Fancy Pants (3 page)
She fell into his arms, sobbing out her relief at seeing him again.
"Jack . . . Jack, my darling . . ."
He ran his thumb across her bottom lip, then kissed her. She drew back
her hand and slapped him hard across the face. "I'm pregnant, you
bastard!"
To her surprise, he immediately agreed to marry her, and they were wed
three days later at the country home of one of her friends. As she
stood next to her handsome bridegroom at the makeshift garden altar,
Chloe knew that she was the happiest woman in the world. Black Jack Day
could have married anyone, but he had chosen her. As the weeks passed,
she determinedly ignored a rumor that his family had disinherited him
when he was in Chicago. Instead, she daydreamed about her baby. How
exquisite it would be to have the undivided love of two people, husband
and child.
A month later, Jack disappeared, along with ten thousand pounds that
had been resting in one of Chloe's bank accounts. When he reappeared
six weeks later, Chloe shot him in the shoulder with a German Luger. A
brief reconciliation followed, until Jack enjoyed another turn of good
fortune at the gambling clubs and was off again.
On Valentine's Day 1955, Lady Luck permanently deserted Black Jack Day
on the treacherous rain-slicked road between Nice and Monte Carlo. The
ivory ball dropped for the last time into its compartment and the
roulette wheel jerked to a final stop.
take her home from the hospital after she'd given birth to her
daughter. Comfortably ensconced in its plush leather seats, Chloe gazed
down at the tiny flannel-wrapped baby who had been so spectacularly
conceived in the center of
Harrods' fur salon and ran her finger along the child's soft cheek. "My
beautiful little Francesca," she murmured. "You won't need a father or
a grandmother. You won't need anyone but me . . . because
I'm going to give you everything in the world."
Unfortunately for Black Jack's daughter, Chloe proceeded to do exactly
that.
In 1961, when Francesca was six years old and Chloe twenty-six, the two
of them posed for a fashion spread in British Vogue. On the left side
of the page was the often reproduced black-and-white Karsh photograph
of Nita wearing a dress from her Gypsy collection, and on the right,
Chloe and Francesca. Mother and daughter stood in a sea of crumpled
white backdrop paper, both of them dressed in black. The white paper,
their pale white skin, and their black velvet cloaks with flowing hoods
made the photograph a study in contrasts. The only real color came from
four jolts of piercing green—the unforgettable Serritella eyes leaping
out from the page, shimmering like imperial jewels.
After the shock of the photograph had worn off, more critical readers
noted that the glamorous Chloe's features were, perhaps, not quite as
exotic as her mother's. But even the most critical could find no fault
with the child. She looked like a fantasy of a perfect little girl,
with a beatific smile and an angel's unearthly beauty shining in the
oval of her tiny face. Only the photographer who had taken the picture
viewed the child differently. He had two small scars, like twin white
dashes, on the back of his hand where her sharp little front teeth had
bitten through his skin.
"No, no, pet," Chloe had admonished the afternoon Francesca had bitten
the photographer. "We mustn't bite the nice man." She wagged a long
fingernail polished a shiny ebony at her daughter.
Francesca glared mutinously at her mother. She wanted to be home
playing with her new puppet theater, not having her picture taken by an
ugly man who kept telling her not to wiggle. She stubbed the toe of one
shiny black patent leather shoe into the crumpled sheets of white
backdrop paper and shook loose her chestnut curls from the confines of
the black velvet hood. Mummy had promised her a special trip to Madame
Tussaud's if she cooperated, and Francesca loved Madame Tussaud's. Even
so, she wasn't absolutely certain she'd driven the best bargain
possible. She loved Saint-Tropez, too.
After consoling the photographer over his injured hand, Chloe reached
out to straighten her daughter's hair and then pulled back with a
sudden yelp when she received the same treatment as the photographer.
"Naughty girl!" she wailed, lifting her hand to her mouth and sucking
on her wound.
