“I’m going to be late,” Tessa moaned in agitation to Fiona, who was helping her get dressed.
“So what, he should understand that you’ve been having a baby all day and it takes a heap of cleaning up to look good after that kind of hard labor.”
“I hate being late,” Tessa said, frantically trying to brush the last of the tangles out of her hair. “The hair stylist sprayed my hair until it was plastered down, and the makeup artist went overboard—she made me look as if I were being tortured to death instead of just having contractions.”
“You look gorgeous now, for God’s sake,” Fiona said. “You’ve been fussing for an hour. Sit still in front of the mirror, I want to show you something important.” As Tessa obediently looked at herself in the mirror, Fiona put her finger on Tessa’s nose, just below her eye, and traced the shape of the bone leading to her eyebrow and her eyebrow itself. “This happens to be one of the most bewitching curves on any face in history, a space unpoetically called an eye socket that you’ve grown up with and take totally for granted. So stop fussing with your hair, Tessa. What man would care about your hair when you have those eye sockets? And I won’t even mention your smile, you know too much about it already. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Luke Blake’s got to be more than twice your age, and let me tell you, the man’s been around the block a time or two or ten.”
“You’re nothing but a common gossip, but since you grew up reading the English tabloid press, I shouldn’t be surprised.” Tessa stared at her eye sockets with new interest. Could Fiona possibly be right?
“Hah! Gossip my ass! If he dropped dead tonight, his New York Times obit would start, ‘Luke Blake, major Australian industrialist and world-class pussy-hound, died in Edinburgh yesterday.’ ”
“Fiona, why are you such a spoilsport? Can’t you let me enjoy myself? I’ve never gotten dressed for a real date before and you know it. All I’m doing is having dinner with a man who was nice enough to try to keep me warm.”
“I’m trying to warn you, in my own subtle way.”
“You think he’s going to try to add me to his list of conquests?”
“ ‘Think’? I haven’t the slightest doubt of his motives. I bet he’s never bought a woman dinner without the intention of getting her into bed in the back of his mind—no, make that the front of his mind. And succeeding nine point nine times out of ten.”
“Fiona, have you ever gone out with a man without the possibility of sex, not necessarily that night, but maybe, just maybe, sex sometime, entering into the disgusting swamp of your brain?”
“Oh! Shit!”
“Aha!”
“You’re right. I’m as bad as any man ever born. That is if we’re not considering obvious noncandidates, like, oh, let’s see, the local minister, or college professors, or my best friends’ fathers, men like that.”
“I wouldn’t trust you with any of the categories you just mentioned, except my own father.” Tessa laughed, doing up her black velvet pants and standing so that Fiona could zip her into her black velvet Regency-cut jacket, trimmed with a heavy white-lace standup collar, and cuffs that fell to her fingers.
“Come to think of it … yeah, college professors …” She hummed thoughtfully. “Of course, I never went to college, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Neither did I. Never even finished high school. But there were a couple of cute nuns at Marymount …”
“Go, meet that man, Tessa, you fool.” Fiona shooed her out of their suite. “He’s still waiting in the lobby. Shall I stay up for you to come home so you can tell me all about it?”
“Goodnight, Fiona. See you tomorrow.”
“Thank you for the thermal long johns and the electrically heated socks,” Tessa said as she sat down to dinner in the small, perfectly appointed French restaurant with tables set at a pleasant distance from each other. “They came this morning first thing.”
“Did they help?” Luke asked, barely able to speak as he looked at her face framed in white lace. She was like a portrait of a young Renaissance princess, so radiantly, luminously beautiful that you could study the painting for hours, yearning to have been alive when she existed in real time.
“Actually, I had to take them off after the first half hour. Mr. Lean’s childbirth scene was messy, sweaty stuff, but the baby’s going to be born tomorrow, thank goodness, and after that they’ll be more useful than you can imagine.”
“How does a virgin know how to play a woman having a baby?”
“Exactly how do you know I’m a virgin?”
