Collected Stories

The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs Vansittart

‘You couldn’t trust those eyes,’ people on Cap Ferrat say, for they find it hard to be charitable where Mrs Vansittart is concerned. ‘The Wife Whom Nobody Cares For,’ Jasper remarks, attaching a tinselly jangle to the statement, which manages to suggest that Mrs Vansittart belongs in neon lights.

At fifty-four, so Jasper has remarked as well, she remains a winner and a taker, for in St Jean and Monte Carlo young men still glance a second time when the slim body passes by, their attention lingering usually on the rhythmic hips. Years ago in Sicily – so the story is told – a peasant woman spat at her. Mrs Vansittart had gone to see the Greek ruins at Segesta, but what outraged the peasant woman was to observe Mrs Vansittart half undressed on the grass, permitting a local man to have his way with her. And then, as though nothing untoward had happened, she waited at the railway station for the next train to Catania. It was then that the woman spat at her.

Mrs Vansittart is American, but when she divides her perfect lips the voice that drawls is almost that of an English duchess. Few intonations betray her origins as a dentist’s daughter from Holland Falls, Virginia; no phrase sounds out of place. Her husband, Harry, shares with her that polished Englishness – commanded to, so it is said on Cap Ferrat, as he is commanded in so much else. Early in their marriage the Vansittarts spent ten years in London, where Mrs Vansittart is reported to have had three affairs and sundry casual conjunctions. Harry, even then, was writing his cycle of songs.

The Vansittarts live now in the Villa Teresa just off the Avenue du Sémaphore, and they do not intend to move again. Their childless marriage has drifted all over Europe, from the hotels of Florence and Berlin to those of Château d’Oex and Paris and Seville. To the Villa Teresa the people from the other villas come to play tennis twice a week. In the evening there is bridge, in one villa or another.

Riches have brought these people to Cap Ferrat, riches maintain them. They have come from almost all the European countries, from America and other continents. They have come for the sun and the bougainvillaea, purchasing villas that were created to immortalize the personalities of previous owners – or building for themselves in the same whimsical manner. The varying styles of architecture have romance and nostalgia in common: a cluster of stone animals to remind their owners of somewhere else, a cupola added because a precious visitor once suggested it. Terracotta roofs slope decoratively, the eyes of emperors are sightless in their niches. Mimosa and pale wistaria add fairy-tale colour; cypresses cool the midday sun. Against the alien outside world a mesh of steel lurks within the boundary hedges; stern warnings abound, of a Chien Méchant and the ferocious Sécurité du Cap.

In her middle age Mrs Vansittart’s life is one of swimming pools that are bluer than the blue Mediterranean, and titles which recall forever a mistress or a lover, or someone else’s road to success, or an obsession that remains mysterious: Villa Banana, Villa Magdalene, Morning Dew, Waikiki, Villa Glorietta, Villa Stephen, So What, My Way. The Daimlers and the Bentleys slide along the Boulevard Général de Gaulle, cocktails are taken on some special occasion in the green bar of the Grand-Hotel. The Blochs and the Cecils and the Borromeos, who play tennis on the court at the Villa Teresa, have never quarrelled with Mrs Vansittart, for quarrels would be a shame. Jasper is her partner: her husband plays neither tennis nor bridge. He cooks instead, and helps old Pierre in the garden. Harry is originally of Holland Falls also, the inheritor of a paper-mill.

The Villa Teresa is as the Vansittarts wish it to be now; and as the years go by nothing much will change. In the large room which they call the salon there is the timeless sculptured wall, a variety of colours and ceramic shapes. There are the great Italian urns, the flowers in their vases changed every day; the Persian rugs, the Seurat, and the paperweights which Harry has collected on his travels. Carola and Madame Spad come every morning, to dust and clean and take in groceries. The Villa Teresa, like the other villas, is its own small island.

‘Ruby, don’t you think it’s ridiculous?’ Mrs Vansittart said a month or so ago.’Don’t you, Jasper?’

Mrs Cecil inclined her head. Jasper said:

‘I think that sign they’ve put up is temporary.’

‘If they spell it incorrectly now they’ll do it again.’

Two tables of bridge were going, Mrs Cecil and Signor Borromeo with Jasper and Mrs Vansittart at one, the Blochs, Signora Borromeo and Mr Cecil at the other. In the lull halfway through the evening, during which Harry served tea and little pâtisseries which he made himself, the conversation had turned to the honouring of Somerset Maugham: an avenue was, to be named after him, a sign had gone up near the Villa Mauresque, on which, unfortunately, his surname had been incorrectly spelt.

