Resurrection by Danielle Steel

Author:Danielle Steel [Steel, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2024-05-09T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

When Mariette Nattier heard that they were about to be confined immediately in France, she had to send her domestic employees home and shut down her factories. She was about to spend several weeks or a month confined with her husband. It sounded like a fate worse than death to her. With no children, she could never explain to herself why she and Philippe had stayed married, other than laziness or not wanting to untangle and disengage their financial affairs. Both she and Philippe had established successful businesses of their own. They had led separate lives and had separate bedrooms for thirty years, and each had had several serious romantic liaisons, but none of them serious enough to want to get divorced. Mariette was sixty-two, a once sexy, slightly overweight artificial blonde, and Philippe sixty-nine, mostly bald with a sizable paunch. Their ages put them both in the category of those most vulnerable to the virus, and least likely to survive if they caught it, according to initial estimations, similar to last time in Philippe’s case, not hers.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had a lengthy conversation with her husband, spent a weekend with him, or shared a meal, let alone been locked in a house alone together for an indeterminate amount of time. She felt nearly suicidal at the thought, and Philippe wasn’t pleased at the prospect either. And worse yet, they both had to shut their factories down, since neither of their businesses qualified as essential, and they couldn’t risk their factory workers’ lives. They both intended to try to have meetings and work remotely.

She owned the most successful perfume factories in France, and she was consulted by perfume manufacturers all over the world. Philippe had been an inventor who had had no success with any of his projects until he turned fifty. And then twenty years ago he had had what became legendary success, at first with a remarkable hair dryer, then with heaters and fans, and household appliances that were much more efficient than any ever made before. They sold for ten times the usual price and were snapped up as though they were giving them away. Nattier products were considered a stroke of genius, and Philippe had made millions. But his hair dryers and vacuum cleaners weren’t considered “essential” products either, so his factories were also now closed. Other than Zoom meetings they each organized several times a day, he and his wife were stuck looking at each other and having to be far more civil than they had been to each other in several decades.

Their successful businesses had kept them legally married so as not to lose half of their fortunes in a divorce, but hadn’t improved the quality of their relationship, and Mariette was well aware that Philippe had a new Russian mistress who was twenty-three years old and costing him a fortune. He hadn’t given Mariette a gift, let alone an Hermès crocodile bag, in thirty years. He had just given Olga, his Russian girlfriend, four, with diamond-encrusted hardware.

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