For nearly three years after that, Hilary Moon was on velvet. He had the run of the Atkinsons’ solidly luxurious house in Hampstead, he was treated as one of the family, and given expensive presents, and his account of himself as the sole descendant of a very old and impoverished family from Ireland was unquestioningly accepted.
Hilary, since those days, had often reflected cynically on his own folly in losing all that he had gained.
But young Atkinson’s dog-like and idiotic devotion irritated him unbearably, and he took to snubbing him savagely.
Atkinson, made to be kicked, would have endured it all, but his mother resented it for him.
Hilary was shown the door.
In the days of his vicarious prosperity, he had broken off all relations with his mother, and had no wish to resume them, since he felt certain that she neither could nor would give him any money.
But he had made useful acquaintances with the Atkinsons, especially amongst women. Natural adaptability and a spurious air of intelligence enabled him to acquire a standing in one of the many fifth-rate artistic and literary sets of suburban London. Drifting from one group to another, and borrowing money whenever and wherever he could, Hilary picked up quite a number of temporary jobs, that were usually paid on commission, and when he fell violently in love with Angie, married her, mainly because she was the central figure of a large circle, and boasted frankly that she never had to pay for her own meals.
On Angie’s beauty, and Hilary’s powers of cadging, they had been living ever since.
Hilary told himself bitterly that he was becoming heartily sick of it. Angie’s admirers, now, were apt to ignore her husband altogether, and Angie did nothing to remind them of his existence. Hilary thought how much better he could have done for himself as an unmarried young man. There was Chrissie Challoner, for instance — obviously the romantic type, and certainly making a good deal of money....
Hilary was at once both too obtuse, and too conceited, to doubt his own ability where love-making was concerned. He felt sure that he could, by flattery, please any woman, especially one older than himself, as Chrissie was, and devoid of obvious prettiness.
Would it be worth trying?
He knew that there was not the faintest prospect of his being able to pay the Hotel bill, and he suspected furiously that Madame did not intend to wait long for her money. Then there would be a very unpleasant scene, and he and Angie would have to make a get-away.
Hilary looked with hatred at Muller, the rich American, crossing the terrace just outside.
Hilary hated all rich people, but most of all the ones from whom he knew that he could not possibly hope to get money.
“Good-morning — er — Moon,” said the voice of Denis Waller just behind him.
Wearing his too-expensive silk dressing-gown, over the turquoise-blue bathing-suit from which his skinny legs and arms protruded oddly, he looked sallower and more nervous than usual.
“Hallo,” said Hilary contemptuously. It gave him a definite feeling of satisfaction to make it plain that he despised Denis. This satisfaction was increased when Denis showed, by the sudden disappearance of his tentative smile and a compression of his thin lips, that he noticed and resented Hilary’s tone.
He continued, however, to stand his ground.
“What are the plans for to-day, I wonder? I — I think Mr. Bolham would like to know.”
Hilary made use of a coarse expletive.
“... as if he gives a damn! I wish I’d your job, Waller, I know that. You seem to me to get time off just whenever you want it. By the way, how’s your head feeling this morning?”
Hilary’s intonation left — and was meant to leave — no doubt whatever as to the offensiveness of the allusion.
Denis uttered an inarticulate exclamation, crimsoned, and turned away. Hilary laughed loudly.
“Sorry, and all that, if it’s a tender subject.”
Denis surprised him by suddenly turning round again and facing him.
“I don’t know if you mean to be deliberately rude to me,” he enunciated in a voice pitched unnaturally high, “but I resent your tone very much indeed. And I don’t think, if it comes to that, that you came very creditably out of yesterday’s accident yourself.”
Hilary stared at him in some astonishment. He had not sufficient perspicacity to connect Waller’s sudden outburst with the presence of an audience, but he realised that Dulcie Courteney had appeared in the hall, and was gazing at Denis with adoring schoolgirl eyes.
