Forty is Beginning (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  She sat down feeling still hungry. She would write a bitter letter to Miss Marvin, for the paper had disclosed her address, and by the look of the thing Les Papillons hotel was most expensive; that fountain, all those flowers; for Miss Halifax missed nothing.

  ‘That beastly woman has done what I would have given the world to do,’ Miss Halifax thought, for she would readily have let her history tripos go, she would have burnt the frightful picture of herself and her fellows, snapped on the day when they took their degrees, and later signed with their triumphant names under the picture. She was a woman bound by the red tape of routine. She would never marry, of course, and had arrived at the age when she thought all the principles of marriage rather rude, and like Miss Marvin had never had the chance, but there was nothing she would have loved more than to be the wife of a handsome Colonel, to have borne good-looking children, and to be able to put ‘Mrs.’ in brackets after her name. What was a history tripos compared to that?

  ‘Damn the history tripos!’ she thought.

  She wrote bitterly. She would like an immediate explanation of the most curious announcements that had appeared in the local press, and she for one must ask the reason. The new term was approaching, and it was important for the character of the young ladies in her charge at St. Helena’s that there should be no scandal, and no talk, most certainly no public announcements about the women whom she entrusted to give them tuition having risked their good names in games of chance, roulette, etc., ‒ illegal in our fine country ‒ and with friends of suspicious character.

  It was a typical Miss Halifax letter, signed in full.

  She posted it, with her mouth set like a trap and returned to a most dreadful lunch with the Preb.

  But there was one thing that Miss Halifax had not reckoned on; matters had changed considerably before her letter arrived at Cap Rabat; her letter and the hearty congratulations of the Haineses, who wished to tell her, ‘Sister, are we pleased!’ and she would be welcome back to her room, they’d put up a proper harvest home when she returned, and have her favourite pudding on the table; a letter from the Minister who, although he could not approve her method of increasing her finances so astoundingly, desired to remind her that there was still the lads’ outing, and surely now she would wish to send them all to Blackpool for a week, himself included; they would of course need someone to act as escort. He ventured to suggest that it would be a noble effort towards her old town if she did this, and he knew it would appeal to her conscience; on receiving her instructions he could arrange everything for her, and would work out the cost.

  ‘I shall never like her,’ he told his wife as he sealed the letter, and then at the post office he found to his horror that the postage would be fourpence, which was too bad. It seemed that Miss Marvin had set out to be a nuisance all ways round. Then he decided that he would be forgiving; after all, it would pay to be forgiving if the lads got their outing.

  Much happened in Cap Rabat that week.

  In the first place, the publicity simply romped through the press.

  She discovered almost at once that apparently almost the whole of Cap Rabat wanted to know her. She had only to go out for people to say: ‘Ah, there she is!’ Her mail increased to such an extent that it took an entire van to bring it along to her. A great many well-dressed people called upon her; if she saw them she was astonished to find that they were really only discreetly dressed beggars. They told their stories very well, so well that she could only surmise that they had done it frequently before.

  Although she tried hard to get away from the ghastly publicity which now pursued her, she found that if anything it was increasing. It was horrifying.

  Francis Lorimer came to call and brought the most exquisite bunch of flowers. She had only the dimmest recollection of him, for that acquaintance had begun on the night of the champagne, which had been the start of it all.

  By daylight he was a palely aesthetic gentleman, who wrote poetry, apparently lived on private means, and possessed a handsome villa with a swimming pool. He wore too slender suits, which were too wide at the shoulders and cut in a rather accentuated manner. She recognised that the suits were wrong, but did not know how or why.

  Miss Marvin bought a large box of nougat tied with tinsel, and she sent it to Mr. Swinnerton, hoping that he would like it. She dispatched a lot of highly-coloured picture postcards to the Haineses.

  For the moment she was so confused that she did not know what was happening. She wanted to sit back, enjoy herself, and come to.

  For yet a third time she tried her beginners’ luck. ‘This is where I go right down the drain,’ she thought, ‘but I must have a go.’

