The One in My Heart (18 page)

“My wife and I are delighted to have met you.”

I smiled like the paragon everyone believed me to be. “It’s a pleasure to spend some time with you and Mrs. Somerset.”

“We have met only one other of Bennett’s girlfriends—you know something of the circumstances.”

“Yes, I believe so.”

Bennett’s father studied me for a moment—as if my equanimity in the matter still surprised him. “There were quite a few things about that relationship that unsettled us. The age difference and that it had begun while Bennett was still a minor were the most obvious issues. But what mattered as much was the tremendous romantic delusion they had both been under. It wasn’t so surprising that a teenage boy should be somewhat blind about his first great love. But for Ms. McAllister, a woman of sophistication and insight, it was beyond us how she looked at Bennett and saw only what she wanted to see.”

I smoothed the napkin on my lap. “There’s no age at which one becomes immune to the cognitive impairment love causes.”

“You’re absolutely correct. My wife and I used to sit in stunned silence after one of our encounters with Ms. McAllister and wonder whether she was right—whether we knew our son at all. When they eventually broke up, we weren’t surprised, but a small part of me was disappointed: It would have been something remarkable had they managed to maintain their relationship. Even I, stick-in-the-mud extraordinaire, as Bennett liked to call me, couldn’t be entirely indifferent to the force of such an all-conquering love.”

I smoothed the napkin some more. “But it wasn’t.”

“No, it wasn’t, in part because of that romantic delusion. Had they seen each other more realistically, the outcome might have been different.”

I saw where this conversation was going. “And you’d like to know whether I’m also under some sort of delusion about who and what Bennett is.”

“I hope you are not offended.”

The irony of it. I shook my head. “No, I’m not offended.”

“Then do you mind if I ask what you think of my son?”

He was a forthright man, Bennett’s father, not given to pretenses. I wondered what he had made of Bennett’s apparent ease and good cheer the night before. A stranger walking by would have seen a dazzling young man, one who already had everything he could possibly desire. That young man did not need his less wealthy, less glamorous parents; he was happy to humor them, but he had moved far beyond their sphere of influence.

I stirred my coffee. “What I think of his flaws, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Weeks of internal debate. Whether to approach her. It might turn out to be serious.

Flaw 1: He spouts so much BS.

What do you do when you despair, and there isn’t an August rain to drown your sorrow?

Flaw 2: I’m afraid he sees through me.

“There’s an excess of pride to him,” I said, breaking off a piece of a chocolate croissant. “A healthy amount of arrogance. Opportunism, too—he’s not above being exploitive. I think I may safely call him a shark, your son.”

“Yet you’re with him,” said Mr. Somerset.

“Yet I’m with him.”

Should I be concerned at how convincing I sounded? Had I become that good an actress, or was it something else that gave force and gravitas to my words?

“Why?”

“You mean besides the obvious? I like that he’s always been up-front with me, especially about his flaws. I like that he isn’t pissing away his money on hookers and blow. And I like…I like that he challenges me.”

Strangely enough, I might not be lying outright on the last part. As much as I hated it when Bennett called me out on my BS, in a way it was also something of a rush. Nobody else did.

The only thing I didn’t like was that he was only my pretend boyfriend and I the set dressing for his newfound maturity and seriousness.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Somerset. “I’m glad—and relieved—to hear it.”

I wasn’t as glad to have enumerated reasons Bennett’s hold on me grew more tangible with each passing day. But this wasn’t about me. “He’s really quite remarkable, your son.”

“Yes, he is,” said Mr. Somerset. “And has always been.”

A declaration of fact on his part, rather than one of pride, as if he were stating Bennett’s age or height: This was a man who had a clear, unsentimental view of his son.

We fell back into small talk. Ten minutes later, coffee and pastry consumed, we were once again shaking hands, wishing each other safe and pleasant trips.

“Bennett is very lucky to have you,” said Mr. Somerset.

“Who knows, maybe I’m the luckier one here,” I answered. “I hope to see you again when we’re all back in the city.”

Mr. Somerset smiled. “Yes, I’d like that.”

