Imogen

Chapter Eleven

Sulky faces greeted them as they drove up to the hotel.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ snapped Cable.

‘Exciting each other on the beach at St Trop,’ said Matt.

Nicky and James were gaping at Imogen, who had got out of the car and was standing in the street in her bikini, her hair streaming down her back.

‘Gosh,’ said James in awe. ‘You look like one of the girls at the Motor Show.’

‘Matt seems to have been playing Pygmalion,’ said Cable frostily.

‘Rather successfully, don’t you think?’ said Matt, looking at Imogen.

‘She looks tremendous,’ said James. ‘Have a drink?’

‘We bumped into Antoine de la Tour, mad as ever. He’s coming over this evening. How was the water skiing, darling?’ said Matt to Cable. He bent over to give her a peck on the cheek, but she jerked her head away and spat a remark at him which only he heard.

He straightened up and looked at her.

‘It’s those loving things you do that make me grow so close to you,’ he said in an undertone.

‘Yvonne’s ill,’ said Nicky, who was still staring at Imogen. ‘She’s been stung by a jellyfish.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Matt in concern. ‘Is the poor jellyfish expected to live?’

James tried, but failed, to look affronted.

‘She wants me to sit by her bedside all night,’ he said plaintively. ‘I’d get her some pills to ease the pain, but I can’t make the beastly chemist understand.’

‘I’ll get her something,’ said Matt. ‘Order us a drink. I’ll be right back.’

‘First she says I stink of garlic, and then I mustn’t touch her because of her sunburn, and now this. What a holiday.’ James looked as though he was going to cry.

Nicky turned to Imogen. ‘You look sensational,’ he said, and began to tell her about the water skiing, his eyes wandering over her body as of old. Cable looked so thunderous, Imogen was glad when Matt came back.

‘Here you are,’ he said, handing James a phial of green pills. ‘But tell Yvonne not to take too many. They’re absolute knockouts.’

‘Thanks awfully,’ said James, bolting into the hotel. He came back five minutes later, his face wreathed in smiles.

‘What on earth were they?’ he asked. ‘She went out like a light.’

‘Smarties,’ said Matt. ‘I got them from the sweet shop round the corner. We extracted the green ones.’

Cable was the only person not to join in the shouts of laughter.

‘I’m going to change,’ she said.

‘So am I,’ said Matt grimly.

Imogen, at a discreet distance behind them, saw Matt follow Cable into their room.

‘When are you going to stop buggering up every one else’s holiday?’ she heard him say.

‘Male chauvinist Pygmalion,’ thought Imogen.

Dinner was decidedly stormy. The collision of wills in the bedroom had obviously escalated into a major row. Cable was in a murderous mood, her jaw set, her green eyes glittering. She kept ordering the most expensive things on the menu, and then sending them back untouched.

She was drinking heavily. And although Nicky was listening to her feverish chatter, every so often he cast discreet glances in Imogen’s direction.

Imogen was feeling beautiful in one of the dresses Matt had bought her. She had noticed the way men’s heads had turned and looked at her and stayed looking, as she came into the restaurant. It was a completely new experience. Even Cable couldn’t destroy her mood of euphoria. James, delirious to be off the matrimonial lead, was getting thoroughly overexcited. Matt appeared outwardly unruffled, but he was lighting one cigarette from another.

No one was sorry when Antoine and Mimi arrived and bore them all off to a disco outside the town.

On the way they passed a large turreted house, strewn with creeper, set back from the road behind high walls and huge iron gates.

‘That’s one of Braganzi’s ’ide outs,’ said Antoine. ‘It go straight down to a private beach.’

Above the burglar alarm trill of the cicadas, they could hear the faint baying of guard-dogs.

‘I ’ave made the enquiries, Matthieu,’ Antoine went on. ‘If you go along to Le Bar de le Marine tomorrow lunchtime and ask for a Monsieur Roche, ’e might be able to help.’

The disco was called Verdi’s Requiem. Imogen was almost knocked sideways by the brush-fire smell of pot, Alice Cooper thundering out of the stereo and a mass of writhing bodies. Antoine promptly ordered champagne all round and installed them at the best table.

Immediately Nicky asked Imogen to dance.

‘You look simply terrific,’ he said as soon as they were out of earshot of the others. ‘I hardly recognised you when Matt brought you back this evening. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit offish lately. But when you kept hustling me out of the bedroom and then losing your pills.’

‘It seemed as though I was deliberately rejecting you?’

