They started out together, and when she fell behind, he treaded water while she caught up. When they reached the platform, she waited for the dip between the swells to climb the ladder. He followed quickly behind her, climbing the rungs two at a time. They lay on the hot boards with their eyes closed and listened to the dots and dashes of a seagull’s cry as it flew over them. The floating platform rocked in slow motion up and over the swells and then down into the troughs. When they had rested, they swam back, the swells pushing them up and forward to the shore. They read until lunch, and later in the afternoon, Christopher repeated the swim. The waves had been building from the morning, and Helen decided not to go. The size of the swells did not faze him. He trusted the sea because it felt familiar. She watched him swim away from her—steady, strong, at ease. When he reached the platform, he turned back. She flipped through a guidebook of the Balearic Islands and read about a monastery located in Valldemossa where Chopin had gone with his lover, George Sand, to recuperate from tuberculosis. The article on the monastery showed an image of a perfectly preserved apothecary from the eighteenth century lined with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century blue-and-white ceramic pots with names of all the drugs and ointments and extracts in Latin. She would have liked to go there, but she knew Christopher would not want to move, so she let the thought drift away as she watched him swim back to her.
Helen was curious to see who would arrive for dinner. At seven P.M., “sunset” cocktails of tequila, pink grapefruit juice, and mint were served on top of the old fort, where Moroccan tents and Persian rugs and comfortable sofas had been arranged. Guests drifted upward—a family of five from England who, from what Helen could tell, were involved in property development; a middle-aged German couple; a group of six—a second marriage with adult children from each side, speaking a mixture of German and French and English; a young Spaniard and his Eastern European girlfriend. Each group stayed to itself. Christopher and Helen remained until shadows stretched into darkness and the seam between the water and sky disappeared.
For four days they followed the same rhythm. They would sleep late and enjoy the wicker baskets of breakfast delivered each morning. They would dress for the beach and bring books and newspapers and walk down the cliff and lie on the rocks. At two they would walk to the restaurant overlooking the sea and share a paella. In the afternoons they played tennis or rode bicycles to the marina. Before dinner, they read in their room or sat on the terrace with a glass of wine. She loved having him all to herself.
On the day they were leaving, they went for one last swim. Several large yachts were headed toward the marina. One pulsed past, brimming with women in bikinis and bare-chested men—all keeping beat to loud club music.
Helen asked Christopher what he thought about an article on the megayachts that were being built for all the Russian oligarchs.
“I told you no discussion of work. I’m surprised you’re not the one enforcing this.”
“I rather think these waters are neutral territory.”
“Okay,” he said. “Your logic’s not sound, but I’ll still answer. No, you shouldn’t do it.”
“Why?”
“You’ll get bored. I’ve watched you for the past year. In the middle of it, you’ll change your mind and decide you don’t want to do it. It has no soul.”
“Am I that predictable?” she asked as she waded into the water. It was cold. She moved slowly.
“Taking the fifth and changing the subject,” he said as he dove in to join her. “Have you ever been to Ibiza?” he asked as he resurfaced.
She chopped water in his direction.
“What’s so funny?”
“That there are still questions about each other that we don’t know the answer to.”
“But why isn’t that good?” He combed his hair back with his hands.
“It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just that I guess I always thought I would know everything about the man I married.”
“Mission impossible. So what’s the answer?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“But I thought it was the party place for all pretty young things from London.”
“It is. But I never went.”
“No rites of passage?”
“Not for me,” she said.
They watched the sun catch the edge of a late afternoon cloud. She shivered and got out of the water. He followed her to the towels they had left on the rocks.
“Now my turn.”
“For what?”
“To ask you any question I want.”
He laughed.
“It gets worse. You have to answer it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m thinking. Okay, so when you asked me to marry you, did you know you were going to at the time?”
“No.”
“No? That’s it?”
“I know you think I can always see beyond the next move or the next challenge as if I’m playing chess. And on a lot of things I can and I do. But on some things—”
“Like us?”
“Yes, like us, you’re way too unpredictable.”
The sun was now completely covered in clouds and the wind was picking up. Helen’s teeth chattered and she pulled her towel around her. “Maybe I should have just asked you how many girlfriends you had before me.”
“Missed your chance,” he said and stood up. He held his hand out to her. “Let’s go. It’s not going to get any warmer out here.”
“You know you’re like a matador,” she said as he pulled her up.
“How so?”
“You sidestep all my questions.”
He shook his head. “Only the ones that don’t matter.”
Later that night he told her, “I just knew my life could no longer be separate from yours. I knew whatever happened to you would happen to me, too.”
* * *
Marc picked them up at Heathrow. As he updated Christopher with the latest developments of deals their firm was working on, Helen counted the number of days they had in London before they left in August.
At some point on the drive, Marc turned to Helen and told her he had met a very attractive Italian woman. Her name was Ghislaine and she designed jewelry. She had been married to a much older Italian who had decided one morning he was moving to Costa Rica without her. Marc said Philippe Pavesi had introduced them at the Art Basel fair. Helen recognized the name of his girlfriend as being from an old titled Venetian family, but she did not know if the name were her maiden or married name. Marc was vague about whether she was divorced yet or would even get a divorce, so Helen let him, as she often did, tell her only what he wished her to know—to be the only spinner of the narrative. She was disappointed when Christopher asked Marc to bring Ghislaine to Saint-Tropez in August. She was irritated that he had not discussed it with her first.
