The Other Side of Silence

FOUR

For a couple of weeks my arrangement with Anne French worked well. She was a quick study and took to the game like a new deck and a dealer’s shoe. She wasn’t a bad cook and I even managed to put on a few extra pounds. Best of all, she made a hell of a gimlet, the kind you can taste and feel for hours afterward. This might even be why, once or twice, I got the idea she wanted me to kiss her, but I managed to resist the temptation, which is unusual for me. Temptation is not something I can easily avoid when it comes wearing Mystikum behind its rose petal ears and you can see its smaller washing still hanging on the line outside the kitchen door. It wasn’t that I didn’t find her attractive, or that I couldn’t have used a little affection—or that I didn’t like her underwear—but I’ve been bitten so many times that I’m as twice shy as the wild pigs that came into the trees at the bottom of her garden after dark and truffled around for something to eat. Shy and apt to think that someone might have a rifle pointed at my ear. Meanwhile, I continued going to La Voile d’Or for my biweekly game and my life continued along the same monotonous path as before. Life can be appreciated best when you have a regular job and a goodish salary and you can avoid thinking about anything more important than what’s happening in Egypt. At least, that’s what I told myself. But one night Spinola was drunk—too drunk to play bridge—and I was actually pleased because it gave me an excuse to call Anne to see if she wanted to take the Italian’s place at the table. I was disappointed to discover, first that she wasn’t at home and second that I was more disappointed than I told myself was appropriate, given everything I’d told myself and her about not getting involved with hotel guests. Meanwhile, the Roses drove Spinola home in their Bentley, which left me alone on the terrace with a last drink and cigarette, wondering if I should drive to Anne’s house in Villefranche and look for her in case she hadn’t heard the telephone or chosen not to answer it. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, and I was just about to do it all the same when an Englishman with a little dog spoke to me.

“I see you here a lot,” he said. “Playing bridge, twice a week. I say, aren’t you the concierge at the Grand Hôtel?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “When I’m not playing bridge.”

“It is rather addictive, isn’t it?”

He was probably about forty but looked older. Overweight and a little sweaty, he wore a double-breasted linen blazer, a white shirt with overextended double cuffs and gold links that looked like a modest day on the Klondike, gray cavalry twill trousers, a silk tie that was the color of a South American jaguar, and a matching silk handkerchief that was spilling out of his top pocket as if he were about to conjure a bunch of fake flowers, like a cheap magician. He was the same man I’d seen arguing outside the hotel entrance with Harold Hennig.

“Hello, I’m Robin Maugham.”

“Walter Wolf.”

We shook hands and he waved the waiter toward us. “Buy you a drink?”

“Sure.”

We ordered drinks, some water for the dog, lit our cigarettes, took a table on the terrace facing the port, and generally tried to behave normally, or at least as normal as you can when one man isn’t homosexual and knows that the other man is, and the other man is fully aware that the first man understands all that. It was a little awkward, perhaps, but nothing more than that. I used to believe in a moral order, but then so did the Nazis, and their idea of moral order included murdering homosexuals in concentration camps, which was more than enough for me to change my own opinions. After the orgy of destruction Hitler inflicted upon Germany, it seems pointless to give a damn about what one man does in a bedroom with another.

“You’re German, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s all right. I’m not one of these Englishmen who doesn’t like Germans. I met a lot of your chaps in the war. Solid men, most of them. In forty-two I was in North Africa with the 4th County of London Yeomanry, in tanks. We were up against the DAK—the Deutsches Afrikakorps—which was the 15th Panzer Division in my neck of the woods. Good fighters, what? I’ll say so. I sustained a head injury at the Battle of Knightsbridge, which ended my war. At least that’s what we called it. Strictly speaking, it was the Battle of Gazala but one always thinks of it as the Battle of Knightsbridge.”

“Why?”

“Oh. Well, that was the code name for our defensive position on the Gazala line: Knightsbridge. But to be quite honest there were so many chaps I knew in the 8th Army from Eton and Cambridge and my Inn of Court that it sometimes felt as if one was shopping in Knightsbridge. Not that I was an officer, mind. I joined up as an ordinary trooper. On account of the fact that I was a bit of a bolshie. And just to pay my own bar bills, so to speak. I never much liked all that damned officer malarkey.”