‘A deliberate rejection was exactly what it semed.’

‘I’m sorry, Nicky. I didn’t mean it.’

‘I’m sorry too. No hard feelings?’

They smiled at each other. His eyes are like velvet, thought Imogen, but was shocked to find herself adding that his forehead was too low, and his smile like a toothpaste commercial. He laid his smooth brown cheek against her hair and drew her closer to him, but her heart didn’t thump in the usual way; she even felt very strong at the knees.

‘Did you have a nice day with Matt?’ he said.

‘Yes, thank you. Did you have a nice day with Cable?’

‘It’s rather like looking after a two year old,’ said Nicky. ‘You have to keep her amused all the time and she’s into everything, particularly boutiques. I can’t think how Matt can afford her. She needs a play pen.’

The moment they got back to the table James swept her on to the floor. It was as though he had hitherto proceeded gingerly through life like a sports car towing a huge cumbersome trailer. But now suddenly the trailer had been detached (or rather stung by a jellyfish) and the sports car was careering off joyfully into the unknown.

‘Jolly handsome chap, Antoine,’ he said as his hands roved eagerly over Imogen’s body. ‘I wonder if I could get away with wearing earrings.’

‘Would it be quite the thing for a Tory candidate?’ shouted Imogen above the din of the music. ‘You’d have to have your ears pierced.’

‘My ears are pierced every day by the voice of my dear wife,’ said James petulantly.

Imogen giggled. She realised she’d had a great deal too much to drink. Oblivious that James was breathing down the front of her dress, and caressing her back, she tried to unravel her confused emotions. Whatever had happened to that undying love she had sworn to Nicky last night?

She looked across the room at him, talking earnestly to Cable, as though he was placating her for dancing so long with Imogen. She was alarmed that she felt no pang of jealousy. What price the constant nymph now?

‘Many a tear has to fall but it’s all in the game,’ sang the record player.

‘That Mimi’s a bit of all right, isn’t she?’ said James, squeezing Imogen ever tighter. ‘How do you say, “Do you bop?” in French?’

A few minutes later James and Mimi had taken the floor.

James, just about coming up to Mimi’s shoulder, happily buried his pink face in her magnificent bosom.

Imogen meanwhile was having a long dance with Antoine, who divided his time between flirting outrageously and telling her how awful he thought Cable was. ‘She is a nighthorse,’ he said finally.

‘Nightmare,’ giggled Imogen. But she was surprised.

She had thought Antoine and Cable would get on. Perhaps they were both too fond of the limelight.

‘This is a very nice place,’ she said.

‘I own it,’ said Antoine simply, looking like the devil himself, swaying in front of her, all in black with his diamonds flashing gaudily, and his white teeth gleaming tigerish in his dark gipsy face. Any moment she expected him to disappear through a trapdoor in a puff of smoke.

‘Oim jolly well pleased to see you,’ he said.

‘Mimi goes to Paris at the week-end. I come over and see you. I have villa just behind the village. We might go riding or sailing together. I have been sailing in England, at Calves.’

‘Calves?’ said Imogen, puzzled.

‘Yes, in the Island of Wight.’

‘Oh, Cowes!’ She went off into peals of laughter. She found it impossible to take him seriously.

‘I love England, but I think your countrymen behave atrocious abroad.’

He was looking at James, who, with Mimi’s help was energetically lowering his country’s prestige on the other side of the floor.

‘Mimi make the distress signals,’ he said. ‘I must salvage her. A bientôt, ma cherie,’ and kissing Imogen fondly on both cheeks, he delivered her back to the table.

James asked her to dance, and then Nicky again and then James. Cable, refusing to leave the table and the champagne, was looking absolutely thunderous, and didn’t even cheer up when Nicky made the disc jockey play one of her favourite tunes.

Fate is conspiring against me, thought Cable bitterly. For the first few days of the holiday, everything had gone so well; she had succeeded in enslaving Nicky and James, irritating Yvonne, utterly overshadowing stupid naïve Imogen, and finally most important of all continually keeping Matt on the jump. She knew how upset he had been beneath that apparent imperturbability. She had felt the whole time as though she’d been driving a coach and five with complete success. But tonight, suddenly, she felt the reins slipping out of her hands. Matt had obviously enjoyed his day with Imogen and brought her back looking quite passable — at least Nicky and James and Antoine obviously thought so and were all over her. Men always went for anything new. Cable was further irritated that Antoine hadn’t reacted to her charms.

