A Tangled Web (10 page)

“Cotton. The blouse was white and the skirt was striped red and black.”

“Where did I buy them?”

“I have no idea. Probably in France.”

“You didn't see a label on them?”

“No.” He contemplated her. “You didn't ask any of these questions in the hospital.”

“I didn't think of them then. Did you see labels on any of my clothes?”

“You unpacked a Valentino evening dress on the ship, and two Christian Dior blouses.”

“That's all?”

“We didn't finish unpacking. I wanted you to see the
skyline of Monte Carlo from the lounge and we went forward.”

“That was all you saw? No private label?”

“What made you think of that?”

“If I had a dressmaker, she would know me.”

“There were none.”

Stephanie was frowning, studying his face. She did not believe him. Something was wrong; she knew it, even though she had no idea what it could be or why he would lie to her. She felt ungrateful, doubting him after all he had done for her, but she could not shake this certainty. “Did I have a purse?”

“Of course, but I wasn't in the habit of rifling it.”

“Did I wear makeup?”

“A little. Not very much. You didn't need it.”

“What was my hair like?”

“Long. Magnificent. You can let it grow again, if you like.”

“I think I will.” She looked at her hands. “You said I hadn't been married. When did I tell you that?”

“Soon after we met. Why?”

“I don't know. I think . . . maybe . . . it might not be true.”

“Indeed. Why do you think that?”

She fell silent, suddenly reluctant to confide in him the new thoughts that came to her each day. “What did you do after your mother died?”

He paused, wondering if he should pursue his question. Not necessary, he thought; the less we talk about it, the better. “My father and I kept moving: Spain for a while, then London. I told you about my mother yesterday. You remembered.”

“Oh.” She sat forward. “Max, I remembered!” For the first time since she awoke in the hospital, she smiled, a slow smile that caused Max to draw in his breath on a wave of desire that made him dizzy. He had wanted her every minute of the past week, since coming to Cavaillon, but he had held back and given her her own bedroom, put
off by the distant look in her eyes when she turned to him: the look of a stranger, the look of someone who had no desire to be close to him. He knew that was not true of her; their affair in October, in the weeks before the yacht exploded, had been the most passionate he had known in a lifetime of sexual encounters.

They had met again, in London, years after Max had first met her, when she and Denton, newly married, were guests on his yacht. She was unused to their ways then, resisting the drugs and casual sex that the rest of them took for granted. When he saw her again, at the end of September, sitting with Brooks and Gabrielle at Annabel's, there had been a hunger in her eyes for adventure, and a kind of recklessness, as if she were trying to squeeze everything into a short time. He had liked that; it was the way he had always lived.

He had asked her to decorate and furnish his new town house, and she had done it brilliantly, and then she had made it hers as well by staying there for a weekend that had struck him with that same kind of intense recklessness: as if it were to be their only time together.

He had fallen in love with her then; her presence haunted him after she left. But at the same time he had been preoccupied with his company, Westbridge Imports, with Denton's trying to take it over, with rumors of reporters working on stories about smuggled antiquities and forged works of art. He had been busy winding up his London operations, setting up Lacoste et fils in Marseilles, and getting out of England while he could, to make a new life with a new identity in France, and so he did not recognize the fact that he had fallen in love with her and, in fact, probably would have asked her to marry him if the explosion on the yacht had not happened.

Now, in Cavaillon, seeing her smile, seeing her eyes come to life, he could not wait any longer. He took her in his arms. “My beautiful, adorable Sabrina,” he said, and covered her mouth with his.

She let him hold her, but her mouth was slack beneath
his and her hands stayed in her lap, and after a moment he let her go. “What we had was so memorable,” he murmured, but then he realized the irony of it. Nothing was memorable to this woman, and that was the way it had to be: they could go on together only if she remained locked in her amnesia, believing she was his wife and knowing nothing of the bomb on the yacht, or that it had been put there to kill not only Max Stuyvesant but Sabrina Longworth as well.

“Memorable,” Stephanie said wryly. “It would have had to be a lot better than that.”

