Take Me Higher (9 page)

She was shaken by the confrontation but Caleb had driven her into a corner of despair she could no longer bear. To retaliate as violently as she had quite traumatised her. Her feelings were mixed and foreign to her. She was feeling in control of herself and her life as she had never been before and yet she was like a new-born babe, living in the moment and not knowing or even thinking what to do next.

Caleb was as good as his word. One enormous problem after another fell upon Syrah like great stones. Weighed down by them and with not enough time to contemplate them or what to do with Ruy Blas, she let things drift for several weeks. The only bright light on her horizon being that, although for the moment she had abandoned her vineyard and cellar, James had not. He was carrying out the plan he had mapped out for her and keeping away from Syrah so that she might have the space and time she needed to heal from Ethan’s death.

It was during those few weeks after Caleb’s visit that the many condolence letters from friends and business associates of her father’s in the wine industry, containing offers of help when she was ready to enter the wine world and take up her father’s gauntlet, made Syrah realise how much a part of her her legacy was. The words of those men and women who had loved and respected Ethan for the man and Master of Wine he had been made such a profound impression on her that she began to understand how much she needed to take control of her life and once more become a part of the Napa Valley. She must find a way to make a niche for herself and Keoki in the name of great wine, and to emulate Ethan’s life’s work.

So many times during those stressful weeks in Malibu her thoughts turned to James: sensual longings to be with him in lust and love, to feel his body next to hers, even the scent of the man, were things she conjured up in the loneliness of the night. Yet she never called him. She did not want to mix up the need she felt for him with love or sexual passion, not until she was able to make an attempt at sorting out the mess that was her life at the moment. He never called from the Valley and she loved him more for that – that he knew without being told that she needed time to mourn Ethan and get her life in order; that she would call him when she was free and ready to move on in his direction. She had walked away from him and his love once long ago. She wanted to be sure of her feelings for him now because she knew she could never do that again.

Then one morning she woke and felt a strength that she had always had but which had deserted her with Ethan’s death. She was herself once more and feeling she had come out of some dark and dismal place into the light. It was around half past six in the morning, Keoki and Melba were still asleep in their rooms. The sun was out and there was a fresh breeze coming off the Pacific. There was hardly a soul out on the beach. Syrah donned a pair of loose white linen trousers and a T-shirt, a wool jumper over that, and walked from her bedroom down the stairs to the beach. Barefoot, she ran across the sand to the water’s edge and broke into a run. The sound of the waves, a steady mesmerising pulse and the scent of the ocean filled her heart and soul. They seemed to energise her, spur her on. She ran faster, faster, and felt a sheer excitement at being alive – as she had never felt before except possibly when she was in her plane flying solo over the ocean, diving from great heights and sweeping just barely above the tops of the waves only to climb steeply up, up, back into the clouds.

A sense of joy was hers. Laughter had once again entered her life. She ran in and out of the shallows and the cold water caught the cuffs of her trousers which flapped against her ankles. Still on the run, she pulled her jumper off and tied it around her waist and kept running. Other runners and joggers appeared on the beach and by the time Malibu had really woken she was running up the stairs to her house and into the kitchen, out of breath but riding high on adrenaline and the joy of being alive.

Keoki was having his breakfast. Melba, busy pouring milk, had only to look at Syrah to know she had returned to them whole and her own self. She rushed over to her son. Throwing her arms around him, she kissed him again and again until giggles of pleasure erupted from them both.

‘Pancakes! lots of your thin luscious pancakes drenched in butter and maple syrup – I’m famished. Pancakes for us all and after that a family conference. I’ll be back from my shower in a flash,’ she told her housekeeper and son.

In the shower she thought about James and her erotic feelings for him. Why wasn’t he here in the shower with her? She caressed her breasts, silky smooth with bath gel. It felt so good to be fondled. In her misery of the last weeks she had nearly forgotten how good it was to be alive, passionate to live out the excitement of just being in lust and love.

Out of the shower Syrah went directly to the telephone next to her bed and rang James. His mobile telephone was switched off. She rummaged through her handbag and found the office number at Ruy Blas. Henri Chagny answered. No James was not there but Henri expected him and would give him a message.

‘Is everything OK with Ruy Blas?’ she asked.

‘Yes, under control. James checks in every day and the vineyard is carrying on as usual. We appreciate all that he is doing for us, the payroll he meets every week and the running expenses. There have been a few disturbances from Richebourg-Conti on Caleb’s orders but we managed to solve the problems. I will have James call you as soon as we hear from him.’

Syrah slipped into a terry-cloth robe and, still towel drying her hair, marched through the house to the kitchen where she dropped the towel into the laundry basket and took a seat at the table. Melba placed a stack of pancakes on the table and mother and son dived at them with their forks while Melba sat down.