“Oh.” He fell silent and dropped his eyes in embarrassment.
“Is it common knowledge, does it show somewhere, or did you just assume it?” Tessa demanded, her eyes flashing mischief.
“David told me,” he admitted.
“Out of the blue? As if virgins are as rare as unicorns and you had to be alerted when there’s one in the neighborhood, like a special tourist attraction?”
“Actually he was warning me not to pursue you.”
“I hope you told him to mind his own damn business.”
“Something more or less like that.”
“Does he also think I’m not old enough to be let out alone with such a hardened sinner as you?”
“Definitely that, at the very least. Who told you I was a hardened sinner?”
“Everybody. It’s common knowledge, as famous as my deplorable virginity.”
“Well, that makes us even, doesn’t it? Two of a kind? Two of an opposite kind, that is.” I’m babbling, he thought. I’m not making sense, except, I don’t feel foolish.
“That makes us people who shouldn’t even be having dinner together,” Tessa said serenely.
“Is that why I feel so blazingly happy with you?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders in an eloquent gesture of lyrical, shameless ignorance. “I don’t know you at all, certainly not what makes you happy. I just know you’re kind and good and I feel something with you I don’t feel with anybody else, not even Roddy.”
“ ‘Roddy’?” he asked, feeling a shaft of jealously more intense than he’d experienced in forty-five years.
“Roddy Fensterwald. He directed my first two pictures.”
“I know him, great guy,” Luke signed in relief. “What is it you feel with me that you don’t feel with Roddy?”
“Safe,” she said quietly. It took all her courage, but she was determined to tell him. “Totally and completely safe. As if nothing bad can possibly happen to me, as if you’ll protect me from all the frightening, hard, awful things in the world. It’s crazy, it makes no sense at all, I’ve just met you, but in my whole life I’ve never felt that way before. It’s like discovering that I can be a completely new person. It’s as different as—as if I woke up and discovered I was six feet tall and had just won the Olympic gold medal in ski jumping. It happened to me yesterday when we shook hands. I decided I should tell you because it’s too important to keep secret. I don’t mean to make you feel any sense of obligation, I don’t realistically expect you to take care of me for a single second, that’s not what it’s about in any way—but I wanted you to know.”
“You don’t frighten me.”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“You have to know that what you just said would scare the living Jesus out of most men.”
“I felt you were tough enough to take it. And if I’m wrong, it’s better for me to know now. I thought about it all night.”
“I thought about you all night long, too.”
“What sort of things?” she asked without coyness.
“About the facts that you’re very young and a virgin. I discovered how amazingly important that virginity is to me, and I never knew that about myself. Your age isn’t of consequence, you’re definitely a grown-up and that’s the essential thing—but the fact that you’ve never made love with a man—that’s different. Altogether different. I’ve been with a lot of women, but there wasn’t one of them who did
n’t have some experience. It’s got to be the old altar boy in me—I have absolutely no right at all, considering the life I’ve led, to prize virginity so much. I’m not absolutely clear on why virginity is deeply, mysteriously meaningful, and, for me, wonderful beyond words—but it is. Enormously. Maybe it has something to do with my mother and her mother. They were both virgins when they married—naturally in those days—but my mother always told me how important it would be to her for me to marry a virgin. I discounted it, I thought she was simply being a good Catholic, but nevertheless she got to me. More than I can say.”
Tell him now, Tessa thought. Tell him now, before this conversation goes further. But tell him what? She was a virgin, in every technical way, and giving birth hadn’t changed that fact. The three-second episode with what’s his name didn’t count, couldn’t possibly matter, she’d been drunk and not responsible and it wasn’t remotely sex. The only kisses she’d ever experienced had been before a camera. She’d never even been allowed to go out on an unsupervised date. There was nothing to tell, except the part she’d confessed and been absolved of, and that was between her God and herself. She took a deep breath and sat back in her chair, glad to forget the ridiculous, self-defeating idea of telling him the truth.
