by Ray Connolly
Sharon stared silently at the telephone, willing it to ring. She was a tall, all-American, fair-haired girl from Kentucky, one of life’s natural cheerleaders, with a smile seemingly crammed with too many Pepsodent white teeth, and a tan of pure honey brown. But on this particular day, the tan looked yellow with worry and the teeth gnawed anxiously on the end of a pencil.
Sharon and Pagett had been lovers for just three weeks, and although neither had suggested that they set up house in his bungalow, the thought had crossed Sharon’s mind.
Marriage between CVs was not common, but a serial monogamy inevitably developed on a seasonal basis. During her ten years with Club Village, Sharon had rarely stayed at any one village for more than a season without forming some kind of relationship. She had had seven lovers and about a dozen casual affairs. For a girl in her position that was hardly considered promiscuous. Indeed, she saw herself as one of the older, more sedate CVs.
The sharp ringing of the telephone bit into her distraction. It was the Coast Guard at Freeport. A yacht had been sighted drifting off Bimini, but there was no sign of the missing powerboat. Sharon thanked them for this unnecessary information and replaced the phone.
The door from the outer office opened and Homer Wolford loped into the room carrying a Telex message. “Paris want more details,” he said simply, sprawling his six-feet-five frame around a bamboo rocking chair. Homer was the director of sports, a black giant from South Carolina who had given up a promising pro football career to be a penniless nomad with the club.
Sharon took the Telex. It was a cold, impersonal request for details of when and where Pagett had last been seen, and any information he had left about his plans for the day. She thought bitterly that the message had all the markings of some officious time server in the Bourse who wanted everything done by the book. Behind the paternalistic affection of Quatre Bras stretched a huge bureaucracy of computers, efficiency, and impersonality.
“What do you think, Homer?” she asked.
“What can I think? Dick decides to take a powerboat out to scout locations. He often does that. But this time he doesn’t come back. No one remembers seeing him after he left the harbor. But he was too old a hand to be caught out or hijacked or any of those things. I just don’t understand.”
Sharon stared at the Telex again. “Do you think Paris thinks he was into something?”
Homer shook his head. “They can think what they like. I know that guy. I’ve done five seasons with him. He was straight. Maybe eccentric sometimes, maybe too easygoing sometimes. But he was straight.”
“Paris wants us to keep it a secret from the guests until we get more details,” said Sharon.
“Wouldn’t they just?” Homer shook his head wearily. “It’s too late for that. Keeping a secret in a village like this is about as possible as staying celibate. The CVs have been gossiping around the bar all day.”
“Saying what?” Sharon demanded.
Homer shook his head. He wasn’t going to tell her the wild stories he’d overheard, the stories that Pagett was involved in a dope-running deal, that he’d fallen out with his bosses and paid the inevitable penalty, or that his body had already been fished out of Nassau Harbor. Club Villages saw a great deal of gossip, like every small community. People there could be warm and loving, but they could also be vicious. Dick Pagett had always joked that just by sitting at a Club Village pool you would see all aspects of human behavior.
And Homer knew only too well that behind many gracious smiles lay cruelty and envy.
Five
The evening in Val d’Isabelle began well and got better. The six-o’clock weather forecast on ORTF brought a promise of an end to the blizzard, and fine days for skiing ahead. Cheered by this news, Hardin decided to celebrate by ordering a bottle of champagne for every table. The head of food and beverages argued that Paris would have something to say about that.
“Paris will have a lot more to say if we send 350 people home having had a lousy vacation for the sake of a few thousand francs,” Hardin replied irritably. “Later in the season we’ll find some way of making a saving if it’s possible, okay, Georges?” And with that he dismissed the argument.
Dinner was usually followed by a show performed by the CVs, a series of mime acts to well-known records, or sometimes amateur revues. But Hardin’s idea of a masked ball had quickly become a weekly favorite at Val d’Isabelle.
He had noticed that there is something romantic and yet anonymous about a mask. It breaks down barriers between the more reserved guests, and draws together the most unlikely couples.
The masked ball was an occasion for which everyone was expected to dress and, apart from the inevitable few scruffy young Dutch, everyone did. In keeping with the tradition of European balls, Hardin had devised a program of music, played by an amateur band who worked farther down the valley. The band took the waltz time from Strauss and played it through a four-stringed electric bass.
As a final incentive for couples to split, Hardin, acting as master of ceremonies, directed the men to one side of the assembly hall, now decorated with an assortment of lascivious masks, and the women to the other.
“And there is one final rule,” he called out as masks were pulled over the eyes of the guests, blotting out the white rings that distinguished the keen sports from the frivolous sun-seekers, “For the first three dances, no one is allowed to dance with his wife, fiancée, or girl friend. This is a ball for getting to know new people.”
Despite her beauty, or perhaps because of her beauty, Beta Ullman was not the first person to be asked to dance. Indeed, she was a wallflower as guests and CVs raced to bag the prettiest of girls. Beta, aloof in her black Valentino dress, was intimidatingly beautiful, but it was the huge Swiss girl, Valerie, whom Hardin invited to dance first.
