Honor Thyself (21 page)

“We both were,” he added sadly, remembering all that had happened after that.

“Something happened. You had to leave.”

“Yes, I did.” He was amazed that she remembered. He had almost forgotten it himself, although it had been an enormous drama at the time. They had radioed him on the boat. He had had to leave her at the airport in Nice, and had left on a military plane himself.

“Why did you leave? Someone was shot, I think.” She was frowning, trying to remember as she stared at him. “Who was shot?” She had to know.

“The president of France. It was an assassination attempt, which failed. During the Bastille Day parade on the Champs Elysées. I should have been there, but I was with you instead.”

“You were in government… something very high up and very secret. What were you?… Was it secret police?” She was squinting at him from her bed.

“That was one of my duties. I was the Minister of the Interior,” he said quietly, and she nodded. It came back to her now. There was so much she didn't recall about her own life, but she remembered that. They had sailed the boat into the harbor, and left for the airport in a cab. He had left her minutes later, and she had watched him take off in the military plane, and gone back to Paris on her own. He had been apologetic about leaving her that way, and there had been soldiers around him with machine guns. She wasn't frightened by it, but it seemed strange.

“There was something else like that … another time… someone was hurt, and you left me somewhere, on a trip… we were skiing, and you left by helicopter.” She could still see it rising in the air, blowing snow everywhere.

“The president had a heart attack, and I left to be with him.”

“That was at the end, wasn't it?” She looked sad.

He nodded, silent at first, remembering it too. It was the incident that had brought him to his senses and reminded him that he couldn't leave his job, and he belonged to France. They owned him, no matter how much he loved her, and wanted to leave everything for her. He couldn't in the end. They had had a little more time after that, but not much. And his wife had been making a lot of trouble then too. It had been an impossible time, for both of them. “Yes, it was nearly the end. There were two years between those two events, and a lot of wonderful times.”

“That's all I remember,” she said, watching him, wondering what the two years had been like. She had a sense that they had been exciting, because he was, but hard at times, which he was too. As he had just told her, he had had a complicated life. Politics, and the drama that went with it, had been his life's blood. But for a time, so had she. She had been the heart that kept him alive.

“We spent Christmas in Gstaad together the first year, with the children. And then you started another movie in England, and I came over to see you every weekend. When you came back, I wanted to go to the lawyer to get divorced, and my wife begged me not to again. She said she couldn't face it. We'd been married for twenty-nine years, and I felt I owed her something, some respect at least, since I no longer loved her. She knew that, she knew how much I loved you, and she didn't hold it against me. She was very compassionate about it. I was planning to leave my job in the government that year, it would have been the perfect time to end it with her, and then I got named for another term. You and I had been together for a year by then, the happiest year of my life. You agreed to give it another six months. And I had every intention of getting divorced. Arlette promised not to stop it, but then there were scandals in the government involving other people, and I knew it was the wrong time. I promised that if you gave me another year, I would resign and come to the States with you.”

“You would never have done it. And you'd have been miserable in Los Angeles.”

“I felt I owed my country something … and my wife… I couldn't just walk away from either of them, without fulfilling my duty, but I had every intention of leaving and coming with you, and then…” He stopped for a moment, and Carole remembered what had happened. “Something terrible happened …”

“Your daughter died … in a car accident … I remember … it was awful …” Their eyes met and held, and she reached out and touched his hand.

“She was nineteen. It happened in the mountains. She went skiing with friends. You were wonderful to me. But I couldn't leave Arlette then. It would have been inhuman.” Carole remembered his saying that to her.

“You always told me you would leave her. Right from the beginning. You said your marriage to her was over, but it wasn't. You always felt you owed something more to her. She always wanted another six months, and you gave it to her. You always protected her, and not me. I remember it now. I was always waiting for you to divorce her. You lived with me, but you were married to her. And to France. You always had to give one more year to France, and six more months to your wife, and suddenly it was two years later.” She looked at him then, stunned at what she had just remembered. “And I was pregnant.” He nodded, with a look of anguish. “I begged you to divorce her then, didn't I?” He nodded again, looking humbled. “I had a morals clause in my contracts then, and if anyone had found out I was living with a married man, and having his baby, my career would have been over. I would have been blackballed, or out of work at least. I risked that for you,” she said sadly. They had both known the risks going in. His country would have forgiven his having a mistress and cheating on his wife, it had been perfectly acceptable in France. Her country, or her industry at least, wouldn't have forgiven her an affair with a married man, and being his mistress, involved in a public scandal with a high government official. Let alone an illegitimate baby. The morals clause in her contracts had been rigid. Over night she would have become a pariah. She had risked it because he had insisted that he would get divorced, but he had never even gone to see an attorney. His wife had begged him not to, so he never did. He just kept buying time with Carole. Always more.

“What happened to the baby?” she asked in a strangled voice, looking up at him. Some things were still lost for her, although there was so much about it that was coming back now.

“You lost it. A boy. You were almost six months pregnant. You fell off the ladder, decorating the tree at Christmas. I tried to catch you, but you fell right past me. You were in the hospital for three days, but we lost him. Chloe never knew you were pregnant, but Anthony did. We explained it to him. He asked me if we were going to get married, and I said we would. And then my daughter died and Arlette had a nervous breakdown and begged me not to. She threatened suicide, and you had lost the baby by then, so our getting married wasn't as pressing. I begged you to understand. I was going to resign in the spring, and by then I thought Arlette could survive it. I needed more time, or at least that was what I said.” He looked at Carole then with mournful eyes. “In the end, I think you did the right thing.” It killed him to say it. “I don't think I'd ever have left her. I meant to. I believed I would, but in fact I just couldn't. That, or my job. I didn't retire for another six years after you left Paris. And I'm not sure I could ever have left Arlette. There would have always been something, some reason why she wouldn't let me leave her. I don't even think she loved me, not as you did, or as I loved you. She just didn't want to lose me to another woman. If you'd been French, you would have put up with it. But you weren't. It all sounded like lies to you, and some of them were. I just didn't have the courage to tell you I couldn't do it. I lied to myself more than I did to you. When I told you I'd divorce her, I meant it. I hated you for leaving me. I thought you were being cruel to me. But you were right to do it. I would have broken your heart in the end, even more than I did. The last six months were a nightmare. Constant fights, constant crying. You were devastated after you lost the baby. So was I.”