“Is that what makes you feel happy with me, my all-too-much-discussed state of virginity?” Tessa asked with wry curiosity.
“I felt that way almost before I knew damn-all about you except that you were freezing. It started right after I put my coat around you. It’s something about your eyes and your smile and your voice—if I’m not careful I’m going to sound like lyrics to a Gershwin song, minus the wit and invention.”
“All those women you’ve had, did they make you happy?”
“Not one, not truly, or I’d have married her.”
“You don’t frighten me, either,” Tessa said as lightly as she could, suppressing a tremor with her actress’s skill. She had to change the subject or the surprising, inexplicable tears of joy that menaced her might rise to the surface. She felt atoms of happiness swirling and churning and slowly turning into a solid pillar somewhere in her chest. “What sort of things do you like to do?”
“Sail a small boat and fly a small plane,” he said, thinking of priorities, “and marinate a rack of homegrown lamb in my homemade sauce, and dance a samba in Brazil and eat a Peking duck at Mr. Chow’s in London and read until three a.m. and go to auctions and ski the fall line and, oh, I almost forgot, kiss pretty girls. And take care of my business. What about you?”
“Me? Not fair!” Tessa said indignantly, instantly jealous of his easily produced list of delights that included so much enviable experience that had nothing to do with her. “I haven’t had time to choose what I’d like to do because I’ve been so busy taking the lessons Roddy and Aaron decided I should take. I can dance, but not a samba, whatever that is. I love to read, but I don’t even know what a Peking duck looks like. You’re overprivileged, Luke Blake. Where do you live?”
“Here and there, more or less. I have a place in Melbourne and another in Cap-Ferrat, near Monaco, but I rarely spend more than a few weeks in Australia and a few weeks in the South of France every year. That’s where I go to sail and unwind. I have business all over the world, so I roam about, living in hotel suites most of the time.”
“What sort of business?”
“Mining, milling, brewing, finding new ways to dig things out of the earth.”
“Why can’t you just leave the earth alone?” she said, provokingly.
“I often wonder. My great-grandfather started it and I’m trapped in the family business. Now too many people depend on me to even think of stopping.”
“Under the circumstances, with all this rape of the planet you’re hopelessly involved in, in spite of certain philosophic reservations, for which I give you very little credit, don’t you think we might have something to eat?”
“Did I forget to order?” he asked in wonder.
“Not even a drink.”
“Lord, I’m sorry. What will you have?”
“I’ll try a Blake’s, see what all the fuss is about.”
“You’ve never had a Blake’s?”
“Never had a beer, actually.”
“Why the hell not? You’re hurting my feelings.”
“I used to experiment with real liquor when I was a kid, a day student at a convent, and I was being naughty with my friend Mimi, but then … we stopped … and I haven’t had a drink since, except for sips of champagne at family weddings. I’ve lived at home, you see, until I left for location on this picture, and my parents never keep liquor around, so I didn’t drink on dates—well they weren’t date dates, just publicity things.”
“Lucky David didn’t know about all this. He’d have locked you in your room, and me in mine.”
“Don’t tell him anything! My reputation’s too good as it is.”
“Waiter, two Blake’s, please.”
“I’ll try, sir,” answered the waiter in the most authentically French restaurant in the aristocratic, sophisticated old city. “But I’m not sure we have that particular brand of beer.” Amazing, he thought, why don’t they ask for Coca-Cola while they’re at it?
“Shocking. Well then, bring us a bottle of champagne. I’m sure you have Dom Pérignon. What shall we drink to, Tessa?”
“My first real grown-up date,” she said with decision.
“You don’t mean—you can’t mean—me?”
“You. And about time, I think.”
“Good God in Heaven!”
“Yes, indeed.”
10
The next morning Tessa was pulling on her jeans and sweaters for her early-morning wardrobe call when Fiona came in with a note and a bunch of pallid daffodils. Tessa tore open the note, read it twice, turned quickly, and hurled the daffodils into a wastepaper basket.