With her was Patrick Romayne. They were carrying bathing-wraps.
Ignoring Denis, Hilary turned to the boy.
“Going down to the rocks?”
“I think we’re bathing from the plage this morning. My mother sent me to find Mr. Buckland. Have you seen him anywhere about?”
“No, I haven’t.”
It occurred to Hilary that he had not seen Angie about either, and he felt fairly certain that she and Buckland were together somewhere.
“Look here, can I run you and Mrs. Romayne down in my car to the plage? If Buckland’s not available, I mean? You don’t drive, do you?”
“Not supposed to,” the boy admitted, with a fleeting smile that gave sudden charm to his young, anxious face.
“I say, would you really? That would be awfully kind of you. Will there be room —— ?” He indicated Dulcie by a gesture.
“Certainly,” said Hilary coldly. He thought nothing of Dulcie, but knew very well that it was advisable to remain on good terms with her father. Courteney, he suspected, had been far from admiring his conduct of the motor-boat expedition.
“I’ll bring the car round, if Mrs. Romayne is ready to go now,” he said, and walked out ignoring Denis Waller.
That motor-boat affair would need a good deal of living down, he morosely reflected as he walked the length of the blazing terrace towards the garage. They’d all made a hero out of Buckland — the fools — and Angie was clearly loopy about the fellow.
What was the sense of it, when Buckland was solely dependent on his job? And he wouldn’t keep that long, if he didn’t play his cards better.
Hilary climbed into the long, low car, backed her with consummate skill and swiftness out of the garage, turned in a single movement and drove smoothly up to the Hotel steps, drawing up there with perfectly-timed precision.
He thought himself a most beautiful driver — as indeed he was — and was superbly indifferent to the fact that he was almost entirely ignorant of the mechanism of a car.
It was a point of view that neatly typified Hilary Moon’s attitude towards life.
(4)
Patrick, like Hilary, admired Hilary’s driving. His appreciation of it renewed his ardent desire to drive his mother’s Buick.
It was only that beast, Buckland, who’d put it into her head that she mustn’t allow him to drive in France. Just because he wanted to do it himself all the time.
Thank Heaven he was out of the way for a bit. It might be fun bathing from the plage where the raft was, without him.
Abruptly, Patrick realised that they were waiting for his mother.
“Shall I go up and see if she’s ready?” he suggested.
“Let me — I’d love to,” Dulcie cried effusively.
She was rushing half-way up the stairs before Patrick could answer her.
He grinned a little.
If she wanted to fag, better let her do it, he supposed.
Hilary Moon was still reclining at the wheel, smoking a cigarette as usual, and evidently with no desire to make conversation.
Patrick sat down on the stone coping of the balustrade, consciously liking the impact of his body against the sun-heated surface, and gazed, screwing up his eyes against the glare, at the shimmering blue of sea and sky, set in a crescent of red rocks and grey-green pines and cypresses.
How odd it was that no one ever seemed to notice that the Côte d’Azur was so beautiful. Or if they did, they never said anything about it. People only tal
ked about themselves, or the other visitors, or clothes and trains and food, and the service in the hotels. And even when a plan was made to go to some special place, it was mostly for the sake of having drinks there, and a meal, and perhaps swimming a bit.
The Morgans, thought Patrick dreamily, probably noticed a bit more. They were different.
He remembered that David, who was only a tiny little chap, had once said that it was a pity there were no song-birds on the coast. It turned out that he was interested in birds, and knew quite a lot about them. His father had taught him about them, at their place in Wales.
Patrick, who secretly admired Captain Morgan, had admired him more than ever after that. He must be a frightfully intelligent man, as well as kind to have taken all that trouble so that David should know about birds.
Patrick rather liked birds himself, though he knew very little about them. But he remembered a book — with a lot of coloured plates — all about birds, that he’d liked frightfully as a kid.... That was ages ago, when he and mother and daddy were all living at a place near Haslemere, in Surrey. What had happened to the book? he wondered.
