The Jewels of Tessa Kent (13 page)

“Why, Luke, can you possibly have been reading history?” Lean asked in amusement.

“Certainly. Enough so that I know what happens to Mary after the film’s over. I don’t have tunnel vision, unlike you, David, I get interested in these characters. When you’re finished with Mary you’ll be roaring off with another script and another bunch of actors, forgetting that poor girl imprisoned by her cousin for twenty years, you can’t deny that.”

“You make me feel like a savage,” he laughed.

“All directors are savages, couldn’t be such heartless buggers if they weren’t, letting Miss Kent stand there covered in goose bumps. You’re a disgrace. I’m almost ashamed to know you. However, in view of the past, dinner tonight?”

“Of course.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Blake,” Tessa said, resisting the pull of the wardrobe mistress. Maybe he’ll invite me too, she thought. “How should I get your coat back to you?”

“Don’t give it a thought, I have others. Anyway, aren’t you and I planning on dinner tomorrow night? We can discuss it then.”

“You’re staying around?” Lean asked, in surprise.

“Indefinitely. If I’m welcome.”

“I warn you, one false step and I’ll glue you to the floor.”

“A small price to pay.”

“Tell me about her, David,” Luke Blake asked as they sat down to dinner, without formality or preliminary.

“You might at least ask how I am, and how the film’s
going, it’s your twenty-five million pounds that’s paying for it, as I remember.”

“Bloody details. Tell me about Tessa Kent and stop playing games, cobber,” Luke said, grinning fondly at the great director.

“She’s out of your class, boy.”

“Who decided that?”

“Everyone. I’ve known you too long. You have a bad record. Forty-five years old and never married, the man who’s kept half the available great ladies of the last quarter century. A famous moving target who, to my knowledge, has never come close to love as we mortals define it. You’re asking about a barely twenty-year-old kid who’s more innocent than any actress I’ve ever worked with, a girl who still lives at home. Not your kind of material, old friend, not in your wildest dreams. Not bedable, not keepable, not obtainable at any price.”

“So it would seem.”

“Don’t even think about it,” he said warningly.

“And I thought you were a pal, David.”

“As a pal, I’m asking you an important question: Why make yourself miserable? There are some things in life, even in the life of Luke Blake, that not only can’t happen and won’t happen, but shouldn’t happen, and Tessa Kent is one of them.”

“ ‘Shouldn’t’? I don’t see where you get the authority—or the bloody nerve—to make that judgment.”

“The age difference.”

“Besides that?” he said, waving it away.

“She’s a virgin.”

“I have to admit that you’re never wrong on that score.”

“And a Catholic.”

“Well, so am I as a matter of fact, lapsed thirty years ago, but still a cradle Catholic, to say nothing of having been a splendidly efficient altar boy.”

“You’d never set out to seduce a twenty-year-old virgin, Luke, that’s just not your style.” Lean laughed.

“You’re right, I’m basically a good sort of chap. What I can’t stand about you, cobber, is that you know all my weaknesses, all the decent things about me I try to hide. They could hurt my captain-of-industry image.”

“Not fair, is it?”

“Not at all. Where’d the whiskey get to?”

“The waiter’s bringing it. How’s the beer business, Luke?”

“Better than ever. Who would have thought, when my sainted great-granddad started making the stuff, that Australians would drink absolutely any amount they could get?”

“Anybody who had brains.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Dry, hot, thirsty work, being an Aussie. It turned out to be a lot better business move than if he’d tried to find gold the way everyone else was doing at the time.” Luke laughed.

“Are you the richest man in Australia, Luke?”

“Damn close, David, but not my fault, just born into the right family. Beer was so damn good to Great-granddad, David, that the next generation was able to buy the gold and copper mines other men had discovered. Then Granddad expanded into railroads and cattle ranching and timber, leaving me old dad to move right into the oil companies and the steel mills—amazingly complicated, a fascinating business. What’s more, we’re still selling beer to the whole world.”

“What about that guy they call Bad Dennis Brady?”

“He’s probably richer than I am, but he’s a loafer, not interested in making more money, spends all his time on the Riviera gambling, lets his board of directors make all the decisions. You’d never catch me doing that. I think of myself as the company’s chief troubleshooter, and we have companies all over the world now.”

