The Villa Golitsyn

by Read, Piers Paul;

  ‘Can’t you stop him?’ Simon asked Charlie.

  ‘Drinking? No.’ He laughed – a nervous laugh.

  Simon turned to look at Charlie’s face. It was bland: he was looking at the red light at which he had stopped, waiting for it to change to green, with his usual fixed, ingratiating smile.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Charlie added, ‘that I’ve started drinking too. He makes you feel awfully mean if you don’t join in.’

  The lights changed and they turned off the Promenade des Anglais and drove inland again – under the railway line which had carried the train into Nice, and then up a steep, winding road lined with suburban villas. At the top they drove into a cul-de-sac, through two tall green gates, down fifty yards of gravel to stop at the front door of the Villa Golitsyn.

  The house was not what Simon had expected. Half-hidden by cypress trees, it was tall and square with yellow stucco walls and purple shutters. The roof was of red tile, and beneath the exaggerated eaves there was a painted frieze of interwoven blue irises.

  They got out of the car and Charlie fetched the suitcases from the boot. ‘There’s a garden around the corner,’ he said, ‘but no swimming pool I’m afraid. A funny sort of house to have taken, but then that’s Willy …’

  He opened the heavy, studded front door and led them into a dark hall. The floor was of black marble and the walls were covered with a green and gold paper. Because so little light came in through the shaded windows, Simon felt as if he was standing at the bottom of a pond. He followed Charlie through two double doors into a long room which seemed to cover most of the ground floor of the house. Despite the large windows and the sunny, cloudless sky this room too seemed dark because the walls were a dark red – the colour of roast beef – and the ceiling was formed by panels of stained wood. The furniture too was dark – an oak dining table at one end, and a spinach-coloured sofa at the other. Over the fireplace there was a large gilt mirror and on the walls some grim portraits of what appeared to be Muscovite grandees – and equally sombre pictures of their wives, who for all the tricks and talents of the nineteenth century painters peered squat and plain from their gold frames.

  Charlie crossed the room towards the open French windows which led out onto a terrace. ‘Willy?’ he shouted. He disappeared into the garden. The two others waited. Simon went to a tall, glass-fronted book-case made of the same dark oak as the dining table at the far end of the room. It contained an incongruous mixture of books – uniform editions of the classics, including the memoirs of ‘Willy’s Friend’, Alexander Herzen, mixed up with paperback thrillers and the red Michelin Guides. Next to the book-case there was a heavy roll-topped desk with brass handles, on which stood two photographs in silver frames. One was of Willy as Simon remembered him – it must have been taken in his first year at Cambridge – and the other matching photograph was of a girl a year or two younger. Simon assumed that it was of his wife.

  Besides the photographs and the books there was nothing in the room to give him an idea of what Willy might have become. It had the impersonal feel of an embassy drawing-room; the only signs that it was someone’s home were two postcards propped against the wall over the mantel; some newspapers and magazines on the sofa; half a dozen different bottles on the sideboard; and an unemptied ashtray on the parquet floor.

  Charlie came back through the French windows. Behind him, blank against the light, there was the figure of a woman.

  ‘Hello,’ she said as she came into the room. ‘I’m Priscilla Ludley. I’m so glad you could come. Will has told me so much about you.’

  They shook hands. She wore baggy shorts and a man’s shirt – the tails tied together over her stomach. ‘You’ll have to call me Priss,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid everyone does, although I’m not a prissy person, am I Charlie?’ She turned to smile at Charlie and saw Helen, who stood beside him. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked turning back to Simon with a look of amused curiosity. ‘Have you brought your daughter?’

  Simon introduced Helen and explained her predicament.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry to be a nuisance,’ said the schoolgirl, shaking her hair over her face as if to hide behind it.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Priss in a kind but clipped tone of voice. ‘I’m very glad you’re here. We rather depend upon people passing through for company.’ She smiled – a smile which was almost artificial but made with good intentions. She led Helen to the spinach-green sofa, and as the two women sat down to discuss the uncle in Monte Carlo, Simon studied her appearance.

