The Key to Rebecca - Ken Follett [97]
“Thank you, Gaafar.”
The servant went out. Elene was thrilled to be in Vandam’s house and left alone to look around. The drawing room had a large marble fireplace and a lot of very English furniture: somehow she thought he had not furnished it himself. Everything was clean and tidy and not very lived-in. What did this say about his character? Perhaps nothing.
The door opened and a young boy walked in. He was very good-looking, with curly brown hair and smooth, preadolescent skin. He seemed about ten years old. He looked vaguely familiar.
He said: “Hello, I’m Billy Vandam.”
Elene stared at him in horror. A son—Vandam had a son! She knew now why he seemed familiar: he resembled his father. Why had it never occurred to her that Vandam might be married? A man like that—charming, kind, handsome, clever—was unlikely to have reached his late thirties without getting hooked. What a fool she had been to think that she might have been the first to desire him! She felt so stupid that she blushed.
She shook Billy’s hand. “How do you do,” she said. “I’m Elene Fontana.”
“We never know what time Dad’s coming home,” Billy said. “I hope you won’t have to wait too long.”
She had not yet recovered her composure. “Don’t worry. I don’t mind—it doesn’t matter a bit ...”
“Would you like a drink, or anything?”
He was very polite, like his father, with a formality that was somehow disarming. Elene said: “No, thank you.”
“Well, I’ve got to have my supper. Sorry to leave you alone.”
“No, no ...”
“If you need anything, just call Gaafar.”
“Thank you.”
The boy went out, and Elene sat down heavily. She was disoriented, as if in her own home she had found a door to a room she had not known was there. She noticed a photograph on the marble mantelpiece, and got up to look at it. It was a picture of a beautiful woman in her early twenties, a cool, aristocratic-looking woman with a faintly supercilious smile. Elene admired the dress she was wearing, something silky and flowing, hanging in elegant folds from her slender figure. The woman’s hair and makeup were perfect. The eyes were startlingly familiar, clear and perceptive and light in color: Elene realized that Billy had eyes like that. This, then, was Billy’s mother—Vandam’s wife. She was, of course, exactly the kind of woman who would be his wife, a classic English beauty with a superior air.
Elene felt she had been a fool. Women like that were queuing up to marry men like Vandam. As if he would have bypassed all of them only to fall for an Egyptian courtesan! She rehearsed the things that divided her from him: he was respectable and she was disreputable; he was British and she was Egyptian; he was Christian—presumably—and she was Jewish; he was well bred and she came out of the slums of Alexandria; he was almost forty and she was twenty-three... The list was long.
Tucked into the back of the photograph frame was a page torn from a magazine. The paper was old and yellowing. The page bore the same photograph. Elene saw that it had come from a magazine called The Tatler. She had heard of it: it was much read by the wives of colonels in Cairo, for it reported all the trivial events of London society—parties, balls, charity lunches, gallery openings and the activities of English royalty. The picture of Mrs. Vandam took up most of this page, and a paragraph of type beneath the picture reported that Angela, daughter of Sir Peter and Lady Beresford, was engaged to be married to Lieutenant William Vandam, son of Mr. and Mrs. John Vandam of Gately, Dorset. Elene refolded the cutting and put it back.
The family picture was complete: Attractive British officer, cool, self-assured English wife, intelligent charming son, beautiful home, money, class and happiness. Everything else was a dream.
She wandered around the room, wondering if it held any more shocks in store. The room had been furnished by Mrs. Vandam, of course, in perfect, bloodless taste. The decorous print of the curtains toned with the restrained hue of the upholstery and the elegant striped wallpaper.