“Don’t you consider your investing in pictures gambling?”

“It’s my hobby, cobber. Or call it informed risk taking.
With you, the risk is so substantially reduced that it almost qualifies as another business.”

“Show business is always a risk, trust me. Your hobby’s still a hobby. Shall we look at the menu?”

“I’m going to be late,” Tessa moaned in agitation to Fiona, who was helping her get dressed.

“So what, he should understand that you’ve been having a baby all day and it takes a heap of cleaning up to look good after that kind of hard labor.”

“I hate being late,” Tessa said, frantically trying to brush the last of the tangles out of her hair. “The hair stylist sprayed my hair until it was plastered down, and the makeup artist went overboard—she made me look as if I were being tortured to death instead of just having contractions.”

“You look gorgeous now, for God’s sake,” Fiona said. “You’ve been fussing for an hour. Sit still in front of the mirror, I want to show you something important.” As Tessa obediently looked at herself in the mirror, Fiona put her finger on Tessa’s nose, just below her eye, and traced the shape of the bone leading to her eyebrow and her eyebrow itself. “This happens to be one of the most bewitching curves on any face in history, a space unpoetically called an eye socket that you’ve grown up with and take totally for granted. So stop fussing with your hair, Tessa. What man would care about your hair when you have those eye sockets? And I won’t even mention your smile, you know too much about it already. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Luke Blake’s got to be more than twice your age, and let me tell you, the man’s been around the block a time or two or ten.”

“You’re nothing but a common gossip, but since you grew up reading the English tabloid press, I shouldn’t be surprised.” Tessa stared at her eye sockets with new interest. Could Fiona possibly be right?

“Hah! Gossip my ass! If he dropped dead tonight, his
New York Times
obit would start, ‘Luke Blake, major Australian industrialist and world-class pussy-hound, died in Edinburgh yesterday.’ ”

“Fiona, why are you such a spoilsport? Can’t you let me enjoy myself? I’ve never gotten dressed for a real date before and you know it. All I’m doing is having dinner with a man who was nice enough to try to keep me warm.”

“I’m trying to warn you, in my own subtle way.”

“You think he’s going to try to add me to his list of conquests?”

“ ‘Think’? I haven’t the slightest doubt of his motives. I bet he’s never bought a woman dinner without the intention of getting her into bed in the back of his mind—no, make that the front of his mind. And succeeding nine point nine times out of ten.”

“Fiona, have you ever gone out with a man without the possibility of sex, not necessarily that night, but maybe, just maybe, sex
sometime
, entering into the disgusting swamp of your brain?”

“Oh! Shit!”

“Aha!”

“You’re right. I’m as bad as any man ever born. That is if we’re not considering obvious noncandidates, like, oh, let’s see, the local minister, or college professors, or my best friends’ fathers, men like that.”

“I wouldn’t trust you with any of the categories you just mentioned, except my own father.” Tessa laughed, doing up her black velvet pants and standing so that Fiona could zip her into her black velvet Regency-cut jacket, trimmed with a heavy white-lace standup collar, and cuffs that fell to her fingers.

“Come to think of it … yeah, college professors …” She hummed thoughtfully. “Of course, I never went to college, so I wouldn’t know.”

“Neither did I. Never even finished high school. But there were a couple of cute nuns at Marymount …”

“Go, meet that man, Tessa, you fool.” Fiona shooed her out of their suite. “He’s still waiting in the lobby.
Shall I stay up for you to come home so you can tell me all about it?”

“Goodnight, Fiona. See you tomorrow.”

“Thank you for the thermal long johns and the electrically heated socks,” Tessa said as she sat down to dinner in the small, perfectly appointed French restaurant with tables set at a pleasant distance from each other. “They came this morning first thing.”

“Did they help?” Luke asked, barely able to speak as he looked at her face framed in white lace. She was like a portrait of a young Renaissance princess, so radiantly, luminously beautiful that you could study the painting for hours, yearning to have been alive when she existed in real time.