  He had not at first thought she was pretty: her figure was too slight and her features too subtle to make an immediate impression; but as he watched her now, her tall body leaning towards the younger girl, her fair hair hanging straight down from her cocked head, he saw that she was exceptionally beautiful.

  She seemed to be around the same age as he was – thirty-three or thirty-four – yet the skin of her stomach and legs was as smooth as that of a younger girl. Because she was tall, had blonde hair, blue eyes and a creamy brown complexion, she reminded him momentarily of the wife of a West German diplomat in Jedda, but despite her height, her appearance was not Teutonic. Her limbs were delicate and her voice, as she spoke to Helen, was unmistakably English – soft and quick with an old-fashioned tightness of the mouth which made her sound like an actress in a pre-war film.

  Every now and then she would look at Simon and address a remark to him with the offhand friendliness of someone who had known him for a long time. This familiarity unsettled him. Since the suffering of his divorce, he had protected his bruised heart with a reflex reluctance to be attracted to women, but now he felt involuntarily drawn towards Priscilla Ludley – not just by her attractive face and figure, but by the much more powerful pull of her eyes, her smile, her mannerisms and the sound of her voice. He searched frantically for a flaw, but all he could find to criticize was a trace of hard curiosity in her expression, as if she was sizing them all up for reasons of her own. Towards Helen, for example, she showed more than polite solicitude: she kept looking down at the woollen jersey and tweed skirt which covered her adolescent body and eventually said: ‘You must be awfully hot, dressed like that.’

  ‘I am, rather,’ said the schoolgirl, blushing behind the screen of her hair.

  ‘Why not come up and change into some cooler clothes?’ Priss got up from the sofa and started towards the hall. ‘You aren’t in a hurry to ring your uncle, are you? You’ll stay to lunch?’

  ‘Yes, I mean, I’d love to, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  Priss turned towards Simon. ‘Come up, will you? I’ll show you your room.’

  They climbed the curling stone staircase. ‘It’s a ridiculous house,’ said Priss. ‘It’s big but there are hardly any bedrooms.’ They reached the landing. ‘It was the winter home of an old Russian prince – one of the Golitsyns – and nothing much has been changed since the Revolution. Poor Charlie has to sleep in a serf’s attic while we have this grand suite.’ She pointed through an open door into a vast bedroom, dark because the shutters had been closed against the sun. In the gloom Simon could make out a large, four-poster bed with heavy red hangings and faded gold tassels.

  ‘There’s one other room up here, which is where I’ve put you, Simon,’ said Priss. She opened a door at the end of the landing, crossed to the window and pushed open the shutters. Daylight shone into another large bedroom with two narrow single beds and a vast painted wardrobe. ‘Rather style Russe, isn’t it?’ she said, turning to Simon with another of her deliberate smiles.

  ‘It’s delightful,’ he said.

  She turned to Helen. ‘Come and change,’ she said. ‘You can borrow the Prince’s dressing-room. It’s connected to our room but it’s quite private.’

  They left Simon to unpack. He felt sticky after the journey so he took a shower and changed into jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. He then went and stood for a while at his window. It looked out from the side of the house over the lush gardens of the neighbou
ring houses. At this level the Villa Golitsyn was overlooked by several blocks of flats, some of them quite close, and Simon wondered why the Ludleys should have taken a house in the middle of the town rather than something more secluded in the hills behind Nice.

  He left his room and went down through the gloomy hall and vast living-room into the garden. There he sat down on one of the wicker chairs he found placed around a parasol. It was hot, and he faced the sun to try and brown the pasty complexion he had seen reflected in the bathroom mirror. He could hear the sound of cars and motorcycles driving up the hill; and every now and then there was the roar of an aeroplane taking off over the bay, or a clap of thunder as a train crossed the steel bridge below. But though open to these sounds of the city, the garden itself was hidden from the view of the other houses or blocks of flats which surrounded it by the cypress trees planted close together along its perimeter; and by a large, untended olive which cast its shade onto the south side of the house.

  The garden itself was gravelled in the French manner with little close-clipped box hedges surrounding rectangular rose beds. At the centre there was a shell-shaped fountain, dry now and covered with flaking moss. Behind it, to one side, was an orange tree; to the other, a lemon tree; and right at the back of the garden a tall palm, its leaves rustling in the light breeze.

