Scruples Two (21 page)

Even if he were fool enough to give her all of his heart, to think of marrying her, even though she might agree to marry him with the best will in the world, no one could ever expect it to work, Quentin told himself, not a chance in bloody hell, and he knew it to the bottom of his soul.

No one had warned him, he reflected miserably as he found a parking place, that a single taste of the California lifestyle would end up giving him such problems. Why couldn’t he have stumbled on that big, bovine Anglo-Saxon blonde he’d wanted, instead of a quicksilver blend of Celt and Italian with larcenous eyes and a pickpocket mouth?

Even now, after only a month, Gigi was too much for him by half, and she wasn’t even trying to be reasonable. She was too eager for his kisses to listen properly whenever he made an attempt to tell her that they should slow down, go easy, cool it. Gigi was reckless right up to, and almost past, the edge, blithely braving any hazard, seizing any chance to touch him, to caress him, even when there were other people in the room, drunk on the excitement of a kind of danger that was utterly new for her. Quentin knew that one day they’d be discovered, one day, sooner or later, it was inevitable that they’d be caught if they carried on as madly as they had been doing.

The summer still stretched ahead, over two months before classes started in September, and even then Gigi would be sleeping at home every night. Quentin Browning told himself that he was running a fearful risk that mounted every day and that if—no, when—their affair came to light the blame would all fall on him, for he was an adult and Gigi had been a virgin when he came to the great house, this almost-child who was the darling of every member of the staff and the most prized possession of the frighteningly powerful Mrs. Ikehorn, who would ruin him for life.

He pushed two shopping carts to the meat section, where he would instruct the butcher exactly how to prepare the particular cuts of loin of veal he needed for tonight, and then go about his shopping, picking up the meat on his way out. As he passed a towering display of canned tomatoes, Gigi approached him, sashaying down the aisle with imperturbable poise and dancing Jazz Baby step, her marigold hair catching and holding the lights of the huge market, as if she were on center stage. As she came abreast of him she stopped and looked at him with surprise. “Fancy bumping into you here,” Gigi said, swiftly bending down to pick up a can. She managed to brush his knuckles with a kiss before she threw the tomatoes into one of his carts.

“Gigi! Be reasonable, for Christ’s sake. What if one of Mrs. Ikehorn’s friends saw us?”

“Billy’s friends don’t do their own shopping,” she answered, shrugging impatiently and moving toward him with purposeful intention in her eyes. “Give me a real kiss, my sweetest darling, there’s nobody around. I need a kiss so badly, I have to have it.”

“Stop it!” Quentin gave her an icy, angry look, abandoned the carts and disappeared around another aisle as quickly as his long legs could take him.

“I’m really disappointed about Quentin,” Josie Speilberg sighed to Gigi, a day later when Gigi appeared in her office to ask her to renew her Automobile Club card.

“Didn’t Billy’s dinner party turn out perfectly?”

“He’s resigned, is what he’s done. He’s leaving tomorrow—not even giving a week’s notice. It’s incredibly thoughtless and it just couldn’t be more inconvenient, there’s never anybody halfway decent looking for a job at this time of the year, but he was absolutely adamant in spite of all my advice.”

“Advice?” Gigi could only echo Josie.

“Obviously I asked him to give me a single reason why he’d leave this job so quickly, particularly when he’d promised to stay for at least a year, and the only reason he could give me—at least he sort of hinted at it, in his confusion, but I drew my own conclusions—was that he’d gotten in over his head with some girl or other and he didn’t know how to get out of it without hightailing it home to England immediately. I suggested a dozen different things he could say which would let her down lightly so that he could stay on—Dear Abby has nothing on me in that department—but he kept insisting that he had to leave. Maybe she’s pregnant … I’ll just bet that’s what it is. I don’t know what Mrs. Ikehorn will say when she gets back from Hong Kong and finds another new face in the kitchen, assuming that I can find one. Isn’t it a shame when people let you down that way?”

“I won’t believe it!”

