Voice of the Heart (74 page)

Doris Asternan walked along the white marble terrace of the Villa Zamir with graceful precision, veering neither to the right nor the left, placing one foot carefully after the other, as though she were following some chalked-in line.

Doris was thinking; and when she thought she walked. Her mind was ticking over with the same precision as her evenly balanced paces, analysing the information currently stored in her not inconsiderable brain, selecting and evaluating, and sometimes discarding, the different approaches she could take. Doris was troubled.

It was late afternoon, early evening almost, that peculiarly hushed and gentle hour which hovers between declining day and impending nightfall when the earth is still and every living thing seems temporarily at rest. The August fireball of a sun had long since dropped down behind the hills above Roquebrune, its last rays fluttering streamers of saffron and gold at the edge of the cobalt sky, and soon the diffused fight would prevail. But the breeze was soft, hardly a breeze at all, and the balmy air held the warmth of the sun.

The great white villa slumbered and there was a sense of peacefulness everywhere, the atmosphere redolent of honeysuckle and frangipani, roses, heliotrope and carnations. Nothing broke the silence except the click of Doris’s gold sandals against the hard marble, the faint swishing of her pale green silk caftan as it swirled around her long legs. The sounds of irrepressible laughter, cheerful young voices, popular music blaring from the record player, the plop-plop of tennis balls, whoops of enthusiasm echoing up from the pool—all were absent for once. The villa was relatively deserted, apart from the servants, and Doris welcomed
the solitude. Kim had driven up to Grasse to visit an old school friend and would be gone until tomorrow. Francesca had disappeared at noon, with Diana in tow, murmuring something about a picnic with Nicholas Latimer, who was helping her with her book on Chinese Gordon. David was taking a nap, and Christian had also retired to his room. Both had claimed fatigue after they had returned from a luncheon party at the home of friends in Monte Carlo. A luncheon that had been rather heavy on champagne and light on food, in Doris’s opinion.

A slight noise distracted her, and she came to a standstill, peered over her shoulder, Yves, the butler who was head of the staff attached to the villa, had opened the French doors leading from the main salon to the terrace.

‘
Bonsoir, Madame
,’ he said, nodding politely.

‘
Bonsoir, Yves.
’

The butler proceeded to wheel out the large brass and glass trolley that served as an outdoor bar. It was loaded with all kinds of
apéritifs
, liquor, mixes, soft drinks, and crystal glasses that rattled as he trundled the cart to the far corner, near the seating arrangement of terrace furniture. Once he had positioned it to his satisfaction, he asked her if she had finished with the tea tray. Doris told him she had, thanked him; with a brief deferential smile Yves lifted the tray from the glass coffee table and departed.

Doris looked at her watch. Soon the girls would return. David and Christian would appear, the cocktail hour would commence, and she would be submerged in people. Fifteen minutes, she thought, fifteen more minutes to think things out clearly. Decide on my strategy. She moved across the terrace and sat down on the two-seater hammock, sinking against the upholstered yellow cushions, not bothering to stop its motion, letting the sofa swing backwards and forwards. The canopy cast shadows across her face, freckled and bronzed by the sun, and they underscored its brooding aspect as she fell into further contemplation. Excessive ambition,
she said inwardly, how it drives people to extremes, causes them to do the most extraordinary, and often unthinkable, things.

Doris herself was ambitious, but not to the point of damaging others, or sacrificing personal happiness on the altar of ambition. She was a giving and loving woman; love was her whole life really. She had married Edgar for the man himself, not his millions; by the same token she was about to marry David Cunningham, the 11th Earl of Langley, for reasons of the heart not the head. Money and tides do hold a certain intrinsic appeal, Doris was honest enough to now acknowledge, but she also knew that neither had been determining factors in her decisions at any time in her life.

Doris Asternan’s ambition sprang from the intellect, was rooted in the desire to be associated with people of calibre and superior character, who were educated and civilized. Men and women from whom she could learn—and thus grow. My ambition is abstract in nature, she thought, and
has
been tempered by reason and judgment. Whereas
she
is driven solely by ambition, to the exclusion of all else, and therein lies the clanger.

