A Rather Curious Engagement (29 page)

“You look
très belle,
Penn-ee,” my father said. Bless ’im. He was wearing a fine grey suit with a nice blue and grey linen shirt and a blue tie; and my mother was in a pretty red dress with matching jacket. They were both so cute and dressed up. Every outing they made, they exulted in, as if just happy enjoying each other’s company.

“Thanks,” I said morosely, trying to pull myself together and resume being a grown-up again. We had gone to a new restaurant with a French/Vietnamese cuisine, and my father kept exhorting me to try different appetizers that he’d ordered.

“Well, you’re right, this is very good,” I grumbled, poking around with my chopsticks. “Jeremy doesn’t know what he’s missing. ”

My father said knowingly, “You have to be patient with young men. They are not so good at explaining their worries to the women they love. They want you to admire their strength.”

“Oh, he told me what he’s worried about, with work,” I said glumly. My father looked at me with gentle humor, as if I were his idiot child who required extra patience.

“Not work, that’s nothing,” he said with a wave of his hand. He put his hand over his heart. “It is what’s in here that he finds hard to tell you. But,” he added with a chuckle, “always remember that you have my French blood in you.”

“Oh?” I asked, intrigued. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I glanced at my mother, and she looked amused but did not contradict him.

“You can charm him whenever you want to,” my father said with utter confidence. “Using lightness and humor.”

While I sat there trying to imagine how a glamorous French woman would handle the situation, the main course arrived in several platters which my father passed around to us. Seeing how distracted I was, my father scooped things up he thought I should try, and deposited them on my plate. It was what he used to do when I was a little girl, and he wanted to teach me the fine art of appreciating well-prepared food.

“It can’t be easy,” my mother said, “meeting your boyfriend’s first wife and all her chums. Don’t get stuck on trying to win their approval. The minute you don’t care, that’s when they’ll give it to you.”

“It’s not that,” I said hesitantly. Now, look. I’m not the kind of girl who calls her mother up every five minutes and tells her the minutiae of my life. In fact, with my own English blood, I’m not much at confiding in others at all. Too embarrassing. So I only said, “It’s just that they have too much influence on him. They make him feel bad for wanting to go out on his own, that’s all. And I think he’s caving in.”

“Really?” my mother asked crisply. “And what have you offered as an alternative?”

I didn’t quite get her point at first. “I can’t
make
him want to stick with our Plan,” I said. “I can’t
make
him want to build our own enterprise. It wouldn’t mean anything if he didn’t decide he wants to do it on his own.”

“Well, I must say, that’s not necessarily the best strategy to take.”

“Strategy?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“My advice is, you have to fight for your man,” she said, “so long as he doesn’t make you do it all the time.”

As her words sank in, I said, “But you didn’t have to fight for Dad . . . did you?”

“Why, of course, darling!” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in all the world. My father, who was refilling our wine-glasses, beamed.

“Wait a minute,” I said in a deadly tone. “All my life you’ve told me that you and Dad fell smack-dab in love from the very moment that you ‘clapped eyes on each other.’ Those were your exact words!”

“That’s right, dear,” my mother said serenely. “Love at first sight is all very well. But it’s second and third and fourth sight where you have to show your mettle.”

“Wha-a-a-at?!” I said, feeling slightly betrayed. These two always acted as if they were perfectly fitted pieces of a puzzle that just automatically clicked together.

“Certainly,” my father said in that low chuckle of his. “Smoothing out the rough edges is half the fun.”

I sat back in my chair. Then, in a more hushed, awed tone, I said, “So what should I actually do?”

“Well, darling, I really couldn’t say,” my mother began with her usual disclaimer, “but if it were me, I certainly wouldn’t hang about waiting for a man to sort out all his problems so he’s the perfect mate. Meanwhile, you can’t put off your dream while waiting for him to do it for you,” she added incredulously. “If you want to start an enterprise, go ahead, but always leave him an open door, and share your enthusiasm with him, so that it’s so contagious that everyone around you just wants to jump aboard. And do listen to what he’s trying to tell you. Otherwise even the best of men might get the wrong idea, and think you didn’t care.”