All the while they chatted over breakfast, Syrah’s mind kept wandering away from the conversation and dwelling on thoughts of James and what he was doing for her at Ruy Blas. He had taken on a great deal for her.

Three pancakes down the telephone rang. Syrah jumped from her
chair to answer it. Instinct told her it was James. Walking from the kitchen with the cordless telephone she heard him telling her, ‘Every day since you left I’ve been waiting for your call. Are you well? Keoki too?’

The moment she heard his voice she was filled with love for him. ‘Fine, we’re both fine. James, I know how much you’re doing for me, Henri told me. I have to know why? What, if anything, do you expect in return?’

He hesitated before he answered. She somehow sensed she had just posed the most important question he would ever have to answer; that what he did answer would govern their respective lives from that day onward. She heard him give a nervous cough and finally clear his throat. She imagined the tears coming to his eyes, and closed her own to try and calm herself.

A slight tremor in his voice, he told her, ‘For love and a lifetime of loving you.’

Any questions Syrah might have had about his motives or his personal life vanished instantly from her mind. They were no longer relevant. Only that he loved her. Overwhelmed by his declaration, her own sense of excitement and erotic passion for James surfaced. That love and sensual attraction had been mutual! Life was changing for her at such a dizzying pace she had no time to play love games. She merely blurted out, ‘In the garden, when you put your arms around me, an instant sense of love that I know will go on forever overwhelmed me. That’s why I ran away. It’s something so precious, we must take great care with it. I know you feel the same way.’

‘Yes. I never stopped loving you. Though I made a life without you, you were always there. I believed in the depths of my being you would come back to me,’ he told her.

‘James, all that money you’re putting into Ruy Blas – I’m so grateful to you but I’m not used to taking financial advantage of anyone, let alone a man with whom I am in love and who is in love with me. My affairs are in a dreadful state. If I’m to keep and run Ruy Blas, move back to the Valley, which is my intention, I must find a way to finance the vineyard so you need not carry on lending me money. I don’t want anything to get in the way of the love that is growing between us, and certainly nothing as crass as taking advantage of it. You do understand?’

‘Of course. But until you are able to sort out your affairs and no longer need me to fund Ruy Blas, I will carry on playing its banker.’

‘I know nothing of your life, can you afford to help me like this?’ asked Syrah hesitantly.

‘Not for much longer. But … I must see you, talk to you about my present life. It’s not so straightforward as I would like it to be.’

Chapter 7

Diana lived in Beverly Hills; possibly the smallest, most understaffed house in Beverly Hills. People envied her English garden, and lawns, her tennis court and cricket pitch; considered the house itself, tucked away behind flowering shrubs and trees, to be enchanting. It had a reputation for being very private and off bounds as a party place.

Ira had bought her the house, which had been extraordinarily expensive. He had insisted upon her accepting it as a gift. ‘An expression of love,’ he had told her. ‘In admiration of your beauty, your unique talent as a great actress, and because I want you always to be living well and close to me.’

The house had five bedrooms and baths, a large kitchen, a long rambling drawing room with French doors that led on to the terrace and garden, a swimming pool and walled kitchen garden. The dining room had been turned into a library but was still used on the rare occasions when Diana did entertain. One of the bedrooms had been turned into a gym, another given over to Keoki. A third, her own, was enormous and overlooked the pool and gardens that rambled charmingly away from the house, to walks through rose arbours and to a folly.

There was hardly a day that went by when Diana did not remind herself to be grateful for her house. The English matinee idol who had built it fifty years before had created for himself a home that was a corner of England, and not Hollywood-style. Diana clearly loved her house and spent a great deal of time in it.

She had no housekeeper but a houseman, Willoughby. He was a jack-of-all-trades and keeper of her life. A man in his fifties, he had been an actor in B movies but not, sadly a successful one and so became a dresser for better actors than himself. When the young Diana George won the first of her Oscars, Willoughby recognised in her a great artist.
Over the years they became friends and when she became a stage actress as well as a screen star he offered her his services. He was wizard at running her life.

Everyone liked Willoughby who turned out to be more extraordinary than anyone had given him credit for. Even Ira. Willoughby was devoted to Diana, impressed by Ira, adored Syrah and Keoki, and was always in love with some young man who was at all times kept by him but far from Diana and her world. These young men were Willoughby’s secret vice, one everyone knew about but never confronted him with. Willoughby’s entire purpose in life was to remove the mundane from Diana’s, which he did admirably.

She was watching her houseman who stood in the garden talking to Rachel the gardener. A woman in her mid-fifties, she had been working on the garden for the past thirty years. Rachel had come with the house. It had been a condition of sale. Diana’s greatest pleasure was to work alongside her in the vegetable and herb patch. The marvellous thing about this odd couple, who lived in staff quarters over the garages, was that they were never intrusive. They respected Diana’s privacy, rather snobbishly enjoyed her being a theatre and Hollywood star without playing the celebrity game. Unbeknown to her they kept scrap books of her achievements as well as her celebrity life on Ira’s arm in Tinseltown Society.

