Authors: Michelle Wan
“Oh, look, don’t rub it in, will you?” he snapped.
Julian put all of his other contracts on hold so that he could concentrate on Prudence’s courtyard. With luck, everything would be ready for her party that weekend. It wasn’t the kind of work he particularly liked, but he had to admit that the effect he’d created was nothing short of a marvel of container landscaping. She had wanted a tropical look. The walls dripped with hanging baskets of fuchsia and bougainvillea. The pièce de résistance, on which he was still working, was a kind of botanical tour de force built up in the middle of the courtyard, a temporary jungle of potted palms, lacy umbrella plants, flame coleus, and even orchids (rented from Géraud at exorbitant cost) in beds of sphagnum moss. He had not yet presented Prudence with his bill, but she was looking so pleased with everything that he hoped she wouldn’t care.
“You should make a business of it,” she advised, ever with an eye to the market. “Theme landscaping. Its time has come. Even here. You’ll be at my do, of course,” she added by way of invitation. “It’ll be chock-full of Americans with dollars to burn who’ll all want your services, once they see what you can do. Besides, I need people who can
parler français
with the French. And by the way,” she added, “Mara’s
coming. The two of you should get together. I think she’s interested in you.”
He called Mara, got her answering machine, and left a message: “Look, Mara, there’s this thing on at Prudence’s on Saturday. I know you’ve been asked, too. Why don’t I pick you up? Or, if that won’t work, we could meet up there and go on someplace after.”
Mara didn’t reply. Too busy, he suspected. He knew she’d been working on Prudence’s kitchen, whipping it into shape, with the same deadline as he.
On Saturday evening, the narrow country lane running past Prudence’s house was clogged with cars. Among them Julian spotted the Chez Nous van. Guests from Bergerac to Brive filled the courtyard. Mado and Paul, who were catering the affair, moved among them, pouring champagne and replenishing trays of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres.
On entering, Julian was immediately press-ganged by Paul into helping to shift more champagne from the van. Staggering under the weight of a crate of bottles, he spotted Mara through the crowd. She wore a long black dress that made her look as lean as a knife and provocatively dangerous. Her only splash of color was a large, red silk flower pinned to the shoulder.
“Fancy meeting you,” he called out as he deposited his load. A moment later, he sidled up and presented her with a refill of champagne. “Let me guess. You are a mysterious double agent posing as an interior designer.”
“Clever of you.” Mara smiled, tossed her head, and exchanged her empty glass for the full one he offered. She waved at the courtyard. “Very impressive. I didn’t know you were so good.”
“Oh, I’m very good. What are you doing for afters?” he whispered into her ear in a way he hoped was suggestive.
“Looking after my date,” she told him archly and ruined his evening by introducing him to someone whom Julian had difficulty for a moment placing, and then recognized as the sandy-haired man from the forest.
They shook hands. So this was Alain de Sauvignac. He was bigger than Julian remembered, no taller than Julian but more solidly built in that muscular, athletic way that Julian loathed. Attractive, too, he supposed, if you liked the tanned, tourist-brochure look. Instinctively, Julian distrusted him.
Prudence arrived to sweep Mara away, leaving the two men together.
“So you’re the orchid expert,” Alain said, studying him with an assessing eye. He opted to speak English, which was another thing Julian held against him. As if his own French weren’t good enough.
“Amateur,” Julian corrected with the false ha-ha voice he used when he was not enjoying himself.
“Nevertheless, Mara tells me you’ve managed to locate the entire orchid sequence between the Bessède Forest and Les Colombes. Quite a botanical feat.”
“The full sequence but one,” Julian corrected
again. “She might have mentioned that we’re missing a
Cypripedium.”
He wondered how much Mara had told Alain about her sister and their search for Bedie’s trail.
“Ah. Yes, come to think of it, she did say that.”
“You work abroad, I hear.”
“Right. Gabon, Ivory Coast, Senegal. Most recently Cameroon. I’m a civil engineer. Government-to-government projects. Back on home leave. In between contracts for the moment, actually.”
It was Julian’s turn to say, “Ah.”
The conversation languished. Unhappily, Julian wandered off to do his French bit with the locals and chat up his hostess’s wealthy compatriots. That was what he was there for. Over a bumper of champagne, he covertly observed Mara returning to Alain’s side, saw him slip his arm around her waist, and felt another headache coming on.
