Whispers of the Flesh by Louisa Burton

Author:Louisa Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553905694
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Three

I FELL IN LOVE with your mother in this garden,” Emmett Archer said as he lingered over lunch in the Beckett Garden the next day with Jason and Grace.

Not that Emmett had eaten what you’d call “lunch.” Darius, perched on a crossbeam of the colonnade that shaded the lushly planted terrace, had seen the administrateur consume perhaps three spoonfuls of milk toast pressed upon him by his nurse. Nevertheless, he was having what Grace termed “a good day.” Were he not, he would hardly have asked to be brought down here—no easy task, what with the oxygen concentrator and all—to enjoy the spring sunshine in this, his favorite garden.

“You must have fallen hard and fast.” Isabel, sitting across from her father at the linen-draped table with a sketchbook and a mechanical artist’s pen, was working on a drawing of him with the garden and reflecting pool in the background, and beyond that, the bucolic parkland that surrounded the château. “You dated Mom for what, like, two months before you tied the knot. Your most impulsive act ever,” she told him with a grin.

“Was she pregnant?” Jason said. He was dressed as he’d been the day before, in baggy jeans and a baggy flannel shirt over a baggy T-shirt, this one sporting an image of a double helix.

“Oh, no, you did not just ask that,” Grace said, sounding more New York than London.

Glancing up from her drawing to give Jason a look, Isabel said, “She wasn’t pregnant.”

Archer smiled. “Of course she was.”

Isabel gaped at her father.

“You were born seven months later,” her father said.

“I was premature. I was conceived on your honeymoon. I weighed four pounds, two ounces.”

“You were eight pounds even.” He gave her a rueful smile. “Your mother insisted on the preemie story. I’m sorry, my dear. It never sat well with me, lying to you.”

Jason, his chair tipped back, hands behind his head, looked back and forth between father and daughter as if he were watching one of those American reality shows.

“Mr. Archer,” Grace said, “are you going to take that pill or just sit there fiddling with it all afternoon?”

“Wait a minute,” Isabel said. “So I was conceived during the love-in?”

“The house party?” Archer said pointedly, only to lapse into a coughing fit. “No, Maddy brought a boyfriend, worse luck. It wasn’t until we were back in London again that we started seeing each other.”

Isabel said, “You must have seen an awful lot of each other pretty fast, if she was two months’ pregnant when you got married, um . . . two months later.”

“It took me a few days to work up my courage to call her, once I got back to London. I couldn’t believe it when she not only agreed to go out with me, but seemed enthusiastic about it. But she was rather . . . mercurial, you know. A free spirit.”

“Mr. Archer, do take that pill,” Grace said. “I know it’s hard, but—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said in an irritated tone. Darius heard him take a scratchy breath, as if steeling himself.

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