Diana was constantly bemused by the couple who were most respectful, formal even, with each other. She placed the script she was reading in her lap and closed her eyes. The sun felt good. It soothed her somewhat shattered nerves. The weeks since Ethan’s death, being steeped in Syrah’s profound sadness and Keoki’s loss of the only real male figure in his life, had not been easy. She had been friends with Syrah and Ethan even before Keoki had been born and bore her own sadness at losing the old man too. She had loved him as Syrah’s father, he had adored her as a great actress and his daughter’s best friend. Their relationship had been as close as a family tie.

Diana and Syrah were the sisters neither of them had been born with. They had seen each other through traumatic events: affairs, Keoki’s birth, the years Diana had been blinded by love for Ira. Those times played through her mind as she sat in a wicker chaise next to the pool wearing a large straw hat. She had done very well for herself, this
thirty-year-old actress known for her intelligence, exceptional beauty and talent. From humble beginnings, her roots still went deep. Poor, just above survival level, backwoods farming people from the bible belt were her earliest influences. For all her fame and wealth and success, there remained in her a vestige of backwoods farming ideology that at all times kept her feet firmly on the ground.

Diana’s rise to celebrity status had not come easily and when it did arrive she lived modestly, saved and invested her money. There had been tips from Ethan about investing and through the years with Ira she’d had access to many more. He had wanted her to have money. Believed that great wealth brought power. So she’d learned from him how to make money and how to keep it. She knew to the very penny how much she was worth but for Diana it was paper money, to play with as she saw fit.

When she finally did walk out on Ira it left her emotionally fragile for some time. She no longer felt the pain of the betrayal he had so publicly inflicted upon her with a nineteen-year-old model he had flaunted for all the world to see while Diana was still living in his house. The gossip columns had made a meal of the very private life of Diana George. She had loved him completely, unconditionally, and for all the years they’d lived together, believed that he loved her in the same way. Now, sitting in the sun, she could remember dispassionately the things that had been so good between them. And the bad things. ‘No regrets,’ she said aloud, and picked up the script she was reading.

It was a good script and there was a part in it on offer to her. Some time later, still lost in it, she felt a momentary chill. Looking up, she saw Ira standing before her blocking the sun. She leaped from the chair and the script fell on to the grass.

Ira grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you?’

‘Well, you have, Ira. And what are you doing here anyway?’

‘I wanted to talk to you, it’s important to me,’ he told her, caressing her hair.

Diana took a step away from him. ‘You might have called.’

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t see me,’ he told her as he followed her round the pool towards the house.

‘You’d have been right about that. How did you get past Willoughby?’

The passionate feelings she had nurtured so long for this handsome,
undeniably sexy man were no longer there. She saw standing before her someone she had loved beyond measure and had watched transform himself from loving human being into someone she could barely recognise. How many times had she tried to save their love affair? Countless. It had been torture for her to see what money and power had done to the man she’d loved.

‘I told him you wanted to see me,’ was Ira’s sheepish reply.

‘Since we occasionally move in the same circles, I thought we’d agreed to remain civil in public and nothing in private?’ she said.

‘Well, I wouldn’t have put it exactly like that,’ he told her, a disturbing twinkle in his eye.

‘I would and I do. Can we leave it at that?’

‘You know, I still want you in my life. I’ve told you that a hundred times and I’ll say it again,’ he declared as he grabbed her arm in an attempt to stop her.

Diana did stop. She removed her dark glasses. Gazing at him she said, ‘What! And be humiliated again by your disloyalty, your pathological womanising. Be constantly exposed to the image of the great land developer multi-millionaire you have made of yourself, your passion for “the deal” and tossing away of genuine generosity. I think not, thank you. And never, but never, come to my house uninvited.’

All that was said not in anger but in a dispassionate voice as cold as steel. It was that tone in her voice that for a brief moment affected Ira more than anything she’d said. Of course he could not be surprised by what she’d had to say about him, it was all true and they both knew it. Ira was a man who knew who and what he was and how to live happily with that. All Diana had had to do was accept him for who he had been and what he had become. He saw her as flawed, her love for him not as strong as she had proclaimed. They had parted because she no longer loved him more than she loved herself. It was that selflessness he had fallen in love with as much as her beauty, fine mind and stardom.

Ira followed her into the kitchen where he watched Diana pour herself a glass of iced tea. He watched her, hand rock steady, showing not a shred of anxiety at his being there.

‘A glass of iced tea for me, five minutes of your time and then I’ll leave, never to impose myself on you again.’

