie’s always wanted to meet you, so you ought to see him when he’s less—er—celebratory.”

Jeremy looked unmistakably fond of his school chum when he said, “Bertie was a good friend, he really was. We lost touch socially, because, well, his wife didn’t really care for Lydia.”

That I could believe. But I said nothing. I supposed that Lydia could have read, online, about the christening of our yacht in that boaters’ gazette.

“Bertie and I got each other through university, and he’s one person I’ve always known I could really count on, even though we used to compete over girls in our school days,” Jeremy explained.

“Oh,
bingo
!” I said wearily. “Well, I have to hand it to Lydia, she knew just which cards to play, and which buttons to push.”

Jeremy, intelligent man that he is, actually looked genuinely bewildered. “What are you on about?” he asked. “Did it ever occur to you that you can sometimes be wrong? For instance, you thought Lydia was after me! See how mistaken you were?”

“Piffle,” I said. “Did it ever occur to
you
,” I went on to explain with infinite patience, “that Lydia is trying to make you jealous by evoking your old rivalry with Bertie over girls?”

Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

“In any case, you owe me a nickel,” I said. At his blank look, I said, “The Sincerity Test I told you about when we left London. Remember our bet? I said that if Lydia was really trying to start anew, she’d stay put in her nice new apartment, soberly assess her life, and get on with it. But if she was after you, then she wouldn’t be able to stand being in London when you weren’t there. She even found an excuse to come chasing after you in the Riviera and check out your boat. And she snooped around our villa! Damn it, Jeremy! She might have been trying to assess your inheritance to figure out what you’re worth.”

“She’s had that one all figured out, ages ago,” Jeremy protested, “and Bertie is a fine catch, believe me. He stands to inherit a great deal, and he’s already made millions.”

“Nevertheless,” I continued, undaunted, “I do NOT want that woman dogging our path down here for months on end with her brilliant ideas to make the villa look like some horrible magazine spread. And, I might add, the last thing we need right now is publicity. Showing the whole world—all those crazy people who want to sell us things or want us to pay for their kids’ college tuition— exactly where we live and what we’ve got. Including whoever it was who vandalized the boat—I mean, suppose there were really drugs hidden in that Lion and smuggled onto the yacht? Happens all the time. If they couldn’t find it, they might think we’ve got it stashed at the villa. And Lydia will give them a road map straight to us.”

“Hold it right there,” Jeremy said, sounding annoyed now. “Before you go off the deep end with drug smugglers and axe-murderers.”

“All I’m saying is, we need our privacy, and we can decorate our own home, ourselves, thank-you-very-much,” I said hotly.

“Really, Penny, I thought you were bigger than all this silly female competitive stuff,” Jeremy said, annoyed.

Now, no woman in love wants to hear even the tiniest bit of disillusionment in her man’s voice, particularly when he’s just had his ex-wife hanging about with her arms around his neck. But I was feeling a tad let down, too.

“Well,
I
thought I’d found the one man on earth who was above being duped by manipulative women like Lydia,” I retorted. "And P.S., I am not competing with her. She is competing with me! There’s a world of difference . . .”

“Penny,” Jeremy said slowly, “I don’t care a hoot about having Lydia decorate the villa. I frankly think she’ll forget all about it when she gets back to London, because she’s got a rather short attention span.”

“Hah!” I said darkly. “She won’t forget.”

“If she persists,” Jeremy said, “you can tell her again that you don’t want it. I leave it to you. Only, please, do it with dignity. Above all, I don’t want to quarrel with her—or you—anymore. It’s not about an ex-wife. It’s about Bertie. One has to be careful with friends, especially when you don’t like their choice of spouse. Once the women get catty with each other, things can get very ugly very fast. Everybody starts trading insults, and the resentments can fester for years and years. And I don’t want to be put in the position where I can never talk to Bertie again. I like Bertie. I’ve missed him. And life is too damned short to forget about your friends. I know he’s an ass sometimes, but so is everybody. Including me.”

“No, you’re not,” I said in a small, distressed voice, then amended it with, “except when you let your ex-wife touch you as if you still belong to her.”

I frankly felt, at this point, that Jeremy should have woken up and realized that all I needed was a little reassurance on his part. But he was too upset to notice. He was saying, “You have my permission to tell Lydia to bug off about the decorating, but just don’t do it with ill will. Can we even do it with some grace? Is that possible? ”

I thought I detected a teeny tiny bit of the old class prejudice, as if somehow I’d been raised without his snotty attitude which passed for good breeding.

