‘That’s another reason I’m calling you, I have to fly to the coast tomorrow. Meetings with the Aaronson lawyers. The merger’s on, after all.’
‘Oh. It’s unexpected, isn’t it?’
‘Yep, it sure is. But what can I do, I’m needed out there.’
‘Never mind. But it would have been nice to have you in Paris if only for a couple of days.’
‘Sorry, darling, it can’t be helped. When do you think you’ll be back?’
‘I have appointments set up for the early part of next week, Doug, so I’ll probably leave for New York on Thursday or Friday.’
‘Great! You’ll be here next weekend, and so will I. This is probably going to be a quick trip to LA. In and out.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Er, the Peninsula, in Beverly Hills, as usual.’
‘Doug?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve really missed you this week.’
‘I’ve missed you too, darling. But we’ll make up for it, and you know what they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.’
She laughed. ‘I guess it does…the way I’m feeling right now, I wish you were here…’ She laughed again, a light, infectious laugh.
He laughed with her. ‘Got to go, sweetie.’
‘When are you leaving tomorrow?’
‘My flight’s at nine in the morning, and I’m going straight into meetings once I’ve dropped my luggage off. I’ll call you.’
‘’Bye, darling.’
‘’Bye, Laura. And a big kiss,’ he said, before hanging up.
Laura sat soaking in the bath longer than usual. There had been no cabs on the street when she and Claire had left the museum earlier; they had walked all the way back to the hotel where Claire had finally found a cab.
The water was helping Laura to thaw out and to relax, and she luxuriated in the hot bubble bath for a while, thinking of Doug. She had married Douglas Casson when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-seven. They were a perfect fit, compatible, attuned to each other in the best of ways. But lately he worked too hard. She smiled at this thought. Didn’t he say the same thing about her?
To his way of thinking, they were both workaholics, and he seemed to relish announcing this. It was true, of course, but she didn’t like that particular word. It smacked of obsessiveness, and she was quite sure neither of them was that. Not exactly.
Anyway, Claire had always said that the ability to work hard for long hours was the most important thing of all, and that this was what separated the women from the girls.
But Laura thought that love was important, too. Hadn’t Colette, her favourite writer, once written that love and work were the only things of consequence in life. Certainly she believed this to be so. But Claire didn’t – at least not the love part, not anymore. Claire had been burnt. ‘And they were third-degree burns, at that,’ Claire had said. Those burns had taken a long time to heal. ‘Now I have built a carapace around me, and I’ll never get burnt again. Or hurt in any way. My shell protects me. Nothing, no one, can ever inflict pain on me.’
Laura loved Claire. She also had enormous compassion for her, because of all the bad things that had happened to her. Laura was well aware that Claire was raw inside; still, she couldn’t help wishing her friend would open herself up to love again instead of retreating into her shell the way she did. There was something oddly sterile about a woman’s life, if she did not have love in it, if she didn’t have a man to cherish and to love.
These days, whenever she broached this subject, Claire only laughed hollowly, and responded swiftly, ‘I have Natasha, and she’s all that matters. She’s my life now, I don’t need a man around.’
But a fourteen-year-old daughter wasn’t enough, was it? Laura wondered. Surely not for a loving, passionate, intelligent woman like Claire.
Claire. The dearest friend she had ever had. And still her best friend, the one she loved the most, even though they lived so far away from each other now. Claire and she went back a long way. Almost all of their lives, really.
She had been five years old when Claire and her parents, Jack and Nancy Benson, had come to live in the apartment opposite theirs in the lovely old building on Park Avenue at Eighty-Sixth Street. She had instantly fallen in love with her in the way a little girl of five falls in love with a very grown-up ten-year-old. She had worshipped Claire from the start, had emulated her. Once their two families had become acquainted, Claire had taken Laura and Dylan under her wing, had been baby-sitter, pal, and confidante.
Cissy, the Valiant nanny, had had her hands full with Dylan, who was then only two and very naughty. So Claire had been a welcome addition to the Valiant household. An only child, Claire had loved being part of this extended family, especially since Laura’s grandparents, Owen and Megan Valiant, were very much in evidence. They all helped to make Claire feel like a very special member of their family.
Because Claire attended Miss Hewitt’s School, Laura went there as well. And there came a time when the five years difference in their ages suddenly seemed negligible. As teenagers and young women they were as inseparable as they had been as children, bonded together as sisters in soul and spirit, if not blood.
Claire had married young, at twenty-one, and her daughter Natasha had been born a year later. Two years after that she had moved to Paris with her husband and child. But nothing, not distance, husband or child, had ever come between them or changed the nature of their friendship. Very simply, they loved each other, and, as Claire was wont to say, they would always be sisters under the skin, no matter what.
The sad part was that Claire’s life had gone horribly wrong seven years ago. Her marriage had foundered and she had divorced; her parents had died within a few weeks of each other, not long after this, and then Natasha had been in a car crash and had suffered serious injuries. But thanks to Claire’s nursing, the girl had made an amazing recovery.
Laura roused herself, pushing herself up in the bath. Here she was daydreaming about the past when she should be getting dressed.
No time to dawdle now.
‘Don’t you like the room, Hercule?’ Claire Benson asked, pausing near the grouping of Louis XVth chairs, resting a hand on the back of one of them. ‘Is it the chairs? Do you think they’re inappropriate? Don’t they work?’ She shot these questions at him as she glanced down at the silver-leafed wood frame under her hand, and then at the silver-grey upholstery. ‘Yes, it is the chairs, isn’t it?’ she asserted. ‘Maybe they’re totally wrong for the setting.’ She looked across at him questioningly.
The Frenchman chuckled. ‘Ah, Claire, so many questions you fire, rat-a-tat, and you make the jest, n’est-ce pas?’
‘No, I’m being
