As I sat on my bed, trying to recover enough composure to reflect on what had happened, a joke popped into my mind.
An Englishman, an Australian, and a Frenchman are discussing the meaning of sangfroid. The Englishman tells a story about a man who catches his wife in bed with her French lover. “Make yourselves decent, and I’ll speak to you in the drawing room,” he says. That, says the Englishman, is sangfroid.
The Australian responds with a similar story, but the antipodean husband adds, “Finish what you’re doing first.” That, he says, is true sangfroid.
“Ah,” says the Frenchman, “my story ees the same, but when ze Australian husband says, ‘Finish what you’re doing,’ the Frenchman does. That, mon ami, is sangfroid.”
Charlie may have demonstrated the Australian version of sangfroid, but that story was a joke. Real people—even people who can make an instant decision to give up custody of their daughter and take advantage of the resulting shock to grab the wine cellar—have been known to commit homicide in such circumstances. Nobody can stumble upon their partner screwing someone else and act unsurprised. He must have known or suspected what he was going to find before he walked in.
Whether or not he had caught the whole performance, the timing suggested that he had waited until we were finished to announce his presence. There was another thing. Surely Angelina knew there was a lemon tree. Had her “trust me—it will be all right” extended to this scenario? Had she anticipated it? Or even set it up?
The one thing I did know was that Charlie—and obviously Angelina—seemed prepared to accommodate what the late Princess Diana had called a third person in the marriage. Perhaps just the once. Perhaps not.
* * *
Dinner was, unsurprisingly, excellent. Angelina was in a sleeveless short dress, a light blue one, set off by a ring with a sapphire the size of the last joint of my middle finger.
Gilles, comically small next to Charlie, joined us in the courtyard for oysters, shucked by our host at the cost of a gash between his thumb and forefinger. Gilles spoke as much English as Charlie and Angelina spoke French. I let him know that I understood him without making a show of it, and he gave me a tour of the garden on the other side of the house so we could chat.
I needed the time-out. Angelina seemed to be taking the predinner drama in her stride. On reflection, I thought it unlikely she had been party to a setup—her initial response had mirrored mine and I knew her—but she was better placed to make sense of her husband’s response than I was. Charlie, at least, was playing some sort of game. I felt as his ex-wife must have done: What was the catch?
Gilles told me that Angelina and Charlie had installed him in the apartment above the garage in exchange for caretaking, gardening, and the occasional use of his car. He spoke well of them, as was to be expected, with just a gentle dig at their eating oysters in June and drinking wine from outside the region.
I asked him where the citronnier was.
“Too cold,” he said. “There is no lemon tree.”
* * *
Gilles returned to his apartment and Charlie led us up to the balcony for the foie gras. Angelina did not partake, and Charlie had made her a pissaladière, a square of pastry with anchovies and black olives.
We drank the leftover Sauternes with the foie gras. It was apparently a classic combination. Angelina stayed with the red, and Charlie’s observations on food and wine matching kept us going until we moved inside for the main course.
“We’ll finish Angie’s Bordeaux and then try its big sister,” said Charlie. “Come with me,” he said, and led me downstairs to the cellar.
It could have been the moment for a man-to-man chat—or a quiet murder, the body never to be found—but he contented himself with showing me his wine collection. Was he waiting for me to ask the question? I wasn’t planning to go to bed not knowing what was going on, but if I was going to start the conversation, I would do so with Angelina in the room.
Charlie selected a bottle and we returned to the dining room. The fruitwood table, uneven and with a patina of age, was set with colorful crockery, silver cutlery, and large thin-stemmed wineglasses. It hadn’t taken me long to work out that Angelina and Charlie were not short of a quid, but there was nothing ostentatious about either of them, aside from Angelina’s preciousness about wine.
“We’ll let it settle,” he said. He put the wine on the sideboard and poured us glasses from the bottle he had opened the previous night for Angelina. “Second wine of Château Margaux.” He swirled his glass. “A day hasn’t done it any harm at all.”
I was feeling similarly relieved to have made it through the day unharmed. So far.
“Did you manage to do what you needed to get done?” I asked Charlie, making conversation. “I gather you’re a lawyer, too.”
“Past tense. Threw it in when we went to L.A.”
This was news, though there was no reason to assume that people who had money and a house in Europe would sit around in Australia for twenty years.
Angelina finished giving her wine the swirl, sniff, sip, purse-lips-and-suck-air treatment and swallowed.
“We moved to L.A. in 1991 so I could have a chance at Hollywood,” she said. “And do a bit of the tourist thing. I don’t suppose you’ve been to Yosemite?”
Thank you, Randall and Mandy. Thank you.
