The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (42 page)

“You must fight for what is rightfully yours,” Nanny said firmly again. “Go tell them what has happened, claim your inheritance.”

I shook my head miserably. My mother’s fortune had blighted my life. I would rather be poor and free and happy.

“But when you marry,” Nanny urged, “what then? You cannot deny your children the right to claim their grandmother’s fortune. It is what she
wanted. The Kanes have stolen it, just the way they stole your childhood from you.”

I remained adamant about not wanting the money. I told her that all I wanted to do was to paint and that now I felt I had found my spiritual home. When she finally saw I would not change my mind, she persuaded me to write my story down “for the next generation.” She said she would take it, with my birth certificate and her own “document” telling the story as she knew it, along with my mother’s tragic letter, and place them all in a safety-deposit box at the bank. She would put the key to the box in her bureau drawer and a copy of the document under her mattress for safekeeping, just in case she wished to add anything to it. And then, she said, she would finally be content.

Flora Beale had kept her promise to Marie-Antoinette Leconte. She had done what she could to protect her son and also her future grandchildren. “When they are old enough,” she told me, satisfied, “they will make their own choice.”

As for me? I too have made my choice, and I am happier for it. I have no wish to possess the Villa Mimosa, with all its sad memories, though it is probably the place I love best in the world. I have no need of my dear mother’s fortune because I have seen how money and greed can destroy a man. And I have learned how to live on my own terms. I have my painting, and I am back in my homeland, and I have found my old mentor and friend Flora Beale, and a man could wish for no more. I am finally happy.

31

B
ea was still curled up on the green wicker sofa on the terrace when the sun came up the next morning. She clutched the papers telling Johnny Leconte’s story to her chest, watching the glow of rising sun spread over the sky and turn the Mediterranean into a lake of gleaming gold.

She stretched the weariness from her bones and walked back along the terrace into the hall. She stood looking at the place at the foot of the stairs where Marie-Antoinette Leconte’s body had been found and ran her hand along the smooth koa wood banister, as Marie-Antoinette must have done so many times before.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for what happened, and I’m sorry I never knew you.”

She went to her room and called Nick. She told him that she had read Johnny Leconte’s story and asked him to come over right away.

She was waiting on the steps when he drove up half an hour later.

They sat together, hand in hand, on the marble steps. “Just as Johnny used to sit,” she said with a sad
half-smile. “Of course, it was he who told me the story I now remember so well. I can’t think how I ever forgot. He was such a vivid raconteur, and the way he wrote it was exactly the way he told it to me. Now I remember everything, and I’ll continue where he left off.

“He told me that in 1954 he rented a little stone house in St.-Paul-de-Vence, a tiny village up in the hills behind the coast. He said it was an enclave of artists, writers, and musicians, like-minded souls who gathered in the cafés in the square of an evening to share a meal and a glass of wine and sometimes afterward a game of pétanque. The hill villages then were still the way they had been for centuries, with the same families, the same simple way of life. He said it was like stepping back in time to a more innocent era.

“He told me he had finally rid himself of the past, and he painted with a new freedom. He painted a hundred pictures of Nanny Beale, bending over her roses in her garden, pouring tea from her old brown pot, dozing on the vine-shaded terrace. I remember his showing them to me and explaining that they were not portraits as such; they were never photographic reproductions of a set of features. They had a subtle dreamlike quality, and as Maluhia once said, they captured the person she was in her own heart.

“He showed me the paintings he did of the village women with their lined, weather-burned faces, their sharp eyes crinkled against the strong light, with black scarves covering their hair and white aprons over their black dresses, and their large peasant feet thrust into clumsy black shoes. Somehow, with the magic of his brush, he captured the gentle bovine innocence of their children and the stooped backs of the men who had worked half a century in the fields. He painted the owner of the café, his bulk propped against his zinc bar, his sharp eyes forever scanning the little saucers on each table, assessing who had paid and who had
not. He painted the priest sitting on an old wooden upright chair outside his little white church. His arms were folded across his ample stomach, his legs outstretched, his hat tilted over his eyes, and his black soutane blowing in the mistral, as he dozed.

“And he had painted a dozen pictures of Maluhia. His color palette changed from the clear, sunbaked Riviera tones, and his paintings became more dreamlike, more exotic; outlines of shape and form half hidden beneath a veil of color: Maluhia combing her long black hair, like a silken screen hiding her face, the plumeria lei around her neck covering her breasts, a mere hint of an image. He painted the slender naked girl swimming under a crystal green ocean, as at home in her watery environment as the jewel-colored fish he remembered so well.”

She looked at Nick, and he nodded. He knew those paintings; everyone did. They hung in some of the most famous museums and galleries in the world.

“He put his heart into those paintings of Maluhia,” Bea said softly. “He told me he would never forget her. He said that her love had made his life on Kalani tolerable and that he had wondered if he would ever love anyone like that again.

“Then one day he met Sévérine Jadot. She was visiting from Paris, where she lived with her mother. He was sketching the village men at their evening game of pétanque, and she stopped to admire his work. She was as tall as he was, and she had fiery red hair and a piquant face with a dusting of freckles and expressive green eyes. He followed her into the café, and they began to talk.”

