A Rather Lovely Inheritance

by C. A. Belmond

  “Paste,” I repeated to myself, sighing theatrically like Simon.Then I had a shock. Right next to Great-Aunt Penelope’s gilt-framed movie-star photo, I saw my own face, reflected and framed in the gold-and-white mirror.There we were, side by side, about the same age, but she looked glamorous and carefree, and I looked like a hunched-over, disheveled, frowning, pale, poor comparison as I squinted at the sparkling earrings in the photo, trying to see that they weren’t diamonds after all—hence my furrowed brow. And believe me, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  I’d been feeling like a movie star because of my charming surroundings, but in reality I looked more like a scullery maid who’s just scuttled the ashes and paused to catch her breath by sneakily sitting at her ladyship’s table. The lack of sleep, the dehydration from too much airplane travel, the months of cramped, crunched-up muscles from close work—it was all catching up with me. In my twenties, one night’s sleep usually banished any telltale signs of the previous day. But now, there I was, eyes all squinty, hair all flat, dark sleepless circles under the eyes, mouth pressed together in grim concentration, brow all furrowed, clothes all wrinkled from travel, like yesterday’s newspaper.

  I straightened up, horrified. I saw that I’d been working like a galley slave for months, maybe years. I never took vacations because of the fear of dropping out of sight and not being hired ever again. Unemployed spells were not restful, because the credit-card balance mounted and every jaunt to a shop or restaurant caused paroxysms of guilt about spending more money. Not enough sleep, too much dread. It was all there, in worried little puckers and lines. I needed smoothing out, or this rumpled, mournful look might just become my permanent face.

  I thought of Severine, too. Somehow she managed to work, be efficient and productive, and still look ruthlessly magnificent. But she had Louis, an assistant, and she made loads of money. Surely that helped. She didn’t go scurrying around library stalls, squinting at badly projected microfilms of old manuscripts and newspapers.

  I looked at Aunt Penelope’s photograph again. It was a publicity shot, of course, and she’d probably pulled out all the stops to look glamorous for it, but it implied a certain lifestyle of fun and good times and carefree tossing of the head on the deck of a yacht or the balcony of a villa. She went jaunting around in an “auto,” not a “car,” for fun, not simply to commute to work in rush-hour traffic and then to scramble from one chore to the next.

  She’d be baffled if she knew how we “liberated” women spent our days, even our pathetic little extended weekend vacations, when we bothered to take them at all. When Aunt Penelope’s generation travelled, I thought darkly, they didn’t kill themselves rushing to get to the airport early, only to be frisked like thieves at security checkpoints.

  No, Aunt Penelope’s crowd lazily sailed away on “ocean liners” that might take a month to reach their destinations. So people made a party of it, with friends coming down to the boat to gaily see them off; then they embarked upon weeks of floating champagne suppers and dancing under the stars, in the company of dukes and ballet dancers, not swarms of budget tourists looking for a cheap buffet.

  Oh, I knew perfectly well that nostalgia for the past—especially a past that isn’t even your own—is like believing in fairy tales. But maybe our rushed new century is missing something slow, sweet and elegant from bygone eras. If we even remembered to look for charm and elegance in our lives, could we manage to find it? I wondered.

  That was why I kept trying to escape into romanticized previous times, but I saw that as a strategy for living it clearly wasn’t working. Because I’d finally got my magic wish—to have a little paid-up, elegant launch pad in a fine part of a lively city—and now, I was the one who had to change, and learn to live up to it, or surely it would disappear.

  The clock in the library gonged softly, telling the passing hour. It told me that there probably wasn’t much I could do about it immediately, but still I ought to do something, even symbolic, perhaps one tiny step toward restoration that would set me on a larger path.

