“Would you?”
“Good heavens, no,” Cora said emphatically. “A collector always wakes up excited by the thrill of the chase—it’s like having a full-time job, except that you spend money instead of making it. I’ve always thought that the only way to be rich and stay interested in life was either to collect with passion—collect anything, it doesn’t matter what—or be very competitive at something you do well—some sport, for example. I’m sure that’s the explanation for golf.”
“And bridge.”
“Exactly. Now, when do I see this mystery house? Empty or not, I won’t be satisfied until I lay eyes on it.”
“We can go after lunch if you like,” Billy said, realizing that eventually she’d have to show Cora the house, and the sooner she got it done, the less she’d have to juggle her life while Cora was visiting. And Cora could report to anyone who was making a mystery out of the Rue Vaneau that it was just a big empty house in the process of being redecorated, no more, no less.
Merely meeting Cora for lunch today had meant an extra trip to the Ritz in order to transform herself into the Billy Ikehorn Cora expected to see. Changing her clothes for lunch, she’d found herself so rushed that her heart had pounded with anxiety as she abandoned one set of clothes for another. She’d have to go back to the hotel room she’d taken on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, stuff the Saint Laurent dress and coat she was wearing into the back of the closet, and change into something else before she could go back to Sam. No, damn it! That would mean going home in clothes different from those she’d worn when she left Sam this morning. He’d notice—he noticed everything about her. She’d have to return to the fucking Ritz, change fucking back into the fucking clothes she’d put on this fucking morning and then go home. And all this without using her fucking driver because she never let him pick her up at the Ritz or deposit her either at the Rue Vaneau or Sam’s studio. What a fucking drag!
“My driver’s sick today,” Billy added smoothly. “I hope we can find a taxi.”
“Jean-François? I thought you were in Aix, buying antiques?” Billy was disagreeably surprised to see her decorator arriving at the Rue Vaneau. She had just given Cora a whirlwind tour of both floors of the restored manor house, and they were on their way out when Jean-François Delacroix entered. Without being impossibly rude, she had to introduce him to Cora, and it was five o’clock already.
“I came back on the TGV this morning, Madame. There wasn’t much to be had, and what there was, I bought yesterday.”
“Is this Monsieur Delacroix?” Cora asked.
“Oh, forgive me. May I present Jean-François Delacroix? Jean-François, this is the Comtesse de Lioncourt. We’re just leaving.”
“Everyone knows of the Comtesse and her exquisite taste,” the young decorator said, kissing Cora’s hand. “I tremble already.”
“Nonsense,” said Cora, “nothing’s installed yet … alas, in such a superb house there’s nothing for me to see, either to praise or to criticize. It is all potential, but splendid potential.”
“Madame, we needed time to perfect the setting, the frame, so that it will be light, flexible and pure throughout, the spirit of the eighteenth century revisited, as it were, by Madame Ikehorn’s sensibility. Meanwhile, I am storing the treasures we find in the old stables.”
“I wonder,” Cora said, quivering with eagerness, “if I could have a quick peek at them.”
“It would be my pleasure, Madame, but they are all carefully covered against the damp.”
“Oh no!” Cora almost stamped her foot in frustration. The visit had been pure irritation from beginning to end. Visiting bare rooms, with nothing to look at but architectural details and newly restored floors and walls had been a form of torture that had left her feeling murderous, yet she’d been fairly warned beforehand, so she couldn’t show how cheated she felt.
“Couldn’t you uncover something, something small?” She might yet salvage something from this afternoon.
“I could try, Madame, that is … if Madame Ikehorn …”
“Go ahead, Jean-François,” Billy said with resignation. Once Cora had heard the word “treasures,” Billy had known that there would be no avoiding a visit to the stables. “I’ll stay here and find out what that gardener is doing. He should have finished planting bulbs days ago. But don’t be long, it’s getting late and we have to find a taxi before the worst of the rush hour. You have only ten minutes.”
