Accordingly at ten o’clock a shining platoon of blue saloon-cars stood outside the Hôtel d’Azur, each with a swarthy chauffeur, wearing a black béret, at the wheel.
Courteney, very calm and pleasant, walked about with a list in his hand. He was still calm and pleasant when, at half-past ten, a message reached him that the Duvals had changed their minds, and were not coming, when the concierge assured him that a change in the weather was imminent and that le mistral would be blowing before noon, and when Hilary Moon suddenly announced that he had, on the previous afternoon, invited Miss Challoner and her secretary to join the expedition, and they had agreed to do so, and were expecting to be picked up at the villa at a quarter-past ten.
It was by then twenty minutes to eleven.
Nobody showed any signs of being ready to start excepting Captain Morgan and his daughter Olwen, Denis Waller — who was scribbling at the farthest writing-table in the hall, and shielding from sight with one hand what he wrote with the other — and Dulcie.
Courteney thanked Hilary with quite effusive politeness for his belated and unwelcome announcement, and sent a telephone message to the Villa les Mimosas to say that the start had been slightly delayed.
Madame came out of her office, smiling and bowing, and Courteney, in French superior to her own, paid her compliments on the beauties of her native Provence.
At ten minutes to eleven Angie Moon came downstairs wearing a new suit of beach-pyjamas of white silk with a bright-green diagonal stripe, a huge grass-green straw hat, and green sandals.
She said that Mrs. Romayne was on her way down.
Denis rose from his writing-table, and pushed the envelope that he had just addressed into the pocket of his new blue flannel suit.
“Do you want to post your letter, Mr. Waller?” said Dulcie, who had been watching him with her head on one side. “It’ll go at eleven o’clock, if you do.”
“No, thanks,” returned Denis colouring. “I — it’ll — I think I’ll post it in Monte Carlo. It’ll probably get to London quicker that way.”
“Oh, but it won’t, Mr. Waller. It — —”
Courteney half turned round and gave his daughter a look that silenced her on the instant.
Denis, striding as he always did to try and make himself look taller, approached the others. He cast an uneasy glance round at the other men.
Morgan, who had said that he was not going into the Rooms, was wearing khaki shorts and shirt. Courteney had on an old pair of white flannel trousers and a zip-fastened cotton singlet. Buckland, strolling in from the terrace, wore grey flannels.
Denis began to mutter. He went up to Courteney.
“I’m not sure — I hope I’ve got on the right clothes — I wasn’t quite certain. I can easily slip upstairs and change.”
His anxiety to be seen wearing the right clothes was only surpassed by his reluctance to admit ignorance on the point.
Courteney, polite on principle to any visitor in the Hotel, did not in reality rank Denis as such, any more than did the concierge, or the waiters.
“You’re all right,” he said curtly. “Anyhow, you haven’t got time to go up again now. We shall start extremely late as it is.”
He consulted his list.
“Who isn’t here? Mrs. Romayne — Patrick. And we have to pick up Miss Challoner and her friend on the way. I really think the first car had better start now, and do that, which will give the other cars time to catch up.”
Courteney’s slightly raised voice had somehow assembled everybody on to the steps, those who were going, and those who were not. Even Mr. Bolman put down the newspaper that he was reading on the terrace and stood up.
“If I may be allowed to make a tentative suggestion or two about the seating in the cars, it might save a little confusion,” said Courteney, smiling agreeably, and crushing up into a tiny ball the paper on which he had worked out the whole of his tentative suggestions with great care and in the utmost detail the evening before.
“Moon, will you and Waller get in, and take up Miss Challoner and Mrs. — er — Wolverton-Gush? Good-morning, Mrs. Romayne — no, indeed, you’re not at all late. I hope you’ll let me come in the car with you, and let me see — Buckland — and you, Dulcie.”
(“Am I going with you, Pops? How lovely!” squeaked Dulcie, with a small skip.)
“Captain Morgan, that leaves the remaining car for Mrs. Moon, if you’ll look after her, and then your daughter and Patrick Romayne. Now I think we’re all accounted for. We’re all going to drive straight to the car-park outside the Casino, so we shall meet there.”
Gwennie Morgan climbed up on to the stone coping of the terrace, and began to call out “Good-bye!” dancing up and down and waving her hand.
“Good-bye,” echoed David, joining her.
Everybody began to exclaim, to say good-bye, and to exchange wishes for a pleasant day.
The cars moved away, down the drive.
(3)
The day spent by Mary and her two younger children with Mr. Muller had been a great success.
They drove a long way in the extremely magnificent car of Mr. Muller, they saw beautiful scenery, they bathed, and picnicked on the rocks, and finally dined early on the terrace of a French hotel overlooking the sea.
It was eight o’clock when they got back to the Hôtel d’Azur.
“Thank you so much for taking us. It was lovely,” said Gwennie.
“Thank you very much,” echoed David.
They had been angelic all day.
Mary sent them up to bed, feeling a glow of pride and thankfulness.
“We loved it,” she told Mr. Muller, standing beside him in the lighted hall.
