Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (13 page)

'Really? I suppose people say the same things. We're all a bit of a cliché.' Her expression changed. 'Are you close?'

'No.'

'Tom says you're rather brilliant. He's a good judge,' she said. 'It's such a relief he's his old self again after Marie-France. I knew she was trouble the moment I laid eyes on her.'

'Marie-France?'

'Oh, you don't know her. She was awful. Awful. She broke Tom's heart.'

'Oh.'

'I'm sorry, Katie, I didn't mean that. It's over. I assure you, and thank heavens for that.'

'Marie-France,' I said. 'It's a beautiful name.'

11

Kamarovsky's Girl

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. This obsessive idea is above all a child of giant cities, of the intersecting of their myriad relations. – Baudelaire, from
Le Spleen de Paris

In the last days of Soviet Russia, two groups of people disappeared through the vanishing iron curtain: the former apparatchiks turned oligarchs, who had obtained the deeds to the nation's natural resources, and the party insiders at the defunct ministries, who were going to help them spend it.

Leon
Kamarovsky was one of the latter. An adviser on French art at the Ministry of Culture until its dissolution in 1991, he was a guest at the marriage of a former KGB general who revealed after hurling his glass in the fireplace that his young bride, tall, blonde and with an interest in fashion, had refused to submit to his fondness for restraints until he found them a home in France. The two men wept, the Russian way, and, in the beat of those sobs, the young art attaché heard the sound of opportunity knocking.

Kamarovsky had travelled to Paris on official delegations. He had always enjoyed the city, the language, the river turning gold at sunset, the girls with their swaying nonchalant walk. Like a fly buzzing against a window, thoughts of seeking asylum had moved often through his mind. But to do what exactly? And with what? Even now, with the frontiers open, unlike those who had got their hands on the oil and gas, the Chigalls and Kandinskys in The Russian Museum were an unmoveable feast.

By the time the general dried his eyes and filled another glass, he was committed to Kamarovsky's proposal that he, Kamarovsky, a French speaker, journey to France to find a suitable property. With a small retainer, he left immediately, such was the general's misery, and every day through the coming weeks faxed back photographs and details of the houses he had visited. They spoke regularly on the telephone and, sight unseen, the general finally agreed to buy a 17th century chateau in Sancerre, a hilltop town noted for its gourmet restaurants and fast road links to the couturier shows in Paris. With its wistful towers and high arched windows, the chateau satisfied two preconditions: it was flooded with light and had wide vistas in every direction, the opposite of the general's office in the Lubyanka Building with its windowless cells and abiding demons.

It was the start of the global boom in house prices that ended with the banking crisis and the worst depression since the 1929 Wall Street Crash. But that was to come and, in the heady years
of the nineties,
Kamarovsky found, as few men do, his
raison d'être
. With their innate fear of inflationary spirals and fluctuating exchange rates, Russians with bulging suitcases were eager property buyers and the French nobility, who had inherited their chateaux without the funds to maintain them, were willing sellers.

Kamarovsky travelled from the austere agricultural towns of the north to the sun-washed Côte d'Azur, from the Alpine slopes of Saint-Jean Montclar to Biarritz with its faded hotels and neglected boulevards. The small city was like an ageing beautiful woman in a dress from another season, an echo to Kamarovsky of the Russia he had left behind. He stood on the long wind-blown beach in this forgotten corner of south-western France with the waves filling his vision. His eyes welled-up in tears, real tears, as he realized for the first time that he was free. Free of morose Mother Russia. Free of the party, the past. Free to be whoever and whatever he wanted to be. As he walked back to his hotel, it was as if he had left behind on the empty beach an empty shell, the husk of the past. He pulled back the wide doors at the Hotel du Palais and it was a different person who stepped across the threshold.