“Tell me where you went in Aix, Monsieur,” Cora asked, and she and the young decorator plunged into a discussion of the merits of the antiques dealers of Provence as they crossed the courtyard to the stable block. There he threw open the old doors, turned on the lights and revealed the two dozen old horse stalls, packed full.
Cora walked up and down, realizing quickly that each piece of furniture and each object was far too carefully wrapped for her to see anything in a short time.
“Yes, Madame,” the decorator shrugged, seeing her face, “I know, it is disappointing. I would like to have your opinion of many of the things I have bought. But, here, at least, I can show you something that has just arrived and has not yet been protected properly.” He pulled a tarpaulin away from what seemed to be a picture leaning up against a wall and revealed an oblong mirror, elaborately surrounded by a carved mirror frame, all of it glimmering and glistening dimly like a dark window into a jeweled past.
“Ah … lovely! Very lovely indeed. It isn’t French, is it? Late seventeenth century.”
“Precisely, Madame. It is German and was presented to the ruling House of Orange to celebrate a victory in battle.”
“It’s marvelously flamboyant. And in perfect condition, I see.”
“I intend it for Madame Ikehorn’s bedroom. To view oneself in such a mirror is to see oneself reincarnated in another era, do you not think so, Madame?”
“I agree, Monsieur,” Cora said, looking without pleasure at her reflection in the old glass. “Is the house to be surpassingly romantic, then?”
“Who can tell, Madame?”
“Surely you, Monsieur,” Cora said in surprise.
“I think I may well be the last man in Paris to know.” The young decorator spoke with an edge of bitterness that was at odds with his evident desire to show her something beautiful.
“How is that possible?” she probed, smiling as if she thought he meant to be merely modest.
“I must not complain, Madame, but this is not like any other project in which I have been involved.” He covered the mirror and started toward the stable door.
“No, wait, Monsieur Delacroix, you seem discouraged. Perhaps I can help. As you may have guessed, Madame Ikehorn relies heavily on my advice.”
“You are the first of her friends to visit the house. That gives me some hope that soon there will be others.”
“You are discouraged. Is my friend difficult to please? Because if she is, you must know that she has always been that way. It is not a reflection on your talents.”
“Difficult? No, I could not say that Madame Ikehorn is … difficult.”
“Then what problem is there? Surely not that of the expense involved in furnishing the house?”
“Nothing like that, Madame. I have carte blanche. From the very first day I was asked to undertake this project, not a single one of my suggestions has been turned down because of its cost.”
“Then you have a decorator’s dream job.”
“Yes, in principle, one would be forced to say so.”
“But?”
“Ah, Madame de Lioncourt, you will think that I am complaining …”
“Not at all, Monsieur.” Cora gave him her lovely smile. “You are not a man who complains, I can see that.”
“It is the waste!” he burst out. “This is a marvelous house, one of the most charming in Paris, this is a house that was created at a time when the nobility could lead lives that were an art form. This is no ordinary house, Madame, it is one that demands a greatness of concept. Once I saw it,
I knew that if I could bring it back to life I would achieve a dream. For weeks I could not believe how lucky I was to have this rare privilege dropped in my lap, a house that asks in every stone to be opened up to the world, a house whose very walls inform you that within them you are at the peak of Western civilization. I believed that when it was finished there would be dinners, galas, garden parties, large receptions … I confess I even entertained the fantasy that it would be photographed for magazines …”
“A house like this will make your career,” Cora said reassuringly. “Everyone will be talking about it. I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
“But no! Madame, that is why I am discouraged.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I. Madame Ikehorn has told me that she does not intend to receive on a large scale, that she does not want me to design the reception rooms with great galas in mind, that she will never allow the house to be photographed. ‘Make my house cozy,’ she has told me, cozy, as if this were an English cottage! Cozy! That is for the bourgeois. The bedrooms, of course, should be intimate and comfortable, but the reception rooms? Impossible!”
