Sophie's Secret

by Anne Weale

  ‘Are you a polyglot, Mr Washington?’ she asked.

  ‘I wish I were. I have a few words of several languages but I’m only fluent in Italian…which means I can get by in Spain. What made you choose Italian as your principal language?’

  ‘When I was small, someone in my family spoke it. I used to like listening to them…I still think it’s the most musical language in Europe.’ In case he should press for a fuller explanation, she said, ‘You were going to tell me some of the problems I’ll have to deal with.’

  ‘First I’ll explain the project. When you visited Venice, did you go to any of the other islands in the lagoon— Torcello—Burano—Murano?’

  When she nodded, he went on, ‘Those three are the only ones most tourists see, but there are more than thirty. The cost of saving Venice for posterity is immense. No other city in the world has so many historic buildings and no other city has its foundations in the sea. To raise more money for the preservation of Venice an auction was held for long low-rent leases on thirteen of the unused islands in the lagoon. I was one of the successful bidders. My island is called Capolavoro.’

  ‘What are you planning to do with it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s going to become a refuge.’

  ‘For wildlife?’

  ‘For me. My present base in Venice is the top floor of a palazzo built by my mother’s family. The rest of it’s home to various elderly relations. I need somewhere quieter and more private.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised you were yourself a Venetian on your mother’s side,’ said Sophie.

  Although now, looking at him with that knowledge, she wondered why she hadn’t guessed that his forebears included some of the extraordinary men who had made their fortunes in Venice and spent them on the magnificent palaces along the Grand Canal.

  Rogues and schemers, many of them, some cruel and ruthless in achieving their objectives, all of them had been motivated by the powerful thirst for life he had warned her he had and expected his underlings to share.

  Suddenly Sophie had the feeling that she might be out of her depth, that working for Marc Washington would be unlike any previous job and, in spite of the laudatory references given her by previous employers, she might not have the skills to cope with the man beside her.

  All this went through her mind in seconds, leaving only a brief pause before she went on, ‘Where do you feel you belong…in Venice or America?’

  Having asked, she wished she hadn’t. He might think the question too inquisitive.

  ‘I belong wherever I am,’ he said. ‘There aren’t many parts of the global village where I haven’t been or where I feel out of place.’

  She had already noticed that while he talked he looked intently at her, never switching his gaze somewhere else as most people did when conversing.

  ‘Where do you feel you belong?’ he asked. ‘In that little village in Devon where you were born?’

  He really did have a phenomenal recall of facts, thought Sophie, switching her own gaze to the bulkhead in front of her. To remember the county of her birthplace was remarkable, and how did he know it was a village with a population of fewer than five hundred people? Perhaps Mrs LaRue had checked, adding a note to Sophie’s dossier.

  ‘No, definitely not,’ she answered. ‘I was there for six months as a baby and then taken somewhere else. The place where I belong is somewhere I haven’t found yet.’

  The meal was over and they were drinking coffee when Marc Washington said, ‘Once you’ve been shown the ropes, I shall have to leave you to handle things on your own a great deal of the time, although you’ll always be able to contact me. Your role will be to liaise with all the people involved in the restoration and development of Capolavoro. To be a mediator when they come into conflict—as they will.’

  ‘May I ask you why you didn’t engage a home-grown PA for this?’

  ‘That was my first intention, but no one good enough applied. In Italy top-level PAs gravitate to Milan and Rome. Anyway, there are advantages in bringing in an outsider. In many ways Italy is one of the most civilised countries in the world, but getting things done quickly and efficiently has always been a problem,’ he said drily. ‘Americans are better at that. I was expecting all the New York applicants to be American.’

  Sophie couldn’t resist asking, ‘What gave me the edge over the two other finalists?’

  ‘In terms of qualifications you were very evenly matched. In that situation the choice depends on the selector’s quirks. I liked the look of you best,’ he added casually.

  For a second or two she was flattered. Then, slightly perplexed, she said, ‘But we didn’t submit photographs. When did you see us?’

  ‘While you were in the waiting room. The Venetian mirror you noticed when you came in is also a one-way window.’

  ‘A window!’ Sophie’s startled exclamation drew a glance from a passing stewardess.

  ‘The fact that you were the only one to appreciate the nature of the frame was a minor point in your favour. I like people who take an interest in their surroundings and recognise fine things.’

  ‘You’ve ruined the fineness of that mirror by replacing the proper glass with that nasty piece of one-way window glass,’ Sophie informed him bluntly.

  Normally she had a low boiling point, and had not lost her temper in years. But anger welled up in her now and she couldn’t contain it.

  ‘I think watching people without their knowing it is…’ On the brink of saying unpardonable, she modified her word to, ‘Unethical.’

  ‘But practical,’ he said coolly. ‘More revealing than a face-to-face meeting when you would have been putting on a front. I saw you behaving naturally.’

  ‘Could you hear what we were saying?’

  ‘No, the room isn’t bugged.’

  His indifference to her disapproval fanned her anger. ‘You surprise me,’ she said sarcastically. ‘If you’re prepared to spy on people, why jib at listening?’

