Indiscretions (9 page)

Venetia glanced across the aisle of the private jet to where India sat with her feet curled beneath her and a book in her hands, pretending to read. Venetia hadn’t seen her turn a page in the last half hour. Paris lay full length across three seats behind India, one thin arm flung across her face so that her eyes were hidden. The steward had covered her carefully with a blanket and she seemed to be sleeping, but Venetia doubted it.

Venetia stretched her stiff legs. It was weariness that she felt, not fatigue. Too much was happening in her head, too many thoughts, too many questions. Too much guilt. If only she’d gone home when Jenny asked her … Abruptly she made her way toward the powder room at the rear of the plane.

A door stood open on the left and she peered in at the compact, luxurious little room that was almost filled by a low bed covered in a soft dark-brown moleskin rug. Subdued
lighting, a large mirror, a console by the bed that controlled the television and movie screens and the music system. Fitz McBain’s bedroom. She could lie down here, now, if she wanted. The bed was there for her to rest on. Venetia wondered briefly about the man whose bedroom this was, the rich man who owned a dozen luxury hotels, a château in France, and a penthouse in New York’s newest and most prestigious building. The plane is his home, Morgan had said. He spends most of his life in transit, flying from one meeting to the next. His father had two of these planes and they were identical. It was almost, thought Venetia, remembering Morgan’s story at dinner last night, as though Fitz McBain still lived in the trailer where he’d had his beginnings. A luxurious airborne trailer, but was there really much difference? Fitz McBain was still living “over the shop.”

She wandered through to the tiny bathroom and gazed around. Mirrors, crystal knobs on the faucets, bronze tiles … very masculine … a bottle of Lagerfeld cologne, creamy towels monogramed
MCB
in scarlet. There were few clues to the man who had, when Morgan telephoned him in Hamburg, instantly put his private plane at the Haven daughters’ disposal. That, and any help he could offer, which included the two burly bodyguards sitting, as discreetly as two very large young men could, at the rear of the plane, and when they landed in Los Angeles they would be joined by two more.

Fitz McBain had thought quickly. “I’ll have the girls picked up in Rome and Paris and get them to London right away. They’ll be all right at Heathrow,” he’d told Morgan. “We’ll get them out before the story breaks. But there’ll be trouble at L.A. International—reporters, TV, you name it. Everyone will be there hoping for the scoop on Jenny Haven’s daughters. She’s kept them out of the limelight all these years and she wouldn’t want to see them involved in any flashpulp disputes when they get off
the plane. They’ll be distraught and tired. A car with two extra guards will be waiting on the tarmac and I’ll arrange for them to be taken directly from the plane to my Bel-Air house. That place is a fortress, no one will disturb them there. Once they are settled, they can decide what they need to do.”

It was typical of his father, Morgan had thought, that after the first small silence when he had said that Jenny Haven was dead, he had foreseen not just the need to get all three girls to Los Angeles as soon as possible, but also the need to retain their privacy. Fitz McBain was a man who, despite an outwardly flamboyant life-style, had courted privacy all his life.

Venetia examined her pale, blotched face in the gleaming mirror. She looked terrible, but it didn’t matter. She turned out the light and drifted back into the bedroom. The digital clock by the side of the bed offered the times of day in London, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney. All you had to do was press the button. It was ten o’clock in the morning in London, and two o’clock the previous night in California. Did that mean Jenny had been dead less time in L.A.?

Vennie curled up on the soft brown moleskin-covered bed and cried herself to sleep.

The book she had been staring at for the past hour slid to the floor with a small thud, but India scarcely noticed. All she saw were images of Jenny’s face. Jenny smiling at her, her blue eyes sparkling with amusement; Jenny talking on the phone, running her left hand through her thick blond hair in that familiar nervous gesture; Jenny looking haughtily into a mirror as she clasped diamonds around her neck and snuggled a vast white fox fur coat around her slender shoulders, preparing for the annual Oscar Award ceremony; Jenny soft and laughing, lying in bed
while her three young daughters clambered around her begging for another story; Jenny arrogantly demanding only the best hotel suites because “she’d earned it, damn it”; Jenny wide eyed and breathlessly in love with some new man … there was always a new man, no one ever lasted. Poor Jenny.

