Imogen

Chapter Nine

Next morning, feeling pale and sickly, Imogen staggered down to the beach. The sea was blue and sparkling, the sand hot and golden. Umbrellas stretched six deep, edge to edge, for half a mile along the beach. Bodies lay stretched out hundreds to the acre, turning and oiling themselves like chickens on a spit.

Nearly everyone, Imogen realised to her horror, was topless. Cable, as brown as any of them, was wearing the bottom half of the briefest bikini — two saffron triangles, held together by straps of perspex. Her small perfect breasts gleamed with oil. Her hair hung black and shiny over the edge of her lilo. Nicky lounged beside her, slim, lithe and menacing. He totally ignored Imogen when she arrived. Matt lay on his back, his eyes closed, his powerful chest curved in an arch above his flat heavily muscled stomach. Having sallow skin, he was already going brown.

He opened a lazy eye and grinned at Imogen. ‘Come and join the oppressed white minority.’

As she struggled into Lady Jacintha’s red bathing dress, she tried to protect herself with a small face towel.

‘There’s masses of room on my towel if you need it,’ said Matt who had been watching her struggles with unashamed amusement. He rolled over and went back to sleep. Imogen lay in silence, bitterly ashamed of her whiteness.

‘Christ,’ said Nicky, who was reading a copy of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, ‘Nastase was knocked out in the first round.’

‘Damn, damn, damn!’ said Matt suddenly. Everyone looked up. ‘Here comes Mrs Set-your-teeth-on-Edgworth and the prospective candidate for Cockfosters.’

Yvonne was picking her way daintily across the miles of tangled brown flesh. Behind her staggered James weighed down by towels, lilos, snorkel masks, picnic baskets, a large parasol and Yvonne’s make-up case, but still managing to cast excited glances at the naked bosoms around him.

‘They look as though they’re going on safari,’ said Cable. ‘There’s something rather prehistoric about James’s shorts.’

‘He looks as though he’s crossing the foot hills,’ said Nicky.

‘What a crowd,’ sighed Yvonne. ‘You get such lovely deserted beaches in the Bahamas. No, put the lilo there, Jumbo, with the towel spread over it. I don’t want to perspire. And put the parasol so it keeps the sun off my face. Can you move just a fraction of an inch, Imogen? Yes, that’s lovely. When you’ve finished, James, just pop over to the café and get me some orange squash. Such a funny thing’s just happened,’ she added to Cable. ‘A little French girl came up to me and asked me for my autograph. She’d seen one of my commercials when she was staying in England.’

Matt, looking at her with acute dislike, was about to say something, then turned over and went back to sleep.

Although she was pouring with sweat, Imogen was too ashamed of her white body to go and swim until Cable and Nicky were safely in the sea. Then how cool and sympathetically soothing the water felt to her limbs. Below the dark green surface, she could see the slow moving shape of a fish. Then suddenly someone grabbed her ankles and she was falling. She seemed to swallow half the ocean. Choking, she came to the surface to see Nicky shooting away at a flashy crawl. Later he and Cable played very ostentatiously with a yellow beach ball.

‘I say, that’s rather naughty,’ said James, staring fascinated at a girl whose bikini pants had practically no back to them.

‘I don’t know why she bothers to wear anything at all,’ snapped Yvonne.

‘Why don’t you wear a bikini?’ Yvonne asked Imogen. ‘I’d lend you one, but I don’t think you’d get into it. I really think you ought to do something about your thighs.’

‘Exercises are the best thing,’ said Cable, flopping down on the lilo. ‘Sally Chetwynde lost five inches by bicycling every night.’

Imogen blushed as red as her bathing dress. If Matt had been there she was sure they would never have been so nasty to her. They shut up as soon as he came back.

She watched him oiling Cable, his hands moving steadily over her slim brown body, big practised hands, as skilful at making love as keeping a large car steady on a winding road at excessive speeds.

Her heart suddenly twisted with loneliness. Her skin was already turning as pink and as freckled as a foxglove. Oh, to be as beautiful as Cable, and to be loved by a man like Matt.

She was also worried that although she’d searched her room high and low she couldn’t find her pills. What on earth was Nicky going to say when he discovered she’d lost them? Perhaps she could get some from a chemist. ‘Avez-vous la pilule pour arreter les bébés?’ But wasn’t France a Catholic country which forbade the pill anyway? If only Yvonne or Cable were more cosy she could have asked them.

‘Of course Vogue pay peanuts, only twenty-five quid a day,’ Yvonne was saying.

‘I wouldn’t put on my make-up for twenty-five quid a day,’ said Cable.

Matt sighed and took refuge in a tattered copy of Brideshead Revisited.

