This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (14 page)

“No worry about that. She won’t arrive until the very last minute. She never arrives on time, and most especially if she knows it’s a proper luncheon party.”

Moses rose and fetched from the marble-topped French steel baker’s rack a baking tin on which was laid the sea bass. The pastry was already decorated with fin and tail scales. He sat down with a bowl of egg glaze and a pastry brush and began to wash the pastry with it.

“You’re an amazing man, Moses. A marvel. That looks absolutely terrific. Only last night, I was telling the chef at La Côte Basque about your sea bass, how the crust comes out of the oven in a shimmering shade of old gold. What sauces are you going to serve with it today?”

“I’m serving this on that French baroque silver fish platter that the Princess Eirene gave to the Coreys as a wedding gift. I’m going to put these water lilies and lily pads that I’ve just finished carving all around the bass to pretty it up. One of the fish-shaped silver sauceboats will be used for a hollandaise sauce spiked with tomato. The other will be filled with
concasse
of tomato flavored with spices.”

“Oh, dear,” said Deena as she pushed the plate with the two untouched oatmeal cookies from her. “You’re right as always, Moses. I’ll wait for lunch. I can’t bear to spoil your meal. If Mirella wasn’t my best friend, I would steal you from her. So help me, I would.”

“Oh, we all know that,” he said, a hint of a laugh tinged with pride in his voice.

“Do tell me the menu for today, you culinary genius.”

Moses laughed and put the pastry brush down. He leaned back in the Windsor chair and drank some coffee. Replacing the cup, he said, “Such flattery. Don’t you ever want to be surprised?”

“No, I really hate surprises. Well, I don’t exactly hate them. Let’s just say I like to enjoy the food twice: once in my imagination, and then on my tongue.”

“Well, actually it’s the kind of lunch you enjoy, because, like you, the Princess Eirene prefers fish to meat or game. So, for the first course, an appetizer — slivers of smoked salmon rolled around a mousseline of John Dory topped with fresh asparagus tips and a cream sauce.”

“Ah, shades of that archetypal
maître chef
, Louis Outhier.”

“I hope so,” said Moses. “Then comes this fine sea bass with its sauces, which I will serve with fresh-blanched French green beans and a purée of celeriac. For dessert, a cream of sweet chestnut, liqueurs, and a hint of praline set in a crispy pastry basket flecked with candied meringue.”

Deena could not utter a word. Her glazed-over eyes were compliment enough for Moses. While she was still recovering from these imagined foretastes, he said, “I have a message for you, Miss Deena. Ms. Mirella called and said, if you should arrive before she did, I was to put you properly in the picture.

“Ms. Mirella and Mr. Adam are flying out tonight on the Corey Trust’s jet to Athens. Then they board Mr. Lala Mustapha’s boat in Piraeus for a visit to the Greek island of Delos. From there they take a helicopter and island-jump through the Aegean to Turkey. Or something like that. She says, please join them. Either tonight on the plane or in Istanbul. She said to tell you, sorry for the short notice, but they only decided on the plan two hours ago.”

“What about her work at the UN?”

“I don’t know, but she must have it all planned. She mentioned something about taking the remainder of her holiday leave now, when she told me we wouldn’t be returning till the opening session of the Security Council after the summer recess. I say ‘we,’ by the way, because I’m closing up the house tomorrow and joining the Peramabahçe household in Istanbul in five days’ time. Mr. Adam insists upon it. Says he wants me to see Turkey, since we’ll be living there at least half the time. Wants me to find my place in the running of the palace there, to fit into his scheme of things. Same way some of his people will have to find theirs when they’re working here in New York with me. And Mr. Lala Mustapha has organized two weeks’ vacation there for me, as a thank you for the help I gave him with the wedding preparations. Now he didn’t have to do that for me, but the two men and Ms. Mirella insist that I accept. They are very generous to me, all three of them. But my arm didn’t need twisting …”

“Christ, Moses, what a turn of events. And, I might add, you deserve it. Aren’t you excited?”

“Yes.” He bit his lip, trying to be blasé about it, but delight radiated out of him. “Quite an adventure for me. Mr. Adam has certainly changed our lives, hasn’t he?”

“More, I think, than any of us realizes,” Deena said pensively.

