Sailing to Capri (3 page)

By now I was, and I was practically humming with pleasure. “This is the best chicken I ever tasted,” I said, but Sir Robert was already attacking his roast beef. There is no other way to describe the way he ate. He was like a man with his last meal, intent on savoring every morsel. In his massive hands the silverware appeared smaller than life-size and his enjoyment had smoothed the scowl from his face. There was more than a faint resemblance to Shrek here, I thought.

“So what exactly are you doing here in London, anyway?” he asked suddenly.

“I told you, I work for an American magazine.” Oh my God, the lies came so easily it was scary. Until now I’d been honest all my life. Yeah, and look where that got you, a cold little voice whispered in my head.

“Hah! You’re no more a gossip columnist than I am. They’re
a breed apart, recognizable at fifty paces at any party. And none of them ever looked like you.”

My hackles rose. I put my knife and fork carefully onto my plate. “Oh? And exactly how do I look then?” I prepared mentally for his attack.

“Like a woman who got lost somewhere along the way.”

He completely took the wind out of my sails. Was my past written so clearly on my face, like scars after a bad accident?

“Don’t worry,” he said, in a softer voice. “I’ve been there too, at the bottom of the emotional heap. Oh, I know, looking at me, reading about me in the papers, you’d never think this brash, common, ugly old bastard had feelings. But … I’m a man …”

I was silent. I didn’t know what to say to this total stranger.

“Well?” He was looking at me, brows raised, awaiting an answer. I glanced down at my fingers, twisted together like hightension wires. Here was my opportunity to tell my story, but I couldn’t. It was too humiliating. I shook my head. I could not confess my plight to this man. I just could
not.

He summoned the waiter and ordered coffee. The bottle of wine, only half-drunk, sat unwanted in its bath of ice in a silver bucket. The spark had gone from the evening. I suddenly remembered his dog. Worried, I asked if Rats might need to go for a walk.

“They’ll have seen to that,” he said. “But thank you for thinking about him.”

I shrugged. At least I understood his love for his dog.

He signaled the waiter for the bill. When it came, he pushed it across the table at me. “A deal is a deal, right?”

Oh God, I’d forgotten that he’d said I should pay. I’d been living on cereal and cheese sandwiches for two weeks. If I paid, I doubted I’d be able to eat at all. I stared numbly at the breathtaking numbers. Pride up, I dug the last of my money out of my bag and counted out the correct amount.

“Mustn’t forget the tip,” he said, with a patronizing little smile. “Personally, I always give twenty-five percent here—it makes for good relations between me and the staff.”

“And personally, I never give more than twenty,” I snapped back. He was trying to control me, enjoying my discomfort at being stuck with the large bill.

He picked up the money, counting it. “You don’t look like you’re enjoying living up to your deal. Why not? You been lying again?”

“I never lie,” I said stiffly.

He laughed, a loud, gruff bark that turned heads toward us. “There you go, doing it again,” he said.

He put the money in his pocket, slid a credit card into the leather wallet containing the bill and handed it to the waiter.

“In fact, you look like a woman in need of a job to me.” I glared at him. “What’s up?” he said, still grinning. “Afraid to work your soft hands to the bone? Afraid of getting ’em dirty? Afraid of overtaxing your poor little brain? What’s your real story, anyway?”

For a long moment, I stared numbly at him; then I suddenly crumbled beneath his onslaught. I apologized for lying. I told him my story. I told him about my mother, an Irish woman from minor aristocracy. “Believe it or not, I’m really a lady,” I said. “Well, I mean I’m an Honorable. But my mom was. She
married an Irish lord and became the Lady Keane and was poor with it. She was even poorer when he died and she moved to America and big-city Chicago, where she had relatives. The Irish are all over the place in America, you know. Anyway, we lived in a small apartment and she got a job in food services.”

“She was a chef?”

“Actually, a waitress. She never told anyone about her title; she was such a modest woman she wouldn’t have known how to use it to better herself. We got by somehow, got educated, grew up, got married.”

“And divorced.”

“Just me. Lavender is still married with three kids. Vi is single, works for the National Geographic Channel. She’s always in places like Borneo or Mato Grosso.” Our eyes met. “And you know all about me.”

“Not quite all.” His bushy brows rose in interest and suddenly memories I had deliberately kept hidden in the darkest recesses of my mind came flooding back, stinging with remembered pain.

I found myself telling Bob Hardwick everything. About how when my husband left me, taking with him everything we owned, driving away to start a new life with a gorgeous young woman on his arm, I cried bitter tears. I screamed and howled. I told myself endlessly that I must be to blame. I was not attractive enough, not sexy enough, not a fun companion. Not a good wife. In other words. I felt sure it must be my fault. Even now, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, and I was too wounded even to ask myself whether he was the one guilty of all those things.

I told Bob about how, when I finally got myself somewhat back together, I pushed those bad memories away. I hid from them and from my past, determined to find a new me, a woman who was no longer vulnerable to predatory men, and I wrapped my romantic heart in a shell never again to be broken.

“I’ll take the man’s role from now on,” I told Bob Hardwick, who was sipping his wine, elbows on the table, pale blue eyes fastened intently on me. “And that’s why I’m here in London,” I said with a final shrug. “Now you know it all.”

Bob was silent. Embarrassed, I grabbed my glass and took a gulp of wine, wishing I had not bared my soul to this complete stranger.

“It’s over,” he said at last. “The guy was a bastard. You should never have trusted him, but women are suckers for a pretty package. And good sex.”

“Not even that,” I blurted, then I blushed, once again wishing I hadn’t said that. I’d always been this way; the words just came out before I could stop them. Besides, I’d never admitted this before, not even to myself, or my best friend, Bordelaise. And now Bob was laughing at me.