“He’s gone!”
“What? Let me see that.” Fiona grabbed the slip of paper and muttered, “Have to leave for London suddenly, hotel florist not open, hope you like daffodils, keep warm, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Do you believe that?” Tessa raved.
“I still don’t know how last night ended,” Fiona said, reaching for a pragmatic tone.
“He brought me back to the hotel, escorted me up to the door to our suite, looked into my eyes for a very long time, as if he were memorizing them, kissed me gently on the top of my head, and abruptly left, leaving me standing there stupidly waiting—I don’t know what I expected but it was definitely not that after we’d both said things … things that I thought meant … obviously I was wrong … meant that we liked each other very much. More than very much. Oh, Fiona, we weren’t flirting, I was so sure of that. We were speaking from our hearts.”
Tessa’s eyes were full of incredulous disappointment, deception, and disbelief. She felt utterly abandoned in a way so basic that she could barely comprehend what had happened. How could she ever reconcile last night’s long dinner, and the intimate, serious, revealing conversation that had lasted until late in the evening, with the note she’d just received? Until she’d read it, she’d been plunged into a pool of tremulous emotion, so new in her experience of life that she’d been up all night long, alternately examining everything she had said to Luke and Luke had said to her, reliving every detail, abandoned to her happiness, her heart so full that she’d wept for joy and laughed at herself and wept again.
“But Tessa, he doesn’t say he isn’t coming back,” Fiona said, as briskly as she could, but still sounding only a hollow note of hope.
“When? The very next time he has business in Scotland. Between trains in five years.” Tessa abandoned her attempt at brittle scorn and cried out, “What kind of man could do a thing like this? What kind, Fiona? Can you explain it? You’ve been around, you know men. Is it typical, is it something I should have expected? He ‘had to leave for London’? Why didn’t he even mention that detail last night when he was so busy telling me how blazingly happy—yes,
those were the words he used—I made him? Can you think of a single reason, even one, that makes any sense? I know that Mr. Lean expected him to stick around for a while. He mentioned that yesterday.”
“Damn, I was afraid of this,” Fiona said viciously. “A bloody hit-and-run driver.”
“You were so right. And you can say ‘I told you so’ as much as you want to—I deserve it. Oh, what a fool I was!”
“At least he didn’t get the pearl of precious price.”
“That’s probably why he left, it’s the only thing that I can think of to explain his running away. He has a virgin fixation. I believe that in his crazy, mixed-up mind I’m too pure, I’m taboo, somebody he shouldn’t possibly have anything to do with. Not even a kiss on the lips. Messing with a virgin is against whatever religion he has left, he said it as flatly as that.”
“Tessa darling, I’m sick that you’ve been so badly hurt, but Luke Blake wasn’t for you and you knew it all along. Come on, admit it. My God, the guy’s middle-aged and more than lived-in. You’re ten thousand times too good for him, too young, too fresh, too talented, with too many wonderful things that are going to happen to you. Your life’s just beginning. What did you see in him, anyway? It’s just one of those location things, happens all the time. And what’s this virgin fixation all about. It’s utterly ridiculous!”
“He’d heard, as apparently everybody in the whole of show business has, that I’m a virgin, and he’s a lapsed Catholic, thirty years lapsed, which is plenty lapsed, believe me, but it’s still left him with a major complex about the marvel of virginity. Sick, that’s what it is, sick! Oh, I hate him!”
“The bastard’s not worth hating. Don’t waste your energy. You’re going to be late as it is and you have a long day’s work. Come on, let’s go. They’ll feed us in wardrobe and that’s what we need, both of us. Daffodils! Those grimy little things. It would have been better to have sent nothing. It’s odd, but I feel personally insulted.”
“You know what’s really and truly the worst thing about all this,” Tessa asked Fiona in a flood of fresh misery as they were driven up to the castle. “I can’t trust my instincts ever again.”
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 10
