I leaned into the hand resting on the small of my back, thought of the rose lying upside down in my kitchen sink, and breathed a silent prayer of thanks that I hadn’t managed to screw everything up with that ridiculous phone call two nights ago.
By the time we arrived at the gallery, I had my halo firmly in place. As far as relationship issues went, one needy sister was a fairly small cross to bear. I was going to be on my very best behavior and not make any fuss about sharing my Valentine’s Day with Serena. And who knew? It might even be fun.
Relinquishing our coats, Colin and I made our way, arm in arm, into Serena’s gallery. It was one of those terrifyingly posh modern places where they hang a single canvas per wall and the asking price per artwork is roughly the same as a down payment on a one bedroom flat. Not that they would do anything so indiscreet as affix a price tag to anything. That was for shops, not galleries. Instead, a tastefully clad assistant (i.e., Serena) would glide helpfully over and talk up the finer points of the piece until the question of purchase was reached after a decent interval of art appreciation, the intimation being, of course, that mere money could never be the point when Art was at stake, as though selling were somehow only a byproduct of the gallery’s proper mission of Encouraging Art.
“Isn’t your mother an artist?” I asked idly, as we strolled into the main gallery, having scooped up glasses of pink champagne from a tray by the entrance. The glasses were either genuine crystal or a very good facsimile. It was a far cry from red plastic tumblers in someone’s apartment in Cambridge.
“A painter,” confirmed Colin, nodding to an acquaintance in passing. “Some of her paintings are down at Selwick Hall. You’ve seen them.”
“The Italian scenes?”
“Like Canaletto on speed,” Colin agreed calmly.
I had thought they were quite good. “Did she get Serena this job?” I asked, guessing.
“No.” Was it my imagination, or did Colin’s lip actually curl? “Her husband did. He also works in the art world.”
Yep, that was definitely a curled lip, like curdled milk in smile form.
No one warns you, in college, that when you date someone you run a good chance of dating his family as well. This was a new experience for me. Grant, the evil ex, had been one of those oddly rootless types one finds frequently in the Ivy league. Grant had left the Midwest for Princeton at eighteen and never looked back. I knew he had a largeish family back in Michigan, with multiple brothers and sisters and even a few nieces and nephews floating around, but in the whole two years we had dated, I hadn’t met a single one of them. He had spoken to his mother on the phone for half an hour once every month, regular as clockwork and about as intimate.
Colin, on the other hand, came not only with a full complement of interesting ancestors, but plenty of living ones, all of whom kept intruding on the scene in one way or another. I couldn’t decide whether to be entertained, or very, very afraid. My mother would probably opt for the latter. She has very strong feelings about certain of my father’s relatives.
What was the stepfather doing dredging up jobs for Serena, when, from what I could gather, Serena wasn’t on speaking terms with either him or her mother?
“What do you think of the show?”
Not wanting to set off any more red flags about his family—I had done enough of that the other night—I let it go. For the moment. I could always ask Serena later.
I squinted at a very large bronze that might be either Europa being seduced by a bull, a squashed globe, or an interpretive exposition on global poverty in a postmodern world (that last comes from the little plaque in front of the sculpture). Personally, I didn’t see it. But it could have been worse. Crosses in urine, toilets masquerading as installation art, rooms constructed entirely of balloons that popped when you stepped on them.
Compared to the exploding balloon exhibit, I could cope with Zeus as commentary on global poverty.
Leaning comfortably against Colin’s arm, I took the measure of the room. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
“It helps to have low expectations,” my boyfriend agreed, looking doubtfully at his pink champagne before taking a gingerly sip.
Across the room, I could see Serena, pink-cheeked with champagne, in an animated discussion with a man in a black cashmere turtleneck and something that wasn’t quite a beret but wanted to be. They seemed to be deeply enmeshed in agreeing over the merits of a statue that looked to me like a squashed hamburger without the bun.
“We’re philistines, aren’t we?” I said, looking up at Colin.
