Objects of Desire (11 page)

‘Not very well, David. I want to come home to Lakeside.’

He remained silent on the other end of the line. Finally, he spoke. ‘I’m not so sure the time is right for you to come home, Anoushka.’

‘I miss my home, my family. It’s so hard, this endless holiday I’m on that’s no holiday at all, more like a penance I am being made to pay. Glamorous, velvet-lined if you like, but a penance nevertheless.’

‘That’s tragic, Anoushka, and you can’t become a tragic figure, you owe it to yourself and to the boys to be better than that. You’re still a young woman, and beautiful. You have a brain. Do something for yourself.’

David had never spoken to her like this in all the years
he had known her. How was it that he felt he could now? Was she so different as someone other than Robert’s wife? But his words gave her no real direction, merely a hint of one. She needed more. ‘Why don’t you think it’s the right time for me to come home?’ she asked.

‘Think about it, Anoushka. What have you got to come home to? To become another statistic in that vast number of women trying to recapture the life they had with their husbands. Not many of them make it. Divorced women, especially ones whose husbands have walked away, are the new underclass. When you come home I would like to see you as one of the few who survive the destruction of one life, and watch you build a new one for yourself and your boys. And if you can’t, then at least give it a try. There are hundreds of thousands of women just like you having to begin again and few of them have what you have as a jumping-off point. What have you done, if anything, about making new friends, finding a vocation for yourself, having a real adventure?’

‘Nothing.’

‘That was part of your problem here at Lakeside, Anoushka. Robert was your only friend, your only life. Otherwise you liked your own company more than anyone else’s.’

‘That’s not wholly true, David. Robert, my boys, my lifestyle as Mrs Rivers, that was everything I ever wanted. And I enjoyed my solitude, as something precious, all for me. Robert understood that even if his friends didn’t.’

‘There you have it, they’re Robert’s friends not yours. My case rests. Robert’s gone forever, Anoushka, and you have to get a life together for yourself before you come home. Get out of the Crillon and into a flat, go to a café and make a friend, get a job – it doesn’t matter what, but something to occupy your mind. Solitude is all right, a luxury, wonderful – if you can afford it. For the moment you can’t. You’re still trying to live on memories of your great love, and that’s not living. If you come back here now you’ll never find as good a life as you had with Robert, and what you should be looking for is a better one. Be brave, think not what is expected of you, or what others do in your situation, but of what you want to do this second time around.’

‘You make me sound pathetic.’

‘Well, it’s a pathetic situation you are in, but only you can turn it around.’

‘You give good advice, David. Hard to take but too sensible to ignore. You make me see what a long road I have to travel.’

‘Just take the first step, Anoushka, that’s always the hardest. Get into your stride, and I’m sure you’ll surprise us all when you walk back to Lakeside.’

‘Isn’t it strange? I never liked you as much as I do right now, David.’

‘Not so strange, Anoushka. You never opened yourself up to me before. Friendship has to do with just that. Well, maybe not just that. I have to go, I have someone waiting on the other line. Stay in touch.’

Who is to know how and when a profound change happens, one that comes from within and is to last a lifetime? That sort of change is real and fundamental. Anoushka was trying to avoid at all costs changing her life. But it did happen to her, while sitting in the sun outside the Café Flore, drinking Pernod and eating salted cashews while reading the
International Herald Tribune
.

She put the paper down on the table and sat back, feeling suddenly different, more relaxed in herself. All the tables were filled and the passing parade of Parisians seemed somehow to look even more attractive and full of life than usual. Paris was flourishing in the springtime. The Parisians’ passion for street life, as well as home and all things pertaining to the enhancement of the senses, was infectious.

A smile appeared first at the corners of her lips and then spread across her face. She laughed aloud, at first softly then louder and even louder. She seemed unable to stop and it was laughter so full of joy and sweetness that people around her could not help but smile. Anoushka felt as if she were cleansing herself. A smile still on her face, she raised her hand to call the waiter.

‘Will you allow me to offer you a drink?’ asked the man sitting at the table next to hers.

The woman with him bent forward to add, ‘Oh, do let him. He’s charmed by your laughter, and he’s quite a nice man.’

‘It had something child-like and innocent, it made me feel, for one moment, as if I were five years old.’

