"Mary Stewart - Madam Will You Talk [txt]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

"Well, put it right, there's a good boy. And hurry up and change. It's nearly dinner-time. Where have you been today?"
"By the river."
"How you can -" She laughed and shrugged, all at once very French, then reached in her bag for a cigarette. "Well, put the table up, child."
David pulled the reluctant Rommel towards a tree, and began to tie him to its stem. He said flatly:
"I can't lift it."
A new voice interrupted, smoothly:
"Permit me, madame."
The man who had come quietly out of the hotel was dark and singularly good-looking. His clothes, his ait, no less than his voice, were unmistakably French, and he had that look of intense virility and yet sophistication--the sort of powerful, careless charm which can be quite devastating. It was all the more surprising, therefore, that the woman, after a glance of conventional thanks, ignored him completely, and lit her cigarette without glancing in his direction. I would have gone to the stake for my conviction that she, where men were concerned, was the noticing type.
The newcomer smiled at David, lifted the heavy table without apparent effort, set it straight, then dusted his hands on a handkerchief.
"Thank you, sir," said David. He began untying Rommel again from the tree.
"De rien," said the Frenchman. "Madame." He gave a little bow in her direction, which she acknowledged with a faint polite smile, then he made his way to a table in the far corner of the courtyard, and sat down.
"If you hurry," said David's mother, "you can have the bathroom first."
Without a word the boy went into the hotel, trailing a somewhat subdued dog after him on the end of the string. His mother stared after him for a moment, with an expression half puzzled, half exasperated. Then she gave a smiling little shrug of the shoulders, and went into the hotel after the boy.
The Frenchman had not noticed me either; his handsome head was bent over a match as he lit a cigarette. I went quietly back through my window, and stood for a moment in the cool shade of the room thinking over the little scene which, somehow, had hidden in it the elements of oddity. The exquisite film starry creature, and the dilapidated dog . . . Christian Dior and Gilbert White . . . and she was French and the boy's accent was definitely Stratford-atte-Bow . . . and he was rude to her and charmingly polite to strangers.
Well, it was no affair of mine.
I picked my bag up and went downstairs for a drink.

CHAPTER II


Ther saugh I first the derfe ymaginyng Of jelonye . . .

(chaucer)

When I got down into the little courtyard, it was beginning to fill up. Louise was not down yet, so I found a table in the shade, and ordered a Cinzano.
I looked about me, resigned to the fact that almost everybody in the hotel would probably be English too. But the collection so far seemed varied enough. I began to play the game of guessing at people's professions--and, in this case, nationalities. One is nearly always wrong, of course, and it is a game too often played by those self-satisfied people who are apt to announce that they are students of human nature . . . but I played it, nevertheless.
The two men at the next table to me were Germans. One was thin and clever-looking, and the other was the fat-necked German of the cartoons. And since I heard him say "Ach, so?" to his companion, it didn't need any great insight to hazard the rest. There was a young couple, honeymooning at a guess, and, at another guess, American. Then there was the handsome Frenchman, drinking his Pernod by himself in the corner, and another man sitting alone near the trellis, reading a book and sipping a bright green drink with caution and distrust. I puzzled for a long time over him--he might have been anything--until I saw the title of the book. Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot. Which seemed to settle it. There were two other parties who might have been anything at all.
At this point Louise joined me.
"I have been kept from my drink," she complained, bitterly for her, "by the patronne, who is convinced that I cannot wait to know the history, business, and antecedents, of everyone in the hotel. And who, incidentally, was panting to find out mine and yours."
Her vermouth was brought, and she tilted it to the light with a contented sigh.
"L'heure de I'aptritif. What a civilized institution. Ah, that must be M. Paul Very." She was looking at the Frenchman in the corner. "Madame said he was handsome enough to suicide oneself for, and that hardly applies to anyone else here. He's from Paris. Something to do with antiques."
"This is thrilling."
"The other lonely male is English, and a schoolmaster. His name is John Marsden and he is almost certainly a Boy Scout and a teetotaller as well."
"Why on earth?" I asked, startled.
"Because," said Louise drily, "any lonely male I ever get within reach of these days seems to be both, and to eschew women into the bargain. Is that the right word, eschew?"
"I believe so."
"At any rate, one would not suicide oneself for that one. I wonder why he looks so solemn? Do you suppose he's reading Whither England, or something?"
"It's T. S. Eliot," I said. "Four Quartets."
"Oh well," said Louise, who does not consider poetry necessary. Mr. Marsden was dismissed.
"I suppose that couple are American?" I said.
"Oh yes. Their name is Cornell, or they come from Cornell, or something. My French had a breakdown at that point. And Mama and Papa under the palm tree are hot from Newcasde, Scotland."
"Scodand?" I said blankly.
"So Madame informed me. Scotland, zat is ze Norz of England, n'est-ce pas? I like the daughter, don't you? The Young Idea."
I looked cautiously round. The couple under the palm tree might have sat anywhere for the portrait of .Suburban England Abroad. Dressed as only the British can dress for a subtropical climate--that is, just as they would for a fortnight on the North-East coast of England--they sat sipping their drinks with wary enjoyment, and eyeing their seventeen-year-old daughter with the sort of expression that barnyard fowls might have if they suddenly hatched a flamingo. For she was startling to say the least of it. She would have been pretty in a fair English fashion, but she had seen fit to disguise herself by combing her hair in a flat thick mat down over one side of her face. From behind the curtain appeared one eye, blue-shadowed to an amazing appearance of dissipation. Scarlet nails, spike-heeled sandals, a flowered dirndl and a cotton jersey filled to frankly unbelievable proportions by a frankly impossible figure . . . Hollywood had come to Avignon by way of the Scotswood Road. And it became apparent that this not inconsiderable battery of charm was turned full on for someone's benefit.
"The man in the corner ..." murmured Louise.
I glanced towards M. Paul Very, who, however, appeared quite indifferent to the effort being made on his behalf. He had a slight frown between his brows, and he was tracing a pattern with the base of his glass on the table-top as if it were the only thing that mattered in the world.
"She's wasting her time, I'm afraid," I remarked, and, as if he had heard me (which was impossible) the Frenchman looked up and met my eyes. He held them deliberately for a long moment in a cool, appraising stare, then, just as deliberately, he raised his glass and drank, still with his eyes on me. I looked away to gaze hard at the back of the fat German's neck, and hoped my colour had not risen.
"She is indeed wasting her time," said Louise softly. She raised an amused eyebrow at me. "Here's metal more attractive."
"Don't be idiotic," I said with some asperity. "And control your imagination, for goodness' sake. Don't forget this is Provence, and if a woman's fool enough to be caught staring at a man, she's asking for it. That's what's called an ceillade, which is French for leer."
"All right," said Louis tranquilly. "Well, that's all that Madame told me. I think the other lot are Swiss--nobody else except Americans could afford a gorgeous vulgar car like that --and are just en passant. The only other resident is a Mrs. Bristol, who's either a widow or divorced. Et voila tous. Shall we have another drink?"