“Couple of times,” I said, with a touch of world-weariness. I could guess why she had singled out this particular tourist destination. My enduring memory of Yosemite—and the Grand Canyon—was the sheer height of the cliffs, a vertical span too great to fit in the field of vision. “How did you cope with the heights?”
“You remember.” Angelina looked at Charlie—Do you want to tell this story?—but continued. “I freaked out. We walked up one of the tracks and that was okay, but when we got to the lookout—”
“The Upper Yosemite Fall,” said Charlie, and I nodded.
“I couldn’t do it. It was about ten in the morning and Charlie wouldn’t let me come down until I’d gone out to the viewing area.”
“You make me sound like a monster,” said Charlie.
“You were. About lunchtime I just said to myself, ‘Get it over with,’ and then he made me stay out there for about two hours.”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Anyway, I still hate heights.”
“But what did you learn?”
Angelina stuck her tongue out at Charlie. “You tell him.”
“I said to Angelina, ‘If you fall, you’re no more dead than if you fell three stories.’ Which is to say, you’re going to have failures in life anyway, so you might as well aim high. Won’t hurt any worse if you don’t make it.”
“L.A.’s pretty intimidating, and I was starting to think I wouldn’t make it.” She laughed. “I was right.”
“But you didn’t die wondering,” said Charlie.
Once again, on the face of it, the conversation was all for my benefit, bringing me up to speed, or demonstrating the strength of what they had built together. But if their marriage was in trouble, perhaps it was about reminding themselves what they would be losing. Or were they just giving it a decent funeral?
My life did not appear to be on the agenda, and that was fine with me.
“How long were you in L.A.?” I asked.
“Eighteen months,” said Charlie.
“You weren’t working?”
He laughed. “One of us had to pay the bills. Angelina was studying at an acting studio, and I had a job with one of the Big Four—the Big Six back then. Got it in Australia, then organized a transfer. That said, it was a pretty junior position. I’m not licensed to practice law in the States.”
“Must have been difficult, going backward,” I said, earning a nod from Charlie.
“He wasn’t junior for long,” said Angelina. “Tell Adam the story.”
“What story?”
“All right,” said Angelina. “Don’t complain if I get bits wrong.”
Charlie went to the kitchen to check on dinner as she got started. Oddly, I was enjoying hearing how Angelina’s life had panned out with another man. On the one hand, there was the reminder of what I had failed to seize, but on the other it was like being at Christmas with her family and filling the gaps in my knowledge of her life. And it was hard not to like Charlie.
He had been a member of a negotiating team for a company acquisition. There was a fault with the lifts and the two consultancy teams were stranded at street level with the directors of the buyer and seller sixty floors above them.
“Forty-three,” said Charlie, returning with serving spoons.
“Whatever. So Charlie dumps his briefcase, races up the stairs, and, by the time the lifts are working again, they’ve got a deal.”
“We had an agreement on the headline figure,” said Charlie.
“The story went right up to the CEO,” said Angelina. “Made him a bit of a legend.”
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“I wasn’t carrying so much weight back then.”
“I meant—”
“I know. Wasn’t rocket science. These guys knew each other. They wanted to do the deal. I just got there before the lawyers wound them up and made a meal of it. Takes one to know one.”
The lawyer in the blue dress smiled. If there was some sort of put-down, she was letting it go.
“So that’s what I do,” said Charlie. “I’m the facilitator, the honest broker, the guy trying to find the best solution for everyone. Reassuringly expensive, but better value than paying lawyers to fight about it.”
Which left one question for Angelina, although I knew the ultimate answer.
“What about the acting?”
“I wasn’t good enough.”
“Doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t get the break,” I said. “Why I’m not Billy Joel. Besides not writing ‘Uptown Girl.’”
Charlie grinned at my choice of song, but Angelina just waved her empty glass.
“I’d auditioned for this role, not a big role, and one of the other women from my acting class got it. It was a level playing field: she wasn’t screwing the director or anything. But she was better-looking than me, and that mattered more than how many years I’d spent studying the Stanislavski method. So I booked a nice restaurant, ordered champagne, and celebrated that we were going to go back to Australia to start a family and I was going to be a lawyer.”
“Just like that,” I said.
“Just like that.”
Charlie decanted the red and poured a measure for Angelina. “Tell him about the waitress,” he said.
“Oh, the server came over to take our order and it was the girl who’d got the part. A reminder of what I wasn’t missing out on.”
Charlie fetched the plat du jour, carved on a platter and surrounded by three kinds of mushrooms.
Angelina took only a small portion of the guinea fowl and removed the skin. She was less careful with the wine. The decanter was empty before Charlie asked her to guess what she was drinking.
“Château Margaux,” she said. “You said before we’d be drinking the big sister.”
