Judith Krantz (61 page)

“The archive room,” she remembered. “How could I have forgotten? Where’s your key?”

As they unlocked the door to the archive room, they heard the unmistakable sound of water where there should be no water. Jazz held her breath in guilt as Casey switched on the lights. The archive room held the only irreplaceable things in the hacienda; it should have been the first room they checked. Relief crept slowly over her as the source of the leak was apparent. It came from the corner opposite the shelves of portfolios, where a stream of rainwater had already formed a large pool on the uneven floor, but the far wall behind the portfolios themselves showed no damp spots.

“Thank goodness, they’re safe,” she said with a sigh of relief.

“That leak’s going to spread,” Casey warned, “and new ones might start. We’d better move the portfolios someplace where we can keep our eyes on them and still stay warm.”

“Move them? The two of us? There are hundreds of them!”

“We’re strong enough,” he grinned.

“I used to be,” Jazz muttered, resigned, “before you started messing with me.”

“We still have time to mess around a little more before the roof falls in.”

“You climb that library ladder and hand them down to me,” Jazz answered. “When this is all finished, I’ll make lunch. Then we’ll see.”

Two hours later, weary but with a sense of a job well done, Casey and Jazz had moved all the portfolios to the living room of the hacienda, where they put them on the floor in the order in which they had been removed from their shelves. Jazz had separated the little brown portfolio that belonged to her great-grandmother, and placed it on the desk in her room. She’d remembered the charmingly frilly old valentines it held, and had formed a secret plan to recycle them, for surely Amilia wouldn’t mind and Valentine’s Day was coming next month.

It was late on Sunday night. After the rescue, she and Casey had celebrated their heroics by the fire with food and love and wine, remembering from time to time to rush around and empty buckets of rainwater from his bedroom and the archive room. It had been an exhausting day, and Casey was asleep again, this time in her bed. Jazz watched him in puzzlement. Was there some fundamental difference in the sexes that permitted a man to fall asleep instantly after making love on and off all during a rainy, constantly watchful and interrupted day, while a woman stayed awake, listening to the diminishing rain, feeling as overtired as a child after the excitement of Christmas, wishing she could sleep too, but unable to stop thinking about all the new marvels in her life? She felt she’d be up all night.

Maybe a dull book? She looked around the room and saw many books, not one of which had been bought because it promised boredom. She’d already
had a lulling bath; she’d tried counting down from a hundred, she’d tried imagining that she was descending in an elevator while visualizing the numbers of the floors, she’d tried imagining that she was on a giant ferris wheel going slowly backwards, but none of the familiar tricks worked.

Jazz slipped out of bed, picked up Amilia’s portfolio, and crept back under the down quilt. She remembered the letter from her great-great-grandmother and decided that an attempt to use her rusty high-school Spanish to make a translation into English, from a document written in elaborate handwriting, had to be the final answer to her insomnia. Her brain would shut down from the sheer tediousness of the endeavor, and she’d slip into the unconsciousness that all her senses craved.

Less than an hour later her eyes were half closed and her notes all but unintelligible. The letter had started out as a warm but conventionally formal welcome to the prospective new bride, Amilia Moncada y Rivera, from her future mother-in-law, Juanita Isabella Valencia Kilkullen. Apparently the two women were second cousins, a fact Jazz had never known. Jazz, her brain increasingly weary, had translated more and more roughly, and the next-to-last paragraph had been so difficult to translate that when she had it down on paper she gave up the task, rereading what she had just scrawled.

“Something something question mark, something something question mark,” Jazz muttered, turning out the light and pushing the yellow pad aside, with the letter folded into it. She was asleep before the pad slipped off the bed to the floor.

Her saleslady at Bergdorf’s was a tactful creature, Liddy Kilkullen reflected, but her tact had not been equal to the task of concealing her surprise when a customer who had never bought anything that wasn’t on sale headed straight toward the new resort clothes that had just come into the store, and asked to have them brought to her in the dressing room. The saleswoman had actually told her,
warned
her, no less, that these clothes were new and wouldn’t be marked down for months.