  So, with this in mind, I rose resolutely and put on an old favorite flowered cotton dress that had a full, flounced, fifties skirt and short matching jacket, which I’d brought with me on the off-chance that I’d have a day without work. Then I set out to experience the world with new eyes, and to enjoy my own life.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  NOT BEING PARTICULARLY EXPERIENCED IN DOING SIMPLE, LIGHT-HEARTED things, and not really knowing my way around London’s pleasures, I started out getting knocked about in pedestrian traffic, bus traffic, the Tube trains underground, and general everyday mayhem. I couldn’t go to a museum like most people, because for me that would be a busman’s holiday.

  But, thanks to Simon, who’d told me about Aunt Penelope’s favorite haunts in London, I was able to plunk myself on a park bench by her favorite fragrant flowered path, where I could enjoy the light, sweet air of a warm summer day in London.Then I did a little selective shopping. Mindful of Aunt Penelope, I bought a few good things that I normally would find excuses not to buy: a fine-spun silky cocktail dress with a gold satin evening coat whose lining matched the dress, and a pretty bathing suit with a cover-up.The kinds of things I always wanted but talked myself out of, by buying cheaper versions, for fear that my grubby lifestyle would wear them out and I wouldn’t be able to afford to replace them. All in soft pastels and whites, too, instead of dour and durable black. It may seem a conventional way to try to improve one’s life and appearance, but for me it was a major accomplishment, because I normally hate shopping and do it with grim determination, agony over money, and guilt. It’s amazing how quickly you can shop when you’re not torturing yourself.

  When I was done, I felt triumphant, but out on the street again the rest of the world was definitely not trying to lead a calmer life, and everybody was in a frantic hurry to get past me, around me, and perhaps through me if necessary—and because of lingering travel fatigue I was at a disadvantage in maneuvering. I looked around quickly for some quiet place to duck into so I could catch my breath and get my bearings.

  I’d retraced Aunt Penelope’s footsteps all over London, and, according to Simon, this was the street where she went to have a weekly massage . . . and to have her palm read. There were no fortune-tellers there anymore, but Aunt Penelope’s little masseuse had been replaced by a full-fledged spa, right there in the very same building, with the same narrow, dark flight of stairs (although I later discovered that around the corner there was another entrance, with a fast modern elevator). It was just too appealing to my mystic sense of fate, so I went right in the same door as Aunt Penelope, and up the same mysterious staircase.

  What was I expecting to find? A peaceful, leisurely Victorian spa where mildly tubercular guests clad in formal white linen were served seven-course meals on delicate china and crystal in turn-of-the-century dining rooms? Where you were bathed and gently massaged and then tucked into balcony chairs with blankets called “rugs,” overlooking placid lakes and mountains, where you could be generally pampered in a quiet and dignified environment? Once again, my fatal capacity for believing what I read instead of seeing what’s right in front of me did me in.

  To be fair, it’s not entirely my fault that I’m so gullible. I’m not the only one who goes around pretending that things are more wonderful than they really are. Somebody took the trouble to make that reception room a peaceful cocoon in earthy red, brown and cinnamon, replete with dried flowers and herbs, soft, soothing music and lighting, and a whispery high-priestess receptionist who offered me a gentle, restorative “Half Day of Rejuvenation” described with overtones of a nineteenth-century taking-of-the-waters experience.

  But in the end, whammo—modern everyday reality took over. Once she knew I was on board, the receptionist’s voice actually changed from soothing guru to brisk assembly-line overseer, as she whisked me off to a gym-style locker room where she padlocked my clothes so I couldn’t have a sudden change of heart and bolt out of the
place.

  Wearing my newly issued cardboard slippers and a scratchy one-size-doesn’t-fit-all, fat-lady robe with sleeves as long as the Seven Dwarfs’, I padded down the hallway, which smelled of glue and quick-dry paint from the nail salon that treated hands like reconstruction jobs. I declined a complete nail replastering, and got a quick paint job, requiring me to make that tiresome request of please-don’t-cut-my-cuticles-thank-you.