“One of the five premiers grands crus of Bordeaux,” Charlie offered for my benefit. “Sorry. Am I telling grandma how to suck eggs?”
“No,” I said. “I’m appreciating the education.”
“The most feminine of the first growths. How old do you think, Angie?”
Angie again. That was what Jacinta had called her. Much less twee than Angel. If I had thought of her as Angie, there would have been fewer songs that pushed the memory button. But who knows what people call each other behind closed doors? And she had once sung, “Just call me Angel.”
Angie was assessing the wine, swirling it in her glass like a pro. “It’s old, but still quite firm. Not really old. Twenty, twenty-five years.”
Charlie retrieved the bottle and handed it to Angelina. “Wow,” she said, and passed it to me for inspection. Grand Vin de Château Margaux, 1966.
“One of the three good vintages of the sixties,” said Charlie.
It was also Angelina’s birth year.
“How did you find this?” I asked.
“After we got married, I started buying the vintage at auction. We have one every birthday. This is the last bottle of the Margaux.”
Not saved for the next birthday. Surely there was a message in that. And given the precedents, Angelina should have had no trouble nominating the vintage without all the swirling and sniffing.
“Solves the problem of birthday presents,” I said.
“I wish,” said Charlie. “I made a big mistake. The first birthday we were together, before we were married, I bought her a ring. Thanks to lack of imagination, I bought her a ring on the next birthday, and at that point she decided it was a tradition.”
“I did not.”
“Right. One year I bought her something else and the face just dropped, didn’t it? Wisely, I had a ring in my pocket just in case.”
“Stop it,” said Angelina. “You’re making me sound—”
“Just making sure all the facts are on the table.” He went off to get the apple tart.
I looked at Angelina and laughed. “You’ve been spoiled.”
“True,” she said. “He’s very, very nice to me.”
Her tone suggested something was missing, but the dynamic between them was a long way from poisonous. Claire would have been envious. Most married couples would have been envious. God knows what Richard would have made of him, running back and forth from the kitchen.
We had Calvados with dessert and slipped briefly into a mellow silence.
“So,” said Charlie, directing his question to the ceiling. “How was the tart?”
“Brilliant,” I said.
“As good as you remember?”
“Behave,” said Angelina.
“Sorry. It’s easy to forget the proprieties. Shame on me.”
We were on the brink.
“Charlie,” I said, and then didn’t know where to go.
“Adam,” he said. “Sorry, I was teasing. I’m sure you’ll understand the temptation.”
He waved us both up from the table toward the sofa and chairs, carrying our brandy balloons. He and I took the chairs, and Angelina sat in the middle of the sofa.
“Nothing worse than not knowing what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t know what Angie’s said to you, but she has free rein as far as I’m concerned.”
At one level this was a relief, but where was the guy coming from?
“If I did have a problem, it’d be between Angie and me, not with you. I don’t subscribe to the ethos that blames the third party. Now drink your Calvados and tell me, if you want to, whether you think she’s changed.”
“Charlie! Cut it out.” Angelina sounded only half serious.
The simple and honest answer was: “Not in any way that matters to me.” I was not going to share that with Charlie.
Instead, I said, “Am I going to be out of line if I say that I once dated the sexiest woman on the planet, but I think you got the better deal?”
They both liked that.
“I do have to thank you for teaching her to appreciate the finer things in life,” said Charlie, patently not talking about 1966 claret.
“Coming off a low base,” I said.
He laughed. “I’ll do you a deal. No more personal questions if you play something on the piano. I believe that’s what started it all.”
This was a good deal. There were all kinds of questions I still wanted to ask but instinct told me that Charlie had revealed all he wanted to at this point. These are the rules—if you don’t like them, don’t play. Did they have an open marriage? Was he letting her play out a fantasy? Perhaps he had some physical impediment. Diabetes and impotence would go with the weight. It was an explanation that they might not want to share with me. It also fitted with Angelina talking Charlie up.
I played a couple of exploratory chords on the Yamaha. Sweet sound. I had just the song—an old music-hall number my dad used to play.
I went to see a lady
I’ve been there before
Shoes and stockings in her hand
And her feet all over the floor
Champagne Charlie’s my name
Champagne Charlie’s my name
Champagne Charlie’s my name by golly and
Roguein’ and a-stealing is the game.
I sang it through, and they both joined in on the choruses. At the end we were all laughing.
“Good song,” said Charlie. “Okay, guys—I’m going to bed.”
“Me too,” I said. “Thanks again for the wine. And the meal.”
I turned toward my room, walked a few steps, then looked back at Angelina. Charlie was nearing the top of the stairs. Angelina stood up, turned off the light, and followed me.