The Secret of Provence House

by Aubrey Rhodes

  The chair she sat in had an ottoman. He leaned over, pulled it to him and sat down facing her.

  ‘Maybe we just need to get some sleep,’ he said. ‘I’ll skip tomorrow’s meetings and we can spend the day together.’

  He reached for her hand and she gave it to him. She thought back to the first time she’d seen him in Camilla’s living room, back to their drink at The Wounded Hart, their meeting at the bar at the Bowery Hotel, their lovemaking at the cottage in Cornwall. She looked at their hands together in the darkness.

  ‘Come to bed,’ he said.

  The following morning, she wasn’t there. Seeing the note on his bedside table produced a jolt of adrenalin and a ‘Fuck.’ But the note’s contents could have been worse.

  James, I’ve decided to get my own room at another hotel. As soon as I know which one, I’ll let you know. You can stay as many of these remaining three nights with me there as you wish, but with your phone turned off. If you choose to go back to the Excelsior to sleep, I’ll understand that too. But I need some autonomy. I’m discovering that a little bit of this mistress role goes a long way. In addition, your hotel is too grand and fancy for my taste. I imagined us being somewhere simpler, smaller, and frankly, more elegant. Go to your meetings and we’ll catch up later in the day. Love, Laura

  In the shower minutes later, he sat on the marble bench and forced himself to think about divorce again. It felt harsh. Everything felt harsh. Laura should have been there with him at that moment in his fancy hotel, the two of them embracing under the stream of hot water. Carmensina was basically fine. Since she lost the baby things had improved between them. What was wrong with seeing Laura now and then when the opportunity presented itself? No one had to get hurt. They were grown-ups. These things happened and had been happening since the dawn of time. Surely a lie here and there was better than some bourgeois insistence on the kind of honesty that stuck knives into people’s hearts. Laura was under no obligation to be with him. She was as free as a bird and could walk away whenever she wished, but why now, after waiting all this time for this holiday, why now just because of an ill-timed phone call?

  To make things easier for him she looked at places on the Lido first, but none were to her liking. By mid-morning she found a five-room boutique hotel she loved the look of, near the Grand Canal in the Santa Croce neighbourhood. She checked in and got the only room ready for occupancy at that hour. Though not especially big it had high ceilings, two balconies overlooking the water, and a king-sized bed. Then she headed back to the Excelsior to retrieve the suitcase she had left with the front desk. It was close to lunchtime when she arrived. She preferred not to contact James again until she was fully installed in her own place and she was nervous about running into him. But once she had her suitcase, she found the meeting room where the publishers were gathered and stole a glance through a porthole shaped window in the door.

  She saw a lot of men. Men of many ages, shapes and sizes. Men with long hair, short hair, and men without any hair at all. There were men who were somewhat stylish, somewhat handsome, and many more who, had they passed her on the street, she would not have noticed. To her surprise it took a few seconds to find James among them. At first, she thought that maybe he had skipped the event, or had gone to the restroom and might return and would tap her on the shoulder at any moment. But then she saw him, seated in the middle of it all, listening to the speaker. The speaker was a drab older man and projected on a large screen behind him was a slide of a pie chart depicted in basic colours. The room was drab as well, similar to hundreds like it in large hotels around the world, with floor-to-ceiling divider panels, red carpeting, and folding chairs. She looked hard at James and saw a contemporary professional from Barcelona, a husband, a father of two young girls. It was hard for her to discern the boy who had gone swimming with Camilla in Mallorca, the attractive half-British, half-Catalan man who drank her brandy in the Cornish pub, or the fellow who had lugged a toolbox into the priest hole.

  On the vaporetto heading back to the San Stae stop, her arms draped over the retractable handle of her suitcase, and surrounded by selfie-obsessed tourists, she knew that neither she nor James had changed in any significant way. They were still the same people they had been over that first drink at the Bowery Hotel. So why did everything feel so different? Was it a question of context or an upsetting reminder of how capricious human desire can be? All she knew for certain, then and there gliding upon the water, was that for her the love affair was ending. She no longer desired him. And she had sensed it even yesterday, the minute they were alone in his room, hours before Carmensina’s phone call.

