The Suitors (18 page)

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Even if I found it impossible to suppress my sensual awakening, which sprang from something too primitive to be denied, I could resolve to forget the thoughts and feelings about Marie that had so pained me the previous evening. And this I tried to do all during that last day before our return to Paris. Because there was no question of my allowing the slightest distance to grow between us, still less when we were already committed to our project, even if it was absurd.

The plot thickened the following weekend, when some friends of my father, Georgina de Marien and Charles Ramsbotham, arrived at L’Agapanthe. My mother called them the Oddballs and found them so tiresome that she regretted not having argued more firmly, at the moment of sending out her invitations, against their coming. She’d been particularly set against Charles Ramsbotham, who, although tremendously rich and upper-crust (being a lord, the seventh Earl of Stafford) did not “play the game” with the culture and refinement she had expected of him.

Charles was, it’s true, surprising in every way, beginning with his looks. Through a laudable desire to take care of himself, this middle-aged man had concentrated all his attention on his face, but since he had no taste
whatsoever, he’d had his hair dyed as black as shoe polish. More or less insensitive to pain, he’d gone the whole hog: botched eyelid surgery had left his eyes in a permanent state of astonishment, while his skin—no doubt pockmarked even before his several face-lifts—had the texture of sandpaper and the color of a pear way past its prime. Through an inexplicable paradox, however, he had completely neglected to keep physically fit. He was fat. Quite fat. Which didn’t seem to bother him, but my mother couldn’t get over it, as if he’d meant his waistline to be a personal affront to her. Why else did he merrily stuff himself at every meal instead of being ashamed of his girth and trying to slim down?

The other game Charles seemed unable to play was the art of dressing stylishly. His own codes and predilections, for example, allowed the wearing of polyester shorts and a leopard-print short-sleeved shirt with an elastic bottom hem that puffed out over his paunch. And taking my mother’s suggestion of “casual” attire too literally, he could turn up for breakfast in a canary-yellow tracksuit he’d personally ordered from an Italian couturier shortly before the man was assassinated. In other words, Charles was
the
client for men’s ready-to-wear, of the kind one would have thought had long since vanished from this earth.

So he stuck out like a very sore thumb at L’Agapanthe, a temple of graceful conversation, and adding insult to injury, he was utterly indifferent to the charms of the mature women who formed the core of the feminine contingent there. The only women who interested Charles were breathtakingly beautiful prostitutes—or fighter pilots! And he made no effort to speak to my mother or her women friends at meals, except when he interrupted their noble attempts to entertain him by asking them to pass the salt, tell him the time, or inform him what make of car they drove. Because Charles really cared about only two things: automobiles, about which (delighted to be an expert at last on at least one subject) he loved to know and understand everything, and gorillas, which he truly worshipped. To the point of building more than a dozen supersophisticated cages for them at his home in Gloucestershire.

All this made it hard for my mother to put up with this boor whom she considered shallow and uncultivated and who did not blend in with her “little band,” like a gladiolus stuck in among orchids. And aside from her displeasure at being invisible to him, she found fault with Charles for the admiration he aroused in the imbeciles who, eager to appropriate some of his originality, made much of the funny stories he told about his
gorillas. My mother therefore felt within her rights to expect that her faithful friends should openly share her disdain for Charles, whose shortcomings she pointed out at every opportunity.

Frédéric was always the first to oblige, with brief remarks that both soothed and enchanted his hostess, quips along the lines of, “So when may we expect him, our Goat’s Butt?” For nothing amused him more than to indulge his passion for nicknames, which he invented by translating or deforming the real name of his victim. “And George?” he added, meaning Georgina de Marien.

Georgina was my father’s acknowledged “platonic girlfriend,” and my mother had nothing nice to say about her, either. For at least ten years now, my mother had been in the habit of inviting a woman who would prove an amusing companion for her husband, since she had little time to pay attention to him herself, given that L’Agapanthe was as difficult to run as a busy hotel. The ideal woman for this task had to please my father, which implied gaiety on her part, good looks, and the ability to accompany him on his long swims in the bay. This lady friend should also, however, suit my mother, by not harboring any desire to flirt with my father for real or play at being mistress of the house—so she had to be astute enough to understand any such obvious prerequisites.
Well, such a pearl doesn’t turn up every day. So once my mother had assured herself that Georgina was not an adventuress, she assigned her the part.

The drama in question had been running for a long time, though, and my mother shared the philosophy of one of our neighbors, who made it a rule never to rent her house more than three years in a row to the same person, to make sure of remaining the lady of the manor. My mother was therefore preparing to banish Georgina from L’Agapanthe once she had laid the groundwork with enough cutting remarks in that regard.

And yet Georgina was a nice person, who never spoke ill of anyone or had any intention of vamping my father. She would naturally have loved to have a touch of romance in her life, but she wasn’t prepared to go to the mat over it with my mother, whose temper she feared as deeply as she appreciated her hospitality. Besides, she was independent and happy to be so. Born Miro Quesada, she was the daughter of a man known as the Guano King, just as Patiño was the Tin King. A Peruvian, she came from a family that had Spanish roots and numbered among its members two presidents, many intellectuals, some newspaper magnates, and one hero of the hostilities with Chile during the War of the Pacific. With no need to work for a living, Georgina de Marien began
traveling after the death of her husband, but she neither went off to spas nor embarked on short cruises. Rather, she traveled like a diplomat sent from post to post and had gone in succession to London, Rome, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and New York.

Hidden behind his
Paris-Turf
, Frédéric greeted me when I showed up at L’Agapanthe that Friday like a puppeteer announcing the arrival of Punch and Judy, with a jolly “Are we ever going to have fun!”

Charles Ramsbotham, who had shown up shortly before I did, had just broken all the rules in the book by giving my father a Jet Ski, even though he knew perfectly well that all guest gifts ought to be purely symbolic gestures.

A man of concrete and practical mind, Charles could never remember any of these rules of
savoir vivre
for very long, for he had no patience with such subtleties. As a guest, he thought it shameful to offer what he considered “crud,” which was doubtless suitable for the impecunious friends of my parents, but not for him, for his lifestyle was so opulent that one might well have thought
him even wealthier than he was. Indeed, his generous character and personal ethics impelled him to treat his friends with the same lavish generosity with which he indulged himself. This led him, every year, to offer my father some costly gadget such as a GPS or a satellite telephone with worldwide coverage, a device that had the considerable merit of keeping Charles temporarily occupied (until he had mastered the operating instructions and tested his gift for his hosts) in a house where he was bored stiff.