Danielle Steel - Honor Thyself

“I invited you to dinner the next night, and we went to some silly place from my student days. We had a good time, and talked all night again. We never stopped. I was never able to express myself to anyone like that in my life. I told you everything, all my feelings and secrets and dreams and wishes, and some things I shouldn't have, about my work. You never broke my trust. Never. I trusted you completely, right from the beginning, and I was right.

“We saw each other every day until you finished the film five months later. You were going back to New York, or Los Angeles, you weren't sure where to go, and I asked you to stay in Paris. We were deeply in love by then, and you agreed. We found the house together. The one near the rue Jacob. We went to auctions together, we furnished it. I built a treehouse for Anthony in the garden. He loved it. He took all his meals there that summer. We went to the South of France when they went to see their father. We went everywhere together. I was with you every night. That summer, we spent two weeks on a sailboat in the South of France. I don't think I've ever been that happy in my life, before or since. They were the best days of my life.” Carole nodded as she listened. She couldn't remember the events, only the feelings. She had the sense that it was a magical time. Thinking about it made her feel warm, but there had been something else too, something that was wrong. There had been a problem of some kind. Her eyes searched his and then she remembered, and said it out loud.

“You were married,” she said sadly.

“Yes, I was. My marriage had been over for years, our children were grown. My wife and I were strangers to each other, we had led separate lives for ten years before you came along. I was going to leave her even before I met you. I promised you I would, and I meant it. I wanted to do it quietly, without embarrassment for any of us. I talked to my wife about it, and she asked me not to, not right away. She was afraid of the humiliation and scandal for her, with my leaving her for a famous movie star. It was painful for her, and it was liable to become an international cause célèbre in the press, so I agreed to wait six months. You were very understanding about it. It didn't seem to matter. We were happy, and I lived with you in our little house. I loved your children, and I think they liked me, in the beginning at least. You were so young then, Carole. You were thirty-two when we met, and I was fifty. I could have been your father, but I felt like a boy again when I was with you.”

“I remember the boat,” she said softly, “in the South of France. We went to Saint Tropez, and the old port in Antibes. I think I was very, very happy with you,” she said dreamily.

“We both were,” he added sadly, remembering all that had happened after that.

“Something happened. You had to leave.”

“Yes, I did.” He was amazed that she remembered. He had almost forgotten it himself, although it had been an enormous drama at the time. They had radioed him on the boat. He had had to leave her at the airport in Nice, and had left on a military plane himself.

“Why did you leave? Someone was shot, I think.” She was frowning, trying to remember as she stared at him. “Who was shot?” She had to know.

“The president of France. It was an assassination attempt, which failed. During the Bastille Day parade on the Champs Elysées. I should have been there, but I was with you instead.”

“You were in government… something very high up and very secret. What were you?… Was it secret police?” She was squinting at him from her bed.

“That was one of my duties. I was the Minister of the Interior,” he said quietly, and she nodded. It came back to her now. There was so much she didn't recall about her own life, but she remembered that. They had sailed the boat into the harbor, and left for the airport in a cab. He had left her minutes later, and she had watched him take off in the military plane, and gone back to Paris on her own. He had been apologetic about leaving her that way, and there had been soldiers around him with machine guns. She wasn't frightened by it, but it seemed strange.

“There was something else like that … another time… someone was hurt, and you left me somewhere, on a trip… we were skiing, and you left by helicopter.” She could still see it rising in the air, blowing snow everywhere.

“The president had a heart attack, and I left to be with him.”

“That was at the end, wasn't it?” She looked sad.

He nodded, silent at first, remembering it too. It was the incident that had brought him to his senses and reminded him that he couldn't leave his job, and he belonged to France. They owned him, no matter how much he loved her, and wanted to leave everything for her. He couldn't in the end. They had had a little more time after that, but not much. And his wife had been making a lot of trouble then too. It had been an impossible time, for both of them. “Yes, it was nearly the end. There were two years between those two events, and a lot of wonderful times.”

“That's all I remember,” she said, watching him, wondering what the two years had been like. She had a sense that they had been exciting, because he was, but hard at times, which he was too. As he had just told her, he had had a complicated life. Politics, and the drama that went with it, had been his life's blood. But for a time, so had she. She had been the heart that kept him alive.

“We spent Christmas in Gstaad together the first year, with the children. And then you started another movie in England, and I came over to see you every weekend. When you came back, I wanted to go to the lawyer to get divorced, and my wife begged me not to again. She said she couldn't face it. We'd been married for twenty-nine years, and I felt I owed her something, some respect at least, since I no longer loved her. She knew that, she knew how much I loved you, and she didn't hold it against me. She was very compassionate about it. I was planning to leave my job in the government that year, it would have been the perfect time to end it with her, and then I got named for another term. You and I had been together for a year by then, the happiest year of my life. You agreed to give it another six months. And I had every intention of getting divorced. Arlette promised not to stop it, but then there were scandals in the government involving other people, and I knew it was the wrong time. I promised that if you gave me another year, I would resign and come to the States with you.”

“You would never have done it. And you'd have been miserable in Los Angeles.”

“I felt I owed my country something … and my wife… I couldn't just walk away from either of them, without fulfilling my duty, but I had every intention of leaving and coming with you, and then…” He stopped for a moment, and Carole remembered what had happened. “Something terrible happened …”

“Your daughter died … in a car accident … I remember … it was awful …” Their eyes met and held, and she reached out and touched his hand.

“She was nineteen. It happened in the mountains. She went skiing with friends. You were wonderful to me. But I couldn't leave Arlette then. It would have been inhuman.” Carole remembered his saying that to her.

“You always told me you would leave her. Right from the beginning. You said your marriage to her was over, but it wasn't. You always felt you owed something more to her. She always wanted another six months, and you gave it to her. You always protected her, and not me. I remember it now. I was always waiting for you to divorce her. You lived with me, but you were married to her. And to France. You always had to give one more year to France, and six more months to your wife, and suddenly it was two years later.” She looked at him then, stunned at what she had just remembered. “And I was pregnant.” He nodded, with a look of anguish. “I begged you to divorce her then, didn't I?” He nodded again, looking humbled. “I had a morals clause in my contracts then, and if anyone had found out I was living with a married man, and having his baby, my career would have been over. I would have been blackballed, or out of work at least. I risked that for you,” she said sadly. They had both known the risks going in. His country would have forgiven his having a mistress and cheating on his wife, it had been perfectly acceptable in France. Her country, or her industry at least, wouldn't have forgiven her an affair with a married man, and being his mistress, involved in a public scandal with a high government official. Let alone an illegitimate baby. The morals clause in her contracts had been rigid. Over night she would have become a pariah. She had risked it because he had insisted that he would get divorced, but he had never even gone to see an attorney. His wife had begged him not to, so he never did. He just kept buying time with Carole. Always more.