‘Then you must tell them, my dear,’ urged Jasper, who liked to make mischief when he could. ‘You must go along and vigorously protest.’

‘Oh, I have. I’ve talked to the most awful little prat.’

‘Did he understand?’

‘The stupid creature argued. Harry, that’s a polished surface you’ve put your teapot on.’

Harry snatched up the offending teapot and at once looked apologetic, his eyes magnified behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. Harry isn’t tall but has a certain bulkiness, especially around the waist. His hands and feet are tiny, his mouse-coloured hair neither greying nor receding. He has a ready smile, is nervous perhaps, so people think, not a great talker. Everyone who comes to the villa likes him, and sympathizes because his wife humiliates him so. To strangers he seems like a servant about the place, grubbily on his knees in the garden, emerging from the kitchen regions with flour on his face. Insult is constantly added to injury, strangers notice, but the regular tennis-companions and bridge-players have long since accepted that it goes rather further, that Harry is the creature of his wife. A saint, someone once said, a Swedish lady who lived in the Villa Glorietta until her death. Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch have often said so since.

‘Oh, Harry, look, it has marked it.’

How could she tell? Mrs Cecil thought. How could it be even remotely possible to see half-way across the huge salon, to ascertain through the duskiness – beyond the pools of light demanded by the bridge tables – that the teapot had marked the top of an escritoire? Mrs Cecil was sitting closer to the escritoire than Mrs Vansittart and couldn’t see a thing.

‘I think it’s all right,’ Harry quietly said.

‘Well, thank God for that, old thing.’

‘Delicious, Harry,’ Mrs Cecil murmured quickly, commenting upon the pâtisseries.

‘Bravo! Bravo!’ added Signor Borromeo, in whom a generous nature and obesity are matched. He sampled a second cherry tart, saying he should not.

‘We were talking, Harry,’ Mrs Vansittart said, ‘of the Avenue Somerset Maugham.’

‘Ah, yes.’

He pressed the silver tray of pâtisseries on Signora Borromeo and the Blochs, a wiry couple from South Africa. ‘Al limone?’ Signora Borromeo questioned, an index finger poised. Signora Borromeo, though not as stout as her husband, is generously covered. She wears bright dresses that Mrs Vansittart regards with despair; and she has a way of becoming excited. Yes, that one was lemon, Harry said.

‘I mean,’ Mrs Vansittart went on, ‘it wouldn’t be the nicest thing in the world if someone decided to call an avenue after Harry and then got his name wrong.’

‘If somebody –’ Mr Cecil began, abruptly ceasing when his wife shook her head and frowned at him.

‘No, no one’s going to,’ Mrs Vansittart continued in a dogged way, which is a characteristic of hers when her husband features in a conversation. ‘No, no one’s going to, but naturally it could happen. Harry being a creative person too.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch swiftly and simultaneously.

‘It’s not outside the bounds of possibility,’ added Mrs Vansittart, ‘that Harry should become well known. His cycle is really most remarkable.’

‘Indeed,’ said Jasper.

No one except Mrs Vansittart had been permitted to hear the cycle. It was through her, not its author, that the people of the villas knew what they did: that, for instance, the current composition concerned a Red Indian called Foontimo.

‘No reason whatsoever,’ said Jasper, ‘to suppose that there mightn’t be an Avenue Harry Vansittart.’

He smiled encouragingly at Harry, as if urging him not to lose heart, or at least urging something. Jasper wears a bangle with his name on it, and a toupee that most remarkably matches the remainder of his cleverly dyed hair. Sharply glancing at his lip-salve, Mrs Vansittart said:

‘Don’t be snide, Jasper.’

‘Someone’s bought La Souco,’ Mrs Cecil quickly intervened. ‘Swiss, I hear.’

Harry gathered up the teacups, the bridge recommenced. While the cards at his table were being dealt, Jasper placed a hand lightly on the back of one of Mrs Vansittart’s. He had not meant to be snide, he protested, he was extremely sorry if he had sounded so. The apology was a formality; its effect that which Jasper wished for: to make a little more of the incident. ‘I wouldn’t hurt poor Harry for the world,’ he breathlessly whispered as he reached out for his cards.