Francesca's eyes immediately clouded with tears, and Chloe was furious
with herself for having spoken so sharply. Quickly, she pulled her
daughter close in a hug. "Never mind," she crooned. "Chloe isn't angry,
darling. Bad Mummy. We'll buy you a pretty new dolly on our way home."
Francesca snuggled securely into her adoring mother's arms and peeked
up at the photographer through the thick fringe of her lashes. Then she
stuck out her tongue.
That afternoon marked the first but not the last time Chloe felt the
sting of Francesca's tiny, sharp teeth. But even after three nannies
had resigned, Chloe refused to admit that her
daughter's biting was a problem. Francesca was merely high-spirited,
and Chloe certainly had no intention of earning her daughter's hatred
by making an issue out of something so trivial. Francesca's reign of
terror might have continued unabated if a strange child had not bitten
her back after a tussle over a swing in the park.
When Francesca
discovered that the experience was painful, the biting stopped. She
wasn't a deliberately cruel child; she just wanted to get her way.
Chloe purchased a Queen Anne house on Upper Grosvenor Street not far
from the American embassy and the eastern edge of Hyde Park. Four
stories high, but less than thirty feet wide, the narrow structure had
been restored in the 1930s by Syrie Maugham, the wife of Somerset
Maugham and one of the most celebrated decorators of her time. A
winding staircase led from the ground floor to the drawing room,
sweeping past a Cecil Beaton portrait of Chloe and Francesca. Coral
faux marbre
columns framed the
entrance to the drawing room, which held
a stylish mix of French and Italian pieces as well as several Adam
chairs and a collection of Venetian mirrors. On the next floor
Francesca's bedroom was decorated like Sleeping Beauty's castle.
Against a backdrop of lace curtains swagged with pink silk rosettes and
a bed topped by a gilded wooden crown draped with thirty yards of filmy
white tulle, Francesca reigned as a princess over all she surveyed.
Occasionally she held court in her fairy-tale room, pouring sweetened
tea from a Dresden china pot for the daughter of one of Chloe's
friends. "I am Princess Aurora," she announced to the Honorable Clara
Millingford on one particular visit, prettily tossing the chestnut
curls she had inherited, along with her reckless nature, from Black
Jack Day. "You are one of the good women from the village who has come
to visit me."
Clara, the only daughter of Viscount Allsworth, had no intention of
being a good woman from the village while snooty Francesca Day acted
like royalty. She set down her third lemon biscuit and exclaimed,
"I
want to be Princess Aurora!"
The suggestion astonished Francesca so much that she laughed, a
delicate little peal of silvery sound. "Don't be silly, darling Clara.
You have those great big freckles. Not that freckles arenH perfectly
nice,
of course, but certainly not for Princess Aurora, who was the
most famous beauty in the land. I'll be Princess Aurora, and you can be
the queen."
Francesca thought her compromise was eminently fair and she was
heartbroken when Clara, like so many other little girls who had come to
play with her, refused to return. Their abandonment baffled her. Hadn't
she shared all her pretty toys with them? Hadn't she let them play in
her beautiful bedroom?
Chloe ignored any hints that her child was becoming dreadfully spoiled.
Francesca was her baby, her angel, her perfect little girl. She hired
the most liberal tutors, bought the newest dolls, the latest games,
fussed over her, petted her, and let her do everything she wanted as
long as it could not possibly endanger her. Unexpected death had
already reared its ugly head twice in Chloe's life, and the thought of
something happening to her precious child made her blood run cold.
Francesca was her anchor, the only emotional attachment she had been
able to maintain in her aimless life. Sometimes she lay sleepless in
her bed, her skin clammy, as she envisioned the horrors that could
befall a little girl cursed with her father's reckless nature. She saw
Francesca jumping into a swimming pool never to come up again, tumbling
from a ski lift, tearing the muscles in her legs while practicing
ballet, scarring her face in an accident on a bicycle. She couldn't
shake the awful fear that something terrible lurked just beyond her
vision ready to snatch up her daughter, and she wanted to wrap
Francesca in cotton and lock her away in a beautiful silken place where
nothing could ever hurt her.
