Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [2]
Kate sighed. Marie-Thérèse was the au pair and notoriously lazy but Lydia could never be persuaded to get rid of her. “Think of the poor girl’s mother in France,” she always said when presented with each maddening example of Marie-Thérèse’s inefficiency. “What would she think if we threw out her daughter and said she was no good?” So Marie-Thérèse stayed and did less and less as the weeks went by.
“There are fresh flowers waiting in the kitchen, the table needs setting, get Shaky off the sofa in the drawing room and tidy it up.” Venetia dashed for the door.
“But where are you going?” yelled Kate as Venetia slammed the door behind her.
“Shopping!” If she took the Mini and double-parked, she’d just make Europa Foods on Sloane Street before it closed. The question of Venetia Haven’s future was pushed once again to the back of her mind.
PARIS, 24 October
Paris Haven leaned back from the littered drawing-board and stretched her aching back. She’d been working without a break since before lunch and now it was almost dark. She swept her hands impatiently through her long dark hair and glanced at the serviceable carbon-and-steel Rolex that she always wore on her right wrist because she was left-handed and it got in her way when she was sketching or cutting fabrics. The watch was Jenny’s birthday present to her—two birthdays ago, Paris remembered with a shock of surprise. She was twenty-four now and she still hadn’t made it! And Jenny hadn’t let her forget it. “Keep after it,” she always said on the phone. “Push yourself forward, always look good and go where it’s good to be seen. You’re the one with talent, Paris. I know you’ll make it.” So much for that!
Paris leapt guiltily from the tall chair in front of the drawing board. She’d invited Amadeo Vitrazzi for drinks at eight, and now it was ten minutes before the hour. Oh, God, she hadn’t realized it was so late! She glanced around the one large room, whose skylights let in the glowering gray of an October evening in the city for which she was named. That was another of Jenny’s eccentric ideas—naming each of her three daughters so oddly. If they’d all lived in Los Angeles as kids it wouldn’t have been so bad, but to live in Paris and be called Paris had been a childhood burden she didn’t care to remember. It was only when she was sixteen and developing her very own individual sense of style that she had felt she could live up to its promise.
The long attic studio, together with a tiny bathroom and a minuscule kitchen, was both her home and her workroom and it was, as usual, desperately untidy, awash beneath a sea of half-finished and discarded sketches and a flurry of fabric samples. But despite its disarray it had—like Paris herself—an offbeat, inviting charm.
Leaving the lamp on over the drawing board she crossed to the living end of her abode and began frantically plumping up the caramel velvet cushions on the antique sleigh bed that she’d bought with Jenny’s last birthday money and which served as both bed and sofa in her meagerly furnished atelier. A pair of ancient velvet theater curtains, picked up at auction, and faded from their original bold color, had been cut to form a spread for the bed and act as a room divider, hanging from an ornate brass rail effectively bisecting the living area from her “kitchen” and bathroom. Their apricot glow gave a feeling of intimacy to the living end of the white-walled expanse of the atelier itself. Most of the room was taken up by the drawing board, cutting table, and stacks of industrial shelving that held bolts of fabrics and the patterns for her designs, and their colors glowed as vividly as a Matisse against the deliberately neutral interior of the room.
After a long day at her drawing board when her eyes were dazzled with the colors conjured up from her own palette, Paris found it restful in the evening to settle back into