“Backside getting scorched?” said Hilary Moon, and Patrick found, rather to his surprise, that he must have moved without realising it, for he was standing up.
“It is a bit hot,” he said.
(5)
Chrissie Challoner and Mrs. Wolverton-Gush went that morning to the plage.
This was not by any wish of Mrs. Wolverton-Gush. Bathing from the rocks below the Villa les Mimosas was one thing: a comparatively decent and simple affair. It was easy to walk down the garden steps with a wrap over one’s bathing-dress, slip it off on the flat rock below the wall, and lower oneself into the water.
But the plage, from the point of view of Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, was open to a number of objections.
To begin with, the hired car that took them there stopped amongst the pine trees at the edge of the road, and a very steep and sandy descent had to be negotiated on foot.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush hated the climb down, along a narrow path of sandy soil, thickly bordered with small, tough, low-growing bushes that scratched her legs and caught in her bathing-cloak. Every day her feet swelled with the heat, and the sandals that had seemed endurable in the morning had become red-hot instruments of torture by noon.
And when the plage was at last reached, it was crowded with fat, semi-nude Frenchmen, and still more nude Frenchwomen, and groups of tiny brown naked children walking in and out of the water, screaming, throwing about large, coloured rubber balls with unsteady aim, and staring out of enormous, hostile dark eyes at the English and American visitors.
The French people, as a rule, had bathing-tents, although they seldom used them. The visitors had none.
“One can manage under a towel, or something,” said Chrissie indifferently.
She did not in the least mind exposing her little slim figure.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, however, would not for the world have shuffled in and out of a bathing-dress on the open plage, and she always adjusted her tight bust-support, and her dark green silk costume, with a short skirt from waist to knees, before leaving the Villa. It was uncomfortable having to sit about in it after her bathe, but it dried quickly enough in the sun.
The objective of all bathers from the plage was the raft. It swung slowly from side to side on the glittering water, and was almost always crowded with shrieking, sliding figures, slipping backwards and forwards on its wet surface and splashing in and out of the sea as the balance of weight shifted.
From one end of the raft uprose the diving-steps. Almost every time that a bather stood poised on the topmost step and then sprang through the air there was a moment’s hush, whilst people watched.
The divers were usually English or American, although one or two Frenchmen performed admirably.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush never swam as far as the raft. Her swimming was an affair of determination rather than of skill, and she did not enjoy being in the water. She seriously believed that she might at any moment drown, and exercise, in any case, was apt to bring on her indigestion. But as usual her private concerns must be sacrificed, ruthlessly and in silence, to the whims of her employer.
Otherwise she might find herself out of a job. Mrs. Wolverton-Gush knew exactly what that meant for a woman of her age. She sat down on the hot sand, consciously restraining the heavy grunt that was nature’s protest against unfamiliar exercise for elderly muscles buried in fat, and pulled the skirt of her bathing-dress as far down as she could over her large thighs, tinged with violet.
Chrissie, in a scarlet swimming-suit that left the whole of her back, sides, and shoulders exposed to the sun, threw herself down at full length, protecting her eyes from the glare with her hands.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush glanced down at her with a secret envy. Chrissie lay as flat, as straight, as an immature child of ten or eleven years old. Even the rise of her tiny breasts was almost imperceptible. Her stomach, thought Mrs. Wolverton-Gush resentfully, was positively concave.
It was unnatural.
Yet she knew that Chrissie neither dieted nor did slimming exercises.
“Look, dear, there’s your friend Mr. Moon, with Mrs. Romayne and Patrick.”
“Oh, damn,” said Chrissie.
She sat up.
“I don’t mean your Mrs. Romayne, Gushie, but Moon bores me beyond words. Have they seen us?”
They had, and were picking their way through the groups.
“Good-morning,” said Hilary Moon, with more amiability than usual. “Have you been in yet?”