  Beyond the nail salon was the chamber where torturous medical instruments were being used to do “scientific” things to brighten, whiten, even out, and rejuvenate the skin with poisonous needles and peels. Or you could get the “natural” option, a mud face masque for sensitive souls, which I went for. I was then parked in a waiting room among other robe-clad women with masques on their faces and cotton stuck between their toes, who coughed ominously and chatted loudly on mobile phones. At this odd juncture I was offered a “health appetizer”—stale carrot juice and soy paté that tasted of refrigerators. I was kept waiting long enough to hear the same sitar ditty come round again on the canned music.

  Finally I was summoned into a dark, closet-sized room at the very far end of the hall, which was filled with a massage table and pots of creams in unmarked silver containers, making the room resemble a doctor’s office. Here at last I met a tired-looking woman who introduced herself as my “massage therapist” (she got insulted when I called her a masseuse). She rattled off a swift explanation of every phase of the treatment, with mingled overtones of religious fervor, medical righteousness, and false perkiness, as she helped me onto a table so overheated electrically that I felt nauseous when I lay stomach-down on it.

  I’d expected to drift off drowsily with a meditative massage, but this salon believed in pummeling you into shape to give you a smugly virtuous edge over the rest of the flabby world. In a muffled voice I explained that I wasn’t interested in having my inner organs pounded and kneaded like dough. She shrugged and lightened up, but her mind seemed to be on her next meal, date, or day off, because occasionally she’d have a lapse and start vigorously shaking my arms out of their sockets as if shaking out a mop, until I squawked and woke her from her reverie.

  Having next been covered with seaweed, wrapped in foil, and steamed like a fish, all to the tune of Zen zithers or whatever they were, I at least had the sense to refuse a radical haircut and asked, instead, for a light trim and a simple blow-dry. However, I didn’t catch on in time to avoid the highlight of my treatment, which spas seem to be most obsessed about—the removal of body hair.The “Half Day of Rejuvenation” included getting waxed like a lemon.

  During the whole rip-and-tear session I kept my mind busy by contemplating how the act of dripping hot wax on a human being would have displeased Lucrezia Borgia, who, after just one of these sessions, would surely have ordered her “massage therapist” to be summarily executed by being dropped into a vat of hot wax. And further back, our monkey ancestors would have simply bitten the arm off anybody who tried to deprive them of their body hair.

  Mercifully, my skin rebelled just in time to prevent me from having the final wax job on an area of the body that only porn stars used to wax.The “therapist” stopped short and said,“Oh my God.You should have told me you were sensitive. Better not do the bikini area.”

  I looked down at my arms and legs, which were covered with round red welts the size of silver dollars. “What’s that?” I cried.

  “Hives,” she said quickly. “It must be hives. Haven’t you ever had hives before?”

  “No,” I said. It looked like I had a rare case of mega-measles.

  “They’ll go away in a few hours,” she promised in an uncertain tone.“Your skin is really sensitive.You should definitely skip the exfoliator. I wouldn’t do another thing to your face.”

  At that particular moment my mobile phone rang in the pocket of my scratchy bathrobe. It had been there all day, but any sound it may have made earlier would have been drowned out by the very loud Zen lutes, flutes, drums and chants that were piped in at full roar in every treatment room. They must have paused to change the tape or something, for in that blessed moment of silence I heard my phone shrilling insistently. The girl handed me my robe from the hook on the door where it was hanging, and I fumbled around in the voluminous pockets.

  “Penny,” Jeremy said.“Where the bloody hell are you? My out-of-town client cancelled and I’ve been trying to reach you at Aunt Pen’s all morning. Then I found your mobile number, but I kept getting your recording. Are you all right?”

  “I had an appointment,” I said, trying to sound as confident as Aunt Penelope.The Zen music started up again, full bore.

  “What’s that music? Have you put yourself in an ashram or something?” he demanded.

  “Has something happened?” I inquired in a tone to challenge his demanding one, covering my other ear so I could hear him better.