"No!" she shrieked as Francesca dashed from her side and ran down the
sidewalk after a pigeon. "Come back here! Don't run away like that!"
"But I like to run," Francesca protested. "The wind makes whistles in
my ears."
Chloe knelt down and held out her arms. "Running musses your hair and
makes your face all red. People won't love you if you're not pretty."
She clasped Francesca tightly in her
arms while she uttered this most terrible threat, using it the way
other mothers might offer up the horrors of the boogey man.
Sometimes Francesca rebelled, practicing cartwheels in secret or
swinging from a tree limb when her nanny's attention was distracted.
But her activities were always discovered, and her pleasure-loving
mother, who never denied her anything, who never reprimanded her for
even the most outrageous misbehavior, became so distraught that she
frightened Francesca.
"You could have been killed!" she would shriek, pointing to a grass
stain on Francesca's yellow linen frock or a dirty smear on her cheek.
"See how ugly you look! How awful! Nobody loves ugly little girls!" And
then Chloe would begin to cry in such a heartbroken fashion that
Francesca would grow frightened. After several of these disturbing
episodes, she learned her lesson: anything in life was permissible ...
as long as she looked pretty doing it.
The two of them lived an elegant vagabond life on the proceeds of
Chloe's legacy as well as the largess of the stream of men who passed
through her life in much the same way their fathers had once passed
through Nita's. Chloe's outrageous sense of style and spendthrift ways
contributed to her reputation on the international social circuit as an
amusing companion and highly entertaining houseguest, someone who could
always be counted upon to enliven even the most tedious occasion. It
was Chloe who dictated that the last two weeks of February must always
be spent on the crescent-shaped beaches of Rio de Janeiro; Chloe who
enlivened the leaden hours at Deauville, when everyone had grown bored
with polo, by staging elaborate treasure hunts that sent all of them
out racing through the French countryside in small sleek cars searching
for bald-headed priests, uncut emeralds, or a perfectly chilled bottle
of Cheval Blanc '19; Chloe who insisted one Christmas that they abandon
Saint-Moritz for a Moorish villa in the Algarve where they were
entertained by a group of amusingly dissolute rock stars and a
bottomless supply of hashish.
More frequently than not, Chloe brought her daughter with her, along
with a nanny and whatever tutor was currently in charge
of Francesca's slipshod education. These caretakers generally kept
Francesca separated from the adults during the daytime, but at night
Chloe sometimes offered her up to the jaded jet-setters as if the child
were a particularly clever card trick.
"Here she is, everyone!" Chloe announced on one particular occasion as
she led Francesca onto the afterdeck of Aristotle Onassis's yacht
Christina
, which was anchored
for the night off the coast of Trinidad.
A green canopy covered the spacious lounge at the stern, and the guests
reclined in comfortable chairs at the edge of a mosaic reproduction of
the Cretan Bull of Minos set into the teak deck. The mosaic had served
as a dance floor barely an hour before and later would be lowered nine
feet and filled with water for those who wished to take a swim before
retiring.
"Come here, my pretty princess," Onassis said, holding out his arms.
"Come give Uncle Ari a kiss."
Francesca rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stepped forward, an
exquisite baby doll of a little girl. Her perfect little mouth formed a
gentle Cupid's bow, and her green eyes opened and closed as if the lids
were delicately weighted. Froths of Belgian lace at the throat of her
long white nightgown fluttered in the night breeze, and her bare feet
peeked out from beneath the hem, revealing toenails polished the same
delicate shade of pink as the inside of a rabbit's ear. Despite the
fact that she was only nine years old and had been awakened at two
o'clock in the morning, her senses gradually grew alert. All day she
had been abandoned to the care of servants, and now she was eager for a
chance to garner the attention of the grown-ups. Maybe if she was
especially good tonight, they would let her sit on the afterdeck with
them tomorrow.
Onassis, with his beaklike nose and narrow eyes, covered even at night
with sinister wraparound sunglasses, frightened her, but she obediently
stepped into his embrace. He had given her a pretty necklace shaped
like a starfish the night before, and she didn't want to risk
sacrificing any other presents that might come her way.