Bea smiled as she thought of their meeting for the first time, imagining them when they were young and passionate. “They fell in love,” she said softly to Nick, “and instead of going back to Paris, Sévérine moved in with him. He was crazy about her, and of course, he took her to meet Nanny Beale.

“He said the old lady put on her hoity-toity countess expression because in her opinion, no woman was good enough for her Johnny. She served them tea and ginger cake, and he could tell she was watching Sévérine’s manners and assessing her upbringing, but Sévérine was the model of French politeness,
de ban genre.
Even Nanny Beale couldn’t fault her.

“‘Marry her,’ she whispered to him as they left. ‘It will be the best thing you have ever done.’

“He said he just laughed, but he knew she was right, and anyway, he had already asked Sévérine to marry him. Nanny was a witness at their wedding a month later. The ceremony was conducted by the same village priest whose portrait he had painted in the same simple village church. The wedding party was held at the café, and all the locals came, and all the other artists and the writers and the musicians. He said-there was music and dancing until late into the night, and it was the best party they ever had.

“It was the early 1960s then. He was in his forties, I guess, and Sévérine would have been in her late twenties. They lived a simple life in their little stone house in St.-Paul-de-Vence, but things were changing on the Riviera. It was taking on a new kind of sophistication and tourists were beginning to penetrate their little stronghold.

“Nanny Beale didn’t live to see the changes, though. One spring evening she was reading a passage from her favorite Charles Dickens. She put her eyeglasses down on the open page as she always did, to mark it. Then she just fell aleep and passed peacefully into another world.

“That’s why her cottage looks the way it does. Johnny said it shouldn’t only be the rich and famous who are remembered. He wanted it kept exactly as she left it. He said it was to be like a museum commemorating Flora Beale’s unselfish life of service to others, her dignity and simplicity, and her goodness.

“After she died, he and Sévérine moved farther away into the hills of Provence. They bought an old farm near Bonnieux, overlooking the fields of lavender and poppies, and they were happy there. He wanted only to paint; he had no business head and no time for art dealers. If it had been up to him, he would never have wandered farther from home than Avignon or Aix. So it was Sévérine who took his paintings to Paris and arranged an exhibition at a major gallery. It had been a long time since his first portrait had caused such a stir, but he had not been forgotten. And those years of seclusion had given him the time to develop his talent. The paintings of Maluhia and Nanny Beale caused a sensation.

“After the success he was restless. He said he couldn’t paint; he needed a change of scenery. There was to be an exhibition in New York, and they went there and stayed awhile and found they liked it. But he could never live in a city, so they bought an old mill in the Berkshires.”

Bea’s golden velvet eyes were filled with the warmth of her memories as she looked at Nick. “That’s where I was born,” she said softly. “On the twenty-eighth of July, 1968.

“They named me Marie for my grandmother Leconte and Laure because it was pretty. I was like my dad, a skinny waif of a child, with my mother’s red hair and his dreamy brown eyes. We spent every summer at Les Cerisiers, the farm in Provence, and I grew up speaking French as easily as English.

“And then, when I was fourteen and he knew I was old enough to understand what he had to say, my father took me to see Nanny Beale’s cottage. And the Villa Mimosa.”

She dropped Nick’s hand as she said, “My father and I sat on these very steps, gazing at this same magical view, while he told me the terrible story of his life. We were so close, so in tune with each other’s emotions
I was devastated by the pain of what he had gone through. I felt it so deeply it was almost as if it had happened to me, as if I were the innocent happy child on the cool marble steps, listening to the songbirds and clutching Fido to my heart. As if I were the one whose small safe world ended that day, with the great black cloud shutting out the sun forever.”

Tears coursed down her cheeks, and Nick put his arms around her. “It’s all right, Bea,” he said. “It’s all right now, love.”

She nodded, letting her tears fall. “He said he was telling me because Nanny had been right. He said one day, when I was older, I would have the right to claim my grandmother’s fortune. If that was what I wished.

“I told him I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t care about the money. But I thought he should have the villa. ‘It should be yours,’ I said to him. ‘It’s the place you loved, where you were happy. And Grandmère Marie-Antoinette would have wanted us to be here.’

“He just smiled and said it wasn’t possible. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ he told me, ‘in case they turn around and bite you again.’”

Bea wiped away her tears and said wearily, “So that was that. He never lived at the Villa Mimosa again. Life went on happily. I was the child of an artist, but it was a normal sort of life, and I was a normal sort of kid. You know, I did all the usual things, sleep-overs, and high school, and then college.” She smiled thinking about it. “They never sent me away to a smart prep school because Dad said he couldn’t bear to part with me. ‘The only day you’re going to leave home is the day you marry,’ he said laughingly. And Maman really had to work on him to let me go to college. I went to Vassar—not too far away, so I could come home weekends. And how I loved coming home; it was the best place in the world. My father loved his solitude, he needed it in order to paint, and our house was a sort of haven of
tranquillity. It always seemed miles away from the harsher realities of life.

“I guess they didn’t have any really close friends; there was just never time for them. They were complete, you see; the perfect couple. They didn’t need anyone else.