Mistral's Daughter (83 page)

Nadine
waved away a pile of magazines that a young assistant in a smock presented to
her. No, she did not want
Match
or
Jours de France
or
Marie Claire
or
Elle.
 
Thank you but no.

Indeed,
she had already seen them.
 
She had
bought a pile of brightly colored weekly magazines at a kiosk yesterday and
taken them quickly home to read in private, for each of them treated the
Cavaillon
series as its main story.
 
What
incomprehensible fit of madness had caused the old man to paint those monstrous
things with Hebrew lettering on them?
 
Nadine had asked herself in aversion and disgust.
 
She couldn't endure looking at them
—
the inscriptions alone made her shut her eyes.
 
How typical of the press it was to make such a fuss over them, such an
inordinate fuss, as if Julien Mistral had been a new discovery, an overnight
sensation, a revelation.
 
She couldn't
understand the amount of space, the covers and full-page photographs, that had
been devoted to this mere handful of canvases.
 
And, God knows, it wasn't sour grapes, she told herself.
 
She wouldn't want them herself for anything
in the world.
 
"Immortal," one
critic had actually said.
 
"The
final proof of his boundless genius," another.
 
"A legacy for which the entire human
race is richer" had announced a third.
 
They were all equally ludicrous, each baying together like a pack of
dogs, just as they always did, attempting to outdo each other, like the fashion
writers after a successful collection.
 
Their words could be about a new style as easily as about paint on
canvas.

Yet,
all it did, in the end, was to make her own pictures the more valuable.
 
She couldn't really object if they wanted to
rediscover Mistral, Nadine thought.
 
Naturally they had all pounced on the
Cavaillon
series, when the
old man had singled it out in his will, and naturally they had all insisted on
treating Fauve as if she were the star of the whole sideshow.
 
She didn't begrudge Fauve her cheap little
moment in the limelight.
 
It would dim
quickly.

Nadine
was so lost in her thoughts that she was surprised to find the coiffeur had
presented her with a mirror so that she could inspect his work.
 
She checked the back of her head carefully.
She could see that it was perfectly acceptable but it wouldn't do to let him
think that she was too easily pleased.
 
"Perhaps you've made it a bit too tight at the side," she
said, smoothing her hand under the shimmering hair that curved under her chin.

As
he worked she looked around her.
 
There
must be a dozen women here she knew, Nadine realized as she exchanged nods and
smiles around the big room.
 
She had had
no idea that so many of her friends came to Alexandre, that so many of his
clients were the women she was accustomed to dining and lunching with.
 
They all looked, in her opinion,
overdone.
 
Why had the Comtesse d'Ornano
added that twist of false braids to her lovely black hair?
 
And the Princesse Laure de Beauveau-Craon had
chosen, for some strange reason, to wear sprigs of tiny purple orchids in her
chignon.
 
Quite odd.
 
As for Baronne Guy, her long blond locks were
imprisoned in a sort of gilded net.
 
Madame Patiño, Princess Alexander of Yugoslavia, the young Baronne
Olimpia de Rothschild
—
all of them with highly decorated hair.
 
Didn't they know how fussy it looked, how
unsuited to real life?
 
If this was what
Alexandre's stylists did to women whose taste was normally good, she had better
be on her guard.

"If
I might suggest, Madame," the coiffeur said, "perhaps we might try
something a bit more formal?"

"Don't
touch it," Nadine snapped. "It's fine."

"As
you wish.
 
I thought that for the ball
tonight..."

"I'm
in mourning," Nadine said quickly.

"My
regrets, Madame."
 
He was plainly
relieved that he had not been tactless.

"I
couldn't possibly go to a ball."

"Of
course not, Madame.
 
It is painful, is it
not," he murmured.
 
"Particularly painful to miss this ball, the first time that the
Princesse Marie-Blanche has opened her château since her husband died.
 
That's why we're so crowded this
afternoon.
 
They say it will be the
greatest ball since the last one of the Baron de Rédé's."

"Yes,
that was a beautiful evening," Nadine said mechanically.

Princesse
Marie-Blanche
?
 
So her affair with Phillipe had continued
even while the Prince lay dying, even after his death, even now.
 
Otherwise, why would she not have invited as
close a friend as Nadine to her ball?
 
The only possible explanation was that Phillipe was, in some way, going
to be the unofficial host.
 
Strange, that
she had not heard any gossip about Marie-Blanche and Phillipe, for
Marie-Blanche led Parisian society.
 
When
Marie-Blanche said dance, they danced; when she said drive fifty miles out to
the country for a ball, they drove the fifty miles and counted themselves among
the blessed.
 
What would Marie-Blanche
want
with Phillipe Dalmas, for God's sake?

As
Nadine stared into her own sharply outlined eyes in the mirror she tallied up
in her mind the number of unattached middle-aged men in Paris who were
charming, good-looking, well-dressed and heterosexual, who danced well, played
cards well, played polo well and were adored by every hostess.
 
Besides Phillipe she knew of three
—
no four, counting Omar Sharif. And how many women were there who were rich
—
many of them far richer than she
—
unattached, and desperate for an
escort, let alone such a man?
 
Dozens.
 
Dozens and dozens.
 
Her heart shriveled, a foul and evil dust
filled her mouth, and a pain she would not have believed existed, ignited in
her abdomen, a pain that seemed to be a burning rat eating at her insides, a
rat on fire running wild with feet of hot lead.

No,
she had not heard any gossip about Phillipe and Marie-Blanche.
 
She had not heard any gossip because she had
no invitations...
 
no invitations worth
speaking of, only a few unques- tionably third-rate invitations that she hadn't
deigned to decline.
 
