Chapter 2
Finn served supper. The tight-lipped husband of Bidelia was tall and lean with an almost invisible comb-over, and he had a pinched but not unfriendly face with a veined, hawkish nose. During the meal – roast chicken with fingerling potatoes and a chilled red wine – Camilla, as promised, avoided any specific mention of what it was she might require Laura’s help with. At first, she avoided conversation in general, which made Laura nervous and caused her to talk too much about herself.
‘While I studied for my doctorate at Columbia in New York I went out with a poet.’ Camilla’s forced smile diluted Laura’s confidence, but she forged on. ‘Much to my mother’s chagrin, I moved in with him down in Greenwich Village just before graduating, and after saving for a year we took off for Europe and ended up staying almost three months with my Uncle Manolo – the black sheep of my mother’s family who lived like a Bohemian Pasha in the hills outside of Málaga.’
She could see her hostess beginning to fidget with her napkin, a clear cue for Laura to wrap things up quickly. But lemming-like, she kept on full tilt toward the cliff’s edge. ‘He had this glorious house, surrounded by lemon trees, that was filled with books and cats and dogs, and he was involved in an explosive ménage à trois with two Finnish sisters. There was a constant stream of visitors that ranged from California drug runners to louche Euro types, including a not terribly good painter, gaunt and balding, who was a descendant of the Marquis de Sade.’
She included this last detail hoping it might at least raise one of Camilla’s eyebrows, but the woman, displaying the composure of a Zen monk, remained immutable. ‘Everyone appreciated Manolo’s wine and whiskey and his politically incorrect conversation. And as much as I sometimes like to ignore it, the truth is that he had an important influence on me. Apart from being an outwardly amoral man who hid a Catholic, guilt-ridden core, he was a polemicist of the first order. His specialty was aggressively debunking the most cherished beliefs of true believers, be they political or religious. But he also would become especially obnoxious when anyone began to agree with him – at which point he would instantly change sides just to spite them. Fiona spent some time there with me that summer and loved it. And it was at Manolo’s that I began to read, voraciously, tons of literature. He had an amazing library and it was there I picked up the Bible, a lovely old, King James edition.’
This last detail did seem to breathe some life into Camilla’s face. ‘I could tell he was pleased that I was taking on such an unlikely book for someone my age, and his way of showing his approval was by taunting me and telling me why the text was corrupt and leagues away from the originals. This, coupled with a trip Saul – the poet – and I made to Paris where I got to see some ancient manuscripts, stayed with me. When we returned to New York we soon split up. He was appalled at my interest in Hebrew, a language that had been an integral part of his nightmare of a childhood. I got my PhD from Columbia and then began studying for a ThD at Harvard where I began seeing a professor who was a curator on leave from the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. We lived together in London for a time until I had to admit he was essentially gay – but I also realized that areas related to his field fascinated me and I ended up being invited to Oxford as a visiting fellow and then went on to the Sorbonne – like I told you earlier.’
She stopped, out of breath, enveloped in a wave of self-loathing, and reached for her wine, hoping she wasn’t blushing. What was that all about? She thought to herself. She would never have done such a thing at a conventional job interview. Then Camilla confirmed her worst suspicions by simply ignoring it.
‘Where are you planning on working next?’ her hostess asked.
‘I’ve applied to a number of places,’ said Laura, ‘but I have my own income, a modest trust fund my stepfather set up for me that gives me enough to get by on, so I’m not absolutely desperate.’
She took another sip of wine, a large one.
‘And when did you meet Fiona exactly?’
‘After her mother got divorced and moved to New York for a while, Fiona went to my high school, a private girl’s school called Chapin. We were in the same class. She spent a lot of time doing homework at our apartment that was practically across the street from school.’
‘Ah yes. I visited with them once during that time.’
‘And then when I lived in London, we became good friends.’
‘You mentioned a current beau I believe. I don’t mean to be a busybody, but might that relationship be problematical in terms of how much time you could stay here?’
This was the first indication that the unsolicited revelations of her personal life might not be held against her.
‘I have a boyfriend, a man I’m with. But that won’t be a problem – at all.’
‘At all?’
‘Let’s just say I’m glad to be here, and not there, at the moment.’
‘How old are you Laura?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘And you’ve never married?’
‘No.’
This line of questioning made her uncomfortable. And here she had been thinking that Camilla could not have cared less about these kinds of things.
‘Why is that?’
‘Maybe I’m too much of a romantic?’
‘In what sense?’
‘I’ve a notion about the way I’d like to feel with someone before marrying them – and that hasn’t happened to me.’
‘Yet.’
‘Yet. Yes. That’s the spirit.’
‘And how about children?’
‘I don’t want to have them enough to have them alone or have one with someone I’m not truly into.’
‘No. Quite right. Well I wish I had been more like you. Perhaps I was born a bit too early, or in the wrong ambiance.’
Laura sensed a slight crack opening in the woman’s elegant veneer.
‘So how did you get to Spain, Camilla? Fiona told me you’ve spent a lot of time there.’
‘I was born there, for one thing.’