Maybe, thought India, if my father had lived she might have found lasting happiness instead of just temporary pleasure. Jenny had loved him, she told me so. And he had loved her. It hadn’t been the way it was with Paris’s father, a passion that needed to run its fast-burning course, nor with Venetia’s father. That had been an amusing flirtation with a very correct older man, possessor of a great English hereditary title and vast inherited lands, whom Jenny had delighted in seducing, tempting him into realms of sexuality he hadn’t known existed and couldn’t resist. India never knew if the story of the gondola was an embellishment of Jenny’s to add extra spice to the story, but knowing Jenny she would bet it was true. Jenny would have done it just for the fun of remembering this proper but passionate, trouserless Englishman straddling her in a wildly rocking gondola on the dark canals of Venice—and she would have loved the heightened thrill of sex just barely hidden from discovery. Sex wasn’t something that Jenny enjoyed only when she fell in love, however brief that emotion might be, it was a way of life for her. Jenny Haven loved to make love—and there were those who phrased that more crudely—but still India was sure Jenny had loved her father.

A smile flickered across India’s face as she remembered Jenny’s “father stories,” told to them bit by bit over a period of years, garnished with more detail as they grew older, until they had become family legends. Paris’s “father story” was passionate, Venetia’s was fun, but mine, thought India, was romantic, mine was the vulnerable Jenny in love who, on a houseboat in Kashmir,
wrapped in the warmth of her lover’s arms, saw the still, cool, star-spangled dawn rise over Lake Srīnagar … and named her daughter India. But this time when the movie the two were making together was over the romance hadn’t faded. They were to have been married after his complicated divorce finally came through, but then he was drowned on location in Singapore. Just one of those needless accidents that change so much. It might have lasted for them, and then perhaps Jenny would still be alive too.

Perhaps that’s why she kept me close to her, mused India. Is that the reason I was the one sent to schools in the States instead of Europe? Eastern schools, of course—only the best—in line with Jenny’s policy that education was of paramount importance in life. First Miss Porter’s in New York, and then Vassar, and always with Jenny constantly in touch. India had never felt neglected or unloved simply because they were separated by several thousand miles. Jenny was always there at the end of the telephone, or a quick plane ride away in emergencies like appendicitis or the knee fractured in a skiing fall. Oh, I loved you, Jenny, thought India numbly, I loved you as a mother, I admired you as a hardworking movie actress, and when I was old enough to understand, I loved you for the woman you were.

It hadn’t always been easy being Jenny’s daughter, and India had alternately basked in her glory and hidden from it, particularly when it came to dating boys and at art school. Boys, because everyone knew—or thought they knew—the real story of how Jenny Haven had made it, though even India didn’t know for sure how much of it was true. But she was nervously aware that the boys speculated how much she might be like her mother. It was a fact that Jenny had run away from her small hometown in North Carolina after winning a talent competition singing and tap-dancing in a local beer hall. With the
fifty dollars’ winnings in her pocket she’d hopped on the Greyhound bus and headed west to the beckoning bright lights of Hollywood, aged thirteen and looking seventeen, tall, blond, sexy, and innocent. Until she hit town. The legend that she had been seduced by a famous old-time movie director with whom she lived for three years while he “guided her career,” asserting all the time that he was nothing more to her than a benevolent old uncle, was one that India suspected was true. Jenny’s progress in her teens through the arms of the famous older stars, the casting couch to success … how much was exaggeration, how much reality? Jenny herself had always laughed at the stories, and dismissed them casually. But she had never denied them, had she?

Anyway, Jenny’s bitterness was not at any sexual exploitation. She’d quite enjoyed that—or most of it; there were some scenes she’d rather have forgotten if she could—but at her ignorance. Jenny Haven was convinced that had she had the education, or the “right” background, or better still a combination of both, she would not have had to claw her way to success but could have stepped calmly into her allotted place in Hollywood’s halls of fame simply on her looks and talent alone. But would she have? wondered India. Hollywood is filled with astonishingly beautiful girls, many with talent and many without. And who is to say which will succeed?