  “Denby called,” Jeremy said. “He said he’d found a few things in the car we might want to see for ourselves. He was funny about it, said he didn’t want to discuss it on the phone. He’s never like that. Besides, my car is ready, too. Severine is out of town and I don’t want to leave this to Louis, so I’m going to fly down there. Do you want to come? Because I’m on my way to the airport and I can pick you up, but really we’ve got to move fast.Where are you?”

  I gave him the address of the salon, but not the name, because it was called “The Scarlet Plume.” I’d no idea why. Anyway, he said, “Fine. Because I’m only fifteen minutes away. But can you be out on the street ready to jump in? Because we literally must fly.”

  “All right, all right,” I said.“I’ll be out there ready when you arrive.”

  And then, after I rang off, having allowed my not-cousin to rush me like that right after vowing that I would lead a calmer, more measured, ocean-liner-paced life, I saw that there were not only more red splotches on my legs but new ones emerging between my eyebrows.

  “Oh, no,” I moaned.“I can’t let him see me like this. Can’t you do something?”

  To her credit, the wax therapist swung into action by paging the make-up expert and having him come in. He was a tall, thin, wiry Asian man with a headful of thick, wavy hair.

  When he saw me, he sucked in his breath between his teeth, sized it all up, and said, “For the arms and legs, we’ll use my BodyGuard Armour for Extra-Sensitive Skin—it’s got skin-colored vitamin E lotion. Maybe a little green Sleuth UnderCover first, which I’ll also use on your face so it won’t be, like, the first thing that hits him when he sees you.” It was then, and only then, that I understood the motif of this place, which was that it used espionage and spy symbols, as if its customers were international intriguers. For fun.

  “Are you sure her skin can take it?” the wax therapist asked nervously.

  “Honey, this is not my first time out at the rodeo,” he said.“A little Agent Aloe under all of it will do the trick.”

  “You’ve now got eleven minutes,” I gulped. He flung open his bag of tricks and set to work, expertly painting with green makeup, and blue, which at first alarmed me because it looked far more monstrous, but then came the next layers of ivory, yellow, and white.

  “Go easy on the face,” I warned.“I don’t want to look like a clown.”

  “No clowns in this circus,” he assured me. “And while I’m at it, I’ll get rid of those dark circles under your eyes.”When he was done, it actually looked so miraculously normal and healthy that I ended up buying the green and blue and other paints.

  “Not that I expect to break out into hives like this again anytime soon,” I mumbled.

  “Be prepared.That’s my motto,” he said crisply.

  I stumbled into the reception area and elevator with all my shopping bags of new clothes for a calmer life, trying not to sneeze at the mingled strong scents of hair dye, nail glue, chemical peel, and aroma-therapy with wafting patchouli, fake lavender, rosemary, and camphor. There is, after all, a rather fine line between being pampered and being e
mbalmed.

  Down on the street a nice wind whipped up, all full of soot, dust, and the first plops of rain. It had been deceptively sunny when I’d gone out without my umbrella. So now I stood there while my expensive hair blow-dry wilted and I tried to shield my face-camouflage from being washed off. Mercifully my new clothes were in plastic garment bags, so they were more sheltered than I was.

  Jeremy had, of course, neglected to tell me that he would be in a company car that looked like everybody else’s wet black company car. He had to bellow out the window, “Penny! Yoo-hoo!” and I had to slosh through some rapidly forming puddles and take one last splashy leap into the backseat, where I landed half across his lap.

  “Marvelous. Do you jump through hoops of flame as well?” he inquired, trying to help me right myself. He sniffed. “Wow.You smell like you’ve plunged into a barrel of patchouli,” he said. “You’re late. Why didn’t you tell me you were at The Scarlet Plume, instead of being so mysterious with building numbers? Were you considered a hard-core case? What exactly have you been up to this afternoon?”

  “Nothing,” I muttered. “A man who doesn’t return phone calls and then suddenly shows up with an emergency flight plan really doesn’t have any business asking a lot of nosy questions no man should ask a woman.And how do you know about this place? Have you been there yourself?”

  “My secretary swears by it,” he said with a straight face that required absolute control.