Although hesitating Deena was enthusiastic about the prospect of seeing Turkey with Mirella, Adam, and Rashid. Nothing had been said about Rashid being in Turkey, but Deena knew instinctively that he would be there.

“Where is Mirella? I’ll have to talk to her before I can make a decision.”

“You’ll probably have to wait until after lunch, because when she comes home it will be with the princess and Mr. Adam. She did say she tried to call you a couple of times this morning but couldn’t reach you.”

“Well, where from? I can call her there.”

“The Plaza Hotel. But don’t call. I’ve got an idea they’re having a very private romantic two-day idyll, and don’t want to be disturbed. They’ll be here in only forty-five minutes. Now, shoo! Out of my kitchen, please. I have too much to do before lunch.”

Deena put her coffee cup down and was about to rise from her chair when Moses said, “Oh, I almost forgot. One other thing. Mr. Ribblesdale is arriving here from London in time for lunch.”

The furious flush of red to Deena’s face was uncharacteristic enough for Moses to note and be puzzled by it. He picked up the pastry brush and continued his task.

Silence hung heavy between the two, and Moses did not quite know how to break it. Deena tried desperately to still her heart. Surprise at the prospect of being with Brindley again rattled her feelings. Her mind was in a turmoil, trying to deal rationally with the present, while it thrilled again to the memory of her sexual encounter with Brindley on Mirella’s wedding night.

There followed for her an involuntary playback of the ecstasy they shared, their voyage of self-discovery and deep erotic release, overwhelming to them both. Memories of passion sated and an intense new feeling of love were mixed with embarrassment — or was it guilt? — over so much freedom and self-indulgence. She recalled the contentment of feeling complete in herself and another human being at the same time. Of having it all.

It came rushing back to Deena, right there in Moses’s kitchen, and she understood for the first time what she had
missed that night and day when they were together, and again when she saw Brindley off to London … and yet again all during their two weeks of separation and silence.

They had fallen in love: that’s what she had not understood. Not Deena had fallen in love. Not Brindley had fallen in love.
They
, together, had done it. Hadn’t they?

Deena could hardly believe that in order to protect herself from a real and shared love, and all the ramifications that it might entail, she had used a brilliant defense mechanism. She had labeled her night of bliss with Brindley as “the greatest one-night stand.” She had even blocked out the expectation of a phone call, a letter, a card. And had received none. Not once since they parted had she thought of him. She now knew why. It had been too dangerous, the pain of losing him too great.

Moses and Deena’s awkward silence was broken by the appearance of the diminutive Turkish girl, Muhsine, so pretty and exotic-looking even when not dressed in her native salvar, but in a more Western version of the blousy pantaloons — more like wide trousers with a long tunic over them that hung to the middle of the calf and was slit up the sides.

Deena stood up and greeted the young woman. They hugged each other, all smiles at meeting again. The language barrier between them, and Muhsine’s last-minute tasks before the guests arrived, separated them very quickly. Deena looked after Muhsine. Objects of wonder Muhsine and Mirella were to Deena. Each had reconciled herself to her exclusive role in Adam’s household and in his heart: unique, yet perilously close to overlap. Her admiration for Muhsine, who had stepped aside from Adam’s bed and relinquished her role of favorite gracefully, embracing Mirella as Adam’s wife, was enormous. Could she have confronted the emotional risks these two women took for Adam’s love? For the love of any man?

Her mouth suddenly felt very dry, her tongue like cotton wool. She went to the old pine hutch at the far end of the kitchen and took a glass and filled it with Perrier. She drank it slowly and the throbbing on the roof of her mouth and at the temples of her head eased, but only slightly. Still with her back to Moses, she placed her hands on the hutch and leaned her weight on them, closed her eyes and took several deep
breaths and let them out slowly. And it worked. The acute anxiety slowly dissolved.

She could hear Moses move from the table to the Aga, open the oven door and slip the baking tin onto its shelf. The clang of the oven door shut out the anxiety and the memories along with it. A burst of music from the kitchen radio brought her back to the here-and-now. She straightened up, took one more deep breath, and turned around.

Moses saw a subtle glow spread across Deena’s face and the trace of an inner smile lying lightly on her lips. He placed a copper pot he had in his hand on the pine table and said, “Ah, that’s more like it. Not only do you look pretty, but suddenly you look happy.”