It was then, as each hand of cards was being arranged and as Harry picked up his tray, that a bell sounded in the Villa Teresa. It was not the telephone; the ringing was caused by the agitating of a brass bell-pull, in the shape of a fish, by the gate of the villa.

‘Good Lord!’ said Mrs Vansittart, for unexpected visitors are not at all the thing at any of the villas.

‘I would not answer,’ advised Signor Borromeo. ‘Un briccone!’

The others laughed, as they always do when Signor Borromeo exaggerates. But when the bell sounded again, after only a pause of seconds, Signora Borromeo became excited. ‘Un briccone!’ she cried. ‘In nome di Dio! On briccone?’

Harry stood with his laden tray. His back was to the card-players. He did not move when the bell rang a third time, even though there was no servant to answer it. Old Pierre comes to the garden of the Villa Teresa every morning and leaves at midday. Carola and Madame Spad have gone by five.

‘We’ll go with you, Harry,’ the wiry Mr Bloch suggested, already on his feet.

Mr Cecil stood up also, as did Jasper. Signor Borromeo remained where he was.

Harry placed the tray on a table with a painted surface – beneath glass – of a hunting scene at the time of Louis XIV. Nervously, he shifted his spectacles on his nose. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said, accepting the offer of companionship on his way through the garden to the gate. Signora Borromeo fussily fanned her face with her splayed cards.

It was Jasper who afterwards told of what happened next. Mr Bloch took charge. He said they should not talk in the garden just in case Signor Borromeo was right when he suggested that whoever sought entry was there with nefarious purpose. He’d had experience of intruders in South Africa. Each one caught was one less hazard to the whole community: the last thing they wanted was for a criminal to be frightened away, to bide his time for another attempt. So as the bell rang again in the villa the four marched stealthily, a hand occasionally raised to smack away a mosquito.

The man who stood at the gate was swarthy and very small. In the light that went on automatically when the gate was opened he looked from one face to the next, uncertain about which to address. His glance hovered longer on Harry’s than on the others, Jasper reported afterwards, and Harry frowned, as if trying to place the man. Neither of them appeared to be in the least alarmed.

‘It is arranged,’ the man said eventually. ‘I search for Madame.’

‘Madame Spad is not here,’ Harry replied.

‘Not Madame Spad. The Madame of the villa.’

‘Look here, my old chap,’ Mr Cecil put in, ‘I doubt that Madame Vansittart is expecting you.’ Mr Cecil is not one to make concessions when the nature of an occasion bewilders him, but it was Jasper’s opinion that the swarthy visitor did not look like anyone’s old chap. He thought of saying so, sotto voce, to Mr Bloch, but changed his mind.

‘Better,’ he advised the man instead, ‘to telephone in the morning.’

‘My wife is playing bridge tonight,’ Harry explained. ‘It’s no time to come calling.’

‘It is arranged,’ the man repeated.

In a troop, as though conveying a prisoner, they made their way back through the garden. The man, although questioned further by Mr Bloch, only shrugged his shoulders. No one spoke after that, but similar thoughts gathered in each man’s mind. It was known that old Pierre would shortly be beyond it: after tennis one evening Mrs Vansittart had relayed that information to her friends, inquiring if any of them knew of a younger gardener. What would seem to have happened was that this present individual had telephoned the villa and been told by Mrs Vansittart to report for an interview, and now arrived at ten o’clock in the evening instead of the morning. When they reached the villa Mr Cecil began to voice these conclusions, but the man did not appear to understand him.

He was placed in the hall, Jasper and Mr Bloch guarding him just to be on the safe side. The others re-entered the salon and almost, immediately Mrs Vansittart emerged. As she did so, Jasper took advantage of the continuing interruption in order to go to the lavatory. Mr Bloch returned to the salon, where Harry picked up his tray of tea things and proceeded with it to the kitchen.

‘I told you not to come here,’ Mrs Vansittart furiously whispered. ‘I had no idea it could possibly be you.’

‘I tell a little lie, Madame. I say to the men there is arrangement.’

‘My God!’

‘This morning I wait, Madame, and you do not appear.’

‘Will you kindly keep your voice down.’

‘We go in your kitchen?’

‘My husband is in the kitchen. I could not come this morning because I did not wake up.’

‘I am by the lighthouse. It is time to fix the tablecloths but I stand by the lighthouse. How I know you ever come?’

‘You could have telephoned, for God’s sake,’ whispered Mrs Vansittart, more furiously than before. ‘All you had to do was to pick up the damn telephone. I was waiting in all day.’