“It seems like a contradiction in terms,” Cora murmured.
“Exactly that! Only the English in their country houses can combine grandeur and cozy. With them it is the result of ten generations of collectors, each one adding another layer of objects so that eventually even the largest spaces become a three-dimensional tribute to their ancestors, filled with things good and bad, memories—and dogs, especially dogs; is that not true?”
“Dogs do furnish a room,” Cora murmured, her mind intent on his words.
“In Paris it is not possible to achieve this cozy effect in a classical building of such perfection. I believe it would violate the spirit of the house. I have tried to explain it to her … but she insists. She says it can be done. At first she asked me to surprise her, but that was the last thing she wanted—I discovered that quickly. So I have tried to give her what she wants.” Jean-François sighed as he thought of his strong-minded client. “We have found all our treasures together on the few days a week she can spare me. Madame Ikehorn insists on sharing in all the details of the decoration.”
“I’m sure you underestimate yourself,” Cora said thoughtfully. “You may achieve a new kind of grand coziness that will be just what people are looking for in these difficult days.”
“That is what I have told myself, Madame, that is what I hope it will be like. Even if only a few close friends of Madame Ikehorn see it, still, they will tell others …”
“I promise to come back when it is finished, and you can be sure that I will spread the word,” Cora said.
“I hope Madame is prepared to be patient.…”
“But the house is ready for the installation, why shouldn’t it proceed?”
“Madame Ikehorn is in no hurry to move in. She does not want me to complete the house yet, she tells me she is in no rush and that once it is installed she will have the problem of finding staff to maintain it. Now she has only the guardian in the gatehouse. So I wait. Sometimes I ask myself if Madame Ikehorn intends ever to finish this house? You understand that this is difficult for me? I do not wish to complain, but I too have my sensitivities. If this house were mine, I could not wait to take possession of it.”
“Nor could I. I wonder why she is not eager.”
“That is what I ask myself. It hurts me to see the house empty, not just professionally but personally. I tell you this in confidence, of course, since you are Madame’s intimate friend. I would not speak of it to others. I hope you do not think I’m complaining. I adore Madame Ikehorn, you understand.”
“You have every right to complain,” Cora said. “In your place I would go mad. But perhaps we should return now.”
“You will keep my confidence, I know.”
“You may count on me, Monsieur.”
Cora de Lioncourt dressed for dinner in a fever of delighted speculation. As she changed from a black suit to a black dinner dress, she made a mental tally of the extraordinary changes in Billy Ikehorn, changes no mere year in Paris could explain.
In the first place, the woman who had been famous for a decade and a half for her unrelenting chic, the woman who always wore the latest styles before anyone else, had been dressed in a dress-and-coat ensemble from a Saint Laurent collection that had been photographed in a half dozen magazines several couture seasons ago. Even if it was her favorite outfit, it was deeply odd for her to be seen still wearing something so dated. And far worse, far, far worse, the dress had been tight. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the dress had been tight at the waistline and over her hips. Six pounds? Seven? Billy, whose past, well-documented public life proved that she had never deviated from the iron discipline that is second nature to the true woman of fashion, had done the unthinkable and put on weight. It hadn’t taken her gusto for the revoltingly fattening rillettes to prove it—her zipper told the story.
Cora thought back to the lunch in New York with Spider Elliott. Billy had possessed a perfection of grooming then that was missing today. Another woman might not have noticed it, for Billy was as beautiful as before, perhaps more so, but the high gloss that spoke of hours and hours of attention, the varnished finish that only money could buy, had been absent at lunch. Billy’s nails had not been polished, nor had they been buffed to a high shine. Her hair had been permitted to grow out of its short blunt cut. Now it reached below her ears, an attractive look, perhaps, but one without style. Her eye makeup seemed to have been put on in a hurry, and she’d worn no earrings. Details … vital details.
