By the time she got to Leslie’s apartment in East London, about forty people were already there. They were a good-looking group of young people, mostly in their thirties, and Coco guessed that she might be the youngest person there. Everyone greeted her warmly when Leslie introduced her and Coco said she was freshly arrived from New York. They asked where she had been working before, and she explained that she was officially still a student at Columbia, but had gotten the job through the Time bureau in New York.
“They must have been desperate to get rid of you, or thought you were fantastic to send you to us,” a handsome blond man in his early thirties teased her. His name was Nigel Halsey-Smythe. He was very handsome and seemed intrigued by Coco. He was obviously taken by how beautiful she was. “I’m a younger son,” he rapidly explained with a grin, as he handed her a glass of wine after introducing himself. “In our system here that means a fancy name and no money. My older brother got it all, so he’s got the family seat in Sussex, the estate, and the title, and I’m left to eke out a living. I sell advertising upstairs at Time. We’re paid mostly on commission, which means that if we go to dinner, you’ll have to pay. Although you probably make less than I do, so we’ll have to go to parties at art galleries with champagne and free hors d’oeuvres.” He was funny and she was touched by his honesty about his situation. In the British system, younger sons often had no money. The eldest brother got everything, while everyone else had to struggle and got nothing. As they talked, she learned that he had gone to Eton, the best boys’ boarding school in England, and Cambridge, one of the finest universities. He also mentioned that he was thirty-three years old. He said he’d never been married, although his older brother had been married twice. “Younger sons are not in high demand,” he said, pretending to be mournful, and they both laughed. He introduced her to a dozen other people. There was a plentiful buffet with Indian food, and she noticed that the caterer was pouring good French champagne. The assembled group, which grew in size rapidly, was an interesting mix of aristocrats, working-class people, mostly from the magazine, and a number of foreigners, including a group of Italians and two very pretty French girls who worked for British Vogue and looked like models themselves. They had a cluster of men around them at all times. Coco felt like a bumpkin compared to them. Nigel saw to it that she met nearly everyone, and they settled in a corner on a couch with some others to talk.
“So how long are you here for?” he asked her. He had made her the focus of his attention for the evening so far, and went through the buffet line with her. He seemed mesmerized. They were balancing their plates on their knees, as Leslie continued to greet new arrivals. A waiter from the caterer relieved guests of their dripping raincoats and umbrellas in the front hall. It all felt very British to Coco, and she wished that she could FaceTime Sam so he could see the scene. It was a whole different atmosphere from their student milieu in New York. This was much more sophisticated and international than what she was used to in her college life, and she was grateful to have Nigel at her side. He gave her the lowdown on everyone, and he seemed to know them all. Whose father was a lord, who had a title, who was a nobody, who had a fantastic job, or a fabulous country house and gave house parties where people killed to be invited. How aristocratic their families were was very important to him, but he didn’t act like a snob. He just liked knowing about everyone and was curious about Coco.
“Great manor house, terrific food, no central heating, and no money, like most of us,” he described one couple. “The roof is going to cave in on them one of these days. The place leaks like a sieve,” he said of one of the houses where the owners gave the best parties, according to him. “Do you ride?” Coco nodded, slightly in awe of all of them, but surprisingly comfortable with him. She liked his openness and lack of pretension, and his good looks had caught her attention when she walked in. She’d noticed him staring at her until he walked over to meet her. She was flattered by his attention, and his description of people’s circumstances made her laugh. “So, what does your father do? Banker, lawyer, head of some vast American corporation, Wall Street genius, famous artist, or a mere mortal?” He was constantly playful, but interested in all the details to place where she fit into his world. Leslie seemed to have a very eclectic group of friends. Coco could tell that one was just as likely to meet someone with a title as a photographer with a heavy Cockney accent in her living room. It was fascinating. Nigel seemed to fit into the upper echelon of the scale, despite being a younger son, as he so easily confessed. He didn’t have the title or the money, but he clearly had the blue blood and noble heritage.
