Kissing Kin (30 page)

The expense of running such a household with an always amiable staff of well-paid servants, with unlimited food and drink at all hours, with a multitude of cars at everyone’s disposal, fresh fruit and flowers daily in all the rooms, fresh linen before you could turn round from having washed your hands, streams of telephone calls, telegrams, and cables, which no guest ever paid for, was something not even Bracken liked to contemplate.

Most of the conversation—scandal, politics, sport, clothes—even when conducted in English, was completely above Camilla’s head, but before she had time to find this an embarrassment she realized that Sosthène was as silent as she was—not because he did not know what they were talking about, or because he was bored, but simply because there was no necessity in the midst of all that babble for him to speak. After that, Camilla was content to watch and listen, unless directly spoken to. Dinah had seen to her wardrobe, Virginia had taught her to do her hair, and there was no need to keep her up to the mark on her make-up—lipstick, she discovered, made more difference than anything. She had an interesting mouth, with long, sensitive lips, and she learned to make the most of it with bright, neatly applied colour, and a honey-toned powder which brought out
her grey eyes. Properly made up, she ceased to feel thirty-ish, and consequently ceased to look her age.

To see Sosthène again, where he seemed now always to have been, from where he had been only briefly uprooted by the war and thrown across her path, was a lesson very hard to learn. Camilla bit on it gamely, convinced that to see him at all was worth the cost. Her faint hope that she would find the old obsession outgrown or at least dulled by time and
separation
soon gave up the struggle. From the day she arrived, with her heart pounding in her ears because when she stepped out of the car he would be there, she knew it was going to be just as bad as it ever was, and worse, for here was where he belonged and was obliged to remain—this was his life and Sally’s as she had always shrunk from imagining it. Each day underlined anew that he was Sally’s, and that he had made himself content to be. Now and then his eyes would meet Camilla’s with a look so grave and kind and so impenetrable that she never knew if he meant to reassure or to warn her, and she would try to look away before her own eyes gave away too much. Her perpetual consciousness of onlookers, her pervading sense of inner guilt, an unfounded illusion of her own intrusion where she was as a matter of fact completely welcome, made her unduly reticent and cautious in her contacts with other guests in the house, and laid a restraint over her every waking hour which was attributed by strangers to shyness or possibly inadequate French.

Other people were in love, at Sally’s house, often quite shamelessly so—it was in the hot, scented air and the
whispering
nights. Sometimes Camilla only wanted to escape from it, and told herself that she would ask to go back to England tomorrow. Other times she surrendered to it, dreaming dreams which made the barren reality all the harder to bear. But it was still Sosthène—always Sosthène—so that she was brusque or cool to advances from friendly, curious men who might have done her a world of good if she had let them, instead of hugging her emptiness to herself.

It was not long before she discovered that Sally’s guests were nearly all very good at something, and were accustomed to being called on to entertain the rest. Professional musicians with widely-known names poured out fortunes in box-office value, playing and singing in the vast, flowery drawing-room after dinner. Novelists brought her their latest autographed copies, and could be persuaded to read aloud from them. Theatrical people performed for her, impromptu, their most talked-about scenes. Impresarios introduced to her their latest sensations. And Camilla, who had fallen back into the
Williamsburg
way of thinking of Cousin Sally as perhaps a trifle demi-mondaine, was jerked into a realization of Sally’s unique position here in her adopted country.

Never knowing who was who, because of Sally’s careless ways about introductions, Camilla was only moderately nervous at being requested to play and sing for the guests one evening when the gathering was comparatively small and intimate. After one panicky glance at Sosthène, who nodded serene encouragement, she sat down obediently at the piano and sang to her own accompaniment some simple
lieder
and then a new song or two that she had picked up in London. It seemed to her that she was being kept at it a little longer than most people were required to perform, and that she was being listened to with closer attention than such amateur
entertainment
warranted, but confidence grew in her and she could not help but know that she was doing well—quite as well as could be expected from her.

She was astonished to hear, in the silence following her last song, an authoritative voice saying, in strongly accented English, “The touch is good—the tone, the feeling—excellent. The voice will not last.”

