Empress Bianca (20 page)

‘Oh, darling,’ she said cheerily, ‘the last thing I want is to upset you. I couldn’t help it if I fell in love with the house. You must admit, it is the most amazing place you’ve ever seen.’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ Ferdie said, now clearly irritated. ‘I’ve seen plenty more fantastic places. It is exquisite, but I have no intention of buying any house in the South of France. Not now, not ever. And if I don’t buy it for you, who will? I don’t see your father’s money extending to L’Alexandrine.’

‘Ferdie, why do you always take everything so much to heart? Has it not occurred to you that this may just be a pipedream?’

‘A man has to nip these things in the bud, otherwise they flower and bear fruit and the next thing he knows, he’s leading a life he doesn’t want,’ Ferdie said defensively, removing her hand from his arm and withdrawing to the furthermost reaches of the backseat.

Like many women with a Middle Eastern heritage, Bianca seldom challenged a man directly. Rather, her tactic was to ignore the fact that something unpleasant might be happening and to plough ahead as if everything were all right. It was a technique that proved infallible when it came to taking the wind out of a man’s sails, and she resorted to it now.

‘I do hope Yvette doesn’t have another appointment,’ she said, referring to their masseuse. ‘I could certainly do with a long lingering massage, and those punctures have made us late. Maybe you’d prefer to go first?’

‘No, I have work to do. Those flat tyres have thrown out my whole afternoon.’

‘I know, darling, I know,’ Bianca said sympathetically. ‘But you really mustn’t let every little thing get to you. It’s bad for your health and only makes you miserable, and the last thing I want to see is my Ferdie unhappy.’

Ferdie, however, would not be jollied out of his mood, and when they reached the harbour, he leaped out of the car and was halfway to the
mooring before Bianca even had a chance to alight. Had she married him for love, this sort of conduct would undoubtedly have perturbed her.

Neither Bernardo nor Philippe had ever behaved like that, and if they had done so, she would have taken it adversely. But because Ferdie could not reach her heart, Bianca accepted it from him as just another manifestation of his impatient personality. It was therefore an unperturbed Bianca who made her serene way up the gangplank, where the chief steward was awaiting her arrival.

‘Mademoiselle Yvette is waiting on the poop deck,’ he informed her.

‘Please show her to the gymnasium,’ said Bianca.

With that, she made her way into the boat and to the appointed meeting place, where the Venetian blinds had been drawn, blocking out most, although not all, of the daylight. She undressed fully and slipped into a heavily embroidered silk kimono-style bathrobe, ignoring the white terry-cloth one hanging beside it. No sooner had she tied the sash than Yvette entered.

‘I’m so sorry we’re late,’ Bianca said graciously. ‘We had a mishap on the road.’

‘Is Madame hurt?’

‘No. Just anxious to have my massage,’ she said, slipping off the bathrobe and making herself comfortable on the massage table.

Yvette opened her leather container and took out various bottles of oils. Bianca breathed in the delicate but crisp scent, relaxing before the masseuse had even touched her. This woman was the best practitioner of her art that Bianca had ever experienced and, being something of an expert on the subject, having had a massage every week of her adult life, she now surrendered herself to the delights awaiting her. In fact, Bianca’s love of massage provided an invaluable insight into her personality. She loved being touched and prodded and kneaded. She was transported when a good masseuse worked her fingers over her body and through her scalp. She did not mind in the least that her hair became matted with essential oils, nor that she would have the trouble of having her hairdresser come to wash and style it. To her, the sensation of gentle fingers working their way over every external centimetre of her flesh was more than just a sensual experience. It was also a spiritual one.

‘How is that, Madame?’Yvette asked as she started the massage, gently pushing her thumbs into Bianca’s shoulders.

‘Good…good,’ she replied, almost dreamily.

The woman silently continued her circular movements.

‘So have you and your boyfriend decided on a wedding date yet?’ Bianca asked, her voice turning husky as she surrendered to the stimulus of those relaxing hands.

‘Yes, Madame,’ Yvette replied. ‘We’re getting married on the November 16 in a little church in St Paul de Vence.’

‘Have you decided what you’re going to wear yet?’

