Olivia concentrated more of her efforts on the inside of the chateau and coordinating the artistic side of it. Joachim oversaw the construction and outdoor landscaping. Together they formed a formidable task force. They even worked on many weekends. There was still much she wanted to do in Paris, but she had no time now until they finished the chateau. And looming in the distance was the end of her lease on the Paris apartment. She already knew she wanted to stay, but hadn’t told her landlord yet, and hoped he’d let her. She didn’t want to move again, she loved her new home, and had no desire to go back to her dreary apartment in New York. It seemed part of the past now and wasted years of her life. But she hadn’t let it go or sublet it in case she decided to move back at the end of the year in Paris.
They were driving back to the city from the chateau on a Friday night when Joachim asked her a question she constantly asked herself.
“What do you want to do after the chateau?”
She’d been thinking about it a lot lately, as the project neared completion. “Maybe the same thing on a smaller scale. A lot of Americans still buy chateaux in France. I’ve loved refurbishing this one. Maybe something less extreme. I’ll never have another client with this much money, but it adds a lot of pressure too, although he’s certainly easy to work for.” They both agreed on that. Petrov was an invisible, undemanding presence with unlimited funds.
“Too much so. I hate to think where the money comes from,” Joachim commented. A job as a butler still hadn’t come up in England for him, and he’d done nothing about pursuing it lately. He was having too much fun working with her, and he couldn’t make this kind of money as a butler. She was paying him a very fair portion of her earnings, in consideration for all the work he was doing. They both knew she couldn’t have done it without him. There was far too much work for one person to handle, too many component parts, and workers you constantly had to chase to show up and threaten and cajole. He was better at that than she was, and she liked the artistry of it better. Their combined talents made for a very efficient team.
“What are you doing tonight?” he asked, as they entered the sixteenth arrondissement.
“I was going to soak in a hot tub and go to bed.” She had helped carry some of the lumber that day since the workmen were shorthanded, and rocks for the garden. Each rock was individually selected. Nikolai Petrov wanted the most beautiful garden in France. And Joachim was constantly impressed by how hard she worked. Nothing stopped her or was too hard. “But I think I’ll go to a movie. There’s a new one on the Champs élysées I want to see, the original version in English. I get homesick once in a while, but not very often.”
He smiled. Her French had improved in the last few months from speaking to their workers. Her accent was pure American, but she knew the words she needed to speak to the workmen, and they understood her.
“You can’t go to the Champs élysées alone. It’s dangerous.” He frowned at her. “There are juvenile delinquents all over the place, and Gypsies.” She still hadn’t made any friends or met anyone, other than the people she worked with, and Joachim. They had a good employer-employee relationship that had developed into an artistic partnership, like war buddies, but he was careful to maintain a respectful distance, which was comfortable for her too. They were both people who shied away from close relationships, although it manifested differently. He had said to her once that signing on for a life of service was like joining a religious order. You gave up your personal life for your job. To do it well, you had to give up your freedom, independence, and other loyalties. The job would always have to come first and the family you worked for, and your own family, personal pursuits, and girlfriend would have to come last.
“And no woman likes that,” he had said, and she agreed.
She had sacrificed her own personal life for her work, for a magazine that didn’t even exist now, so what had that gotten her? Ten years of hard work and long nights and an empty pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
They both agreed that if they’d been dating anyone, they couldn’t have devoted the same intense amount of time to the chateau. But as a time-limited project, they were both willing to do it, and the rewards were considerable.