Doris shivered, even though there was not the slightest chill in the air, and glanced around, became conscious of the dimming light. The sky was losing the last of its colour, the blue draining away into pearl and opalescent tints, and the terrace was suddenly murky with shadows, and gloomy. She bent forward, lifted the glass chimney off the lamp, found the box of matches next to it on the table. Cupping her hand around the wick of the stout white candle, she lit it, blew out the match. She sat back quickly, and so forcefully that her movements started the hammock swinging again. As she rocked gently to and fro, fragmented thoughts intruded, decimated her concentration, tore her mind away from her dilemma.

She remembered another hammock, in another place, at
another time in her life. On her grandmother’s porch of the trim white house in Oklahoma City. The house where she had been raised by a doting mother and equally devoted and adoring grandparents. A house full of love and humour and honesty and solid values, although not a great deal of money. She closed her eyes and saw that porch in minute detail; with its vivid pots of flowering plants, wicker furniture, the old Victrola, the pitcher of lemonade and cookies in a silver dish, set on a white-painted table with a blue checked cloth.

The porch had been
the
gathering spot in the hot summer months and on lovely fall evenings throughout the years of her growing up… a place of laughter and good talk, of wisdom and gentleness… those were the things it spelled to her, and so much more besides. Grandpa smoking his pipe and rocking as she was rocking now, and reading wondrous stories to her from his many books when she was a small child; her school friends congregating there; and then, in later years, it had become the corner for conspiratorial whispers and stolen kisses when the boy of the moment had dropped her off after the Saturday night dance at the church.

Edgar Asternan had sat on that porch the first day they had met, rocking, talking to her grandfather, calling him Doc as if he had known him all of his life. Two men wholly different yet curiously alike in so many respects, one dedicated to the practice of medicine, the other to big business. Dedication and similar beliefs: perhaps those had been the link. Certainly they had understood each other, instantaneously.

How odd life is, Doris mused, recognizing that she might never have met Edgar Asternan if she had not been downtown, shopping for a new dress; if she had not stepped off the sidewalk at the precise moment she had done so. Edgar had almost run her over. Distraught and apologetic, even though it had not been his fault, he had insisted on driving her home in the Buick convertible that belonged to the manager of his Oklahoma City meat-packing plant.

It had been a Saturday afternoon, sultry, with not a
breath of air. Edgar had been pressed into staying for a cool refreshing glass of Grandma’s lemonade. When Grandpa had returned from a confinement a short while later, he had shaken his head, replaced the lemonade with good sour mash whiskey and informed them that this was the only
real
drink for a man. The time had passed quickly; it was suddenly supper time. Grandpa, having already established that Edgar had no pressing engagement, would not allow him to leave, nor had Edgar wanted to go. Her grandmother had brought out one of the best lace cloths and their finest china, and they had eaten chicken and dumplings followed by freshly-baked apple pie and homemade ice cream, and the dining room had reverberated with laughter throughout the entire meal. Edgar had stayed until midnight, relaxed and at ease, enjoying the lazy evening with his new friends, interested in everything about them. That night was entrapped in Doris’s mind like one of those miniature scenes set in the centre of a glass ball: the two men on the hammock, Gran in the rocking chair. Her mother’s bright auburn head bent over the tapestry she was working, her needle flying, and Doris herself curled up on the wicker chaise, chin in hands, listening in fascination to Edgar and Grandpa. Smoke curling up from the men’s cigars; the clink of their coffee cups; Sinatra’s young emotional voice crooning ‘All or nothing at all’ on the radio; the low murmur of deeply masculine voices talking of many things, but mainly of the war in Europe. And none of them had realized that only a few short months later America would be plunged into the fray, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

She had been twenty-one that September, a kindergarten teacher, and extraordinarily pretty. Sweet, virginal, and yes, something of a country girl. Edgar had been fifty-seven, widowed and childless, a dynamic, sophisticated, multi-millionaire from Chicago, who was bored with making money inasmuch as he had no one to leave it to or spend it on; a busy man, yet lonely. He had fallen in love with her All-American college girl good looks, her wholesomeness,
her quick, inquiring mind, her intelligence, and the potential he saw in her. Three months later, on a sunny December afternoon a few days after President Roosevelt had made formal declaration of war on Japan, Doris Halliday became the second Mrs Edgar Asternan. Her life had never been the same since.

