Invitation to Provence (12 page)

“Just in case you or Mr. Jake fancy a little Earl Grey, Madame,” he said. Positioning the trolley with its exquisitely
arranged delicacies next to them, he made a polite little bow and left them to their conversation.

Even though he was dying to hear what went on, Haigh did not lurk behind the wisteria to eavesdrop because he was certain to hear it all from Rafaella herself later. Instead, he went back to his kitchen and poured himself a glass of the Scotch whiskey that bore his name, although with a slightly different spelling, and to which clan he sometimes, in moments of grandeur, claimed to be related. Then he settled down with the daily newspaper to wait.

“To our meeting again after all these years,” Rafaella said, lifting her glass.

“Champagne like this is a small miracle,” Jake said, tasting it.

“I can’t think of anyone I would rather share it with.” She rearranged her wide-brimmed straw hat so it shaded her eyes properly from the sun and also softened the lines on her face, because after all, she was still vain about her looks. “So, Jake, first tell me about
you.
Is there someone new in your life? Are you married again? Children?”

Franny came instantly into Jake’s mind, blond, innocent, smiling at him with those blue-jeweled eyes. It was the only time he had not thought of Amanda first, and he was shocked by the power of his feeling for Franny. Still, he shrugged. “No one special,” he said, “and certainly no children. And anyhow, you know I’m still in love with you, Rafaella.” And she laughed with him, enjoying the joke.

“You’ll find her, one day,” she promised.

Looking around him, Jake heaved a sigh of pure pleasure. “To a boy who never had a real home life,” he said, “you
Martens were my ideal family. You had everything, and for a while you let me be a part of it. It was the happiest year of my life and I’ve never forgotten it.”

“Ah, yes, we Martens with our château in Provence and our famed vineyards, our apartment in Paris and the villa on the Côte d’Azur. But we were also a family with a history of too much pride, and you know that old saying, Jake? ‘Pride goes before a fall’?” She heaved a deep sigh. “Sometimes I wish I’d never heard of the word
pride.
In fact, that’s why I finally buried my own and decided to ask my sons to this family reunion. Not that there’s much ‘family’ left, especially now with Felix gone. Poor, poor Felix, I think he broke his own heart as well as mine.” Her voice trembled but she was determined not to cry in front of Jake.

Then Jake said, “There’s good news too, Rafaella.” She glanced at him, brows raised. “You have a granddaughter,” he said, smiling.

She looked at him, stunned. “It can’t be true!” she said, but looking into Jake’s smiling face she knew that it was. The despair over Felix that was like a stone in her chest lifted a little and she smiled.

It was that same joyous smile Jake remembered from the old days. It lit up her face and suddenly she was ageless, beautiful again. “A granddaughter!” she exclaimed. “But where is she? Whose child is she? Tell me all about her.” She was already making plans. “She must come here to live of course, so I can spoil her and teach her how to run the winery.” Still smiling, she looked expectantly at Jake.

“She is Chinese and her name is Shao Lan,” Jake said. “It
means Little Blue—and she was named that because she has your blue eyes. There’s no mistaking she’s a Marten. She’s ten years old and she lives with her ailing grandmother, in very poor circumstances, in Shanghai. The only thing we don’t know about her is which of your sons is the father. Felix was helping out minimally, but he certainly wasn’t keeping her in luxury, and definitely not the way you’d expect a man to look after his daughter. And Alain, of course, did nothing.”

Rafaella nodded. She understood her sons. “Felix was always a snob,” she said. “He’d rather miss out on the joy of bringing up his own child because he was too ashamed to admit he had a relationship with some poor Chinese woman. Ah, Felix, just look what you missed.” She smiled at Jake again. “But now I reap the benefit. I have a granddaughter to welcome home to the château.”

Haigh was back again, hovering behind the wisteria arbor. He’d heard Jake tell Rafaella about the new granddaughter and he heaved a big sigh of relief, thanking god for giving his friend a break because, with Felix’s death and Alain missing, it had looked like Rafaella’s family reunion was going to be a disaster.

He cleared his throat as he approached, letting them know he was there. “More champagne, Madame, Sir?” He took the Krug from the ice bucket and wrapped it in the white linen cloth, then he refilled the tall glasses and presented them to his employer and her guest.

“Pour yourself a glass, too,” Rafaella said, smiling. “This is a celebration, Haigh. We have a new granddaughter!” Then Rafaella said she would send her an invitation welcoming her to the château right away.

After that she looked Jake in the eye and said, “So now, Jake, tell me the bad news.”

Puzzled, he said, “But how did you know there’s bad news, too?”

She smiled. “I know you too well, Jake Bronson. In some ways you’re exactly like your father. So now, tell me, what is it?”

“I don’t believe Felix committed suicide,” he said. “I think he was killed.”

Rafaella gasped. “Are you telling me that Felix was
murdered?”

“That’s the way it looks right now. Only time and good detective work will prove me right or wrong.”

“But what about Alain?” she said, subconsciously linking the thought of murder to her other son, something Jake spotted immediately, though he said nothing.

“Felix lied to me about Alain. Of course he’d kept track of him all these years. My contacts followed Alain’s trail of self-destruction through Vietnam and Cambodia, but he’s disappeared from the face of the earth. We may never find him, never know what really happened.”

“But …” Rafaella began.

He knew she was going to ask how he knew Felix was murdered, and he put up a warning hand.

“Better not ask,” he said. “Just let sleeping dogs lie.” Yet even as he said it, he knew that he would not. He would not rest until he found Alain and discovered the truth about Felix’s death.