As he lifted her onto his lap, she glanced over at Chloe, who had
cuddled next to her current lover, Giancarlo Morandi, the
Italian Formula One driver. Francesca knew all about lovers because
Chloe had explained them to her. Lovers were fascinating men who took
care of women and made them feel beautiful. Francesca couldn't wait to
be grown up enough to have a lover of her own. Not Giancarlo, though.
Sometimes he went off with other women and made her mummy cry. Instead,
Francesca wanted a lover who would read books to her and take her to
the circus and smoke a pipe like some of the men she had seen walking
with their little girls along the Serpentine.
"Attention everyone!" Chloe sat up and clapped her hands in the air
above her head, like one of the flamenco dancers Francesca had seen
perform the last time they were in Torremolinos. "My beautiful daughter
will now illustrate what abysmally ignorant peasants all of you are."
Derisive hoots greeted this announcement, and Francesca heard Onassis
chuckle in her ear.
Chloe snuggled close to Giancarlo again, rubbing one leg of her white
Courreges hip-huggers against his calf while she tilted her head in
Francesca's direction. "Pay no attention to them, my sweet," she
declared loftily. "They're riffraff of the very worst sort. I can't
think why I bother with them." The couturier giggled. As Chloe pointed
to a low mahogany table, the wedge-shaped front of her new Sassoon
haircut swept forward over her cheek, forming a hard, straight edge.
"Educate them, will you, Francesca? No one except your uncle Ari is the
slightest bit discriminating."
Francesca slid off Onassis's knee and walked toward the table. She
could feel everyone's eyes on her and she deliberately prolonged the
moment, taking slow steps, keeping her shoulders back, pretending she
was a tiny princess on the way to her throne. As she reached the table
and saw the six small gold-rimmed porcelain bowls, she smiled and
flipped her hair away from her face. Kneeling on the rug in front of
the table, she regarded the bowls thoughtfully.
"Jack . . . Jack, my darling . . ."
He ran his thumb across her bottom lip, then kissed her. She drew back
her hand and slapped him hard across the face. "I'm pregnant, you
bastard!"
To her surprise, he immediately agreed to marry her, and they were wed
three days later at the country home of one of her friends. As she
stood next to her handsome bridegroom at the makeshift garden altar,
Chloe knew that she was the happiest woman in the world. Black Jack Day
could have married anyone, but he had chosen her. As the weeks passed,
she determinedly ignored a rumor that his family had disinherited him
when he was in Chicago. Instead, she daydreamed about her baby. How
exquisite it would be to have the undivided love of two people, husband
and child.
A month later, Jack disappeared, along with ten thousand pounds that
had been resting in one of Chloe's bank accounts. When he reappeared
six weeks later, Chloe shot him in the shoulder with a German Luger. A
brief reconciliation followed, until Jack enjoyed another turn of good
fortune at the gambling clubs and was off again.
On Valentine's Day 1955, Lady Luck permanently deserted Black Jack Day
on the treacherous rain-slicked road between Nice and Monte Carlo. The
ivory ball dropped for the last time into its compartment and the
roulette wheel jerked to a final stop.
Chapter
2
One of the widowed Chloe's former lovers sent his Silver Cloud Rolls to2
take her home from the hospital after she'd given birth to her
daughter. Comfortably ensconced in its plush leather seats, Chloe gazed
down at the tiny flannel-wrapped baby who had been so spectacularly
conceived in the center of
Harrods' fur salon and ran her finger along the child's soft cheek. "My
beautiful little Francesca," she murmured. "You won't need a father or
a grandmother. You won't need anyone but me . . . because
I'm going to give you everything in the world."
Unfortunately for Black Jack's daughter, Chloe proceeded to do exactly
that.
