Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

  ‘And pay,’ suggested Inspector Cockrill pleasantly.

  She whipped away from them, running off abruptly down the wooden steps on soundless, rubber-soled feet, and away under the bougainvillea boughs. They saw her emerge from the tunnel of jasmine that covered the steps from the upper terrace to the lower, pause for a moment to fling her white towel into one of the bathing huts, and run out along the ridge of the diving rock, bounce once on the springy board and soar out – out and down to the blue water, twenty feet below.

  The sea sent up a feather of triumphant spray: and closed in over her.

  *

  Sharply, as a razor blade slitting through stretched blue satin, her white hands cut their way up through the surface of the water. She swam back to the shore immediately, shaking the drops from her shining black costume. ‘I hope she feels – cleaner,’ said Mr Cecil, still standing at the balcony rail, staring down at her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cockie. He thought it over. ‘What a very curious conversation!’

  ‘Very revealing, don’t you mean?’ said Cecil.

  ‘Yes, that’s just what I do mean.’ She had climbed up the path in the angle of the land and the rock and now appeared on the terrace, they saw her go up and speak to the group standing watching her there. She pointed down to the beach and they began to move off, down the steep path up which she had come. ‘They’re going to watch from there,’ said Cecil. ‘She’s going to show Mr Rodd a dive that he could do. Let’s go and watch too.’ His face had lost something of the pasty look that terror had brought to it, he was returning to a nervous desire for action, he was longing to talk, to confide, to protest, to exclaim. ‘Where’s Louli? We’ll go and find her.’ They went down the central steps together and joined Helen Rodd and Leo, now standing on the sand looking upwards at the diving board. Vanda Lane had gone out there again and was standing, gently springing, deep in thought. As they watched, she turned sideways to the board’s end, her right arm stiff to her thigh, the left curved upwards over her head: and so sprang high into the air and forced herself up and out and down. But she hit the water rather flatly, surfaced almost at once and, as she scrambled ashore, stood for a moment and gave her head a little, uncertain shake. Leo Rodd ran forward to meet her. ‘You didn’t hurt yourself?’

  ‘No, but …’ She blew out her breath and patted her diaphragm. ‘I’m winded, that’s all. I came down a bit flat.’ A faint stain of pink was slowly creeping up over her shoulder and arm where she had hit the water, and she raised her knee and hugged it, blowing out her breath again. ‘I say, I do feel bad about this,’ said Leo. ‘You were trying it for me.’

  She protested. ‘No, no, I’m perfectly all right; but the truth is, the board’s too high for experimenting. It was stupid of me.’

  ‘Yes, well don’t try any more. I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I do feel guilty.’

  Miss Trapp and Fernando arrived at this moment and Miss Trapp was suddenly galvanized into womanly concern. She thought Miss Lane looked not at all well, she thought Miss Lane should lie down for an hour or two, she thought Miss Lane should take a drop of brandy or some aspirin at least.…

  A civil wrangle followed between two schools of thought, those who considered that Miss Lane should certainly take brandy and lie down, and those who could clearly see that she had had the wind knocked out of her for a moment but was already practically restored to normal health. Miss Trapp, however, was adamant, threatening to march Miss Lane back to the hotel herself, tuck her up with a couple of aspirin and mount guard over her to see that she didn’t get up. Vanda, quite obviously horrified by this well-meant offer, finally consented to change out of her wet things and perhaps have a rest on her bed. Cockie, looking on with a lacklustre eye, suspected that she was not entirely sorry to be forced to give in. She toiled back up the little path to the top of the rock and paused there for a moment, apparently to speak to Louli Barker; for Louli, a couple of minutes later, came flying down the path, looking rather white, but loud with exaggerated accounts of the hideous time she had had cowering in one of the huts while they all nattered outside, holding together the split in her already not very adequate bathing suit. However, she said, in a rather forced, high voice, fortunately that clever Miss Lane had had the brilliant suggestion of tying it up with a handkerchief, which was not frightfully safe but on the whole doing quite well …

  ‘In one of the bathing huts?’ faltered Miss Trapp.

