A Tangled Web Page 2

  “Mom lets us take a sip,” Cliff said. “She never used to, but all of a sudden, you know, lately she started—”

  “It’s because you’re twelve,” Garth said.

  “But I’m only eleven and I get a sip, too,” said Penny.

  “Those are the magic ages: eleven and twelve,” Sabrina said lightly, sliding past another observation—one of so many in the past year—that she did things differently from the way Stephanie had done them. “Now, what’s going to happen to that large, elegantly wrapped gift still sitting on the coffee table?”

  “Open it!” cried Cliff.

  “Please open it,” Linda Talvia said. “I’m going crazy, waiting.”

  “So am I,” Dolores said. “We bought it together. Of course you can buy any of these things for yourself now, but we thought—”

  “Not necessary,” said Nat, his hand on her arm.

  Sabrina pretended to be absorbed in working open the gilt wrapping paper. There had been difficult moments among the six of them when the others became aware of how much money and property the Andersens now had, since Sabrina’s will had left everything to her sister. I’ve left everything to myself, Sabrina had thought, frantic with despair and bitter humor the previous October, in those awful weeks after Stephanie’s funeral. But she and Garth were careful to keep their life much as it had been except for a few changes. They had had the house painted, and she had gradually brought in some fine antiques from London and from Collectibles, the shop in Evanston where she had become a partner. She had linked Collectibles to Ambassadors, and occasionally she went to London to buy at auction and to watch over her shop. She and Garth took more short trips together, and of course Mrs. Thirkell was there, the perfect housekeeper, the envy of everyone.

  Those had been the only changes, and as the months went by, everyone seemed to forget that Garth and Stephanie Andersen had become wealthy, at least compared with other academics in Evanston.

  But now Linda said, “We think about it, though, buying you things. It used to be so different. Remember when we bought you that bathrobe? Dolores thought it was too loud, but I said you’d been wearing brighter colors since you got back from China, so we bought it and you loved—”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Sabrina breathed, lifting from its cushioned box a Penrose Waterford decanter. From the early nineteenth century, it was etched with eight-pointed stars, its stopper shaped like a small umbrella above three doughnut-like rings. “It’s absolutely perfect. Where did you find it?”

  “The Charteris estate sale. I knew you liked Waterford.”

  “Oh, I do. And I’ve never had a Penrose.”

  “You’ve never had Waterford, period. Until lately, that is.”

  “That’s true.” Sabrina barely noticed her small slip; no one else did, either. By now she did not guard her tongue as she had in the beginning; if she spoke occasionally from Sabrina’s background and experience, or did not know what they were talking about when they reminisced together, the others found ways to explain it away. They explained everything away; they always had, from her first night home when they were in the kitchen and she’d asked Garth and the children where they kept the pot holders. After that there had been dozens of mistakes and slips of the tongue, but no one was suspicious or even curious because, Sabrina realized, people see what they expect to see and they find reasons for oddities to protect the comfortable order and predictability of their lives.

  Now, in her living room, she set the decanter on the coffee table and stretched her arms wide. “What a wonderful birthday. The best I’ve ever had. It’s so perfect, being here with all of you, knowing this is where I belong . . .”

  “Dad, you didn’t give Mom a present,” Cliff said accusingly.

  “Where is it?” Penny demanded. “You told us you got it.”

  Garth grinned at Sabrina. “Right again.” He pulled a small velvet box from his shirt pocket and put it in her hand. “With all my love. For now, for always.”

  Sabrina kissed him, then opened the box. A long sigh broke from her.

  “What is it? What is it?” Penny cried.

  “Hold it up, Mom!” said Cliff.

  “It’s a ring,” Nat said, looking into the box over Sabrina’s shoulder. “Stunning. A star sapphire, yes?” he asked Garth.

  “Yes,” Garth murmured, his eyes holding Sabrina’s.

  She put her hand along his face. “My engagement ring.”

  “But you’re already married,” Penny protested.

  “I never had an engagement ring,” Sabrina said.