She’d always heard what a wolf he was and he wasn’t even flickering in her direction. As for that blousy overweight Mimi, even in the gloom of the disco everyone was turning their heads and staring at her in admiration.

In the same way, Cable supposed people would stare at an elephant if it came through the door. And then Nicky wasn’t being as tractable as usual. That very afternoon she’d caught him exchanging surreptitious but no less smouldering glances with a blonde nymphette at the water-skiing club. She’d have to give him some concessions soon. She drained her glass of champagne and banged it imperiously on the table.

‘Get another bottle,’ she ordered Matt.

Totally ignoring her, Matt turned towards Imogen, who was coming off the floor with James. Her hair was tumbled from dancing, her cheeks flushed, her breasts rising and almost falling out of the low cut dress.

‘My turn I think,’ he said, getting to his feet.

‘Beautiful, beautiful girl,’ said Antoine. ‘How I love Yorkshire girls.’

Nicky was about to agree with him, and claim responsibility for discovering her, then, glancing at Cable’s face, thought better of it.

‘Isn’t that Bianca Jagger over there?’ said James, peering through the gloom. ‘I’m going to ask her to dance.’

Imogen had been waiting to dance with Matt all evening. There was a thrill of excitement in the pit of her stomach, as, loose-jointed, he swayed in front of her, his lazy triangular eyes amused yet approving.

‘You’re having a good evening, darling. They’ve been after you like wasps round a water melon.’

‘It’s entirely due to you,’ she said. She looked across the room at Nicky and Cable who were deep in conversation. Nicky was holding Cable’s hand and apparently trying to calm her down.

‘I’m sorry it didn’t work — getting Nicky off Cable, I mean.’

Matt shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m not losing any sleep,’ he said. The music accelerated, the colours were shifting like a kaleidoscope. The floor was filling up and they were constantly thrown together. Matt put his hands on her shoulders to protect her. She was finding it difficult to breathe.

Suddenly, he buried his face in her neck. Her body turned to liquid.

‘You’ve been pinching Cable’s scent,’ he said.

‘Oh, goodness, I’m sorry,’ said Imogen, blushing crimson in confusion.

‘I don’t mind. Pinch away. It doesn’t suit you, that’s all. Too clinging.’ Imogen was about to say she felt clinging when Nicky came over.

‘Antoine’s off, James is about to be duffed up by the husband of a girl he’s convinced is Bianca Jagger, and Cable says she’s bored.’

‘And I’m in absolutely no hurry. Cable can do the waiting for a change,’ said Matt.

Imogen didn’t dare look in Cable’s direction, and tried not to feel elated, as they danced on for another two records by which time the table had emptied.

Outside they found Rebel, the black chauffeur, bearing a heavily embracing Antoine and Mimi away in the huge Rolls-Royce. Cable was crouched over the wheel of the Mercedes with Nicky beside her, an arm along the back of the seat.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ said Cable, furiously revving up the car.

‘Keeping you waiting,’ snapped Matt.

‘You and your darling protégée have been doing that all day.’

‘I should write to The Times about it if I were you,’ said Matt.

‘Stop sending me up,’ howled Cable. ‘You can both bloody well walk home,’ and, jamming her foot down on the accelerator, she thundered off down the coast road.

‘Oh dear,’ said Imogen in horror.

‘Silly bitch,’ said Matt totally unmoved. ‘Shall we walk? It’s only a mile or two. If you’re too knackered I’ll go back and ring for a taxi.’

‘Oh, no, I’d love to,’ said Imogen, unable to believe her luck.

‘Suits me,’ said Matt, taking her arm. ‘I want to have a closer butcher’s at Braganzi’s house on the way.’

After the day’s relentless heat, the night was warm and sultry. Compared with the stuffiness of the disco the air was sweet and smelt faintly of dew, wild thyme and the sea. The cicadas were cawing in the trees like frogs. Port-les-Pins glittered in its cove ahead of them, and every few seconds its northern jut of rock was bathed in a white beam from the lighthouse. Far above them everything in the sky, stars, planets, Milky Way, moon seemed to be out and twinkling eons away in their own heavens. And I’m so lit up they can probably see me twinkling away down here on earth too, thought Imogen. She was swaying slightly from drink and euphoria, but Matt steadied her, holding her above the elbow, gently stroking the inside of her arm with his thumb. He’s probably so used to caressing Cable, he does it automatically, she thought.