“Oh, gosh, gee, let me see, I
guess
I can figure out a way to be gracious,” I said, “even though of course it goes against all my principles. Just who do you think raised me, anyway?”

“Good God,” Jeremy said, amused now, “how did this turn into a quarrel about upbringing?” He sighed heavily. “Penny, we don’t have to go to Bertie’s party. This is our summer break, and we’ve got plenty of excuses to beg off. There will be other parties, anyway. But do let’s be careful with people, all right?”

I suddenly got a terrible, awful, rotten vision of what my future could hold. I thought of having to chum around with Bertie and Lydia for the rest of our lives. The curse of a working imagination is that suddenly you can conjure up the most vivid pictures even before you’ve given your mind permission to do so. I saw Lydia in ski-bunny costume, forcing us to go on winter vacations with her. I saw her in a teeny bikini, jumping into
my
pool at the villa. I saw shooting parties in country houses where I’d get stuck with the females while the men went out and hunted poor little foxes and pheasants. And everything, no matter what we’d do, would become a competitive sport: who’s got the bigger car, the better apartment, the trendiest kitchen, the nicer clothes, the prettier figure, the smartest babies, the most sought-after nanny, the richest husband, the sexiest wife.

But I realized that there was a lot I didn’t know about Jeremy’s circle of friends, and, therefore, a few things I didn’t know about him. I loved him enough to want to find out what they were, and to consider that, if he cared about Bertie and his crowd, then there were probably good things I’d overlooked or hadn’t yet discovered about them. I certainly didn’t want to add to his stress, nor make him feel he had to choose.

We drove back to the villa quietly, very quietly, more quietly than ever before. Then Jeremy reached out and squeezed my hand.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Once
Penelope’s Dream
is up and running, and we’re no longer a captive audience sitting there in the harbor, then nobody will be able to find us and we’ll always have a ready-made excuse—as Mum said, we’ll be a moving target. Meanwhile, you and I have gotten ourselves a little assignment. What do you say we get cracking on it?”

The best thing about the next couple of days was that I discovered how much more delightful it was to have a partner in my eccentric career. Until now I’d always done my research alone, working for days, even weeks without talking to a solitary soul, except for the occasional curator or librarian. I don’t know if I started out in life with the personality of a hermit, or if I developed it of necessity, because of my job. Sometimes you think you’re a certain type of personality just because your life circumstances didn’t offer you much choice.

But now, I had Jeremy to commiserate with. We camped out in the living room of the villa, because it was the one room that the workmen were done with. We dragged the furniture off the patio and set ourselves up there. At least we were now wired for highspeed Internet, so we set up our computers and sat, head-to-head, digging up whatever we could that was pertinent to the case. We were so engrossed that we scarcely noticed when it began to rain, until it started coming down in sheets, and the workmen told us they’d have to knock off till it stopped.

Well, to slightly alter a well-used expression, when it rains on the Riviera, it pours. Cats and dogs. And those charming, breathtaking corniche roads that make hairpin turns around the stunning cliffs, suddenly turn into a scary roller coaster. You don’t want to go for a drive anymore. You just want to stock the house with food and coffee and wine, and snuggle under a blanket until the sun comes out again.

And that’s exactly what we did, for several days, sitting there clicking away on our computers. Every now and then one of us would shout out some new information, and print it and put it in a file marked “Lion” or the one marked “Boat.” And, Jeremy kept making jokes. Bad ones, at times. And I kept laughing at them, even though I knew I shouldn’t encourage him. But he was working seriously, too, and at lunchtime we’d take a break and compare notes.

“What have you got?” he’d say briskly, looking up.

I said, “Remember the Count said that some beggar woman had put on a curse on him—as if she’d even caused that storm that made him ill?”

“Of course,” Jeremy said.

“Well,”
I said excitedly, “he may not have been totally bonkers. In Corsica they have these local shamans called
mazzeri
. That’s the plural. It’s ‘mazzer-
u
’ for a guy and ‘mazzer-
a
’ for a woman. Anyway, they conduct their magic at night, in their dreams. During the daytime, they are fairly ordinary citizens, but are known for their strange, hypnotic stare.”

“Like vampires or zombies?” Jeremy asked, fascinated.

“No, not at all. Being one of the
mazzeri
is considered a higher calling.
Mazzeri
could be anybody—the butcher, the baker, the farmer’s wife, the mayor. Ordinary by day; but in the parallel world of dreams, they are ‘spirit-hunters.’ ”