Of course she’d been kind to the foolish, flustered creature, Liddy thought, as she stretched out on her chaise longue in Fernanda’s guest room and sipped a cup of tea. She’d passed over the gaffe, pretending not to notice, said something vague about her ship coming in, and gone on to buy and buy and buy. She hadn’t bothered to glance at a single price tag. If something was becoming, she bought it; clothes for morning and afternoon and evening; ten times more clothes than she’d ever bought at one time before; the resort clothes that were always so much more experimental than the ordinary summer line, the clothes that she’d need when she flew to California to supervise her daughters.

Actually, Liddy admitted to herself, she didn’t actually
need
these new clothes right now. California in winter didn’t have resort weather, but something in between, weather that called for a suit and blouse with a warm coat for the evenings. She was perfectly aware that she’d used her trip as an excuse for a shopping binge with the only clothes in the city that weren’t on sale after Christmas, and she didn’t give a damn.

It was the only way she knew to celebrate her fortune, and she had to celebrate or bust. If she were a chocolate-eating woman, she’d have consumed enough chocolates to bring on a liver attack; if she were a drinker, she’d have spent the time in an alcoholic haze; if she were an eater, she’d be twenty pounds heavier than she had been when she’d struck her deal with Jimmy Rosemont. But the discipline of a lifetime had long ago caused her to lose whatever craving she might ever have had for food or drinks or sweets, and she wasn’t going to buy jewels yet, not until she had completed her new wardrobe.

Some women chose their clothes to show off their jewels, others selected jewels to complement their clothes, and she was of neither group, Liddy saw in a sudden burst of pleasurable insight. She was one of the very few whose clothes and jewels, no matter how brilliant, would always form a perfect background against which she herself would be the only object of attention.

So this was what real money could do. It could make her realize her potential in a way that had always been obscured by having to plot and plan how best to spend what little money she had. She’d constantly been fascinated by her rich friends, always wondered what it felt like,
really and truly felt like
, to be them, but she’d always known that there was no way to imagine or to understand something so central to a person’s inner core of self unless you had it yourself, unless you controlled it yourself, in a way that depended on no one else in the world.

She wondered what their money would do to Fernanda and Valerie. They would change, of course, but in what way? Unforeseen ways. Perhaps unfortunate ways, precipitate, unbecoming, unwelcome to her. It was that realization that had prompted her to decide to join them in California. The telephone wasn’t a satisfactory way to communicate with her daughters, and now that they had finally become the heiresses she had planned for them to be for so long, they needed her counsel and advice more than ever. For the last
three decades she had watched and observed the kind of life they were going to lead now, and she knew the traps that lay thick on the ground.

Yes, Liddy mused, if there was one thing she was an authority on, it was the way of life of the very rich. No one could be as objective about it as someone who had not been forced to be a—why not use the harshest word she could think of, since it no longer had the power to wound?—a hanger-on. True, she had been one who paid for her place in the world of the very rich, paid on a daily basis, with her accounts always neatly balanced, but a hanger-on nevertheless, not truly entitled.

But just as the legendary English tailor was never supposed to dun a rich man for his overdue bill, she would never have to balance her accounts again. Never again the charming, prompt thank-you notes, never again the flowers sent the day after a party, never again the wondering if she owed someone an invitation—from now on people would feel as if they
owed
her. Like a great beauty, a great star, or a great talent, a very rich woman could live carelessly, pleasing only when and if it pleased her to do so.

Startled, Liddy realized that she would never go back to Marbella. As if she had been making a conscious decision and had arrived at it carefully, she suddenly knew where she had chosen to live: San Clemente.