“I’m going in now,” said Chrissie. “Are you coming, Gushie?”
“I think, dear, that I’ll sit here a little first.”
“I’ll come with you to the raft, if I may,” Hilary announced.
“All right. Come on, Patrick.”
The three of them raced down to the edge of the water. Coral Romayne, her face a thunder-cloud, threw herself down beside Mrs. Wolverton-Gush and began to fling the sand about violently with both hands.
“I think I’m going to leave this place,” she announced abruptly. “I’m perfectly sick of it.”
“Are you thinking of Cannes, or dear old Monte? I must say I’ve a terrible weakness for Cannes myself. It’s what I call such a really smart place.”
Coral made no reply. She pulled a comb from her cretonne beach-bag, and dragged it repeatedly through her lustreless thatch of coarse, discoloured hair.
At last she burst into angry speech, her voice rising higher and higher as she went on.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush listened, but paid no attention. She knew what Coral’s grievance was. It was the age-old grievance of a woman no longer young, to whom sexual adventure is supremely important, and whose chances of it are daily diminishing.
Ruth Wolverton-Gush attached but little importance to sexual adventure herself. She saw life in terms of money, and had done so almost ever since she could remember. Had she ever been attractive to men, she would have exploited her attractions for the sake of the material advantages they might have brought her. But even as a girl she had never had the admiration of men. She was too hard, too dictatorial, too obviously out for what she could get.
Life had not softened her in the least: on the contrary. But it had taught her to conceal her hardness under a veneer of lip-sympathy.
She offered it to Coral now, her mind all the time busy with her own affairs: the pain that warned her of oncoming indigestion, the one-sided pull of her bust-support, denoting that one of the hooks had given way and must be sewn on directly she got in.
“It’s too bad, dear. I’m really sorry. It does seem as if he was behaving badly. I certainly should never have expected Buck to let you down like that. I almost feel it reflects on me, in a way, as I introduced him to you.”
“Oh, it’s nothing to do with you, Gushie,” said Coral mechanically. She kept silent for a moment, and then burst out again.
“It’s perfectly indecent, t
he way Angie — or whatever she calls herself — runs after men. It makes me sick! And just because Moon was fool enough to spill them all into the sea out of his rotten motor-boat, and Buck didn’t scream and panic like that dirty little coward What’s-his-name, you’d think he’d saved all their lives.”
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, who had heard Coral loudly proposing Buckland’s health in champagne the night before, at once said with great decision:
“Hysteria, dear — that’s all it is. Simply hysteria. Mrs. Moon and that silly little Courteney girl were thoroughly worked up, and they had to make an adventure out of what was probably a very simple occurrence. Naturally, if it had happened in England, it might have been most unpleasant — not to say dangerous — but an hour or two in the water in this climate means nothing at all.”
“I can’t see that Buck did anything marvellous,” Coral repeated sullenly. “By the way they go on you’d think he’d saved a dozen lives. As a matter of fact they could all swim perfectly well. Buck just happened to be less of a fool than the other men, that’s all. If you can call either of them men,” she added viciously.
“I certainly don’t care very much for Mr. Moon, I must admit.”
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush had no intention of committing herself to any statement whatever about Denis Waller. Chrissie was, or seemed to be, temporarily infatuated with him — and Chrissie was her employer.
But Coral was not interested in the very least in Denis. She wanted to talk about herself and Buckland.
“I’ve been frightfully generous to him, too — taking him with us everywhere, and never making any fuss about money, and God knows he’s always done himself well. I don’t believe there’s another woman in the world in my position who’d have stood for it. I know one thing: it isn’t going on.”
“You mean you’re going to tell him he can go?”
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush did not really believe this. She had had previous experience of Coral Romayne, of her instability, her violent changes of mood, and susceptibility to flattery. She thought that Buckland was behaving like a fool.
Suddenly Coral gripped her arm, digging her pointed nails painfully into the flesh.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 398