‘You’re too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off you,’ hummed Matt abstractedly.

They could see Braganzi’s house ghostly in the moonlight, its turrets thickly hung with creeper and silhouetted against the sky.

‘Is it really necessary to get to see him?’ said Imogen nervously. ‘Oughtn’t you to be relaxing on your holidays?’

‘All journalists are the same. Once they’ve got on to a scent they can’t let it alone, like dogs with a bitch on heat.’

They were only a hundred yards away now. There were two lights on upstairs with bars like lift gates over the windows. Perhaps one was the Duchess’s bedroom. Imogen imagined her brushing out her long dark hair with silver brushes with coronets on. She longed to open all the shutters like an Advent calendar and perhaps find the little baby asleep in one room or Braganzi plotting some dastardly crime in a black shirt and a white tie in another.

Outside the main gates, they could see a figure walking up and down with an Alsatian on a lead. The dog growled, the man stubbed out his cigarette and looked around. Imogen started to tremble.

‘Let’s have a look round the back,’ whispered Matt.

Fifteen foot high walls with another three feet of iron spikes, and rolled barbed wire on top of that, went almost all the way round the house, then divided at the back, running down to the sea and protecting Braganzi’s stretch of private beach.

‘The only way into the house is from the sea,’ whispered Matt, ‘and I bet that’s guarded night and day. He’s not taking any chances, is he? It’s worse than Colditz.’ He looked at the burglar alarms that clung like limpets to the walls of the house.

The brightness of the moonlight and the sweet heavy smell of tobacco plants and night-scented stocks made it all the more sinister.

‘Do let’s go,’ pleaded Imogen. She was sure the guard dogs could hear the frantic hammering of her heart. They were creeping close to the wall now. Suddenly she heard a tinny sound, as her foot hit something metallic.

‘Bugger,’ said Matt, bending down to look. ‘That’s probably an alarm.’

Next moment there was a frantic barking of dogs, and sounds of a door clanging.

‘They’ve rumbled us,’ gasped Imogen.

‘Come here,’ said Matt, and the next moment he’d pushed her down on the ground and was kissing her, tugging down the top of her dress, baring her shoulders. She could feel the rough scrub against her back, and taste the salt and brandy on his lips.

The growling grew closer and more ferocious.

Imogen wriggled in terror.

‘Lie still,’ muttered Matt, putting his full weight on her. ‘It’s a lovely way to go.’

Next moment the area was flooded with light. The dogs charged forward. It seemed they must rip them to pieces, and then suddenly the ferocious growling stopped not six inches away. Imogen’s French was not particularly fluent, but she could just make out Matt furiously asking what the bloody hell the guards thought they were doing as he pulled Imogen’s dress up over her shoulders.

The guards dragged the dogs off and made her and Matt get to their feet. Matt explained that they were holidaymakers who’d got separated from the rest of the party and decided to walk home, that they were staying at La Reconnaissance in Port-les-Pins. Then the guards frisked Matt and had a look at his wallet and his traveller’s cheques. Imogen nearly fainted when she saw that all four men had guns. They certainly took their time searching her, rough hands wandering into the most embarrassing places until Matt shouted at them to leave her alone.

Finally the guards conferred among themselves for a minute and then told them to be on their way, shouting something after them with a coarse laugh that Imogen didn’t understand. She could feel their eyes following her and Matt like eight prongs sticking into their backs.

‘Keep walking! Don’t look round,’ hissed Matt. ‘Thank Christ I didn’t have my passport on me, or they’d have rumbled us.’

After what seemed an eternity they rounded the corner, out of sight, with Port-les-Pins’s friendly lights winking just below them.

Imogen started to tremble violently.

Matt put his arms round her. ‘Darling, I’m terribly sorry. Are you all right?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I thought our last moment had come.’

He held her close to him and stroked her hair and her bare arms until the reassuring warmth of his body made her calmer.

‘But your reactions were like lightning,’ she stammered. ‘Pushing me on to the ground like that, then acting dumb and outraged like any old tourist caught in the act.’

Matt laughed and got a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket.

‘I always turn into a bumpkin at midnight. Anyway I’ve talked myself out of much worse trouble spots than that. All the same, I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have put you through it.’

‘What did they say as we were leaving?’

‘Next time I brought a bird up on to the cliffs for a quick poke to choose somewhere else.’

‘So they really believed you?’

Matt shrugged his shoulders. ‘They won’t tomorrow when they check up with the hotel.’