“That’s exactly what I said to him … Gigi! Wait, leave me your old card. Oh, really …” Josie Speilberg looked at her empty office. Why couldn’t people be more organized? Why did everyone make life difficult for her? Why was everybody in such a rush and at the same time so stubborn? Now if she ran the world …

Gigi locked herself in her room and abandoned herself to a torrent of grief so dreadful that she had to stuff the edge of a sheet in her mouth to keep her cries from drawing the attention of the maids who passed in the corridor. She was curled up on the bed in a tight, shaking ball of frightening anguish, the bedspread covering her entirely, trying to hold herself together, hugging herself with all her strength to contain the violence of the pain that felt like a wild animal, suddenly uncaged, trying to eat its way out of the trap of her chest. Yet her mind never stopped working. She never doubted for a second that Quentin was going to leave the next day. If she hadn’t happened to talk to Josie today, he would have disappeared without saying anything to her.

He didn’t love her. He’d never loved her. He wanted out and he was too cowardly to face her and tell her. He thought she’d make a scene, he knew she’d try to stop him, he hadn’t even been kind enough to lie to her, to invent a story, a family emergency she could believe. Why hadn’t he said that he’d had a phone call from home, that he had to rush home to help out his father? Did he think she’d insist on going with him? Probably … probably … that must have been exactly what he thought. So he wasn’t being entirely cowardly, just taking his precautions, to escape her unwanted.… attentions. Unwanted, oh yes, unwanted, with just the same cold withdrawal he’d shown her at Gelson’s the other day. She could have endured anything, even his telling her that he didn’t love her, if he’d only had the respect—yes, the basic respect for her—to sit down and tell her how he felt. Just because she was in love with him didn’t mean that she couldn’t accept the truth. He didn’t owe her his love.

After a long while Gigi stopped weeping and lay still, trying to think what to do. If only she could hide in her room until Quentin was gone, stay safely here and not let anybody see her face, but if she did, no matter what health reason she gave, from cramps to a head cold, Josie would quickly put two and two together and know exactly what had happened. Such humiliation was worse than anything she could imagine, even though she was sure that Josie would never reveal her secret, never discuss it, never even look as if she knew it.

In four hours she had a cooking lesson, and if Quentin didn’t want her to ask questions, he’d be in the kitchen waiting for her, just as usual. Of course she could cancel the lesson, Josie would think nothing of that, but everything in her rebelled against that thought. She could retrieve nothing now, except her pride, the self-respect that had been stripped from her. No, thought Gigi, going into her bathroom to soak her face in cold water until she could see through the slits of her eyes, no, she would cancel nothing, she too would behave as usual … or almost as usual.

As soon as she’d managed to make herself presentable, Gigi slipped out of the house unnoticed, and made a lightning trip to Santa Monica Seafood. She returned to the house at an hour when she was certain that Quentin would have left the kitchen and taken himself off someplace where she couldn’t find him, before her cooking lesson would force him back to the kitchen.

She carried four large bags into the kitchen, put on her apron and began the long process of laying out everything she would need, as precise as a scrub nurse in an operating room, glad of the necessity to focus her mind. Deciding what she must do in advance, for she intended to do only the minimum before her lesson, she prepared a savory fish stock, using chopped vegetables, spices, wine, clam juice and water into which she put all the bones, heads, tails, skins and trimmings she removed from the many pounds of red snapper, halibut, pompano, scallops and perch she had bought. In another pot she steamed the shrimps, clams and mussels in their shells, while she plunged the lobster into a third pot of boiling water.

Gigi left the broth to simmer for a half hour before she strained it and replaced it on the stove in the largest pot in the kitchen. She retrieved the cooked lobster and, when it was cool, divided it into easily handled pieces. She made another rapid check of the kitchen table and glanced at the clock. She went to the intercom and buzzed Burgo, who always, at this hour, put his feet up in his room.

“Burgo, will you come watch my cooking lesson today?”

“I can’t stand it, Gigi, not even for you. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but enough’s enough.”

“I won’t be taking a lesson today, Burgo, I’ll be giving one,” she said in a tone of voice that made him put his feet down with a bang.

“All right! Got your Irish back, have you, kid? How much of an audience do you want?”

“Everyone you can round up, including Josie and all the gardeners.”

“You’ve got ’em.”

“Just come one minute early, and Burgo, if Quentin tries to leave, don’t let him.”