The smile broadened, and she walked around the table to Moses, kissed the big handsome man on the cheek, and said as she climbed the stairs, “Oh, I am, Moses. I’ve just rediscovered love.”

9

“D
o you believe that fate governs our lives, Mrs. Wingfield?” asked the Princess Eirene.

“Not at all,” Lili snapped back. “But you obviously do.” A note of utter disdain for the woman and her question colored Lili’s voice.

“Oh, but I don’t,” the princess said.

“That surprises me. I would have thought that sort of thinking would be right up your alley,” Lili shot back.

“And why would you think that of me, someone whom you have only just met, and hardly know?”

The other three women in the room, Mirella, Deena, and Muhsine, were aghast at Lili’s manner toward the honored guest. But before Mirella could say anything, Lili continued.

“Because you play the role of the Orientalist. You are, after all, a princess who has lived her entire life in a backward country. I don’t suppose a woman of your age and background, steeped in a Turkish culture, and a privileged world, can stop using fatalism as an excuse for everything. Come now, admit it, you do believe in fate.”

It was at that point that Muhsine, who was treated in the Corey household as more of a lady-in-waiting to Mirella than a maid or servant, rose from where she sat at a discreet distance from the other guests, and moved to stand behind the princess’s chair. It was a small gesture but a very powerful one, the more so because everyone in the room knew that Muhsine’s English was not up to registering every nuance of Lili’s rudeness.

Mirella was flushed with embarrassment. All through lunch, which had gone off perfectly, she had been worried about Lili. Lili had said barely a word, had hardly touched her food, had listened to them all laughing and talking and pretended that she wasn’t there. Mirella had enjoyed herself enormously. Adam, Brindley, and Rashid, the princess, Deena, and she herself had been in top form. But still she had been relieved when the men remained in the dining room to drink port and the ladies had retreated to the living room. Mirella stood up and was about to say something in defense of the princess, when Eirene imperiously held up a hand to stop her.

“But my dear Mrs. Wingfield, I did not say that I don’t believe in fate. What I said was that I don’t believe that fate governs our lives. Quite a different thing, and what I asked you about.”

There was an awkward moment when all eyes were on Lili, who stared at the princess, refusing to answer. The embarrassing silence was broken by a discreet knock at the pair of mahogany doors into Mirella’s first-floor living room. Moses pushed them open, and walked in carrying a large baroque silver tray with handsome English Jacobean glass decanters and small goblets of exquisite shapes in twinkling clear crystal.

The women remained silent while he placed the tray on the table between the two Chippendale settees in front of the fireplace. Their attention was diverted from the strained atmosphere by having to choose between two of the world’s most celebrated white dessert wines.

The princess chose Château d’Yquem, the Sauternes she called liquid sunshine. For over two hundred years the estate had been in the same family, and she often marveled at that and the fact that she had sipped Château d’Yquem that had been up to one hundred years old and was still perfect nectar.
She addressed Moses as he so very carefully poured one of the most expensive wines in the world.

“I would like to thank you for such a perfect meal, Chef. It was memorable, and to end it with Yquem, perfection.” Moses beamed. It was a joy for him to cook, and commendation from the princess was a bonus.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, offering her the goblet from a small silver salver.

“Did you know,” asked the princess, “that it takes one whole vine to make a single glass of Château d’Yquem? Astonishing, is it not?”

They all agreed and chose the Yquem in preference to the Tokay in the second decanter on the tray. Except for Lili, who abstained, saying, “I will have nothing, Moses. I know both these wines, but prefer to drink them only on very special occasions. But if I were to have one, it would have been the Tokay.”

“How interesting,” said the princess. “That is one of the things I remember about your mother: her preference for Tokay.”

Again there was a long silence, as the women sipped and savored their wine. Moses left the tray, retreated through the double doors, turned and pulled them closed.

It was such a little thing, the princess remembering that Lili’s mother had a taste for Tokay, but it had a remarkable effect. The princess had used a feather instead of a fist to punch her out, and like all bullies Lili went down for the count, winded.

The tense, bitchy atmosphere Lili had created suddenly vanished. The relief felt by the younger women in the room was enormous.