Chapter Fourteen
London
Almost as soon as they returned to London there was an invitation from Fiona Campbell for a girls’ lunch. Christopher had been introduced to Fiona and Adrian at a drinks party for Édouard Beaumont earlier in the year. Helen was surprised by the invitation—she had never met Fiona. The Campbells owned the villa down the hill from Édouard, and when Fiona heard they would be taking La Mandala for August, she wanted to meet this young woman of whom Édouard was so enamored.
Helen was expecting not to like Fiona, a former model who, according to Christopher, after she divorced her Australian husband, moved to London to marry a much older and titled Englishman. Christopher told Helen that he would be surprised if she did not like Fiona—she was fun and surprisingly irreverent. Helen was not keen to go, but he pushed her. “You might surprise yourself and have a good time. They are just the type who might know people in Tangier—they might even know Pauling.”
David, Helen’s editor, had offered her an article on William Pauling, an Englishman in Morocco who had a rare and controversial piece of Chinese sculpture
from the European Pavilions in the Summer Palace. The European Pavilions had been designed by the Jesuit monk Giuseppe Castiglione in the 1700s for the Qianlong Emperor, and the sculpture, also designed by Castiglione, was part of an elaborate clepsydra, which was the centerpiece of the pavilions. The sculpture was the featured piece in Christie’s major London sale scheduled for early December and had already received a great deal of attention. The ownership of the sculpture had become an international issue, with China asserting that the statue had been illegally plundered during the Second Opium War and demanding that it be returned.
A massive amount of research was required, and while David did not plan to run the piece until just before the sale, he said there was some urgency. Pauling had agreed to an interview, and David was worried he might change his mind. Pauling had told David he was expecting any journalist David sent to know as much, if not more, about Castiglione than he did. David told Helen to prepare in case Pauling agreed to see her before the start of the summer holidays.
The story was complicated. During the Second Opium War, two British envoys and a journalist met with the Royal Chinese Prince to negotiate a settlement but instead were imprisoned and tortured to death. Lord Elgin, the British High Commissioner to China, retaliated by ordering British and French troops to destroy everything in the Summer Palace, including the European Pavilions. The treasures—porcelains, bronzes, marbles, and jewels—that were not destroyed were plundered by the soldiers. Now the only visual record of the design was a set of twenty engravings executed by the Chinese artist Yi Lantai, who had trained under Castiglione. Castiglione, credited with changing the way Chinese artists viewed perspective, was an intense subject all to himself. With so much research ahead of her, a ladies’ lunch in Belgravia did not seem a good use of her time.
When Helen grumbled once more, Christopher reminded her that for all she knew, Adrian might have gone to school with Pauling. “You never know about the connections between these English public school boys.” It was enough to push her forward.
* * *
Helen was the next to last to arrive. Fiona greeted her with a glass of champagne and introduced her to everyone. She was surprised to meet Marc’s girlfriend Ghislaine and wondered if Christopher had known she had been invited. No one seemed to know anyone particularly well. Helen watched Fiona charm everyone; she gave them energy because she had so much herself. The last to arrive was Solange Bolton, an older woman whom Fiona introduced as the wife of Adrian’s best friend, Anthony, who had the grandest shooting estate in Northumberland.
Over lunch, Solange admired the looking glass that hung over an early eighteenth-century painted side table and asked if Fiona had just acquired it. “Oh, no, Harry and I had it,” she said, referring to her ex-husband. “When Adrian and I moved into this flat, I needed something to hang over that table. I remembered the looking glass Harry and I had. I called him up and asked him for it. He said, ‘Fine, darling. I’ll have it shipped over to you right away.’ Adrian was thrilled. He said it’s almost as good as that side table, which he inherited from his grandfather. And that vase,” she said, pointing to a Lalique bowl filled with peonies. “I asked Harry if I could have that, too. When we divorced, I must have forgotten to ask for it, but Harry was more than happy to give it to me.”
“Sounds as if you’ve remained good friends,” Amanda said. She was tall and blond. Helen suspected that she, too, had once been a model.
“Oh, yes, we’ve remained very good friends,” Fiona said.
“But then why did you divorce?” Amanda asked.
“He had a little girl on the side, and when I asked him if he was going to give her up, he said no. Harry has to be the most generous man on the planet, not a mean bone in his body, but he has a weakness for little tarts, and I would not tolerate it, so that’s why we divorced. But nothing much has changed. We still talk on the telephone once a week, and when he comes to London, we always have dinner.”
Amanda was surprised. She was getting divorced. She had a four-year-old son about whom she was concerned. When Ghislaine asked her if she was certain it was over, she said yes, that really they should never have gotten married. “He was so good-looking, and I was determined to beat my best friend down the aisle.” Amanda said this last statement half seriously. “You know, Richard has never grown up. Except for the first year of our marriage, I suspect he has always had a girlfriend.”
