“Francesca!” Chloe exclaimed. “What's wrong, my darling?”
Onassis scowled and muttered something in Greek that sounded vaguely threatening to Francesca. She puffed out her bottom lip and tried to think how to recover from her mistake. Her small problem with temper tantrums was supposed to be a secret—something that, under no circumstances, could ever be displayed in front of Chloe's friends. “I'm sorry, Mummy,” she said. “It was an accident.”
“Of course it was, pet,” Chloe replied. “Everyone knows that.”
Onassis's expression of displeasure did not ease, however, and Francesca knew stronger action was called for. With a dramatic cry of anguish, she fled across the deck to his side and flung herself in his lap. “I'm sorry, Uncle Ari,” she sobbed, her eyes instantly filling with tears—one of her very best tricks. “It was an accident, really it was!” The tears leaked over her bottom lids and trickled down her cheeks as she concentrated very hard on not flinching from the gaze of those black wraparound sunglasses.
“I love you, Uncle Ari,” she sighed, turning the full force of her pitiful tear-streaked face upward in an expression she had gleaned from an old Shirley Temple movie. “I love you, and I wish you were my very own daddy.”
Onassis chuckled and said he hoped he never had to face her over a bargaining table.
After Francesca was dismissed, she returned to her suite, passing by the children's room where she took her lessons during the day at a bright yellow table positioned directly in front of a Parisian mural painted by Ludwig Bemelmans. The mural made her feel as if she'd stepped into one of his Madeline books—except better dressed, of course. The room had been designed for Onassis's two children, but since neither was on board, Francesca had it all to herself. Although it was a pretty place, she actually preferred the bar, where once a day she was permitted to enjoy ginger ale served in a champagne glass along with a paper parasol and a maraschino cherry.
Whenever she sat at the bar, she took tiny sips from her drink to make it last while she gazed down through the glass top at a lighted replica of the sea complete with little ships she could move with magnets. The footrests of the bar stools were polished whales’ teeth, which she could just touch with the toes of her tiny handmade Italian sandals, and the upholstery of the seats felt silky soft on the backs of her thighs. She remembered one time when her mother had screamed with laughter because Uncle Ari had told her they were all sitting on the foreskin of a whale's penis. Francesca had laughed, too, and told Uncle Ari that he was silly— didn't he mean an elephant's peanuts?
The Christina held nine suites, each with its own elaborately decorated living and bedroom areas as well as a pink marble bath that Chloe pronounced “so opulent it borders on the tacky.” The suites were all named after different Greek islands, the shapes of which were outlined in gold leaf on a medallion fastened to the door. Sir Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, frequent visitors on board the Christina, had already retired for the night in their suite, Corfu. Francesca passed it, then looked for the outline of her particular island—Lesbos. Chloe had laughed when they were put in Lesbos, telling Francesca that several dozen men would most definitely disagree with the choice. When Francesca had asked why, Chloe had said she was too young to understand.
Francesca hated it when Chloe answered her questions like that, so she had hidden the blue plastic case containing her mother's diaphragm, an object Chloe had once told her was her most precious possession, although Francesca couldn't really see why. She hadn't given it back, either—at least not until Giancarlo Morandi had pulled her from her lessons when Chloe wasn't watching and threatened to throw her overboard and let the sharks eat out her eyeballs unless she told him what she'd done with it. Francesca hated Giancarlo Morandi now and tried to stay far away from him.
Just as she reached Lesbos, Francesca heard the door of Rhodes opening. She looked up to see Evan Varían walk out into the corridor, and she smiled in his direction, letting him see her pretty, straight teeth and the matching pair of dimples that indented her cheeks.