Diana gazed at him silently. One thing about Ira never changed, he
always stood by his word. She turned her back on him and poured a second glass of tea. She handed it to him then placed a plate of freshly made ginger biscuits on the table under an awning off the kitchen and took a chair.

‘Five minutes you said? The clock is ticking,’ she told him.

‘You’ve changed, become hard.’

‘No. Just taken off the blinkers, Ira.’

He laughed. ‘Boy, when you make up your mind to play hard ball, you are unbeatable.’

‘Now you have four minutes. Hadn’t you better get on with it? What do you want?’

‘OK, this is serious. I’m here to ask a favour. I want you to convince Syrah to sell me Ruy Blas and Ethan’s wine cellar.’ As she was clearly about to interrupt him, Ira put up his hand in a signal for her to be quiet and continued, ‘Hear me out,
please
, for Syrah’s sake. She has no choice but to sell Ruy Blas, it’s the only way she can get on with her life. No one will better my offer, her future would be assured.’

‘Why this grand gesture of coming to Syrah’s rescue? There must be more to your generosity than just seeing she’s treated correctly.’

‘I couldn’t bear for her to be cheated and as you well know she is no businesswoman. Who else will step in and help her? I can assure you her brother won’t. Why shouldn’t I step in as a gallant? I’ve always had a soft spot for Syrah. Admired her background: wine aristocracy, the classy lifestyle. I see great potential in the Napa Valley and would love to be the proud owner of Ethan’s pet vineyard and wine cellar. Will you help me? You would have done so once without a second thought.’

‘That’s true, but not any longer. How crass of you to remind me of what we have both lost.’

‘We were very good together,’ he told her.

A softness, and sexiness came into his voice, a charm she had fallen in love with. She watched his sexuality come to the surface, the way he used it to try and win her over. What for? she wondered. A seduction for a favour? His motives were so blatant she felt he must think her a fool.

Her thoughts were interrupted when he said, ‘I’m going to marry. It’s time. I wanted it to be you. Neither of us will ever do better for a
mate. You should think about that before I find someone else to fit the bill. Who knows? It might even be Syrah. There has always been sexual attraction between us. We fought off deeper feelings because she insisted upon being loyal to you. You left me, allowing that obstacle to vanish.’

‘What vanity! And how very typical of you, leaving all options open so you can pluck the best deal for love, sex and marriage Ira-style. Another one of your games: wanting both Syrah and me to round out your life. It will never happen. How clever, how devious you are to seize the moment when she is most vulnerable and I am still weak and burned out from loving you. What lengths would you go to to get me back? What dastardly tricks and ruthless games would you play on Syrah to take over Ruy Blas and Ethan’s cellar? Go home, Ira, forget me, I am no candidate for
anything
with you. I know you too well, I’ve had the best you had to offer. Who and what you have holds no interest for me any more. Will I plead your case to Syrah? I certainly will. But not for your sake, for hers. I will tell her every word of this conversation.’

Ira approached Diana, audaciously, laughter in his eyes and a smile on his lips. He kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘That would be the kindest thing you could do for her,’ and left.

She sat where Ira had left her for quite a long time. She was not upset by her confrontation with him but wondered how she could ever have loved such a monstrously unloving man. It had been sexual that was for certain. He had been able to awaken in her a sexuality that had been lying dormant, waiting to be released from repressive morality. He had opened her eyes to much she would have missed had she not been with him. But had the love between them been only hers, working overtime? Had she, through all those years with him, lied to herself that he loved her as she did him? Had he always been the man she had seen and heard today? Of course, that had been exactly how it had been. Diana knew now, could face and come to terms with the mess that had been her life with Ira Rudman. She could also accept that though she had truly left him behind her, she had not changed her life or created a new one. Her moments of insight galvanised Diana and she went to the telephone and called her friend.

Syrah was having a terrible day. Every day seemed to be a terrible day for her. Her money problems appeared to become worse week by week.
The money she had borrowed from Diana was long since gone. Now it was a matter of selling her possessions and that meant everything, to the last handkerchief if need be, if she was going to work her vineyard and change her life by moving to the Valley. Which was what she intended to do. That in itself posed huge problems but the visit from Caleb had made her mind up for her. Since that morning she had been trying to work out a plan for disposing of her assets. She had tried to keep her stressful situation from Keoki and Melba until she felt the time was right. That time seemed close at hand now.

Syrah heard the sound of Diana’s horn. She rushed from the house to open the gates from the highway to her private drive. Short as it was, she had been too slow. Keoki had them partially open. He flung open the door and slid on to and across the seat next to Diana. Godmother and godson kissed each other. His best friend Obi jumped in next to Keoki and they coasted down to the entrance of the house. It was left to Syrah to close the gates.