W
HEN
S
HAO
L
AN’S INVITATION
arrived by special delivery, at first she refused to open the door, afraid it was the landlord about to throw them out again. The “apartment” was only a single small room that Shao Lan had divided with a screen made from bamboo poles strung with red cloth. It gave a false air of gaiety to the place, which pleased her, but now she ignored the knocking and hurried into the sleeping part of the room with her sick grandmother’s supper—a bowl of chicken broth and a rice cake and some hot tea in a small, blue-patterned egg-shaped cup. She stood the tray on the rickety table next to the bed and said in Shanghainese, “Look, Grandmother, here is your supper and your pills.”

Shao Lan spoke Shanghainese because that was her grandmother’s only language. But Shao Lan also spoke Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as some English, which she had learned in school. She could also curse fluently in all of these languages, as could every child in the poor neighborhood where she lived.

Bao Chu wafted away the soup with a limp hand. Struggling upright she took the packet of pills, swallowed two and washed them down with the tea. Then she lay back again, eyes closed, her breath rasping harshly.

Poverty hung around the Ching household like a cold shroud of despair. The meager room was as clean as Shao Lan could keep it while also attending school, trying to keep up her grades, and looking after her sick grandmother.

That same despair had carved a stamp of seriousness on ten-year-old Shao Lan’s heart-shaped face. Her large, round blue eyes, with just the slightest tilt at the corners to say she was Chinese, were solemn and she never smiled. There was nothing to smile about—she just took care of things.

All she knew was the daily juggle with money. Shao Lan never got new clothes, only second- or third-hand school uniforms from charitable societies who also chipped in with a present at Chinese New Year. The present was never what she’d dreamed about though, so she had given up dreaming and just got on with the harsh business of living, relieved when every month the letter arrived from the Bank of Shanghai containing the few dollars that paid their rent and their small expenses. Because of her grandmother’s illness their expenses were soaring, terrifying Shao Lan, who wondered where they would ever get the money to keep her grandmother alive.

She often thought of the unknown man who was her father, wondering if he knew about her, and if so why he had never come to see her. Her mother had died when she was born, and the only family she had known was her grandmother, who had named her Shao Lan, or Little Blue, because of her startlingly blue eyes, rare in a world of brown-eyed people. Bao Chu’s own name meant Precious Pearl. This was so far from the truth, because she had no monetary value whatsoever in this world, that even Bao Chu herself laughed at it.

The knocking at the door had stopped. Shao Lan lingered
by the bed, wanting to ask Bao Chu about her father, but she was afraid of the harangue that came whenever she tried to bring up the subject: She had no daddy. There never was one and never would be one, and she had just better get used to it. Sometimes Shao Lan wondered if it were true and that, like the Madonna, her mother had a virgin birth and she was some kind of freak.

She sighed as her grandmother started to cough. She coughed for what seemed to Shao Lan like a long time as she hovered over her with the tea.
Oh god, please don’t let her die,
she prayed.
Don’t let her leave me all alone.

Visions of herself in an orphanage with bars on the windows, a place where it was always cold and there was even less food than here, flitted through her mind. She shivered, facing the truth. More likely she would end up on the streets, sleeping in a cardboard box and begging for a living, along with the other homeless. It was that or doing bad things with men.

When the knocking started again she went to peek through the door crack and saw a man holding an envelope. She flattened herself against the wall but he rapped even harder. “Hey,” he shouted, because he knew she was there and knew the fears of the poor, “this is no summons to court. The landlord isn’t after you for the rent. It’s a letter from France, that’s all.”

Shao Lan hardly dared breathe in case he heard her. They didn’t know anybody in France and she hoped he’d just go away. Too curious to let it go though, she finally opened the door a cautious crack. The messenger thrust the envelope through the gap. “Sign here,” he said. Terrified, she cursed at him and flung the envelope back at him and made to shut the door in his face again.

He cursed back in rapid Shanghaiese, telling her she was a foolish child and all he was asking her to do was to sign this paper saying he had delivered it and she had received it. Still reluctant, Shao Lan opened the door again and signed the paper. She hoped she had done the right thing.

The letter was addressed to Bao Chu, and she took it into her. “Look, Grandmother,” she said. “Here’s a letter for you,” but Bao Chu wafted her away with a limp hand.

“It’s from France,” Shao Lan said, and Bao Chu lifted her head, suddenly alert.

She struggled upright against the sweaty pillow, pushing her black hair from her hot face. “Open it,” she said. Shao Lan did. “Read it to me,” Bao Chu commanded. Shao Lin did.

“Oh, Grandmother,” she cried, her face alive with a big smile. “Imagine, we are invited to go to France for a
family reunion.
You never told me we had a
family.”

“And I never would have, if it were not for this letter,” Bao Chu said, leaning back against her pillows because she knew this invitation was the only hope for her granddaughter and it meant that she would lose her. “You will go to France, Shao Lan,” she said. “And you will go alone,” she added firmly.

She might as well have been sending her to the moon. Shao Lan’s jaw dropped. “Alone,” she whispered, afraid, because her own little section of Shanghai was the only world she knew. “But why?”

“It’s time for you to meet your father.” Bao Chu began to cough again. And Shao Lan knew her grandmother was too ill even to leave the house, and she cried because she was afraid to go to this strange country alone. She also knew that if she went, she might never see her grandmother again.

The Preparations

Life is a maze in which we take

the wrong turning before we have

learned to walk.

—CYRIL CONNOLLY

C
LARE HAD RETURNED
from Atlanta, where she’d gone to pick up more of her possessions, and now she had taken up residence in Shutters Hotel, on the beach in Santa Monica. The two had spent all their time together after they’d met, and Franny thought there was nothing she didn’t know about her new friend. In fact, she’d never had a woman friend she felt so close to.