“Hello, princess,” he said, speaking in the full, liquid tones he used whether playing the rogue counterintelligence officer John Bullett in the recently released and phenomenally successful Bullett spy film, or appearing as Hamlet at the Old Vic. Despite his background as the son of an Irish schoolteacher and a Welsh bricklayer, Varian had the sharp features of an English aristocrat and the casually long haircut of an Oxford don. He wore a lavender polo shirt with a paisley ascot and white duck trousers. But most important to Francesca, he carried a pipe—a wonderful brown daddy's pipe with a marbled wooden bowl. “Aren't you up a little late?” he inquired.
“I stay up this late all the time,” she replied, with a small shake of her curls and all the self-importance she could muster. “Only babies go to bed early.”
“Oh, I see. And you most definitely aren't a baby. Are you sneaking out to meet a gentleman admirer, perhaps?”
“No, silly. Mummy woke me up to do the caviar trick.”
“Ah, yes, the caviar trick.” He tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with his thumb. “Did she blindfold you for the taste test this time, or was it a simple sight identification?”
“Just by sight. She doesn't ask me to do the blindfold trick anymore because the last time we did it, I started to gag.” She saw that he was getting ready to move on, and she acted quickly. “Don't you think Mummy's looking awfully pretty tonight?”
“Your mummy always looks pretty.” He cupped a match in his palm and held it over the bowl.
“Cecil Beaton says that she's one of the most beautiful women in Europe. Her figure's nearly perfect, and of course she's a wonderful hostess.” Francesca cast about for an example that would impress him. “Do you know that Mummy did curry before absolutely anyone else thought of it?”
“A legendary coup, princess, but before you exert yourself any further in extolling your mother's virtues, don't forget that the two of us despise each other.”
“Pooh, she'll like you if I tell her to. Mummy does everything I want.”
“I've noticed,” he observed dryly. “However, even if you managed to change your mummy's opinion, which I think highly unlikely, you won't change mine, so I'm afraid you're going to have to cast your net elsewhere for a father. I must tell you that even the thought of being permanently shackled with Chloe's neuroses makes me shudder.”
Nothing was going right for Francesca that evening, and she spoke pettishly. “But I'm afraid she's going to marry Giancarlo, and if she does, it'll all be your fault! He's a terrible shit, and I hate him.”
“God, Francesca, you use the most awful language for a child. Chloe should spank you.”
The storm clouds gathered in her eyes. “What a beastly thing to say! I think you're a shit, too!”
Varían tugged on the legs of his trousers so he wouldn't crease them as he knelt down beside her. “Francesca, my cherub, you should consider yourself lucky that I'm not your daddy, because if I were, I'd lock you up in the back of a dark closet and leave you there until you mummified.”
Genuine tears stung Francesca's eyes. “I hate you,” she cried as she kicked him hard in the shin. Varían jumped up with a yelp.
The door of Corfu swung open. “Is it too much to request that an old man be allowed to sleep in peace!” Sir Winston Churchill's growl filled the passageway. “Could you conduct your business elsewhere, Mr. Varían? And you, missy, get to bed at once or our card game is off for tomorrow!”
Francesca scampered into Lesbos without a word of protest. If she couldn't have a daddy, at least she could have a granddaddy.
As the years passed, Chloe's romantic entanglements grew so complex that even Francesca accepted the fact that her mother would never settle on one man long enough to marry him. She forced herself to look upon her lack of a father as an advantage. She had enough adults to cope with in her life, she reasoned, and she certainly didn't need any more of them telling her what she should or
shouldn't do, especially as she began to catch the attention of a bevy of adolescent boys. They stumbled over their feet whenever she was near, and their voices cracked when they tried to talk to her. She gave them soft, wicked smiles just so she could watch them blush, and she practiced all the flirtatious tricks she had seen Chloe use—the generous laughter, the graceful tilt of the head, the sidelong glances. Every one of them worked.