It was still stiflingly hot, and strange insects were buzzing and flapping about, more noticeable than usual in the silence, for half the Hotel was at Monte Carlo and the other half at dinner.
“You don’t have to go just yet, do you?” enquired Muller. “Won’t you come and sit on the terrace for a few minutes? Have an iced drink or something.”
“Ce soir,” said the unexpected voice of the concierge behind them, “il y aura des feux d’artifice au village.”
Mr. Muller glanced enquiringly at Mary.
“Oh, I adore fireworks,” she said.
“That’s fine. We’ll go down right now and see them.”
“Just let me run upstairs and say good-night to the children first,” cried Mary.
“Sure. I’ll wait for you here.”
She ran upstairs, as excited as a schoolgirl, and in five minutes was back again.
Muller’s car was at the steps once more, and he sat at the wheel.
Mary took her place beside him, conscious that the long day spent together in an intimacy that might have been domestic had it not been so unfamiliar, had created between them a surprisingly strong sense of companionship. She knew instinctively that the silent American liked her very much.
She liked him too.
They found the small place in the village thronged with a typical Southern crowd of stout men in shirt-sleeves, hatless women, and small, bullet-headed children.
Dance-music blared out from a loud-speaker placed in an open doorway, and couples were dancing all over the road. Every now and then the glare of approaching head-lights, and the sound of a motor-horn, caused the dancers to swerve violently, screaming, and scattering in every direction. Muller drew up close to the side of the road and put out the head-lights.
“I guess the fireworks will take place by the edge of the sea. They usually do. If we sit here, we shall see them very nicely.”
The raucous sound of the ill-regulated wireless was so loud that they made no attempt to talk.
It was curious, thought Mary, how possible it was to sit beside this chance companion in silence, without any feeling of self-consciousness.
Presently the dance-music stopped and there was a kind of pause. Many of the people surged across the road to the open doorway of the brasserie.
“Look,”
said Mary, “there are some men going down to the edge of the water. That’s where the fireworks will be; you were quite right.”
“Didn’t you think I would be?” Muller enquired dryly.
They both laughed.
“I guess I know the way things are done on this coast about as well as I know anything,” said Muller. “I’ve been here nearly every year for the last fifteen years.”
“And do you like it?”
“Well, I don’t know that I do, so very much. I’ve got tired of it, I expect. The place is beautiful enough. I wouldn’t get tired of that. But it’s just seeing the same crowd of people, over and over again, with nothing different about them except their names.”
“Are they all so much alike? I didn’t know. You see, I’ve hardly ever been abroad — and never to a place like this before.”
“Excepting Bolham, and your own family, Mrs. Morgan, there isn’t anyone staying at the Hôtel d’Azur that you couldn’t meet, almost by the dozen, in any other hotel along the coast.”
“Oh!” cried Mary. “Not anyone as pretty as that girl — Mrs. Moon. She’d be remarkable anywhere.”
“Not to me, she wouldn’t,” said Mr. Muller with simple finality. “She’s pretty, I quite agree, but so are many other people of her age. And they all talk the same way, and walk the same way, and drink the same way, and make love the same way. And that’s about all they ever do do.”
“I thought,” said Mary simply, “that any man in the world would admire her, just for her looks. It’s very evident that some of the people in the Hotel do.”
“Well, when they’ve lived a few years longer and seen a few more hundreds of young women, just exactly like her, walking up and down the pavements in Paris, or London, or N’York, they won’t any more — that’s all.”
Mary remembered how very often she had thought of Angie Moon’s youth and loveliness as passports to some undefined region of romance. The thought had been a sentimental one: common sense told her that romance would hold no place whatever in Angie’s scheme of existence.
There was a sharp, hissing sound, and the first rocket shot up into the air, hung, a point of light poised for an instant against the velvet sky, and then shivered into a rain of tiny, coloured, falling stars.
They exclaimed, almost involuntarily.
She was fascinated and sat leaning forward, earnest and absorbed as a child, watching the display.
(4)
Muller, sitting silent beside her, smoking, was watching his companion rather than the indifferent Roman candles and Catherine-wheels. He was, and had been from the first moment of seeing her, strongly attracted by Mary Morgan.
Her natural setting was one of which he scarcely knew anything at all, except that it still existed, and would probably not continue to exist very much longer.
His own upbringing had been the cosmopolitan one of wealthy American youth, and — knowing almost every great European city — he was almost wholly unfamiliar with society other than urban.
He thought Mary beautiful in an unusual style, intelligent rather than cultured, and profoundly and passionately romantic. To Mervyn Morgan, he inwardly conceded the merit of good-breeding. In every other respect he considered him to be wholly negligible. He would not have suffered any compunction, on Morgan’s account, in making love to Morgan’s wife.
A great many women had been more than ready to let him make love to them — some of them far readier than Muller had been to do so.
It was a great part of Mary’s charm for him that she should be so unaware of the fact that she attracted him.
He reflected, without fatuity, that it would not be difficult to rouse her to awareness. She was, he felt certain of it, both sensitive and responsive. She was lonely, because no companionship existed between herself and her husband, and she was not the type of woman to seek for it elsewhere. She had sublimated her unfulfilled desires, perhaps, in her evidently deep affection for her children?
