The Twyborn Affair (10 page)

But I
must
escape, and not through suicide. I knew it as I dashed the (healing) water from my face and body on those damn rocks, to which I should have had no intention of returning. Was this why I wrote the letter to Joanie Golson? to enlist her sympathy, her help? Can you escape into the past? Perhaps you can begin again that way. If you can escape at all.

When I got back, Angelos said, ‘Where were you? I began to worry. What were you doing? Look, your feet are bleeding!'

‘Yes, they're bleeding, I'll put iodine on them. That will be hell—but your wife Anna would have approved. Actually, I only went for a swim—nothing less orthodox than that,
darling
.'

A. laughed. ‘I wondered where you were, and why you didn't bring me my coffee.'

This is why you can't help loving A.—in the absence of a Holy Ghost, his trust in one frailer than himself.

 

Mrs Golson had just returned from the English Tea-room and Library where she had succeeded in securing (there was no other word for it) that elusive novel by Mrs Wharton. If Mrs Golson was already intimidated by what she saw at a glance between its covers, she would be proud to sit with it in public places. In fact she had already more or less decided to venture into the rotunda and order tea instead of having it sent up to their suite, when she discovered that it was Madame Vatatzes, no less, standing at the reception desk.

Mrs Golson's spirits soared, which did not protect her from simultaneous confusion.

‘Are you visiting somebody,' she asked, ‘at our hotel?'

Madame Vatatzes also appeared confused. ‘I was passing,' she replied awkwardly, ‘and thought I'd look in—to see whether you were still about.'

‘What good luck that I am!' Mrs Golson hoped she sounded jaunty rather than rakish.

Madame Vatatzes seemed to find her manner acceptable. They both laughed.

But almost immediately the unfortunate Mrs Golson was faced with another dilemma: whether to take her attractive friend up to her private
salon
and keep her to herself, or to flaunt Madame Vatatzes, far more spectacular than Mrs Wharton's novel, in a public room?

When suddenly she was tossed, with no effort on her part, on what seemed the dilemma's only possible horn. ‘Shall we be devils and brave the music in the rotunda?' It sounded most unlike herself.

‘Why not?' said Madame Vatatzes. ‘We'll have each other to fall back on.' Immediately after, that white smile broke in the terracotta face.

Mrs Golson almost took her by the hand and led her towards the
music. If she thought better of the hand-play, she continued to feel extraordinarily daring, as she marched ahead across the gloomy hall towards the more luminous rotunda, where the palms stood quivering in their jardinières under onslaught by piano and strings.

Mrs Golson paused to look about her in triumph and choose a table worthy of her guest. Not neglecting that other alliance with Mrs Wharton, she held the volume flat against her bosom. They made an imposing trio, Mrs Golson saw reflected in panels of amethyst and amber, her own lips sligntly parted, Mrs Wharton's lettering at least displayed, Madame Vatatzes graver in expression, perhaps because censorious. It might well have appeared a worldly, and to a refined, reclusive young woman, a vulgar scene.

What if it were? Mrs Golson was thriving on it; she would not apologise any more.

‘Shall we take this table?' she suggested. ‘Or shall we be deafened?' Almost another apology; she laughed to make it less so.

‘More likely seduced by those sticky strings,' Madame Vatatzes remarked.

Memories of their first conversation persuaded Mrs Golson she ought not to feel surprised. So she swam across the short space separating them from the desired table, moistening her lips, lowering her eyelids ever so slightly, conscious of the sounds her movements made, those of silk and feathers, and in regrettable undertone, the faint chuff chuff of caoutchouc.

Madame Vatatzes was following with a charming negligence reflected in the amethyst and amber. Today she was wearing grey, which made her look, Mrs Golson decided, almost a quaker—a tall one. She was so glad Curly wasn't with them. Nor was he likely to nose into the rotunda; he had a passionate hatred of music, especially the violin.

For a moment as they seated themselves Mrs Golson wondered what on earth they would say to each other, but now there was the tea to order—and oh, yes,
gâteaux
; she would insist that Madame Vatatzes eat several, which would give herself the opportunity of eating one, or perhaps two; and there were other eyes to outstare,
of those who resented intruders, who despised newcomers, for Mrs Golson and her caller could not but fit, for the present anyway, into this unfortunate category.