“My parents died last July, a year ago,” Coco said quietly in answer to what her father did. Nigel sobered for a minute, and gazed sympathetically at her.
“Oh, I’m sorry. How awful for you. Both at once?” She nodded. “It must have been an accident. Terrible bad luck. Do you have siblings?”
“No, I don’t,” she said softly, trying not to sound tragic about it, although it was. “Cannes, last July.” He knew instantly what that meant, and touched her hand gently, although he barely knew her. The kind gesture brought tears to her eyes. “We used to go to the South of France every year. I wasn’t with them last year. I had a summer job at Time. I didn’t go back to school last year because of it. I was thinking of starting again this September, but I’ll wait till January now. This is a wonderful change of scene after all that. It was a hard year.”
He nodded and then smiled at her. “Thank you for warning me. We’ll have to do our best to convince you to stay here. University is so boring, and we have much more fun here. Do you hunt?”
“I never have.”
“We can arrange that when the season starts. I have lots of friends who hunt. My brother is the master of the hunt in our region. But we don’t speak so we can’t go there. It’s great fun, if you like to ride. I usually avoid my brother at all cost. We hated each other growing up. I almost got over it, but then he inherited everything, and I can’t stand his greedy little pig-eyed wife,” Nigel said somewhat bitterly. Leslie pulled her away from him then, before Coco could comment, as they set their empty plates down and a waiter whisked them away. Nigel conceded with regret as Leslie removed her. “We can talk about my family some other time,” he said, as Coco followed Leslie.
“Don’t let Nigel monopolize you. He’ll talk your head off. He knows everyone in London. He has a complex about being a younger son, but he’s very sweet,” she said, smiling. Coco had enjoyed him, and she liked hearing all the pertinent insider information he had shared with her. It added local color. Leslie introduced her to the two French girls from Vogue, who were very stylish and avant-garde. They spoke perfect English, and greeted Coco warmly, despite the flock of handsome men around them, most of whom were dressed like Nigel, in jeans, tweed jackets, and brown suede shoes. It was a good look and Coco liked it. She thought that most of the men in the room were sexy and handsome and seemed more polished than their counterparts in New York, although most of the men she knew there were students or recent graduates like Sam. Ed, of course, was at a whole different level, and wore a suit most of the time, except on weekends. There wasn’t a suit visible in Leslie’s living room. They were all much more casual, and the Italians looked more stylish than anyone else. Leslie made a real effort to introduce Coco to as many people as she could, although it had gotten difficult to move around her living room, so many more people had arrived as the evening wore on.
Nigel came to say goodbye to her before he left, asked for her cellphone number and said he’d text her and take her to a party sometime soon, or maybe they could have dinner together. She gave him her number willingly, and stayed for another hour after he left. One of the Italians had been flirting with her at a distance, but never came over to talk to her. She ended up chatting with a very interesting group of women who worked for Condé Nast, and an auctioneer at Christie’s who was in the art department. Coco could se
e that Leslie knew lots of interesting people, and Coco wasn’t alone for a minute all night. She left after midnight, and the party was still going strong, but she’d had two glasses of wine and one of champagne, and she was tired. She slipped away quietly, after thanking Leslie for a fantastic time. Several people were smoking joints by then, and the whole group seemed slightly drunk, some more than others. The alcohol had flowed generously all evening, and people had settled into smaller groups, some sitting on the floor.
Politics was a popular subject, and Leslie seemed to know a number of people in fashion. Coco noticed that all of the men in the fashion business wore heavy oxfords and no socks. The rest of the guests were more traditionally dressed. Leslie herself had worn a short tight black knit Alaïa dress that showed off her figure and her hair was as dark as Coco’s. She wore it in a knot, with no makeup. She was an attractive woman and didn’t look her age. Coco liked her, and had had a great time at her party.