In 1961, when Francesca was six years old and Chloe twenty-six, the two
of them posed for a fashion spread in British Vogue. On the left side
of the page was the often reproduced black-and-white Karsh photograph
of Nita wearing a dress from her Gypsy collection, and on the right,
Chloe and Francesca. Mother and daughter stood in a sea of crumpled
white backdrop paper, both of them dressed in black. The white paper,
their pale white skin, and their black velvet cloaks with flowing hoods
made the photograph a study in contrasts. The only real color came from
four jolts of piercing green—the unforgettable Serritella eyes leaping
out from the page, shimmering like imperial jewels.
After the shock of the photograph had worn off, more critical readers
noted that the glamorous Chloe's features were, perhaps, not quite as
exotic as her mother's. But even the most critical could find no fault
with the child. She looked like a fantasy of a perfect little girl,
with a beatific smile and an angel's unearthly beauty shining in the
oval of her tiny face. Only the photographer who had taken the picture
viewed the child differently. He had two small scars, like twin white
dashes, on the back of his hand where her sharp little front teeth had
bitten through his skin.
"No, no, pet," Chloe had admonished the afternoon Francesca had bitten
the photographer. "We mustn't bite the nice man." She wagged a long
fingernail polished a shiny ebony at her daughter.
Francesca glared mutinously at her mother. She wanted to be home
playing with her new puppet theater, not having her picture taken by an
ugly man who kept telling her not to wiggle. She stubbed the toe of one
shiny black patent leather shoe into the crumpled sheets of white
backdrop paper and shook loose her chestnut curls from the confines of
the black velvet hood. Mummy had promised her a special trip to Madame
Tussaud's if she cooperated, and Francesca loved Madame Tussaud's. Even
so, she wasn't absolutely certain she'd driven the best bargain
possible. She loved Saint-Tropez, too.
After consoling the photographer over his injured hand, Chloe reached
out to straighten her daughter's hair and then pulled back with a
sudden yelp when she received the same treatment as the photographer.
"Naughty girl!" she wailed, lifting her hand to her mouth and sucking
on her wound.
Francesca's eyes immediately clouded with tears, and Chloe was furious
with herself for having spoken so sharply. Quickly, she pulled her
daughter close in a hug. "Never mind," she crooned. "Chloe isn't angry,
darling. Bad Mummy. We'll buy you a pretty new dolly on our way home."
Francesca snuggled securely into her adoring mother's arms and peeked
up at the photographer through the thick fringe of her lashes. Then she
stuck out her tongue.
That afternoon marked the first but not the last time Chloe felt the
sting of Francesca's tiny, sharp teeth. But even after three nannies
had resigned, Chloe refused to admit that her
daughter's biting was a problem. Francesca was merely high-spirited,
and Chloe certainly had no intention of earning her daughter's hatred
by making an issue out of something so trivial. Francesca's reign of
terror might have continued unabated if a strange child had not bitten
her back after a tussle over a swing in the park.
When Francesca
discovered that the experience was painful, the biting stopped. She
wasn't a deliberately cruel child; she just wanted to get her way.
Chloe purchased a Queen Anne house on Upper Grosvenor Street not far
from the American embassy and the eastern edge of Hyde Park. Four
stories high, but less than thirty feet wide, the narrow structure had
been restored in the 1930s by Syrie Maugham, the wife of Somerset
Maugham and one of the most celebrated decorators of her time. A
winding staircase led from the ground floor to the drawing room,
sweeping past a Cecil Beaton portrait of Chloe and Francesca. Coral
faux marbre
columns framed the
entrance to the drawing room, which held
a stylish mix of French and Italian pieces as well as several Adam
chairs and a collection of Venetian mirrors. On the next floor
Francesca's bedroom was decorated like Sleeping Beauty's castle.
Against a backdrop of lace curtains swagged with pink silk rosettes and
a bed topped by a gilded wooden crown draped with thirty yards of filmy
white tulle, Francesca reigned as a princess over all she surveyed.
Occasionally she held court in her fairy-tale room, pouring sweetened
tea from a Dresden china pot for the daughter of one of Chloe's
friends. "I am Princess Aurora," she announced to the Honorable Clara
Millingford on one particular visit, prettily tossing the chestnut
curls she had inherited, along with her reckless nature, from Black
Jack Day. "You are one of the good women from the village who has come
to visit me."
