Acts of Love (28 page)

Sir Anson and Ben entered the room. Arianne watched Sir Anson go to Artemis and present her with several dozen long-stemmed white roses. The pleasure she found in the presence of the men and in the scent of the roses, the flirtation with life that
Artemis indulged, were all there in every word, every gesture. She enslaved her guests with her charm. They obeyed her by basking in her light. Never had Arianne loved her mother more, never been more proud to be her daughter. She knew now why she had always loved Artemis. She had within her, even now, in her declining years, that rage to live. Life was still an adventure for her.

All through lunch – lobster tails in a thermidor sauce, roasted wild duck breasts on a bed of sliced white peaches, wild mushrooms and rice, a purée of fresh fine beans, and most especially over the pudding, a plum tart with a light custard sauce – Artemis wooed Ben, to the delight of everyone around the table.

Fortified by several fine wines drunk with their meal – a white, Corton-Charlemagne 1980, a Margaux 1976, and a Sauternes with the pudding – they were now, over snifters of Calvados, quite tipsy with well-being.

‘What a marvellous lunch, Artemis. What a wonderful woman you are. Thank you.’ With elaborate chivalry, Ben placed the perfect continental kiss upon her hand.

‘Charming of you to say so, Ben.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘There was a time when I would have run away with a young man like you.’

Arianne rose from her chair and went to stand next to Ben, to place an arm around his shoulder. ‘Like mother like daughter, Artemis. I already have. He’s taken.’

Everyone in the room was astounded. It was so unlike Arianne to take such a forceful action. No one was more surprised than Arianne that she should give away her precious secret. Her public declaration of love for Ben nearly overwhelmed him. He knew she hadn’t intended to make it. He removed her arm from around his shoulder and kissed her hand in another calculated display of gallantry.

‘How nice, Arianne, that we have, at least, kept him in the family,’ Artemis announced to her daughter, a knowing smile crossing her lips. ‘Now, how about a rubber of bridge?’ Artemis had absorbed their news as she did all good news, with momentary delight and a practised indifference.

The day with Artemis was one of the most agreeable Arianne had ever spent with her mother. When Artemis, Anson and the
dogs walked the couple to Ben’s car, she adjusted a strand of Arianne’s hair that had fallen out of place and brushed a bit of lint from her shoulder. Then, turning to Ben, she said, ‘What a lucky man you are, Ben. Arianne is more like me than I ever imagined she could be. Now run along, you two. There is a big wide world beyond Chessington Park to be wickedly happy in, and you’re young and able enough to do it.’

Halfway down the drive, Ben said, ‘You have a remarkable mother.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘That was a seal of approval being stamped on us – or am I wrong?’

‘Not wrong. She has conferred her approval.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘That’s it. We are expected to be happy and live our lives to the full for us and us alone, as she has always done. Still does.’

‘She won’t want to be involved with our lives?’ asked Ben.

‘She would hate that.’

‘Nor interfere with the way we want to live?’

‘She never has in the past.’

‘All Artemis will want is to have a good time when we meet, which will be at her convenience?’ A note of incredulity shaped Ben’s question.

‘That’s just about it.’

‘Arianne, she sounds the perfect mother-in-law.’

The two began to laugh and then Ben teased, ‘We mustn’t laugh, that would be tempting fate. A non-critical mother-in-law, what a blessing.’

‘I never promised she wouldn’t be critical.’

‘Oh.’ The laughter evaporated from Ben’s voice.

Arianne leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It’s not so bad. Artemis’s criticisms are always sharp and to the point. Always delivered on the spot, directly at me. And only when I am standing in front of her. She is no telephone nag. Not one of those mothers who send lethal letters of disapproval. Her aloofness doesn’t allow it.’

‘What a relief.’

‘She detested Jason. She had a basic instinct that he was the wrong man for me, no matter how happy we had been together.
She never changed her mind about that. But she never interfered in our life. She merely stated an opinion – and only to me.’