  ‘You exaggerate. Watching people and even, in certain circumstances, listening to them, isn’t the same as spying on them. It’s an accepted technique which has many applications. Manufacturing companies often use it to gauge customers’ reactions to their product. They set up consumer discussion groups and listen to them talking. The groups know they’re being monitored but they respond more freely without the visible presence of people taking notes.’

  ‘That’s the difference…they know. We didn’t. We thought you weren’t in the building. Didn’t it cross your mind that we had a right to see you?’

  She knew she was taking a tone he wouldn’t like, but she felt impelled to have this out with him. It was a matter of principle.

  ‘If you had met me, would it have made you withdraw your application?’ he asked sardonically.

  The arrogance implicit in his question brought a crisp retort from Sophie. ‘I already had reservations about it. I might well have withdrawn if I’d known about the mirror. I’m sure Mrs LaRue can’t have liked being a party to that. I thought she looked uncomfortable when she told us you wouldn’t be able to see us.’

  ‘Audrey may not be comfortable with a lot of my methods but she knows which side her bread is buttered. If you can’t accept my authority, if you’re going to purse your lips every time I do something you don’t like, it had better be hello and goodbye. You can fly back from Paris at my expense and I’ll send for one of the other two.’

  A stewardess removed their empty coffee-cups. When she was out of earshot, he said, ‘Think it over. I don’t want anyone working for me who can’t go along with the way I do things. I’m going to read now. You have the rest of the flight to decide.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOR a while Sophie sat silently simmering, but gradually her temper cooled. She realised she had handled the whole thing very badly. When she’d found out about the mirror, she should have held her tongue until she’d had time to think it over.

  This way, by speaking recklessly, she had diminished her credit
with him if she did decide to stay with the job.

  Now, from the window, Sophie could see the curvature of the earth and the infinity of space. It was only by courtesy of the man beside her that she was having this experience. Many people would think her crazy to put at risk the salary and the opportunities that working for him offered.

  Later in the flight, while they were still in the stratosphere at their cruising altitude, he suddenly closed his book, adjusted the angle of his seat and lay back and shut his eyes. She thought he was probably thinking rather than sleeping, although there were many examples of famously dynamic men who topped up their energy with catnaps.

  Either way, he looked subtly different; the angular architecture of his face was softened by the closed eyelids and unexpectedly silky black eyelashes near the downward slash of his cheekbones. When his eyes were open, the probing scrutiny of his Italian-dark irises distracted attention from his eyelashes.

  She was thinking about the strange mixture of his bloodlines—old Virginian and even older Venetian— when she had the strangest feeling that somewhere, a long time ago, she had seen him before.

  Where?

  Reviewing all the cities where their paths could have crossed or converged, if only for a few moments in some expensive street where she had been window-shopping and he had been buying, she failed to come up with an answer.

  In one year, if you worked in a city, you saw thousands of faces, she thought. Did the brain memorise all those images, stashing them away in the back of the mind, most of them irrecoverable but a few in a special place from which they could be retrieved like the hidden files on a computer?

  What she did remember, very clearly, was the evening this adventure had begun. Not that she had immediately recognised it as a turning point. Did one ever? she thought, her mind going back to the evening in question.

  ‘So what’s new in your world?’ asked Merle.

  After watching fifteen minutes of the news they had agreed to zap the newscast and eat their lap-suppers in peace.

  Sophie shrugged. ‘Nothing much.’

  She was in her white terry bathrobe which, according to Merle, made her look at least ten years younger than twenty-five. Especially with her face cleansed with mousse, and her blonde hair, normally worn in a sleek, swingy bob, caught up by a tortoiseshell spring-clip from which a few silky tendrils had escaped to curl round her ears and her high cheekbones, which had emerged from the round, cheerful face captured in photographs of her schooldays.

  Both her job and Merle’s involved working late several nights a week. Tonight Sophie had got home in time to take a quick shower before fixing a salad to go with the fillets of salmon she had slipped under the grill when she’d heard a key in the lock of their shared West Side apartment.

  ‘How did your day go?’ she asked Merle now.

  Having just filled her mouth with salad, her friend waved her fork to signal that she would reply in a moment. Like Sophie she was a PA, her boss being the founder of New York’s most famous firm of headhunters.

  Most of the people they hunted were senior executives required for plum positions with America’s commercial giants. But sometimes they searched for people lower down the corporate scale, even recruiting secretaries when exceptional skills were asked for.

  When Merle could speak, she said, ‘Something came in today I wouldn’t have minded trying for myself if my CV had filled the bill. Whoever lands this cushy number has to speak fluent Italian. I only have French.’

  ‘Why is Italian a must?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘The job is in Venice, Italy.’

  When Sophie had been working in London, before crossing the Atlantic, it had puzzled her that Americans always said ‘Paris, France’ or ‘Naples, Italy’. Soon after arriving in New York she had realised that almost every town and city in Europe had a namesake, and sometimes several, in the United States.