On the dance floor Hardin felt Valerie hook herself onto his loins and hang on. Apparently the notion of subtlety had never been one she had found very useful.
“This is a great way of getting to know people,” said Valerie, as her pelvis crushed farther into him.
Hardin smiled wanly as he felt a flicker of automatic interest and tried gently, and uselessly, to ease his body away from this all-devouring woman. He had asked her to dance because he had not wanted her to suffer further the indignity of being forever a last choice, but he had not been prepared for such an open attack.
“We find that the masks allow people to behave in a way they normally would not,” he said. “It lets their inhibitions fall a little bit farther.” If Valerie had any inhibitions she was keeping them very secret. Gripping him tighter, she moved him around in a circle so that she could observe the rest of the room.
“Who’s the very beautiful girl who never takes her eyes off you?” she asked.
Hardin shot a quick look across to the solitary figure of Beta, watching from the sidelines. “A friend,” he answered, and turned back to Valerie. He was glad no one had asked Beta to dance. He had purposely ignored her invitation to dinner, not because he wished to be rude but because he had a feeling that girls like Beta always had everything too easy in life. Remembering the times in his youth when he had had the door slammed in his face by women like Beta, he took pleasure in neglecting her.
Valerie crunched her thighs closer to his. “You must be very sure of yourself,” she said with half a smile.
“What do you mean?” He tried again to prise some space between their locked lower limbs. She responded by swiveling herself deeper into him.
“Aren’t you afraid one of your staff will get to her first?”
Hardin shook his head. “No.”
“Were you always so arrogant?”
“It isn’t arrogance,” he answered after a moment’s consideration. “That lady is the girl friend of one of the people I work for.”
“And where is he?”
“In Paris.”
“So?”
Hardin could not answer. Valerie was smiling at him. “So?” he repeated lamely.
“So if I were you I’d stop worrying about my job and enjoy myself.”
“You don’t understand,” Hardin replied.
“Don’t I?”
At last Hardin smiled back. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Beta watching them with astonishment. No one who cared to look could be unaware of what Valerie was doing to the chief of the village out there on the dance floor, but almost everyone was enjoying himself in a similar, if less obvious, manner.
Suddenly the music stopped and couples began rearranging. Valerie at last unbuttoned her body from Hardin’s. He could see her eyes glinting mischievouly behind her mask. “If I were you, monsieur chef de village, I would claim the lady while I go away and do my vacuuming,” she said. And with a slight tilt of her head she kissed him cheekily on the lips and moved away. Hardin watched her go. One of the CVs who had been watching her manipulation of Hardin immediately asked her to dance, and as the music struck up she once again went straight into a clutch.
Awkwardly, Hardin made his way toward Beta.
“Shall we dance?” asked Hardin.
Beta smiled at him. “After that little exhibition I wouldn’t think you’d have the energy, James,” she said sweetly.
He held out his arms and she moved into them. Now there was no provocative squirming. Beta kept her distance, and he was grateful to her, as together they waltzed sedately around the room. Above them a spotlight played on the inevitable spinning globe, reflecting a dappled light across the masked dancers.
“Why do you like making Ernst jealous?” Hardin asked as they moved out of earshot of the other dancers.
Beta frowned and gazed reflectively at the band. “Because it’s my nature,” she said. “He uses me like he uses his wife and everybody else. The only defense I have is to make him jealous.”
“You don’t have to stay with him. Why don’t you find someone who doesn’t use you?”
Beta swung Hardin around on the floor, and pressed her lips against his ear. “I suppose I must love him, if you want to know. And now can we stop this silly conversation, and grab a bottle of champagne and go and amuse ourselves somewhere in private? Or do I have to throw myself all over you like your big Swiss friend?”
Hardin hung on for one more minute. “I don’t understand you,” he said.
“Do you understand your own reflection?” Beta retorted. “I’m like you. I want the best of all worlds. Now can I have the best of this particular one, please?”
With that Hardin capitulated, just like he’d always known he would. Leading Beta from the floor he slipped the key to his suite into her hand, and leaving her to go on ahead, he crossed to the bar, signed for a bottle of Moët and Chandon, helped himself to a bucket of crushed ice, and slipped discreetly away from the ball. As he left he cast a glance back to the floor and his guests. Valerie and her incredible body massage had already disappeared with the lucky CV. The nighttime’s vacuuming had already begun.
Beta was already in his heavy wooden bed by the time he reached his room, lying there, still wearing her black lace eye-mask, snuggled up under the patchwork duvet. Without a word Hardin bolted the door behind him. His rooms were slightly bigger than anybody else’s in the village, but they still did not amount to much more than a small, sparsely furnished apartment. Club Village did not encourage its employees to amass possessions. Quatre Bras needed people who could be moved quickly and painlessly around the world.
Hardin released the wire cap and began slowly to ease the cork out of the bottle, twisting slowly in opposite directions to avoid an explosion.
“I never imagined you in pajamas,” said Beta, gesturing toward the pair she had discovered under the pillow and which were now lying redundant at the foot of the bed.