“Irredeemably,” he agreed cheerfully, taking a more confident swig of his champagne. Apparently, he had concluded that just because it looked pink didn’t mean it tasted pink.
My heart squeezed with a rather embarrassing rush of affection for him, which I covered by hastily babbling, “The posters aren’t bad, though. I rather like them.”
Someone, possibly Serena, had come up with the idea of hanging huge art posters in the empty spaces on the walls, as a pictorial representation of the history of love through art. They had played around with the colors, of course, framing the classic images in funky hot pink frames and coloring some of them with a neon wash in multiple variations, like those Andy Warhol prints, but it still made a nice effect. Among other favorites, I recognized Botticelli’s Venus, Fragonard’s Love Letter, and Francisco Hayez’s The Kiss.
There were darker images at play, too: Waterhouse’s Ophelia twining wildflowers in her hair; the Lady of Shallot floating down to many-towered Camelot as singing in her song she died; Dicksee’s Belle Dame Sans Merci tempting her knight at arms to his pale and loitering fate. The Belle Dame’s unbound locks were a bright, unmistakable red. Red, like my hair, or like that of Penelope Staines, nee Deveraux. All around me, in the bright posters hanging like feudal banners in the walls, red-haired women were coming to bad ends, and all for love. It was an unexpectedly sobering observation.
I looked at them all, trapped in their several fates, and thought about Penelope, trapped in her own spider’s web, like Rosamund in Queen Eleanor’s tower, or the Lady of Shallot in her doomed barge. A sad soul, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had called her, and as I read on, I was beginning to understand why.
It was, I thought, dangerously easy to get swept up in other people’s expectations, pulled into patterns based on the person you had been five, or even ten, years ago. Look at Serena. On her own turf, she seemed happy. Confident, even. She was still too thin, but in her blush pink cashmere dress, with a glass of champagne in one hand and a gloss in her hair, she looked elegant rather than sickly. With a deftness I would never have imagined of her, I watched her guiding potential patrons neatly in the direction of unsold pieces, sorting out some confusion about the canapés, and soothing the ruffled feathers of a man whose name had been left off the guest list. But put her within five feet of her brother, and she suddenly became an awkward adolescent again, all open wounds and raw emotions.
Not that I should talk. Over on the other side of the room, under the poster of Belle Dame Sans Merci, I spotted my friend Pammy, decked in a hot pink crocodile-skin sheath. We will ignore the fact that I am pretty sure there is no such animal as a hot pink crocodile. Pammy is a law unto herself, in more ways than one. And I was just as bad as Serena—or Penelope. Put me in a room with Pammy, and I was in sixth grade again, standing shyly at the sidelines of the middle school dances, while Pammy pulled boys over by their ties. No matter how old we got, to a certain extent our relationship would always be a replay of our respective roles from middle school. There were times when it was comforting, like a tattered old shoe, but other times when I found myself behaving in ways that I didn’t like and didn’t respect, all on the strength of those old patterns.
Speaking of people I neither liked nor respected . . . Standing not far from Pammy, I recognized Joan Plowden-Plugge, Colin’s next-door neighbor from Sussex, the one with the ungodly crush on Colin. She was wearing red, of course. It loo
ked smashing with her faux blond hair.
Making a face, I pointed Joan out to Colin. “Where’s her broomstick?”
“I’m sure she left it in the cloakroom. Serena got her to agree to write up the show for Manderley.”
That was undoubtedly a coup for Serena. Manderley was a very respected arts journal and they seldom had much to do with anything more modern than William Morris. It was also a pain in the you-know-where. I didn’t want to have to be nice to Joan. It was Valentine’s Day. Fortunately, Joan appeared to be occupied for the moment with a large glass of pink champagne (which clashed beautifully with her dress) and a shaggy-haired man with trendy rectangular glasses, who I assumed had to be another arts journalist.
Next to them, Pammy had got her hot pink fingernails into Nick. She was doing her twinkly laugh at him, the one that goes with the hair flip and the eyelashes at half-mast. Nick was flirting happily back, and I wondered what had happened to the blonde I had seen with him at the movie theatre. Whoever she was, she didn’t seem to be in evidence.