A chorus of shrieks and exclamations went up, as a rather shaky set-piece appeared.
With any other woman whom he admired as he did Mary, the long companionship of the day, this close proximity of their bodies in the warm semi-darkness would have ended in a kiss at least.
Muller bit hard on the stump of his cigar. Then, with a stifled sigh, tossed it into the low tangle of bushes below the car.
The gesture was unconsciously histrionic. Relinquishment.
(5)
“Good-night,” said Mary, half an hour later on the steps of the Hotel. And she added, very much as her children had done:
“It’s been so lovely, thank you very much.”
She held out her hand, smiling.
Muller held it for a moment in his, looking gravely down at her.
“Good-night,” he said at last. “And it’s for me to thank you for a very wonderful day.”
He turned back again to his car, and Mary went indoors. The concierge, rising sulkily to his feet, told her that the party from Monte Carlo had not yet returned.
“Merci. Bonsoir.”
“‘Soir, madame.”
The lift took her slowly and jerkily up to her own floor. Feeling suddenly very tired, Mary went into the double bedroom, and sat down on the edge of the bed without troubling to turn on the switch near the door. Through the half-closed shutters she could see lights trembling on the water, and other brighter clusters, denoting St. Raphael. In the village, the music had started again, and reached her softened and beautified by distance.
The sound of a car approaching swiftly up the hill came nearer and nearer. There was another one close behind it.
They were back from Monte Carlo.
Mary sat still for another second or two, her hands covering her face.
She had wondered, when the American said good-night to her, if he wanted to kiss her.
For a brief moment, before she sprang to her feet and switched on the light, she wished very much that he had done so.
CHAPTER XI
(1)
It seemed to Denis that an almost incredible piece of good fortune had befallen him when he was told by Courteney to go in the first car — the one that was to stop at the Villa Mimosa for Chrissie.
He superstitiously told himself that his luck had turned: he believed implicitly in good and bad luck.
His wretchedness of mind throughout the last few days had been intense. During the daytime he could distract his thoughts but at night he suffered tortures, turning over and over the possibility that Chrissie would find out, perhaps through Courteney, his major deception of her.
He did not think that she would view his marriage as an obstacle to the relationship between them that he always scrupulously called their friendship, but he had an unescapable, agonising conviction that she would despise him for having kept it from her. It was not only his vanity that writhed at the thought: he was sentimentally, if not passionately, in love with Chrissie, and felt that to lose her would be unendurable.
Leaning back in the swiftly-moving, comfortable car, Denis felt his nerves relax for the first time since Courteney’s recognition of him.
Perhaps everything was going to be all right after all.
Little as he liked or esteemed Hilary Moon, it was a relief to be with him, rather than with Buckland or Courteney. And in another minute or two he would see Chrissie. They could spend the whole day together.
Denis even told himself that he might be lucky at the Casino and win some money there.
He looked at Hilary, lounging beside him.
“Shall you try your luck at the tables this afternoon?” he enquired in his best imitation-Oxford voice.
“What else do you suppose I’m going for?” said Hilary contemptuously.
Denis drew his lips together and relapsed into an offended silence.
At the Villa, Denis sprang out of the car, eager as usual to display his good manners, and then stood in the road for five minutes feeling that he was looking foolish, whilst they waited.
As soon as Chrissie and her companion appeared Hilary also got out of the car, and it was he who helped them both in. Denis had been prepared to shake hands, but Chrissie only smiled at him, and Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, creaking slightly at the waist, gave him a stately little bow.
The car could comfortably accommodate four passengers, and the two men sat on the back seats.
Since Hilary had preceded him into the car Denis found himself opposite to Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, his feet in an awkward proximity that he found embarrassing, to her massive legs, which seemed to have no ankles at all.
He pressed his knees tightly together, and in a screwed-up and uncomfortable position he spent the journey.
Chrissie and Hilary seemed suddenly to have discovered that they might have something in common after all, and talked about books and literary acquaintances. Denis would have liked to join in, but recent experiences with Mr. Bolham had taught him wisdom. He contented himself with looking from one to the other, with the air of one intelligently following a conversation without caring to contribute to it. He hoped ardently that Chrissie was noticing him.
From time to time she glanced at him and once she leaned forward to touch his arm and draw his attention to the loveliness of the road they were following.
Cars were numerous, and one, flashing past them with reckless speed on a dangerous curve, caused them all to exclaim.
“It was one of the Hôtel d’Azur lot,” declared Hilary. “I’m certain it was, I saw Angie’s green hat. Besides, they waved to us — didn’t you see?”
“These foreign chauffeurs are really terrible,” Mrs. Wolverton-Gush said, shuddering. “If anything had been coming the other way, round that bend, nothing could have prevented a smash.”
“The roads are so heavily cambered, too. That car would have gone clean over the edge.”
They all turned involuntarily and gazed at the red, jagged rocks below.
“Certain death,” Denis observed, glad of an opportunity for making his voice heard at last.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 400