Although Yvette did not know Bianca well enough to realize that such interest in her activities was a natural part of her patron’s warm and affectionate personality, it was indeed actually typical of Bianca. She seldom read books. She had no intellectual curiosity. She had no real hobbies. Her whole being was geared towards people and the rewards relating to them brought. People were her interest, her hobby and her activity, and she treated everyone with whom she came into contact with kindness and consideration. The result was that she was the firm favourite of many of the people who served her, not because she was undemanding - on the contrary, anyone who worked for her had to provide her with precisely what she required as and when she did require it - but because she was so human with them. The class barriers seemed to have been removed, and there was a natural ebb and flow that gave vitality and dignity to the relationship that employees knew to be rare.

‘I’ve seen the most beautiful dress in a shop window,’ Yvette went on. ‘It’s outside my budget, but I’m going to do some extra sessions and hopefully I’ll earn enough to make a large enough down-payment for the shopkeeper to allow me to pay off the rest after the wedding.’

‘Hire purchase,’ Bianca said. ‘That’s how my husband got his start in the business world. How much is the shop asking for the dress?’

‘One hundred and twenty dollars in United States currency,’ the girl replied.

An hour later, from somewhere between sleep and complete relaxation, Bianca heared Yvette give her cue that the massage was at an end: ‘Thank you, Madame. I hope you’re feeling well.’

Bianca opened her eyes, adjusted her gaze to take in Yvette, who seemed like a distant shadow even though she was no more than three feet away. ‘Be a dear and reach me my handbag,’ she said.

Yvette brought over the large, tan, calf-leather Hermes bag from the
chair where Bianca had rested it. Bianca sat up, naked, on the massage table, while Yvette fetched the terry-cloth robe.

Yvette held it up, allowing Bianca to slip in her left hand first. ‘What a great lady,’ she thought to herself, filled with admiration. ‘None of my other ladies are so refined that they use a soft silk robe when their skin is clean, but a terry-cloth robe when their skin is covered in oil. All my other ladies either use silk, which they then have cleaned, or terry-cloth, which is so harsh to the touch unless you’re covered in oil.’

Bianca, who had meanwhile been scrambling around in the recesses of her oversized handbag, pulled out a wallet, opened it, took out a note, folded it in two and said: ‘Here, buy yourself something nice as a wedding present.
Yourself
, mark you. Not your husband.’

Yvette took the bill and, in keeping with the tact that made her such a good servant, tucked it away in her trouser pocket without even looking at it.

‘Thank you, Madame,’ she said. ‘That’s very kind of you. I’ll treat myself to something special.’

What Yvette actually had in mind was heading into Eze with what she imagined was a five or ten dollar tip and buying herself a hundred millilitre bottle of
Moment Volé
toilet water from the Fragonard shop.

‘You do that, Yvette,’ Bianca said, amused and respectful of Yvette’s discretion and without giving a clue as to what she knew would come.

‘Now, if you’ll wait a few minutes, I’ll have the chief steward fetch Monsieur.’

With that, Bianca padded out of the gymnasium, knowing only too well that Yvette would look at the note as soon as she had left the room.

Sure enough, no sooner has the door shut than Yvette pulled the banknote out of her pocket. She looked at it and blinked. She had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before, and she had to look twice to be sure that her eyes were not playing a trick on her. When she accepted that they were not, she jumped - literally jumped - with joy then quickly stuffed the money away in her purse. Knowing the standard of calmness required of her, she suppressed her exuberance and composed herself once more so that when Ferdie came into the room, wearing a terry cloth robe, nothing in her obliging professional demeanour would give away what had just taken place – just in case he would not have approved of his wife’s gesture.

Had Ferdie known of it, he would not have been displeased. Although
he did not indulge in impulsive gift-giving with employees the way Bianca did, he was one of the richest men in the world, his worth on a par with that of Aristotle Onassis, Stavros Nairchos and J Paul Getty, and his generosity was justifiably legendary. Unlike Getty, who had installed a payphone at his stately home in England when too many guests made long-distance calls, Ferdie was genuinely munificent and only too happy to have everyone share in his good fortune. This was true both personally and professionally. Not only did Calorblanco operate an official policy of socialized education, hospitalization, medical care and hire-purchase schemes for its employees and their families but Ferdie himself could not have been more open-handed with everyone who crossed his path.