  “Neither did I,” said Dolores. “Probably for the same reason: Nat couldn’t afford it.”

  “Neither could Marty,” Linda said. “Garth, what a nice idea.”

  Garth pulled off Sabrina’s gold wedding band and slipped the engagement ring and wedding band together onto her finger. Sabrina closed her eyes. This ring was for a wedding the others knew nothing about. This was for a rainy December day when Garth had come to London to say he loved her and wanted her and it no longer mattered what she and her sister had done; and for another rainy day two days later, when they took the train to Canterbury, where no one knew them, and bought two gold wedding bands and found a magistrate to marry them. The narrow streets and stones of that ancient town were dark gray, streaked and dripping in the steady downpour, but Sabrina wore a red raincoat and rain hat and she bought Garth a red carnation for his lapel, and when their eyes met as each slipped a ring onto the other’s finger and the magistrate said “husband and wife,” they saw in each other the sun, and spring, and hope.

  “Thank you,” Sabrina said, her lips close to Garth’s. “It’s the most wonderful gift I could have imagined. And the most private; you were right about that. So when we’re alone . . .”

  The telephone rang, and abruptly she began to tremble. She knew Penny and Cliff were watching, but she could not stop. She could not hear a late night ring without recalling in terrible detail the night last October when Brooks had called from London, crying, to say that Max Stuyvesant’s yacht had gone down and everyone on board . . . everyone on board . . . everyone on board—

  “It’s all right.” Garth drew her tightly to him. “It’s all right, my love, we’re all here, it’s all right.”

  “My lady,” Mrs. Thirkell said from the doorway. “There’s a call for you, from London—”

  “No,” Sabrina cried involuntarily.

  “—Miss de Martel. Though of course she’s Mrs. Westermarck now; I must try harder to remember that.”

  “Gaby,” Sabrina said. She forced her body to stillness. “At three in the morning London time. What in heaven’s name is she up to? Excuse me,” she said to the others, and left the room behind Mrs. Thirkell’s ample back, her muscles tight, her heart pounding.

  “Gaby,” she said, picking up the telephone in the kitchen. “It must have been quite a party, if you’re just getting home.”

  “I haven’t been to a party in two weeks.” Gaby’s high voice was clear and close. “We’ve been in Provence, bicycling. I’ve had an inordinate amount of fresh air; I can’t believe it’s healthy for anyone to have that much all at one time. You didn’t tell me you’d be there; we could have spent some time together.”

  “That I’d be where?”

  “In Provence. Avignon, to be exact. About a week ago.”

  “I wasn’t there, Gaby, I was here. What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, God, am I being indiscreet? Stephanie, were you there to see somebody? I can’t believe it; I thought you were head over heels for your professor. Have you got something going on the side? You can trust me, you know; I’d do anything for you because you’re Sabrina’s sister and I adored her and she saved Brooks and me when—”

  “I’m not having an affair; I haven’t got anybody but Garth. Gaby, what is this all about?”

  There was a silence. “You weren’t in Avignon last week?”

  “I just told you. No.”

  “But I saw you.
Or your double. It was some festival or other, hordes of people—”

  Or your double. Sabrina was trembling again. Once she had had a double. Once she had had a sister.

  “—and I couldn’t get to you—you were across the square, walking in the other direction, with a guy, very handsome, very attentive—and you took off your hat, one of those wide-brimmed straw ones with a long scarf tied around the crown, red and orange, and you were brushing back your hair—you know, combing it with your fingers?—and then you put on your hat again and you were gone.”

  Brushing back your hair. She and Stephanie had done that all their lives: taken off a hat, combed their hair with their fingers, feeling the air lift and cool it, then replaced the hat. Their mother had not approved; a lady kept her hat on, she said. But Sabrina and Stephanie went on doing it long after they were grown up and far away from their mother’s strictures. Brushing back your hair.

  “My lady?” Mrs. Thirkell pulled a chair up and put her hands on Sabrina’s shoulders, settling her into it. “I’ll get you some tea.”

