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‘Please be careful,’ he pleaded with Anika. She was by far his favourite of the young women he used for pleasure.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Jesus, you’re like my father.’ She was laughing as he ended the call.
The thought of Anika’s mouth around the sheik’s cock made him shudder, but he also felt a searing jealousy, while the thought of the wealth the sheik must have made him livid.
Yes, Robert had money, but he wasn’t obscenely liquid like the Middle Eastern sheiks or the Russian oligarchs.
His thoughts went back to his mother’s will and he felt a small seed of doubt sprout in his mind. Maybe things weren’t going to go to the way he expected after his mother’s death, and he wondered why he thought they would since they had never gone to plan while the old bitch was alive.
Leaving the kidskin wallet on the table, he made his way downstairs and through the garden out to the street, where he saw his Bugatti was now sporting a parking fine.
Today was proving to be the worst, he decided, when his phone rang and he saw his daughter’s name on the screen. Now it was proving to be even more hellish.
‘Celeste,’ he barked. ‘I can’t talk now.’
‘Why not?’ He could hear the pout in her voice. ‘I just want to find out about Grand-Mère’s funeral. When is it?’
Robert pulled the ticket off the windscreen and unlocked the car.
‘I don’t know, I haven’t organised it yet.’
‘Papa, she died two days ago, what do you mean you haven’t organised it?’
‘I haven’t had time, I have a company to run, not everyone lives your life,’ he said as he slid into the seat of the car, cursing his back. He needed one of those driver’s pillows he had seen in a catalogue for people with disabilities when he was last visiting his mother.
He made a mental note to get his secretary to order one, as he started the car, the sound of the engine nearly blocking out Celeste’s question.
‘What did you say?’ He wasn’t sure he heard correctly.
‘Do you want me to organise it?’ she asked again, her voice sounding small. ‘I thought it might be nice for me to do it.’
Robert paused, the phone still up to his ear, the engine thumping impatiently.
‘That would be lovely, Celeste, really, if you think you can handle such a sad affair. I need to be looking at the company and all that it entails, so your help would be so wonderful.’
His charm soothed him, and he felt the anxious grip in his chest loosen.
‘Do whatever you need and just send the invoices to Le Marche,’ he said. ‘Now I must go, darling, about to head to a meeting, message me with any details.’
And he hung up before she could speak.
What a gift, he thought happily, as he pulled out into traffic without looking, knowing he wouldn’t be hit by another driver. Who wanted to deal with the insurance on a Bugatti? He laughed as he turned up the radio to a song he didn’t know the words to until it annoyed him enough to change it to the jazz station he loved. Soon John Coltrane was playing Lush Life, and Robert thought that his life was indeed very lush, and once he had Le Marche sold, then he would be the one sailing through the Greek Islands or the Mediterranean and girls like Anika would never leave him for a sheik again.
Everything was looking up, he thought. He was even feeling generous to Henri’s child. Let her have whatever it was Daphné had willed to her, what did he care now. Most likely it was one of her hideous paintings or some jewellery. He was about to get what he deserved and, even though he was fifty-eight years old, he still felt thirty. With this in mind, he dialled another girl he liked.
‘Chloe, my place, twenty minutes?’ he demanded more than asked and she responded as he thought she might and agreed to see him but for double the price.
But what did he care? He was truly rich now and, as his mother always said, the wealthier you become the more life costs you.
His ex-wife’s face came to mind and he felt himself scowl and then stopped. Matilde wasn’t worth getting more lines over, he thought, as he glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. His blond hair had turned silver, which, he’d decided when he turned fifty, was elegant. He could have dyed his hair, like his grandfather had for years, according to Anna. What a pathetic old man, he thought, thinking of Giles Le Marche.
Robert was very proud of himself for growing up without a decent male role model. His father was inept, his brother too. He was his own creation, and now without his mother’s domineering influence, he would finally, at the age of fifty-eight become the man he was always knew he was meant to be.
Better late than ever, he said to himself, and pressed the accelerator on the car, making sure he would be able to meet Chloe for his celebratory blowjob.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_4da907e8-f19e-539e-89ee-fe0bc14f19ff)
Matilde
Matilde adjusted the collar on her black Dior coat, aware that all the eyes of society were on her, and then genuflected at the altar of Sainte-Chapelle.
She had stopped believing in anything when Camille died, but Daphné had believed in God, or so Celeste had said when she planned this spectacle of a funeral.
Daphné’s coffin was lying in state, covered in what seemed to be one hundred amber roses, the heady scent mixing with the frankincense that was burning in the brass censers on the altar.