“What finally did it? What made me leave?” Her voice was a whisper.

“Another day, another lie, another delay. You just got up one morning and started packing. You waited till the end of the school year. I'd done nothing about the divorce, and they were asking me to do another term in the ministry. I tried to explain it to you, and you wouldn't listen. You left a week later. I took you to the airport, and neither of us could stop crying. You told me to call you, if I got divorced. I called, but I never got divorced, and I stayed on in the government. They needed me. And she did too, in her own way. She didn't love me, but we were used to each other. She felt I owed it to her to stay with her.

“I called you several times when you were back in L.A., and then you stopped taking my calls. I heard you had sold the house. I went there to look at it one day. It nearly broke my heart when I remembered how happy we'd been there.”

“I went to see it that day, before the bomb exploded in the tunnel. I was on my way back to the hotel when it happened,” she said, and he nodded. It had been a place of refuge for both of them, a haven, the love nest they had shared and where they had conceived their baby. She couldn't help wondering what would have happened if she'd had his child, if he would have finally divorced his wife. Probably not. He was French. Frenchmen had mistresses and illegitimate children. They had done it for centuries, and nothing much had changed. It was still acceptable, but not to Carole. She was a farm girl from Mississippi, no matter how famous she was, and she didn't want to live with another woman's husband. She had told him that right from the beginning. “We never should have started,” she said, looking at him from where she lay with her head on the pillow.

“We had no choice,” Matthieu said simply. “We were too much in love with each other not to.”

“I don't believe that,” she said firmly. “I think people always have choices. We did. We made the wrong ones, and we paid a high price for them. I'm not sure, but I don't think I ever forgot you. I didn't get over you for a long time, until I met my last husband.” She remembered that clearly now.

“I read that you got married, about ten years ago,” he said, and she nodded. “I was happy for you”—and then he smiled ruefully—“and very jealous. He's a lucky man.”

“No, he isn't. He died two years ago of cancer. Everyone says he was a wonderful person.”

“That's why Jason was here. I wondered why.”

“He would have come anyway. He's a good man too.”

“You didn't think that eighteen years ago,” Matthieu said, looking irritated. He wasn't sure she would have said the same about him, even today, that he was a good man. In her eyes, he hadn't been. She had said so at the time. She said he had lied to her and misled her, and was a dishonest, dishonorable person. It had cut him to the quick at the time. No one had ever accused him of that in his life, but she was right.

“I think he's a good person now,” Carole said about Jason. “We all pay for our sins in the end. The Russian girl left him by the time I left Paris.”

“Did he try to come back to you?” Matthieu was curious about it.

“Apparently, he did. He says I didn't want him. I was probably still in love with you at the time.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Yes, I do,” she said honestly. “I wasted two and a half years of my life with you, and probably another five getting over you. That's a long time to give to a man who wouldn't leave his wife.” And then she thought about it and wondered what had happened. “Where is she now?”

“She died a year ago, after a long illness. She was very sick for the last three years of her life. I'm glad I was with her. I owed her that. We were married forty-six years in the end. It wasn't the marriage I would have wanted, or the one I thought I'd get when I married her at twenty-one, but it was the one we had. We were friends. She was very elegant about you. I don't think she forgave me, but she understood. She knew how in love with you I was. I never felt that way about her. She was a very cold person. But she was a decent, honest woman.” So he had stayed, just as she'd always thought he would. And even he had said she'd done the right thing by leaving. She had the answers now, the ones she'd come to Paris for. That it had been too late for her with Jason, by the time he came back. She no longer loved him, and she couldn't have stopped him from marrying the Russian supermodel. She had no choice there, and by the time she did, she didn't want him. She didn't even want him now. It was too late. And all she would ever have been to Matthieu was his mistress. He would never have left his wife until she died. Carole felt she understood that when she left Paris, which was why she had. But it was only now that she knew it was the right decision. He had confirmed it to her, which was a gift of sorts, long after the fact.

A lot of it had come back now, some of the events, and too many of the feelings. She could almost taste her disappointment and despair when she had finally given up and left him. He had very nearly destroyed her, and her career. He had even disappointed her children. Whatever his intentions had been in the beginning, or his love for her, he hadn't been honorable with her. At least what Jason had done, no matter how awful it had been for her, had been up front and honest. He had divorced her and married the other woman. Matthieu never had.

“What are you doing now? Are you still in government?” she asked.

“I was until ten years ago, when I retired and went back to my family law firm. I practice with two of my brothers.”

“And you were the most powerful man in France. You controlled everything then, and you loved it.”

“Yes, I did.” He was honest about that at least, and he had been honest about the rest of it now too. It proved her right finally, but hearing it even now was painful. She remembered too well how much she had loved him, and how badly he had hurt her. “Power is like a drug to men. It's hard to give up. I was addicted to it. But I was even more addicted to you. It nearly killed me when you left me. But I still couldn't divorce her, or give up my job.”

“I never wanted you to give up your job. That wasn't the issue. But I did want you to divorce her.”

“I couldn't.” He hung his head as he said it, and then looked her in the eye again. “I didn't have the courage.” It was an enormous admission, and Carole didn't answer for a minute.