A Wreath for the Enemy E-Book

Pamela Frankau

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 415

Beschreibung

Presently, on the sea-floor, I began to find lost things; to raise the moods that were mine when I was fourteen years old, sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology of Hates. I would begin there. Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. Until she meets the Bradleys. Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class – everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. Compellingly told in a series of first-person narratives, A Wreath for the Enemy explores death, morality, friendship and shows just how brittle and chaotic our lives can become once they collide explosively with those around us.

Leseprobe

A Wreath for the Enemy

PAMELA FRANKAU

DAUNT BOOKS

ToJOHN VAN DRUTEN

In loving gratitude for all the years and all the moods of our friendship.

Contents

Title Page Dedication IThe Duchess and the SmugsIISmug’s Eye ViewIIIThe Road by the River Epilogue Daunt BooksAbout the AuthorCopyright

I

The Duchess and the Smugs

TOLD BY PENELOPE WELLS

I sat still at the table, with the blank paper before me. I went back; I remembered; I thought my way in. It was the sensation of pulling on a diver’s helmet and going down deep.

Presently, on the sea-floor, I began to find lost things; to raise the moods that were mine when I was fourteen years old, sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology of Hates.

I would begin there.

I

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 sheepdog, 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 a 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 bougainvillea 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 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 blood-curdling events.’

I begged her to excuse me, adding that I did not anticipate any blood-curdling 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 timetable. 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 waterskiing. 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 loathed 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 waterskis. 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 waterskis 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 waterski 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, waterskiing.’

‘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 waterskiing 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.

II

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 a 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 a 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 bougainvillea, 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.

III

I might have known that the end of the day would bring doom. It came hard upon the exquisite pleasure of my time in the speedboat with the Bradleys. This was even better than I had planned it in anticipation, a rare gift. I thought that the occasion must be under the patronage of a benign saint or what the Duchess would call a favourable aura; the only worry was Mrs Bradley’s worry about my having no dry clothes to put on after swimming; but with typical Bradley organisation there were an extra white shirt and grey shorts in the boat. Dressed thus I felt like a third twin.

The sea changed colour; the sea began to be white and the rocks a darker red.

‘Would you like to come back and have supper with us, Penelope?’

I replied, ‘I can imagine nothing that I would like more.’

‘She does say wonderful things, doesn’t she?’ said Eva. I was drunk by now on Bradley admiration and almost reconciled to personal remarks.

‘Penelope speaks very nice English,’ said Mrs Bradley.

‘Will you ask your stepmother then?’ she added as we tied up the boat. I was about to say this was unnecessary when Don gave my ribs a portentous nudge; he said quickly, ‘Eva and I will walk you up there.’ It was obvious that the hotel exercised as much fascination for them as they for me.

When the three of us set off across the rocks Mr Bradley called, ‘Seven o’clock sharp, now!’ and Eva made a grimace. She said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to be punctual for anything?’

‘I never have to be,’ I said, ‘except at school, and I think that I prefer it to having no timetable at all.’

‘Oh, my goodness! Why?’

‘I like days to have a shape,’ I said.

‘Can you just stay out to supper when you want to? Always? Without telling them?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What would happen if you stayed away a whole night?’

I said that I had never tried. And now we went into the bar because Don said that he wanted to see the photographs again. Laurent was there; straw-coloured and supercilious in his white coat. He began to make his jokes, ‘Mesdames, monsieur, bon soir. What may I serve you? A Pernod? A champagne cocktail?’ He flashed along the shelves, reading out the name of each drink, muttering under his breath, ‘Mais non; c’est terrible; we have nothing that pleases our distinguished visitors.’ I saw that the Bradleys were enchanted with him.

We walked all round the gallery of photographs and were lingering beside Winston Churchill when the worst thing happened. I heard it coming. One could always hear the Duchess coming. She made peals of laughter that sounded like opera; the words came fast and high between the peals.

And here she was, escorted by Francis. She cried, ‘Ah, my love, my love!’ and I was swept into a complicated, painful embrace, scratched by her jewellery, crushed against her stays, and choked with her scent before I got a chance to see her in perspective. When I did, I saw that there were changes since last year and that these were for the worse. Her hair, which had been dyed black, was now dyed bright red. Her powder was whiter and thicker than ever; her eyelids were dark blue; she had new false eyelashes of great length that made her look like a Jersey cow.