“It was better, and we'll have it again. Listen to yourself, Sabrina: this is the first time you've been able to look at yourself with humor. You're getting better.” He took her unresisting hand. “If you still want to wait, if you insist on sleeping downstairs . . .”

“Yes.”

“Well, for a time.” He kissed her fingers and her palm. “I adore you, Sabrina; you're everything I want. You'll come to me, and I promise you we'll be everything to each other. We don't need anyone else; all we want, all we need, is here.”

Stephanie gazed at the top of his head as he kissed her hand. She felt his lips brush her skin, but that was all. I ought to feel something if he's my husband.
I ought to want him.
And she knew then that she knew what sexual desire was and that she had felt it once, but felt nothing now.

Two weeks after they arrived, the weather changed: the sky lowered into a solid gray and the wind rose, bending the trees and making the shutters creak. Rain spattered on the white stones of the terrace, and chill air crept into the house. For the first time, Max and Stephanie ate lunch indoors, in a small room off the kitchen with a round olivewood table and four cushioned wicker chairs. Madame Besset had been making bread, and the room was fragrant and snug while the wind flattened the grass beyond the windows.

Something let go within Stephanie. The tense fearfulness of the past two weeks began to ease, her body relaxed against the flowered cushions of her chair, and she picked up her glass and saw how beautiful was the pale gold of the wine in the golden light from the chandelier. I'm alive and I'm getting better, she thought. And if I keep getting better, pretty soon I'll remember everything. I'm already remembering things that happened yesterday and the day before, and I do know some things about myself. She ticked them off in her mind. I knew someone named Laura and she may have been my mother, and I cut roses with a silver scissors and I moved around a lot. She felt a sudden sinking. It isn't much. It really isn't anything.

“Sabrina?” Max was looking at her.

“I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.”

“Dreaming again.” He looked up as Madame Besset came in.

“There is a man waiting to see you in your study. Very serious, very intense. He calls himself Father Chalon, though you would not know he is a priest to look at him, and he says he will wait until you have finished your lunch.”

“No, bring him here; he'll join us for lunch. A good friend,” Max said to Stephanie. “I've been wanting you to meet him.”

Stephanie looked up as he came in: he was short and slender, with a neatly trimmed brown beard shot with gray and dark brown eyes set close together above a thin nose. He bent over her hand. “I'm so pleased to meet you. Max speaks of you often.”

“Join us,” Max said. “Madame Besset is bringing a plate.”

“Thank you.” Robert sat down, his eyes still on Stephanie. Quite young, he thought. Thirty? Perhaps thirty-one or -two. Slender, holds herself well; perhaps she has been an athlete. He recognized the clothes she wore: the white turtleneck sweater and blue jeans that Max had bought on a shopping trip in Marseilles. Robert had
been with him, watching with amusement Max's sureness with sizes and styles: he knew how to dress a woman.

But more than anything, Robert was struck by her beauty, a vibrant beauty enlivened by the curiosity and intelligence in her eyes. That had not been visible when he helped bring her to Marseilles; he had known only that she probably had once been beautiful. Now, looking at her as if he were viewing a Botticelli in the Uffizi, or one of Titian's glorious women in the Louvre, he felt the tug that beauty exerts: the desire to draw close to it, to absorb some of its perfection, to believe that, because it exists, the world can become a place without pain or sorrow or grief. He became aware that the silence was stretching out and he said, “I am delighted to see you so much improved.”

Sabrina looked at Max questioningly.

“Robert accompanied us to Marseilles and to the hospital,” he said.

“And would not have predicted such a rapid recovery. I can see that your bruises have faded, as has the swelling; how is the wound on your head? That frightened us very much.”

Instinctively, Stephanie's hand went to the scar, hidden by her hair. “It's much better. I'm getting better.”

“And remembering, too?”

“No.” She looked swiftly at Max. “You promised you wouldn't—”

“I told only Robert because he's very close to us. We'll tell no one else; I promise you that.”

“Close to us?” Stephanie waited as Madame Besset arranged a plate and cutlery for Robert and placed a casserole nearby so he could serve himself. Max poured his wine as Robert broke off a chunk of bread from the large round loaf in the center of the table.

