The Emperor's Children (Electronic book text)

Our Chef Is Very Famous in London Darlings Welcome And you must be Danielle?" Sleek and small, her wide eyes rendered enormous by kohl, Lucy Leverett, in spite of her resemblance to a baby seal, rasped impressively. Her dangling fan earrings clanked at her neck as she leaned in to kiss each of them, Danielle too, and although she held her cigarette, in its mother-of-pearl holder, at arm's length, its smoke wafted between them and brought tears to Danielle's eyes. Danielle didn't wipe them, for fear of disturbing her makeup. Having spent half an hour putting on her face in front of the grainy mirror of Moira and John's bathroom, ogling her imperfections and applying vigorous remedial spackle--beneath which her weary, olive-shaped eyes were pouched by bluish bags, the curves of her nostrils oddly red, and her high forehead peeling--she had no intention of revealing to strangers the disintegration beneath her paint. "Come in, darlings, come in." Lucy moved behind them and herded the trio toward the party. The Leveretts' living room was painted a deep purple--aubergine, in local parlance--and its windows were draped with velvet. From the ceiling hung a brutal wrought iron chandelier, like something salvaged from a medieval castle. Three men loitered by the bay window, talking to one another while staring out at the street, their glasses of red wine luminous in the reflected evening light. A long, plump, pillowed sofa stretched the length of one wall, and upon it four women were disposed like odalisques in a harem. Two occupied opposite ends of the divan, their legs tucked under, their extended arms caressing the cushions, while between them one rested her head uponanother's lap, and smiling, eyes closed, whispered to the ceiling while her friend stroked her abundant hair. The whole effect was, for Danielle, faintly cloudy, as if she had walked into someone else's dream. She kept feeling this, in Sydney, so far from home: she couldn't quite say it wasn't real, but it certainly wasn't her reality. "Rog? Rog, more wine " Lucy called to the innards of the house, then turned again to her guests, a proprietorial arm on Danielle's bicep. "Red or white? He's probably even got pink, if you're after it. Can't bear it myself--so California." She grinned, and from her crows' feet, Danielle knew she was forty, or almost. Two men bearing bottles emerged from the candlelit gloom of the dining room, both slender, both at first glance slightly fey. Danielle took the imposing one in front, in a pressed lavender shirt and with, above hooded eyes, a high, smooth Nabokovian brow, to be her host. She extended a hand. "I'm Danielle." His fingers were elegant, and his palm, when it pressed hers, was cool. "Are you now?" he said. The other man, at least a decade older, slightly snaggletoothed and goateed, spoke from behind his shoulder. "I'm Roger," he said. "Good to see you. Don't mind Ludo, he's playing hard to get." "Ludovic Seeley," Lucy offered. "Danielle--" "Minkoff." "Moira and John's friend. From New York." "New York," Ludovic Seeley repeated. "I'm moving there next month." "Red or white?" asked Roger, whose open shirt revealed a tanned breast dotted with sparse gray hairs and divided by a narrow gold chain. "Red, please." "Good choice," said Seeley, almost in a whisper. He was--she could feel it rather thansee it, because his hooded eyes did not so much as flicker--looking her up a