Authors: Roberta Latow
Cressida had a rage to live and have it all, and for the most part she did. In that she was like both Byron and Rosemary. Though it was from her father that she learned by example, not to be greedy. She understood, only too well, that life deals its blows and disappointments. That it is constructed of an endless chain of change. That, in truth, there is no such thing as having it all or lasting security. But for certain, in the arms of Kane Chandler, in the Paul Revere Rooms of the New Cobham Inn, for a few hours she did have it all.
Carlos Marias Arriva was not a happy man. Cressida had not returned his calls. She was behaving out of character. They had a tacit understanding: he called, she answered. Carlos and Cressida had known each other for more than a decade. After her father, he was the most important man in her life. He had been, still was, her devoted lover, the man who set her challenges that seemed always to change her life and enrich it. Theirs was a
Pygmalion
story. He had taught her so much, most importantly to love herself. He had helped to mould her into the woman she was, and never with the idea of possessing her, keeping her for him alone. He was one of the reasons she never accepted an offer of marriage from Sami Chow, though in truth she probably loved Sami Chow more. Sami accepted and loved Cressida without question, respected and admired even her flaws, and more importantly, allowed her to keep them.
Cressida and Carlos didn’t so much love each other as feel passion for each other, a near obsessional wanting always to be in a relationship. Their very special and unique kinship was all important to them. Its foundation was sexual, and from that they’d constructed a very special togetherness that neither one of them wanted to lose.
They were the same age, born in the same month, on the very same day, three hours apart but worlds away: he into the Spanish aristocracy, in an eighty-room palace in Madrid, and she in Hollihocks on Cape Cod. He was spoiled and pampered from birth. As a child, a boy, a man, he lived an extraordinary and unimaginably luxurious life between Spain and South America where for generations the family’s vast fortune had been amassed. She had been born and brought up in Puritan New England, living with ignored wealth and in comfortable frugality. She still lived very much the same way.
As the youngest and only son of an elderly duke famed for his many titles, outward reserve, generosity, and well-protected privacy, Carlos had much to live up to, and did. And like his father, he had a secret. A penchant for sexual lust, the decadent, a fascination with depravity which he practised with well-paid women who were prepared to keep his secret.
The Duchess, Carlos’s mother, and his five sisters had never found the knack of handling their lives so that they might reap the same reward. They lived only some of the life they wanted. More simple, less complicated lives than they might have envisaged for themselves. In the lap of luxury always, and with a court of friends, they were happy, content, but always ruled by the centre of their existence: the Duke and Carlos. Both father and son adored women, all women, from all walks of life. They had the ability to direct them in how to better their self-esteem, and were rewarded with love, loyalty, passion. The Marias Arriva men were constructive admirers and lovers, lord and masters over the women they became involved with. And their women, for the most part, became obsessively attached to them.
Cressida was not one of those women. Her only obsession with Carlos was the same as his: that they should never lose each other, no matter who they were with or what they did with their lives. They were not siblings, nothing like. They were passionate lovers, the closest of friends, he her mentor, she his pliable pupil, and yet this extraordinary coincidence of being born within hours of each other somehow bound them into a more than intimate relationship. Something else indentured them to one another. Carlos found Cressida when she was drowning emotionally. He saved her, and they had both felt to some extent that she belonged to him from that day onward.
The sex. Sometimes it was not there for them. At other times, they could not get enough of each other. But sex between them was never a problem. It took only a call from either one of them, a look, a touch of the hand, a certain way of kissing, and then the sexual yearnings of one became the wishes of both for an erotic tryst. Their sex life was something more than thrilling, it was filled with abandon, acceptance of the darkest side of sexual fantasy, an adventure Cressida could never take on with any other man.
Carlos was an incredibly handsome man: very tall and slender, with wide shoulders, a narrow waist, slim hips. A muscular, big-chested man with a rounded, rock hard bottom that in the nude gave him the look of the Greek youths seen taming bulls on painted Minoan vases. Women found him erotic to look at, the athletic body, long and thick penis, large and luscious scrotum, the way he moved, enjoyed his masculinity, the incredible sureness of self. He emanated a powerful sexual presence that women obeyed without demur.