  Louli gave her a wink which considerably imperilled the safety of one set of the preposterous eyelashes; but Cockie could not rid himself of an impression that she looked rather white and strained and, as Cecil rushed up and poured out his confidences into her ear, he saw her jaw drop, her eyes grew wide and startled, she began to gabble in reply, returning confidence for confidence, looking back over her shoulder to the top of the rock; looking at the rest of the party, now swimming or floundering in the sea as their custom was – at Helen and Leo (she shook her head vigorously) – at Fernando, at Miss Trapp.… At Cockie himself. After a moment they came to some agreement about Cockie; and so parted and fell to an exhibition of bobbing and screaming whose forced gaiety quite outdid the bobbing and screaming of the earlier bathe at Rapallo. So, thought Cockie, they’re going to confide in me that Miss Lane is trying to blackmail them; and I shall reply that she is merely taking a malicious pleasure in frightening them and that they are silly to go and give away, by their very response, that they each have something to be blackmailed about. And then they will decide that I am only a stupid old codger, and leave me to read in peace.

  And sure enough, as soon as the bathe was over, Louvaine appeared, sauntering up the shallow steps to the lower terrace where he had established himself in his deck-chair. ‘Oh, hallo, Inspector. I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ said Cockrill, sardonically.

  ‘Goodness, you are cosy! I shall come and join you.’ She sat down on the pebble-patterned terrace at his feet, shaking out her mop of red hair. He observed with amusement that with all the bobbing, not one drop of water had been permitted to endanger the wisdom of a dozen magazine articles on How to Keep Lovely in the Summer, accumulated on her charming face. To make quite sure, she dived into the recesses of the scarlet beach bag and, producing an outsize flapjack, peered intently into the looking-glass, added yet another layer of sun-tan powder, attended to the left set of eyelashes which had become seriously unsettled by her earlier wink at Miss Trapp, and removed excess grains of powder from both with a licked fourth finger. ‘That is a disgusting habit,’ said Inspector Cockrill severely.

  ‘Well, some people actually put them on with spit. I do use my white of egg.’ She added some quite unnecessary lipstick and fished in the bag again. ‘Do you mind if I do my nails?’

  ‘If it involves the smell of pear drops, I mind very much,’ said Cockie.

  ‘No, that’s taking off. I’m putting on.’ Unvarnished, the inch-long nails looked like an extension of her fingers, they made the whole hand seem very narrow and inordinately long. ‘Repellent, aren’t they? Like poor, dead hens’ hands, I always think, hanging up in poulterers’ shops.’ She produced a bottle of violently bright varnish and a little brush. ‘I say, Inspector – do you think Miss Lane’s a blackmailer?’

  ‘Is that what you came up here to ask me?’ said Cockie.

  ‘Yes,’ she said frankly. ‘Cecil and I agreed …’

  ‘I know you did. Well, the answer is – no. Not for money.’

  She looked up at him sharply, one hand half-painted, held with fingers apart to keep from smudging contacts. ‘Goodness, Inspector – what a clever person you are!’

  ‘I think what she does, she does for the kick she gets out of it. It gives her a sense of power. Herself, she’s unsocial and ungregarious, she’s an introvert: she doesn’t like to see other people free and easy and happy, and so she tries to spoil things for them, that’s all. She’s clever at putting two and two together, she finds out things or she just guesses and i
f the guess doesn’t come off, there’s no harm done. But it often does: most of us have a bone or two at least, in the skeleton-cupboard.’

  ‘You think she just likes to see us wriggling on the hook?’

  ‘Us?’ said Cockie. ‘You too?’

  She bent her head over her hand again. ‘Well, you see-I don’t know if you know that Leo Rodd and I …’

  ‘Yes, what about it?’ said Cockie.

  She seemed surprised by his level tone but after a moment’s hesitation she went on. ‘Well she – she sort of referred to it. Look – I’ll tell you what happened. You know when you talked to me on the balcony up there? – well, you didn’t know it but you said something and it made me give a sort of jump and I was fiddling with my bra at the time which was a tiny bit torn at the top and I must have given it a jerk because the damn thing started to split right down. Well, my dear, there isn’t much of it at the best of times and by the time I’d got down to the diving rock it had gone a bit more and it really was not quite the thing! So I dove into one of the huts because it was a trifle embarrassing, Leo being there with Mrs Rodd and all, so I sort of skipped round the back and dove in and thought I would try and fix it; but I had nothing to fix it with and it wasn’t all so easy, and by that time Fernando and La Trapp had arrived so I couldn’t go out and there I was …’

  ‘And there you were, as Lem Putt would say – catched.’