Clara, the only daughter of Viscount Allsworth, had no intention of
being a good woman from the village while snooty Francesca Day acted
like royalty. She set down her third lemon biscuit and exclaimed,
"I
want to be Princess Aurora!"
The suggestion astonished Francesca so much that she laughed, a
delicate little peal of silvery sound. "Don't be silly, darling Clara.
You have those great big freckles. Not that freckles arenH perfectly
nice,
of course, but certainly not for Princess Aurora, who was the
most famous beauty in the land. I'll be Princess Aurora, and you can be
the queen."
Francesca thought her compromise was eminently fair and she was
heartbroken when Clara, like so many other little girls who had come to
play with her, refused to return. Their abandonment baffled her. Hadn't
she shared all her pretty toys with them? Hadn't she let them play in
her beautiful bedroom?
Chloe ignored any hints that her child was becoming dreadfully spoiled.
Francesca was her baby, her angel, her perfect little girl. She hired
the most liberal tutors, bought the newest dolls, the latest games,
fussed over her, petted her, and let her do everything she wanted as
long as it could not possibly endanger her. Unexpected death had
already reared its ugly head twice in Chloe's life, and the thought of
something happening to her precious child made her blood run cold.
Francesca was her anchor, the only emotional attachment she had been
able to maintain in her aimless life. Sometimes she lay sleepless in
her bed, her skin clammy, as she envisioned the horrors that could
befall a little girl cursed with her father's reckless nature. She saw
Francesca jumping into a swimming pool never to come up again, tumbling
from a ski lift, tearing the muscles in her legs while practicing
ballet, scarring her face in an accident on a bicycle. She couldn't
shake the awful fear that something terrible lurked just beyond her
vision ready to snatch up her daughter, and she wanted to wrap
Francesca in cotton and lock her away in a beautiful silken place where
nothing could ever hurt her.
"No!" she shrieked as Francesca dashed from her side and ran down the
sidewalk after a pigeon. "Come back here! Don't run away like that!"
"But I like to run," Francesca protested. "The wind makes whistles in
my ears."
Chloe knelt down and held out her arms. "Running musses your hair and
makes your face all red. People won't love you if you're not pretty."
She clasped Francesca tightly in her
arms while she uttered this most terrible threat, using it the way
other mothers might offer up the horrors of the boogey man.
Sometimes Francesca rebelled, practicing cartwheels in secret or
swinging from a tree limb when her nanny's attention was distracted.
But her activities were always discovered, and her pleasure-loving
mother, who never denied her anything, who never reprimanded her for
even the most outrageous misbehavior, became so distraught that she
frightened Francesca.
"You could have been killed!" she would shriek, pointing to a grass
stain on Francesca's yellow linen frock or a dirty smear on her cheek.
"See how ugly you look! How awful! Nobody loves ugly little girls!" And
then Chloe would begin to cry in such a heartbroken fashion that
Francesca would grow frightened. After several of these disturbing
episodes, she learned her lesson: anything in life was permissible ...
as long as she looked pretty doing it.
The two of them lived an elegant vagabond life on the proceeds of
Chloe's legacy as well as the largess of the stream of men who passed
through her life in much the same way their fathers had once passed
through Nita's. Chloe's outrageous sense of style and spendthrift ways
contributed to her reputation on the international social circuit as an
amusing companion and highly entertaining houseguest, someone who could
always be counted upon to enliven even the most tedious occasion. It
was Chloe who dictated that the last two weeks of February must always
be spent on the crescent-shaped beaches of Rio de Janeiro; Chloe who
enlivened the leaden hours at Deauville, when everyone had grown bored
with polo, by staging elaborate treasure hunts that sent all of them
out racing through the French countryside in small sleek cars searching
for bald-headed priests, uncut emeralds, or a perfectly chilled bottle
of Cheval Blanc '19; Chloe who insisted one Christmas that they abandon
Saint-Moritz for a Moorish villa in the Algarve where they were
entertained by a group of amusingly dissolute rock stars and a
bottomless supply of hashish.
