Читать книгу A Wreath for the Enemy - Pamela Frankau - Страница 3

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There had been two crises already that day before the cook’s husband called to assassinate the cook. The stove caught fire in my presence; the postman had fallen off his bicycle at the gate and been bitten by Charlemagne, our sheep-dog, whose policy it was to attack people only when they were down.

Whenever there were two crises my stepmother Jeanne said, “Jamais deux sans trois.” This morning she and Francis (my father) had debated whether the two things happening to the postman could be counted as two separate crises and might therefore be said to have cleared matters up. I thought that they were wasting their time. In our household things went on and on and on happening. It was an hotel, which made the doom worse: it would have been remarkable to have two days without a crisis and even if we did, I doubted whether the rule would apply in reverse, so that we could augur a third. I was very fond of the word augur.

I was not very fond of the cook. But when I was sitting on the terrace in the shade working on my Anthology of Hates, and a man with a bristled chin told me in patois that he had come to kill her, I thought it just as well for her, though obviously disappointing for her husband, that she was off for the afternoon. He carried a knife that did not look particularly sharp; he smelt of liquorice, which meant that he had been drinking Pernod. He stamped up and down, making speeches about his wife and Laurent the waiter, whom he called a salaud and many other words new to me and quite difficult to understand.

I said at last, “Look, you can’t do it now, because she has gone over to St. Raphael in the bus. But if you wait I will fetch my father.” I took the Anthology with me in case he started cutting it up.

I went down the red rock steps that sloped from the garden to the pool. The garden looked the way it always looked, almost as brightly coloured as the postcards of it that you could buy at the desk. There was purple bougainvillæa splashing down the white walls of the hotel; there were hydrangeas of the exact shade of pink blotting-paper; there were huge silver-grey cacti and green umbrella pines against a sky that was darker blue than the sky in England.

I could not love this garden. Always it seemed to me artificial, spiky with colour, not quite true. My idea of a garden was a green lawn and a little apple orchard behind a grey stone house in the Cotswolds. It was my Aunt Anne’s house in the village of Whiteford. I saw that garden only once a year, in September. I could conjure it by repeating inside my head—

‘And autumn leaves of blood and gold

That strew a Gloucester lane.’

Then the homesickness for the place that was not my home would make a sharp pain under my ribs. I was ashamed to feel so; I could not talk about it; not even to Francis, with whom I could talk about most things.

I came to the top of the steps and saw them lying around the pool, Francis and Jeanne and the two novelists who had come from Antibes for lunch. They were all flat on the yellow mattresses, talking.

I said, “Excuse me for interrupting you, but the cook’s husband has come to assassinate the cook.”

Francis got up quickly. He looked like Mephistopheles. There were grey streaks in his black hair; all the lines of his face went upward and the pointed moustache followed the lines. His body was dark-brown and hairy, except that the scars on his back and legs, where he was burned when the aeroplane was shot down, did not tan with the sun.

“It’s a hot afternoon for an assassination,” said the male novelist as they ran up the steps together.

“Perhaps,” said Francis, “he can be persuaded to wait until the evening.”

“He will have to,” I said, “because the cook is in St. Raphael. I told him so.”

“Penelope,” said my stepmother, sitting up on the yellow mattress, “you had better stay with us.”

“But I am working on my book.”

“All right, chérie; work on it here.”

The lady novelist, who had a sparkling, triangular face like a cat, said, “I wish you would read some of it to us. It will take our minds off the current bloodcurdling events.”

I begged her to excuse me, adding that I did not anticipate any bloodcurdling events because of the battered look of the knife.

Jeanne said that the cook would have to go in any case, but that her love for Laurent was of a purely spiritual character.

I said, “Laurent is a smoothy, and I do not see how anybody could be in love with him.”

“A certain smoothness is not out of place in a head waiter,” said the lady novelist.

I did not tell her my real reason for disliking Laurent: he made jokes. I hated jokes more than anything. They came first in the Anthology: they occupied whole pages: I had dozens and dozens: it was a loose-leaf book, so that new variations of hates already listed could be inserted at will.