Leon Kamarovsky was tall, dark with wide cheekbones, a hooked nose, like some Caesar on a Roman coin, full, sensitive lips, dark hair and deep-set almond-coloured eyes, a reminder of the forebears who had migrated west from Kazakhstan a century before his own journey westward to Paris and Biarritz. He was immensely strong but light, supple, like a dancer with a dancer's sense of rhythm and timing. Free from the cropped brush cut customary at the Ministry of Culture, he wore his dark hair swept back in a shiny wave and grew a moustache that added maturity to his firm features. In 1992 he celebrated his thirty-first birthday, a milestone in the age of a man, thirty being connected to the twenties, of youthful vanity and excess. At thirty-one, he reasoned, it was time to lay the foundations for the future. With his Emile Lafaurie suits in pale colours, long walks following street plans through the bejewelled fabric of French towns and cities, and a love of sea swimming, be it the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, he grew lean, bronzed, and was one of those men who turned the heads of women when he passed.

Arranging the purchase of the chateau for the KGB general provided Kamarovsky with a reputation as a fixer, a man who got things done; great success often begins with a minor triumph. He sought out properties for the new Russian entrepreneurs, yachts and berths to keep them in, rundown hotels needing a cash injection, there were a great number in Biarritz; empty castles, abandoned vineyards, towns hungry for a shopping mall. He took commissions from the sellers, not the buyers. Those men who had slipped through the crumbling walls may have shaken the dust and debris from their collars, but remained what they were. They knew Kamarovsky would never cross them and he knew, if he did, he would be cast off, most probably from the deck of a yacht at night with his throat slit and his feet weighed down with a rusting bust of Joseph Stalin.

He travelled the country by road and rail, adding properties to his portfolio. Like a convert to Buddhism, he had become a Francophile, a believer. He read the French poets, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Pierre Baudelaire. Just rolling out those names and hearing their prose on his tongue made Kamarovsky feel in touch with something hidden and abstracted deep in the core of his being. He listened to the radio, watched movies in half-empty cinemas and read aloud in hotel rooms in an incessant battle to wear down the burr of his Muscovite accent.

In 1995, he found himself in Beaune, in the Côte d'Or. He stayed at the
Hotel de la Poste,
an old coach house, and strolled the mediaeval streets of the walled town. He sat in the main square with a glass of burgundy. He liked the way the French enjoyed their wine, drinking for pleasure, not regret.
Un verre de vin pour le bonheur
. From beneath the shade of an umbrella, he watched the promenade, men with good shoes and brisk walks; women with bare arms and straw hats, the fine gaps in the weave letting in flashes of light like silver fish that swam over their faces. Those women at whom he smiled responded with a faint lift of the shoulders and smiled back. It was another custom he appreciated, that French women accepted a man's admiration of their beauty, as a man may admire a painting in a gallery, for what it was, not for what it might imply.

After lunch, he followed the ring road around Beaune and took the scenic route to Nuits Saint-Georges, 'the world's most illustrious wine village,' he'd read in the guide. Flies tapped against the windscreen and birds lifted indolently from the road as the vehicle approached. The country lanes curved between vineyards and fields of ripening crops, a landscape unchanged for centuries, and he felt when he saw the sign for Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin that vague sense of accomplishment that comes at the end of a long journey.

Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin was a large country house with a defunct oil mill that began life in the Middle Ages and had been extended in a palette of styles ever since. The windows were shaded by red shutters, dark as rubies against the necklace of large-leafed ivy coating the walls. The building, on three floors with a cellar, stood in a wide stretch of parkland in the still of a summer's day, the earthy, subtle tang of rural France, like a woman's scent, overwhelming his senses.

He stepped from the car as the owner of the house made her way towards him across the courtyard.

'Bonjour.'

'Bonjour.'

'Monsieur Kamarovsky,' she said without smiling, and offered her small white hand. 'Sibylle Durfort.
Bienvenue dans ma maison.'

She studied him as if she were looking into a mirror to check her own reflection, or through binoculars at an empty landscape. The study was brief, just a second, but mildly intimidating, like the fleeting gaze of a senior figure in the politburo.

'You would like to see everything?'