She wore a dress of dark-blue chiffon, sewn all over with sequin stars, and long red gloves with her rings on the outside; she tilted back on her heels, small and bony, gesticulating with the gloves.

‘Beautiful – beautiful – beautiful!’ was one of her slogans. She said it now; she could not conceivably mean me; she just meant everything. The Bradleys had become awed and limp all over. When I introduced them they shook hands jerkily, snatching their hands away at once. Francis took from Laurent the bottle of champagne that had been on ice awaiting the Duchess; he carried it to her favourite table, the corner table beside the window. She placed upon the table a sequin bag of size, a long chiffon scarf, and a small jewelled box that held bonbons au miel, my least favourite sweets, reminding me of scented glue.

Francis uncorked the champagne.

‘But glasses for all of us,’ the Duchess said. ‘A glass for each.’ The Bradleys said, ‘No, thank you very much,’ so quickly that they made it sound like one syllable and I imitated them.

‘But how good for you,’ cried the Duchess. ‘The vitalising, the magnificent, the harmless grape. All children should take a little to combat the lassitude and depressions of growth. My mother used to give me a glass every morning after my fencing lesson. Et toi, Penelope? More than once last year you have taken your petit verre with me.’

‘Oh, didn’t you know? Penelope is on the water wagon,’ said Francis, and the Duchess again laughed like opera. She cried, ‘Santé, santé!’ raising her glass to each of us. Francis helped himself to a Pernod and perched on the bar, swinging his legs. The Bradleys and I stood in a straight, uncomfortable row.

‘Of youth,’ said the Duchess, ‘I recall three things. The sensation of time seeming endless, as though one were swimming against a current; the insipid insincerity of one’s teachers; and bad dreams, chiefly about giants.’

Sometimes she expected an answer to statements of this character; at other times she went on talking: I had known her to continue without a break for fifteen minutes.

‘I used to dream about giants,’ said Eva.

‘How old are you, Miss?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘At fifteen the dreams become passionate,’ said the Duchess, sounding lugubrious about it.

‘What do you dream about now?’ asked Don, who had not removed his eyes from her since she came.

‘Packing; missing aeroplanes; losing my clothes,’ said the Duchess. ‘Worry – worry – worry; but one is never bored in a dream, which is more than can be said for real life. Give me your hand,’ she snapped at Eva. She pored over it a moment, and then said briskly, ‘You are going to marry very young and have three children; an honest life; always be careful in automobiles.’ Don’s hand was already stretched out and waiting. She gave him two wives, a successful business career, and an accident ‘involving a horse between the ages of seventeen and eighteen’.

‘That is tolerably old for a horse,’ Francis interrupted.

‘Sh-h,’ said the Duchess, ‘perhaps while steeplechasing; it is not serious.’ She blew me a little kiss: ‘Penelope I already know. She is as clear to me as a book written by an angel. Let me see if there is any change,’ she commanded, a medical note in her voice. ‘Beautiful – beautiful – beautiful! Genius and fame and passion are all here.’

‘Any dough?’ asked Francis.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said the Duchess, who knew perfectly well what ‘dough’ meant, but who always refused to recognise American slang.

‘I refer to cash,’ said Francis, looking his most Mephistophelean. ‘My ambition for Penelope is that she acquire a rich husband, so that she may subsidise Papa in his tottering old age.’

‘Like so many creative artists, you have the soul of a fishmonger,’ said the Duchess. She was still holding my hand; she planted a champagne-wet kiss on the palm before she let it go. ‘I have ordered our dinner, Penelope. It is to be the écrevisses au gratin that you like, with small goûters of caviar to begin with and fraises des bois in kirsch afterward.’

I had been anticipating this hurdle; she always insisted that I dine with her on her first evening, before she went to the Casino at nine o’clock.

‘I am very sorry, Duchessa; you must excuse me. I am having supper with Don and Eva.’ I saw Francis raise one eyebrow at me. ‘I really didn’t know you were coming tonight,’ I pleaded.

‘No, that is true,’ said the Duchess, ‘but I am very disappointed. I have come to regard it as a regular tryst.’ She put her head on one side. ‘Why do you not all three stay and dine with me? We will make it a partie carrée. It could be managed, Francis? Beautiful – beautiful – beautiful! There. That is settled.’

‘I’m most awfully sorry; we’d love to,’ Eva said. ‘But we couldn’t possibly. Supper’s at seven and Mum’s expecting us.’

‘Thank you very much, though,’ said Don, who was still staring at her. ‘Could we do it another time?’