The princess stretched her arm over her shoulder and offered her hand to Muhsine, who took it in hers and kissed it, saying in Turkish, “At your service, my princess.”

The princess asked, “Please pour a glass of the Tokay for Mrs. Wingfield.” And while Muhsine was doing it, she said to Lili, “Please join us, at least in just a sip. Humor an old friend of your mother’s, who loved and admired her, and who has spent many an afternoon not unlike this sipping Tokay among other women like ourselves, unhampererd by the intrusive presence of men.”

Mirella watched Lili take a sip, and close her eyes for a
second savoring the taste. A touch of the wand, and as if by magic, a hardness, a manic toughness slipped slowly from her mother’s face.

Mirella looked around the room. Suddenly it seemed quite different. Yet it wasn’t. Nothing had been changed for months, not since the night Adam had filled it with flowers and they made love together for the first time.

She caught a glimpse of the organized chaos of the room reflected in one of the several gilt Chippendale and Georgian mirrors, hanging on or leaning against the eighteenth-century pine paneling.

For the first time she realized how truly unique and enchanting the room was with its boxes and crates, half opened, with straw and various art treasures spilling onto faded and worn antique Persian carpets. Her collection of Japanese prints: the finest Hokusais and Utamaros, in simple gold-leaf frames washed with silver, stacked one behind the other against the walls.

And everywhere flowers, potted shrubs; white daisies with rich, egg-yolk yellow centers, magenta, red, hot-pink azaleas in full bloom, three, four, five feet high, and umbrellas of even larger palms, and
Ficus benjaminas
, and pandanus, and fig trees, heavy with luscious green leaves, were chucked among the large and beautiful Ming, Tang, and Han objets d’art. The large decorative Imari pots and vases, bases for lamps, with their handsome but worn and tatty ivory silk shades, askew or tilted dangerously to one side, were dotted around the room, standing on a wood-slatted crate here, a table there, on the floor, and on a lovely, large Boulle desk at the end of the room that overlooked the garden in the back. Overall was an air of elegant, depraved dishevelment.

Mirella gazed into the mirror, seeking what was different about the way the room appeared to her today. She felt herself melt into the mirror, disappear, as it were, into the reflection, and had a strange sense of déjà vu. Had she been there sometime in the past, in another life? If she had, it had been a different room, but its atmosphere and what it evoked must have been the same.

Then, quite suddenly, while enjoying every detail of the scene she was viewing — the books piled helter-skelter on Queen Anne wing chairs covered in their original tattered and torn tapestry, on the end of a settee, the pale mauve marble
top, with a crack across it, of an impressive French Directoire table, whose legs were replaced by ormolu mounts of giant birds, wings flung back, adding a dash of what a French colleague of Mirella’s from the UN described as typifying
le désordre britannique
— she found her answer.

What was different today was the beauty and utter femininity of the ladies languishing among cushions on the settees. She had never before seen her mother or her best friend, or the two Turkish women, or herself for that matter, as modern-day odalisques. But in this oddly sensuous room, with the sunlight dancing through the windows and playing shadows across the worn white satin Chippendale settees in the center of the paneled room, that was how they revealed themselves.

The diminutive, delicate-looking Princess Eirene, still an exotic beauty looking no more than forty-five years old, half her age, was dressed in a pale mauve linen and silk dress, over which was draped, across one shoulder, a dramatic black and white print of cabbage roses on a long length of lustrous silk. She wore her hat, a tiny pillbox of the same print, like a crown. The huge pearl studs on her ears, and a long strand around her neck that nearly reached to her waist and lay half on the mauve and half on the softly draped black and white scarf, dazzled the eyes with their luster. The scarf and the pearls were reminiscent of a sash of honor and the jewels of a queen.

Muhsine, standing behind her, the youngest and most Oriental and sensuous looking of all the women in the room, might have posed for any of the famous Orientalist painters. Her brightly colored tunic of purples and reds would have made a rich pattern for their palettes. Her dark honey-colored skin and mysterious slanted eyes like those of the princess seemed still to hold the secrets of their past.

And as she gazed past the two Turkish women, framed by the white satin of the settee where the princess sat, and on through the flowers and trees, Mirella could just see two huge, black, black Sudanese eunuchs of considerable age.

