Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [28]
Venetia examined her pale, blotched face in the gleaming mirror. She looked terrible, but it didn’t matter. She turned out the light and drifted back into the bedroom. The digital clock by the side of the bed offered the times of day in London, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney. All you had to do was press the button. It was ten o’clock in the morning in London, and two o’clock the previous night in California. Did that mean Jenny had been dead less time in L.A.?
Vennie curled up on the soft brown moleskin-covered bed and cried herself to sleep.
The book she had been staring at for the past hour slid to the floor with a small thud, but India scarcely noticed. All she saw were images of Jenny’s face. Jenny smiling at her, her blue eyes sparkling with amusement; Jenny talking on the phone, running her left hand through her thick blond hair in that familiar nervous gesture; Jenny looking haughtily into a mirror as she clasped diamonds around her neck and snuggled a vast white fox fur coat around her slender shoulders, preparing for the annual Oscar Award ceremony; Jenny soft and laughing, lying in bed while her three young daughters clambered around her begging for another story; Jenny arrogantly demanding only the best hotel suites because “she’d earned it, damn it”; Jenny wide eyed and breathlessly in love with some new man … there was always a new man, no one ever lasted. Poor Jenny.
Maybe, thought India, if my father had lived she might have found lasting happiness instead of just temporary pleasure. Jenny had loved him, she told me so. And he had loved her. It hadn’t been the way it was with Paris’s father, a passion that needed to run its fast-burning course, nor with Venetia’s father. That had been an amusing flirtation with a very correct older man, possessor of a great English hereditary title and vast inherited lands, whom Jenny had delighted in seducing, tempting him into realms of sexuality he hadn’t known existed and couldn’t resist. India never knew if the story of the gondola was an embellishment of Jenny’s to add extra spice to the story, but knowing Jenny she would bet it was true. Jenny would have done it just for the fun of remembering this proper but passionate, trouserless Englishman straddling her in a wildly rocking gondola on the dark canals of Venice—and she would have loved the heightened thrill of sex just barely hidden from discovery. Sex wasn’t something that Jenny enjoyed only when she fell in love, however brief that emotion might be, it was a way of life for her. Jenny Haven loved to make love—and there were those who phrased that more crudely—but still India was sure Jenny had loved her father.
A smile flickered across India’s face as she remembered Jenny’s “father stories,” told to them bit by bit over a period of years, garnished with more detail as they grew older, until they had become family legends. Paris’s “father story” was passionate, Venetia’s was fun, but mine, thought India, was romantic, mine was the vulnerable Jenny in love who, on a houseboat in Kashmir, wrapped in the warmth of her lover’s arms, saw the still, cool, star-spangled dawn rise over Lake Srinagar … and named her daughter India. But this time when the movie the two were making together was over the romance hadn’t faded. They were to have been married after his complicated divorce finally came through, but then he was drowned on location in Singapore. Just one of those needless accidents that change so much. It might have lasted for them, and then perhaps Jenny would still be alive too.
Perhaps that’s why she kept me close to her, mused India. Is that the reason I was the one sent to schools in the States instead of Europe? Eastern schools, of course—only the best—in line with Jenny’s