He had drunk too much, eaten too little, and needed air. On his way out to the courtyard, he snagged a couple of
escargots en brioche
, one of Paul’s specialties, waved off a compliment or two on his handiwork, and found himself alone in the lane. The evening was filled with distant laughter. An early moon rose through the trees. Sourly, Julian pictured the after-party scene. Alain and Mara would go back to her place. He couldn’t see them sitting on her impossible chairs. That left her bed or the Aubusson rug. He scowled and viciously ground a patch of nettles to shreds under his heel.
A low moan caught his attention. It came from Mara’s Renault. Jazz was in the car, head thrust through the open window. A slow, malicious smile crept over Julian’s face. If there was a God, he thought, Jazz ought to be counted on to take Alain de Sauvignac’s head off at the very least.
•
As it turned out, Jazz did not have a chance to do his work because Alain and Mara had come separately to Prudence’s party, Alain arriving in his father’s old Citroën.
“It’s good to get the old
guimbarde
out on the road,” he had explained to Mara. “Papa drives it so little nowadays. But also it’s easier this way. I think you realize Papa would be very upset if you turned up for me at the door after he sent you packing.”
More than upset, Mara thought, remembering the expression on the elder de Sauvignac’s face. The father had been frightened—no, terrified—of something. What? There was something Alain was not telling her. One way or another, she intended to find out.
•
The existence of Alain in Mara’s life was a new dynamic that had been thrown, clanging like a spanner, into Julian’s consciousness. He knew she had the right to see whomever she damned well pleased. Nevertheless, after all the effort he had put into helping her with her damnable orchids, he felt that she might have shown him a bit more consideration. It was always like that, it seemed. Just as you got interested
in someone, they turned on you, kicked you in the balls.
He confessed all this to Paul and Mado a few evenings later, over a solitary dinner at Chez Nous.
“He
was
very good-looking,” Mado affirmed.
It was not what Julian wanted to hear.
“What I mean,” he said plaintively, shoving new peas about his plate with his fork, “is that to her I’m just a means of tracing her sister. I doubt she even sees me as a person. Frankly, I feel used.”
“Hah!” Mado contrived to look sympathetic and intensely gratified at the same time. Paul merely gave an exasperated snort and demanded what the hell Julian expected.
“Well, not a lot,” said Julian defensively.
“What you need,” Paul began and stopped.
Bigre!
He didn’t quite know how to tell Julian that what he needed was to cash in his chips and settle down. Put crudely, he needed a combination of mothering and regular sex, which he clearly wasn’t getting; otherwise, he wouldn’t be going around looking like he was holding in a belch and a sour taste in his mouth.
Julian and Mado were regarding him expectantly. Paul shook his head and retreated to the bar.
“What you need,” he repeated, fetching back a bottle, “is something for the digestion.”
•
That night, Paul was restless as he lay in bed beside Mado. He had been having a spell of
nuits blanches
recently: white nights, in which, although his body
was numbed by the desire to sleep, his inner eye stared dry and lidless at a moving jumble of worries, the detritus of the day-to-day thrown onto the conveyor belt of his mind. The transmission of the van needed attention. Last month’s restaurant receipts were down. Julian’s face, disembodied, slid by, came past again. Paul exhaled noisily.
“What’s wrong?” Mado murmured thickly, turning to curl against him.
“Nothing,” he grunted. Her breathing was slow and soft. “Except…”
“Mmmm?”
“I was just thinking. About Julian.”
She said sleepily, “What about him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s something funny about him. I mean, have you noticed how none of his relationships seem to last?”
“He’s shy. Besides, he always hooks up with the wrong sort of person.” Mado was fully awake now. “Domineering types who like to push him around.”
Paul wondered if his wife meant Mara. He didn’t think she was domineering. Strong-minded, maybe, but nothing a real man couldn’t handle. He folded his arms behind his head, staring up into darkness. Anyway, it wasn’t that Julian was shy so much as inept. Of the few relationships he’d known his friend to have, it had always been the woman going off Julian rather than the other way around. And go off she did, because she never showed her face around these parts again. Like that skinny
anglaise
, Coco
Somebody, a few years back. Julian had been very offhand about her departure. “Oh, she went back to England,” he had said in passing one day and had not referred to her again.