When Imogen looked at herself in the glass before dinner, she was scarlet. Her head and her eyes ached; she had obviously overdone it. Her hair was stiff with oil, sand and sea water. Sand also seemed to have got into everything: towel, comb, bag, clothes; the floor of the room was just like the Gobi Desert. She lay on her bed and wondered which would be the worst evil, her baggy trousers or her other kaftan. She decided on trousers, which would at least hide her legs. After she had dressed and had another fruitless search for her pills, she wandered into Cable’s room and found her busy combing out newly washed ebony curls.

‘Goodness, you’re red,’ said Cable. ‘Good thing you kept yourself well oiled. Try some of my green face powder. Guess what? James Edgworth’s just made a pass at me. Serve Yvonne right for being so bitchy last night. I can’t think why I liked her in London. And, do you know, she was Purley Carnival Queen when she was 14? James made me promise not to tell anyone!’

In spite of the green face powder, Imogen’s face glowed like a furnace as the evening wore on. After dinner they went to a nightclub. She couldn’t believe how ravishing the girls were with their smooth expressionless faces, and long, long legs. And how beautifully they danced. It was as though the sun had melted their limbs to liquid. Nicky, having drunk too much, spent most of the evening wrapped round Cable. Matt ignored them both, and gabbled away to the nightclub owner. Every so often he smiled reassuringly at Imogen through the soupy darkness.

But later, back in her room, she wondered if she had ever been more miserable in her life. Here she was on the Riviera with the handsomest man in the world — a real daydream situation come true — and she was loathing every minute of it. She winced from sunburn as she climbed into bed. Oh please, God, make him be nice to me tonight.

Much later Nicky came in wearing not the violet dressing-gown which she’d so nearly been sick over last night, but a pair of black pyjamas. His gleaming beauty, after a day in the sun, was overwhelming. Squinting slightly from so much drink, he looked like a dangerous, hungry Siamese cat. He was obviously not going to put up with any nonsense tonight. Her stomach contracted with fear and expectancy.

‘Feeling bridal, darling?’ he said silkily, and pulled her towards him, his fingers biting into her arms. ‘It’s time you stopped playing games.’

His kisses were hard and brutal and gave her no pleasure. She was nearly suffocated by the smell of Cable’s scent.

‘No, no, Nicky, I don’t want to!’

‘Well, this time you’re going to have to, honey child.’

‘But you don’t love me,’ she gasped. ‘Not a bit. You’ve ignored me since we left England.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Nicky. ‘I tried hard enough last night, didn’t I?’

‘I couldn’t help it. Oh, Nicky please, please don’t. I can’t find my pills.’

‘Your what!’ It was like a pistol shot.

‘I’ve looked for them everywhere. I must have left them in that hotel on the way.’

His slit eyes were like dark thread. ‘Jesus, can’t you do anything right? I don’t believe you ever got them in the first place.’

Imogen gave a gasp of horror. ‘Oh, I did, I did. I promise.’

‘Crap,’ said Nicky. ‘You just pretended you had. We can’t do anything to upset Daddy, can we?’

‘I did get them,’ said Imogen, bursting into tears. ‘Oh, why won’t you believe me?’

Nicky, mean with drink inside him, rattled her like a cat shaking a mouse, calling her every name he could think of until someone banged on the wall and told them to shut up in German. Nicky swore back in German and pushed Imogen back against the pillow.

‘I’m s-s-sorry, Nicky,’ she sobbed. ‘I do love you.’

‘Well, I don’t love you,’ he snarled. ‘Get that straight. Nor do I like prissy little girls who string men along just for the sake of a holiday in the sun.’

And he stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

There were four church clocks in Port-les-Pins, and Imogen counted each one chiming the quarter hours through the night, until the crowing cocks brought the morning sun streaming through the shutters.

As she was going downstairs next morning, dark glasses covering her reddened eyes, Cable popped her head out of the bedroom door. ‘I just found these at the bottom of one of my espadrilles,’ she said. ‘I do hope you weren’t looking for them.’ And, laughing, she thrust the mauve card holding the pills into Imogen’s hand.

Laughter, thought Imogen, is the most insidious sound in the world. Cable and Nicky lay on the beach slightly out of earshot from the rest of the party, heads together, laughing and talking in low caressing voices.

The heat of the sun was as fiery as yesterday’s. But a fierce wind was raging. It tore the parasols out of the ground, blew sand in everyone’s faces, and ruffled the green feathers of the palm trees along the front.

‘It’s called a mistral,’ Matt told Imogen. ‘It makes everyone very bad-tempered. Have you noticed how the nicest people become absolute monsters with too much spare time on their hands?’

Yvonne was moaning at James, who was hiding his pink burnt body under a huge green towel. Cable was as snappy as an elastic band with Matt, and Nicky didn’t deign to recognise Imogen’s existence.

