Читать книгу Death on the Riviera - Ernest Elmore - Страница 8
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The remaining guest at the Villa Paloma hadn’t come down to breakfast because when Nesta had an artist living in the house she expected him to behave like one. Paul Latour certainly did his best to live up to the fin de siècle Bohemianism on which Nesta had erected her romantic ideas of the genre. He started off with one great advantage—with his tall, slightly stooping figure; his unruly dark hair and shaggy beard; his lean and hungry features—he looked the part. For the rest he took care to lay on a careful and wholly convincing act. He dressed sloppily in ginger corduroys, loose blue blouse, spotted neckerchief and sandals. He rose late, went to bed at dawn, made love to the maids, dropped ash on the carpets, poured scorn on the heads of the Philistines and corroded the reputation of his fellow artists with the acid of his vituperation.
It was Nesta Hedderwick’s old friends Colonel and Mrs. Malloy who’d first introduced Paul into the villa circle. The Malloys lived a little farther along the coast at Beaulieu and came over once a week to play bridge—a game at which Nesta displayed more enthusiasm than skill. The Colonel had struck up a conversation with Paul in a café at Nice and, sensing that they’d many interests in common, invited him back to his house for dinner. Learning that Paul was more or less broke to the wide he hastily handed him on to Nesta, knowing only too well Nesta’s predilection for romantic young men with more charm than money. As Malloy anticipated Nesta gobbled him up hook, line and sinker. She converted one of the attic rooms at the villa into a self-contained studio, gave him a small but adequate allowance and bored her more influential friends with garbled explanations of his peculiar genius. She hoped they’d buy his pictures. One or two did and furtively hid these masterpieces in the cellar.
For six months now Paul had been sitting pretty at the Villa Paloma. He was, so to speak, the second oldest inhabitant. Not quite so firmly established, perhaps, as Tony Shenton, but doing very nicely for himself. If he played his cards sensibly there was absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t settle down indefinitely at the villa. Or at least until such times as he should find himself financially independent, with a villa of his own.
