Invitation to Provence (2 page)

Now Rafaella Marten stands alone in the château’s sunlit hall. A bird trills outside, then all is silent. Leaning on her cane, she stares out on the magical vista, at the
allée
of century-old chestnut trees that leads to the lake and the fantastical Japanese bridge, built by her great-grandfather, connecting to a small island. On hot summer nights when she was a girl, she would wander across that bridge to sleep
naked in the little gazebo, safe from prying eyes, with a soft breeze to tantalize her restless young body.

…
Ah… youth,
Rafaella thinks, smiling at the memory,
so long ago … when everything seemed possible.

It is a hot day but the faded parquet floor feels cool under her bare feet, for even now she still like to go barefoot. Her gypsyish red skirt swirls around her ankles as she walks, the very same skirt she had worn the day she met the man who became the love of her life and who most certainly was not her husband.

She glances ruefully at herself in the long gilt rococo mirrors spaced along the hall: at the mass of silvery hair pinned into a loose bun and the lined parchment-skin, at the strong nose that even in her youth had given her an arrogant look, and the soft, full mouth that gave lie to it. Only her eyes are the same, heavy-lidded and the blue of the Mediterranean, which is not so many miles away and where, once upon a time, she had swum every glorious day of summer.

Rafaella lives alone at the château now, with only Haigh, her English butler and dearest friend and companion, to look after her. Haigh is a little bantam cock of a man, short with spindly limbs and the thin, deprived face of a poor Cockney boy. He’s been the Marten family butler for over fifty years and is almost as old as Rafaella.

There’s nothing Haigh doesn’t know about Rafaella. He’d been there when she was young and vital, commanding her small empire—the château and its vineyards. He’d been there through the good times and the bad. She has no secrets from him.

Once this house had rung with children’s laughter, the splashes and happy shrieks coming from the swimming pool, the plop of tennis balls on the red clay court, the tinkle of ice
in cocktail glasses as the sun set red as fire over the white stony hills. But now the doors are locked, the rooms behind shuttered, the lovely old furniture shrouded in dustcovers. The family is long gone, scattered to the four corners of the earth, shattered by scandals over money and women and by a mysterious death.

Rafaella leans on her cane, listening for sounds of the past. A grandfather clock ticks. A bee buzzes, trapped in the window. Loneliness hangs in the air along with the scent of the wild roses that give her château its name.

It seems to Rafaella that the château is dying of that loneliness. It needs youth and energy, love and laughter. It needs a family to overcome the past and to bring it back to life.

Her mind finally made up, she walks back through the house, whistling for the dogs. They come running, claws skittering on the cool parquet, the massive brown-and-white Bernese mountain dog she’d named Louis because his floppy ears and soulful eyes gave him the look of one of the old French kings. Mimi scrambles behind him, a miniature black poodle, a mere fraction of Louis’s size, though she seems not to know it. By now, in dog years, they are almost as old as Rafaella.

“Come, my children,” she says, smiling, for in her heart they are her children and they love her as her own real offspring never had. “It’s time to take action.”

She walks to her room, takes a seat at her desk. Louis flops against her, panting, while Mimi, attracted by her frivolous scarlet toenails, begins to lick her feet. From the drawer Rafaella takes the large square cream-colored cards with
Château des Roses Sauvages, Marten-de-Provence
engraved in dark blue. Then she picks up her pen and, in her now shaky script, she begins to write.

The Invitations

Passion is a malady. It’s dark.

You are jealous of everything.

There’s no lightness, no harmony.

—GEORGES SIMENON

W
HEN THE INVITATION
that was to change Franny Marten’s life arrived in her mailbox on a leafy Santa Monica street that last day of July, she didn’t even notice it. She was too worried about her long-distance boyfriend, Marcus. She was meeting him tonight. He’d said they “needed to talk.” “So talk,” she’d said, smiling into the phone, but then he’d said it wasn’t the right moment and besides he needed to see her. Now Franny was wondering nervously if there was something ominous in those words.

She was leaving Your Local Veterinary Clinic where she worked, and she turned her head as she always did when the glass doors shut behind her, just to check that her name was really there. It still gave her a buzz to see those hard-earned letters after it that said she was a qualified doctor of veterinary surgery, and it always tugged at her heart that her father was not there to see it, too. He would have been so proud of the way she’d handled herself after he’d died, leaving her alone in the world at age seventeen. He’d have been proud of her struggle to put herself through college and med school, working all those jobs, baby-sitting, cleaning houses, waitressing,
any work she could get to make ends meet, and even then it had been touch and go.

Franny looked like the typically blond Californian, but she was still a small-town Oregon girl at heart. Ten years had passed since she’d driven down the coast in a junky old car with that newly earned vet license in her otherwise empty pocket, in search of a new life. That dream life included success in her new career and of course love and marriage, which would lead automatically to children and “a family.” She’d especially hoped for the family because it was something she’d never had. She sighed thinking about her dream. So far only the career part had come true. Still, maybe one out of four wasn’t bad.

She opened the door of her dusty white Explorer Sport, flinching as the day’s trapped heat wafted over her. Air-conditioning blasting, Kiss FM blaring, she gunned the engine and headed for Main. Of course the traffic was hell, but wasn’t it always? Stalled at the light, she flipped down her mirror and checked her appearance. Hot, un-made-up, blond hair dragged back in a fat, untidy braid. Purple smudges of fatigue showed under the long, narrow water-blue eyes, an asset she owed to her Norwegian mother. She looked awful and she knew Marcus would notice and comment on it because that’s the way Marcus was—he always found her weak spots.