Ben was surprised by that. Why should Artemis feel that way about her daughter’s husband when Arianne had been nothing but happy in her marriage with him? Ben felt no jealousy about Jason. Nor about Ahmad, who seemed still to figure in Arianne’s life. She and Ben had no ban on their dead spouses or past loves being mentioned. Very occasionally those past loves drifted into their conversation but that was all. It was as if their own love had put the past in a proper perspective to the present and left them with no emotional hang-ups about relationships that were dead or out of their lives.

More than once during these last weeks while Ben had been living with Arianne in the house in Three Kings Yard, he had marvelled at the silver-framed photograph in the sitting room of Jason, Arianne and Ahmad lying on a beach, the waves rolling over their bodies. The happiness, sensuality, love, of the
ménage à trois
seemed to leap from the figures frozen in time at the click of a camera’s shutter. Under a pane of glass and imprisoned by a silver frame they were captured for posterity. Ben doubted that Arianne realised how revealing the photograph was. His first instinct on seeing it was that the three were lovers. Only after his own sex with Arianne revealed to him her exquisite passion for all things sexual was it confirmed.

Trust. That was implicit in their relationship. That trust that allowed them to understand the sexual truth about each other without having to discuss it. There was no doubt in Ben’s mind that Arianne knew he was aware of the sexual life she had led with the two men. Every night they made love he became more aware of her rapacious libido. It suited his own to perfection. What need had they to talk of other erotic liaisons that had only added positive experience to the sexual freedom and pleasures they now shared?

Thoughts about Arianne and the two men who had made up her marriage were triggered by Arianne’s declaration that Artemis had never approved of Jason. Those thoughts vanished from Ben’s mind as he turned his attention back to his future wife.

‘Arianne, let’s start from the beginning. Go back to the States, get married there.’

‘In the next few weeks,’ she added, as if reading his mind.

‘We’ll buy a town house in Manhattan and get married there, in our own place.’

Palm Beach, a tropical island, even Las Vegas, and Aspen, Colorado were the other suggestions. There were too many options, and they wanted to get married in them all. ‘Never mind that now, let’s think of the present.’ And Ben headed the car in the direction of Le Manoir, where it had all begun for them, albeit disastrously. This time the memory of Jason did not surface for Arianne. They remained there for three days, playing truant from the world and their business affairs. Theirs was a love affair of the heart and the soul, which they did not take for granted, but felt humbled by. And it was there that they finally settled their arrangements of how and where to become man and wife.

In London they got on with their lives, lives that seemed richer, more wondrous and exciting now that they had each other. They took a week in New York to look for a town house in the upper East Side. Manhattan swept them up into its very special orbit. The buzz of the city, the adrenaline high of the people they met, the fun of rekindling old friendships, revisiting old haunts, only confirmed to them that it was time to go home, to make New York and the States their base, the château their second home and the world their playground. Europe would be another workplace.

For Arianne it was a bonus that Ben discussed his work with her, that he sought her opinions and respected them, that he wanted her to be a part of everything he was involved with. When they were apart, he would call her several times a day to tell her how his meetings were going. She found it easy to respond with constructive suggestions when he posed questions to her about his business affairs. His willingness to take her into every aspect of his life seemed to build her confidence to go forward on her own projects. They were exciting, but the more so for Arianne because she had Ben to talk to about them now. She was delighted when he asked to attend a viewing or a sale with her. This was a new kind of togetherness that she had never experienced with a lover before. Her life was new and exhilarating.

In the weeks that followed they made two more visits to New York, flying in by Concorde, to see houses. Finally they found
one they both fell in love with. It had been the library, a magnificent room, where Ben suggested Arianne could bring her clients once she had a stock of rare books to offer, that had convinced them this was the house for them.

There, sitting on the floor in the empty library, with not a scrap of paper in the room, not a book on the shelves, Arianne broke down. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. Ben placed an arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. He tried to make a joke of her tears simply to ease the pain he saw in her eyes. ‘I said we’d buy the house, not that you couldn’t have it, Arianne.’ He kissed her wet cheeks.