BENNETT AND I HAD AN
uneventful flight to London. At Heathrow Airport we were met by Mrs. Asquith’s man, Hobbs, who drove an old-fashioned sedan with a partition between the front and the back seats. Her house was forty minutes away, a small estate tucked into the Berkshire countryside—not far from Eton, according to Bennett.

“Did you like going to the school?”

“It was okay. I liked playing rugby—always thought American football too wimpy, all those helmets and paddings.”

My lips curved very slightly at that. “Why did your parents put you there, rather than somewhere nearby to keep a closer eye on you?”

“Two years before we met, Moira was arrested in London for being rowdy and in possession of narcotics, so she couldn’t enter Britain. My parents gave my passport to the master of my residence house, so I couldn’t leave. It was a pretty clever plan on their part.”

“So you visited another old lady instead.”

“Huh,” said Bennett.

He gave me a dirty look, but its effect was undercut by a smile. I found myself smiling back at him. And then we were looking at each other and not smiling.

I felt as if there were nothing solid underneath me, as if I might do something regrettable at any moment. Breaking off eye contact, I opened my purse and pretended to check inside. “Did Mrs. Asquith know about Moira?”

“She did after I told her.”

“How’d she take it?”

“With cautious delight. She loves a scandal, that one. I think at one point she almost started the process to get the Home Office’s ruling overturned, so Moira could visit. But in the end she became convinced I’d knock Moira up, and that would be a bigger scandal than even she could handle, especially if it came out that she had something to do with it.”

My head snapped up. “Jesus.”

“I know, as if we’d never heard of contraceptives.”

He was observing me again in that way of his, and I felt like a mechanical watch with its covers taken off, all the wheels and gears inside clearly visible.

“I was talking about Mrs. Asquith almost taking leave of her senses.”

“You
wouldn’t
want a nice young man to see his girlfriend, whom he missed desperately?”

“I’d rather buy you a hooker for your birthday.”

I almost winced at the hard edge to my answer: I was jealous of a dead woman, of the single-minded devotion she had once inspired in my lover.

He cast me a sidelong glance. “Interesting positions you take, Dr. Canterbury.”

I stared at him. I wanted him to touch me. To ignite and then annihilate me. I wanted the opportunity, even if it was only for a few minutes, to pretend that the fire of lust was something far more substantial and all-encompassing.

His eyes darkened. They lingered on my lips. Then he gazed back into my eyes, and I forgot how to breathe. When he looked at me like this, it was easy to believe that no other woman existed but me, that I was indeed the one he had been waiting for all along.

He tilted his head slightly. My heart beat ridiculously fast. My fingers dug into the supple leather of the seat.

The car door opened. “Here we are,” Hobbs said cheerfully. “Mind your step.”

AT FIRST GLANCE, MRS. ASQUITH
didn’t seem like the kind of woman to help with a boy and his more-than-twice-his-age lover: the sharply tailored royal blue dress, the triple strand of pearls, the perfectly coiffed, snow-white hair—if she were to introduce herself as a dowager countess, nobody would blink an eye.

Then she smiled, a smile full of mischief and the-hell-with-it attitude, and suddenly I could see her as a coconspirator in all kinds of outrageous schemes. “Bennett, you scamp. And Evangeline, my dear, how wonderful to meet you at last.”

The skin of her hand was papery, but her handshake was strong. “And may I introduce Mr. Lawrence de Villiers?”

I’d noticed the man to her side the moment we entered the room. He was in his late fifties, with the look of an older Mr. Darcy—he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Colin Firth.

“I rang up Mrs. Asquith a few days ago, and when she said you were going to be here, I asked if I could join you,” Mr. de Villiers said to me. “Zelda and I knew each other from before she emigrated to America.”

He
was Zelda’s old boyfriend, the one who left. I’d hoped to learn something more about him from Mrs. Asquith. But here he was in the flesh, a clear-eyed, handsome man to whom Zelda obviously still mattered, or he wouldn’t have invited himself to meet her former stepdaughter.

“Very nice to meet you,” I said.

We sat down to a late lunch of piping-hot soup and warm sandwiches—steak with caramelized onions on ciabatta for the meat eaters and a toasted Camembert sandwich for the vegetarian.

Bennett teased Mrs. Asquith, who had probably never turned on a stove in her life, on her much improved culinary skills.