  Any mention of what, to her, was the one and only Venice always triggered her interest. She never spoke of the reasons why the Italian city was special to her, but even to see on a poster in the window of a travel agency the familiar bow-prong of a gondola, or one of the famous bridges over the network of canals, was enough to revive poignant memories.

  ‘What is the job?’ she asked.

  ‘Same as yours,’ Merle replied. ‘PA to a boss who expects to have a miracle-worker in his outer office. But he’s ready to pay big bucks for his wonder woman.’

  Sophie’s eyes widened when Merle told her the salary the job carried. ‘Every PA in New York with a smattering of Italian will be lining up for an interview,’ she went on. ‘But, aside from being genuinely fluent, there are some other essentials that will whittle the final line-up down to single figures.’

  ‘What are the other qualifications?’ Sophie asked, aware that she was beginning to feel more than a casual interest.

  For some months now she had been waking up in the morning without the sense of eagerness to see what the coming day offered that she felt people ought to experience if their life was on the right track.

  New York, so exciting and stimulating when she had first come here, had begun to lose some of its charmin the same way that London had palled after a few years of working there.

  Maybe she was growing out of big cities, beginning to need a different kind of environment. But what and where was a puzzle she had yet to solve.

  ‘For a start the successful applicant has to be free of all ties,’ said Merle. ‘No husband, no partner, no one she’s serious about.’

  ‘That’s not going to thin out the field much,’ Sophie said drily. ‘This city is teeming with women who would sell their souls to have a man in their life. But the only ones they ever meet are other women’s husbands or their discards. Neither of us has a guy we couldn’t bear to tear ourselves away from. Will we ever?’ she added, with a faint sigh.

  Merle said, ‘You could have plenty of dates if you were less picky. I couldn’t see too much wrong with Robert.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything wrong with him,’ Sophie agreed. ‘He just didn’t make me feel the way people should if they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together.’

  ‘That’s an ideal that doesn’t work out in real life,’ Merle said firmly.

  Sophie knew that Merle thought her views naïve and unrealistic for a person in her mid-twenties; she had already abandoned a couple of promising relationships for reasons which didn’t make sense to her friend’s way of thinking.

  They had argued the subject many times, and sometimes, awake in the night, Sophie wondered if Merle was right and her expectations were set too high.

  Now, to avoid another disagreement, she recapped the qualifications Merle had already mentioned. ‘Fluent Italian. No ties. What else?’

  ‘Great legs.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  Sophie had lived in America long enough to know what an uproar that requirement would cause in certain quarters. Even in Europe, where the feminist and politically correct lobbies were not yet as powerful as here, it would be considered unacceptably sexist for a male employer to insist on specific physical attributes in his female employees.

  ‘We’re not advertising that,’ said Merle. ‘But, although we’re keeping it quiet, only the long-stemmed applicants will get through to the final interview.’

  ‘This client must have a lot of clout to get away with that proviso. Who is he?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘No one you’ve ever heard of—but with as much clout, if not more, than most of the top tycoons who are household names,’ Merle told her. ‘His name is Marc Washington…the Marc spelt with a c.’

  In Sophie’s job it was essential to read and absorb information from all the best sources of international business news. If asked, she could have given a résumé on most of the financial and commercial top people. But her mental file didn’t come up with any facts about Marc Washington.

  The following day she asked her boss about him. It turned out that Washington was the he
ir to a fortune founded in the last century by a man with ancestral links to the Virginian family whose most famous son had been America’s first president. However, although Marc Washington was known to have a finger in many successful pies, he was a mysterious figure about whose personal life little was known outside his immediate circle.

  From then on, each evening, Sophie couldn’t resist asking Merle how the search for someone to fill the Venetian post was progressing.

  ‘Why are you so interested?’ Merle asked, about a week later.

  Sophie’s answer surprised them both. Until that moment she hadn’t made up her mind to take such a life-changing step.

  ‘I’d like to apply for the job, Merle.’

  Merle took a minute or two to recover from her surprise. Eventually she said, ‘You fit the bill on most counts, including the great legs. But the key qualification is the fluent Italian.’

  ‘I speak Italian as well as you speak French.’

  ‘You do? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It never came up.’

  After a pause, Merle said, ‘There’s quite a lot about you that’s never come up, isn’t there, Sophie? I’ve always known there were parts of your life you didn’t want to talk about, and I’ve gone along with that, but the applicants for this job have to fill in a long questionnaire giving their entire life history. Are you prepared to do that?’

  ‘If I want the job, I’ll have to, won’t I?’ Sophie responded lightly.

  Inwardly, she had no intention of revealing every aspect of her past to an employer whose own life was shrouded in secrecy.

  On the day of the final interview Sophie already knew that only seven people had survived the preliminary sifting. Those on the short-list had then been reinterviewed by the charming but eagle-eyed woman who was Marc Washington’s personal assistant in New York.

  Afterwards, Sophie felt sure she wouldn’t be among the finalists bidden to attend an interview with Marc Washington himself. To her surprise, she was.