It was for all these reasons that Jenny, who had married none of her daughters’ fathers, was determined that they should be brought up as ladies, that after their first tender years they should be removed from the potential taint of Hollywood and the label of being Jenny Haven’s indiscretions. Her girls would grow up only in the best places, they would be educated at only the most exclusive schools, they would be cultured and learn about art and music and books. Any talents that emerged would be encouraged, the right college would perfect them for the
road to success. Because, of course, each of her girls would be successful. How could they fail? They were
her
daughters. Jenny had been willing to spend any sum necessary on their education, she’d bought them extravagant gifts, she’d met them in Europe and they had stayed at the grandest hotels. But once their education was finished she had informed them that they were now ready for “life.” They would never have to climb the ladder of success the way Jenny had, ignorant, painfully young and desperate, but nevertheless they would “make it” on their own. Jenny had earned her own millions—and so must they.

India sighed with sad remembrance of the burden of being Jenny Haven’s daughter with only a minor talent. She’d deserted Vassar to take an art history course in Venice and had fallen in love with Italy. There had been idyllic days at art school in Florence where she had learned her pretty accomplishment of watercolor painting and had also learned that she wasn’t talented enough to succeed on Jenny’s level.

India glanced at her sister Paris tossing restlessly on the seat behind her. Jenny’s mistake had been in assuming that they would all have inherited her ambition and drive, but only Paris had that. Paris needed success, she burned for it, and India had the uncomfortable feeling that Paris would be prepared to do almost anything to achieve it. And what about Venetia? A young Jenny Haven, with that same intoxicating combination of innocence and sexuality that India wasn’t even sure that Venetia herself was aware of—yet.

And what about me? India stared blankly out of the window at the banked clouds, graying as the plane flew into the night. What do I want from life? I’ve drifted along just enjoying myself. I think I’m happy … I would be if Fabrizio were free. Wouldn’t I? Be realistic, India, she told herself with unaccustomed bitterness.
Fabrizio will never leave Marisa no matter what he feels for you, and anyway, what does he feel? It was a question she had avoided often before. There had been no one else since she had met Fabrizio, in fact she hadn’t even been interested in anyone, until last night and Aldo Montefiore. She remembered his hands on the wheel of the VW, square, firm hands with dark silky hair, the battered profile silhouetted against the streetlamps, and his amused dark eyes gazing into hers. Jenny would have liked Aldo. Oh, what difference did it make? thought India wearily, the Conte di Montefiore was looking for a rich wife and she was damned if she would go through life always as “the other woman”!

Tears slid down her cheeks and dropped onto the pretty scarlet Ginocchietti sweater that she had worn to the party the previous night. After that first call and the numb half-hour alone when she had been incapable of moving, she had called Fabrizio and he had come to her immediately. And then the phone hadn’t stopped ringing with instructions and arrangements. It had all been such a rush, there hadn’t been time to think about suitable clothes, so here she was arriving for her mother’s funeral dressed in scarlet. Oh, Jenny, Jenny, she mourned silently, you expected so much from me as the daughter of the one man you really loved, but there’s nothing remarkable about me and I don’t want what you wanted. The only trouble is, I don’t know what I do want.

Paris’s eyes burned with the tears she couldn’t shed. When she closed them she still seemed to hear the phone shrilling through her studio. She could see again the gray silk dress, the satin underwear, the broken glass. She could feel again how she had hoped it might, just
might
, be Amadeo … and she hated herself again for thinking of him. Worse. What she’d thought about Jenny; she’d blamed her for allowing herself to seduce Amadeo in exchange
for his silks, but no one was to blame but Paris herself. And all the time Jenny must have been lying in Malibu Canyon. Why? Why had she been driving alone along Malibu Canyon at four in the morning? Wearing an evening dress?

She hadn’t been out that night, the housekeeper had said. Jenny hadn’t been feeling well and had stayed in her room. The TV was still on when the housekeeper went to bed at twelve-thirty—she had noticed the time because Johnny Carson was on. The police said it must have happened about four or five o’clock in the morning, but the accident hadn’t been discovered until hours later. Why had no one missed her? Probably, thought Paris bitterly, because Jenny had allowed no one to be that close to her. Nobody had
owned
Jenny, not even the live-in lovers. She was a free spirit and loved and lived where she chose. Maybe she died the same way?