AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Alan . . . ?” Phoebe whispered, and for a moment it was like the wind in the trees answered back.
FLOWER
Sara yawned, opened one eye, allowed the thin English sun to fall across her face, then shut the eye again. She liked the one-sided dimension this skewed vision gave her. It seemed to simplify her complicated world and the endless financial responsibility that had colored everything lately.
“2009, 2009,” she thought to herself, “where have the last two years gone?” She lay in bed a little longer but the rose-colored heat leaked in under her eyelids. “I can only shut the day out for so long,” she thought, snuggling down further into the cool Egyptian cotton sheets. “Besides”—and at this point her eyes snapped open—“life is vitality, vitality is good, and I am vital,” she murmured with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. It was the mantra her life coach/trainer had instructed her to repeat every morning upon waking. It was meant to counteract her current malaise, a postdivorce depression that had lingered for months matched with downward-spiraling self-esteem.
“I’m here to triumph, make a new start and all that other New Age bullshit,” she concluded, failing to keep cynicism out of her voice.
Swinging her legs out of the bed, she stepped down onto the Persian rug. The high-ceilinged Regency bedroom was large and beautiful in its proportions. She had deliberately kept it sparse, a restraint that had irritated Hugh, her ex-husband, whose own taste ran to the baroque and anything else that shouted wealth. In contrast, Sara’s furniture was a mix of original Empire and a little Louis XIV, then peppered dramatically with a couple of startling sculptural contemporary furniture pieces. In front of the curved floor-to-ceiling window bay sat a white marble table, its sweeping organic curves rendering the stone near translucent. Although functional, it resembled both a desk and a large white flower, yet somehow the ornate Louis XIV gilded chair sitting beside it made perfect visual logic. That was Sara all over. Despite her inherited wealth and despite both parents having little to no taste of their own, she had managed to forge an aesthetic lexicon of her own—no mean feat in the social circles she moved in.
The floor was cool under her bare feet. She walked over to the large mahogany closet and opened the door, revealing the full-length mirror that was set on the inside. Pausing, Sara took a deep breath, let her dressing gown slip to the floor, then looked up at her naked reflection. It was a ritual she’d adopted since her separation and divorce—a kind of brutal self-examination to track any visible signs of either emotional or physical disintegration. In fact she’d lost weight, initially from the shock and then deliberately with the help of her life coach. After all, looking fantastic was at least some balm to the soul after being left for a younger woman. But Sara’s soul was not quieted. If anything, a spiritual restlessness had set in upon her return to London, a sense that her life was now futile and meaningless, and the murmured mantras had failed to exorcise the feeling. Now that she was no longer Hugh Lander’s wife she wanted to do something, be something. But what? She lifted her gaze to her reflection.
Our heroine was of average height, average weight, and average appearance, one of those women you might glance at casually at a party and then look away again. Up until her marriage Sara had dedicated quite a lot of time and skill to achieving invisibility, a reaction to her very visible and very wealthy parents. Her mother had been a famous fashion model of the early 1960s and her father was a European aristocrat who graced the social pages of the era. Sara had spent most of the early part of her life as a source of disappointment to her mother, who’d wished for a daughter who reflected her own beauty, and a source of thwarted ambition to her Italian father (he’d wanted a son), and now that the gloss of youth had left Sara, she’d finally succeeded in achieving what she’d craved as an unloved child—to be ignored.
She glanced across at her breasts and liked what she saw. The chest exercises had lifted her heavy breasts a couple of inches, and despite the weight loss further down her body, they’d remained firm. Her waist, which had started to thicken in the manner of most women over forty, seemed to have diminished slightly and her thighs and hips were definitely lighter. Her gaze traveled across her sex, where she’d noticed a change too. It was as if her ex-husband’s rejection had made it wither slightly in disappointment, and it had become just a little more furrowed, a little less plumped. Her sense of being a sexually vibrant being had certainly been demolished. Although there had been intellectual incompatibility in the marriage, the sex had always been great, at least from Sara’s perspective, and Hugh’s sudden absence from her bed had made her feel as if she were missing an annex of her own body. His lovemaking had defined her, had drawn her physical perimeters like an outline in an etching; without him she feared she was lost.
