An Inconvenient Woman Read Free

just have sixty for dinner with rare wines and a flown-in orchestra on a nightly basis?”
    Camilla laughed. “You’re right. It is quite special. I shouldn’t act like I take it for granted, but I’ve been coming to parties here for so many years that I might have lost my sharp eye.”
    “You mustn’t ever lose your sharp eye, Mrs. Ebury,” said Philip. “Or ear, for that matter. You might miss something.”
    Camilla looked at Philip, interested. “Camilla,” she said.
    “I’m Philip,” he answered.
    “I know.”
    “What kind of people are these?” Philip asked, holding his hand out to indicate the guests. “Aside from the former President and the film star, I mean.”
    “Oh, the core, I suppose. My father used to describe them as the kind of people who can keep things out of the newspapers,” said Camilla.
    “What kind of things?”
    “Oh, things.”
    “The woods are full of bodies, you mean?”
    She laughed. “In a manner of speaking.”
    Philip looked around the room again. “This is all quite glamorous in a way. At least it is for me.”
    “I suppose it is when you’re traveling like you are, staying a few days or a few weeks; but if you were to stay longer, you would begin to see that each evening is a variation on the same theme, except at the Mendelsons’, where it’s a little more extravagant, but then the Mendelsons aren’t really Angelenos in the sense that the rest of us are who were born and brought up here. There are about two or three hundred of us who dine together in various combinations, and we rarely widen the circle, and you rarely read about us in the newspapers.” She smiled almost apologetically and made a helpless gesture.
    “Go on. I’m fascinated,” said Philip.
    “Well, we never mix with the movie crowd, and only sometimes with the people from Pasadena, except for civic evenings or certain charities, like the museums or the Music Center. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the way it is and the way it always has been. If you want to know the truth, I’d love to know a few movie stars.”
    Philip laughed. Camilla looked at Philip and saw that he gave her his full attention. She moved in closer to him and spoke in a lowered voice. “Now that you mention it, I think there was originally a point for this party. We all thought that an announcement was going to be made tonight that Jules was being sent by the President to Brussels to head up the American delegation at the statehood of Europe. It would have meant staying there for the whole of nineteen ninety-three, at least, and Pauline was looking forward to it enormously. She speaks perfect French, and I think she sometimes gets bored here.”
    “It’s not to be?” asked Philip.
    “Oh, yes, it is to be, but not to be announced as yet, apparently.”
    Philip nodded. “Good soup,” he said.
    “Marvelous.”
    A Mendelson party was, even for the initiated, a heady experience. The food was prepared by their own chef, a famed figure in gastronomic circles, and the wine, from Jules Mendelson’s own cellar, was superb. There were orchids, and antiques, and priceless art on every wall in every room. In the library, which the Mendelsons used for a sitting room when they were alone, there were more French paintings, and English furniture, and armchairs and sofas covered in glazed chintz. There was a long table for photographs in silver frames, including several of Pauline and Jules with Presidents and First Ladies at White House dinners, as well as signed photographs from the monarchs of Spain and Great Britain. There was a matching table on the other side of the room for magazines, changed weekly or monthly, and newspapers, changed daily. Tall French windows, elaborately curtained and swagged, opened onto a terrace with umbrellaed tables, and a garden beyond, and a lawn beyond that. People who visited the Mendelsons always said about this room, “How marvelous!” So Philip Quennell, a newcomer to such grandeur,