“Robert and I do some work together,” Max said. “It's something that would not interest you. But—”

“Why not?”

“Well, it might, someday, but not today. Anyway,
Robert has had a most unusual life; he might tell you about it.”

“If madame would be interested,” said Robert.

“Oh, not ‘madame,' ” Stephanie said. “It doesn't sound like me.”

“Ah, thank you. Sabrina, then. A very lovely name. If indeed you are interested . . .”

“Yes.” And to her surprise, she was. It was the first time since she had been in the house that she had felt a spark of curiosity. She had not opened any of the books that filled the library; she did not look at
Figaro
when it arrived each day on their doorstep, nor had she read
Madame Figaro,
the glossy magazine that came with the Friday edition. She had thought idly of going into Cavaillon, especially on market days, but Max said they could not go yet, and she did not care enough to press it.

But today the wind howled, the breakfast room was cozy, and it was exciting to talk to someone who was not a doctor or a nurse or Max. Today, over the deep sadness that lay like a weight inside her, and over the terrors of emptiness that haunted her nights, she felt a ripple of being alive and of being glad that she was. She smiled at Robert. She liked him. He wore corduroy pants and a dark blue sweater over an open-necked shirt, and his raggedly cut hair reached his collar. He looked like a schoolboy. “How old are you?” Stephanie asked.

“Forty-one,” he said promptly. “Forty-two next month.”

“You look younger.”

“I feel younger. Probably from bicycling up Mont Ventoux once a week. Perhaps you'll do it with me one day.”

“I don't know if I know how to ride a bicycle.”

“The easiest way to find out is to start pedaling. If you find you can't do it, I'll gladly teach you.”

Stephanie looked at Max. “I'd like to try. Is it all right? May I buy a bicycle?”

“Of course, if that's what you want. We'll wait,” he said to Robert, “until she's stronger.”

“She's strong enough now for many rides around here. The postal roads that circle the vineyards and cherry orchards—empty except once a day when the postman comes in his car—even you could do them.”

Max smiled. “I thought you'd given up trying to turn me into an athlete. But if Sabrina wants it, of course she'll have it.”

Stephanie felt like a child between two grown-ups. They knew everything, and she knew nothing. She imagined curling up between them, letting them take care of her. Then, perversely, she felt stirrings of anger.
Don't treat me like a child.

But in a powerful way, she really was like a child. She had no history, no framework of experience in which to maneuver and hold her own and make decisions about the future.

Then I'll pretend, she thought, and said to Robert, “You were going to tell me your story.”

“And so I will.” He wiped his plate with his bread, finished his wine, and sat back. “My father was a pirate.” He smiled at Stephanie's expression. “It amuses me to say that, and in fact, when I was growing up, that was what he told me and my brothers: he was a pirate on the high seas. But he was something less dramatic: a clever and rather lucky thief who worked as a steward on a very posh cruise line. He was quite short, but extraordinarily handsome and well-muscled, and he charmed everyone; I never knew a man before or since who was so loved—adored, really—by everyone. Including, of course, his wife and six sons.”

“That I hadn't known,” Max said. “Six boys. No girls?”

“My mother often said her character was forged by having to hold her own against seven men. And she was indeed a woman of admirable fortitude. She was a maid in the Hôtel Fouchard, an elegant place with a restaurant that Michelin gave three stars every year. That was my favorite place in the world, that kitchen.”

“What did your father steal?” Stephanie was leaning forward, her chin on her folded hands, for the first time happily absorbed in someone else.

“Whatever he could. Small amounts of money that were not likely to be missed; jewelry, always from women who had brought such an enormous cache of gold and jewels on board that a bracelet or brooch or jeweled hair clip might not be missed until they were back on shore. It was highly risky and stupid, because his tips were extremely generous, and of course it was immoral, but he was convinced he could not support his family in fine style in any other way. And then, you see, he had so many successful years that it all began to seem quite normal. After a while he saw himself as an entrepreneur, his business, with regular routines and accounting systems and steady hours, was piracy.”