'Yes, yes I would,' he replied.

'Do come.'

They entered Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin, it was surprisingly cool after the rising heat of the stone courtyard, his gaze drawn constantly to Madame Durfort's erect slender figure as he followed her through rooms with marble fireplaces, frescoed ceilings and carved Provincial furniture, the walls adorned with paintings in gilt frames. A piano and cello stood in the shadows of the music room, the objet d'art precisely placed as to appear arbitrary. He paused before leaving the library.

'Is that a Cézanne?'

'It was once,' she replied. 'Now it's just a copy. Like everything.'

'Not your house.'

'No, my house is my house.'

He followed her up creaking staircases and along corridors lit by sunlight that ran in strips through the half-opened shutters. He liked the way she moved, so light it was as if her feet barely touched the floor, the way the light filled her hair, it was pale, like honey, and lifted from her neck with stray strands falling from a tortoiseshell clip. In a sleeveless, ivory-coloured shift and rope-soled espadrilles that tied about her slender ankles, Sibylle Durfort was ethereal, a fleur-de-lis, delicate, elusive. She was ten years older than him, he thought, and he was reminded suddenly of that day on the windy beach in Biarritz when his soul migrated from Russia and fixed itself in France.

They entered a large room on the top floor.

'My studio,' she told him, and shrugged as if to dismiss the implication.

He studied the unfinished painting on the easel. It was a pastel landscape with a lemon sky, pink fields and blue trees vanishing into mist, the result alluring and mischievous, even transcendental. More paintings were hung and stacked against the walls, scores of them.

'They are wonderful,' he said. 'You have so many.'

'When I finish one, I start another.'

'Do you have shows?' he asked, and the way she looked back over her shoulder gave him once more that feeling of being clumsy; uncivilized.

'No. Nothing like that,' she answered.

He followed her out to the balcony. What he could see was rolling green fields divided by trees that turned hazy along the horizon, the view when it transferred to the unfinished canvas softened, impenetrable.

'It's so peaceful,' he said.

'Like the eye of the storm,' she continued. 'Wherever you go in France it is the same distance. We are in the middle of everything and the middle of nothing.'

'That would have advantages.'

'I suppose it would.'

Their eyes met for a moment, and he gave away a secret, something you should never do in a negotiation.

'I like the house, I like it very much,' he said.

'Yes, so do I.'

'Then why sell?'

She nodded her head and swept a stray strand of hair from her eyes. 'That is easy to answer, Monsieur Kamarovsky, I have run out of money. But then, of course, you must know that.'

He wasn't sure what to say and was saved by the sound of an approaching vehicle. They looked out from the balcony and he could see the roof of a white car through the hedgerows.

'Ah, the children,' she added.

He followed her back downstairs and they left the house as the car came to a halt. The nanny was driving, an English girl; even the French had grown aware that English was indispensable. A boy ran up and hid behind his mother, peeping out timidly with the same expression as the miniature white poodle that chased after him. Nicolas was six, pale and blonde, like his mother. The girl was ten, tall for her age, with her mother's knowing eyes. She strode towards him, nodded in that typically French way, and shook his hand.

'Bonjour, Monsieur.'

'Marie-France,' her mother said.

'Bonjour.'

Her eyes fixed on his and Kamarovsky experienced the same feeling of inadequacy that had pinpricked his shell the moment he had met her mother, that sense of being assessed and found wanting. The girl entered the house while Madame Durfort, with Nicolas and the dog for company, continued the tour, the outbuildings with relics of ancient farm tools, the old mill, the chapel, the stone altar pitted by the woodworm of time. They arrived finally back at his car and he could hear above the courtyard the sound of a cello being played capably if inexpertly in the music room.

A cello. Of course.

It all sounded so...so romantic, so otherworldly, so...so foreign. I felt...parochial, cosseted, inadequate, English.

We had stopped at a station.

'Do you have a photograph?' I said.

He reached for his iPhone. 'I thought you'd looked already?'