Actually, other than the pale blue of her eyes and her blond hair and her name—her mother had been a great admirer of J. D. Salinger—Franny didn’t owe much else to her Nordic mother, who had simply left them for “better opportunities” when Franny was three years old. She died a few years later, and lonely young Franny had felt nothing at all
except, when she was older, guilt for not caring. But her mother had been someone she’d never known, someone who had never wanted to know her.

It was different when her father died. Then she was devastated. He had been her friend, her supporter, the rock on which the burden of her life rested, and suddenly with a car accident all that was taken from her. Somehow she found the strength to get on with life the way they’d planned it, because that’s what her father would have expected of her. And what people saw when they met the nice small-town blond vet was not exactly what they got. There was a core of steel forged from hard times under that soft exterior. She’d needed it in order to survive alone in a big, tough world.

Sighing, she switched her thoughts to the beautiful German shepherd whose life she had—
fingers crossed, hope, hope, hope, please God, I’m praying for him
—saved today. Then she’d had the difficult task of trying to stabilize his distressed owner, a leggy L.A. girl in skintight gray biker shorts and a cropped T-shirt that showed her gold-stapled navel.

“It all happened in a moment,” the girl sobbed. “He just ran after a ball, the car threw him into the air, it never even stopped… . He’s all I’ve got.” And Franny had mopped her tears with Kleenex and comforted her with hot coffee and an arm around her shoulders. Soft-hearted, sympathetic, gentle, she was always ready to listen and to offer help, and she always gave that extra time, which simply left no time for herself. And which meant, of course, that despite Marcus’s complaints, after dinner she would make sure to go back to the clinic and check on the dog. If necessary she would be there all night. That’s just the way she was.

Fretting in the crawling traffic, she finally turned right on
Montana, then left onto a leafy side street, stopping in front of the tiny 1930s Craftsman-style cottage that was her home. Her first
real
home. Well, hers and the bank’s anyway, and small though it undoubtedly was, after the dingy furnished rooms in grim, gray parts of town that were all she’d been able to afford when she was putting herself through school, to her it seemed like a palace.

The house was set back from the street with a narrow paved path and patches of grass on either side. It was painted forest green with tan trim. Four steps led up to a sweet little front porch that just cried out for a rocker, the kind with a slot in the arm to hold your glass and a slatted rest for your feet, but Franny had never yet had enough spare money to buy one.

She found a parking spot and jumped out, stopping at her mailbox for the usual bundle of bills, junk mail, and catalogues. She didn’t even notice the square cream envelope with the French stamps. She took the four steps up to the porch two at a time, then just two more strides to the front door where, as always, she tripped over the loose plank that she’d been meaning to fix for ages. She thought it was really quite dangerous and she’d better do something about it this weekend.

Sadly, though she loved animals, there was no dog or cat of her own to greet her because she didn’t have the home-time an animal needed. Without their friendly barks and purrs, the small house seemed too quiet. She tossed the mail onto the kitchen counter already cluttered with leftover takeout cartons and bundles of half-dead flowers in pottery jars. Six days a week the house was a mess. On the seventh, a Sunday (what else), she cleaned it up. Today was only Wednesday and stuff spilled from drawers and cupboards, old coffee mugs sat around on top of piles of unread books
and magazines, and a trail of discarded clothes led to the bathroom, where she was headed now, flinging more onto the heap as she went. She hadn’t been born a slob—it was purely a matter of the proper allocation of time, of which there never seemed to be enough.

She barely had time to shower and throw on some clothes—jeans, a white tank top, a lacy blue crocheted shawl against the later ocean-night chill, turquoise flip-flops, and the dangly fake turquoise earrings she’d picked up at the drugstore and thought
so
sexy, though she certainly was not feeling sexy tonight. She was too worried about her meeting with Marcus.

Stopping just long enough to check her appearance in the mirror, she tugged at the tank top, hoping Marcus wouldn’t give her that cool up-and-down look that said without words that he thought she looked as though she’d just thrown herself together. Which was the truth. She had. Still, she left her heavy, pale-blond hair loose and sprayed on a generous amount of the ginger-flower perfume. Her cheeks were flushed from rushing, and she looked about nineteen years old instead of thirty-five.

On her way out she quickly tidied the hodgepodge of flea-market bargain furniture, desperately plumping cushions, shoving old newspapers into a pile, because Marcus always came back with her, and he hated what he called her “squalor” and her cheap but eclectic and colorful furnishings.

She got back in the Explorer, heading down the California Incline and onto Pacific Coast Highway. The ocean glimmered on her left like an iridescent pewter bowl, joggers trotted along the beachside paths with their dogs running alongside, and small children dashed happily in and out of the waves, unwilling to call an end to the day.

She remembered clearly the night she’d first met Marcus, a classic tall, dark, handsome guy with a shy smile and bold eyes that had met hers across a table a year ago. It was at a birthday dinner for a friend, and he was with a pretty girl to whom he wasn’t paying much attention. Instead, he kept looking at Franny, couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her in fact. Franny had sipped her wine, trying to act cool, glancing occasionally at him over the top of her glass, wondering if she was misreading that message in his eyes. And she wasn’t, because later he came over to her and said, “You know, you have the most magical blue eyes. I felt as though I’d gotten lost in them. It’s as though I’ve known you for a long time, maybe even in some other life.”

Now no man had ever said anything like that to her before and of course she was knocked out by it, so when he asked for her phone number, she gave it to him. There was a message waiting on her machine when she got home. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “Please say you’ll have dinner with me tomorrow night.”