Whether it was his employees, his friends, his family, his ex-wives or his current wife, he contrived to give them more than they had ever wanted, even in their greediest moments. The result was that Bianca had a weekly allowance of ten thousand US dollars to spend as she pleased without reference to her husband or anyone else for that matter. This was aside from an unlimited dress allowance. The bills for the Fall Collection, her first as Mrs Ferdie Piedraplata, from Yves St Laurent, Valentino, Balenciaga, Ungaro, Givenchy, Balmain and Madame Grés in Paris and Scassi, Norman Norrell, Pauline Trigere, Oscar de la Renta, and Halston in New York had amounted to $241,768.91. This was on top of the $176,836.42 he had allowed her to spend within weeks of their marriage at Maximilien on a maxi sable coat, a black-diamond mink coat, a natural buff-coloured ranch mink coat, a leopard-skin coat and a chinchilla coat, and the $34,751.89 she had spent at Ferragamo at a time when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s total monthly clothing allowance was the supposedly extravagant and previously unheard-of sum of $30,000.

Nor were clothes and furs the only luxuries with which Ferdie indulged Bianca. The jewels she wore engendered as much comment on the international scene as those that Amanda used to wear. Only the Queens of England, Spain and Belgium, the Comtesse de Paris and the Empress of Iran had so splendid a collection, and, of those ladies, only Farah Diba’s was sufficiently modern to indicate living money the way Bianca’s jewels did.

Not, of course, that the jewellery collection was actually Bianca’s, although Ferdie did give her a 29.63-carat flawless white D emerald cut diamond, set in platinum, as an engagement ring. He also gave her a
diamond parure, incorporating a necklace that reduced into two smaller necklaces; a pair of bracelets; a dinner ring; a pair of long-drop earrings that disconnected to leave studs with five-carat central diamonds bordered by smaller brilliant-cut stones; a choker; a brooch; and a tiara as a wedding present. The breakdown value - that is, the value of the stones and metal, which was, of course, platinum - was $2.3 million so the replacement value for insurance purposes was ten times that figure. However, the rest of the jewels with which the gaping world was bedazzled actually belonged to the Piedraplata jewellery shops, a personal investment decision which Ferdie considered wise in the light of how notoriously difficult jewels were to turn into realizable cash if and when liquidity was needed. So, even though Bianca could use whatever she wanted for as long as she wanted, technically she was a walking advertisement for the shops, and this rankled with her. It should not have, however. The morning after they had returned from honeymoon Ferdie had instructed his lawyer to change his will, leaving half of everything he owned to his new wife, the other half going to his son Manolito.

Although Bianca should have been happy with the knowledge that she had married a generous man who had put her in line to become one of the world’s richest widows, she had paid a high price in human terms, having sacrificed a marriage with the man she loved. Although she loved all the worldly benefits of being Mrs Ferdie Piedraplata, there were times when she missed Bernardo and all that they had shared together so much, it physically hurt her. Her character was far too strong to give way to such regrets, but the sacrifice would only be worthwhile if she could materially obtain as much as possible. Here and now. She was not Amanda. The criterion, for Bianca, therefore wasn’t whether Ferdie was generous or not, or whether he was making her financially secure beyond any reasonable expectation. The criterion was what Ferdie could give. And if he didn’t give willingly, she would take.

From Bianca’s point of view, this new husband of hers was not be trusted. He was too capricious. She reasoned, not without a measure of justice, that no man could be relied upon who was so fickle as to reject a loyal and loving wife just because she had adopted without his knowledge or consent a baby girl he might otherwise have wanted. Ferdie’s making her an equal beneficiary with Manolito in his will, therefore, did not even enter into Bianca’s reckoning, not when he could ultimately spurn her for
some similar little thing. It did not occur to her that what Amanda did was not everyone’s idea of a ‘little’ thing and that Bianca only needed to respect his parameters to avoid falling into the same trap as her predecessor had done.

And so she fell into another trap instead by embarking upon a campaign to convince Ferdie that she should stop wearing the glittering array of jewels available on loan from the Piedraplata jewellery stores, complaining about how demeaning it was to have to wear ‘borrowed stock’ when a few nice pieces which were her own would suffice.