‘How odd. That was the way I felt while I was laughing.’

‘And how do you feel now?’ he asked.

‘Wonderful, ready to eat up the world.’

‘Bravo,’ he said.

‘Well, how about starting with having a drink with us?’ suggested the woman.

Anoushka’s heart was pounding with excitement. She was moving. Accepting a drink from a stranger was a little thing but she was doing something
she
wanted to do, not what she thought she should do. Was this the first step that might distinguish her from her old self, the one that might help her to become a new individual? Was this her first step to going home?

‘A Pernod then,’ she heard herself say.

‘I am Hervé Lacoste and this is my friend, a compatriot of yours, the lovely Page Cooper.’ He gave Anoushka a seductive smile that charmed.

He was handsome, but it was not his looks that attracted so much as his obvious sexuality. He wore it like a woman wears a jewel, with pride and coquetry, an adornment to attract the opposite sex. Anoushka sensed he was a rogue with women, he had about him that whiff of danger that some women like. Before Robert, marriage and Lakeside, she had known men like Hervé Lacoste, and had found them exciting; dangerous but electrifying. She had almost forgotten that such men existed. It had been men like Hervé who cultivated the sensuous in her that had so enchanted Robert. Paradoxically, the libidinous nature honed by
such men as he had given her the security and happiness she had always sought. For a time at least.

Hervé’s approach to Anoushka was smooth, clever, intelligent, provocative. Five sentences and he had hooked her on to his line. He began to reel her in. ‘A tourist?’

‘You would prefer that I was a cellist? An opera singer? No, I’m afraid not, just another American tourist.’

‘Somehow I think not,’ he told her, rubbing his chin. He was a man in his fifties with blond hair gone white, and cut short with some chic. Dimpled cheeks when he smiled, and a sensuous mouth, mischievous lines at the corner of his eyes, but otherwise a taut youthful skin over fine masculine bone structure. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and took them off now to wipe the lenses. He did not take his gaze off Anoushka. ‘And how would you know what my preferences are?’

Page entered the conversation, ‘You’re quite right, Anoushka – I may call you Anoushka? You can call me Page. He has a penchant for beautiful, talented, accomplished and clever women. He is an authority on glamorous career women.’

‘Are you a career woman, Page?’ asked Anoushka.

‘She has been,’ Hervé answered for her. Was he telling her they had been lovers, past tense?

He placed an arm around Page and kissed her, first on one cheek and then on the other, and once more. He turned back to Anoushka. ‘In Paris we always kiss three times. In the provinces only twice.’

‘Are you here alone, Anoushka?’ asked Page.

‘Yes.’

‘I would have guessed a husband lurked somewhere round the corner,’ Hervé told her.

‘The husband no longer lurks.’

‘How lucky for us. Then we can ask you to join us this evening.’

Anoushka gave no answer. As attracted as she was to Hervé, she held back from accepting his invitation. He smiled but did not push the matter. Instead he asked her, ‘An American with a romantic Russian name who speaks French with a French accent? Not your average American tourist, I think. Born in?’

‘St Petersburg.’

‘Ah, I thought Russian-born.’

‘Now how would you know that? I am completely Americanised,’ she told him, laughing and quite enjoying his interest in her.

‘The hair, the elegant features, high cheekbones, the way you laughed. You may look like Mrs America but there was the Russian soul in that laugh. My guess would be background white Russia, lifetime red Russia.’

‘You are uncannily right.’ Anoushka talked past Hervé and spoke directly to his companion. ‘Page, is he always so astute?’

‘Always. He’s part Rasputin, part Svengali, but mostly Don Juan.’

‘A dangerous man,’ teased Anoushka.

‘But irresistible to women,’ he added.

‘Oh!’ Anoushka declared, feigning surprise, but in truth she was already aware of that, and thinking, No, not irresistible but fatal.

‘A fact. I’m not bragging, Anoushka,’ he told her, a wicked twinkle in his eyes.

This was café society, and not just at the Flore, the Deux Magots, or Brasserie Lipp, but at any French sidewalk bar. People at their leisure with the knack of conducting amusing conversation, intelligent banter, urbane philosophy, while always using their eyes to check on who is coming, who is going. It was a disease, this people-watching. Even Anoushka caught it. She liked to watch writers scribbling on a pad, painters working out their next canvas over a pastis, the beautiful people cruising the beautiful people, the elite communing with the successful.