“Then she is for Delorme,” said Sally.

“Yes. I should get Delorme to hear her.”

“He’s coining next week. Thank you, my dear, you will want some refreshment now,” said Sally to Camilla, who sat transfixed on the piano bench, and the listening room broke
up into conversation, movement, and the handing round of iced drinks.

Camilla found Sosthène, smiling, at her side with a glass in his hand—for her. She accepted it rather ungraciously, with something like a scowl.

“That was hardly fair of her, to trick me into playing for somebody important, without my knowing I was on trial.”

“You were less nervous, not knowing,” said Sosthène calmly. “You didn’t try too hard. It was the best way.”

“Who is he, anyhow?”

When he told her, the name meant nothing. Nor did Delorme, who was coming next week. But if Delorme took her on as a pupil, said Sosthène, she might go far.

“Go where?” she asked, still rebellious. “As a concert pianist, do you mean?”

His shoulders rose a little. If she chose, perhaps. Anything, perhaps, if she chose.

A slim-waisted, sleek-haired young man sauntered up on the other side of
the piano and leaned on it intimately, bending towards her.

“Do sing that thing from
Pot
Luck
again,” he said.

“I’m afraid not now, they’ve finished listening, they want to talk.” She glanced nervously round the oblivious groups, already absorbed in their own conversation.

“Tomorrow, then—the first thing in the morning.”

“And wake everybody up?” she parried perversely, aware that Sosthène had drifted away, leaving her to cope with it alone.

“You’re marvellous,” said the young man tenderly. “You’re exactly what I’ve been wanting for ages. I must know all about you, and what it was that broke your heart.”

“
Well!
” said Camilla, with a cool look studiously
unimpressed
by his almost excessive handsomeness, his romantic dark eyes, his full, smiling mouth, his tan, his tailoring. “And who might you be? Or should I know?”

“I’m Kim St. Clair. I write songs. You should know, as a matter of fact.”

“What sort of songs?”

“The sort you can sing. Sad, sultry, sexy stuff. With that face and my music you’d knock them endwise.”

“What’s the matter with my face?”

“It’s got a starved sort of haunted look,” said the
conscienceless
young man. “I’ll write a song for you, and show you what I mean. Will you sing it?”

“Here?” Her eyes went again around the room.

“In Paris, eventually. In a cabaret show.”

“I can’t sing in French.”

“That’s a lie,” he said flatly, and the corners of her mouth deepened because he knew it. “Anyway, Americans are all the rage now. We won’t pretend you’re anything else.”

“Are you English, or what?”

“My mother was. But I grew up here. I’m bilingual. It’s very useful. Shall I tell you the story of my life? I’d much rather hear yours.”

Now, Camilla had seldom been flirted with in her sober life, and this time she found it rather stimulating. Her
commonsense
told her that Kim St. Clair, if he had actually been born with that name, always flirted with women, automatically, and that his bright, consuming gaze and impetuous-seeming approach were nothing more than a bad habit with him. But there was an answering gleam in her own eyes as she sat looking up at him, waiting to see what he would say next.

“Mine’s very dull,” she said.

“
Why
do you look so sad?” he murmured, bending nearer.

“I’m
not
—I
don’t!
” She tried to laugh, and found that she could not hold her eyes to his.

“You do, as soon as I saw you I thought you were the most 
bereft
-looking
creature I had even seen! Did they kill your lover in the war?”

“No. They killed my twin brother.”

There was a moment’s silence, while she sat looking down
into her glass, and the outrageous young man produced rather sudden good manners.

“I’m sorry,” he said quite sincerely. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s all right.”

“Come out on the terrace. It’s cooler there, and we’ll talk about songs and—things that don’t matter.”

She rose, carrying her glass, and walked beside him through the long windows which opened on to a flagged terrace with cane chairs and soft cushions, and the garden and the sea beyond. When she sat down in a white armchair he took the glass from her hand and said, “Let me freshen this up for you and get one of my own. Shan’t be a sec,” and returned to the drawing-room.