  “So either you’ve been identical triplets all this time, without telling anybody,” Gaby said, “or something very weird is going on.”

  “Of course we weren’t triplets, don’t be absurd.” She was trembling again; she could not hold herself still. It was as if the earth were shifting beneath her feet. “This whole thing is absurd,” she said, biting off her words. “You saw someone who reminded you of me, that’s all; I can’t imagine why you’d make something of it—”

  “Stephanie, listen, I’m not joking, this is very weird and a little scary. I’ve known you and Sabrina since she and I were roommates at Juliette; I lived in her house on Cadogan Square when Brooks and I broke up, and she and I talked every night; she even took me on her lap once, and I cried like a baby, and I loved having her hold me, and I loved her, and I know what the two of you look like and I’m telling you, I saw you, or her—oh, God, how could it be her, she’s dead—but I know what I saw, and it was you or her. Or a ghost.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Noontime crowds filled the streets of London, and Sabrina merged with them, a Londoner again, Sabrina Longworth again, free and independent, on her way to Ambassadors, the exclusive antique shop she had created after her divorce from Denton. She never thought of Denton except when she was in London, and she thought of him briefly now: his round, rosy face, his fascination with himself and his pleasures, his love of women and gambling. He had been gambling in Monaco when Max Stuyvesant’s ship went down; he was the one who identified the body of Sabrina Longworth. Max’s body had never been found.

  Sabrina’s hands were clenched. Beneath a cool, early-October sun, she walked along Pont Street, wearing a black and taupe plaid skirt and matching cape that furled about her with each step. She wore a black narrow-brimmed hat angled low over her eyes, and fine black kid gloves. She looked sophisticated, purposeful and calm, but beneath the cape she was tense and withdrawn, her thoughts swinging from the past to the present, from one life to another, from Stephanie to herself, from the memory of a funeral to Gaby’s telephone call, and always, always, to Garth.

  She had told him about the call, but made light of it. “She saw someone who looked like me and wondered why I hadn’t told her I’d be in Europe. I’ll call her next time I’m there.” And then, casually, she had added, “I think I’ll go next week. I want to check on Ambassadors and . . . just be there. Would you mind?”

  “And our October trip?” Garth asked.

  “Oh, of course we’ll do that.” She had planned her trip to Ambassadors for the end of October, while Garth gave a paper at the International Biogenetics Conference in The Hague; then they would meet in Paris for a week to themselves. “Of course we’ll go; I wouldn’t give up a week in Paris with you. But I’d like to be there now, too. I was thinking of next Monday; would you mind?”

  Of course he said he would not mind. Garth had always given her plenty of space in which to merge her two lives. “We miss you more each time you go,” he said, “but you’ve given us the formidable Mrs. Thirkell, and if anyone can ease the pain, she can.”

  Mrs. Thirkell had taken firm control of their house, keeping it so well lubricated that none of them could imagine how they had functioned without her. And so when Sabrina moved up her trip to London, there was only a brief conversation with Mrs. Thirkell to go over shopping lists, schedules, the window washer, who was due on Tuesday, and the landscaper, who was coming in a week to cut back the gardens for winter. And then she asked, as she always did, if there was anything she could bring back from the London house.

  “Why not bring the dessert forks, my lady? You don’t entertain there anymore, and we seem to be doing more all the time here, and what a shame to keep such handsome silver locked away.”

  “A good idea.” Sabrina thought of the steady westerly movement of possessions from Cadogan Square to Evanston, matching the steady fading of Lady Longworth into Stephanie Andersen.

  “And then there’s the fish poacher, my lady; I certainly could use that.”

  Sabrina laughed. “I am not about to carry a fish poacher across the ocean. Buy a new one, Mrs. Thirkell; I’m surprised you haven’t already.”

  “You do get a fondness for certain familiar things. But of course I’m sure I’ll get attached to a new fish poacher, too.”