‘Yes, I pick up the damn telephone, Madame. You husband answer, I pick it down again. All the time Monsieur Jean watch me. “It is no good this time to fix the tablecloths!” he shout when I come running from the lighthouse. My hand make sweat on the tablecloths. I am no good, he shout, lam bad waiter, no good for Grand-Hotel –’

‘I cannot talk to you here. I will meet you in the morning.’

‘This at the lighthouse, Madame?’

‘Of course at the lighthouse.’

All this Jasper heard through the slightly open lavatory door. It was not, he recognized at once, a conversation that might normally occur between Mrs Vansittart and a prospective gardener. As he passed through the hall again his hostess was saying in a clenched voice that of course she would wake up. She would be at the lighthouse at half past six.

‘He’s a waiter from the Grand-Hotel,’ Jasper reported softly in the salon, but not so softly that the information failed to reach anyone present. ‘They’re carrying on in the mornings at the lighthouse.’

Signor Borromeo won that night, and so did Mrs Cecil. At a quarter to twelve Harry carried in a tray with glasses on it, and another containing decanters of cognac and whisky, and bottles of Cointreau, cherry brandy and yellow Chartreuse. He drank some Cointreau himself, talking to Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch about azaleas.

‘Harry dear, you’ve dribbled that stuff all over your jacket!’ Mrs Vansittart cried. ‘Oh, Harry, really!’

He went to the kitchen to wipe at the stain with a damp cloth. ‘Hot water, Harry,’ his wife called after him. ‘Make sure it’s really hot. And just a trace of soap.’

He’d had a bad day, she reported when he was out of earshot. In his Red Indian song Foontimo’s child-wife – the wife who was not real but who appeared to Foontimo in dreams – continued to be elusive. Harry couldn’t get her name right. He had written down upwards of four hundred names, but not one of them registered properly. For weeks poor Harry had been depressed over that.

While they listened they all of them in their different ways disliked Mrs Vansittart more than ever they had before. Even Jasper, who had so enjoyed eavesdropping at the lavatory door, considered it extravagantly awful that Mrs Vansittart’s seedy love life should have been displayed in front of everyone, while Harry washed up the dishes. Mrs Bloch several times tightened her lips during Mrs Vansittart’s speech about the difficulties Harry was having with his creation of an Indian child-wife; her husband frowned and looked peppery. It was really too much, Mrs Cecil said to herself, and resolved that on the way home she’d suggest dropping the Vansittarts. There were all kinds of people in this world, Signor Borromeo said to himself, but found that this reflection caused him to like Mrs Vansittart no more. A cornuto was one thing., but a man humiliated in pubblico was an unforgivable shame. Harry was buono, Signora Borromeo said to herself, Harry was like a bambino sometimes. Mr Cecil did not say anything to himself, being confused.

At midnight the gathering broke up. The visitors remarked that the evening had been delightful. They smiled and thanked Mrs Vansittart.

‘She has destroyed that man,’ Mrs Cecil said with feeling as she and her husband entered their villa, the Villa Japhico.

Signora Borromeo wept in the Villa Good-Fun, and her husband, sustaining himself with a late-night sandwich and a glass of beer, sadly shook his head.

‘She has destroyed that man,’ Jasper said to his friend in El Dorado, using the words precisely a minute after Mrs Cecil had used them in the Villa Japhico. In the Villa Hadrian the Blochs undressed in silence.

Mrs Vansittart lit a cigarette. She sat down at her dressing-table and removed her make-up, occasionally pausing to draw on her cigarette. Her mind contained few thoughts.

Her mind was tired, afflicted with the same fatigue that deadened, just a little, the eyes that people are rude about.

Harry sat at the piano in the snug little room he called his den. It was full of things he liked, ornaments and pictures he’d picked up in Europe, bric-a-brac that was priceless or had a sentimental value only. The main lights of the room were not switched on; an ornate lamp lit his piano and the sheets of music paper on the small table beside him. He wore a cotton dressing-gown that was mainly orange, a Javanese pattern.

The child-wife who visited the dreams of Foontimo said her name was Soaring Cloud. She prepared a heaven for Foontimo. She would never leave him, nor would she ever grow old.

Harry smiled over that, his even white teeth moist with excitement. He had known she could not elude him for ever.