  She bought a new frock for it, letting Maison Celeste have its own way. The dress was parchment satin with a diamanté bodice, and she carried a huge hyacinth blue fan, which the modiste insisted was the right thing for it. She looked quite lovely, and was again escorted by Colonel Hewlitt.

  When they entered the casino, everybody had a look, for Miss Marvin had become something of a legend.

  ‘You’ll get used to them,’ said the Colonel.

  She did not stake for a little while, but sat watching; then she proffered a miserable twenty-five francs, and won. That was stimulating, and she started in earnest. It seemed that she could not lose. There are times in life when fate takes a delight in choosing someone to gild with fame, and that was what was happening. Now the pile at her side was beginning to look fantastic.

  ‘Take care of it for me,’ she said to the Colonel.

  It was a bad day for the bank, and the croupiers’ deadpan faces changed to doubt and embarrassment. Beside her the Colonel hummed: ‘The Man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,’ and oh, how she wished he would stop it!

  ‘I can’t do any more,’ she said at last. ‘I have made so much that I can’t possibly spend it.’

  Francis Lorimer, who had squeezed himself in on the other side of her, took her hand. ‘Come out and dance in the ballroom?’ he suggested.

  ‘I don’t dance.’

  ‘You can learn. I shall delight in teaching you.’

  ‘I can’t dance, for what can I do with this?’ she asked, and she indicated the hyacinth ostrich feather fan that she held.

  ‘Lose it,’ he suggested, ‘you have enough to buy a thousand more. I just shouldn’t be bothered.’

  ‘It isn’t me,’ she thought, ‘none of this is me, and when I wake up going back to Brestonbury it will be awful, for I shall never take kindly to cold meat and milk pud. again.’ She was getting the foie gras outlook. She was thinking in champagne.

  Francis drew her to the pool of yellow light which was the parquet floor and the orchestra started: ‘The Man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. She had never danced very much, but at this stage in her life it all seemed easy. She was the centre of the picture, something that she had never been before; and although it made her very nervous it was great fun.

  Francis was whispering in her ear in a husky entrancing voice as they danced. ‘You’re wonderful,’ he said, ‘you’re an inspiration! You must never go back to silly old England!’

  ‘I’m not going back,’ she promised him, for nothing would induce her to return. The north was squalid; when one adventured into other lands it was to make the discovery that England was dull, all that November fog and springtime East wind. Nobody ought to live that other side of the Alps, for this side revelled in glorious sunshine, and left depression behind it. They went to a side table and had more champagne. Charming young girls who looked like the top form at school (only of course these had been groomed for stardom) offered them autograph books and crowded round Miss Marvin.

  ‘I don’t believe this is really happening,’ she told Francis Lorimer.

  ‘It won’t last, but while it does it is pleasant,’ he murmured. Already he had let drop tiny innuendoes about his early life. The mullioned windows of The Keep; the moat where people would drown their cats (‘My dear, it smelt too horrifying!’ I wonde
r we didn’t all die of leprosy!’); the night his sister went to Court. He had been to Eton, and had an aristocratic but misunderstanding father who paid him a skeleton of an allowance not to return home. It sounded so unkind, but then people were unkind, weren’t they?

  Had she only known it, there was much to be said for the father, who incidentally was a tea trader in the City, for Francis had been a very trying son to have, and nothing suited the old man better than knowing he would never see him again. The mullioned Keep had been a detached house in Beckenham, the moat non est, and Eton the Grammar School, which perhaps was not so floreat as it might have been. Still, by now he had hummed the famous boating song so often that he almost believed his story was true. And, as Francis Lorimer was always saying, it takes all sorts to make a world.

  Francis had acquired a villa at Cap Rabat, which was painted in pale pink, and wreathed with wisteria in cascades of heliotrope. An Aunt had been sorry for him and had left him a small annuity; otherwise he lived on what he could get; where he got it from nobody had the slightest idea. The Riviera is full of young gentlemen who live on over-nimble wits, and although they starve some days, there are other very pleasant times when they live on cream buns and foie gras. Anyway, he had decided that Alice Marvin might be a very good friend to have.