The Age of Aquarius had found its princess. Francesca's little-girl clothes gave way to peasant dresses with fringed paisley shawls and multicolored love beads strung on silken thread. She frizzed her hair, pierced her ears, and expertly applied makeup to enlarge her eyes until they seemed to fill her face. The top of her head had barely passed her mother's eyebrows when, much to her disappointment, she stopped growing. But unlike Chloe, who still held the rempants of a pudgy child deep inside her, Francesca never had any reason to doubt her own beauty. It simply existed, that was all—just like air and light and water. Just like Mary Quant, for goodness’ sake! By the time she was seventeen, Black Jack Day's daughter had become a legend.
Evan Varian reentered her life in the disco at Annabel's. She and her date were leaving to go to the White Tower for baklava, and they had just walked past the glass partition that separated the disco from Annabel's dining room. Even in the determinedly fashionable atmosphere of London's most popular club, Francesca's scarlet velvet trouser suit with its padded shoulders gathered more than its share of attention, especially since she had neglected to wear a blouse beneath the deep open V of the wasp-waisted jacket, and the insides of her seventeen-year-old breasts curved enticingly above the spot where the lapels joined. The effect became all the more alluring because of her short Twiggy hairstyle, which made her look rather like London's most erotic schoolboy.
“Well, if it isn't my little princess.” The sonorous voice rang out in perfect pear-shaped tones designed to be heard in the far reaches of the National Theatre. “It appears she's all grown up and ready to take on the world.”
Except for watching him in the Bullett spy films, she had not seen Evan Varian for years. Now, as she spun around to face him, she felt as if she were confronting his on-screen presence. He wore the same immaculately fitted Savile Row suit, the same pale blue silk shirt and handmade Italian shoes. Silver had threaded his temples since their last encounter on board the Christina, but now his hair lay conservatively tamed to his head by an expert razor cut.
Her date for the evening, a baronet home on holiday from Eton, suddenly seemed as young as milk-fed veal. “Hello, Evan,” she said, giving Varian a smile that managed to be both haughty and bewitching.
He ignored the obvious impatience of the blond fashion model draped over his arm as he surveyed Francesca's scarlet velvet trouser suit. “Little Francesca. The last time I saw you, you didn't have so many clothes on. As I remember, you were wearing a nightgown.”
Other girls might have blushed, but other girls didn't have Francesca's bottomless self-confidence. “Really? I've forgotten. Amusing of you to remember.” And then, because she had quite made up her mind to catch the grownup interest of this most sophisticated Evan Varian, she nodded at her escort and permitted him to lead her away.
Varian called her the next day and invited her to dine with him. “Certainly not,” Chloe shrieked, jumping up from her lotus position in the center of the drawing room carpet where she dabbled at meditation twice a day, except on alternate Mondays when she had her legs waxed. “Evan is more than twenty years older than you, and he's a notorious playboy. My God, he's already had four wives! I absolutely won't have you involved with him.”
Francesca sighed and stretched. “Sorry, Mummy, but it's rather a fait accompli. I'm smitten.”
“Be reasonable, darling. He's old enough to be your father.”
“Was he ever your lover?”
“Of course not. You know the two of us never got on.”
“Then I don't see what possible objection you could have.”
Chloe begged and pleaded, but Francesca paid no attention. She had grown tired of being treated like a child. She was ready for adult adventure—sexual adventure.
A few months before, she had made a great show out of insisting that Chloe take her to the doctor for birth control pills. At first Chloe had protested, but she had quickly changed her mind when she had stumbled upon Francesca in a heated embrace with a young man who was pushing his hand under her skirt. Ever since, one of those pills appeared on Francesca's breakfast tray each morning to be swallowed with great ceremony.
Francesca had told no one that the pills had so far proven unnecessary, nor had she let anyone see how her continued virginity upset her. All of her friends spoke so glibly about their sexual experiences that she was terrified they would find out she was lying about her own. If anyone discovered what an absolute infant she was, she was absolutely certain she would lose her standing as the most fashionable member of London's trendy younger set.