The following morning Jasper watched from the rocks near the lighthouse. He carried with him a small pair of binoculars, necessary because the lie of the land would prevent him from getting close enough to observe his quarry profitably. He had to wait for some minutes before Mrs Vansittart appeared. She looked around her before descending a path that led to a gap among the rocks from which, later in the day, people bathed. She sat down and lit a cigarette. A moment later the swarthy waiter from the Grand-Hotel hurried to where she was.

Jasper moved cautiously. He was slightly above the pair, but well obscured from their view. Unfortunately it would be impossible to overhear a word they said. Wedging himself uncomfortably, he raised his binoculars and adjusted them.

A conversation, apparently heated, took place. There were many gestures on the part of the swarthy man and at one point he began to go away but was recalled by Mrs Vansittart. She offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. Then Mrs Vansittart took a wallet from a pocket of her trousers and counted a large number of notes on the palm of her companion. ‘My God,’ said Jasper, aloud, ‘she pays for it!’

The couple parted, the waiter hurrying back towards the Grand-Hotel. Mrs Vansittart sat for a moment where he had left her and then clambered slowly back to the coastal path. She disappeared from Jasper’s view.

Privately, Mrs Vansittart keeps an account of her life. While Harry composes his songs she fills a number of hard-backed notebooks with the facts she does not wish to divulge to anyone now but which, one day after her death and after Harry’s, she would like to be known. Of this particular day she wrote:

I paused now and again to watch the early-morning fishermen. I had paid ten thousand francs. At the end of the season the man might go and not return, as he had promised. But I could not be sure.

The morning was beautiful, not yet even faintly hot, the sky a perfect blue. The houses of Beaulieu seemed gracious across the glittering sea, yet the houses of Beaulieu are as ordinary as houses anywhere. A jogger glanced at me as I stood aside to let him pass, perspiration on his nose and chin. He did not speak or smile. I sometimes hate it on Cap Ferrat.

On the coastal path that morning I thought about Harry and myself when we were both eleven; I was in love with him even then. In Holland Falls he’d brought me to his mother’s bedroom to show me the rings she crowded on to her plump fingers, her heavily stoppered scent bottles, her garish silk stockings. But I wasn’t interested in his mother’s things. Harry told me to take my clothes off, which I shyly did, wanting to because he’d asked me and yet keeping my head averted. Everyone knew that Harry loathed his mother, but no one thought about it or blamed him particularly, she being huge and pink and doting on her only child in a shaming way. ‘God!’ he remarked, looking at my scrawny nakedness among his mother’s frills. ‘God, Jesus!’ I had wires on my teeth, and spindly arms and legs; I didn’t have breasts of any size. I took off Harry’s red windcheater, and after that the rest of his clothes and his shoes. We lay side by side between his mother’s scented sheets, while two floors down she talked to Mrs Gilliland. ‘Now, that’s just a damned lie!’ she afterwards shrieked at Rose when Rose said what she’d seen. I’ll never forget poor Rose’s pretty black face in the bedroom doorway, her eyes as round as teacups, bulging from her head. Harry’s mother got rid of her because of it, but the story ran all over Holland Falls and someone told my own mother, who sat down and cried. My father bawled at me, his fury a single crimson explosion of lips and tongue, his dotted necktie gulping up and down. It wasn’t Harry’s fault, I said, I’d tempted Harry because I loved him. Besides, I added, nothing had happened. ‘At eleven years of age?’ my father yelled. ‘It’s not the point, for God’s sake, that nothing happened!’

On the coastal path that morning I told myself it wasn’t fair to remember my father in the moment of his greatest rage. He’d been a gentle man, at his gentlest when operating his high-speed dentist’s drill, white-jacketed and happy. Even so, he never forgave me.

We ran away from Holland Falls when we were twenty-two. Harry had already inherited the paper-mill but it was run by a manager, by whom it has been run ever since. We drove about for a year, from town to town, motel to motel. We occupied different rooms because Harry had begun to compose his cycle and liked to be alone with it at night. I loved him more than I could ever tell him but never again, for Harry, did I take my clothes off. Harry has never kissed me, though I, in parsing, cannot even now resist bending down to touch the side of his face with my lips. A mother’s kiss, I dare say you would call it, and yet when I think of Harry and me I think as well of Héloïse and Abelard, Beatrice and Dante, and all the others. Absurd, of course.