  It doesn’t take long to get attached to new things, Sabrina thought, approaching Ambassadors, already missing Garth and the children even though her plane had landed only that morning. But she was still attached to Europe, too, where she and Stephanie had grown up. Their life had been nomadic as they moved from city to city whenever their father was assigned to a new embassy. They had learned half a dozen languages, speaking all of them, including English, with a faint, unidentifiable accent, and they had become experts in antiques and decorative arts during leisurely afternoons browsing with their mother in castles, stately homes, and out-of-the-way shops where they would come away with dusty hands and some wonderful piece that their mother would clean up to reveal its hidden beauty and value.

  Then their father was named U.S. ambassador to Algeria. Their parents decided the country was a dangerous place for American girls, and sent them to Juliette high school in Switzerland, where Sabrina roomed with Gabrielle de Martel and Stephanie with Dena Halpern. They earned blue ribbons in fencing and sailing, and then, in their last year, they quarreled, bitterly and painfully, over Stephanie’s feeling that she was always in Sabrina’s shadow, outshone by her more dramatic, more adventurous sister.

  And so they separated, Stephanie to Bryn Mawr College in America, Sabrina to the Sorbonne in Paris. And then they found each other again, after Stephanie married Garth and Sabrina married and divorced Denton. The ties that bound them, so that each felt her sister was the other half of her, could not be torn apart for long, and in the years that followed, they visited in America and London and talked for hours on the telephone. And then they joined a group of antique dealers on a trip to China, and while they were there, away from everything familiar, Stephanie—it was Stephanie, the less adventurous one, who thought of it—suggested changing places.

  Such a simple idea; such a lark. They spent a week memorizing details of each other’s life, and on the last day of the tour, in a Hong Kong hotel, they exchanged clothes and luggage, Stephanie took off her wedding ring and gave it to Sabrina, and they handed each other the keys to their houses. And then they went home.

  Home, Sabrina thought, turning the doorknob of Ambassadors. It wasn’t my home then; it was Stephanie’s. But it became the most wonderful home I’ve ever had. The only home I ever want. She opened the door into the softly lit warmth of the shop, waiting for her eyes to adjust after the brightness outside. “Mrs. Andersen!” said Brian, coming forward. As he came closer, he sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. “Forgive me, Mrs. Andersen; it’s still such a shock, seeing you. You could tell me you’re Lady Longworth, back from the dead, and I’d believe you.”

>   “Yes, Brian.” She began to walk around the shop as if she were a customer. The room was patterned after an eighteenth-century salon, long and narrow, fronted with a square-paned window. The walls had dark oak wainscoting; the ceiling was molded in plaster octagons. Sabrina made a circuit of the room, then stood in the center, turning in place, eyeing the placement of furniture, the arrangement of small objects on shelves, the lighting.

  “Very good, Brian,” she said at last and heard his quick sigh of relief. Every time she walked in the door, Brian held his breath, even now, almost a year after Ambassadors had been taken over, as far as he knew, by Lady Longworth’s sister from Evanston.

  At first he and Nicholas Blackford had been condescending to the housewife from America, but Sabrina had stopped them cold. She had behaved like Sabrina, which confused them, and she had recklessly demonstrated her vast knowledge of antiques and even of London and the people in it. And they had accepted it. Everyone accepted it.

  Because London was just like Evanston. Here, too, everyone found ways to explain away her mistakes. Well, they thought, Sabrina must have told her sister everything: she must have talked about us all the time. How else would Stephanie Andersen know so much? And while they were amazed by that astonishing conclusion, they were also satisfied by it.

  So Brian sighed with relief and Sabrina went into her office and sat at the cherrywood table she used as a desk. I could call Gaby now. That’s what I’m here for, the only reason I came to London now instead of waiting until the end of the month. I’ll call her now; she might be home.

  “There is a fair bit of mail I haven’t had a chance to forward to America,” Brian said, and brought in a basket piled high with letters, announcements of sales, and even invitations, on the off chance that Stephanie Andersen would be in London for various balls and dinners and country weekends.

  It can wait; after all, it’s not really urgent, it’s just something I’m curious about.