Serena was conspicuously not looking at them, talking to black-beret man with an intensity that suggested she knew very well what was going on behind her and was making a concerted effort not to notice. I looked around for Martin, but if he was here, he wasn’t in evidence. Probably moping in the cloakroom, or drunk-dialing his ex.
Useless, I thought irritably, wondering whether we ought to wander over and intercede. Colin had found an old university friend, with whom he was having a grand old time bemoaning the depraved mentality that would take a decent bubbly and tint it pink.
“Nothing short of vandalism!” the friend was saying, holding up the glass to the light in illustration.
It seemed a shame to extricate him, just when he was having fun.
Fortunately, intercession appeared from another quarter. I watched with interest as a newcomer made his way from the cloakroom straight towards Serena. She had her back to him—and, incidentally, to Pammy and Nick. A potential love interest? Or simply a determined customer? It might be either.
The man was on the older side, but so was Serena’s most recent ex. Like her evil ex, this man was in his late thirties or early forties at a guess. But there the resemblance ended. Where the evil ex had been on the broader side, solidly built, this man was tall and willowy, with the sort of slender grace one associates with old movie stars premiering across from Grace Kelly. His clothes were as expensively casual as the evil ex’s had been deliberately formal; his cashmere sweater, black wool slacks, and sports coat all screamed Italian tailoring. His winter tan brought out the bright blue of his eyes. Definitely not the sort of man one would kick out of bed. If one went for the older type, that is. Which Serena quite definitely did.
On the other hand, the cost of his clothes suggested that if he wanted to place a three-foot-high squashed hamburger cast in distressed bronze in the center of his living room, he could very well afford to do so.
As the boys moved on from bubbly to the canapés, I watched as the new arrival tapped Serena casually on the shoulder, with the easy intimacy of someone who felt he had every right to do so. Curiouser and curiouser, as one of my favorite characters might say.
Serena had been so busy ignoring Nick and Pammy that she never saw him coming. She started visibly, spilling champagne in a sparkling stream down the front of her dress, droplets catching on fuzzy bits of cashmere where they glittered like sequins under the bright track lighting.
But even that couldn’t quite account for the look of distress on her face, or the way she backed away from him as though he were a poisonous serpent come to bite her. She pointedly ignored the cocktail napkin he held out to her, liquid dripping from the bottom of her glass onto the distressed wood floor as she stood staring at him from eyes that suddenly looked far too large for her thin face.
Who was he?
He looked familiar. He did. But I couldn’t place why. He wasn’t the evil ex. I should know. The evil ex had asked me out, and not, honesty compels me to add, for the sake of my personal charms. He had asked me out for the same reason he had dated and dumped Serena: in the hopes of getting closer to answers about the elusive—and potentially lucrative—Pink Carnation.
“Who is that?” I hissed, poking Colin in the arm.
“Huh?” said Colin, breaking off mid-sentence. He had been saying something about rugby. At least I assumed it was rugby. It was all gibberish to me, although his friend appeared to be agreeing heartily with whatever it was.
Fortunately, a tray of hors d’oeuvres came around and the other man—Berry? Budgy? It had been something like that—made a flying tackle for a tiny square of high-piled tuna tartare with a rosemary sprig sticking out of it, like the flag of a hostile power laying claim to a small island. It might be raw fish, but sustenance was sustenance and Budgy was obviously hungry. I could see the same maneuver being repeated all around the room by equally ravenous husbands, boyfriends, and dates, all who had been promised refreshments and served fish food.
Taking advantage of his companion’s momentary distraction, I jerked my head towards the other side of the room. “Who is that? With Serena?”
“Where?” he asked, absently rubbing his wounded arm.
I pointed.
Colin’s expression went from friendly to stony in an instant. It was a truly awe-inspiring transition.
“Damn,” he said.
That was certainly informative. “Well?” I prompted. “Who is he?”
