Simon was taken aback – not so much by the reply itself as by the sharpness with which it had been delivered – and Willy, as if regretting his impoliteness, added in a softer tone: ‘I’ve tried a dozen things, Simon, but none of them came to much. I had a go at ranching in Argentina but …’ He sighed and raised his hands as if the gesture would explain what went wrong.
‘And here?’
‘Here I thought I’d write.’ He pronounced the word with ironic emphasis. ‘People write, don’t they, when they’ve nothing else to do?’
‘And what have you written?’
‘Nothing. The climate’s no good for thought. Soggy. The humidity penetrates the skull. The brain becomes a sponge.’
‘In most other respects it’s not a bad place to be,’ said Priss from the other end of the table. ‘People leave you alone, as long as you’ve got money, and you don’t feel particularly out of place because most of the people here are foreigners.’
‘It’s a pleasant nowhere,’ said Willy. ‘People come here to retire – to sit in the sun and wait to die.’
‘But don’t you swim and water-ski and do things like that?’ asked Helen incredulously.
‘No,’ said Willy flatly.
‘You should take some exercise,’ said Charlie to his host. ‘It would do you good.’
‘Je suis anglais,’ said Willy in mock-Churchillian French. ‘Alors je me promène sur la Promenade des Anglais.’
‘We do try and enjoy ourselves,’ said Priss to Helen with a slightly forced gaiety, ‘and I hope you will too.’
After lunch they went back to the wicker chairs in the garden for coffee, and then slipped off to their different rooms for a siesta. Simon took a volume of Herzen’s memoirs from the living-room to read as he lay on his bed – in Herzen, he thought, there might be a clue to Willy’s ideological proclivities – but before he had got very far he fell asleep.
He did not dream, but awoke an hour later in the kind of confusion that often follows a dream. He did not know where he was. His head felt heavy, his mouth sticky and the dark room seemed to shake like a train.
He got out of bed and went into the bathroom to splash his face with cold water. He looked at his watch; it was four in the afternoon. He longed for strong tea, and left his room to see if he might ask for some downstairs but as he came onto the landing Priss saw him from the hall and said: ‘Could you wake your little friend? I’m going to take her into town to buy some clothes.’
‘Where is she sleeping?’ Simon asked.
‘In the dressing-room – the door next to yours.’
He went back along the landing and knocked at the door to the Prince’s dressing-room. There was no answer. He opened it quietly and went in. The room like his own was dark: the yellow sunlight of the autumn afternoon was blocked by the purple shutters. He crossed to the bed. Enough light came in through the slats of the shutters for him to see Helen’s body, dressed only in her underclothes, sprawled asleep on the bed. She wore large, navy-blue bloomers.
Thinking that she might be embarrassed to wake and find him there, he turned to go back and knock more loudly on the outside of the door when suddenly he realized that the figure of a man stood behind him, leaning against the wall beside the wardrobe, silently watching the sleeping girl.
‘Who’s there?’ Simon asked.
The man did not answer.
Simon crossed to the window, pushed open the shutters and turned to see Willy still standing by the wall watching the sleeping girl. She stirred, stretched, and Willy’s brow suddenly creased as if he had been struck by some painful, inner anxiety. Without looking at Simon, or acknowledging his presence in the room, he turned and left through a second door which led into the main bedroom.
Helen was now awake. She pulled a sheet over her body. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘About four. Priss wants to take you shopping.’
‘OK, I’ll be down in a minute.’
Simon left her to get dressed. He went into the garden where Charlie sat drinking tea. There was no sign of Willy.
‘They’ve trained that Moroccan woman well,’ said Charlie. ‘She even makes cucumber sandwiches.’
Simon sat down and filled a cup with tea from the silver pot marked with a crest and a coat-of-arms – presumably those of the Ludley family. ‘Fill me in about Willy,’ he said to Charlie.
Charlie avoided his eyes. ‘How do you find him?’
Simon shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s obviously not very well, physically. But in other ways he seems just the same.’
‘He is, isn’t he? The same old Willy. That’s why it’s so important to pull him round.’
‘Has Priss no influence over him?’
He laughed. ‘Too much and too little.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Aren’t wives sometimes part of the problem?’
Simon blushed – imagining that this was a reference to his own ruptured marriage. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I dare say they are.’
‘It’s not that they don’t get on,’ said Charlie, his anxious eyes now looking at Simon from his weak, amiable face. ‘In fact they seem much closer than most married couples. But there’s something odd, and that’s why I was so keen for you to come. You know more about this sort of thing than I do. I mean, frankly, although there’s a lot in Willy that’s the same, I don’t feel that I’m the same. I mean I feel that I’ve moved on since school whereas he’s moved back. They live out here as if it was an Indian hill station under the Raj, and that’s a long way from LA.’
‘But still you came to stay.’
He shrugged his shoulders: he seemed almost in tears. ‘Sure, yes, though God knows what Carmen is going to make of it.’