Camilla leaned her head against the back of the chair and looked up at the Mediterranean stars. Soft light from the room inside lay in yellow slabs across the stone floor, but her chair was in shadow between two windows. It was disconcerting to be taken possession of like this, but rather comforting too. She supposed that he was a friend of the Kendricks, who knew all sorts. Did she want to sing in cabaret? Would the family object? Would it perhaps be a way of making her own living? Would it be quite—respectable? And did she care?

She was smiling at such spinsterish qualms when he returned with two tall glasses which clinked and sweated. His fingers brushed hers as he gave her the fresh drink, and seemed to linger. He turned another chair and sat down close beside her.

“This is marvellous,” he said. “I’m only here because I’m recovering from an appendicitis operation and supposed to rest. Fabrice warned me it might be dull this week, with none of our own crowd here, but thank God I came, anyway.”

“Were you very ill?”

“Not very, it was one of those bothersome things one has to get over and done with. Now, why are you looking at me like that? Tell me what you are thinking.”

“I was thinking,” she said deliberately, returning his gaze, “that perhaps you are nicer than I thought.”

“Oh, I
am!
” he assured her without blinking. “You didn’t like the way I jumped down your throat, did you.”

“Well, I’m not used to it.”

“That’s marvellous,” he said. “You
are
marvellous, is it because you come from Virginia that you have a sort of other-world thing about you?”

“There you go again, why must you talk like a silly book just when I’m beginning to like you?”

“Do you really?” he cried unrepentantly, with exaggerated joy. “Thanks for saying it’s a
silly
book, I can’t help the way I talk, and it’s you that are bookish and far-away, you know.” He leaned forward, his glass held between his long, too graceful hands. “I think you’re the
realest
person I ever saw,” he remarked earnestly, and added, “And the most defenceless.”

“You say the most extraordinary things,” she began, stiffening, and he laid one hand on her bare arm, his face so close to hers that in the dim light coming from behind her she could see the whites of his brilliant eyes and the shine of his teeth.

“Camilla—lovely name—
darling
Camilla, you make me feel very old and smirched and sinful. But you need somebody like me, if you’re going to stay here. You need me—don’t laugh—to protect you.”

“Oh, nonsense, in my own cousin’s house? If I need
protection
it’s
from
you, not by you!”

“You won’t be in Sally’s house when you come to Pans to sing my songs.”

“How do you know I can? I’ve never sung professionally.”

“You’ve got that thing,” he said, and his eyes went freely over her face and hair and throat. “You’ve got whatever it is—personality, we’ll call it. There’s a shorter and easier word. But it’s all—waiting. No brother ever made you like this, Camilla. You’re in love. And I wish to God it was me.”

Camilla sat up and pushed him from her with a hand on his
stiff shirt-front, but he caught the hand and held it there with unexpected strength, so that she could not rise.

“All right, you can kill me in a minute,” he said. “But first—are you going to marry him?”

“It’s none of your business!” she gasped furiously, but he held her where she was.

“You aren’t,” he said. “I thought not. You can’t, is that why? It hurts, doesn’t it. It hurts like hell. That’s what it is about you, you’re in some little hell of your own and you can’t get out, can you, and you’re ready to bite and claw everybody that tries to help you. How do I know, that’s what you can’t see, isn’t it. I don’t need second sight, Camilla, good God, it’s written all over you! But mostly it’s in your voice when you sing, and in your eyes now, this minute, you can’t hide it, not from your Uncle Kim, I’ve been watching you for two days, trying to see what made you tick, and you never even knew I was there, did you. Shall I tell you who he is?”

Camilla wrenched herself free and stood up, and her glass shattered at their feet.

“Now look what you’ve done,” she said inadequately, and because she could not face the drawing-room eyes she walked away from him towards the balustrade at the end of the terrace and leaned there, staring out towards the black water. It had to be only a question of time, of course, till someone saw, she had known that before she came to Cannes. But she had been so very careful, she and Sosthène had hardly spoken to each other, had never been alone for more than a few moments and by accident—