‘But of course! Tomorrow; what could be better? Except tonight,’ said the Duchess. ‘I was looking to Penelope to bring me good luck. Do you remember last year, how I took you to dine at the Carlton and won a fortune afterwards?’

‘And lost it on the following afternoon,’ said Francis. The Duchess said an incomprehensible Italian word that sounded like a snake hissing. She took a little ivory hand out of her bag and pointed it at him.

‘I thought one never could win at roulette,’ said Don. ‘According to my father, the game is rigged in favour of the Casino.’

‘Ask your father why there are no taxes in Monaco,’ said the Duchess. ‘In a game of this mathematic there is no need for the Casino to cheat. The majority loses naturally, not artificially. And tell him further that all European casinos are of the highest order of probity, with the possible exception of Estoril and Bucharest. Do you know the game?’

When the Bradleys said that they did not, she took from her bag one of the cards that had upon it a replica of the wheel and the cloth. She embarked upon a roulette lesson. The Bradleys were fascinated and of course we were late for supper. Francis delayed me further, holding me back to speak to me on the terrace: ‘Do you have to have supper with the Smugs?’

‘Please don’t call them that. Yes, I do.’

‘It would be reasonable, I should think, to send a message saying that an old friend of the family had arrived unexpectedly.’

Of course it would have been reasonable; Mrs Bradley had expected me to ask permission. But nothing would have made me stay.

‘I’m extremely sorry, Francis; I can’t do it.’

‘You should know how much it means to her. She has ordered your favourite dinner. All right,’ he said, ‘I see that it is useless to appeal to your better nature. Tonight you qualify for R.C.I.’ He went back to the bar, calling, ‘The verdict can always be withdrawn if the candidate shows compensating behaviour.’

‘Didn’t you want to stay and dine with the Duchess?’ asked Don, as we raced through the twilit garden.

‘I did not. She embarrasses me greatly.’

‘I thought she was terrific. I do hope Mum and Dad will let us have dinner with her tomorrow.’

‘But don’t say it’s écrevisses, Don, whatever you do. There’s always a row about shellfish,’ Eva reminded him.

‘I wouldn’t be such an ass,’ Don said. ‘And the only thing that would give it away would be if you were ill afterwards.’

‘Why should it be me?’

‘Because it usually is,’ said Don.

I awoke with a sense of doom. I lay under my mosquito net, playing the scenes of last evening through in my mind. A slight chill upon the Viking parents, due to our being late; smiles pressed down over crossness, because of the visitor. Don and Eva pouring forth a miscellany of information about the Duchess and the signed photographs; myself making mental notes, a devoted sociologist studying a favourite tribe: grace before supper; no garlic in anything; copies of Punch and the English newspapers; silver napkin rings; apple pie. The secret that I found in the Cotswold house was here, I told myself; the house in Devonshire took shape; on the walls there were photographs of it; a stream ran through the garden; they rode their ponies on Dartmoor; they had two wire-haired terriers called Snip and Snap. I collected more evidence of Bradley organisation: an expedition tomorrow to the Saracen village near Brignoles; a current-affairs quiz that was given to the family by their father once a month.

No, I said to myself, brooding under my mosquito net, nothing went wrong until after the apple pie. That was when Eva had said, ‘The Duchess told all our fortunes.’ The lines spoken were still in my head:

Don saying, ‘Penelope’s was an absolute fizzer; the Duchess says she will have genius, fame, and passion.’ Mr Bradley’s Viking profile becoming stony; Mrs Bradley’s smooth white forehead puckering a little as she asked me gently, ‘Who is this wonderful lady?’

Myself replying, ‘The Duchessa de Terracini,’ and Mrs Bradley remarking that this was a beautiful name. But Mr Bradley’s stony face growing stonier and his officer-to-men voice saying, ‘Have we all finished?’; then rising so that we rose too and pushed in our chairs and bowed our heads while he said grace.

After that there was a spirited game of Monopoly. ‘But the atmosphere,’ I said to myself, ‘went on being peculiar.’ I had waited for Don and Eva to comment on it when they walked me home, but they were in a rollicking mood and appeared to have noticed nothing.

Indubitably there is a doom, I thought while I put on my swimming suit, and since I shall not see them until this evening, because of the Saracen village, I shall not know what it is.

As I crossed the terrace, the Duchess popped her head out of the corner window above me; she leaned like a little gargoyle above the bougainvillea; she wore a lace veil fastened under her chin with a large diamond.

