Mistral's Daughter (61 page)

If style is achieved when
your outer surface corresponds perfectly with your real personality, when you
look like what you are, then Nadine was ultimately stylish, Fauve reflected as
she joined her father, her stepmother and her half-sister for a rare family
dinner. Nadine had just arrived from Paris for a few days at
La Tourrello
,
leaving her husband engaged on the details of a business deal.
 
Mistral detested the man she had married and
a tacit arrangement existed between Nadine and Kate not to remind Mistral of
Phillipe Dalmas's existence any more than was necessary.

When Fauve had come to
Provence for the first summer, Nadine had been fifteen and a half, actually a
half-year younger than Fauve now was herself, yet even then she had seemed more
sophisticated than anyone Fauve had ever known before.

That early impression had
only been confirmed by the passage of time.
 
Today, at twenty-three, Nadine was all brilliant cutting edges.
 
Her blond hair swung in two bright polished
arcs under her chin as if it were a truncated wimple, her straight, long bangs
looked as if they could slice into her forehead, her eyes were edged in sharply
drawn lines of dark green, with an Egyptian precision.

The planes of her nose were
whittled to a degree that just escaped being pointed, her teeth were so white
and regular that they reminded Fauve that their primary purpose was to
bite.
 
There was a knifelike line to her
jaw but her upper lip still curved in its eternal smile.
 
She was compelling, Fauve admitted.
 
It was all but impossible not to stare at
Nadine.
 
Wherever she sat or stood was,
always, center stage.

Nadine Mistral presented
herself as she was, with no attempt to mask her own high self-esteem.
 
Superiority was manifest in the absolute
perfection of her immaculately well-cut white linen slacks, in the starkly
elegant lines of her black silk blouse that wrapped and knotted at her slim
waist, in the splendid pair of onyx earrings rimmed in flashing diamonds that
hung from the lobes of her ears.

She permitted herself no
flaws, not so much as a single fingernail was shorter than the others.
 
How many hours each week it took to maintain
this ruthlessly gleaming exterior no one knew, but Fauve was sure that there
were women who could spend their lives trying to emulate Nadine's glacial and
insolent elegance without achieving it, because, at the last minute, they would
be tempted to add a rope of pearls or brush a little softness into their hair
or tuck a flower into a sash.
 
Nadine
was, in her own way, a Minimalist, who made her statement with the fewest
possible elements.

Kate Browning's determination
to devote herself to Julien Mistral, which had seized her on the day she first
saw him and his work, had been largely transferred to her daughter Nadine.
 
The four years during which Mistral had left
her for Teddy Lunel and then, after her death, roamed the earth, had locked
Kate into the most passionate of maternal connections.
 
No matter how all-important being Madame
Julien Mistral was and always would be to her, her second concern now was her
daughter's happiness and her position in life.

Since Nadine's marriage, Kate
had lived in a state of impotent fury against Mistral, who stood between Nadine
and her rightful status as one of the great heiresses of France.
 
In time, Nadine would inherit everything
Julien owned, the treasure of paintings in the storage room, the rich,
income-producing property of
La Tourrello,
their bank accounts, their
investments; all this vast fortune would be hers by French law, but meanwhile,
Nadine actually had been forced to take a job to maintain her style of life.

Two years ago she had married
a man, Phillipe Dalmas, who, for want of a more specific description, was
always referred to in the press as "an investor."
 
He had been celebrated in the social and
gossip pages of the media for many years before he met Nadine because of the
liaisons he had enjoyed with a number of the most sought-after women of the
day.
 
Phillipe was often dubbed "the
most elusive man in Paris" for, at thirty-nine, he had never been married.

By profession he was a deal
maker, bringing together people who needed money and those who had it to
invest.
 
Somehow only a few of his deals
ever came to pass, and his commissions on those that did amounted to just
enough to support himself in great style as a bachelor.

Phillipe could afford to
employ a houseman-valet, he had enough money to order suits made to measure at
Larsen, where he could choose from the seven hundred bolts of wool that lined
the walls like rare books, and his collection of cashmere scarves
—
for
he never wore an overcoat
—
came from the great house of Hilditch and
Key.
 
His small apartment was in an
irreproachable building near the Arc de Triomphe, and it was handsomely
furnished with some good Empire pieces, but his only real capital was his
charm.

Phillipe Dalmas was the
World's Best Guest.
 
Amusing, handsome
and splendidly heterosexual, he was the subject of every hostess's reverie.

When Nadine met this sensual
man, devoted to pleasure, given and received, a man enveloped in an immense
glamour of unavailability, she was immediately determined to catch him.
 
For his part, as Phillipe saw his fortieth
birthday approach, he decided that it was a sensible moment to terminate his
triumphant bachelorhood.
 
He had no
intention of spending a middle age visiting in other people's houses, no matter
how agreeably.

Nadine succeeded in marrying
him, where so many others had failed, by the simple, banal means of appearing
at the right moment in his life.
 
Her
twenty-one radiant years, her flashing flawlessness and, of course, her
incontestable prospects as the daughter of Julien Mistral, made her an almost
inevitable choice, for while Phillipe Dalmas would never have married only for
money, he certainly could not afford to marry someone without it.

Nadine Mistral and Phillipe
Dalmas shared the kind of profound, bred-in-the-bone superficiality that can
become, when superbly mounted, a certain kind of meaningfulness.
 