  Priss Ludley came out with a bottle of wine and some glasses on a tray.

  ‘It’s very nice here,’ said Simon.

  ‘Well, it’s not calme calme, as the French would say, and it’s very unfashionable to live in the middle of Nice, but it’s more or less what we wanted.’

  ‘Where do the fashionable people live?’

  ‘Oh, in Cannes or outside Grasse, or around St Paul de Vence: but out there you have to drive everywhere, whereas from here you can walk to the shops, the bars, the sea, the doctor – all that sort of thing. There are some steps which go down from the garden to the Boulevard.’

  She spoke rapidly, nervously, automatically, as if she had frequently had to justify where they had chosen to live. ‘It’s a nice quartier too,’ she went on. There aren’t any American novelists or Dutch pansies or retired British bankers. Our neighbours are all either academics from the university, which is just up the road, or French bons bourgeois, with the occasional fossilized expatriate from the days when Nice was fashionable.’

  ‘So why do you live here?’ Simon asked.

  She frowned. ‘Well as I said, it’s convenient. Will doesn’t like driving.’

  ‘No – I meant to ask, why don’t you live in England?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ She sighed. ‘Lots of different reasons, really. It’s simplest to say tax, because that’s something everyone understands. Will came into some money – quite a lot, really. If we had stayed in England we would have had to pay ninety-eight per cent income tax.’

  ‘As a socialist Willy should approve of that.’

  She blushed. ‘Yes, well, there are other reasons. The climate and …’

  She would have gone on, but Charlie now came out of the house and sat down between Priss and Simon on one of the wicker chairs. ‘I like what you’ve done to Helen,’ he said to Priss while pouring himself a glass of wine.

  Priss smiled – almost a furtive smile. ‘It was all she had. None of my things would fit her.’

  ‘What is she wearing?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Wait and see,’ said Charlie, ‘but I warn you that you won’t recognize your little friend. Priss has transformed her into a twenties flapper. “Anyone for tennis?” That sort of thing.’ Charlie mimicked what he had just described. Then his expression changed to one of mild anxiety. ‘Where’s Willy?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t he be here to greet his guests?’

  Priss bit her lower lip. ‘He went down for some supplies.’

  ‘Shall I go and meet him? He could probably do with a hand.’ He put down his glass.

  ‘Yes,’ said Priss. ‘Tell him that Simon’s here.’

  Charlie started towards the gate in the corner of the garden.

  ‘If he’s not in the café at the corner,’ Priss shouted after him, ‘try the one further along with the pinball machine.’

  He disappeared down the steps just as Helen came out of the house. She was certainly transformed. Instead of a tweed skirt and blouse she was dressed in a short, sleeveless navy-blue tunic: her hair had been brushed back from her face and was held behind her ears by a hoop. She looked at Simon with a funny smile – like a child who had just raided the dressing-up drawer.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Priss, pouring Helen a glass of wine. ‘Don’t you think she looks nice?’ she said to Simon.

  ‘It’s my gym slip,’ said Helen, sitting down in the shade of a parasol, but stretching her legs to catch the sun.

  ‘It looks fine,’ said Simon.

  ‘It’ll certainly do until the shops open after lunch,’ said Priss.

  ‘It’s much cooler,’ said Helen.

  ‘We’ll go into town this afternoon and get you some jeans.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘We ought to try and get hold of her uncle,’ Simon said to Priss.

  ‘I tried the number,’ said Helen. ‘There was no reply.’

  ‘He may be away,’ said Priss.

  ‘I really am awfully sorry …’ Helen began.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Priss. ‘You can always stay here for a day or two.’ She turned to Simon. ‘Don’t you agree? There’s no point in her leaving with nowhere to go?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Simon, ‘if you really have room for her.’

  ‘She can sleep in the dressing-room,’ said Priss.

  Simon turned to Helen. ‘Perhaps you ought to let your parents know that you’re all right.’

  ‘I don’t see why she should,’ said Priss sharply. ‘Let the old fools sweat it out for a bit.’