He made it all sound like a long day in the cricket field.

“What about you, Walter?”

“I was well behind our lines and quite safe in Berlin. A man without honor, I’m afraid. Too old for all that. I was a captain in the Intendant General’s Office. The Catering Corps.”

“Ah. I begin to see a pattern.”

I nodded. “Before the war I worked at the Hotel Adlon.”

“Right. Everyone stays at the Adlon. Grand Hotel. The film, I mean. Vicki Baum, wasn’t it? The Austrian writer.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thought so. I’m a writer myself. Books, plays. Working on a play right now. A comedy that’s based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. It’s about a man who has three daughters.”

“There’s a coincidence.”

Maugham laughed. “Quite.”

“I suppose it would be too much of a coincidence if you were not related to the other Maugham who lives around here.”

“He’s my uncle. Matter of fact, he used to know Vicki Baum, when he was living in Berlin before the first war.”

The drinks arrived and Robin Maugham grabbed his glass of white wine off the waiter’s tin tray with the impatience of the true drunk. I should know; my own greenish glass had taken on the aura of the holy grail.

“He likes Germans, too. Willie. That’s what we call the old man. Speaks it fluently. On account of the fact that before med school he spent a year at the University of Heidelberg. Uncle Willie loves Germany. He’s particularly fond of Goethe. Still reads it in German. Which is saying something for an Englishman, I can tell you.”

“Then we have something in common.”

“You too, eh? Jolly good.”

It was easy to see that Robin Maugham was a playwright. He had an easy way of speech about him, a talky, bantering sort of chat that concealed as much as it revealed, like a character you knew was going to prove much more consequential than he seemed if only by virtue of his prominence on the theater bill.

“You know, what with the bridge and the German, perhaps you’d like to make up a four at the Villa Mauresque one night. The old man is always keen to meet interesting new people. Of course, he’s notoriously private, but I’ll hazard a guess that the concierge at the Grand Hôtel—not to mention someone who worked at the famous Adlon—well, that person must be used to keeping a few confidences, what?”

“I’d be delighted to come,” I said. “And you needn’t worry about my mouth.”

I thought about Anne French and what she might say when I told her I’d been invited up to the Villa Mauresque. It was possible she would perceive my invitation as an affirmation of her own strategy: to learn bridge in order to meet Somerset Maugham. But it seemed equally possible that she would see it as some kind of betrayal. And while for a brief moment I considered simply not telling her in order to spare her feelings, it seemed to me that my being there at all could only help to facilitate her own invitation. Alternatively, I might be her spy and report on how things really were at the Villa Mauresque, providing her with the color she needed for her book.

“But I feel I ought to read one of his novels,” I said. “I’d hate to have to admit that I haven’t read any. Which one would you recommend?”

“A short one. My own favorite is The Moon and Sixpence. Which is about the life of Paul Gauguin. I’ll lend you my own copy if you like.”

Robin Maugham looked at his watch. “You know, it occurs to me that we could still make dinner at the villa. That is if you haven’t already dined. Willie keeps a very good table. Annette, our Italian cook, is wonderful. Willie was in a good mood today. Rather absurdly, an invitation to the forthcoming wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly in Monaco seems to have left him as delighted as if he was getting married himself.”

“I got an invitation myself but sadly I shall have to decline. It would mean finding all my decorations and buying a new suit, which I can ill afford.”

Robin smiled uncertainly.

I looked at my own watch.

“But sure. Let’s go. I don’t mind interrupting my alcohol consumption with some food.”

“Good.” Robin drained his wineglass, scooped up the terrier, and pointed toward the end of the terrace. “Shall we?”

I climbed into my car and followed the Englishman’s red Alfa Romeo up the hill and out of the town. It was a lovely warm evening with a light sea breeze and an edge of coral pink in the blue sky as if some nearer Vesuvius were in fiery eruption. Behind us the lightly clad myrmidons of Hermès filled the many waterside restaurants and narrow streets, while the miniature Troy that was the little port of Cap Ferrat bristled with innumerable tall masts and hundreds of invading white boats that jostled for undulating position on the almost invisible glass water, as if it mattered a damn where anyone was going or anyone came from. It certainly didn’t matter to me.