More frequently than not, Chloe brought her daughter with her, along
with a nanny and whatever tutor was currently in charge
of Francesca's slipshod education. These caretakers generally kept
Francesca separated from the adults during the daytime, but at night
Chloe sometimes offered her up to the jaded jet-setters as if the child
were a particularly clever card trick.
"Here she is, everyone!" Chloe announced on one particular occasion as
she led Francesca onto the afterdeck of Aristotle Onassis's yacht
Christina
, which was anchored
for the night off the coast of Trinidad.
A green canopy covered the spacious lounge at the stern, and the guests
reclined in comfortable chairs at the edge of a mosaic reproduction of
the Cretan Bull of Minos set into the teak deck. The mosaic had served
as a dance floor barely an hour before and later would be lowered nine
feet and filled with water for those who wished to take a swim before
retiring.
"Come here, my pretty princess," Onassis said, holding out his arms.
"Come give Uncle Ari a kiss."
Francesca rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stepped forward, an
exquisite baby doll of a little girl. Her perfect little mouth formed a
gentle Cupid's bow, and her green eyes opened and closed as if the lids
were delicately weighted. Froths of Belgian lace at the throat of her
long white nightgown fluttered in the night breeze, and her bare feet
peeked out from beneath the hem, revealing toenails polished the same
delicate shade of pink as the inside of a rabbit's ear. Despite the
fact that she was only nine years old and had been awakened at two
o'clock in the morning, her senses gradually grew alert. All day she
had been abandoned to the care of servants, and now she was eager for a
chance to garner the attention of the grown-ups. Maybe if she was
especially good tonight, they would let her sit on the afterdeck with
them tomorrow.
Onassis, with his beaklike nose and narrow eyes, covered even at night
with sinister wraparound sunglasses, frightened her, but she obediently
stepped into his embrace. He had given her a pretty necklace shaped
like a starfish the night before, and she didn't want to risk
sacrificing any other presents that might come her way.
As he lifted her onto his lap, she glanced over at Chloe, who had
cuddled next to her current lover, Giancarlo Morandi, the
Italian Formula One driver. Francesca knew all about lovers because
Chloe had explained them to her. Lovers were fascinating men who took
care of women and made them feel beautiful. Francesca couldn't wait to
be grown up enough to have a lover of her own. Not Giancarlo, though.
Sometimes he went off with other women and made her mummy cry. Instead,
Francesca wanted a lover who would read books to her and take her to
the circus and smoke a pipe like some of the men she had seen walking
with their little girls along the Serpentine.
"Attention everyone!" Chloe sat up and clapped her hands in the air
above her head, like one of the flamenco dancers Francesca had seen
perform the last time they were in Torremolinos. "My beautiful daughter
will now illustrate what abysmally ignorant peasants all of you are."
Derisive hoots greeted this announcement, and Francesca heard Onassis
chuckle in her ear.
Chloe snuggled close to Giancarlo again, rubbing one leg of her white
Courreges hip-huggers against his calf while she tilted her head in
Francesca's direction. "Pay no attention to them, my sweet," she
declared loftily. "They're riffraff of the very worst sort. I can't
think why I bother with them." The couturier giggled. As Chloe pointed
to a low mahogany table, the wedge-shaped front of her new Sassoon
haircut swept forward over her cheek, forming a hard, straight edge.
"Educate them, will you, Francesca? No one except your uncle Ari is the
slightest bit discriminating."
Francesca slid off Onassis's knee and walked toward the table. She
could feel everyone's eyes on her and she deliberately prolonged the
moment, taking slow steps, keeping her shoulders back, pretending she
was a tiny princess on the way to her throne. As she reached the table
and saw the six small gold-rimmed porcelain bowls, she smiled and
flipped her hair away from her face. Kneeling on the rug in front of
the table, she regarded the bowls thoughtfully.
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