She fell asleep minutes after she got home, and tried to describe it all to Sam the next day. He was impressed, and said he’d had a nice evening with Tamar. They’d gone to a movie and had dinner at a kosher restaurant on the Lower East Side, since she was Orthodox, and would only eat kosher meals, which would delight his mother if he told her about Tamar, but he didn’t intend to. He didn’t want to fuel his mother’s obsession about his getting married, especially to an Orthodox Jewish girl.
“No more BLT sandwiches or lobster for you, if you stay with her,” she teased him and he laughed.
“My mother would have a heart attack if she knew what I eat when I’m with you. That sounds like a pretty racy crowd you fell in with last night,” he said, half impressed and half worried for her. “Be careful not to get in over your head.” But fortunately, no one knew her circumstances, so fortune hunters weren’t likely to go after her. She just looked like an exceptionally pretty young woman, and dressed like everyone else their age. Unless they knew who her father was, which most people didn’t, they wouldn’t suspect that she had inherited a fortune. He was glad that she was happy and having fun, and meeting new people, which had been the whole point of going there, and staying occupied. She had spent a year of intense mourning, now she needed to get back into living. The world she was exploring sounded like fun for her. At times, Sam envied her the options she had in her life. In contrast, he felt like he had none at all.
“You have to come over and visit,” she urged him. She’d only been gone for ten days, but already missed him. He was so much a part of her life, and stood in as her family now, that she felt as though she had lost a limb being away from him. She didn’t miss Ed nearly as much as she did Sam, and she was still angry at Ed, and herself for falling for him. She could see now how innocent and trusting she had been, and he had taken full advantage of it, and still wanted to, if she’d let him. She was no longer as naïve, at least not about him. But Sam wasn’t sure how much more alert she would be, if the bad guys were packaged differently in a new setting. She was only twenty-two, and it would be easy for her to be taken advantage of in a fast international crowd in London. It sounded to him like she had fallen in with some of them the night before.
“Just be careful,” he warned her again, and promised to come over when his father would let him take time off from work and he could afford a cheap ticket, if he could find one.
Nigel made good on his promise and called her on Monday, at work. He told her how much he had enjoyed meeting her, and hoped to see her again soon. Hearing from him put a smile on her face as she started her second week of work. The next day, he came down from upstairs and showed up in her office right before lunchtime, and invited her to have lunch with him. She had no plans so they went to a pub nearby, and he had her laughing all through lunch, describing house parties he’d been to. He was the most engaging, ingenuous, funnily innocent man she had ever met. He had a boyish quality about him that was very endearing, and he was very sympathetic about her losing her parents. His own parents had died when he was young, but had been much older than hers, since he was the youngest son and his only brother was fourteen years older than he was, from his father’s first marriage. They walked back to the office together, he disappeared upstairs to the advertising department, and she went back to work for Leslie, and did some filing.
On Thursday he texted her, apologized for the short notice, and invited her to a party on Friday night. “Nothing posh,” he said in his text, “probably just mash and bangers or fish and chips, in the garret of an artist friend.” It sounded like fun to her, and he picked her up at seven-thirty at her mews house, looked around and was impressed.
“I say, Coco, this is very nice indeed. You must be paying a fortune for it. These old mews houses are very hard to find.” It was nicely decorated, which she was enjoying too, and came with everything she needed, a fully stocked kitchen, nice linens, and everything she could have wanted.
“The rent isn’t too bad, and it feels like a dollhouse. I love it. The owner moved to Hong Kong for two years. I was lucky to find it.”
“You certainly were.” They had a drink before they left, and when they got to the party in a shabby neighborhood, they walked up four floors to the artist’s studio. There must have been a hundred people squeezed into the tiny space. The smell of marijuana was heavy in the air, and the crowd was even more eclectic than it had been at Leslie’s, a little more down-market, but mostly very arty. Even in clean jeans and a nice blue sweater, she felt overdressed. Nigel was in a tweed jacket and jeans again, and seemed comfortable wherever he was, in any kind of group. The artist was Indian and had a Chinese girlfriend, who had posed nude for many of his paintings. She had a spectacular body and a lovely face.