‘Who is Carmen?’
‘My girlfriend. You know, the one I’m going to marry.’
‘Of course. Is she coming here?’
‘Yes. Any day now. She’ll think it’s all crazy.’
Simon leaned forward in his chair. ‘Then while we’re alone,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘let’s just sum up what the problem is and what we should try to do.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Willy gets drunk. He’s really an alcoholic, isn’t he?’
‘More or less.’
‘He’ll die if he doesn’t stop drinking?’
‘Yes.’
‘So we want to stop him?’
‘Right.’
‘But how? Has he ever been to a clinic?’
‘Yes. Priss once got him to go to a place in Switzerland. He stuck it out for a week and then shinnied down a drainpipe. The fact is, Simon, that he’s unhappy when he’s sober. I’ve seen it in his face. Life’s only tolerable when he’s drunk.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know. If we knew why, we might solve the problem.’
‘You say that the marriage seems happy?’
Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes. So far as I can judge, very happy.’
‘But no children?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I think Priss can’t have them.’
Simon paused. ‘Does he really do nothing out here?’
‘He says he’s writing a play about Herzen. But it’s just an excuse for buffoonery – one of Ludley’s performances. You know.’
‘Yes.’ Simon nodded. ‘But why Herzen?’
Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s always loved Herzen, and Herzen lived here in Nice. He’s buried up by the castle.’
‘Both rich. Both exiles,’ Simon said. He looked up at Charlie. ‘But why is Willy an exile? Have you any idea why he has never been back to England?’
‘No.’
‘Do any of his friends come out here to see him?’
‘No. I don’t think he has any friends … besides us.’
‘Family?’
‘None.’
‘But what about Priss? Who was she before she married?’
‘I don’t kno
w.’
‘She must have some family – a mother or a sister …’
‘To tell the truth, Simon, I sometimes suspect that they’re not married.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I don’t really know. I think we’d have heard if there had been a wedding.’
‘Not if it was abroad.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Anyway, it doesn’t really matter if they’re legally married or not. They’ve been living together for twelve years, haven’t they?’
‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘And as far as I can make out, they still love each other very much.’
Priss and Helen returned at seven. Like an insect that had shed its skin to become a coloured butterfly, the schoolgirl was now an elegant young woman. Her hair had been washed, cut and was shaped like a soldier’s helmet – framing her face with its firm lines, and removing the overall impression of nits and split ends. She no longer wore her gym slip, but crisp, bleached jeans, a bright check blouse and espadrilles. She came into the garden carrying a pile of parcels, dumped them on the table and smiled embarrassedly at Simon, saying: ‘Priss has been most awfully kind. She’s bought me masses and masses of things.’
Simon and Charlie had both stood as she approached, taking her to be someone they had not met before, and now both sat down again – incredulous that such a further metamorphosis could have taken place in so short a time. The schoolgirl who had looked as if she had chewing-gum stuck behind her ear was now a model out of a fashion magazine; and it gratified Simon that despite this new sophistication, her embarrassment seemed to acknowledge that he might approve or disapprove; that as the man who had found her on the train and had brought her to the Villa Golitsyn, he had some slight authority over her.
‘You must let me pay,’ he said to Priss who came out into the garden after her.
‘Nonsense,’ she said sharply. ‘Money is the one thing we have plenty of.’
‘Even so …’
‘And I hate talking about it. It’s too middle-class.’ She looked irritated and sat down.
Simon said nothing.
‘Do I look different?’ Helen asked him.
‘Quite different,’ he said.
‘Good.’ She too sat down. ‘Then the police won’t recognize me.’
‘We thought,’ said Priss, ‘that once Helen was reported missing, Interpol might send out photographs …’
Simon frowned, and was about to say again that in his opinion Helen should somehow communicate with her parents that she was alive, but was afraid that this too might be thought ‘middle-class’ by his hostess; and there was something about Priss which made him reluctant to cross her or say anything that might lower him in her estimation. In that sense she reminded him of Willy at school. It was not that no one had dared disagree with him, but no one had wanted to. They had used to guess what his opinions might be on a particular subject, and then present them as their own.
Priss now went into the house to make supper. Charlie explained that the Moroccan woman, Aisha, left the villa after clearing up the lunch and did not return until the next morning. Simon therefore went to offer to help in the kitchen, but Priss refused his services so he decided instead to go for a walk in the evening light. Helen went with him – eager to disport herself in her new clothes. They went through the gate in the corner of the garden, and down the stone steps to the street. In five minutes they had reached the Promenade des Anglais.
A steady succession of cars went back and forth in both directions. They waited, crossed at the traffic lights, and then walked beside the sea towards the centre of the town. On the other side of the road there were blocks of balconied flats, and villas of different styles from different epochs – simple, early nineteenth-century houses together with odd, crenellated, turreted houses matching the fragmented fantasy of later generations. To their right, on the far side of the Baie des Anges, they could see Cap Ferrat – vague behind the haze of the early evening. Closer and clearer were the great hotels, the Opera House, the Italianate roofs of the old town and the hill where the castle had once stood – all coloured gold by the setting sun.