‘Are you sure we can afford it, Ben?’ Even his answer did not seem enough for Arianne. It was then that her story came tumbling out: Her father’s library that had had to be sold for debts; her own collection, everything that she had ever owned and cherished, put on the block. A lifetime of dreams and memories swept away to leave her in near-poverty for nearly three years. The humiliation of being poor, living poor, without hope, of walking the streets of the big cities alone, with a fancy wardrobe but no place to go. The people cheated of their money because she had to go into liquidation for Jason. The burden of protecting Jason, because, had he been alive he would have made it all right.

‘It’s the empty shelves and our spending the rest of our lives collecting and filling them. I don’t think I can bear to do it and have it all snatched away from me again.’

‘I want to tell you a story.’ And it was in that exquisite, walnut-panelled library, in that turn-of-the-century, limestone-fronted town house on East Seventy-Ninth Street just off Park Avenue, that Ben told her about being born into genteel poverty, of being made a victim of keeping up with the Joneses. A child having to live off scraps from the butcher, of having worked a paper-round as soon as he had been old enough to cope. A boy working his way through school from the age of eight until he graduated at university. ‘Even in those hard times, Arianne, my mother and my father taught me that it was just as important to know how to play with your life as it was to make a success of it. I may have been the poor man on the block but we lived on the right block. I may have been the most financially deprived of all
my friends but I made it not matter. Because of that my friends rallied around me, and the connections I made among the wealthy boys I played with gave me my first breaks. I don’t think you should be frightened of filling these shelves. We are mature, responsible people, you and I. We will know when we have to curtail any extravagant living, because we have licked the other side of the coin. Don’t be afraid. Don’t deprive yourself or me of one moment of happiness in our new house.’

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘It was Jason’s failure, not yours, that sent you down the tube.’ But that seemed too cruel and unnecessary, and Ben had no intention of speaking ill of a man Arianne had loved for so long and so well.

They were back in London in Number 12, Three Kings Yard, having just returned from a trip to Paris, where Arianne had ordered her wedding dress from Yves Saint Laurent. Ben went with her because he knew the
vendeuse
. He had met her many times while married to Clarissa. The dress was one of his wedding-gifts to Arianne. He insisted she accept it, since she had so little money of her own.

They hadn’t as yet got around to such things as engagement or wedding rings. They were so completely together and happy they felt several steps past all that. Moreover, friends of Ben, once they had met Arianne and understood that the couple would be marrying in the near future, were now constantly dropping in on them or inviting them. Here were a jet-set, sporting sort of crowd that were amusing and adventurous. It was evident in the way Ben looked at her that he was pleased she would get on with his friends. Now he had only to get on with hers. That was why, when the first phone call came from Ahmad to Arianne, Ben was delighted for her and showed it. Since he had met none of Arianne’s friends, Ben was sensitive to the idea that she might feel he was forcing his own crowd on her. They were, after all, not a couple in their first flush of youth, and friends and the compatibility between them and new spouses could sometimes threaten lovers or the newly married trying to blend their old lives in a shiny new life. It never entered Ben’s mind that Arianne should do anything but keep Ahmad as her closest friend. He was aware that, whether either man liked it or not, for Arianne’s sake
they would have to accept each other as friends.

The first call from Ahmad had come soon after Ben had moved in with Arianne. She never told him much about the call except to say that Ahmad was well and happy and he hoped to see her soon. A second call followed, much the same, except that he had asked her to join him in Paris for a long weekend. She declined, telling him the truth: she was going to New York with a friend. But not who the friend was. Arianne had been honest with Ben. She told him, ‘I don’t think I can tell Ahmad about us on the telephone. I think face to face would be better.’

‘I’m not so sure about that. When I told Simone about us, she nearly took me out with a flying bottle of Joy.’

They had been together for months now, and still Ahmad and Arianne had not met. Only a few days before, Arianne had remarked that she felt that, if Ahmad did not turn up in London or New York in the next few weeks, she would have to go to see him wherever he was, to tell him about her and Ben’s impending wedding.