“How did you know?” Helen asked.
“Oh, lots of ways. The last time it was his tie. By then I had just had enough.”
“What do you mean?” Ghislaine asked.
Amanda explained. “Richard’s always been terribly snobby about his ties. It has to be either Turnbull and Asser or Hermès. We were on our way to a dinner party, and he had on this hideous tie. He asked me, ‘So what do you think of my tie?’ as if he were trying to bait me. And I said, ‘I think it’s hideous.’ ‘You don’t like it?’ he asked me. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’ ‘I just saw it in the Next sale.’ ‘When did you go into Next?’ ‘Oh, I don’t remember, it was in the window, and I was walking by, and I saw it and liked it.’” Amanda spoke in a way to imitate his hurried tone, which was meant to put an end to the discussion of the tie.
“And then when we got to the dinner party, he announced, ‘Amanda doesn’t like my tie.’ I just couldn’t figure out what was going on, so the next day I drove up to the Next shop in Cheltenham and asked the shop girl about the striped tie that was in the sale. She didn’t know what I was talking about, so I said, ‘You know, the smart stripy one that is red and green.’ And then she said, ‘Oh. I know which one you mean. It’s not in the sale, it’s never been in the sale, it’s upstairs.’ And then you just start checking. When they leave early in the morning and they aren’t at work, or when they come home late. At Ascot last year I went up to his best friend and asked, ‘Jonathan, you have to tell me, is it still going on?’ and he just bit his lower lip and nodded his head.”
“I know what that’s like,” Ghislaine broke in. “I was emptying the pockets of my husband’s suit and I found a note. He had been traveling quite often to Costa Rica. One of his best friends had gone there to check on some sugar plantations he had inherited. He invited Giovanni to go with him. I didn’t go because I was in the middle of redecorating all the rooms of his family’s villa outside of Lucca. When Giovanni brought me there as a bride, the place hadn’t been touched for almost a century. I told him there was no way we were going to invite people to come stay with us for the weekend unless all the bedrooms were redone. So I set out straightaway getting the place sorted. Anyway, I didn’t go to Costa Rica. And after Giovanni arrived, he called me and said he was going to stay a few more weeks, did I mind? He came home and then went back to Costa Rica a few months later. He had some feeble excuse as to why I shouldn’t go. And I guess I should have been suspicious then, but I think I was too caught up in everything I was doing at home.
“This time Giovanni stayed six months, and when he returned, I unpacked his bags and found a note from this woman. It turns out he had been having an affair with her the entire time he was there. After we divorced, he moved to Costa Rica, but he left her a few months later. I never knew what she looked like, but I’ve been told that she was very beautiful. Very Latin looking. From a fairly nice family. I’ve always wondered if she knew Giovanni was married. After Giovanni left her, he married a girl he had known for only a few months. And now I hear he’s left her and taken up with a portrait painter who had come to stay with them in Lucca.” Ghislaine’s openness and her unadorned tone about being so badly treated drew everyone to her. Helen would later wonder if that had been the point.
Solange, who had been listening to all this, said she would never leave her husband. She was certain he’d had affairs. “It is the way of the man,” she said and poked her head forward and turned the corners of her mouth down.
“I would kill my husband if he had an affair,” Helen said.
&nbs
p; Solange looked at Helen, sizing her up before speaking. “But of course you feel that way,” she said. “You are young and in love. A marriage goes through many stages.”
Fiona switched the subject by asking Solange about their estate. Was it true that they were selling Eastthorpe to some rich Americans?
“It’s not all tragedy. They will give it a much-needed restoration. I can’t tell you the number of leaks in the roof. Anthony’s family has been patching it for years. It is hard to see it go, but at least Anthony hasn’t turned it into a conference center. They never work. The truth is—it needs new stewardship, and why not a rich American? You know it was hard at first for Anthony, but now it has become strangely liberating.”
As the women left Fiona’s, Solange invited Helen to come have a glass of sherry. She lived a few blocks away. Helen explained that she had to get back to work.
“Ah, why am I not surprised. You are quiet and you observe.”
Helen laughed. “Maybe, but I couldn’t match any of those stories. When Amanda asked me if I had ever shoplifted . . .”
“Bored, silly young women. Maybe they are the ones who should take lovers. I will walk with you to the corner. What do you write?”
When she told Solange about her next article, Solange reached into her handbag and gave her a card. “I know exactly who he is. He bought my family’s house outside of Tangier. You see—I know all about letting go. Call me tomorrow with the dates of your travel, and I will write to him.”
Chapter Fifteen
London
Odd but interesting” was the way Helen described the lunch to Christopher when he returned home from work that evening. “You know who was there? Ghislaine. You didn’t tell me she was a friend of Fiona’s.”
“News to me. I wonder how they became friends.”
“I didn’t get a chance to ask her. Almost everyone had some sort of confession about her husband’s infidelity. Including Ghislaine.”
“Really?” Christopher batted back the conversation. His mind was elsewhere. He didn’t like gossip.
A Theory of Love Page 7