‘Good morning, Duchessa. Did you win?’

‘I lost consistently, and your friends cannot come to dine tonight, as you may know; so disappointing, though the note itself is courteous.’ She dropped it into my hands. It was written by Mrs Bradley; fat, curly handwriting on paper headed:

crossways

chagford

devon

It thanked the Duchess and regretted that owing to the expedition, Don and Eva would not be able to accept her kind invitation to supper.

I knew that the Bradleys would be back by six.

IV

I spent most of the day alone working on the Anthology. I had found quite a new Hate, which was headed ‘Characters’. People called the Duchess a character and this was said of others who came here. I made a brief description of each and included some of their sayings and habits.

There was the usual paragraph about the Duchess in the Continental Daily Mail; it referred to her gambling and her emeralds and her joie-de-vivre. Joie-de-vivre seemed to be a worthy subject for Hate and I entered it on a separate page, as a subsection of Jokes.

At half past four, to my surprise, I looked up from my rock writing desk and saw the Bradleys’ car sweeping in from the road. Presently Eva came running down the tiers of terrace alone. When she saw me she waved, put her finger to her lips, and signalled to me to stay where I was. She came scrambling up.

‘I’m so glad to see you. There’s a row. I can’t stay long. Don has been sent to bed.’

‘Oh, dear. I was conscious of an unfavourable aura,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

Eva looked miserable. ‘It isn’t anything against you, of course. They like you terribly. Mum says you have beautiful manners. When Don and I said we wanted you to come and stop a few days with us at Crossways in September, it went down quite well. Would you like to?’ she asked, gazing at me, ‘or would it be awfully boring?’

I was momentarily deflected from the doom and the row. ‘I cannot imagine anything that would give me greater pleasure,’ I said. She wriggled her eyebrows, as usual, at my phrases.

‘That isn’t just being polite?’

‘I swear by yonder horned moon it isn’t.’

‘But, of course, it may not happen now,’ she said in melancholy, ‘although it wasn’t your fault. After all you didn’t make us meet the Duchess on purpose.’

‘Was the row about the Duchess?’

‘Mm-m.’

‘Because of her telling your fortunes and teaching you to play roulette? I did have my doubts, I admit.’

‘Apparently they were quite cross about that, but of course they couldn’t say so in front of you. Daddy had heard of the Duchess, anyway. And they cracked down on the dinner party and sent a note. And Don kept on asking why until he made Daddy furious; and there seems to have been something in the Continental Daily Mail, which we are not allowed to read.’

‘Here it is,’ I said helpfully. She glanced upward over her shoulder. I said, ‘Have no fear. We are invisible from the villa at this angle.’

She raised her head from the paper and her eyes shone; she said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ I had thought it a pedestrian little paragraph, but I hid my views.

‘Mummy said that the Duchess wasn’t at all the sort of person she liked us to mix with, and that no lady would sit in a bar drinking champagne when there were children present, and that we shouldn’t have gone into the bar again anyway. And Don lost his temper and was quite rude. So that we came home early instead of having tea out; and Dad said that Don had spoiled the day and asked him to apologise. And Don said a word that we aren’t allowed to use and now he’s gone to bed. Which is awful for him because he’s too big to be sent to bed. And I’ll have to go back. I’m terribly sorry.’

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘Please tell your mother that I deplore the Duchess deeply, and that I always have.’

As soon as I had spoken, I became leaden inside with remorse. It was true that I deplored the Duchess because she was possessive, overpowering, and embarrassing, but I did not disapprove of her in the way that the Bradleys did. I was making a desperate effort to salvage the thing that mattered most to me.

In other words, I was assuming a virtue though I had it not, and while Shakespeare seemed to approve of this practice, I was certain that it was wrong. (And I went on with it. I added that Francis would not have dreamed of bringing the Duchess into the bar if he had known that we were there. This was an outrageous lie. Francis would have brought the Duchess into the bar had the Archbishop of Canterbury been there – admittedly an unlikely contingency.)

When Eva said that this might improve matters and might also make it easier for Don to apologise, because he had stuck up for the Duchess, I felt lower than the worms.

Which is why I quarrelled with Francis. And I knew that that was why. I had discovered that if one were feeling guilty one’s instinct was to put the blame on somebody else as soon as possible.