‘Well, that will do it.’
‘I’m sure she’s told you all the rest as well. How my mother fell in love, at seventeen, with an Irish boy, Irish-English, and just before he went off to war – World War II – he got her pregnant with me, and before he could do anything honourable about it he got himself killed in Belgium in a V-2 rocket blast.’
‘How terrible.’
What she knew from Fiona was that it hadn’t been just any Irish-English boy. She admired the woman’s style.
‘And in those days such things were far more dramatic, socially I mean, than they are now. In any event, my grandparents shipped my mother off to Mallorca. Have you heard of Robert Graves?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘His father knew my grandfather and Graves’ house in Mallorca was still empty at the time. Graves had left it with one wife when the Spanish Civil War began and was still some months away from returning there with a new one, and so my mother and an aunt that we all loved rented the house from him and I was born there, with a midwife, like something out of Chaucer; and when Robert and Beryl arrived we got our own place just across from them and lived there throughout much of my childhood. I grew up as a wild child in Deià but surrounded by books, like you at your uncle Manolo’s, and Graves took an interest in my education and so all of that went rather well.’
‘I would imagine so!’ Laura was floored.
‘And then I went to university at Cambridge. But I met a man one summer near Cádiz, a Catalan on vacation who seemed a good enough sort, and we married – I was eager to escape my mother’s orbit really. He and I lived in Barcelona mostly, where my children were born, my son, and then a daughter who died when she was still very little. After that happened, I began to spend more time here.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘That I began to spend more time here?’
‘No. Oh no. About your daughter I mean.’
�
�It was … very sad.’
Camilla looked away and it was clear to Laura that a change in the conversation was called for.
‘My mother’s story was a bit similar to yours.’
‘How so?’
‘She came from a very conservative family, from Granada, Spain. Her father was a super-Catholic Franco supporter and an important professor at the medical faculty where my mother also studied. But she made a point of falling for a fellow student who was from Palestine. She did it just to spite her parents. I mean she told me as much. She even converted to Islam, married him in a mosque, and after they got their degrees, moved with him to Hebron on the West Bank, where I was born.’
‘I’d no idea. I thought you came from New York.’
‘It’s a long story. Well, not that long.’
‘Proceed.’
‘In Hebron she discovered that her in-laws were even more conservative than her own family. “I told you it would be like this,” my father apparently said to her. “We should have remained in Spain. Married to you I could have become a citizen and practiced there. We could have had a good life there. We still can.” But my mother could not bear to admit to failure, or to face her family, so she divorced my father, took me, and moved to Madrid. She got work there as a gynaecologist in a doctor’s suite that catered to Americans, which is how she met my stepfather, a State Department official attached to the Embassy. He came from a waspy, wealthy, New York, New England family. When his stint was over, he asked my mother to marry him. She said yes, became a Presbyterian of course, and we moved to Manhattan. I took my stepfather’s last name. When my mother died, suddenly, fifteen years ago, she was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Southampton, Long Island, far from the Roman Catholic campo santo behind the Alhambra where her parents, my grandparents, are interred.’
‘That’s quite the tale. And yes, I do see the similarities. What became of your father?’
‘He died when I was little, after we’d left Palestine.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘He was hit with a stray bullet during the first intifada while trying to help someone who’d been injured.’
Camilla was about to say something, but then Bidelia came in to clear the dinner plates and right after that Finn served dessert and replenished the wine. By the time they were alone again the moment had passed.
After they said goodnight Laura went outside for a walk. A damp sea breeze moistened her face. She liked the gentle crunching sound her boots made on the gravel. The Land Rover and her rented car were covered with night dew and sat snugly by a large hedge that grew flush to a brick wall. All of the talk about her family and past had left her agitated. Though once upon a time she had thought to recover her father’s last name – Hourani – she rarely spoke or thought about him. That side of her gene pool only came up at dinner parties when Nathan liked to brag about that part of her heritage as a way of bolstering his own cultural cred. She had a craving for a cigarette and rummaged around in her bag for some gum to stave it off. She felt particularly virtuous resisting the temptation without Nathan there to scold her.
Venturing out past the gates onto the road, it was very dark. It was difficult to make out the low bulwark of irregular stones on the narrow lane’s far side that marked the border of a scruffy field where, when arriving that afternoon, she had noticed sheep grazing. The field sloped down and ended in dunes, beach and sea. The sound of the waves breaking was exhilarating. Her phone rang. She had forgotten to turn the ringer off before dinner and thanked the stars it had not blared its rap-song ringtone during the meal. It was Nathan. She hesitated to take it, but then she gritted her teeth and did.
By that time, Camilla had changed into a flannel nightgown – not worn since the previous winter – and got into her gondola-shaped, Renaissance-era bed where, as she sometimes commented, ‘Two kings had been born and where, no doubt, all manner of rakish activity had been indulged in.’ She was pleased with how the evening had gone, and generally pleased with Laura. The idea of having to interview two Oxford professors had never thrilled her. Putting up with a strange man wandering about the property in tweeds with a pipe and bad teeth was not something she thought she could stand for very long.
