Читать книгу A Wreath for the Enemy - Pamela Frankau - Страница 4

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I awoke next morning full of a wild surmise. I went down early to the pool and watched Francis taking off for Marseille in his small, ramshackle seaplane. He flew in a circle over the garden as he always did, and when the seaplane’s long boots pointed for the west, I saw Don and Eva Bradley standing still on the gravel terrace to watch it. They were coming down to the pool alone. Offering myself to them, I went out to the flat rock. They waved and beckoned and shouted.

“Is that your father flying the seaplane?”

“Yes.”

“Does he take you up in it?”

“Sometimes.”

“Come and swim with us,” Don called.

I ran down the rock slope on their side. I was shy now that we stood together. I saw that Eva was a little taller than Don; that she also was freckled; and that they had oiled their skins against sunburn as the grown-ups did. Don wore white trunks and Eva a white swimming suit. They laughed when I shook hands with them, and Don made me an elaborate bow after the handshake. Then they laughed again.

“Are you French or English?”

That saddened me. I said, “I am English, but I live here because my stepmother is a Frenchwoman and my father likes the Riviera.”

“We know that,” said Don quickly. “He was shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped and fought with the Resistance, didn’t he?”

“Yes. That is how he met Jeanne.”

“And he’s Francis Wells, the poet?”

“Yes.”

“And the hotel is quite mad, isn’t it?”

“Indubitably,” I said. It was another of my favourite words. Eva doubled up with laughter. “Oh, that’s wonderful! I’m always going to say indubitably.”

“Is it true,” Don said, “that guests only get served if your father likes the look of them, and that he charges nothing sometimes, and that all the rooms stay empty for weeks if he wants them to?”

“It is true. It does not seem to me the most intelligent way of running an hotel, but that is none of my business.”

“Is he very rich?” asked Eva.

Don said quickly, “Don’t, Eva, that’s not polite.”

“He isn’t rich or poor,” I said. I could not explain our finances to the Bradleys any more than I could explain them to myself. Sometimes we had money. When we had not, we were never poor in the way that other people were poor. We were ‘broke’, which, as far as I could see, meant being in debt but living as usual and talking about money.

“Do you go to school in England?”

“No,” I said, handing over my chief shame. “I am a day boarder at a convent school near Grasse. It is called Notre Dame des Oliviers.”

“Do you like it?”

“I find it unobjectionable,” I said. It would have been disloyal to Francis and Jeanne to tell these how little I liked it.

“Do they teach the same things as English schools?”

“Roughly.”

“I expect you’re awfully clever,” said Eva, “and top at everything.”

How did she know that? Strenuously, I denied it. Heading the class in literature, composition, and English poetry was just one more way of calling attention to myself. It was part of the doom of being noticeable, of not being like Other People. At Les Oliviers, Other People were French girls, strictly brought up, formally religious, cut to a foreign pattern. I did not want to be they, as I wanted to be the Bradleys: I merely envied their uniformity.

God forbid that I should tell the Bradleys about winning a special prize for a sonnet; about being chosen to recite Racine to hordes of parents; about any of it. I defended myself by asking questions in my turn. Eva went to an English boarding-school in Sussex; Don would go to his first term at public school this autumn. I had guessed their ages correctly. They were just thirteen. ‘Home’ was Devonshire.

“I would greatly love to live in England,” I said.

“I’d far rather live in an hotel on the French Riviera. Lucky Penelope.”

“I am not ‘lucky Penelope’; I am subject to dooms.”

“How heavenly. What sort of dooms?”

“For example, getting an electric shock in science class, and finding a whole nest of mice in my desk,” I said. “And being the only person present when a lunatic arrived believing the school to be Paradise.”

“Go on. Go on,” they said. “It’s wonderful. Those aren’t dooms, they are adventures.”

“Nothing that happens all the time is an adventure,” I said. “The hotel is also doomed.”