I left the coastal path and went down to the rocks again, gazing into the depths of the clear blue water. ‘You’re never cross enough,’ Harry said, with childish petulance in the City Hotel, Harrisburg, when we were still twenty-two. I had come into my room to find the girl lying on my bed, as I had lain on his mother’s with him. In my presence he paid her forty dollars, but I knew he had not laid a finger on her, any more than he had on me when I was her age.

We went to England because Harry was frightened when a police patrol stopped our car one day and asked us if we’d ever been in Harrisburg. I denied it and they let us go, but that was why Harry thought of England, which he took to greatly as soon as we arrived. It became one of the games in our marriage to use only English phrases and to speak in the English way: Harry enjoyed that enormously, almost as much as working on his cycle. And loving him so, I naturally did my best to please him. Any distraction a harmless little game could provide, any compensation: that was how I saw my duty, if in the circumstances that is not too absurd a word. Anyway, the games and the distractions worked, sometimes for years on end. A great deal of time went by, for instance, between the incident in Harrisburg and the first of the two in England. ‘It’s all right,’ the poor child cried out in London when I entered my room. ‘Please don’t tell, Mrs Vansittart.’ Harry paid her the money he had promised her, and when she had gone I broke down and wept. I didn’t even want to look at Harry, I didn’t want to hear him speak. In an hour or so he brought me up a cup of tea.

It was, heaven knows, simple enough on the surface of things: I could not leave Harry because I loved him too much. I loved his chubby white hands and tranquil smile, and the weakness in his eyes when he took his spectacles off. If I’d left him, he would have ended up in prison because Harry needs to be loved. And then, besides, there has been so much happiness, at least for me: our travelling together, the pictures and the furniture we’ve so fondly collected, and of course the Villa Teresa. It’s the strangest thing in the world, all that.

A fisherman brought his boat near to the rocks where I was sitting. I had lit a cigarette and put my sunglasses on because the glare of daytime was beginning. I watched the fisherman unloading his modest catch, his brown fingers expertly arranging nets and hooks. How different, I thought, marriage would have been with that stranger. And yet could I, with anyone else, have experienced such feelings of passion as I have known?

‘I’m sorry,’ Harry began to say, a catch-phrase almost, in the 1950s. He’s always sorry when he Comes in from the flowerbeds with clay on his shoes, or puts the teapot on a polished surface, or breaks the promises he makes. In a way that’s hard to communicate Harry likes being sorry.

‘Bonjour, madame,’ the fisherman said, going by with his baskets of sole or whatever fish it was.

‘Bonjour’, I replied, smiling at him.

Harry would be still in bed, having worked on his cycle until three or four in the morning. Old Pierre and Carola and Madame Spad would not arrive for another hour, and in any case I did not have to be there when they did. But at the back of my mind there’s always the terror that when I return to the Villa Teresa Harry will be dead.

I clambered back to the coastal path and continued on my way. In England, after the first occasion, there was the convent girl in her red gymslip, who wasn’t docile like the other ones but shouted at me that she loved Harry more than I did. Sometimes she was there when I returned from shopping in the afternoons, sometimes there was only the rumpling of my bed to remind me of her visit. We had to leave England because of the scenes she made, and after the awful melancholy that had seized him Harry promised that none of it would ever happen again.

My presence at the lighthouse that morning had to do with a German girl in Switzerland eleven years ago. The waiter who is at the Grand-Hotel for the season was at the Bon Accueil in Château d’Oex. The German girl was given wine at dinnertime and suddenly burst into tears, hysterically flinging her accusations about. I simply laughed. I said it was ridiculous.

We were gone by breakfast-time and Harry has kept his promise since, frightened for eleven years. Dear, gentle Harry, who never laid a finger on any of those girls, who never would.

Later that morning Jasper’s friend shopped in St Jean, with Jasper’s terrier on a lead. When he had finished he sat down to rest at the cafe by the bus stop to have a jus d’abricot. He watched the tourists and the young people from the yachts. The terrier, elderly now, crept beneath his chair in search of shade.

‘Ah, Mrs Bloch!’ Jasper’s friend called out after a little while, for the lean South African lady was shopping also. He persuaded her to join him – rather against her will, since Mrs Bloch does not at all care for Jasper’s friend. He then related what Jasper had earlier related to him: that Mrs Vansittart now paid money for the intimate services she received from men. He described in detail, with some natural exaggeration, the transaction by the lighthouse. Repelled by the account, Mrs Bloch tightened her lips.