“Too much of the lady to enjoy it, huh?”

I knew Bob meant it as a joke to get us over the dark moment I’d inflicted on our evening, but when I thought about it perhaps he was right. Maybe I’d never let myself go enough, never really dissolved into the passion of the moment, never truly felt what the women’s magazines told me I should be feeling.

“Perhaps you’re right,” I said, finally honest.

“So you’re class then, despite appearances to the contrary.”

I bristled again. “You have a way of getting at people don’t you?”

“Works every time.” He smiled triumphantly. “Anyhow, now you’ll come and work for me. Right?”

“As exactly what?” I was suspicious. After all, this was still a man talking to a woman.

He shrugged. “My P.A. left to take care of her sick mum. I have a place in New York as well as a penthouse here, on Park Lane, and a house in Capri. Then there’s Sneadley Hall, up in Yorkshire. They all take work to keep up. You’ll be my majordomo, if you like. As well as my personal assistant, social secretary, public relations and all around gal Friday … whatever role I need you to play that day. You’ll find me a hard taskmaster. I’m tough to work for, or so they tell me.” He shrugged his big shoulders, exasperated. “It’s just that I want things done
right,
and mostly they’re not—unless I do ’em myself. But I’ll pay you more than you ever thought you’d earn. So—think you can live up to that?”

He took my breath away. This man was a force of nature, larger than life, Shrek with brains. He was challenging me, and I was lured by his offer. Of course it was a lifesaver, but at the back of my mind I was still wary.

He sat quietly watching me think. Then, “Listen, love,” he said gently. “Once upon a time I was young like you. I was broke. And I was in love. Now I’m none of these things, but sometimes I ask myself, if I had the chance, which of the three would I like back? Would it be youth? So I could feel the exhilaration
in the sheer strength of my own body again, the kind of feeling the young take for granted? Or maybe power? So I could have the opportunity of digging myself out of that deep hole of poverty, experience the pleasure of achieving my success all over again? Or what about love? Ah, love!” His eyes closed, and he groaned softly, thinking about it. “That quintessential emotion,” he said. “No—never that. Love’s too painful. That’s all over with. There’s nothing left for me but hard work. And then more hard work. That’s the only thing that gives me satisfaction. That—and the love of a good dog.”

I softened, listening to him unexpectedly baring his soul to
me
—a perfect stranger. Like me, he was alone, though not for the same reasons. He was alone by his own choice. Then he said, “Of course you’ll have to come and live with me.”

I might have known it was too good to be true. I gave him that skeptical sideways look, jumping when he slammed his glass down so hard the wine slopped over onto the tablecloth. A waiter hurried over but he brushed him aside.

“Listen to me, lass,” Sir Robert said in a low, rough, angry voice. “And never forget this.
I am a rich man.
Women pursue me. Beautiful society women, young actresses, models; they pursue me with a lust for my money in their eyes. Women I’ve never met telephone to tell me how much they admire me and to ask me to dinner. Understand this, you dumb freckled redhead,
I can have any woman I want.”
He poked a finger into my faux-furred chest.
“And I don’t want you.”

My starburst brooch popped open under his onslaught, stabbing him. He inspected the blood oozing from his finger.

“Well,” he said with a grin, “we’re off to a good start, aren’t we?”

And that was the beginning of my five years of employment, and of my friendship with Sir Robert Waldo Hardwick. Quite simply the most overbearing, most demanding, most exasperating man I’ve ever known. As well as the kindest, the most understanding and the most tender. How could he be all these things at once? That was the great mystery of Bob Hardwick.

It was also the foundation on which our relationship was built. Tempers, tantrums, tears—mine, of course. Icy dialogue, calm indifference—his. But what was ours too, ours to treasure, was love. We were alike. We were a team. We were friends. And in case you’re wondering, no, he was never my lover.

That night at Le Gavroche, Bob Hardwick took my money because, he told me later, he wanted to see how honorable I was. Of course he’d guessed I was broke and faking it, yet I had lived up to my word. Or rather to his word. It didn’t matter because he was equally honorable.
And
he gave me my money back in the car on the way home.

He also immediately gave me an advance on my very generous salary and told me to get a good haircut and some decent clothes. I moved into his life and into his world and he taught me all he could until I became indispensable, or at least he allowed me to believe that, but in my heart I knew it
was
true. Bob saved me. He gave me a second chance and I loved him for it. Which is why I’m standing here at his snowy funeral with
the tears rolling down my frozen cheeks, saying good-bye to him because he was my best friend and I shall miss him to the end of my days.

At the same time I’m wondering why the other frozen-faced mourners—who include a beautiful French ex-wife and a gorgeous Italian ex-mistress, as well as various buttoned-up city types from Bob’s business world—are here too, because not one of them could have been called his friend.

There was another man completely different from the businessmen mourners; tall and rangy, in a long black overcoat with the snow settling on his close-cropped dark head. He was standing alone at the back of the small crowd of mourners. His narrow dark eyes under stern black brows met mine over their heads and he nodded a greeting. I nodded back, acknowledging him, though in truth I had no idea who he was.

It was over. Done. The city people were turning away, hurrying out of the icy wind to the comfort of their cars, heading for the station in the town ten miles away and the fast train to London. A knot of villagers still clustered together under their umbrellas. Some worked at the Hall: the gardener, the housekeeper, the daily ladies. Then there was Ginny Bunn, the barmaid at the Ram’s Head pub, dressed in black with the big-brimmed black hat she usually wore for the annual garden party at the Hall. And Reg Blunt, the pub’s owner, square and stocky and Bob’s good friend. Blunt had matched pints with Bob many a Saturday night, with Bob on his favorite hard wooden settle near the fireplace. These local people knew him as one of themselves and they came over now, offering their hands and sympathy, some wiping away a tear.