‘
Thé pour deux personnes
,' she offered in her most sculptured French to a waiter who looked quite contemptuous considering how the Golsons overtipped him for his contempt. ‘
Et des gâteaux—beaucoup de beaux gâteaux—pour mon jeune ami
.'

Madame Vatatzes was looking so excessively grave that Mrs Golson, in her sincere delight and manhandling of gender, was reduced to appearing the younger of the two. She was conscious of it herself, not only from her friend's face, but from the reflective panels of amethyst and amber. Mrs Golson hoped that Madame Vatatzes did not regret paying her call.

She would have loved to say something reassuring, as from an older to a younger woman. She would have loved to gaze at Madame Vatatzes' disturbing eyes, which she remembered from the previous occasion. But this was a luxury Mrs Golson promised herself for later, after the weak straw-flavoured tea, and the slight but not unpleasant bilious sensation which came to her from indulging in
Mont Blanc
. By then, each of them, she hoped, would be lulled into the requisite state of intimacy.

In waiting, Mrs Golson tapped with her nails on the bland surface of the little table. The nails had been very conscientiously done by a young Scottish widow, a protégée of Miss Clitheroe's. This afternoon, Mrs Golson felt, her half-moons were particularly fine. (The nails themselves were looking paler than they should have been; should she, perhaps, consult a doctor?)

Far more ominous those full moons the eyes of chattering female macaws and parakeets, their stare levelled at interlopers from beneath wrinkled mauve-to-azure lids. In contrast to the females their no less watchful, for the greater part elderly escorts, lids blackened by digestive ailments and insomnia; in more than one instance a single smoky pearl pinned into what must be a grizzled chest. Among the throng of French, a Russian bearing up under a mound of strawberry hair, who continued munching her language along with a
baba au
rhum
, on one eyelid a pink wart flickering behind the net veil she had hoisted to the level of glaring nostrils.

There were the hats.

There were the jewelled hatpins.

There were the jewels.

And cigarette smoke, a blue-grey, interweaving yarn; to Mrs Golson, the perfume was intoxicating.

But the eyes: if only they had been less daunting; and the ferocious mouths. All the veils had been raised to allow the parrot-ladies to fall upon
le goûter
, the black, the white, the beige gloves unbuttoned, folded back like superfluous skins for the ivory-skeletal or white-upholstered claws to fork unencumbered at confectioner's custard, whipped cream, chocolate pyramids, and chestnut worm-casts.

Each wearing, in addition to the routine rosette, the aura of an ex-president,-prefect, or minor Bonapartist nobleman, the males were more austere. Their movements groaned as they plied their cigarettes, the more indulgent among them sipping a
porto
. There were signs of congestion, a whiff of saltpetre, and from one quarter—was it the creaking of a truss?

Mrs Golson had begun to regret her daring; herself so middle-aged Australian, Madame Vatatzes so young, so healthy, so untarnished.

‘Oh dear, I shouldn't have brought you here!'

‘Why ever not?' The younger woman spoke with a huskiness which might have masked the sulks.

‘Into this mausoleum!' Unfortunate choice of a word, Mrs Golson sensed at once: that elderly husband, who might be asthmatic, and even wear a truss.

‘It's what I'm used to,' said Madame Vatatzes.

She had chosen a
Mont Blanc
, they both had, and were forking them up in what Mrs Golson hoped would become an extended orgy. (She had grown as reckless as Curly on the drive back to Les Sailles.)

When the Russian lady, her eyelid with its pink wart flickering behind the net pelmet, distinctly lowed, if she did not practically
bellow through her
museau de bœuf
, the two friends got the giggles. Transformed into two schoolgirls in a tea-room, they sank back to enjoy the waves of their heaving mirth. Joanie Golson saw that her friend had broken out in delicious speckles of perspiration just where a moustache would have been. Gulping. Biting on the already deformed hotel fork as she dealt with the cream and the chestnut worm-casts. Which according to the tea-room code should have been a lettuce and ham sandwich, its thin green strips smelling of vinegar and knife, with even thinner slivers of ham, the whole lolling loosely round expiring lips before the mouth sucked it in.