She looked down her torso and, parting her legs, looked for gray hairs. To her consternation she discovered a whole outcrop clinging together like some old man’s whiskers. She pulled them out with violent relish, noting grimly that if the graying continued she’d have to consider a Brazilian with just a little landing strip or even shaving the whole lot off—a practice she considered to be both vulgar and brutally American.
She held the hairs up against the sunlight—some of them were pure white. It was deeply depressing; she was only forty-two and she still held hopes of having a child. The white hairs made her feel like old fruit, as if both her sexual and reproductive fecundity were wasting away. She looked down at her labia once more. She didn’t remember her vagina looking that wrinkly when she was young, but back then it was still verboten to discuss the aesthetics of one’s genitalia—unless, of course, you were a man. Back then young girls didn’t look between their legs, Sara noted, remembering how she’d been shocked the night before by the subheading on the cover of a teen magazine a young girl was reading on the Eurostar: “You and your labia—when the crease is pretty.” Was it good or was it bad to have such mysteries reduced to banality? In some ways it was good—at least young men now knew where the clitoris was, and if they didn’t they could always look on the Internet, she thought to herself, remembering some of her more awkward first teenage encounters. On the other hand, though, the current view of sexuality seemed so expedient to her, all so exposed and clinical, the inherent romanticism that had always been her Achilles’ heel now battling her pragmatism.
Sighing, she slipped her dressing gown back over her shoulders and reached for the Chanel suit she planned to wear for her outing.
• • •
Sara hated going anywhere alone. It was a hangover from being the sole offspring of socialites who had little time for her. The memories of her mother were of an impossibly beautiful woman who floated in and out of the house and only seemed to pay attention to Sara when she was hosting dinner parties, during which Sara was expected to perform to amuse the guests: either playing the piano or doing little dance routines. Sara had loathed it. She still had a blown-up photograph of her mother in a bikini, age eighteen, hanging up in the master bathroom. Originally shot for French Vogue, it had been put up by her mother decades ago, and since her death, Sara, despite a strong dislike for the photograph, hadn’t had the courage to take it down. And so it had stayed hanging, a constant reminder to Sara of her own inadequacies.
As a child during the
late 1970s she spent long afternoons wandering around the museums of London with her nanny in stifling silence, the ennui of which even now made her feel panicked. This was probably why she’d ended up marrying her ex-husband in the first place—Hugh had been wildly gregarious and compulsively social. He was someone who didn’t really exist unless he had an audience, and then he would light up, blazing like the Christmas lights on Oxford Street and boy, was he good. Easy on the eye as well, Sara thought ruefully, gazing over at the wedding photograph that still sat in the middle of the white marble desk like a shrine.
Taken in 1992 outside the Mayfair church they were married in, the photo showed both Sara and Hugh looking ridiculously young. Hugh was tall with an angular face, blue eyes, and thick black Celtic hair with dramatic black eyebrows. He looked like a handsome young wizard, oozing sexual magnetism as he stared out at the viewer, daring them not to find him attractive. In the photograph the younger Sara, dressed in a cream silk suit, stared up adoringly at her husband. The pose was indicative of the marriage that followed, Sara reflected bleakly—she had worshipped him while he had continued to look for an audience.
Apart from her ex-husband’s obvious indifference and her obvious adoration, the other striking aspect of the photograph was the imbalance of beauty between them. He had been, in every way, far more beautiful than she. She’d known it then and she knew it now. Even-featured, Sara was pleasant-looking but not striking. She had not taken after her mother in any aspect except her strawberry-blond hair. This was her most attractive feature but she had to have it back-brushed and styled every day to disguise its thinness. Hugh had told her that her best assets were her smile and laugh. He’d loved the way she laughed at all his jokes—in fact she’d laughed at most of his utterances, but this wasn’t appreciation as much as a nervous reaction. In truth she’d been intimidated by his intellect and her laughter was her way of disguising the fact that often she simply couldn’t follow his references or subtle nuances. No wonder he’d finally left her for an academic, she thought bitterly.
The imbalance of beauty: Sara said the words out loud. Beauty meant a lot to Sara, maybe too much, and like many who had suffered the curse and blessing of great inherited wealth, it meant far more to her than money, for as much as one tried to procure it, one could never really own it, as beauty was inherently transient: ethereal in spirit, elusive in nature, and fickle in choice. The only consolation was that one could invite it to dinner, sleep with it for a while, or hang it on the wall until inevitably beauty moved on. But at least one got to live with it for an exhilaratingly brief time, Sara concluded, reflecting on her own marriage. It was the philosophy by which she had always lived, for Sara was an art collector, a serious buyer of seriously expensive art, and this was the one area she knew she excelled in. Her taste was impeccable, a delightfully eclectic mix of both contemporary and classical: Impressionists hung next to Damien Hirsts, Rodin beside Elisabeth Frink. And yet there was always a harmonious theme that linked them all.