Slipping into a pew further down the back of the church, Matilde looked around at the attendance. A decent enough showing of the right sort of people, she thought, and watched as Paul Le Brun walked up the side of the aisle and slipped into a seat.
News of her daughter’s affair with Le Brun had made the gossip pages for a day, until a terrorist threat overtook all other news, and Celeste was spared of too much humiliation. Still, people stared at Paul when he arrived, and she saw their heads joined in covert whispering.
Celeste could do so much better, she thought, as she noted his slightly coloured hair. Matilde was an expert at spotting three things: plastic surgery, hair colouring and sexual attraction.
It had proved to be a very valuable set of skills over the years. She had worked it to her benefit, finding lovers for herself and for her friends, and knowing the exact point in which to topple someone’s ego with a well-placed barb about any work they had done to their appearance.
Matilde was known within her circle as a sharp wit; to those outside of it, she was just a bitch.
More faces, known and unknown, walked into the church and soon it was a sea of black with hushed gossip sending waves through the sacred space.
Finally, Celeste and Robert arrived, arm in arm, Robert’s face looking concerned and upset, but not so much that he might cause any lines, thought Matilde, with a roll of her eyes.
God, being married to a fop with an unquenchable sexual appetite had been exhausting, and even if Camille hadn’t died, she would have left him anyway. She told him then and still stood by her statement. She needed a rest from him, the sex, and his lies.
She saw Celeste glance at her and she raised her head in approval. Celeste had done a wonderful job, with so little time to organise everything. Of course Robert had dumped it on his daughter; he was a lazy son of a bitch, she thought.
Daphné’s funeral had only just made the French rule that all funerals needed to have taken place by the sixth day but Matilde knew that people wouldn’t miss the chance to see the fall of the last of the Le Marche family.
There were more gossips in this church than friends, thought Matilde, as the priest stood at the altar and the ceremony began, and she stood with the rest of the crowd to say goodbye to Daphné Le Marche, the woman who saved her daughter.
* * *
Matilde was the face of Le Marche when she was nineteen, after Daphné decided that they needed to bring in a model to represent the brand and become more current.
By twenty-one, she was dating Robert. At twenty-two, she was pregnant with Camille.
And at twenty-three, she married him, but only after Robert had been threatened with disownment by Daphné.
Camille had changed Robert’s mind about marriage. The moment the child was placed in his arms, he adored her and that was enough for Matilde to forgive him for his transgressions.
There was no father as devoted as him to Camille, and then came Celeste. He would get up to them in the night, which was rare, according to her friends in Paris, and he took them to school. He knew everything that was going on in their lives and their friends and was as much fun as they could wish with a father.
He drove them everywhere. No matter where they wanted to go, he took them, speeding in the latest sports car and bringing back a treat for whoever was at home.
Matilde felt her eyes sting with unshed tears as she remembered, or was it from the incense. She tried to focus on the coffin and the roses, but her mind would not stay with her, and she felt it wander off again and there she was, back as though nothing had changed, and yet everything was about to be shattered.
‘Can you take the girls to ballet?’ Matilde had asked, knowing he would.
‘I’m not going.’ Celeste had pouted. ‘Camille got new shoes and I didn’t.’
Matilde didn’t have time for Celeste’s sulking.
‘Go to ballet, Celeste. You had new shoes last month, and the reason Camille got them was because her feet have grown so much.’
Matilde had looked at her long-legged daughter, who had the best of both of her parents’ looks. The blonde beauty of Matilde, and the fine, aquiline Le Marche nose.
She could model one day. Matilde and Daphné had discussed this quite often, while Robert denounced her plans.
‘No, Camille will take over Le Marche with me one day,’ he had said proudly and Matilde had noticed the shadow cross Celeste’s face.
‘And then Celeste can join when she’s old enough,’ added Matilde.
‘I don’t want to work with Daddy and Camille, I hate them,’ Celeste had said, lashing out as she did when she was hurt.
She was so like Robert, Matilde always said to people when they asked about her demeanour, or was it because of Robert.
The priest was now swinging the censer around, the smoke billowing out, lifting up the prayers to heaven, and Matilde felt the tears fall.
The policeman had escorted her to the hospital, with a screaming Celeste, who didn’t want to go, and had to be lifted into the back seat of the police car.
Robert was almost unscathed. Camille had died instantly.
It was rare Matilde let herself remember that time, but she was at the mercy of her memory as she listened to the prayers, and remembered the year after Camille had died.
Elisabeth and Henri had brought lovely Sibylla out from Australia to try to be a companion for Celeste, but Celeste had hated her on sight and the trip was a disaster, with Robert and Henri having harsh words before they abruptly left.
What the argument was about, Matilde never knew and she never asked, too caught up in her own pain to care.