They turned their heads to look up at it; from here, through the pines and the cactus, we could see the red crinkled tiles of its roof, the bougainvillæa, the top of the painted blue sign that announced ‘Chez François’.

“It can’t be doomed,” Don said. “Don’t famous people come here?”

“Oh yes. But famous people are more subject to dooms than ordinary people.”

“How?”

“In every way you can imagine. Important telegrams containing money do not arrive. Their wives leave them; they are recalled on matters of state.”

“Does Winston Churchill come?”

“Yes.”

“And Lord Beaverbrook and Elsa Maxwell and the Duke of Windsor and Somerset Maugham?”

“Yes. Frequently. All their signed photographs are kept in the bar. Would you care to see them?”

Here I encountered the first piece of Bradley dogma. Don and Eva, who were splashing water on each other’s hair (“Dad is most particular about our not getting sunstroke”), looked doubtful.

“We would love to.”

“I’m sure it’s all right, Eva; because she lives there.”

“I don’t know. I think we ought to ask first. It is a bar, after all.”

Ashamed, I hid from them the fact that I often served in the bar when Laurent was off duty.

“Oh, do let’s chance it,” said Don.

“I don’t believe we ought to.”

Mr. and Mrs. Bradley had gone over to Nice and would not return until the afternoon, so a deadlock threatened. The white starched nurse appeared at eleven o’clock with a Thermos-flask of cold milk and a plate of buns. I gave birth to a brilliant idea; I told her that my stepmother had invited Don and Eva to lunch with us.

It was a little difficult to convince them, after the nurse had gone, that Jeanne would be pleased to have them to lunch without an invitation. When I led them up through our garden, they treated it as an adventure, like tiger shooting.

Jeanne welcomed them, as I had foretold, and the lunch was highly successful, although it contained several things, such as moules, which the Bradleys were not allowed to eat. We had the terrace to ourselves. Several cars drove up and their owners were told politely that lunch could not be served to them. This delighted Don and Eva. They were even more delighted when Jeanne told them of Francis’ ambition, which was to have a notice: ‘Keep Out; This Means You’, printed in seventeen languages. One mystery about the Bradleys was that they seemed to like jokes. They thought that I made jokes. When they laughed at my phrases they did not laugh as the grown-ups did, but in the manner of an appreciative audience receiving a comedian. Eva would hold her stomach and cry, “Oh stop! It hurts to giggle like this; it really hurts.”

I took them on a tour of the hotel. The salon was furnished with some good Empire pieces. The bedrooms were not like hotel bedrooms, but more like rooms in clean French farmhouses, with pale walls and dark wood and chintz. All the rooms had balconies where the guests could eat their breakfast. There were no guests.

“And Dad says people clamour to stay here in the season,” Don said, straddled in the last doorway.

“Yes, they do. Probably some will be allowed in at the end of the week,” I explained, “but the Duchess is arriving from Venice at any moment and Francis always waits for her to choose which room she wants, before he lets any. She is changeable.”

Eva said, “I can’t get over your calling your father Francis. Who is the Duchess?”

“The Duchessa di Terracini. She is half Italian and half American.”

“Is she very beautiful?”

“Very far from it. She is seventy and she looks like a figure out of a waxworks. She was celebrated for her lovers, but now she only loves roulette.” I did not wish to be uncharitable about the Duchess, whose visit was to be dreaded, and these were the nicest things that I could make myself say. The only thing in her favour was that she had been a friend of my mother, who was American and utterly beautiful and whom I did not remember.

“Lovers?” Eva said, looking half pleased and half horrified. Don flushed and looked at his feet. I had learned from talks at school that reactions to a mention of the facts of life could be like this. I knew also that Francis despised the expression, ‘the facts of life’, because, he said, it sounded as though all the other things that happened in life were figments of the imagination.

“A great many people loved the Duchess desperately,” I said. “She was engaged to an Austrian Emperor; he gave her emeralds, but somebody shot him.”

“Oh well, then, she’s practically history, isn’t she?” Eva said, looking relieved.