Last Dance with Valentino

‘All the girls are. My papa said. So I don’t see why you wouldn’t be.’

‘For Heaven’s sake!’

Jack ignored my plea to stay quiet, and bounded over the garden to greet him. I hung back, watching with some jealousy, I suppose, as Rudy’s face lit up. He threw down his cigarette, caught the boy in his open arms, with that peculiar grace of his, and tossed him high in the air. You could hear their laughter through the garden – over the grunts and groans oozing from other quarters . . . Oh, I’m exaggerating, of course. But the truth is, it was wonderful to watch them together: an unexpected blast of joy in that miserable, complicated household.

I had planned to slip quietly away, but Rudy saw me before I got a chance. ‘Aha! Jennifer!’ he cried. ‘I was hoping I would see you! But where are you going?’

‘I’m going . . . ’ Where was I going? ‘Well, I’m going to the house, of course. But I shall be back in a minute,’ I said. ‘I have to fetch something from the nursery.’

I saw Jack mumbling something into his ear, then Rudy nodding solemnly, smiling slightly, glancing back at me.

‘That’s all it is.’ Jack whispered loudly. ‘You see?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Rudy said – loud enough for me to hear it. ‘How extremely fortunate for me.’

At which point I’m almost certain I broke into a run.

Madeleine was in the hall – at a loose end for once. ‘Wait up!’ she said, delighted to find someone to gossip with. ‘Have you seen who’s here again, Jennifer?’

‘I have,’ I said.

‘Surprised you’re not out there. Batting your eyelids.’

‘Oh, be quiet.’

‘He’s handsome.’

‘I know it.’

‘And so does she.’ She indicated the tower boudoir. ‘Crazy bitch,’ she added, because she always did.

Madeleine followed me into the nursery and I suppose half an hour passed while she filled me in with details, some of which I could have survived without, regarding the conversation she had only that morning overheard between Mrs de Saulles and my father.

‘Though it wasn’t really a conversation, to be honest with you, Jennifer,’ she was saying. ‘More a series of grunts.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Yes, you do. And with me in the room, too! Good God, to look at them both – him an old man and her fragile as feather – on the outside. The crazy bitch. You wouldn’t believe they had it in them.’

‘Yes – well. The racket they make, I should think the whole of Long Island knows it by now,’ I said.

‘And there was me thinking, after a certain number of years, the mechanism stopped working. Didn’t you? A man as old as your father . . . ’

‘He’s not that old . . . ’

‘But the mechanism—’

‘Anything! Please! Can we talk of anything but my filthy papa and his ancient mechanism!’

We were laughing loudly, both of us, sprawled out lazily on the nursery floor. I looked up and there, standing side by side, were Rudy and Jack.

Madeleine gave a silly shriek.

‘Sounds like I missed an excellent beginning,’ Rudy said.

‘Not at all,’ I said, scrambling to sit up. ‘Actually Madeleine was being disgusting.’

‘I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘No, no,’ said I. ‘No no no.’

Madeleine guffawed.

‘Only Jack told me,’ Rudy said, ‘there was a steam engine up here, not working as well as it once did?’

‘Quite the opposite, Mr Guglielmi,’ gurgled Madeleine. ‘On the contrary. Ask Jennifer’s papa!’

How I longed to knock her out! Rudy looked for a moment as if he might be about to laugh himself – but then I suppose he saw the mortification on my face and thought better of it. He said, ‘Jack said he had a toy train that was broken. I thought perhaps I could fix it.’

‘And Jack is absolutely right,’ I said. ‘Madeleine—’ I looked at her, and almost – very nearly – started giggling myself. ‘How clever of Jack to remember. He and I have spent days trying to put the wretched thing back together. I’m not sure it can be fixed. Nothing we try seems to work . . . ’

‘Well, perhaps I could – ah!’ He spotted the components, strewn across the table, and right away settled himself before them.

And so the four of us wiled away a little time, with Madeleine and me on the floor, Jack on my lap, and Rudy at the table, with his back to us, bent intently over his work. We talked of this and of that – of nothing, really. I don’t remember a word of it. But I do remember Madeleine, as Rudy worked away, slotting together small pieces of metal – I can see Madeleine now, pulling a face at me, rolling her eyes and pretending to swoon.

Jack said, ‘Mr Guglielmi, poor Madeleine is coming down with something pretty serious.’

He didn’t look up. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t really think so, Jack . . . ’

Rudy moves like a cat. You don’t hear him when he approaches. And he sees things when he doesn’t seem to be looking. Hardly reasons to fall in love with a man, I know. Nevertheless, when he said that, as cool as anything, and without even turning around, I remember even Madeleine blushed. Afterwards she always pretended she disliked him.

The steam train was put back together in no time. Too quickly. I believe that short half-hour, with none of us saying anything much, was the happiest half-hour I could remember. His voice, the faint smell of his cologne, his quiet concentration, the warmth of his presence – they softened the edges of the world for me. I could have stayed there for ever, with the boy on my lap, and Madeleine sulking, and Rudy, so very much there with us and yet so peacefully abstracted. I was in Heaven.

The weeks passed, and then the months. Christmas came and Christmas went. Rudy was at the house a great deal. Sometimes he would come by train, and Mr Hademak would pick him up from the station. Sometimes, though, much to Jack’s delight, he would arrive in his very own auto, and the two of them would spend happy hours playing with it. In any case, however he came, he would always seek us out.

It wasn’t entirely simple, however. Mr Hademak said he didn’t approve of Rudy ‘as a man’ (so he told me over tea one afternoon, though God knows quite what he meant by that). He was certainly very jealous of Mrs de Saulles’s affection for him.

On the other hand, Mr Hademak was undoubtedly fond of young Jack, and knowing how cheerfully he and Rudy played together, I am certain he would have been willing to overlook his disapproval. The problem (once again) was with his mistress. She, who never troubled to entertain the boy herself, who expected Rudy to sit indefinitely and wait, day after day, until she emerged from her sex-den to receive him, who barely acknowledged that I lived under the same roof with her, had ordered Hademak to ensure that the three of us be kept well apart: not simply Jack and Rudy, mind, but Rudy and me too.

‘She is worried what influence Mr Guglielmi might have,’ Mr Hademak told me, without quite looking at me. ‘Not just on the Little Man but on you, too, Miss Doyle. She has your best interests at heart.’ I remember laughing aloud when he said it. Mr Hademak chose not to react.

Her ruling meant that when the three of us were together, our meetings were always a little intense, and always conducted in whispers or at far corners of the garden, out of earshot of the house. Neither Jack nor Rudy nor I ever referred to the illicit nature of our lovely secret get-togethers. Needless to say, it only cemented our friendship further.

Not that Rudy and I were ever alone. In fact, since that first magical night on the terrace, we had not touched. We had barely spoken without young Jack being present. And yet there was a connection between us. Not simply – not only – of desire, but of tenderness, too. Oh, it seems so absurd and vain, seeing it written down here. Anybody who read these words would laugh and remind me that the very essence of Rudy is his magnetism. It is who he is; a man who has made half the world fall in love with him. And yet I know it was not imagined. I know it, because for all the long years when he was lost to me, it was this – this powerful, unspoken tenderness between us – that I could not give up on, that would never release its hold.

One evening, my father sought me out. He came to my room – something he had never done before. When I let him in, he sat himself morosely on the edge of my bed and gazed silently out of the window. I noticed he had lost weight – and heard myself asking if he was happy.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Happy? What an inane question, darling girl. Am I “happy”? Is that what you asked?’