“Well, he’s not getting any younger,” Paul went on. “Time he settled down. Got married.”
“He was married once,” Mado reminded him, raising herself up on one elbow. She trailed her fingertips over her husband’s chest. “I don’t think he liked the experience. Anyway, why are you worrying about Julian at this time of night?”
“He’s a pal,” said Paul. The stroking was creating a pleasant, tickling sensation.
“He’s a big boy.” Tenderly Mado seized his right nipple between her teeth.
“Oh, what the hell,” said Paul, dismissing his friend and giving himself over to a certain way of getting a good night’s sleep.
•
> I tell you, Patsy, it’s as if I don’t really exist for him except as a botanical exercise. Honestly, if it weren’t for that damned Lady’s Slipper, I think he’d be very happy to forget he ever met me. But you should have seen his face at Prudence’s party when I introduced him to Alain—very attractive, by the way. You’d like him. I could tell it had never crossed Julian’s mind that I might have a life!
Mara sighed, reached down to scratch Jazz’s ear, and went on typing.
> The problem with Julian is that he’s terribly private. He never really talks about himself. It’s like there’s some part of him that he’s afraid of revealing, that he wants to conceal. <
Patsy wrote back:
> What do you mean? Like he’s some kind of a Bluebeard hiding a closet full of dead brides? Ease up, kid. He sounds to me more like a disaster victim, someone who’s survived rather than murdered past relationships. <
> What I’m trying to say is, he invites no intimacy, and I’m not even talking sexually. The truth is, the only really personal thing we’ve ever discussed is Bedie. In fact, he seems far more interested in her than me. Otherwise, he talks about flowers. And he’s so damned pedantic. I mean, why does a snapdragon have to be an
Antirrhinum
and everything belong to the buttercup family? And you should hear him on the sex life of the orchid. <
> Hey, I’d like to! But, you know, it can cut two ways. Have you ever considered that maybe Julian knows as little about you as you do of him? Or that what he sees is too much of Bedie and too little of Mara? I mean, shackled to your leg like she is, figuratively speaking, she does tend to dominate
the scene. <
It was true, Mara reflected, and Patsy had said things like this before. However, try as she might, she could not give up her dead. Less now than ever, with the discovery of the
pigeonnier.
Or was it Bedie who would not give her up? For she was always there, standing in shadow at her side, mute but heavy with appeal, asking for—what? Life? Whose life? Mara shuddered.
•
This time lunch was on her. Except that Mara made it dinner at her favorite bistro in Trémolat. On the day, she left her work site early, something she rarely did, and drove home not by the country roads but by the shortest route. Instead of a quick shower, she allowed herself a long soak in a hot tub. She rose from it and stood streaming and naked before her bathroom mirror, careless of puddling the floor, staring at her body. Her flesh gleamed back at her. She was conscious of a sag here or there, but, standing straight and sucking in her stomach, she saw that she was still firm, still attractive. Her dark, wet hair clung to the oval of her face, her chin, as ever, giving a strong finish to her own particular kind of beauty.
That evening Alain did not meet her at the restaurant but instead let her pick him up, although not at the house. He walked down from the château and met her at the roadside.
“Better this way,” he said as he got in her car.
Mara wore an off-the-shoulder dress of sapphire blue. She had made up her eyes to accentuate their boldness, outlined her lips in vivid red. She was aware that his cheek-to-cheek greeting lingered like a caress, that he seemed to take her in appreciatively, that his eyes stayed on her the entire time she drove.
At the bistro they took a table inside because the evening was cool. Alain continued to gaze at her steadily over their drinks.
“Très belle,”
he said finally, but with meaning. He was not, it seemed, a man to use words unnecessarily. In him, his father’s suave courtliness and covert sexuality had been distilled to a more direct, casual virility. He had inherited a more rugged version of his father’s aristocratic good looks. Unlike his parent, Mara was glad to note, Alain did not evoke the moldy reminder of damp places. He gave off instead a musky scent of aftershave. He wore light-gray slacks, a charcoal silk shirt under a loose-fitting cream-colored linen jacket, a gold Rolex. Building things in Africa must pay well, Mara thought.