All that he hid under Savile Row – tailored three-piece suits or riding clothes, Ralph Lauren casual wear. But nothing could hide the sensual lips, the large and handsome Spanish grandee’s face with its prominent nose and large, dark, soulful eyes that gave nothing of the inner man away, merely seduced almost everyone he came in contact with. A
broad smile continually broke over what could have been a hard, tough, don’t-mess-with-me face, and revealed one intriguing dimple. Black silky hair with a hint of a wave in it framed his face and was worn long enough to brush the edge of his coat collar. He was every inch the aristocrat that Velázquez might have painted, as he had Carlos Marias Arriva’s ancestors.
Women wanted him, thought that they could change him, tame him, keep him for always, become his wife. His generosity, his passionate loving, the sensitive poetic side of his nature, were never enough for them. He was a man who gave everything to his love affairs, for as long as they lasted. For Carlos, when it was over, it was over, and then on to another love adventure. He was a man who knew only too well how to let go. Even more importantly, when to let go.
He was very intelligent. It was visible in his face, his manner, how he treated people, what he did with his time and his life. What he admired and what he ignored. A patron of the arts, yes, but more importantly a patron for all the right reasons, and one who could recognise unsung creativity, and knew how and what to do with it.
He was a man who was almost never alone. Solitude was not a necessity in his life; people were. That was one of the basic differences between Cressida and Carlos. Born and brought up surrounded by a close and loving family, whose friends and relatives were drawn from other large and close loving families, it was natural for him to crave the company of people. He came from a home that usually had interesting, intelligent, amusing house guests; beautiful and fascinating decorative women; others who were less beautiful but equally as charming and seductive.
There were almost always people in residence as guests, and the Arrivas’ table never had less than a dozen to dine. They were famed for their hospitality, for having an open and interesting salon. And yet there had always been, for all the people coming and going in the Arrivas’ household, a taste for privacy also. Each of them, and most especially father and son, had a reputation of being very private people for all their extrovert appearance. This then was how Carlos Marias Arriva grew up, and this was the way he lived his adult life.
Carlos was always surrounded by an entourage, whether for pleasure or for work. Even as a child he had known how to keep friends; as a very young man how to delegate. He was a leader without the passion or the need to be one. He controlled people without forethought and certainly without a psychological need to. It was something natural to him. When he went from Spain and Argentina to school in the States, Harvard, he arrived there with half a dozen friends who had also chosen the famed East Coast university. New friends made there were soon
to enlarge his circle. People were his life, and yet not his life at all. Even as a womaniser, which he most certainly was, and one with a near insatiable libido, he was discreet and discerning. He was a handsome, fiercely intelligent, fun-loving high achiever, yet easygoing. A complex person, not difficult to know but almost impossible to fathom. A hook that many a woman became hung on. Never Cressida. She had no aspirations for any more than what they had together. There was always something uniquely complete about their relationship.
Carlos, like so many of the wealthy, kept several houses round the world staffed and ready for him because he disliked long stays in hotels, guarded his privacy, avoided the limelight, enjoyed and could afford the luxury of real comfort. When in London, he lived in a large and beautiful Georgian house in Mayfair. As the chairman of a charitable trust founded by his grandfather for the relief of human suffering, and funded from the family’s vast financial resources, offices were kept both in Madrid and a small but beautiful London house a short walk away from his home. It was in those Berkeley Square offices, sitting round a conference table, that Carlos now kept drifting away from the business at hand because he was concerned about losing contact with Cressida. It did not so much put him on edge as to make him short-tempered with the quality of the work he was to pass judgment on.
Every architectural presentation, which his associates had accepted as the final six of a competition for a vast project to house a half million refugees from civil war in an African country, was in his eyes without merit. He listened to others drone on about time scales, and cost, and the aesthetics and workability of their projects. The presumption that they were building a Utopia and could educate people to live in it as they wanted was for Carlos the final insult. Down came his fist on the oval conference table.