  Back at her new hotel she sat in a chair and stared at her phone. She was uncertain about whether she should follow through on her promise to tell him where she was, or to call and say instead what she was feeling and arrange to meet with him to speak about it the way adults are supposed to. Unable to decide she went out.

  When he called her, she was in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, in the Sala dell’Albergo staring up at the ceiling painting done by Tintoretto, his St Roch in Glory. She had forgotten to silence the ringer and the noise it made embarrassed her and annoyed those standing close to her. Answering it was the fastest way she knew to silence it, and as she did, she began to make her way down to the hall on the ground floor.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Laura.’

  ‘Hello James.’

  ‘It’s good to hear your voice.’

  It was good for her to hear his as well, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘Have you found a hotel you like better?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I’m sorry about how things went last night.’

  ‘Me too.’

  A brief silence ensued.

  ‘We’re back to saying sorry again to each other.’

  He meant it in a nice way, as a way of reminding her of the short but intense history they shared.

  ‘How did your meeting go?’ she asked, stalling.

  ‘It was fine. Boring. And now I’m all done.’

  ‘I’m being a tourist. I like it.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad. But when can we meet?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She was standing before Tintoretto’s Assumption of the Virgin. In the painting, lifted by a gust of wind, Mary begins to leave her son’s apostles behind and ascend into heaven. The sensation of weightlessness in play was something Laura could identify with.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I mean.’

  ‘You’re still upset.’

  Again, she hesitated.

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ she said.

  He was back in the junior suite out on the balcony she had escaped to the night before. The day was clear and mild with a grey Adriatic spreading south below him.

  ‘You’ve met someone,’ he said, ‘and you’re finding it hard to tell me.’

  She smiled, but nervously. She thought about Nicola Carati the archaeologist in Palermo, who was handsome and who she had not been attracted to, but who, in that moment, all of a sudden, represented other possibilities.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t met anyone.’

  ‘You mean you’ve tired of me all by yourself then. The thrill is gone.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for it to happen,’ she said.

  ‘But it has.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘My my,’ he said, ‘and we haven’t even made it to Harry’s Bar.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So, you don’t want to see me? You don’t think we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He was trying to stay calm, trying not to get or sound too exasperated.

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ he said. ‘You know how to reach me. I’m here for you. Call me, please, when you feel a bit clearer about things, all right?
’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I do love you,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  He went back inside and sat in the chair she had sat in. He recalled the calculations that had gone through his head on the flight back to Barcelona from Mallorca with Carmensina and the children after they had buried Camilla. He remembered the concerns he had then, that once Laura had finished the translations, she might very well reassess her feelings for him and the situation he was putting her in. He sat there and tried not to face the realization that his marriage only worked because he had Laura. He did not wish to contemplate what would become of him and his little family without her.

  Laura had considered this as well and thought she knew what would happen, that he would find someone else, someone more pliable and more conveniently located. Rather than cry she wandered the hall and stopped in front of another painting, The Adoration of the Magi. She didn’t like it very much and wondered why Tintoretto, apart from being a Venetian native, was so highly valued. The scene was dark and confusing. With the exception of the man on the far left, the one draped in a red cloak that she assumed to be Joseph, Yeshua’s father, no one else was actually looking at the infant. And then in the background through a gap in the stable walls there was a group of people on horseback who looked to be contemporaries of the painter. The only thing she liked was the surreal presence of the young, pudgy angels hovering above the manger. She went back out onto the street. The building, Venice, all of Italy and the western world, were filled with churches and images of Christ. Her Joseph of Arimathea would have been chagrined and amazed.

  She had a late lunch and went back to her room. She didn’t know what to do. Though lonely, she was wary of wimping out and asking James to join her. Either they would end up fighting or make each other feel even sadder than they were already. She forced herself not to call him and while she had dinner near the hotel, drinking a whole bottle of white wine, he called her twice, but she didn’t answer or listen to his messages. Then he texted her, saying he understood, and that made her angry.