The meal was fish and chips, as Nigel had predicted, and after an hour, he suggested that they slip away and go out to dinner. They left and he took her to a good French restaurant, and contrary to his earlier warning, he ordered a very good bottle of French wine, and paid for the meal. She suspected that he had exaggerated about being dead broke. He was very aristocratic, had lovely manners, and seemed to know every titled aristocrat around the world. He had been to the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, nearly as often as she had. She was surprised she had never met him there, but they had spent their days there in their private cabana, and rarely met the other guests.
“I’m not sure I could ever go back without them,” she said sadly. “That was so much a part of all my summers with my parents. It would be too weird and painful without them.” He nodded and touched her hand again.
“You’re a brave girl to have gone through what you did for the last year.”
“There’s no other choice. Things happen and you have to deal with them. But it was very hard,” she said. She told him about Sam then and what good friends they were, and how he had been at her side for all of the past year. She didn’t mention Ed, who seemed irrelevant now, and a bad memory. She didn’t want to admit to her own stupidity, falling for the classic line of a married man, about having an understanding with his wife, planning to divorce, and never having felt for any woman what he did for her. It was all so trite and such a cliché, she realized now. At least Nigel was single, thirty-three years old, and had never been married. She wasn’t sure yet if they would be friends, or something more, but she was enjoying his company immensely, and he was so charming, amusing, and boyish that he seemed more like her age than his own. He wasn’t afraid to admit to his fears or feelings, which she found refreshing. There was no hidden agenda with him. He said whatever he thought.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked him over dinner, since he didn’t seem as though he was fully an adult yet.
“Rich and happy,” he answered very quickly. “Rich and miserable seems like such a waste,” he said and she laughed. She didn’t ask him how he intended to become rich, since he claimed to be poor now, although she didn’t quite believe that either. He was expensive
ly dressed, and he lived in a stylish part of town. But he obviously had less than his older brother, due to the British laws of primogeniture, which had existed for centuries.
“What do you want to do?” she asked him directly.
“Have fun. As you’ve seen firsthand, life can be cut short. I think it’s important to live life to the fullest, and enjoy every moment. I can’t bear people who whinge all the time.” She had already learned that “whinge” was the British word for whine, and he didn’t. He constantly seemed to be enthusiastic, look on the bright side, and make everything fun. He never complained, which was refreshing, except about his brother, whom he very obviously disliked. But he appeared to have countless friends, and he was fun to have around. He was apparently a popular houseguest, and she could see why. “What about you?” He turned the question on her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess I have to finish college at some point, though I seem to have run out of steam on that. I want to work for a magazine, and I am, even though it’s an entry-level internship. I don’t have a burning desire for a career, but I want to work. I don’t think I’ve found my passion yet, but I still have time, and I haven’t even graduated.”
“Marriage and kids?” he asked, curious about her. She seemed to have a sensible way of looking at life, which he liked.
“Not for a long time,” she answered his question. “My parents married right out of college, at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas.” She grinned and he laughed.
“I’ve always wanted to know someone who did that. I love it. How terrific.”
“They eloped. My mother’s family was fancier than my father’s. She was a debutante, etcetera, etcetera, and they didn’t approve of my father, who grew up poor, and they thought he would never amount to anything. So they got married anyway, and he proved them wrong. They were very happy, and getting married early suited them. I’ve never wanted that for myself, and I’m way too young to think about kids. They had me at twenty-five. I can’t even imagine having children three years from now. It would scare me to death. I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility,” she said honestly. But she did have the responsibility of a large inheritance she had to make decisions about. She had people to advise her, but never mentioned any of that to Nigel. She was extremely discreet about her circumstances.
All That Glitters Page 6