The room fell silent. Not one person moved. The architects standing at presentation boards seemed frozen in place. Some faces even paled. Carlos looked around the room. Several men on the Trust’s board had the good grace to drop their eyes in embarrassment. Three of the architects in the room were world famous names who had combined their efforts and worked as a team. Each of them knew that Carlos Marias Arriva was a man of discerning taste, a man they respected, and the dissatisfaction they saw in his face took them aback.
Such behaviour was completely out of character for Carlos. Not one person in that room had been previously aware that he could be a man of anger, except for one – his father. The elderly Duke Alphonso Marias Arriva, who had been sitting in a velvet wing chair by the marble fireplace at one end of the eighteenth-century pine-panelled room,
merely raised his chin and stroked it several times, all the time keeping his eyes averted from his son’s.
‘Call the other entrants to this competition in to join us. What I have to say I intend all the participants to hear.’ Flunkies moved swiftly to obey his orders. Carlos paced back and forth in front of the twenty-foot-high windows hung with eighteenth-century faded crimson silk damask, a framework of great elegance for the scene from modern London he gazed upon: traffic whirling round the pretty green park in the centre of the square; beautiful, elegant women going to Bond Street for shopping or coming from lunch at some smart restaurant. He was aware of the shuffling of chairs and people moving about behind him and tried to calm himself with a sensual fantasy about a long-legged beauty with blonde, blonde hair, half walking, half skipping across Bruton Street between the cars.
The hopeful expressions of the other architects who had joined the conference soon faded, so tense was the atmosphere in the room. Once everyone had been seated and silence ensued, Carlos turned from the windows and wasted no time.
‘Gentlemen, ladies, all those here concerned with this project – I am appalled and disheartened at what has been selected as the short list for the design and construction of this project. Not one of the schemes is with merit. Not one of them answers the immediate needs of the people who are to live there. Nor do they take into consideration the rights of those people, of how they have lived in the past, are living at present, or want to live in the future. They take no consideration of the customs, the heritage of these refugees, nor their capacity to come to terms with change. Who do you think you are? By what right do you feel you should be able to change and shape their lives so that they should live in a manner which suits
your
design for living? How presumptuous, how pompous of you, to play dictator in the name of design. Answer
their
needs, point the way to make
their
circumstances comfortable so they may function and dictate their own lives, I would have thought would be a more honourable approach to the brief given you.’
The bruised egos in the room collectively recoiled. One architect, Ben Saxon, rose from his chair. ‘There are some damned fine-looking building schemes here, well worth constructing, Carlos.’
‘Sorry, Ben, monuments. Monuments to architecture, to your own egos, to me and my ego, and this Trust’s endeavours. We’re our own monument builders and no one is denying or denigrating that. But did you really follow the brief on what was needed here? There were eighty-five pages explicitly outlining the problems that had to be solved. You have created monumental architecture, but you might as
well have created tombstones for these people because they could never live in these schemes. And, more than likely, if their country’s wretched civil war hasn’t killed them, such an alien lifestyle as you have proposed would.’
‘Now see here, Carlos, that’s unfair. These are schemes, not the finished ideal. Once the Trust has chosen the winners of this competition we go to the next phase. Design and elimination, design and elimination, until we get it right.’
Someone else rose from his chair and added, ‘We all want the same thing: to build structures for these people that will help them rebuild their lives. We’re not bound to get it right on the first try.’
‘That’s deplorable. If you haven’t got it right, then what are you doing here? Sit down, both of you. You can’t win your case like that. Design and eliminate, design and eliminate?
After
a client has bought your scheme on good faith that you have got it right. Drown them in designs that don’t work and paperwork that blinds them to the reality of the situation. And who picks up the tab for your not getting it right? For your going off at a design tangent, for your not listening to what your client wants? The client! Is that what you’re proposing here? Is that how you work? What you have built your reputation on?