With stubborn determination, she reduced her youthful sexuality to a simple matter of social position. It was easier for her that way, since social position was something she understood, while the loneliness produced by her abnormal childhood, the aching need for some deep connection with another human being, only bewildered her.
However, despite her determination to lose her virginity, she had hit upon an unexpected stumbling block. So much of her life had been spent with adults that she didn't feel entirely comfortable with her peers, even those worshiping boys who followed her around like well-trained lapdogs. She understood that having sex would involve placing a certain amount of trust in her partner, and she couldn't imagine trusting those callow young boys. She had immediately seen an answer to her dilemma when she set eyes on Evan Varían at Annabel's. Who better than an experienced man of the world to escort her through those fragile final portals into womanhood? She saw no connection at all between her choice of Evan to be her first lover and her choice of him, years earlier, to be her father.
So, ignoring Chloe's protests, Francesca accepted Evan's invitation to dine at Mirabelle the following weekend. They sat at a table next to one of the small hothouses where the restaurant's fresh flowers were grown and dined on rack of lamb stuffed with veal and truffles. He touched her fingers, angled his head attentively whenever she spoke, and told her she was the most beautiful woman in the room. Francesca privately considered that rather a foregone conclusion, but the compliment pleased her nonetheless, especially since the exotic Bianca Jagger was nibbling at a lobster soufflé in front of one of the tapestried walls on the opposite side of the room. After dinner, they went to Leith's for a tangy lemon mousse and glacé strawberries, and then on to Varian's Kensington home where he played a Chopin mazurka for her on the grand piano in the sitting room and gave her a memorable kiss. Yet when he tried to lead her upstairs to his bedroom, she balked.
“Another time, perhaps,” she said breezily. “I'm not in the mood.” It didn't occur to her to tell him that she would like it very much if he would just hold her for a while or simply stroke her hair and let her cuddle up against him, Varían didn't like her rejection, but she restored his good mood with a saucy smile that promised future pleasures.
Two weeks later, she forced herself to make the long trek at his side up the curving Adam staircase, past the Constable landscape and recamier bench, through the arched entryway, and into his lavishly decorated Louis XIV bedroom suite.
“You're luscious,” he said, coming out of his dressing room in a maroon and navy silk dressing robe with J.B. monogrammed in elaborate script on the pocket, obviously a costume he'd appropriated from his last film. He approached her, his hand going out to stroke her breast above the towel she'd wrapped around herself after she'd taken off her clothes in the bathroom. “‘Beauty like the breast of a dove—soft as down and sweet as mother's milk,’” he quoted.
“Is that from Shakespeare?” she asked nervously. She wished he weren't wearing such heavy cologne.
Evan shook his
head. “It's from Dead Men's Tears, right before I pushed the stiletto through the Russian spy's heart.” He ran his fingers along the curve of her neck. “Perhaps you'd go over to the bed now.”
Francesca didn't want to do any such thing—she wasn't even certain she liked Evan Varian—but she'd come too far to turn back without humiliating herself, so she did as he asked. The mattress squeaked as she lay down upon it. Why did his mattress have to squeak? Why was the room so cold? Without warning, Evan fell on top of her. Alarmed, she tried to push him away, but he was muttering something in her ear while he fumbled with her towel. “Oh... stop! Evan—”
“Please, darling,” he said. “Do as I ask....”
“Get off me!” Panic pounded at her chest. She began shoving at his shoulders as the towel gave way.
Again he muttered something, but in her distress she caught just the last part of it. “... make me excited,” he whispered, pulling open his dressing gown.
“You beast! Get away! Get off me.” As she screamed, she curled her hands into fists and began beating at his back.
He pried her legs open with his knees. “... just once and then I'll stop. Just once call me by name.”
“Evan!”
“No!” An awful hardness probed at her. “Call me— Bullett.”
“Bullett?”
The instant the word left her lips, he thrust inside her. She screamed as she felt herself being consumed by a hot stab of pain, and then, before she could release the second scream, he began to shudder.