Retiring from the conversation, I went to sit on the flat rock at the far end of the pool. Francis and the male novelist returned very soon. Francis came over to me. I shut the loose-leaf book.

“The cook’s husband,” he said, “has decided against it.”

“I thought he would. I imagine that if you are really going to murder somebody you do not impart the intention to others.”

“Don’t you want to swim?” said Francis.

“No, thank you. I’m working.”

“You couldn’t be sociable for half an hour?”

“I would rather not.”

“I’ll write you down for R.C.I.,” he threatened.

R.C.I. was Repulsive Children Incorporated, an imaginary foundation which Francis had invented a year before. It came about because a family consisting mainly of unusually spoiled children stayed at the hotel for two days, and were asked by Francis to leave on the third, although the rooms were booked for a month. According to Francis, R.C.I. did a tremendous business and there were qualifying examinations wherein the children were tested for noise, bad manners, whining, and brutal conduct. I tried to pretend that I thought this funny.

“Will you please let me work for a quarter of an hour?” I asked him. “After all, I was disturbed by the assassin.”

“All right. Fifteen minutes,” he said. “After which you qualify.”

In fact, I was not telling him the truth. I had a rendezvous at this hour every day. At four o’clock precisely I was sure of seeing the people from the next villa. I had watched them for ten days and I knew how Dante felt when he waited for Beatrice to pass him on the Ponte Vecchio. Could one, I asked myself, be in love with four people at once? The answer seemed to be Yes. These people had become a secret passion.

The villa was called La Lézardière; a large, stately pink shape with green shutters; there was a gravel terrace, planted with orange trees and descending in tiers to a pool that did not sprawl in a circle of red rocks as ours did, but was of smooth grey concrete. At the tip of this pool there was a real diving-board. A long, gleaming speedboat lay at anchor in the deep water. The stage was set and I waited for the actors.

They had the quality of Vikings; the father and mother were tall, handsome, white-skinned and fair-haired. The boy and girl followed the pattern. They looked as I should have preferred to look. (I was as dark as Francis, and, according to the never-ceasing stream of personal remarks that seemed to be my lot at this time, I was much too thin. And not pretty. If my eyes were not so large I knew that I should be quite ugly. In Francis’ opinion, my face had character. “But this, as Miss Edith Cavell said of patriotism,” I told him, “is not enough.”)

Oh, to look like the Bradleys; to be the Bradleys, I thought, waiting for the Bradleys. They were far, august, and enchanted; they wore the halo of being essentially English. They were Dad and Mum and Don and Eva. I spied on them like a huntress, strained my ears for their words, cherished their time-table. It was regular as the clock. They swam before breakfast and again at ten, staying beside the pool all the morning. At a quarter to one the bell would ring from the villa for their lunch. Oh, the beautiful punctuality of those meals! Sometimes we did not eat luncheon until three and although Jeanne told me to go and help myself from the kitchen, this was not the same thing at all.

In the afternoon the Bradleys rested on their terrace in the shade. At four they came back to the pool. They went fishing or water-ski-ing. They were always doing something. They would go for drives in a magnificent grey car with a white hood that folded back. Sometimes they played a catching game beside the pool; or they did exercises in a row, with the father leading them. They had cameras and butterfly-nets and field-glasses. They never seemed to lie around and talk, the loathèd recreation in which I was expected to join.

I took Don and Eva to be twins; and perhaps a year younger than I. I was just fourteen. To be a twin would, I thought, be a most satisfying destiny. I would even have changed places with the youngest member of the Bradley family, a baby in a white perambulator with a white starched nurse in charge of it. If I could be the baby, I should at least be sure of growing up and becoming a Bradley, in a white shirt and grey shorts.

Their magic linked with the magic of my yearly fortnight in England, when, besides having the grey skies and the green garden, I had acquaintance with other English children not in the least like me: solid, pink-cheeked sorts with ponies; they came over to tea at my aunt’s house and it was always more fun in anticipation than in fact, because I seemed to make them shy. And I could never tell them that I yearned for them.