A black poodle with a red collar came scampering by, scattering sand. James whistled and made clicking noises with his hand.

‘Don’t talk to strange dogs, Jumbo,’ snapped Yvonne. ‘They might easily have rabies.’

Cable, in an emerald green bikini with a matching turban to keep the sand out of her hair, had never looked more seductive. Matt retired behind Paris Match. Yvonne put on a cardboard beak to protect her nose from the sun, which made her look like some malignant bird. James got out his Box Brownie and went on a photographic spree which consisted mainly of front approaches on large ladies. Nicky went off to hire a pedalo.

Three handsome muscular Frenchmen playing ball edged nearer Cable, then one of them deliberately missed a catch, so the ball landed at her feet. With laughter, and voluble apologies and much show of interest, they all came to retrieve it. Cable gave them a smouldering look. They smiled back in admiration. Next moment another catch was missed and the ball landed on her towel and, with a flurry of ‘Pardons’, was retrieved again. Cable smirked. Matt took no notice and went on reading. Imogen suddenly thought how infuriating it must be for Cable that he appeared so unjealous. Maybe it was an elaborate game between them. She picked up a copy of Elle that Cable had abandoned which said ‘une vrai beauté sauvage’ would be fashionable this autumn. The glamorously dishevelled mane of the model on the front cover bore no resemblance to Imogen’s awful mop of hair which was now going in ‘toutes directions’. The heat was awful. Imogen, who was burning, picked up a tube of sun lotion and began plastering it over her face.

Yvonne gave a squeal of rage and snatched it away from her. ‘How dare you use my special lotion!’

Matt lowered Paris Match. ‘Stop beefing,’ he said sharply. ‘One oil’s the same as another.’

‘This one was specially made for me at great expense, because of my sensitive skin,’ said Yvonne. ‘Because I’m a model, it’s absolutely vital I don’t peel. This stuff is. .’

Matt got up and went down to the sea leaving her in mid-sentence.

‘He’s the rudest man I ever met,’ Yvonne said furiously as she re-adjusted her cardboard beak. ‘I don’t know why you put up with him, Cable.’

Cable rolled over and looked at Yvonne, her green eyes glinting. ‘Because, my dear,’ she drawled, ‘he’s a genius in bed.’

‘What a disgusting thing to say,’ said Yvonne, looking like an enraged beetroot.

‘Once you’ve had Matt,’ said Cable, ‘you never really want anyone else.’

‘Then why are you fooling around with Nicky Beresford?’

Imogen caught her breath.

Cable grinned wickedly. ‘Because Nicky’s so pretty, and I must keep Matt on his toes or, shall we say, his elbows.’

‘You’re going about it the wrong way,’ said Yvonne. ‘You should occasionally sew a button on his shirt or cook more. Modelling’s not a very stable career, you know.’

‘Neither’s marriage,’ snapped Cable. ‘Your husband made the most horrendous pass at me last night.’

And getting up in one lithe movement, she made her way down to the sea to join Nicky on a pedalo.

Yvonne turned on Imogen as the only available target. ‘I don’t know why you came out here with Nicky and then let him get away with it,’ she snapped, and, spluttering with fury, went off to find James.

Imogen got some postcards out of her bag. She had bought them to send home to the family and the office, but what on earth could she say to them? They had all been so excited about her going. How could she tell them the truth?

Dear everyone, she wrote very large. How are you all? I arrived safely. None of the gardens here are as good as ours. Suddenly she had a vision of the vicarage and Pikely. Juliet and the boys would be at school now, her mother would probably be getting ready to go down to the shops, flapping about looking for her list while Homer waited for her, impatiently trailing his chain lead around like Marley’s ghost. At such a distance even her father seemed less formidable. A great wave of homesickness overwhelmed her.

Matt strolled lazily up from the sea, water dripping from his huge shoulders, heavy-lidded eyes squinting against the sun. There was poor little Imogen in that awful bathing dress, surrounded by other people’s possessions. He’d never seen anyone so woebegone. Today she was red-eyed, covered in bruises. Nicky must have put her through hell last night. Those pale-skinned English girls always translated badly to the South of France for the first few days. Her clothes were frightful, her hair a disaster. Once she turned brown, however, she might have possibilities. I could teach her a thing or three, he thought. He lay down beside her and put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I declare National Necking Week officially open,’ he said.

She turned a woeful face to him and held up an arm covered in bites.

‘I don’t seem to attract anything but mosquitoes,’ she said, her lips trembling.

‘Has Yvonne been bullying you? Listen baby, don’t let her get you down. I know how she comes on, like she owns this beach personally and everyone has to act like a vicarage tea party, but you’ve just got to ignore her.’

Poor little thing, he thought, she really is miserable. Something will definitely have to be done about it.