He was walking along with an arm round her shoulders now, and suddenly she felt choked with happiness almost to the point of tears, as it dawned on her how much, in spite of the danger, she’d enjoyed being kissed by him, and feeling the muscular weight of his body on top of her. She was still trembling, but not from fear.

‘He must be terrified of something to wire a place up like that.’

‘Losing the Duchess, I guess,’ said Matt.

They had dropped down into the port now. Lights from the boats shivered in the black water like fallen earrings; the forest of masts swayed gently against the stars. In the distance they could hear the faint splash of the sea as it rolled over and over on the white sand.

They came to an all-night café along the front. A few fishermen were drinking morosely at the bar; a tired-looking waitress had kicked off her shoes and was polishing glasses as though in her sleep.

‘What we need is immediate first aid,’ said Matt, and as he was ordering black coffee and triple brandies for them both, he suddenly turned round and smiled at her. The effect of him that close was so mind-blowing that her knees gave way. She had to fumble for a bar stool and clamber on to it.

‘Will you bother to go and see Antoine’s contact tomorrow?’ she asked, as they got their drinks.

‘If that doesn’t lead to anything, I’ll scrub the whole thing and preserve my energies for squabbling with Mrs Edgworth.’ He took her hand and she hoped he couldn’t feel the tremor that shot through her. ‘Look, angel, I’m really sorry you were frightened. When one’s had scraps with Provos, and white Rhodesians, and even Amin’s henchmen, as I have in my time, Braganzi’s hoods seem pretty small fry, but I know how terrifying it was for you.’

‘Honestly, I’m fine now.’ She could hardly tell him she’d never felt so happy in her life, and she thought he was the nicest man she’d ever met, and if he’d taken her in his arms, and thrown her down on the heath again, she wouldn’t have minded if the entire criminal world formed a shrieking witch’s coven round them. So instead she said, ‘What were Amin’s henchmen like?’

Then he told her about some of the trouble spots he’d been to and they had several more brandies by which time the stars were fading and the horizon was lightening to a pale turquoise. They walked back past the Bar de la Marine and the Plaza Hotel, with its striped umbrellas folded and its dozing doorman. They passed a few elderly homosexuals looking for comfort, and guitarists from the nightclubs sleepily twanging their way home.

‘You’re too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off you,’ hummed Matt.

At the reception area of La Reconnaissance with its one naked light bulb, he took down her key and extracted a dripping purple aster from the vase on the desk. Imogen ran upstairs pressing the lights and racing to catch the next switch before it went out and plunged them into darkness.

Outside her room, he stopped. ‘Good-night little accomplice,’ he said softly, handing her the dripping purple aster.

He’s going to kiss me, she thought in rapture. But as he bent his head and touched her lips a door flew open, and out charged a fat woman in a hair net, who barged past them and rushed down the passage to the lavatory. Next minute they heard the sound of terrible retching, and both collapsed with silent laughter.

Then suddenly another door opened and there was Cable wrapped in a dark green towel, a cigarette hanging from her scarlet lips.

‘And about bloody time too,’ she said.

Inside her room Imogen wandered around in a daze. Matt had kissed her. She knew how casual kisses could be, and they’d both been drinking all day. But she didn’t think Matt was a casual person. Port-les-Pins was teeming with beautiful girls but, unlike Nicky and James, beyond a cursory approving glance, he’d never shown much interest in any of them.

She looked in the mirror, and touched her lips where he’d kissed off all her lipstick, then ran her hands over her body with a shiver of excitement — a genius in bed Cable had said. But it wasn’t just the bed she wanted.

Wipe that silly grin off your face, she kept telling herself, you’re banking on too much. She lay down on the bed, but the room swung round and round, so she got up, and tried on all her new clothes, standing swaying on the bed to see them full length. Tomorrow she’d wear the pale green sundress, or perhaps the duck-egg blue shirt with most of the buttons undone like Cable did. She imagined Matt at this moment having a blazing row with Cable, saying it’s all over between us, I love Imogen.

You mustn’t hope, she told herself sternly, he loves Cable, he only gave you those clothes to get Nicky off her back, but the words made no sense to her.

I love him, I love him, she said, pressing her burning face in the pillow. Then she carefully put the purple aster between the pages of her diary, which wouldn’t shut now because of the yellow centre bit, and lay for a long time watching the sky lighten, listening to cocks crowing and cars starting up, and children shouting, before she fell asleep.