They were dressed in black suits and shirts, magnificent turbans wrapped around their heads. The Princess Eirene’s coat of arms, emblazoned in black enamel on a gold disk, was pinned to their turbans, on one side, just above where an eyebrow might have been, had they not been deprived of hair on their body, by their unusual condition. They were the
Princess Eirene’s two devoted bodyguards, who never left her side night or day, and who had taken turns to sleep across her bedroom door for as long as either of them could remember. Their strangely bland features and womanish voices locked in the bodies of men added a final touch of the harem to Mirella’s living room.

Deena, looking softer and more romantically pretty, exotic in her very own New York chic way, shimmered in the mirror with an innocence and a vulnerability that Mirella had never seen before in her. It surprised Mirella that there was a part of her best friend that she had never known.

Lili wore a Cacherel summer dress of sheer printed silk organza in an all-over pattern of violets and pink and mauve pansies. It was a simple shirtwaist dress with a full skirt over a purple underslip. Round cabochon amethysts set in a circle of small diamonds were on her ears, and a black straw hat whose brim was pinned back framed her face.

For the first time in her life Mirella looked at her mother and understood what her father had seen in her that made him accept with a certain stoicism her petty, mean, and often bitchy antics, and yet remain her devoted man, sometime slave, and lover.

Not only was she lovely to look at, but there was a fiery passion in her, tamed but present. It could be seen in the eyes, the full, pouting lower lip, the nervous energy that manifested itself in the way she fidgeted and moved. She was like a wild mare whom men enjoyed reining in. To tame, and then to ride the voluptuous passion beneath the meanness and bitterness with which she pranced before the outside world, and more often than not her children, would be a tall order, and a thrilling one for any man.

Mirella watched Lili hold her small goblet up to the sunlight and smile, then slowly place it against her lips and sip. Her eyes showed how she savored the taste. Then she said, “Legend has it that Pope Leo XIII was kept alive for the last two weeks of his ninety-three years entirely on Eszencia, the best Tokay. My mother told me that. You are quite right, Princess Eirene, my mother was indeed partial to Eszencia Tokay. My mother used to wax lyrical about Hungary. She adored that country, and its people. They were a refined and elegant people, she used to say, a people with taste as fine, as rare, and as sweet as Tokay. And the Hungarians loved my
mother. It seems that when she was a young girl, she was favored by their king. But then, I imagine you would know more about that, Princess, than I would have been told. To the end of her life, long after kings were obsolete and two world wars ravaged the country, my mother still received high-ranking officials and Hungarian ex-royals, and always had a supply of the best Tokay — Eszencia.”

“I always thought of your mother as a most romantic and elegant woman,” Deena interjected. “I used to long for an invitation from Mirella to go with her for a visit to the Wesson-Cabots on Beacon Hill. I was always so in awe of their being Mirella’s grandparents. I remember once promising myself that one day I, too, would drink a wine that came in a bottle so distinctive,” Deena said, a nostalgic smile on her face.

There was a moment of silence while the women in the room were half lost in their separate memories of Lili’s Turkish mother, Inje. It was broken by Mirella saying, “It comes only from Hungary, and from rare vines that have grown there for more than a thousand years. The Furmint grape they use is virtually unknown in the vineyards of other wine countries. I know all that,” Mirella laughed, “because Nama Inje used to tell me about grapes, all kinds of grapes, which she would feed me as a child. Now, I can tell you more about grapes, and much more about Tokay. For instance, are you aware that Eszencia is so rare because it is made by allowing the late-picked grapes’ own weight to squeeze out the nectarlike juice? Aszu is the best grade of Tokay available today. Except of course in this house, as it was in my grandmother’s house. Mother is able to drink Eszencia here today because she knows the owner of a vineyard, much as my grandmother must have.”

Lili looked both puzzled and somewhat wary. Mirella walked from the
fleur de pêche
marble fireplace, where she had been standing, to the settee and sat down next to Lili.

“I own one of the few private vineyards in Hungary and it happens to produce the finest Tokay in the world. I found the vineyard on my list of acquisitions from the Oujie legacy, and have resisted selling it, because of sentimental loyalty to Nama Inje and her delight in the occasional sip of Tokay.”