  In bed she got an email from Pierre, her colleague in Paris, with a link to a TED talk he had been captivated by and wanted to share with her. It was an astrophysicist who worked for NASA, a woman who explained how all of the atoms in our bodies had come from stars, some of them located on the far side of the galaxy. She was riveted by it and watched it twice. She thought about Lucretius who had predicted the existence of atoms and who had warned about the dangers of religious thinking. She thought about the miniscule size of the Earth compared with the vastness of the known universe, how relative everything was, how brief human life was. The astrophysicist mentioned how the Earth spun around its axis at a thousand miles an hour, while orbiting the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and how the entire solar system was moving about the centre of the galaxy at half a million miles an hour. All of that speed and motion was actually happening as she lay there in her hotel bed off the Grand Canal. It scared her and cheered her at the same time. It scared her because it implied that life was random and meaningless. It cheered her because it was true and wondrous and a clarion call to get the most out of life.

  Once again, she regretted having gone back to New York on that trip when she found Nathan’s mistress and James on his own. If she had stayed in Cornwall, Camilla would have too. Camilla would still be alive. She might never have slept with James to begin with. Finn and Bidelia might never have done what they did. The scrolls and the codices and her translations would have been safe.

  But what, she thought, was the point of such regret? What had happened had happened. The displeasure and betrayal she felt because of Nathan was just as real as the attraction she’d been possessed by for James. It is, she thought, what life is like. ‘First we feel, then we fall.’ It might even happen again. And she knew she was fortunate to live in a time when both of these stories with both of these men could be lived through as real and also be experienced as rites of passage. She had not been condemned to chain herself to either one. A more fulfilling love with someone was still possible. Camilla had told her so at their very first dinner together, Jean-Paul Bonnerive had said it too when she came to his apartment.

  It rained that night and all through the morning. She changed her ticket, checked out of the hotel, and stepped aboard a vaporetto that went to the mainland. Once there she would take a taxi to the airport and catch her flight back to Palermo where the sun was shining. She would buy the abandoned shepherd’s cottage and renovate it into a little house from where she could contemplate the villa and the remains of Daphne’s temple. She would think further about writing a biography of Eleanor of Castile. She would go on and try to forget about James. She would try and forget the remains of Christ buried on Camilla’s Provence House estate in Cornwall. She would ally herself instead with Joseph of Arimathea, savouring the seasons, savouring her senses, savouring life.

  THE END

  If you enjoyed reading about Laura, James and the secrets of Provence House, you will love The Orphan Thief by Glynis Peters, the beautiful story of a young woman and a street urchin orphaned during the Coventry Blitz. Click here to order your copy.

  Similarly enthralling, The Brothers of Auschwitz by Malka Adler reveals the untold story of two brothers separated by the Holocaust and their extraordinary journey back to each other. Click here to order your copy.

  You will also love The Last Letter From Juliet by Melanie Hudson, a moving and powerful novel about a daring WWII pilot who dreams of a lost love on the eve of her 100th birthday in Cornwall. Click here to order your copy.

  And why not try The Secret Messenger by Mandy Robotham, a sweeping tale of the courage of everyday women in German-occupied 1940s Venice. Click here to order your copy.

  Happy reading!

  Acknowledgements

  I need to thank poet and New Testament scholar Willis Barnstone for his guidance and advice concerning the ‘missing years’ of Christ, and Professor Benjamin Rubin for his notes concerning Greek and Roman archaeology. I am also very grateful to Madeleine Feeny for her comments and careful reading of numerous drafts, to my agent Maria Cardona for her unflagging encouragement, and to Charlotte Ledger at HarperCollins for taking this novel under her wing.

  About the Author

  Aubrey Rhodes was born in Ennistymon, County Clare, Ireland and raised in Cornwall. The Secret of Provence House is her first novel. She currently lives between Dublin and Middlebury, Vermont. Her passions are literature, swimming, Arabian horses, and Tibetan Terriers. Her guiding authors are Marguerite Yourcenar, Virginia Woolf, Mary Ann Evans, Elena Ferrante, James Joyce, Edward Gibbon, and Sigmund Freud. She is also an admirer of filmmakers Ida Lupino, early Godard, Michael Powell, Yasujiro Ozu and Michelangelo Antonioni.

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