How funny, how wonderfully funny that now that she could live in style anywhere in the world, she would make a full circle and go back to a small town in California. But so long as Deems White was Governor of the state, so long as he and Nora kept a second home in San Clemente, she would be near him.

Would she ever learn to be absolutely honest with herself, Liddy wondered, smiling like a girl, as she slowly put the teacup down. Trying on clothes in the dressing room today, she had considered nothing but whether they would appeal to Deems. All those excellent reasons that explained how she could be essential to her daughters had very little to do with them and
everything to do with Deems. They could manage nicely for themselves, but her love needed her, and at last she was free to go to him.

Who, she wondered, was the top real-estate agent in San Clemente? The one who handled the very finest properties?

“I thought I’d never find a way to lure you away from Valerie,” Lady Georgina Rosemont said to Fernanda.

“I thought you liked her,” Fernanda answered, as the two women drove back to the Ritz. Georgina had bought her way solidly through the intriguing collection of antiques at Gep Durenburger’s shop in San Juan Capistrano, leaving the charming place quite stripped of its best objects and furniture.

“I do,” Georgina replied, “but somehow nothing’s quite as much fun when she’s along as when it’s just the two of us. I feel a hundred years younger than Val, don’t you? Thank goodness the old dear decided that she didn’t want to take a busman’s holiday. Wait till my precious assistants see that huge crate that they’re going to ship to New York from Durenburger’s—they’ll have to start showing a tad more respect for me.”

“Oh, Georgie, they adore you,” Fernanda protested. She looked at the petite, auburn-haired Englishwoman in ever-renewed amazement. The casualness with which she wore her unfathomable beauty never changed, she didn’t have a self-conscious bone in her body, and her attitude toward herself was one of constant mild amusement.

“I’m just being honest, Fernie. You know as well as I do that I’m not the genuine article, not a real decorator … Jimmy just wants to be sure I have something jolly to do. When it stops being jolly, I’ll stop and find something else. Perhaps a perfect little flower shop. I could bring back nosegays singlehandedly. Whatever they are.”

“Why not a tearoom?”

“Oh, splendid! I’ll toast the muffins and split the crumpets and you can preside over the teapot. Would
you like that? We could go into business together. Seriously, Fernie, it would be fun to work together, wouldn’t it? You’ve got to have something to do, you know, you can’t just sit around and count your money.”

“I’ve never done anything. Why do I have to start now, just because I’m going to be filthy rich?”

“It looks better if you make an effort, pitch in, show the flag, all that nonsense—you don’t want to have to be on all those frightful charity committees, do you? Selling tickets to balls, buying tickets for balls, and then actually going to the balls, with never an end in sight? It’ll give us the perfect excuse—‘Sorry, ladies, we can’t possibly come out to lunch, we have to bake the scones and then there’s the washing up.’ ”

“I thought you liked those parties and balls … you do them all so well.” Fernanda gave the car to a valet parker and the two women started for the elevator at the Ritz, where the Rosemonts had their suite on the same floor as Fernanda’s and Valerie’s.

“Oh, most of that is for Jimmy. I suppose I don’t mind, or at least I didn’t last year, when it was still fresh and a bit of a novelty. Now I’m beginning to find it all just too much—boring, useless and exhausting. I’d far rather just send them the money and not go. Come on in, sweet, and we’ll order some tea and we can see if they serve it as well here as we’re going to serve it in our own little shop.”

“Where’s Jimmy?”

“Off to San Francisco for the day. He won’t be back till after dinner. Meetings and more meetings … you know Jimmy.”

The two women drank their tea and ate their thin sandwiches in relative silence. Georgina seemed plunged in contemplation of the crazy new tea-shop idea, Fernanda thought, and she was content just to look at her and admire her. Georgina was twenty-nine, ten years younger than she, Fernanda realized with surprise, yet they always felt so comfortable together
that it was hard to believe they weren’t the same age. Either there was something very grown-up about Georgina, or else, she, Fernanda, was childish. Probably both.