Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [84]
Her mother says this with a lighthearted tone appropriate to the evening, but before he leaves Olympia, Cote casts a look in her direction, and there is no mistaking the coldness, the knowingness of his gaze. As if saying to her: “If you persist in this charade . . .”
Though Olympia is shaken by the encounter, it is understood that she will remain with her parents and greet the other guests, who begin arriving then in great numbers. She does this until she can bear it no longer. She excuses herself to walk out onto the porch.
A diffuse sunlit mist has rolled in with the sea and has filtered the light so that all objects are lent a salmon tinge, particularly the white dresses of the women and the long scallops of the tent. With a trick of light she does not quite comprehend, the pinkened mist has also produced an aquamarine sea with much white froth at the shoreline. It is a sight to fill the soul with the nearly unbearable sweetness of the best that Nature has to offer, an awareness that is made all the more keen and poignant with the realization that such beauty is transient, that it will soon be gone and might not, because of the unique physics of light, which she does not understand well at all, ever come again. She thinks her father must be chuffed to have Nature as well dressed on this most important evening as his family and his guests.
The beauty of the night begins to erase the memory of the unpleasant episode with Cote. Olympia makes her way down to the tent and strolls through it, looking at the tables with their elaborate settings of Limoges and heavy sterling, which bear her mother’s initials in gold on the stems. Opaline flutes are ready for the champagne, and white candles flicker on every table. Already there are some guests moving along the edges, peering in. Waiters stand ready to serve them oysters and spirits.
“Olympia,” a voice calls to her.
She turns just as Victoria Farragut reaches out one white-gloved hand and seizes Olympia’s arm. “This is all so grand,” she says. “You look ever so nice. I could not get my hair to lie smooth no matter what I did. It is this wretched humidity.”
Olympia looks at Victoria’s hair, which has frizzed all about her face in a way she thinks is rather becoming, and she tells her so.
“Oh, no,” Victoria exclaims. “I am a fright. But you look lovely. I know that dress is from Paris because my mother told me.”
Both Victoria and Olympia, somewhat to Olympia’s surprise, are offered champagne. Olympia has tasted swallows of champagne at other formal parties, but until she met Haskell, she had not ever drunk an entire glass. Now, however, the dry bubbles seem achingly familiar, and for a moment she is seized with the kind of physical memories that are triggered not by thoughts but by sensations.
“This is tickling my throat,” Victoria says, coughing slightly. “I do not know half of the people here. Are they all from Fortune’s Rocks? No, surely, they cannot be.”
“There are some guests up from Boston and Newburyport. But I hardly know most of them myself.”
“My mother fussed so with her dress,” Victoria confesses. “She means to find a husband. No, I should not tell you that.”
Olympia smiles. “I hope she finds one,” she says. “There seem to be enough eligible men here,” she adds, scanning the crowd, in which men of all ages appear to outnumber the women.
“But no one wants a woman with nearly grown children,” Victoria says with a small sigh. “Particularly not a woman who has little money of her own.”
“I do not think a man chooses a woman solely on the basis of her fortune or lack of it,” Olympia says. “Or will refuse to be interested in the woman because of a grown daughter. Is there not the matter of love?”
“Oh, I doubt very much my mother has much hope of love,” Victoria says. “It is a husband she wants. With an income. Will you dance if someone asks you?”
“I suppose I shall have to,” Olympia says.
“Olympia, you sound like an old woman who is tired of life already.”
“I am sorry,” she says. “Perhaps I am simply tired.” She takes