  Simon frowned. Helen’s eyes widened with approval. ‘If they know where I am,’ she said, ‘they’ll make me come back.’

  ‘Then it’s settled,’ said Priss. ‘We need an extra girl. So as far as I’m concerned, Helen can stay as long as she likes.’

  Simon said nothing more. He felt irritated by this sisterly conspiracy between the schoolgirl and his hostess. He realized that Helen was not his charge, but felt responsible for her all the same. It seemed only humane to inform the parents that their child was alive, and he was astonished that Priss, who was herself approaching middle age, should speak of people she had never met like a vengeful adolescent. He wondered for a moment if she had Lesbian tastes; and if that was so, whether Helen would have been better left to fend for herself. She might then have fallen into the hands of a Corsican pimp. Here at least he could keep her under his protection.

  There was a second cause of Simon’s irritation. He was hungry. Breakfast with Helen on the train seemed a long time ago, and he was wondering when they would get lunch when there was the sound of wire scraping on the gravel, which immediately brought an anxious look onto Priss’s face. She stopped in the middle of what she was saying to Helen and turned towards the wicket gate at the corner of the garden.

  At the top of the steps, panting for breath, there stood a tall, thin man carrying two bulging plastic bags. His linen suit hung loosely on his body. His face was oval and long like the effigy on the tomb of a crusading knight, and the skin of his cheeks and chin had the same texture as the dried lichen on the stone fountain in the middle of the garden. His wispy, receding hair was brushed back from his face, and at first it seemed to Simon that he was too old to be Willy Ludley, but as he approached, with Charlie a few paces behind, he realized that this was indeed the hero of his youth.

  ‘Hello Simon,’ Willy said in his old drawling voice.

  ‘Hello Willy,’ Simon replied – feeling a great wave of affection come over him in the presence of his old friend.

  ‘Will,’ said Priss. ‘This is Helen. She’s on her way to Monte Carlo.’

  Willy turn
ed away from Simon, and his puffy lids blinked over his bloodshot eyes. Helen drew her pretty legs into the shade and stared at her host from under the parasol.

  ‘This is Will,’ said Priss to Helen.

  Helen smiled at him but Willy did not smile back. Instead he stared at her, put down the two supermarket bags bulging with bottles, and then stared at her again. ‘What a perfect specimen,’ he then said in a much louder, richer voice – a sound like the lower tones of a cello.

  Simon smiled, because he knew at once that they were about to see one of ‘Ludley’s performances’.

  ‘She’s not a specimen,’ said Priss irritably. ‘Simon met her on the train and …’

  ‘And saw at once,’ Willy interrupted, ‘a perfect specimen of the puella scolastica Anglicana.’

  ‘Do shut up,’ said Priss. She turned to Helen. ‘Don’t pay any attention. He’s just trying to embarrass you.’

  Willy reached for the bottle of wine and filled a glass. ‘Am I embarrassing you?’ he asked Helen.

  ‘No, I mean …’

  ‘I certainly don’t mean to embarrass you.’ He sat down. ‘On the contrary, I meant to compliment you on your youth, your freshness and above all your uniform …’ He leaned forward and felt the hem of her tunic. Helen did not move.

  ‘Do stop treating her like a moth,’ said Priss.

  ‘For an old roué like me,’ said Willy, ‘nothing is as elegant and attractive as the school uniform …’

  Helen wrinkled her nose. ‘I think it’s horrid, really.’

  ‘Please believe,’ said Willy, ‘that your present costume is more alluring than anything a couturier could devise.’ He stood to fill his glass which was already empty. ‘Perhaps,’ he added – and as he stooped over the bottle he looked at Priss – ‘perhaps it brings back the early moments of some first love …’

  Priss stared back into his eyes with a strange expression which Simon intercepted but could not understand.

  SIX

  Lunch was served on the terrace in front of the house by a swarthy Moroccan woman. As they ate Simon told Willy what he had done since they last met. Willy questioned him closely on certain subjects such as the management of the Saudis’ trade surplus and the attitude of the Foreign Office to the status of Jerusalem, as if still interested in international affairs. He appeared to be well informed, but when Simon asked him what he had done over the past twelve years he replied, curtly: ‘Nothing.’