The entire episode at the wine bar might have passed as the effect of living in France—a severe case of going native—except that a woman like Billy Ikehorn would normally live in France forever and never once enter a place like that. Her “petit Beaujol” indeed! It was positively indecent. Not that a liking for Beaujolais was significant in and of itself, Cora told herself, but her ease in the wine bar, her acceptance of a table covered only by paper mats—that was all part of the delicious puzzle.
Cora had known that there was something not right with Billy even before the lunch today that had taken too long to arrange. Many of her friends in Paris had told her that Billy had snubbed their invitations, making excuses for not attending the evening parties and lunches she had been glad to go to when she first arrived. During those first months in Paris, Billy had invited guests to dine in one or another of the great restaurants, in obedience to reciprocity, that most holy rule of social life. Now, Cora was told, she no longer reciprocated even those invitations she deigned to accept, and a single woman, no matter how rich and well placed, must reciprocate or be forgotten.
What could explain Billy Ikehorn’s slide? Why was she dragging her feet so that she didn’t have to move into the house for which she’d been in such a ridiculous hurry to plunk down far too much money, a sale whose every detail Cora had known, for Denise Martin had paid her a handsome commission?
“She didn’t make the grade,” Cora said out loud. She sat down in a deep chair in her hotel room, startled by her sudden revelation. Everything added up when she started to think about it. Cora had made it her business to find out as much as possible about Billy Ikehorn, going back to look at the old newspaper clippings of her first marriage. The New York Public Library was a storehouse of information that no one but she seemed to have the wit to use. There she’d uncovered many a glossed-over fact, guessed at many a secret motivation, detected the murky primary sources of certain fortunes, and factored all of them into her business.
After she’d met Billy, Cora had dug out all the old newspaper accounts of the alliance with Ellis Ikehorn that had made Billy one of the richest women in the world. She knew that although Billy was a Boston Winthrop, she came from a poor and undistinguished subsidiary branch of that huge family. A Winthrop, yes, but in the smallest way. Billy’s background looked good on paper, but the clear reality was that she had been a secretar
y who had married her boss, a man whose own antecedents still remained dubious and unknown. Her early life with him had looked brilliant in photographs, but as a couple the Ikehorns had made no secure place for themselves in society. The Scruples era had kept her picture in the fashion sections, but her West Coast social life was almost nonexistent. Billy’s short second marriage, to a first-generation Italian-American movie producer, was hardly the stuff of society pages.
Yes, Cora understood it now. Billy’s move to Paris had been that of a woman who wanted to make a new start. She understood for the first time why Billy hadn’t been tempted to take on the New York establishment. The Old Guard was almost impossible to penetrate. The new people were a tough bunch, battle-hardened women reluctant to part with their own recently won status, more difficult for a single woman to win over than the French, to whom all rich and generous Americans were equally acceptable and equally indifferent.
So. So that was it. Billy had come here with a lavishly open hand and Billy had bought a house that was much too aristocratic for an American and Billy had indiscriminately accepted all her invitations, good and bad, and somewhere, somehow, Billy had seen that she’d failed to quite measure up to the task she’d set for herself. Perhaps she’d made influential enemies among the ten women who ruled Paris, perhaps she’d slept with exactly the wrong men—somewhere she’d made a huge, irreparable mistake that had taken the wind out of her sails. Of course she was invited to the big catchall balls and parties, but she had never mentioned being invited to those intimate gatherings of close friends, those small celebrations that showed true acceptance, those inner-circle parties to which she had not been invited herself, Cora thought with the deeply satisfied sneer of one outsider recognizing another.
So. Billy must have realized that she wasn’t going to triumph in the game she’d set out to play with trumpets blaring and cymbals sounding. Now she was in the process of giving it up with a show of sour grapes. She had let herself go. She hadn’t made the grade! Billy Ikehorn simply didn’t have what it took to achieve the brilliant position she had come to Paris to seek. She was a Cinderella who had gone slinking back to her fireside, finding the glass slipper too tight for comfort.
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