Only a year later, Henri had died. The Le Marche family had lost two members in two years. It was the sort of thing that the gossipy society Matilde moved in thrived on.
So Matilde drank, and Robert slept with anything that had a heartbeat, and Celeste was ignored.
Matilde wasn’t proud of her mothering. Robert was always the better parent when they were small, but when Camille died, he stopped parenting and Celeste was left with no one.
So she and Robert separated and they sent Celeste away. Out of sight, out of mind, she had thought, but it wasn’t Camille she dreamed of; it was Celeste.
And when Celeste broke down about her unhappiness and had tried to kill herself, Daphné had stepped in.
Without Daphné, Matilde might have no living children, and she said a silent prayer for the woman under the roses.
She loved Celeste, she just didn’t know how to help her. When she had arrived in Nice last week, her face all tear-stained and so thin, Celeste had wanted to hug her and put her to bed and feed her soup and bread and watch her sleep, but the opportunity for her to be a mother had long gone.
Celeste had resisted hugs, and instead went out on the balcony and stared into the horizon. She refused to speak of her pain, even though Matilde knew it was that arrogant Paul Le Brun, and she glanced at him in the church. Handsome yes, but what good is handsome when you’re married to someone else.
Oh, Celeste, don’t choose a man like your father, she thought, looking at the back of Celeste’s blonde chignon at the front of the church.
So many times Matilde wished she had something wise to say to Celeste, or that Celeste would even listen, but she was scared of her daughter now.
Scared she would lose her like she lost Camille, scared of her temper and her biting tongue, and scared of her restlessness.
Matilde stayed in the past, as the service went on, and when it finished, she was one of the last to exit the church and that’s when she saw him.
A man, as handsome as any man she had ever met, in a navy suit, and silk tie, with a crisp white shirt, and a beautiful coat draped over his arm. He had dark, thick hair, cut close to his head, and slightly tanned skin, but it was natural, she could tell. He walked slightly beside her, and they stopped at the entrance of the church, waiting for the crowd to exit.
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he said in her ear and she felt a ripple of something in her body—fear or lust, she wasn’t sure, but God knows, he was too young for her and too handsome to be good for any woman.
‘It is not my loss,’ she said firmly, turning to see eyes of lapis blue. ‘It is my daughter and ex-husband’s loss.’
‘But you were sad, non? I saw it in your face, you had many memories cover your face during the service.’
Matilde felt herself frown. Where had he been sitting? Why had he been watching her?
‘Who are you?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes. He was cunning, she thought, cunning was always hard to manage. Daphné was cunning.
‘Dominic Bertiull,’ he said, extending a hand that Matilde didn’t take.
She sniffed as though the name meant nothing to her, and she pushed her way into the crowd and away from the blue-eyed libertine, who still followed her, but Matilde knew everyone who mattered, that was her job in life.
‘It must be hard for Robert to have to take over the company when he has not really worked in it for a long time,’ said Dominic in a hushed whisper that smacked of false concern.
So the vultures have started to circle, she thought, and she wondered if she should tell Robert that Dominic Bertiull, the corporate raider and slash and burn CEO, was at his mother’s funeral.
And then she remembered Camille. Why should she care if Dominic took Le Marche from under Robert’s rule? He had lost Camille, now he could lose the company he had always desired to be at the helm of, and only then did Matilde feel that justice would be served.
‘I don’t know what Robert does and what he will do next. My only concern is for my daughter, please excuse me,’ Matilde said and, with a push, she forced her way through the crowd to Celeste’s side, where she took her daughter’s hand.
Glancing back to the steps of the church, she saw Dominic Bertiull staring at her and she wasn’t sure if she should feel flattered or scared, or a little of both.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_0b35ef0a-e363-5b7b-a11d-f089db5eb621)
Elisabeth, London, 1983
In London, 1983, the cultural landscape was shifting. Nothing was as it seemed and the roles that people were so familiar with were changing before people’s eyes.
Boy George was changing music with his gender-bending costumes and make-up, a film about a female welder and dancer was number one and Margaret Thatcher had just been re-elected for a second term as Prime Minister.
It was also the year Elisabeth Herod met Henri Le Marche.
As with the most extraordinary of relationships, their meeting was completely ordinary. Elisabeth worked at the bookstore, Hatchards in Piccadilly, and Henri had asked her opinion on The Name of the Rose. She had to admit to him that she hadn’t read the book, but she had heard only good things.
She decided that Henri had a look of a poet, taking in his rumpled suit but expensive silk tie and uncombed hair. His French accent was as delicious as a chocolate soufflé and she thought he would be the perfect man to lose her virginity to while she was in London.