“Man bites dog, huh? High time, is all I can say.”

“I’m a slow study.”

“But not completely stupid, sweetheart.”

“I’m counting on you.”

“You always could,” he said and hung up, mirthful for the first time since the day of the white-on-white cake. It took Gigi an awfully long time to understand men, he thought, but she’d been too young and innocent to realize that playing dumb wasn’t the only or best answer when you wanted to get someone’s attention.

Quentin Browning spent two hours on the sands of the Santa Monica beach, taking his last, desperately gloomy look at the Pacific. He’d never come here again. He’d become a landlocked man, surrounded by cold seas, with only memories of Gigi. Of course he’d marry one day and he’d be happy and the details of his month here would fade. That inevitable forgetting, he mused, was the worst part about it. He couldn’t afford to love Gigi and he didn’t dare to tell her. He might be a shit—okay, he
was
a shit—but he was a very smart shit to get out now, painlessly, quickly, effortlessly.

When he drove back and approached the kitchen he heard the unaccustomed sound of many voices. Good, he thought, thank God he wouldn’t be alone with her. He didn’t know how he could go through with another lesson alone, but he’d had no choice. He walked into the large room and saw Gigi standing at the kitchen table, barely visible through the expectant crowd of staff that surrounded her.

“What’s going on?” he asked one of the maids, but she smiled at him without answering. She knew only that it was a break in the day’s work, some sort of exhibition of Gigi’s, like the ones she gave when Jean-Luc had been there.

“Hey, be careful!” Quentin shouted as Gigi picked up a particularly sharp knife, but before he could reach her she had started to slice leeks into the thinnest of strips, her knife moving so quickly and professionally that he stood utterly still, so astonished that he couldn’t move or speak.

In seconds the julienned leeks were ready and Gigi was dicing tomatoes, mincing garlic, chopping fennel, pulverizing bay leaves, chopping onions, grating orange rind and grinding pepper. She was doing all those various operations simultaneously, or so it seemed to those who were fascinatedly watching her flying hands and her flying feet and the flash and glitter and clicking and flicker of her many tools. The expert rhythm of her movements never faltered for a second as she measured celery seed, opened a package of saffron and extracted a teaspoon of the precious spice, scraped tomato paste out of a can, and finally heaped everything she’d prepared into a large casserole in which hot olive oil was waiting. Then, with careless precision, she shook a few tablespoons of salt into the oil from the palm of her hand before giving the mixture a businesslike stir.

“Gigi …” Quentin began, thinking he must say something, almost anything, but she paid no attention to him or anyone else as she attacked the pile of freshly cleaned fish, fileting them with virtuoso attention, the most deft of fingers and a shining shimmy of knives that she wielded with the authority of a master and the cool proficiency of an authority. When the fish lay ready she diced those that cooked slowly into one-inch cubes and cut the rest into two-inch slices, accomplishing the task so quickly that five pounds of fish took her less than three minutes to reduce to size.

Only when she had slid the fish into the hot broth on the stove did Gigi so much as glance at Quentin. He was standing with his arms folded tightly across his chest, glaring at her as he tried and failed to conceal the anger of someone who realizes he’s been the victim of a huge joke. But there was unquestioned professional admiration in his eyes, and that was the only thing Gigi needed to see.

“Did any of you know,” Gigi asked the room at large, “that bouillabaisse was, or so they say, first invented by some kindly angels who brought it to the Three Marys who happened to be shipwrecked somewhere in the South of France? I didn’t know that sacred personages got hungry like the rest of us, but why not, after all? Of course this soup won’t be as good as it would be if I had Mediterranean rockfish that were caught fresh this morning, but I’m doing the best I can and I believe it’ll be fairly tasty—there’s enough for everybody. Oh, Quentin, would you bring me a lot of bowls, heat them first, please, and slice that French bread over there while I make the garlic mayonnaise—it wouldn’t be traditional bouillabaisse, would it, chef, without the
rouille?”

Quentin turned on his heel and started to leave the kitchen. “I’d bring the bowls she asked for,” Burgo said quietly, blocking his path, “and I’d slice the bread too, if I were you.”