  They danced again. ‘A few lessons and you’d be one of the best dancers here,’ he told her, not quite truthfully, but then the truth is seldom very paying, as he had found out in several mistaken confidences. ‘It’s a lovely perfume you wear,’ he said, his lips uncommonly near her hair, which was rather embarrassing, but thrilling too.

  ‘I know nothing about such things, but the shop said that this was the one to have.’

  ‘It’s the very one for your personality,’ he purred.

  ‘Is it?’ she enquired naively, for she had no idea about such trivialities. However, trivialities built up his life.

  ‘Of course it is! Oh, what men miss never wearing perfume; only an occasional soupçon of White Rose or Imperial Leather. What we miss!’

  They danced on.

  She said, ‘I have been the luckiest woman in the whole world. I came here with so little money, and already I have so much that I don’t know what to do with it.’

  He could have told her what to do with it, but instead he merely asked how she felt about it. Francis was a dancing partner, a ‘taker-outer’, willing to conduct them anywhere they wished, a world tour coming foremost on that list. He had already taken frustrated spinsters for trips to Taormina, where amongst the Saracens’ graves he had said such poetic lines, and on return to the hotel he had by request supplied them with a small account for the benefit of his private purse. He had gone up Vesuvius and looked down the crater with them, and oh how shockingly dizzy-making that was! One of these days he would leave his guts down Vesuvius, he was convinced, but old trouts liked the crater!

  He had gone over to Corsica in a private yacht borrowed from an aristocratic friend; that had been a disastrous holiday, for the crossing was choppy and the sea always gave him migraine; also in Corsica men are men and have very little liking for lounge lizards. There had been a thoroughly sick-making moment with a stout Corsican of the all-brawn type, who had threatened to ‘dot’ Francis one, and Francis had returned very shaky to the yacht, having arrived at the conclusion that in future Corsica would be permanently crossed off his list of suitable spots for pleasant holidays.

  Naples knew him. San Remo was heaven. Florence was an admirable setting for poetically minded ladies, who watched the sunsets with him, and paid for this delight. Just as Rome appealed to the religiously minded, and he drove them round the sixteen fountains and St. Peter’s and the Vatican, and walked them through the Forum and the Colosseum, until he was so worn out that he was a mere shadow of his former self.

  ‘If you have too much money,’ Francis said to Miss Marvin, so that she could take it or leave it, ‘you will always find someone like myself so glad of little favours. My tailor bullies me about what I owe him; it puts years on to my age and gives me bags under my eyes. Too bad, isn’t it? and quite quite shattering.’

  ‘But surely you never buy things you can’t pay for?’ she asked.

  He groaned privately. That was the mistake of starting an affair with a woman from the north of England, where they are all so horribly practical.

  ‘If I lived on that principle, my dear, I’d go about in fig leaves,’ he replied, ‘and what does a fellow do in fig leaves if winter comes?’

  She did not like that one! A silly woman, he told himself, ‘the sort of woman I can’t really like,’ but she had managed to get all this money, and it was a shame that such a fortune should be in the wrong hands!

  He went on being delightfully helpful and kind. He knew of a little modiste who made lovely ladies’ clothes, a milliner who designed the most enchanting hats, and he would adore to introduce Miss Marvin to both of them. There was the jeweller in the Place des Huguenots, where you could buy marvellous diamonds! Diamonds were an investment, they spoke all languages and passed all frontiers. Sometimes they travelled in a pat of soap or the heels of shoes, but diamonds could be relied upon to get by when nylons so often couldn’t.

  Miss Marvin didn’t realise that the little modiste and the milliner paid him a useful commission, as also did the diamond merchant. They were all part of his scheme of life, his private system.

  ‘Now let’s dance again,’ said he.