She harrumphed. “As if I would have given you anything more than tea and plain toast, when you were always using my telephone to ring your girlfriend in America.”

Bennett slanted her an I’m-disappointed-in-you look. “Aren’t you going to tell the full story?”

“All right, so you did pay for a new central heating system and better plumbing. And a new roof. And solar cells. But that was years later. For the better part of a decade I had only my own kindness for consolation.”

“Huh,” said Bennett. “You used to listen in on my calls.”

Mrs. Asquith grinned, entirely unrepentant. “They were my telephone and my telephone line.” She turned to me. “He was a very naughty boy.”

“I’ve reformed,” Bennett protested. “I’m respectable now.”

Mrs. Asquith scoffed. “You are still a scamp. All your respectability is in this young lady here.”

Bennett glanced at me. “Are you really
that
respectable, Evangeline?”

I put down my sandwich. “Please. At Buckingham Palace they ask themselves, ‘What would Dr. Canterbury do?’”

Mrs. Asquith cackled. “When Bennett said you two were seeing each other, I dug up old snaps Zelda had sent of you and said to myself, ‘Lovely girl, but maybe too sweet and gentle for him.’ I see now I needn’t have worried.”

“I keep him on a short leash,” I said. “He’s gone the moment he shows his true colors.”

“Didn’t I tell you I’m afraid of her?” said Bennett to Mrs. Asquith. “Always looking to kick me to the curb, this one.”

“What can I say?” I dipped my fork into the minted pea puree on my plate. “Zelda raised no fool.”

Mr. de Villiers, who had been quietly listening to our exchange, reached for his water glass. “When Zelda was younger, she was convinced she could never handle children.”

I looked at him full on. “She did very well when the time came. She was the best part of my childhood.”

He shook his head slightly. “I couldn’t have imagined. Or perhaps I should say, I didn’t quite trust my imagination.”

“No one can predict the future,” Mrs. Asquith told him. “You made rational choices, Larry. No need to second-guess them after almost thirty years.”

“No, I suppose not,” he said.

But he didn’t sound convinced. We fell silent, and ate for a minute or so without talking. Mrs. Asquith restarted the conversation by making Mr. de Villiers tell us about his work in television: He had produced several iconic shows and been involved in a score more in one capacity or another.

“I was a junior second assistant producer, on my third show ever, when I was assigned to find a composer for the theme music. And that was when dear Maggie here”—he nodded toward Mrs. Asquith—”introduced me to Zelda, in the hope that her connections in the music industry might help me.

“She actually composed the music herself. But the show was never broadcast, so she put some lyrics to the song, gave it to Polygram, and they made a moderate hit out of it.”

“I believe she paid for new insulation on our house a few years ago with royalties from that song,” I said.

“Did she? That’s lovely to hear.”

There was a yearning in his voice, a hunger for such small, mundane news. Did Zelda feel likewise? When she thought of him, did she wonder whether he still liked his morning toast the way she remembered, and whether he had kept using the same soap and shampoo?

“Now, now, Larry,” said Mrs. Asquith. “I agreed you could come on condition that you reveal all about the next season of
Bowyer Grange
. I’m old and I’m impatient, so you’d best start right now.”

FOR THE REST OF LUNCH
, Mr. de Villiers answered Mrs. Asquith’s questions about upcoming plot twists of the hugely popular show. When we rose from the table, Mrs. Asquith asked if I’d like a tour of the grounds. I said yes, and Mr. de Villiers was volunteered to be my guide.

We bundled up and went outside. My companion dutifully pointed out features of interest. When he mentioned that the house was built in the 1880s, I expressed my surprise at its relatively recent origin.

“What’s the term one uses for those big new houses in America?” asked Mr. de Villiers.

“McMansions, you mean?”

“Yes, that. This is an example of its Victorian counterpart—a prosperous man of business building a country retreat for himself and his family. Thousands of these were torn down in the postwar years—too costly to maintain and too new for the state to consider them of historical value. Fortunately for Maggie, hers is small enough that the upkeep falls within her means.

“Or almost, that is. Out of respect, we tend to look the other way when faced with signs of a house’s dilapidation. But Dr. Somerset was just American enough to make the necessary arrangements for workers to show up, so Maggie could harangue them with her demands.”