Chapter 4 #3
“You make me wish I’d had more children,” he said to her as they motored close to the port in the late afternoon.
They were all sorry to see the day end. “I wasn’t married to Quinn’s mother for very long,” he said to Eugenia as they stood at the rail a little distance from the others.
“Five years, which felt like a lifetime then. I was ambitious and all I cared about was building my business. My father was like that too. He took a small fortune he’d inherited and turned it into a large one.
Business was all he cared about. And I was even better at it than he was, I took bigger risks.
I grew up in Chicago, went to Northwestern, then business school at Berkeley, and I never stopped after that.
I hardly knew my father. It was the only way I knew.
Quinn’s mother got pregnant so I married her, but I never opened my heart to her.
I resented having married her. I was twenty-five, in business school at Berkeley, when we married and Quinn was born.
He’s thirty-five now. I was thirty when we got divorced.
At his age, I was divorced with a ten-year-old I rarely saw.
I was too ‘busy.’ I was pretty wild for a while, a long while.
I had a lot of fun, and I didn’t want to get tied down again.
I hated our marriage, I felt trapped. I was too immature to be married and she was the wrong person for me.
I’m not sure when I settled down. Maybe ten years ago when I turned fifty.
Men are immature for a lot longer than women.
I really only got to know Quinn when he was about twenty-five.
We took some trips together, to Africa, India, and we did some Atlantic crossings on the boat, to Europe.
And suddenly we had time to talk, and we had things to say to each other.
I was a lousy father until then, but he gave me another chance, and it paid off, for both of us.
We’re close now, but he’s like I was at his age.
He doesn’t want to get tied down, he wants to nail down his success first. That’s a dangerous game.
You can stay at the party for too long, and then you wind up alone.
He can’t imagine it at his age, but that’s what happens.
Business is a fickle mistress and it’s not enough for the long haul.
That’s what I figured out at sixty, and here I am, with all of this and no one to share it with, and I may lose it all.
” Patrick was matter-of-fact and realistic.
He wasn’t sorry for himself, but he was aware of what he had done, and the mistakes he had made, and willing to admit it.
“I filled the void with my kids,” Eugenia admitted to him.
“And then they grew up, and I discovered the same thing you did. I’m alone.
Kids are fickle too, and once they have partners, there’s very little room for you in their lives, and you don’t belong there anyway.
You need your own life, but I never had time to make a life for myself.
I was always working. And what happens now, if the business goes down the drain?
” she asked, looking at him. There was no artifice about either of them.
They were honest with each other and themselves, they were brave people and the time was right for both of them.
They had been stripped of all the distractions and the accessories, and they had bared their souls to each other.
“If you lose the business, Eugenia, you’ll start another one. That’s what people like us do. I’m not going to retire, and neither are you. Would you go sailing with me again?” he asked her.
“I’d love to.”
“Maybe alone next time. I loved getting to know your kids today. And I love talking to you. How does Wednesday sound to you? Is that too soon? I have to go into the city tomorrow for a meeting, and on Wednesday you could tell me how the meeting went with Wylie.”
“That sounds great to me,” she said. She liked the idea of being alone with him too, if sixty crew members didn’t count, but they were discreet, and disappeared after they served him.
“I’ll have one of the boys pick you up at ten again. Maybe you’d like to stay for dinner on Wednesday?” he said cautiously. He didn’t want to scare her off, but he didn’t want to waste time either. He had a powerful feeling about her.
“I’d like that,” she said, and they left the boat a few minutes later and she thanked him profusely for a fantastic day.
They were all pleasantly tired after the sun and air, and all the physical activity, and as they got into the boat to take them to the shore, Eugenia looked up and saw Patrick watching her from an upper deck.
He waved and she waved back with a smile.
She had something to look forward to now.
Separate from her business. And she had the meeting with Austin Wylie the next day, she was on her guard after what Patrick had said about him.
—
They were all quiet and relaxed on the way back to the house.
And just as their van turned in to the driveway, a red sports car raced past them, coming from the house at full speed.
A woman was driving, wearing a big sun hat and dark glasses.
She sped by, nearly scraping the side of the van, turned onto the road, and took off.
Geoff was standing in the driveway when the van pulled in and they got out, and Eugenia thanked the purser for driving them home.
“Who was that?” Eugenia asked Geoff, puzzled about the red car that had just passed them.
“I have no idea,” he said innocently. “She drove in, took one look at me, turned around and left. She either made a mistake on the address or was looking for the owners. She never stopped to talk to me. I must not have been her type,” he said, and laughed as he put an arm around Gloria’s shoulders and kissed her.
“Did you have fun?” he asked her, ignoring the others, and they walked back to their cottage so Gloria could change for dinner.
Eugenia watched them go, and then walked back to the main house, thinking about the day on the boat, and Patrick.
He seemed like a very special person, and she was happy to have met him, thanks to Daphne.
But she had something else on her mind and it was gnawing at her.
Eugenia waited until Eloise went upstairs to shower and change, then walked out to the kitchen where the two maids were helping the chef with dinner and setting the table.
She took one of them aside, the chattier of the two, and asked her a question out of earshot of the others.
She was curious more than suspicious, but she wanted to know.
“Was there a woman here today, visiting our guest?” The maid hesitated, avoiding Eugenia’s gaze, and then looked at her, not sure what to say.
Eugenia was paying her for the week they were there and the worker seemed like a nice woman.
She liked the family and hoped they would come back again.
“I won’t tell anyone what you tell me, but I’d like to know,” Eugenia said seriously, and the woman nodded.
“He paid us each fifty dollars not to tell anyone. But yes, there was a woman here. She had an accent, Russian or French or German or something. She was here all day, she just left two minutes before you got home.” It was obviously the woman driving the red sports car, in the hat and dark glasses, and with the comment about her accent, Eugenia had a powerful feeling that it was Natasha Wylie, which created a whole new dilemma for her of whether or not to tell Gloria about it.
She deserved to know before she married Geoff that he was cheating on her, if he was.
Eugenia couldn’t believe that they had spent the day together and hadn’t had sex.
Geoff was a whole lot closer to Natasha’s age than Austin Wylie, and better looking.
But Austin was richer, which counted for a lot for a girl off the streets of Moscow, looking for rich men in America.
Geoff would only have been a bit of fun for her, closer to her age than Wylie.
Eugenia thanked the woman who had told her, promised again that she wouldn’t give her away, and walked slowly upstairs to her bedroom.
She had no idea how or when she would tell Gloria, or if Gloria would even believe her or would think Eugenia was lying so she wouldn’t marry him.
But whether Gloria believed it or not, she had to know.
And Eugenia had to tell her. The burdens of motherhood weighed heavily on her shoulders.
In a way, her daughter’s future was in her hands.
It was an awesome responsibility and the hardest job in the world.