Drawing in a long, irritated breath, Colin folded his arms across his chest. “That,” he said succinctly, “is my mother’s husband.”
Oh.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes,” agreed Colin grimly. “Oh.”
No wonder Serena was looking vaguely green. I only had the sketchiest knowledge of Colin’s recent family history, but from the little bits and pieces people had dropped, I had gathered that (a) Colin’s father had been diagnosed with some sort of cancer; and (b) Colin’s mother had decamped with another man, with whom she now lived in Italy.
From what I gathered, Serena had definitely been a daddy’s girl. She couldn’t have taken kindly to the immediate addition of a replacement. Especially when the replacement had to be a good decade younger.
I looked at the man standing next to Serena with renewed interest, trying to work out how old he must be in relation to Colin’s mother. She had looked awfully young in those pictures in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s albums, but even if she had been a teenage bride, she must be at least in her late forties by now, a good decade older than her second husband. No wonder Colin and Serena were so cagey about her second marriage; it must have been incredibly embarrassing having to introduce a stepfather as close in age to them as to their mother.
Not to mention that it had never been made entirely clear to me whether the second husband had made his way onto the scene before or after their father’s death. The impression I had gotten, although I couldn’t say with any authority how, was that Colin’s mother had bolted at the first hint of a lingering illness, abandoning her husband at his most vulnerable moment.
To be fair, though, Colin had never actually specified anything of the kind. That was all me reading between the lines. For all that he clearly wasn’t thrilled to see his mother’s husband in England, it sounded as though Colin had at least remained on speaking terms with his mother. When his mother had been involved in a car accident in Siena a few months ago, he had gone haring off to Italy to make sure she was okay, and I knew he had spent at least part of the Christmas holidays with her and the second husband. So the story couldn’t be that bad. Either that, or Colin had simply shrugged his shoulders, wrestled with his own demons, and taken the practical approach in coming to terms with his one remaining parent. Knowing Colin—or at least, beginning to know Colin—I could well believe that, too. If he had been the sort to hold a grudge, we wouldn’t be out together tonight.
That thought made me feel very warm and fuzzy and prepared to take a gene
rous approach to the rest of the world.
I linked my arm through Colin’s, letting my full weight rest against his side as I whispered, “Should I go rescue Serena?”
He considered it for a moment and then shook his head. “She’s going to have to get used to speaking to him sooner or later.”
As I watched, Colin’s mother’s husband turned to say something to a man on the other side of him, bringing his face fully into view. And as he did, that elusive resemblance clicked into place.
I had seen him before, but not in the flesh. He was considerably older now, taller, more filled out in the chest and shoulder, with a deeper tan and the beginning of a hint of gray in his smooth dark hair, but it was unmistakably the same man I had seen pressed between plastic in the pages of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s photo album.
The man married to Colin’s mother was Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s grandson Jeremy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Freddy’s hair looked obscenely golden against the swollen ruin of his face.
That wasn’t Freddy. It couldn’t be. Not that inert, bloated form, from which the stench of corruption was beginning to rise in the warmth of the October day. Freddy was—oh, Freddy was a dozen things, but none of them this.
This was someone else’s stinking flesh, not Freddy’s. Not Freddy who had always been so particular about his toilette. Even on the long voyage from England to Calcutta, he had been meticulous about bathing, using cologne to mask the deficiencies caused by a dearth of fresh water. Freddy would never have allowed his hair to go unbrushed, his features to be distorted, his flesh to decay. At any moment now, he was going to stroll up behind them, making a moue of distaste at the stinking lump of mortality in the palanquin, and say something like, Must we?
But it wasn’t Freddy’s voice Penelope heard behind her, it was Al ex’s, quietly asking, “What happened?”
“It was a snake.” Even Jasper Pinchingdale’s usual bravado was muted by the presence of death, although his formulaic hush didn’t quite mask an undertone of irritation. It was obvious that he considered it a glaring social solecism for his host to go and die on him in such an abrupt and inconsiderate manner.