And she congratulated herself once again for the decision to have the codices properly translated before alerting Sotheby’s. Though the scroll remnants and the codices had been handed down within her mother’s family for close to a thousand years, lost sometimes for over a century before being recovered, only to be lost and recovered again, she felt no emotional connection to them. If it had been a painting or a house, a piece of jewellery even, she might have felt differently. But a trio of objects so foreign and inscrutable did little to warm her heart. She was only grateful for their existence and grateful to her disaster of a mother who remembered where they were just before the Alzheimer’s had done her in. With any luck their sale might avail her of a proper nest egg for her son and his girls – just in case.
Turning off her reading light she lay in the dark and thought about her mother who had slept, had affairs, and died in that same bed. She remembered coming into that room many times not all that long ago, or so it seemed, to say goodnight, and how more often than not her mother was inebriated, her face covered in night creams. Her mother, who had never tired of complaining of how Camilla was the first woman in the family’s history not to marry into a fortune. Complaining incessantly about how Camilla had run off with a member of Spain’s middle class instead, an attractive but provincial businessman without a title. Whenever Camilla had countered with the observation that her mother had never married at all, she would then watch her take another sip of wine before saying, ‘But your father my dear was the Viscount Elveden, Arthur Onslow Edward Trevelyan, who would have been a millionaire many times over, and if you had been a boy instead of a silly girl your paternal grandfather would have taken more of an interest and bequeathed us a lot more hush money than he did.’
Chapter 3
Laura came down for breakfast just before eight thirty and was told by Bidelia that Camilla had already eaten and left for a good part of the day to attend to a horse. Laura wondered if it was something her hostess had already planned and chose not to mention the night before.
‘I didn’t know she had a horse.’
‘Oh yes, Miss. There’s a stable full of them out back. One of the girls came in this morning to tell her about the one that’s ill and they loaded the creature into a trailer and off they went. She told me to apologise for her.’
‘No matter,’ Laura said. ‘What time does she normally take breakfast, Bidelia?’
‘Seven if it’s in her room, seven thirty if she comes down here, miss.’
And yet she had encouraged Laura to sleep as late as she wished. Might this have been some sort of test she failed?
Two perfectly boiled eggs with soldiers and a cup of Irish breakfast tea settled her. She decided to try and relax and enjoy herself, if only to contradict Nathan’s certainty last night that she was wasting her time, that she should be attending conferences and looking to publish if she was serious about her career. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘She’ll string you along for a few days, positive that she is in possession of some unique treasure – keeping you captive there at Wuthering Heights – and in the end it will be, at best, some bad poetry from medieval France.’ There was always the unstated implication in much of his criticism that she was somehow lazy, that she lacked the necessary discipline, or fire in the belly, that she was en fin, a spoiled girl too easily put off by the sort of demands that real academics, like himself of course, took in their stride. He called her from the apartment on West Tenth Street where once again he had forgotten to water the plants on the terrace and he actually had the gall to get angry with her when she gently chided him about it.
She browsed in the library and thought to call Fiona who would be eager to hear Laura’s first impressions, but she knew Fiona would not be up for hours. She sent her a text message
instead:
Camilla gone for the day! Amazing estate – going out for a hike – seeking Poldark.
But rather than go out just yet she went back to her room to brush her teeth and retrieve the book she was reading. Then she explored the house, peeking into each of the twelve immense bedrooms, including Camilla’s with its bizarre, boat-shaped bed that she found a bit kitsch.
Downstairs she settled into a cavernous and comfortable sofa in the formally appointed living room, the sort found in many grand houses that were rarely used. She looked at a family photo album there, large and brown with sheets of onionskin paper between the pages. Though she saw no hints of royalty, the pictures depicted a century of family life lived, physically at least, in a state of grace. Large lunch tables under trees and grapevines in what was surely Mallorca, with Robert Graves presiding, a teenaged and vivacious Camilla sitting next to a woman who was certainly her mother – a woman with an arresting aristocratic head but thick wrists and hands that Camilla had been fortunate enough not to inherit. Patio life at a villa on what looked to be Lake Como. Riding and hunting parties there on the Cornwall estate – a lot of fly-fishing – a young, dark-haired boy, probably Camilla’s son, being offered a taste from a silver flask as two older men stood by grinning. Pictures of Camilla with a little girl, probably the one who had died.
She fell asleep reading, woke an hour later and went for a long walk. The weather had been calm and sunny early in the morning, but clouds were rolling in from the sea by then and once again a brisk wind blew. The countryside along the road to the mansion was magnificent and had nothing to do with the moors of Wuthering Heights. It was all hillocks and green pastures, fast-running streams, stands of trees broken by gentle glades, and then the beach and the cliffs curving their way north. She wandered about wide expanses of grassland and heather, resting now and then on boulders of granite. Arriving at the edge of a marshy valley, she looked down into it and saw stands of gnarly, ancient, oak trees. Stonechat and Wheatear songbirds accompanied her, and near the sea cliffs gulls rose on currents of air without having to flap their wings.
The Secret of Provence House Page 2