On the way back to the Villa Hadrian she called in at the Villa Japhico with two mouse-traps which she had promised last night she would purchase for Mrs Cecil. The Cecils, with neither gardener nor cleaning woman, do not easily find the time for daily shopping and the chandler’s store in St Jean will not deliver mouse-traps. Mrs Bloch waited to be thanked and then began.

‘To think that man came last night for money! With Harry there and everyone else!’

Mrs Cecil shook her head in horror. Jasper was a troublemaker and so was his rather unpleasant friend, yet neither would surely tell an outright lie. It was appalling to think of Mrs Vansittart conducting such business with a waiter. The satisfying of lust in a woman was most unpleasant.

‘I really can’t think why he doesn’t leave her,’ she said.

‘Oh, he never would. That simply isn’t Harry’s style.’

‘Yes, Harry’s loyal.’

That morning the Cecils had discussed the dropping of the Vansittarts, but had in the end agreed that the result of such a course of action would be that Harry would suffer. So they had decided against it, a decision which Mrs Cecil now passed on to her friend.

Mrs Bloch gloomily agreed.

Mrs Vansittart plays an ace and wins the trick. It is autumn, the season is over, the swarthy waiter has gone.

Harry enters the salon with his tray of tea, and the pâtisseries he has made that morning. He is so quiet in the shadows of the room that Mrs Bloch recalls how strangers to the villa have occasionally taken him for a servant. Mrs Cecil throws a smile in his direction.

Mr Bloch and Mr Cecil and Signor Borromeo, all of whom know about the transaction that took place near the lighthouse, prefer not to think about it. Jasper hopes that Mrs Vansittart will commit some further enormity shortly, so that the gossip it trails may while away the winter. It would be awfully dull, he often remarks to his friend, if Mrs Vansittart was like Mrs Bloch and Mrs Cecil and Signora Borromeo.

‘Oh, my dear, don’t pour it yet!’ she cries across the room, and then with some asperity, ‘We really aren’t quite ready, old thing.’

Harry apologizes, enjoying the wave of sympathy her protest engenders. He waits until the hand is played, knowing that then her voice will again command him. He can feel the stifled irritation in the room, and then the sympathy.

He pours the tea and hands the cups around. She lights a cigarette. Once, at the beginning of their time in the Villa Teresa, she had a way of getting up and helping him with the teacups, but then she sensed that that was wrong. She senses things in a clumsy kind of way. She is not clever.

‘Oh, look, you’ve made marzipan ones again! You know no one likes marzipan, dear.’

But Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch both select the marzipan ones, and Harry is apologetic. He is not aware that people have ever said his wife had three affairs and sundry casual conjunctions when they lived in England; nor does he know it is categorically stated that a peasant woman once spat in her face. It would not upset him to hear all this because it’s only gossip and its falsity doesn’t matter. It is a long time now since she sensed his modest wish, and in answer to it developed the rhythmic swing of her hips and the look in her eyes. Unconsciously, of course, she developed them; not quite in the way she allows the English intonations to creep into her voice. When he looks at her in the company of these people it’s enjoyable to imagine the swarthy waiter undressing her among the rocks, even Signor Borromeo trying something on beneath the bridge table.

Harry smiles. He goes around with the teapot, refilling the cups. He wishes she would say again that an avenue on Cap Ferrat would be called after him. It’s enjoyable, the feeling in the room then, the people thinking she shouldn’t have said it. It’s enjoyable when they think she shouldn’t swing her hips so, and when they come to conclusions about her made-up English voice. It’s enjoyable when she listens to his saga of Soaring Cloud the child-wife, and when her face is worried because yet another song has a theme of self-inflicted death. Harry enjoys that most of all.

Mrs Vansittart loses, for her attention had briefly wandered, as it sometimes does just after he has brought the tea around. She tried not to love him when her father was so upset. She tried to forget him, but he was always there, wordlessly pleading from a distance, so passionately demanding the love she passionately felt. She’d felt it long before the day she took her clothes off for him, and she remembers perfectly how it was.

For a moment at the bridge table the thoughts that have slipped beneath her guard make her so light-headed that she wants to jump up and run after him to the kitchen. She sees herself, gazing at him from the doorway, enticing him with her eyes, as first of all she did in Holland Falls. He puts his arms around her, and she feels on hers the lips she never has felt.

‘Diamonds,’ someone says, for she has asked what trumps are. Her virginal longing still warms her as the daydream dissipates. From its fragments Harry thanks her for the companion she has been, and her love is calm again at the bridge table.