Faced with the
choice between Princesse Marie-Blanche and Nadine Dalmas, people would, of
course, choose Princesse Marie-Blanche.
 
She would make that choice herself.
 
There was no contest.

As
she tipped Monsieur Christophe, so much that he actually looked surprised,
Nadine had only one thought.
 
By chance
she had worn a black suit today.
 
She
must wear only black from now on.
 
She
would find a small hairdresser in her neighborhood, where she wouldn't run into
her friends.
 
Acquaintances.
 
She had no friends.
 
She would wear black for her father and she
would decide what to do with the rest of her life, a life in which she would,
no doubt, often be described as Jean François Albin's ex-employee, as Phillipe
Dalmas's ex-wife, for who was Nadine Dalmas?
 
Who cared?

She
walked down the street looking for a taxi to take her home.

An
empty taxi passed as she stood, transfixed, staring at a headline in
France
Soir
 
displayed on the wall of a
kiosk.
 
"
Fauve Lunel
—
Prendera-t-elle le nom de Mistral, son pere?
" Would Fauve take her
father's name?
 
Who gave a damn what she
did, that tawdry bastard, that interloper, that cunning tramp?
 
Why was she being treated as if she were
Julien Mistral's only daughter? "I," Nadine wanted to scream out loud
at everyone passing by, "
I am Mistral's daughter!
"

When
she decided to stay on for a few weeks in Provence, Fauve had taken a room at
Le Prieuré, and then, when it closed for the season in November, she had moved
into the Hotel Europe in Avignon.

One
morning near the end of November, she drove her rented Peugeot toward Félice,
determined to make a decision about
La Tourrello
before the day was
over.
 
The house had been full of people
since the
Cavaillon
series had been revealed.
 
She had had to act as hostess to a great
variety of guests; journalists, art historians and museum curators.
 
But now the question of what to do with the
Cavaillon
series had been settled.
 
Yesterday the
last canvas had been carefully crated and loaded into the padded trucks that
would take them to Amsterdam, where they would begin their slow, progress from
continent to continent, from major city to major city, to every last one of the
museums that had asked for them, carrying their festive message of brotherhood
throughout the world.
 
If she had kept
them in
La Tourrello
only a relatively few people would have ever seen
them except in reproduction.
 
Someday the
transcendent canvases would come back to her, but for many years to come, the
Cavaillon
series would belong to mankind.

Now
that the studio was empty, now that the storeroom had also been cleared out of
all but the family portraits that Fauve intended to keep for herself, she would
be able to make a reasonable and leisurely judgment about the house.
 
Except for the future of the
Cavaillon
series she felt as if nothing she had decided on since she left New York in
October had been based on firmly collected thought.
 
She'd had to dash into things, she'd been
pulled along by events, and by the end of every day she'd been so exhausted
that she'd fallen into bed with nothing on her mind but the appointments she
had the next morning.
 
She'd hired a
young widow, Lucette Albion, from Lacoste, to come in every day and keep the
house clean, and make lunch and coffee for all the visitors.
 
Today the last of them had gone home, and
La
Tourrello
would be completely empty, since it was Sunday and Lucette had
gone to a wedding in Bonnieux, in which her two small children were going to
be bridal attendants.

A
mistral had been blowing for the past few days and Fauve was bundled up in a
warm plaid jacket over loden-green wool pants and a creamy, cable-stitched,
Irish fisherman's sweater, but that morning the wind had left the Lubéron as
capriciously as it had arrived.
 
The
too-bright sky had turned an ordinary soft blue again, and frilly curls of
clouds were draped like ribbons here and there, the party decorations of
heaven.
 
The only sign of true winter was
the bareness of the fields.
 
The
windbreak borders of cypresses were green and alert, and in the olive trees,
the leaves of the trees were so much like a silver stream that Fauve almost
expected to see fish swimming in them.
 
As she drove along she could hear the sound of shotguns in the hills as
the farmers went looking for game birds; children's shrill, excited laughter
rang out as they played Sunday games, liberated from their perpetual homework,
and at the entrance to many a
mas
stood a table on which ripe fruit was
displayed for sale.
 
Fauve stopped at one
of them, and bought a pear and an apple for her lunch.

She
was getting roundish
—
well, a little anyway, she thought as she drove
past Les Baumettes.
 
Everyone she'd met
had been so hospitable that, no matter how tired she'd been by the end of the
day, she had often found herself eating a large dinner with Jean and Félice
Perrin or with Dr. Lucien Daniel and his wife, Céline, or with some of the
other new friends she'd made in Avignon, in Apt, in Bonnieux.
 
In Félice she often shared a meal with Pomme
and Épinette, both of them as tart and irreverent as ever, in spite of their
married dignity.
 
And, of course, she saw
Adrien and Beth Avigdor.

Eric
hadn't been around much, she reflected, feeling, against all common sense, that
he should have been.
 
But he had two
important new houses under construction on the other side of the Lubéron
mountains, in Les Baux, and it was a curiously long and complicated drive over
little country roads from there to Avignon, since the Autoroute bypassed Les
Baux entirely.
 
He had designed the large
vacation houses for a pair of Swedish industrialists and Eric had to supervise
much of the building himself since the master workmen of Provence had not
become less unpredictable as the demand for their services escalated.
 
This part of France was a paradise for
masons, carpenters and stonecutters.
 
They could pick and choose their jobs.
 
Eric intended to have those houses ready for their owners by spring, if
he had to stay in Les Baux and watch them go up inch by inch.