  She looked at him in innocent astonishment. ‘Good lord – how extraordinary that you should say that.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said, a little guiltily.

  ‘Well, yes, because I … Well, I’ll go on telling it straight through. There I was, as you say, catched. Well then by the sound of it The Lane appeared and she must have put something into the cabin next to me because I called out to her, hey, you haven’t got a pin of sorts, have you? but she evidently didn’t hear because she just went on. So I peeked out, holding the bra together with one hand, but by that time it really was most unsafe; and I saw them all watching her going out along the diving rock and she dived off and disappeared. Then she came back and she told them she’d try and do one that Leo could manage, and to go down and watch it from the beach. So I thought good, then I can hop out and run back to my room and sew the thing up. But just as they were going – Miss Trapp, the last, being most gallantly handed down by dear Fernando – she must have said something very quietly to Miss Trapp, because Miss Trapp went most terribly white, at least she went mud grey actually, and let out a sort of squawk and just stood there. Miss Lane didn’t say anything more, she walked out along the rock and did her dive and I wish she’d come a bit flatter, that’s all. But anyway, meanwhile Fernando had come back up the path to see what was happening to his lady love, I suppose; and there followed the most shy-making conversation which I really cannot bring myself to repeat; and I realized that they didn’t know I was there. But not one word from the Trapp about La Lane. That was peculiar, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ said Cockie, ‘perhaps not.’

  ‘Well, perhaps. Anyway you can see that I was more catched than ever and by this time I was doing a St Lawrence in my little hut, just now and again turning a flank to get the roasting even.’ She wriggled her shoulders under their protecting stole of hotel towel. ‘I sunburn terribly easily and the roofs of those things are only sort of slats: I shall be striped like a zebra-crossing to-morrow.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Cockie, vaguely. It was certainly odd that three minutes after Miss Trapp had been reduced to mud-grey by a word from Miss Lane, she should have been so extravagantly solicitous for the lady’s well-being. ‘And then?’

  ‘And then?’ She screwed into an ungraceful huddle, squinting ruefully over a reddened shoulder to try to estimate the extent of the sunburned strips. ‘Oh, yes. Well then, as Miss Trapp seemed slightly distrait and not madly responsive to Fernando’s declarations, he gave up for the time being and said they had better go on down to the beach, to which proposition, I can assure you, St Lawrence responded with one tiny half-baked cheer. My dear, I look like something off one of those silver grills in the posher restaurants.’

  ‘Never mind your back,’ said Cockie. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Then I went out and practised breathing, which I had practically forgotten how to do, and hung back a bit so that they shouldn’t know I’d been there and feel embarrassed at my having overheard their conversation, which I can assure you they had every cause to do; and then I was just going to bolt up to my room when the Lane came up the path to the top of the rock and I tottered forward on my poor charred stumps of legs and said had she got a pin or anything? She said rather unfriendlily that she didn’t carry a housewife when she went bathing and hadn’t I got a scarf I could use? So I groped about in the old red plastic and dug out a handkie and here, as you see, it is; but while I was fixing it, I was drooling on with what I thought was a gay account of my sufferings in the hut and she suddenly interrupted me and said – well, Inspector, what do you think she said?’

  ‘I should think she said, “And there you were – catched”,’ said Cockie. ‘Like I did.’ He added, equably: ‘Everyone quotes “The Specialist”.’

  She considered that. She gave a little shrug. ‘Well – could be. But then she said something more and she said it very significantly, sort of looking straight at me but not quite straight at me. And then she walked past me and up the steps to the top terrace and never even glanced back.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘It was the way she looked at me!’

  ‘But what was it she said?’ said Cockie.

  ‘It was something out of “The Specialist” too. Come on – as you’re so clever, you guess again. What do you think she said?’