The girls humped their backs and giggled.

Finally Madame Vatatzes sat up. ‘Shouldn't we control ourselves?' she suggested.

But they were off again.

It was Mrs Golson who took control. ‘When we were in Paris,' she told, ‘and I went to the Louvre, of course I had to find the Mona Lisa. Nobody could help.
Nobody
. Curly—my husband—was
furious—
he'd only come because—well, he's my husband. Then I discovered that what we were looking for is known as
La Gioconde
!'

Ultimately rescued at the Louvre, here Mrs Golson remained lost, long-winded, irrelevant: looking at Madame Vatatzes she realised that she and her close, giggly, schoolgirl friend with the lettuce ribbons hanging out of their mouths were of different worlds.

It is always like this, Joan Golson supposed.

On the dais across the room, the violinist was snatching, half brave, half desperate, at a tangle of hairs hanging from his bow.

The Russian began looking down her front to see why she should have become a focus of attention.

Overhead, the immense nacreous shade shed its light more dreamily, that of convolvulus and sea-pinks. It seemed to revolve, though it must have been the effect of the music, for the shade was in fact stationary.

Madame Vatatzes finished her
Mont Blanc
. She wiped her mouth in determined fashion with the paper napkin, and rummaged in her bag, not much more than a shabby old black velvet reticule such as
she might have picked up secondhand, capacious, and probably a comfort to its owner. Mrs Golson herself, fearful of disease and insects, hated anything secondhand.

‘What a charming bag! So practical …' she murmured.

‘Tat,' Madame Vatatzes replied, and even went so far as to confess, ‘I got it secondhand at Marseille.'

Mrs Golson loved her; she would have put up with disease and insects.

Madame Vatatzes had found what she was looking for, which turned out to be a little box lacquered in crimson, black, and gold.

‘Do you smoke?' she asked her hostess.

‘Very rarely. And only in private. I'll sometimes smoke a cigarette to keep my husband company—but seldom finish it.'

Madame Vatatzes offered her box, and Mrs Golson accepted, giggling.

Madame Vatatzes lit their cigarettes after breaking a match or two.

‘We smoke constantly,' she said, and her voice had hunger in it. ‘Smoking is Angelos's worst vice—and one of mine.'

The cigarettes, Mrs Golson realised at once, were of the cheapest French variety. It made her feel more daring, more foreign. The Golsons liked to feel foreign abroad, while tending to deplore foreignness at home, unless, in Curly's case, it promoted business, or in Joan's, if it impressed those who thought themselves socially superior. But in the rotunda at the Grand Hôtel Splendide des Ligures she was more than anything the wicked schoolgirl. As she drew on her cheap cigarette, some of the nostrils closer to them became aware of an infringement on their code of behaviour.

Mrs Golson crossed her ankles, and said in rather a fruity voice, ‘I'd be intrigued to hear, Madame Vatatz
—es
, what you know of Australia. Were you ever there? Or is it only from acquaintanceship with other Australians?'

Madame Vatatzes sank her chin. ‘Oh, I was there! But briefly. Long ago.' Her sigh was outlined in blue smoke.

Joan Golson caught something of the blur of blue leaves, blue bay,
a motor-boat panting in the distance, reflexions distorted by the motions of disturbed water.

Mrs Golson said, ‘I'm so grateful, my dear, that you should have offered me your friendship.' But immediately started wondering whether it had indeed been offered.

For Madame Vatatzes seemed to have forgotten her hostess. Her chin still sunken and moody, she sat smoking with a defiance which suggested rage rather than pleasure.

Disgusted by the filthy cigarette, and made bilious by the
Mont Blanc
as she had feared she might be, Mrs Golson was billowing helplessly, and in her billows envisaged herself being drawn out of her rubber corset. Would Madame Vatatzes hear the sound of suction? She so slim and uncorseted, so long and lean of thigh when divested of her quaker grey, her nipples a tender beige on the slight cushions of her breasts.

Both crushing and crushed, Mrs Golson roused herself, but spoke from behind lowered eyelids. ‘Australia is not for everyone,' she admitted. ‘For some it is their fate, however.'

Madame Vatatzes grunted, or so it sounded. ‘I've not made up my mind about fate.'