‘I heard that about the prince too,’ she says.
‘Oh, he’s a pussycat by comparison.’
‘Right.’ Her heart sinks.
Paulo puts the computer on snooze. Cuts another slice of cake. Looks at it, puts it back. Sighs.
‘What’s up?’ she asks.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he replies. Picks up his gun and slips it into his shoulder holster.
She’ll never get used to being around guns. The thought that they might be needed.
When he’s finished, he looks up. ‘Between us, right?’
Mercedes nods.
‘I don’t know that I’m going to be doing this much longer,’ he says.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s not that. They love me. She keeps raising my money.’
She doesn’t comment.
Paulo sighs. ‘It sort of … this wasn’t what I had in mind, you know? For my life.’
‘At least you’ve never had to wipe their backsides,’ she says.
He chuckles. ‘Seriously, though. It’s getting hard to look my girls in the eye. I mean, we all like the money, but I think this is going to be my last year in private security. Frankly, your average mercenary has more reason to respect himself.’
‘Yes,’ she says. She understands.
‘Don’t you ever think about leaving?’ he asks. ‘It can’t be fun, being away from home so much. Di’s been on my arse for months. Doesn’t Felix mind?’
Do I tell him? She’s strangely ashamed of her situation. Trapped by a contract, by a debt that never decreases.
‘Yeah, it gets lonely,’ she says, eventually. That little white housekeeper’s room often feels like a prison cell. But the thought of telling him why she’s there is more than she can bear.
*
There is more to do before she gets to rest, and Mercedes heads to the storage room, a discreet door at the end of the staircase corridor. Once inside, she puts away the abstract oils of tropical flowers that the latest interior designer pronounced perfect, and which have been hanging on the walls for the past month. You don’t leave the silver out in your Airbnb. It’s the same even when your renters are made of money. Then she gets out the paintings the spaces were really designed to house, and props them one by one against the wall.
She remembers the first of these portraits, from when it came off the ferry in 1986. It still jars, as it did even when she first saw it, with her experience of the real man.
Matthew Meade, in his forties, stands with his elbow on a majestic mantelpiece, one hand rakishly pushing his jacket aside by plunging into a trouser pocket. He wears a tweed suit that makes her hot in the summer heat, and brown brogues whose mirror finish reflects the roaring fire by his thigh.
It can’t have been painted more than five years before they first met, but the man in the portrait is a creature from another reality. She remembers staring and staring as it sat on the dock, and wondering if he even knew how much the artist had flattered him. Matthew Meade’s real face, even back then, had been speckled with raised moles, his eyebrows so bushy they partially obscured his eyes, his jaw soft and doughy and melting into his neck. This man’s clear blue eyes shine alert from an intelligent brow; his jaw is strong and shapely, his skin as smooth as the best kid glove. And, where the bulging mammaries and apron groin should be, the neat lines of a man whose days are spent on a rowing machine.
She takes it to the main house and hangs it, and, as she does so, her breast brushes the canvas. Mercedes shudders, as though she’s touched the man himself. He will be here soon, she tells herself. You need to find your control. Your family retainer smile and your respectful voice. Felix may think you can just walk away, but it’s not as simple as that. He still owns you.
The next portrait is of Tatiana. In the 1950s style, black satin and pearls, perched on an elegant little bench with her skirts spread out, leaning slightly forward to share just a hint of cleavage in her fitted bodice. Pearls on the décolletage, at her ears, on her wrists. Her sallow skin blessed with a glow Mercedes has never seen in real life. As with her father’s portrait, her natural jaw, her putty nose, have been replaced by neater, narrower versions. Unlike her father, the artist hasn’t needed to tell a lie. Tatiana’s nose had entirely changed shape by the time she was fifteen, when they came back for the launch of Mediterraneo. By the time she went to university, she had a jaw like a pixie and a chic little haircut to match.
They are both heiresses, in a way, Mercedes thinks. Matthew’s money, Sergio’s debts. They’ve both settled on the next generation.
She hangs Tatiana on the far side of the room, facing her father. And she goes back for the last, the family portrait.
A family reduced. Matthew Meade’s family, these days, consists only of Tatiana. Thirty-three years after she mixed her amber-coloured cocktail with sleeping pills and lay down to die in her Berkeley Square bedroom, there is no trace of Tatiana’s beautiful mother anywhere in the house. Not a photo, not a knick-knack, not a word of remembrance from one day to the next. She was virtually gone by the time Mercedes first went onto that boat. If you spoke to her daughter, you wouldn’t know that she had ever existed. You would think Tatiana had been created by plucking out one of her father’s well-covered ribs.
They look so complacent, so certain, the two of them. Painted in this very garden: green lawn and white statuary and the blue, blue Mediterranean. The king on his golden throne, smirking as he fondles a wine glass with a gilded rim. He sports holiday casual: pink polo shirt and madras-check cotton shorts, his hairy – oh, so hairy – legs crossed over at the knee, linen deck shoes on his feet. And his heiress, as Mercedes remembers her so often from their childhood, perches on those knees in a halter sundress, hands folded in her lap. The two of them smiling boldly, directly at the viewer. Look at us, say the smiles. We are one. And Tatiana’s smile says so much more. I am my daddy’s girl, it says. Whatever I am, he made me. And all that he has will be mine one day.
She remembers those summer days on the first boat. Tatiana darting on and off that knee, flirting with her daddy, batting eyelashes at the rich old men who came on board to drink champagne. I knew, she thinks. I think I always knew. But wealth is so seductive. Its glittering beams can blind one to the ugliest realities.
This portrait was painted ten years ago. The Matthew it portrays was in his sixties. And Tatiana was thirty-four years old.