Francis called to me from the bar door as I came up on to the terrace. I had been freed from R.C.I. on the grounds of having replaced Laurent before lunch at short notice. He grinned at me. ‘Be an angel and take these cigarettes to Violetta’s room, will you, please? I swear that woman smokes two at a time.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I have no wish to run errands for the Duchess just now.’

Francis, as usual, was reasonable. ‘How has she offended you?’ he asked.

I told him about the Bradleys, about the possible invitation to Devonshire; I said that, thanks to the Duchess cutting such a pretty figure in the bar, not to mention the Continental Daily Mail, my future was being seriously jeopardised. I saw Francis’s eyebrows twitching.

He said, ‘Penelope, you are a thundering ass. These people are tedious petits bourgeois, and there is no reason to put on their act just because you happen to like their children. And I see no cause to protect anybody, whether aged seven or seventy, from the sight of Violetta drinking champagne.’

‘Mrs Bradley said that no lady would behave in such a way.’

‘Tell Mrs Bradley with my love and a kiss that if she were a tenth as much of a lady as Violetta she would have cause for pride. And I am not at all sure,’ he said, ‘that I like the idea of your staying with them in Devonshire.’

This was, as the French said, the comble.

‘Do you mean that you wouldn’t let me go?’ I asked, feeling as though I had been struck by lightning.

‘I did not say that. I said I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea.’

‘My God, why not?’

‘Do not imagine when you say, “My God”,’ said Francis, ‘that you add strength to your protest. You merely add violence.’

He could always make me feel a fool when he wanted to. And I could see that he was angry; less with me than with the Bradleys. He said, ‘I don’t think much of the Smugs, darling, as you know. And I think less after this. Violetta is a very remarkable old girl, and if they knew what she went through in Rome when the Germans were there, some of that heroism might penetrate even their thick heads. Run along with those cigarettes now, will you please?’

I was trembling with rage; the worst kind of rage, hating me as well as everything else. I took the cigarettes with what I hoped was a dignified gesture, and went.

The Duchess was lying on the chaise-longue under her window; she was swathed like a mummy in yards of cyclamen chiffon trimmed with marabout. She appeared to be reading three books at once: a novel by Ignazio Silone, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and a Handbook of Carpentry for Beginners.

The room, the best of the rooms, having two balconies, had become unrecognisable. It worried me with its rampaging disorder. Three wardrobe trunks crowded it: many dresses, scarves, and pairs of small pointed shoes had escaped from the wardrobe trunks. The Duchess always brought with her large unexplained pieces of material; squares of velvet, crêpe de Chine, and damask, which she spread over the furniture. The writing table had been made to look like a table in a museum; she had put upon it a black crucifix and two iron candlesticks, a group of ivory figures, and a velvet book with metal clasps.

Despite the heat of the afternoon the windows were shut; the room smelled of smoke and scent.

‘Beautiful – beautiful – beautiful!’ said the Duchess, holding out her hand for the cigarettes. ‘There are the bonbons au miel on the bedside table. Help yourself liberally, and sit down and talk to me.’

‘No, thank you very much. If you will excuse me, Duchessa, I have to do some work now.’

‘I will not excuse you, darling. Sit down here. Do you know why I will not excuse you?’

I shook my head.

‘Because I can see that you are unhappy, frustrated, and restless.’ She joined her fingertips and stared at me over the top of them. ‘Some of it I can guess,’ she said, ‘and some of it I should dearly like to know. Your mother would have known.’

I was silent; she was hypnotic when she spoke of my mother, but I could not make myself ask her questions.

‘Genius is not a comfortable possession. What do you want to do most in the world, Penelope?’

The truthful reply would have been: ‘To be like other people. To live in England; with an ordinary father and mother who do not keep a hotel. To stop having dooms; never to be told that I am a genius, and to have people of my own age to play with so that I need not spend my life listening to grown-ups.

I said, ‘I don’t know.’

The Duchess sighed and beat a tattoo with her little feet inside the marabout; they looked like clockwork feet.

‘You are, beyond doubt, crying for the moon. Everybody at your age cries for the moon. But if you will not tell me which moon, I cannot be of assistance. What is the book that you are writing?’

‘It is an Anthology of Hates,’ I said, and was much surprised that I had told her, because I had not told anybody.

‘Oho!’ said the Duchess. ‘Have you enough Hates to make an anthology?’

I nodded.

‘Is freedom one of your Hates?’

I frowned; I did not want to discuss the book with her at all and I could not understand her question. She was smiling in a maddening way that implied more knowledge of me than I myself had.