Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [33]
The limousine with its silent occupants took the hill at the top of La Cienega Boulevard easily, slid through the light on yellow, and turned west on Sunset past the billboards advertising the latest rock success, the newest movie, and the current stars of Las Vegas. India averted her eyes as they passed the leisured lawns of Beverly Hills, where Jenny had lived. Though they had never spent much time there, it was still a sort of home. She’d had birthday parties there as a kid, she’d come “home” on the yellow school bus clutching her paintings and Jenny had pinned them on her kitchen wall, she’d had kids over to swim. And then, too, there had been the long summer weeks spent out at the beach house at Malibu. She supposed the properties would both have to be sold now.
The guard on duty at the West Gate of Bel-Air waved them through and the big limousine purred its way up the hillside to the pillared, white-brick mansion that was part of Fitz McBain’s private world. A young man waited on the broad front steps. “Good afternoon,” he called. “My name is Bob Ronson. Mr. McBain wished me to welcome you to his home. I shall be here to look after things for you, so if there is anything you need, anything at all, you just let me know.”
Ronson was one of several young men in Fitz McBain’s employ, a combination of secretary, personal assistant, and majordomo, intent on working his way up through the strata of the multilayered McBain companies. The position was one McBain allotted only to the most promising and ambitious. He had no time for yes-men, and while he acknowledged that there were those who by choice and natural limitation would remain forever in the middle reaches of his complex operations, there was no place for mediocrity in his personal entourage.
The white house was peaceful and sunlit and Venetia thought it very European. Faded Isfahan rugs covered the polished boards in the hall, and a single priceless English landscape dreamed immortally on this Californian wall. A fine pair of carved Hepplewhite mirrors reflected bowls of flowers on the matching hall tables, and instinctively Venetia bent her head to the peach-colored roses, breathing in their familiar fragrance.
“How lovely,” she murmured, wondering whether Fitz McBain chose scented English roses for all his homes, or whether this was the severely suited young Mr. Ronson’s taste.
India’s eyes gleamed with a professional curiosity as she gazed around the drawing room that spread across the full width of the house, noting a Dufy depicting the Baie des Anges at Nice, an early Pissarro, and two lilied Monets on the walls. In her opinion, without them this room would have fallen into the category of “luxury interior decorator style,” though she did admire the color scheme of cream and butter-yellow with touches of a dark teal blue. “I should introduce Mr. McBain to Fabrizio Paroli,” she remarked, sauntering through arched glass doors onto the terrace. A swath of green lawn ended at an azure pool, where a silent youth in white T-shirt and shorts wielded a pole, vacuuming the always flawless depths. It was a Hockney painting come to life.
Ronson led them across to a white-porticoed summer-house that contained changing rooms and a small but well-equipped gymnasium as well as what he told them was Fitz McBain’s favorite room. Venetia knew why instantly. It was a room to relax in; you could curl up on the huge black sofas with a book from one of the shelves that lined the room. Or