Their deep attention to façades gave each of
them a high gloss and together they made an unforgettably decorative couple,
like a pair of rare art objects, burnished to an enviable degree.
 
Once all the hostesses in Paris had resigned
themselves to the loss of Phillipe as a single man, they began to compete with
each other for the presence of the Dalmases, who had one of those marriages in
which the husband and the wife together become the single star of an evening.

Kate would have put away
certain loftier ambitions she had long nourished for her daughter, for she
couldn't deny that Nadine adored her husband, had it not been for Julien
Mistral, who spent a half-hour with Phillipe Dalmas and decided that the man
was essentially worthless.
 
There would
be no dowry, he declared, and his wedding gift to the couple was only a
medium-sized apartment on the avenue Montaigne, the very least, Kate had
managed to persuade him, they could decently offer.

Since then, the allowance he
could so easily have made them had not been paid
—
and never would be,
as long as he was alive, he assured Kate.
 
Nor was it possible now for her to give them lavish gifts.
 
Mistral, who had allowed his wife to make all
the financial decisions for him during their long marriage, suddenly insisted
on carrying on his own correspondence with his dealers and his bankers.

Kate was effectively
prevented from secretly handling any substantial sum and the only money she
could still spend freely was that needed to maintain
La Tourrello
.
 
She was reduced to little more than a
housekeeper and estate manager, she thought venomously.
 
But Nadine took the disappointment with the
philosophy of one whose father is almost seventy years old.
 
It was only temporary, after all, and in the
meanwhile it was chic and amusing to say that she had to work for a living,
more droll than if she had just been
 
another rich girl, particularly since no one could doubt how immensely
rich she would be.

Nadine had created a job for
herself that displayed her to perfection.
 
She worked with Jean François Albin, the only other French couturier who
enjoyed the level of international importance of Yves Saint Laurent.
 

Her work was without specific
title, its boundaries hard to define.
 
She wasn't head of public relations, because that job, with its
technical details of dealing with the world press, was handled by Lily de Mar,
who had been trained at Dior; nor was she involved in the actual design of the
clothes or the selling of them, or any of the business of the House of
Albin.
 
Yet, in a way that was as clear
as if it had been official, Nadine was employed to be Jean François Albin's
Best Friend.

She was the one human being
in the world without whom he simply could not function.
 
She acted as a buffer between him and the
entire world that he saw as full of enemies, or, at the very best, brutes,
people lacking in sensitivity.
 
He
believed that Nadine alone would never lie to him. He was convinced that she
was the only person who did not seek some sort of advancement through her
association with him, for what could the daughter of Julien Mistral gain from
closeness to any couturier, no matter how famous?

To Albin, Nadine Dalmas was
the idealized incarnation of the woman he designed for.
 
He invested her with almost mystical powers
to comfort and inspire and refresh him.
 
He now needed her by his side at all times of crisis.
 
Henri Gros, the solid businessman who was
Albin's partner in a couture house that was swollen with profits from three
perfumes and a number of worldwide licensing agreements, was delighted to pay
Nadine a pleasantly handsome salary for her devotion, no matter how vague her
role seemed to be.
 
The fragile, creative
machine that was Jean François Albin must be, at all costs, nourished,
comforted and comprehended so that he could continue to turn out two
collections a year.

As Nadine talked about her
job at dinner with her parents and Fauve, her proud, cool, jaunty manner that
was not an affectation but her natural form of expression, didn't change.
 
Yet clearly, she was engrossed in her
life.
 
She spoke, as always; in even and
assured tones that were pitched just a bit lower than anyone else's;
 
so that people found themselves stopping
their own conversations in order to listen to her.

"You see, Father, Jean
François was at the breaking point.
 
The
new collection is all finished down to the last button, but last Wednesday he
telephoned in despair in the middle of the night and I rushed over to the
atelier to find him about to take a pair of scissors to every single
garment.
 
I led him away as gently as if
he were a sleepwalker, and told him that we were going to the very best clinic
in St. Cloud, where he would give himself over to a sleep cure until Monday and
I stayed with him holding his hand, until he was actually sleeping
peacefully.
 
On Monday, when I return,
he'll be a new man."

"Does that happen
often?" asked Kate.

"He's had nothing but
trouble these past months," Nadine explained.
 
"All five of our new black manikins
deserted to go to work for Givenchy, and that vacation house in Sardinia I told
you about is driving him mad with worry.
 
Quite naturally, Jean François insists that the interior decorator take
the most precious old brocades and drape them like muslin and use inlaid woods
with the same ease as if it were raw lumber but the man just can't seem to
follow orders."

Gee whiz! Fauve whispered
—
to herself.

"Fortunately,"
Nadine continued, "I've been able to take a lot of this off his hands and
leave him free to concentrate on his art, but no matter what I accomplish, in
the end it's his decision that is vital, and this is just the worst of
years.
 
After all, he can hardly be
unaware that he has become a cult object
—
nothing makes a person more
vulnerable than to be elevated to that sort of worship
—
yet, what can
he do?
 
He must expose himself time and
time again
—
he must risk, he must change."

"Change what?"
Mistral asked, pushing away his plate.

"The length, Father,
Jean François feels that it's time to impose the maximum length
—
the
mini is dead
—
but how can those cows of the public possibly be subtle
and daring enough to follow?
 
Can they
rise to his level?
 
He had such a horror
of the buyers and the press
—
I don't know if he'll be able to face them
after the collection is over —"