  This was when Colonel Hewlitt arrived on the scene. He had been called away to the telephone, about some new arrivals at Les Papillons, and the length of the conversation had spoilt the party for him. Seeing what was afoot, he halted them as they approached the very edge of the ballroom floor. ‘I’ll dance this one,’ he said, and pushed Francis aside.

  Miss Marvin was shocked. ‘But he was dancing with me,’ she said.

  ‘I daresay he was. You had better be careful, for he is an insidious young man. Not the sort the old regiment preferred. What I’d give to have him under one of my sergeant-majors! That would teach him a thing or two!’

  ‘He was telling me where to buy things.’

  ‘He gets a rake-off from all the shops in the district. Didn’t you suspect it? That is one of the ways he lives.’

  ‘It couldn’t be!’ she gasped.

  ‘It is, and what’s more the next thing he suggests will be taking you on a pleasant little holiday somewhere on the continent. He may charter a yacht, you’ll pay of course, for he hasn’t a bean, but he may do anything.’

  ‘I couldn’t go away alone with a man,’ murmured Miss Marvin. That was so obvious that she could not understand why anyone expected that she could.

  ‘I wouldn’t go away with that man,’ he answered, ‘for the bills are fantastic, as he knows how to live on his wits, even if they are nit-wits.’

  The Colonel danced rather clumsily; she had to admit that he had not the same free and easy method of Francis, and she was a little relieved when they sat down.

  She said, ‘This is a dream, the whole thing is a dream, when do I wake up?’ The scent of mimosa came across the verandah, the sea was purring beyond it, and the whole setting was something that she couldn’t believe was true.

  ‘You don’t wake up,’ said the Colonel, ‘ever.’

  Six

  BLISS

  Next morning she slept late, and stirring found the maid there with tea, the sort of real tea that only English people can make so well. The letter had arrived from Miss Halifax.

  It said that Miss Halifax desired an explanation, as was right and proper, or was somebody taking Miss Marvin’s name in vain, and if so, why? She was in one of her worst moods, without a doubt.

  There was a second letter from the Haineses, enclosing a newspaper cutting which gave away the story. They had taken the news from the Monaco paper. There was also a rather miserable note from the Minister stating that now she had made a fortune he hoped that she would do something about the lads’ outing, and suggesting tha
t he worked out the cost of a week at Blackpool.

  Miss Marvin was annoyed that people should behave like this. She could not overcome the feeling of poverty, and had not yet come to the conclusion that she was rich; as though in one phase she knew that she possessed thousands, yet in another she had her doubts and even planned for careful expenditure. After all there was something in what Francis had said about diamonds speaking all languages and passing all frontiers; a little put into diamonds would be an investment against that rainy day which must eventually catch up with her, she felt sure.

  She wrote first to the Haineses, enclosing a hundred pounds for themselves, and another hundred for their social services. Blood and Fire were a good couple. Blood and Fire did not preach to empty chapels, but marched out under a noble flag, and she liked it. She hoped they would accept their hundred pounds to buy themselves something that they fancied for the home or for themselves, and she knew that she got more kick out of that contribution than out of buying all the diamonds in the world.

  She did not answer the Minister’s silly letter, for she knew that phase was over.

  She wrote with reserve to Miss Halifax. She said that she was enjoying her holiday immensely. She was surprised that Miss Halifax had never been to this part of the world, which was delightful, and she was buying the hotel in which she was staying, and would be delighted to arrange for Miss Halifax to visit it if she wished. She knew, of course, that she was safe in suggesting this, for nothing would induce Miss Halifax the smug to trespass into a Côte d’Azur of sin and vice! A land of girls who wore so little that it might be nothing, and of drinks remarkably cheap and remarkably abundant. Miss Halifax would be horrified at what she saw about her, and would hate every moment of it. Miss Marvin was taking to it like the proverbial duck to water. She was enjoying herself no end. She was delighted.

  ‘I shall buy the hotel,’ she thought.

  Until this particular moment she had not intended to do anything of the kind, but suddenly it happened.