“Yeah, but sooner or later he has to decide to make a commitment to one thing or the other,” I said crossly.

“Of course. And he will. In any event,” my mother said, “it helps to be pleasant. Life is only worth living when you’ve found people you can be pleasant with. Don’t let anyone take that away.”

After we’d hugged and kissed, I gazed at them as they walked back to their hotel. Tomorrow they’d return to the States, and tell each other how good it was to be home in their happy hermit existence, gardening and going for long walks together in the Connecticut woods when autumn made the tree colors riotous; then, come winter, they’d go south to their Florida bungalow.

All along, they’d be laughing and cooking together, as always. Mom was a children’s book illustrator, and she and Dad launched their own picture books series. I remember, as a kid, seeing them lay out sketches and pages on the kitchen table after supper, their heads bowed, close, as they leaned conspiratorially over their work, very serious, yet telling wry jokes. They made it seem so easy. But I was beginning to get an inkling of what an accomplishment their lives truly were.

Before heading back to Aunt Sheila’s, I stopped at Great-Aunt Penelope’s townhouse. The workmen were gone, of course, but they would return tomorrow, so they’d left all their tools lying about downstairs, and even on the stairwell. I stepped over everything and went into Aunt Pen’s second-floor apartment, and over to the locked desk where I’d left my computer this morning. I’d set myself up here, answering a few e-mails that had stacked up, because the second floor had needed the least amount of work, so it was a good place for me to hang out, while still being accessible to the workmen when they had questions or decisions for me.

Aunt Pen’s apartment always has a calming effect on me, and even now it still felt like an elegant oasis of serenity. Whenever I was in the library in particular, I felt like a heroine in a 1930s movie set. And I always found myself imagining how my great-aunt would handle these sticky-wicket situations I often seemed to get myself into. Sometimes I even felt as if her spirit lingered over me, offering guidance. Yes, she would have known all about being a single woman, alone in a big city, fending for herself with a can-do spirit.

I switched on the light, and got to work with a large writing pad on the desk, and became deeply engrossed. The meditative atmosphere induced me to think about the case in a slightly different light. It was as if I was trying to build a bookshelf with a do-it-yourself kit that was missing the instructions, and I had all these pieces lying about that simply had to fit together somehow; so I was placing them all out in some kind of order. I kept going over and over the fragmented anecdotes from the Count, and Kurt, and Claude and everybody who had anything to do with it, but still there was something missing.

Finally my mind rested on one piece of information, and a question which, in all the confusion, I’d forgotten to ask. I picked up the phone and called up the photographer who’d taken the picture of the Corsican holiday celebration. There was no answer at his office, so I called his mobile number that was on the back of the photos.

“Hullo!” Clive shouted over very raucous background noise of loud music, loud laughter, and lots of clinking and banging. “Who is it?”

I had to say my name three times before he really heard it. “Ah, Penny,” he said in a friendly way. “I just stopped in for a beer. Fancy a drink?” And he named a pub that was not far from me. I hesitated, but realized that we couldn’t possibly carry on a telephone conversation, so I told him I’d stop in.

The pub where Clive told me to meet him was very unassuming from the outside, apart from clumps of people standing around on the sidewalk, some just arriving, some trying to decide where to go next. They were youngish, very expensively dressed, and the girls were possibly drunker than the boys. They looked as if they had good jobs, and had stopped here to blow off steam after work.

Inside, there were a lot of reflecting mirrors, and balloons tied to the backs of chairs and barstools. It was dimly lit, and the dance floor beyond was also decorated with balloons and mirrors and bouncing lights, so the whole effect made me feel uncertain about whether I was stepping into another room or about to smash against a mirror instead. Gingerly I picked my way through the crowd, and found Clive seated at the bar with other men his age, all watching sports on a large TV overhead. Some of the men were eating their dinner at the bar.