With them on the wide pavement next to the sea other people walked to and fro with less purpose than the mechanical traffic – first the Niçois themselves – small, sharp-faced women with tanned, ageless faces, and their short, thick-set, strutting husbands, men with bulls’ necks and self-important miens. And then the foreigners – the dowdy British; the lanky, kindly Dutch; the vigorous Germans; and the pale, green-faced Belgian pensioners, sent to Nice for their health after a life of labour, only to breathe in a cocktail of carbon monoxide and damp sea air.
Helen was quite unconscious of the fumes from the traffic and noticed only the beauty of the mountains, the city and the sea. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘It lives up to its reputation,’ said Simon.
‘And to think that now …’ – she glanced at her watch – ‘I’d be eating toad-in-the-hole with eighty-five other girls.’
‘You like it better here?’
‘Much better.’
Simon’s face took on a look of slight perplexity. ‘I know it sounds fussy,’ he said to Helen, ‘but I wish, if only for my peace of mind, that you would telephone your parents.’
‘They’d send me back,’ said Helen.
‘We can dial direct. They won’t know where you are.’
‘Priss doesn’t think I should.’
‘I know, but she doesn’t understand. She hasn’t got any children of her own.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. A son and a daughter.’
‘I didn’t know you were married.’
‘I’m divorced from my wife.’
‘Are your children with her?’
‘My son’s at boarding-school, and I know how much I would suffer if he disappeared on the way back at the start of term.’
‘All right,’ said Helen reluctantly, ‘but I’d like to do it from a public telephone. I don’t want Priss to think I’m wet.’
Simon smiled. ‘You like her, don’t you?’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ She looked down at her new clothes. ‘He’s a bit odd, though, don’t you think?’
‘Willy? Yes.’
‘Have you known him for long?’
‘Yes, or rather I knew him a long time ago. I haven’t seen him for more than twenty years.’
‘And what about Charlie?’
‘We were all at school together, but I hadn’t seen him either until I ran into him in London about a month ago.’
‘He seems very nice,’ said Helen, ‘but not like Priss.’ She sighed. ‘And I like Willy too, but I hardly dare open my mouth when he’s there.’
‘You’ll get used to him.’
‘Priss said he gets drunk.’
‘I think he does.’
‘Well Daddy gets drunk.’
‘Perhaps not as drunk as Willy.’
‘But he’s a special sort of person anyway, isn’t he?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I think Willy and Priss are the sort of people Daddy calls hors catégorie.’ She pronounced the words hors as ‘horse’ and catégorie as if it was the English word with a ‘y’ on the end.
‘I’m still not quite sure that I know what you mean,’ said Simon.
‘Well Mummy and Daddy are really very conventional. He’s an accountant. We live near Ascot. He plays golf and I’ve got a pony. All that. You know.’
‘Yes.’
‘And they’re terrible snobs. Daddy rates people like hotels – with stars. One to five. He thinks he’s a five-star person, of course …’
‘Of course.’
‘But once we drove past the gates of a country house and he told us how the man who had lived there – someone rich and grand and with a title – had lost so much money gambling that he had had to sell the whole estate, which had been in the family for hundreds of years. He told the story in a kind of reveren
t voice, like our classics mistress describing the sexy goings-on of Greek gods and heroes. Reverent and embarrassed at the same time. So I asked him – Daddy – how many stars he’d give this man who had lost all his money, and Dad just said that people like that were hors catégorie.’
‘Hors catégorie,’ Simon repeated in a better French accent.
‘Is that how you pronounce it?’
‘More or less.’
‘And it means, doesn’t it, that you’re outside the normal way of judging things?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s just how I feel about Priss and Willy. I’m sure they’re hors catégorie and it’s such a squash on Mummy and Daddy because they’d love to have hors catégorie friends but they haven’t and now I have, haven’t I?’ She beamed at Simon triumphantly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Some hors catégorie and one, I hope, with a star or two.’
‘Oh, you’re five-star,’ she said – intending it as a compliment.
They walked along the front as far as the Negresco and then turned into the town and found a public callbox from which they could telephone England. Simon fed all the change he had in his pockets into the machine and then dialled the appropriate numbers to reach Helen’s parents on the Winkfield Row exchange. Helen listened and said: ‘It’s ringing.’ A hard look came onto her innocent features. When Simon heard her say: ‘Hello? Mummy?’ he left the booth and waited next to it on the street.
A minute or two later she came out and they set off in silence back towards the Promenade.
‘Did she seem upset?’ Simon asked.
‘No. Just cross.’
‘Did she want you to go back?’
‘Yes. She went on how Daddy had paid the fees and what a waste of money it was if I didn’t go.’
‘You didn’t tell her where you were?’
‘No, but she threatened …’
The Villa Golitsyn Page 5