  ‘I think she said that there wasn’t even a window to look out of this time,’ said Cockie. ‘A little window, shaped like a star.’

  No rabbit pulled out of any hat had ever enjoyed a more gratifying reception.

  The long, hot afternoon wore on. Flat on the terrace beside him, Louvaine slept, her curly red head on her arm. Down on the beach, Miss Trapp had shaken off the attentions of Fernando and with the aid of a bathing towel and a large beach umbrella, established a sort of private nudist camp at the foot of the diving rock, and there genteelly sunned herself. Fernando in a series of porpoise wallowings by no means fulfilling his boast of a missed half-blue for swimming, had managed to reach the big wooden raft which was anchored five or six yards from the shore and lay spreadeagled upon it, unafraid of the sun: as the raft dipped and swayed with the ripples of the incoming waves, Cockie caught glimpses of the great, red-brown torso, glistening like satin with its only too natural oils. In a rubber boat, shaped like a duck, Mr Cecil drifted lazily up and down, paddling himself with languid white hands at the ends of slowly reddening thin white arms. The Rodds had thrown themselves down under the sun-shed – a long, narrow roof of dried palm leaves, supported on four-foot poles, open-sided except at the short ends, where one could lie half in, half out of the shade. From where he sat, Cockie could see the backs of Helen’s Dutch doll legs sticking out straight and shapeless towards the sea, and the rope soles of her bright yellow canvas espadrilles; at the opposite side, away from the sea and nearer to him, Leo’s head and shoulders appeared. He had brought down some manuscript music with him and, his wife’s yellow sun-glasses perched on his nose, was holding it against the sky, lying flat on his back, reading upwards; but after a bit, evidently tiring, he relaxed his arm, propped the manuscript over his face like a sort of tent and presumably went to sleep beneath the lot. Miss Lane had evidently taken Miss Trapp’s advice to have a nice lie down, for she did not appear. Inspector Cockrill applied himself joyously to the adventure of Carstairs and the leaping lady.

  At seven o’clock they began to drift up from the beach. The sun was still high but they could not accustom themselves to the idea that dinner would not be served one minute before nine. Louli, wakened by people stepping over her legs, put out a lazy hand and caught at a passing a
nkle. ‘Who’s this? Oh, you, Cecil! My dear, what on earth have you been doing? You look as though you’d been boiled in cochineal.’

  Mr Cecil was in a terrible taking. ‘I went to sleep in my duck, my dear, silly me! – and I must have been drifting and drifting about getting redder and redder every minute.…’

  ‘Most peculiar, ducky, because the back half of you’s quite white; you can almost see a seam where the red and white join.…’

  Fernando arrived, springing up the steps after his innamorata, glittering with health and vitality. ‘Ah, ha, Miss Barker, Inspector, this is where you hide yourselves, is it? – sleeping together all afternoon on the terrace.’ He nudged the Inspector in the ribs with an elbow like a well-cooked pork chop. ‘I have been wide awake all the time,’ said Cockie austerely.

  Leo Rodd bowed to Louvaine. ‘Under the circumstances, that was only gallant.’ His glance met hers and shifted away at once. He added rather hurriedly: ‘Has anyone seen Miss Lane?’

  Nobody had. ‘I hope she’s all right; I feel a bit guilty, she was trying the dive for me.’

  In view of his conversation with Louli, it was quite fascinating, thought Cockie, to watch Miss Trapp go into her routine as the solicitous, the know-all nurse; apparently sincere, apparently truly concerned, and yet with the oddest underlying air of absolute insincerity, of not caring a damn whether the patient lived or died. But that in itself was queer; for if it were true that Miss Lane had uttered to her one of those oddly baleful half-threats of hers, would Miss Trapp be really so detached about her health, would she not rather wish her ill than well? As it was, she led the way up the long, shallow steps to the upper terrace, up the curved wooden steps to the balcony, in a ceaseless twitter of brandy and aspirins, cups of tea, eau de cologne and nice lie downs. At the door of Miss Lane’s room, she paused and listened and, as though caught by some imperceptibly rising tide of hysteria, they all paused and listened too. ‘Not a sound. I wonder if … Should I just give a teeny knock?’