“Actually, I had to take them off after the first half hour. Mr. Lean’s childbirth scene was messy, sweaty stuff, but the baby’s going to be born tomorrow, thank goodness, and after that they’ll be more useful than you can imagine.”

“How does a virgin know how to play a woman having a baby?”

“Exactly how do you know I’m a virgin?”

“Oh.” He fell silent and dropped his eyes in embarrassment.

“Is it common knowledge, does it show somewhere, or did you just assume it?” Tessa demanded, her eyes flashing mischief.

“David told me,” he admitted.

“Out of the blue? As if virgins are as rare as unicorns and you had to be alerted when there’s one in the neighborhood, like a special tourist attraction?”

“Actually he was warning me not to pursue you.”

“I hope you told him to mind his own damn business.”

“Something more or less like that.”

“Does he also think I’m not old enough to be let out alone with such a hardened sinner as you?”

“Definitely that, at the very least. Who told you I was a hardened sinner?”

“Everybody. It’s common knowledge, as famous as my deplorable virginity.”

“Well, that makes us even, doesn’t it? Two of a kind? Two of an opposite kind, that is.” I’m babbling, he thought. I’m not making sense, except, I don’t feel foolish.

“That makes us people who shouldn’t even be having dinner together,” Tessa said serenely.

“Is that why I feel so blazingly happy with you?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders in an eloquent gesture of lyrical, shameless ignorance. “I don’t know you at all, certainly not what makes you happy. I just know you’re kind and good and I feel something with you I don’t feel with anybody else, not even Roddy.”

“ ‘Roddy’?” he asked, feeling a shaft of jealously more intense than he’d experienced in forty-five years.

“Roddy Fensterwald. He directed my first two pictures.”

“I know him, great guy,” Luke signed in relief. “What is it you feel with me that you don’t feel with Roddy?”

“Safe,” she said quietly. It took all her courage, but she was determined to tell him. “Totally and completely safe. As if nothing bad can possibly happen to me, as if you’ll protect me from all the frightening, hard, awful things in the world. It’s crazy, it makes no sense at all, I’ve just met you, but in my whole life I’ve never felt that way before. It’s like discovering that I can be a completely new person. It’s as different as—as if I woke up and discovered I was six feet tall and had just won the Olympic gold medal in ski jumping. It happened to me yesterday when we shook hands. I decided I should tell you because it’s too important to keep secret. I don’t mean to make you feel any sense of obligation, I don’t realistically expect you to take care of me for a single second, that’s not what it’s about in any way—but I wanted you to know.”

“You don’t frighten me.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“You have to know that what you just said would scare the living Jesus out of most men.”

“I felt you were tough enough to take it. And if I’m wrong, it’s better for me to know now. I thought about it all night.”

“I thought about you all night long, too.”

“What sort of things?” she asked without coyness.

“About the facts that you’re very young and a virgin. I discovered how amazingly important that virginity is to me, and I never knew that about myself. Your age isn’t of consequence, you’re definitely a grown-up and that’s the essential thing—but the fact that you’ve never made love with a man—that’s different. Altogether different. I’ve been with a lot of women, but there wasn’t one of them who didn’t have some experience. It’s got to be the old altar boy in me—I have absolutely no right at all, considering the life I’ve led, to prize virginity so much. I’m not absolutely clear on why virginity is deeply, mysteriously meaningful, and, for me, wonderful beyond words—but it is. Enormously. Maybe it has something to do with my mother and her mother. They were both virgins when they married—naturally in those days—but my mother always told me how important it would be to her for me to marry a virgin. I discounted it, I thought she was simply being a good Catholic, but nevertheless she got to me. More than I can say.”

Tell him now
, Tessa thought.
Tell him now, before this conversation goes further
. But tell him what? She
was
a virgin, in every technical way, and giving birth hadn’t changed that fact. The three-second episode with what’s his name didn’t count, couldn’t possibly matter, she’d been drunk and not responsible and it wasn’t remotely sex. The only kisses she’d ever experienced had been before a camera. She’d never even been allowed to go out on an unsupervised date. There was nothing to tell, except the part she’d confessed and been
absolved of, and that was between her God and herself. She took a deep breath and sat back in her chair, glad to forget the ridiculous, self-defeating idea of telling him the truth.