So, in a way, I was content to watch the Bradleys at a distance. I felt that it was hopeless to want to be friends with them; to do the things that they did. I was not only different on the outside, but different on the inside, which was worse. On the front page of the Anthology I had written: ‘I was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ one of the more consoling quotations because it made the matter seem inevitable.

Now it was four o’clock. My reverie of the golden Bradleys became the fact of the golden Bradleys, strolling down to the water. Dad and Don were carrying the water-skis. I should have only a brief sight of them before they took the speedboat out into the bay. They would skim and turn far off, tantalising small shapes on the shiny silky sea. Up on the third tier of the terrace, between the orange trees, the neat white nurse was pushing the perambulator. But she was only faintly touched with the romance that haloed the others. I mourned.

Then a most fortunate thing happened. There was a drift of strong current around the rocks and as the speedboat moved out towards the bay, one of the water-skis slipped off astern, and was carried into the pool under the point where I sat. Don dived in after it; I ran down the slope of rock on their side, to shove it off from the edge of the pool.

“Thanks most awfully,” he said. He held on to the fringed seaweed and hooked the water-ski under his free arm. Now that he was so close to me I could see that he had freckles; it was a friendly smile and he spoke in the chuffy, English boy’s voice that I liked.

“It’s rather fun, water-ski-ing.”

“It looks fun. I have never done it.”

“Would you like to come out with us?” he jerked his head towards the boat. “Dad’s a frightfully good teacher.”

I groaned within me, like the king in the Old Testament. Here were the gates of Paradise opening and I must let them shut again, or be written down for R.C.I.

“Painful as it is to refuse,” I said, “my father has acquired visitors and I have sworn to be sociable. The penalty is ostracism.” (Ostracism was another word that appealed to me.)

Don, swinging on the seaweed, gave a gurgle of laughter.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“I’m terribly sorry. Wasn’t that meant to be funny?”

“Wasn’t what meant to be funny?”

“The way you talked.”

“No, it’s just the way I talk,” I said, drooping with sadness.

“I like it awfully,” said Don. This was warming to my heart. By now the speedboat was alongside the rock point. I could see the Viking heads; the delectable faces in detail. Mr. Bradley called, “Coming aboard?”

“She can’t,” said Don. “Her father has visitors; she’ll be ostracised.” He was still giggling and his voice shook.

“Oh dear, that’s too bad,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Why don’t you ask your father if you can come tomorrow?”

“I will, most certainly,” I said, though I knew that I need never ask permission of Jeanne or Francis for anything that I wanted to do.

I felt as though I had been addressed by a goddess. Don gurgled again. He flashed through the water and they pulled him into the boat.

I had to wait for a few minutes alone, hugging my happiness, preparing a kind of visor to pull down over it when I went back to the group on the yellow mattresses.

“Making friends with the Smugs?” Francis greeted me.

“What an enchanting name,” said the lady novelist.

“It isn’t their name; it’s what they are,” said Francis.

I heard my own voice asking thinly, “Why do you call them that?” He shocked me so much that my heart began to beat heavily and I shivered. I tried to conceal this by sitting crouched and hugging my knees. I saw him watching me.

“Well, aren’t they?” he said gently. I had given myself away. He had guessed that they meant something to me.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I want to know why you think so.”

“Partly from observation,” said Francis. “Their gift for organised leisure; their continual instructions to their children; the expressions on their faces. And the one brief conversation that I’ve conducted with Bradley—he congratulated me on being able to engage in a commercial enterprise on French soil. According to Bradley, you can never trust the French.” He imitated the chuffy English voice.

“Isn’t ‘commercial enterprise’ rather an optimistic description of Chez François?” asked the lady novelist, and the male novelist laughed. Francis was still looking at me.

“Why do you like them, Penelope?”

I replied with chilled dignity, “I did not say that I liked them. They invited me to go water-ski-ing with them tomorrow.”

Jeanne said quickly, “That will be fun. You know, Francis, you are becoming too intolerant of your own countrymen: it is enough in these days for you to meet an Englishman to make you dislike him.” This was comforting; I could think this and feel better. Nothing, I thought, could make me feel worse than for Francis to attack the Bradleys. It was another proof that my loves, like my hates, must remain secret, and this was loneliness.