“Penny, hi, sit down,” Clive said, sliding off his barstool and letting me sit there. A fat guy at the end of the bar raised his head, looked me over, decided I probably wouldn’t unduly disrupt the men’s zone, and went back to watching the TV. Clive stood next to me, ordered another beer for himself to replace his empty glass, and asked if I’d have one. I picked a Belgian ale that Jeremy often ordered.

“What can I do for you?” Clive asked.

“I’m wondering about this family in Corsica who had that shepherd’s hut,” I said. “Did you talk to them at all?”

“Not that night,” Clive said, remembering, “it was pretty noisy, with the festival and all. But a few weeks later, when the thing went missing, Donaldson wanted me to arrange a meeting with the family, but they wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t even let him near the site. They were very upset, and felt that they shouldn’t have allowed me to take a picture of a relative’s grave, so they didn’t want any more strangers prowling about. Well, you can imagine how tough it was for them to have a bunch of greedy foreigners clamoring to see them.”

“So, you never got a chance to ask them about what the artifact was, and how they came to have it?” I asked, disappointed.

“We-e-ell,” Clive said. After a brief pause, he said, “Look. She told me not to tell anybody about this. I mean, you’re not going to write some article or start an expedition, are you? These people will know you got it from me, and they don’t forgive a betrayal.”

I assured him that I would be discreet, and was only trying to help someone who thought he’d purchased the Lion and had been misled.

“Okay, well, there’s a young woman in the family, she’s cool, and very smart. She’s quite educated, won a scholarship to university and all that. She’s studying medicine and genetics; such research is done on Corsica because, you know, it’s a contained community and they can track people more easily.”

“What’s her name?” I asked. Clive started to fish around in his pockets. Being a photographer, he had lots of pockets. While he searched he continued, “Anyway, she became the spokesperson for the family, to handle all the attention they were getting. She protects them. She talked to me once. She’s in her late twenties, I’d say.”

“What did she tell you?” I asked, watching him still fishing in his pockets.

“Oh, you know, after the uproar I asked her what the thing was, and she said it was a family treasure which had been stolen many years ago and then recovered. Most of the time they kept it out of sight. Once a year they take it out for this ceremony. They’ve done this for many years. But this particular time, it got stolen. They say it’s because of my photo. But,” he said defensively, “somebody told me the thing is cursed. Certainly seems surrounded by bad luck.”

“But—whose grave was it?” I asked.

“An ancestor,” Clive said. “Of—oh, Lord, what
is
her name?” He found his mobile phone at last, did some rapid finger work and then said triumphantly, “Ah! Diamanta.”

“I’d really like to talk to her,” I said as calmly as I could.

“I only have an e-mail address for her, no phone. But look, you must promise me that you won’t hound her if she doesn’t reply. As I said, she’ll know you got it from me.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, and he let me look on his phone and copy it down.

“Anything else you can tell me about it?” I asked. Clive shook his head.

“She’s your best bet. But she doesn’t live with the family year-round. She’s at the university. So don’t be surprised if it turns out to be a dead end.”

I slid off the barstool and thanked him. Clive looked at me with interest. “Would you like to pop round somewhere quieter for a bite to eat?” he inquired.

That’s when it dawned on me that, without Jeremy by my side, my snooping could inadvertently help a guy get the wrong idea of why I so urgently wanted to see him, and how excited I was by what he was saying. I sort of forgot about that stuff. I thanked him nicely and he took it with good humor. Then I headed out on my own.

At night, the streets of London can be very changeable, even in the best neighborhoods. Roads that hum with life by day can become totally deserted and shut down in the evening; and a street that’s busy and well-lighted at night might still be right next to a dark, deserted one. So when I turned the corner, searching for a cab, I ended up walking down streets more dangerous-looking than they were when I’d first set out earlier. And, suffice it to say that even when lots of people are out and about to keep you company, well . . . binge drinking is never a pretty sight, especially when someone’s either getting sick, curbside, or is staggering around in a volatile state, becoming suddenly belligerent and aggressive with strangers. I saw two girls physically slugging it out over a guy. Nor is it so great to walk past crowds of emboldened, loud men who bump into you on purpose when you pass them.