“I keep them for fires and special occasions,” Hardin replied. Suddenly the cork was free and with one practiced movement he filled two glasses without spilling a drop. Moving across to her he handed her a glass and put his own down on the heavy, old pine dressing table. Her dress had been tossed carelessly across the floor and her shoes were in separate corners of the room. The remnants of silk which made up her underwear lay on the mat where she had stepped out of them.
She raised her glass: “Cheers. To faithless lovers.”
“And employees,” he countered. Taking a sip, he put his glass down and sat beside her on the bed.
Tantalizingly she ran her hand up his thigh. A bouquet of diamonds, undoubtedly a gift from Ernst, peered up at him from one of her fingers. “Come to bed, for God’s sake, James,” she said.
Taking her hand away he leaned forward and pulled off her mask. “I like to know who I’m sleeping with,” he said, and quickly began to undress, aware of an urgency he had been trying to suppress all day. She watched him appraisingly from the bed. At last he slipped in alongside her. The pink light of the bedside lamp cast a rosy glow upon them. He turned to put it out, but she stopped him.
“I also like to see who I’m making love to,” she said, and reaching up pulled his face down against hers, nibbling his lips with tiny parted teeth, teasing him with her tongue. Then as he lay there she slid her hand down between his thighs and began to explore him, running electric fingers across the flat of his stomach, first down one side and then the other. Sensing her wish to take command of the situation, he lay back and allowed her to slide her face down across his body, biting and kissing him as she went, her hair a fair waterfall across his skin, until he felt himself being slowly devoured as her mouth and tongue wrapped him in their mystery.
Then gradually in a tumbling, turning movement Hardin and Beta moved together, and he buried his face between the velvet of her thighs, seeking out the sweetness of her secret places with his lips, while his hands caressed and lingered over the smoothness of her skin, his senses giddy from the perfume of her sexuality. For long moments their bodies, now intertwined, clung together as one, as their mouths wandered delicately across each other’s bodies.
It was a delicious moment of abandoned carnality and, as Hardin explored, his tongue tracing the delicate contours of her sex, his head hidden in an attitude of supplication between her outstretched, tensing legs, he very gently moved on top. Then, half kneeling, he cupped his hands beneath her bottom, and lifted her body to meet his lips.
Beta lay back, her head propped on a pillow, nuzzling tenderly at the junction of his thighs, her tongue tormenting him with pleasure, her lips darting light, butterfly kisses against his skin, while her nails raked into his flesh.
To Hardin the act of lovemaking was an act of worship. He did not love Beta. That was not necessary. But he exalted in her fragrancy and bathed in the warmth of her body. And when finally they turned once more to face each other their lips met in a mutual celebration of ecstasy and their bodies dissolved together as Beta pulled him ever deeper into her. It was so good neither of them wished it to end. But when at last he felt Beta’s body stiffen and convulse into that final arcing series of spasms, Hardin finally allowed himself the freedom he had been fighting and, with a murmur of relief, he pushed his head into the nape of her neck and, gasping, found himself bleeding freely and warmly into her, while their final desire melted together.
Hardin had liked Beta from the moment they had met fleetingly at a party in St. Tropez nine months earlier, a dusk-until-dawn affair called to celebrate Quatre Bras’ fifty-fifth birthday. Hardin, who had been working in Club Village headquarters in Paris at the time, had been surprised and almost flattered to be asked to such an august occasion. Gossip and rumor in Paris had it that Quatre Bras had taken a particular affection to him because he admired Hardin’s cavalier attitude to some of the club rules. But if that affection was real it certainly was not in evidence at St. Tropez, where Quatre Bras had gone blithely through the evening bathed in a glow of power, glamor, and film camera lights, never even noticing Hardin’s presence among the two thousand guests.
As a party it had been aimed as much at grabbing every gossip column in Europe as celebrating a birth
day. Quatre Bras had learned early in his career that the best form of advertising always comes free, and so the undead of Europe’s night spots and private beaches had been jetted in like a flock of vampires, all anxious for their fix on the wine of notoriety. Most important among the guests, however, were the board, the nine men who together represented the various interests that governed the financial structure of Club Village, powerful middle-aged men accompanied by their wives or mistresses and, in the case of Ernst Ronay, by the Finnish beauty Beta Ullman.
At that time Ernst Ronay was the newly appointed managing director of Club Village, a supremely confident and handsome man in his late forties whose career had been a series of glittering successes in banking, property, and latterly, publishing. Ronay was what might have been described as the complete man for a united Europe, since although his passport was French, his family stretched across several frontiers, while his upbringing and education had been conducted in both France and England, making him a snob in both countries. He had begun life rich and worked ceaselessly to grow richer, following in the steps of his father, who had died young but had had the admirable foresight to invest heavily in London property.
The young Ernst had also shown splendid foresight, particularly in his choice of bride, Lady Sarah Sloane, the only child of the Duke of Buckham, who, although he had disapproved of his daughter’s choice, had done the decent thing by Ronay and fallen under his horse at a polo match in Windsor Great Park shortly after the wedding. The funeral had been a very grand affair, and Ronay’s sadness at losing a father-in-law had been relieved to some extent by the knowledge that his wife had inherited considerable areas of Norfolk as well as prime parts of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.