Once Hervé broke his conversation with Anoushka and Page to say hello to someone passing by their tables. The second time he merely nodded his head and waved. This time he stood up to greet Roman Polanski and Jeanne Moreau who stopped at his table.

He kissed Jeanne Moreau and shook Roman’s hand. Page and Moreau exchanged smiles while Polanski kept his gaze on Page. They talked briefly and then after an apology from Hervé there was an introduction for Anoushka. She was too impressed, too dazzled by it all, and barely said hello. Hervé excused himself and walked away with the actress and director to a table some distance away.

Page and Anoushka looked across the empty chair
separating them and it was Anoushka who spoke first. ‘I hope I didn’t look too impressed. Was I awkward?’

Page began to laugh. ‘You were fine.’

‘I was just so surprised.’

‘If you are with Hervé, it’s always like that. He is one of the world’s great photographers. He has photographed the most glamorous women and men of our time, and his war work is memorable. Everyone wants a portrait by Hervé. He likes you, was probably photographing you in his mind while you were laughing. You did change, looked so extraordinarily pretty, so ethereal – not at all the lady who had been sitting there for an hour looking lonely and lost.’

Anoushka was astonished. For so many years people had looked through her and seen nothing in her to speak of. Not knowing what to say to Page, she asked, ‘Are you in the theatre, a celebrity of some sort too?’

She began to laugh. ‘No, but I do know many people who are. I’m a designer.’

‘In Paris?’

‘Yes, and London and New York. I have offices and shops in those cities but I travel everywhere on my commissions. I am the florist for people with discerning taste – I create floral spectaculars for all sorts of events. Fashion shows for the haute-couture collections, palaces for formal occasions … all sorts of fascinating jobs. Sometimes just a single orchid or daisy will do for the right occasion.’

‘How wonderful.’

‘Yes, it has been wonderful, years of hard workaholic living with short pauses for hard core playing. It made up for a lot of things I lost out on in my life. Or at least I thought it did. What about you, Anoushka? What do you do?’

‘You mean what have I done? I have done wife and mother. One might say I’d done it to death.’

There was something in the way Anoushka spoke that made the two women burst into laughter. ‘I’ve done flowers and you’ve done marriage.’

‘More like marriage has done me.’

‘I don’t know what to say to that,’ said Page.

‘There’s not much one can say. Past tense is past tense. After the initial shock of having been dumped by my husband and, as my attorney said, becoming one of the new underclass in society, I have finally come to see the only way to survive is to let the past lie firmly where it is, and do something with the now, not as compensation but in the spirit of adventure.’

‘Well, that’s something I wish I had learned long ago. I think we should celebrate. A rebirth? Yes, maybe what Hervé and I saw in your laughter was a newborn woman. How exciting.’ Page lifted her arm to catch the attention of the waiter. ‘House champagne and three glasses.’

‘What a good idea,’ said Anoushka, feeling somehow close to this beautiful stranger who seemed to understand her. Had she too, at some time in her life, faced emotional trauma? Could Page possibly have felt the pain of loss on a grand scale such as Anoushka was
feeling? It was the first time she could remember feeling such interest in a female acquaintance – one she sensed could very easily become a real friend. After the months of travel, the years of feeling interest in no one but Robert and their family, Anoushka found the prospect strangely appealing.

‘I too am looking for a new life,’ said Page. ‘I and my demons have struggled through the old one and I’ve had a good time, a great time. But I’m burned out. I’m going on an adventure, a great safari, seeking what has so far eluded me. Wrong paths, bad choices … who hasn’t taken those?’ Page shrugged her shoulders and then asked Anoushka, ‘What about you?’

‘I don’t know where I’m going, or even how to take the first step. I’ve forgotten who I am, what I want, where I want to go with my life.’

Like fellow conspirators the two women fell silent on seeing Hervé returning. Page leaned across the empty chair. Lowering her voice, she told Anoushka, ‘I can tell he wants to bed you. Don’t mind me. I have had him for years, on and off. Strictly sexual lust. An arrangement, so to speak. I’m sure he would like us both. Don’t look so shocked, Anoushka. You have to begin casual sex somewhere, and it might as well be with him.’