Sometimes Sara wondered whether this was what her marriage had been—an art purchase. Perhaps she had collected Hugh for his aesthetic appeal and then perversely he had put her back on the shelf. But then there was the money. Hugh’s departure had been swift but that hadn’t stopped him from hiring the best divorce lawyer in London and dragging her through the courts to usurp the prenuptial she had made him sign. The publicity around the case absolutely terrorized Sara. A desperately private person, she was a watcher, not a performer, and her family were old European money with a lineage that stretched back to thirteenth-century Venice. Monte Carlo was awash with gossip, many of her cousins still living in mainland Europe were scandalized, and the news had been all over the tabloids. Sara had been forced to retreat to Morocco for several months to be forgotten. Now it was October and she was back in her Georgian house in Mayfair, ready to step back into the raging torrent of gallery openings, charity balls, gala dinners, and opera events that roared through the upper echelons of society as ruthlessly and indifferently as time. It was either that or social suicide, and our heroine wasn’t ready to become reclusive just yet. And then there was the matter of her quest, her desire to do something useful with her life and the little talent she thought she actually had. Over the past couple of weeks an idea had occurred to her. Nebulous and shape-shifting, it was about as formed as a ghost, but she knew this much: she wanted to start an art collection, officially, then auction it off and donate the proceeds to a charity. The problem was, she hadn’t been able to decide which charity. She had toyed with retired donkeys, abused greyhounds, Greenpeace, Shelter, and the antiwhaling campaign, but none of them had really caught either her imagination or empathy. And as the proceeds could easily amount to more than six figures, she wanted something that she could commit to passionately. It was a dilemma.
Sara finished buttoning the gray linen jacket, and after throwing on a YSL blue faux-fur coat, headed down to Cork Street, where she was meeting with one of her gallery owners.
• • •
“My God, you look amazing. Isn’t it wonderful how divorce is always so good for the complexion!”
June Smithers, the gallery owner Sara regularly bought from, stood admiring Sara’s outfit while rubbing her hand across the polished leather surface of Sara’s new Louis Vuitton handbag, which resembled a sculptured leather pillbox, as her gaze panned down Sara’s body. For a moment Sara was convinced she could see the price tag of each item of designer clothing reflected in the gallery owner’s pupils. Code, Sara thought wryly, one’s persona is an assemblage of codes and labels that translate into monetary figures by which one is judged.
“I don’t know about divorce but I can tell you I never realized love could be so expensive!” Sara joked back in her soft, seductively lilting voice. Her accent was impossible to place, unless you had spent time as a child in the palaces of the Mediterranean surrounded by various nannies and great aunts who would switch fluently from Italian to French to occasionally dipping into formal German (a concession to the more distant relatives), and then you would have recognized Sara’s accent immediately.
“So, I believe you have someone I should meet,” Sara continued while discreetly retrieving her handbag, the rubbing of which had taken on a near-masturbatory nature.
For several years before Sara was married, June Smithers had taken responsibility for the heiress’s cultural and artistic education. She’d achieved this through engaging (at Sara’s expense) a series of handsome male “walkers,” all of whom had been homosexual. They were usually either aspiring curators or art critics, and all were socially ambitious and elitist.
“And here he is now!” June, who was excitable by nature and an enthusiast by calculated choice, leapt forward as an impeccably dressed man of about thirty entered the gallery.
The young man, who was well over six foot tall, was immaculately dressed in a Paul Smith suit. Although he appeared to wear his body more than his clothes, moving in a sensual manner that suggested he was both proud and aware of the physique that was no doubt a result of hours in the gym. His face was broad and almost Slavic, with long narrow eyes that were a piercing blue, high cheekbones, and a strong mouth with a fuller lower lip. His thick blond hair was trimmed close to his skull. In short, he appeared so perfect as not to be human at all.
“This is Sven,” June declared as if she were announcing the arrival of a new marketing campaign, “and today he is to take you to the Frieze show—which this year is, I promise you, sublime!”