A wooden shutter slamming back against the wall of the villa brought Doris back to the present. She leaned forward, looking down the terrace. Light was spilling out of the windows of the library, which she had converted into a bedroom for Christian. He began to play his violin, and the strains of a classical piece drifted down to her, poignant, melancholy, and beautiful in the silent twilight. Mozart, Doris thought. He always plays Mozart, and with such feeling and brilliance. A deep sadness enveloped her. How her heart ached for Christian, and also Diana. They were both far too young to carry such terrible burdens. She had invited David’s sister to join them for the summer, and although Arabella had tentatively accepted, Doris knew she would not come, as did Diana. Neither of them had dared voice this shared opinion to David, who was elated at the prospect of propelling his sister ‘back into the land of the living’. But Doris understood—understood the woman’s state of mind, her motivation. Princess Arabella von Wittingen, caught in limbo with time suspended, could not bring herself to leave West Berlin for any prolonged period. She was waiting for her husband to return from the dead.

Sighing, Doris lit a cigarette. In the flare of the match her sapphire and diamond ring glittered like sharp blue flame. Doris studied it for a moment. It was her engagement ring from David. He had brought it back to France with him last weekend, when he and Kim had driven the Rolls-Royce down. It was part of the Langley Trust, and normally he was reluctant to take such heirlooms out of the country, in case of loss or theft. But, he had said, he wanted her to wear it immediately. ‘It makes our engagement official, and it also
says “hands off to all the stray wolves around here,’ he had laughed when giving it to her. She twisted the ring, smiling thoughtfully, knowing it had been worn by his grandmother, his mother, and his late wife, Margot, mother of Francesca and Kim. Doris loved it because of its significance in this family, her family now. Her hand went up to her throat to finger the necklace resting there, a delicate thread of sapphires and diamonds, understated and beautiful, with a matching bracelet and earrings which she was wearing tonight. Edgar had given her the sapphires only a couple of days before he had died four years ago.

Overpowering though her grief had been, time
had
subdued and lessened it. Yet even so, Doris knew that she would never forget that terrible day as long as she lived. How shocked and stunned she had been when Edgar had dropped dead, felled by a heart attack in his Chicago office. She had been inconsolable, her sense of loss so enormous she had been unable to function.

Doris saw Edgar then, as though he were standing before her on this terrace, saw him as he had looked that morning before he had left the mansion on Astor Street. A handsome, vigorous man, full of life and fit as a fiddle at sixty-six. Yes, his death had indeed devastated her, for Edgar Asternan had been everything in the world to her—husband, lover, father figure, teacher, friend and confidant.

Be glad for me, Edgar, be happy, my darling
, she now whispered, talking to him as she so often did.
David is a good man, loving and kind and innately decent like you. I’ll be happy with him, as I was happy with you. It won’t be the same. Nothing is ever quite the same. But we do have a lot to offer each other. Thank you, Edgar, for everything… for helping me to become what I am today. If I had not had you, I would not be sitting here tonight.

Goodbye, Edgar, my dearest darling.
The time had come to finally let him go. She was about to embark on a different life, with a man who needed her as much as she needed
him, and there could be no shadows from the past. She leaned back against the cushions, sighing lightly, but it was a peaceful sigh.

A clock chiming the half hour brought Doris fully out of her reveries. She crushed the cigarette in the crystal ashtray and stood up, smoothing the silken folds of her caftan. No more introspection, she told herself, walking slowly along the terrace and into the main salon.

Doris paused for a moment beside the ebony and ormolu
directoire
desk, straightening the magazines, her mind revolving around her problems again. If only it had not surfaced
now
, she thought dismally. It would have been so much easier to handle later. This is the worst possible time. There will be nothing but upset and embarrassment. Everyone is going to be affected, and it will cast a dreadful pall over the rest of the summer. Oh God, I don’t know what to do for the best.
David must be told.
There was no alternative.