Something in Disguise (17 page)

‘She looks like some science fiction reptile – or very close-up of an insect, don’t you think?’ he remarked as they made their way back to the pool and its owner.
‘It’s partly the freckles – they pop up all over the place the moment you get her out of a night club.’

‘I must keep her out of night clubs then,’ said John tranquilly. ‘I’m devoted to her freckles.’

A telephone rang, and he got up to answer it. He was even taller than Oliver, Oliver realized, and he walked as though he had a low opinion of doorways. On either side of the breakfast table
terrace were square little pavilions – changing rooms, he supposed, beginning to get the hang of what to expect – and by one of these was a telephone. He picked up the instrument,
listened for a moment and said, ‘Well, well well!’ in tones of the mildest possible surprise.

Elizabeth said, ‘Come on! Swim!’ And before she could drag or push him into the water, he jumped. She followed him: she swam very well, and just as he was thinking how seldom –
since they were children – they had swum together, she said, ‘Do you realize that this is the first time we’ve been abroad together? At the same time, I mean?’

‘You mean together.’

‘No I don’t. I mean together at the same time.’

‘But if we’d been abroad together, it would have to have been at the same time.’ Then he saw what she meant and reached out to duck her head under, but she eluded him. The
water was so bright and light a blue that it was surprising the drops on her shoulders weren’t that colour.

‘Lovely water,’ he said.

‘John says it tastes of American prawns,’ she answered, and as she mentioned his name they both looked at him. He had finished telephoning, and was looking under breakfast covers.
‘He wants to eat,’ she said and swam fast and splashily to the side of the pool.

During breakfast the telephone rang twice more. The first time it was London and the second time New York. With the London call, John said, ‘Look here, you know how I love the sound of
your voice, but twice before breakfast is overdoing it.’ With the New York call he simply said, ‘Dear boy, I’ve known all that for half an hour: London told me,’ and put
back the receiver.

Oliver ate a huge breakfast and decided that he liked John: Elizabeth kept buttering croissants and then dipping them in cherry jam and
then
handing them to her lover and her brother. The
coffee was wonderful: there were fresh trout, Charentais melon and raspberries with thick, rich, slightly sour cream. John ate sparingly, Elizabeth hardly at all. She perched on the end of some
gaudy chaise-longue, licking cherry jam off her fingers and smiling gently as she looked from one to the other.

‘Like a little marmalade cat,’ John said. The sky was violet blue and the sun so sharply golden it was like some brilliant daydream, with each pair of them admiring the third so that
they took turns at being part of a conspiracy and the object of conspiratorial approval.

‘What happens next?’ Oliver asked, after another swim.

‘We’ve been asked to the local hotel for lunch – and swimming, of course. Up to you: it’s rather like here, really, but with more people. I have to go; but you two stay
here, if you like?’

‘Coming with you,’ Elizabeth said and then looked anxiously at Oliver.

‘Fine: anything,’ he said. The telephone rang again and when John had answered it, he said, ‘The secretary’s arrived. So up I go. Why don’t you take your brother
down to the sea?’

‘When will you be through?’

He looked at her again. Whenever either of them did this, the whole place became rich with sexual affection, Oliver noticed.

‘By lunch time,’ was all John said.

‘At the nauseating risk of sounding like Juliet’s nurse, I should say you’ve fallen on your back,’ Oliver remarked as they made their way down the blazing little
path.

‘Juliet’s nurse?’

‘Romeo’s Juliet’s nurse. Shakespeare’s Romeo’s Juliet’s nurse.’

‘All right, all right.’ She was walking ahead of him. She was wearing a lemon-coloured bathing suit that fitted her beautifully, and was excellent with the bronzed hair and freckles
and cream of her skin.

‘Did John choose that bathing suit?’

‘Yes. He likes choosing things, I told you. He’s jolly good at it.’

‘Do stop boasting about him.’

‘I can’t. You’re the first person I’ve had to boast
to
about him, so do be fair.’ A minute later she said.

‘I’ve got a ring this colour: it looks a bit like tarnished diamonds, but it’s something Portuguese called chrysolite.’ Then she added, ‘I’m so happy that
every day seems about like a week, and I can’t even imagine leaving
here
. It’s extraordinary how when everything is
being
perfect, the future simply doesn’t count at
all – there’s just what happened before, and
now
is everything else.’

Oliver was silent at this, because he had never been as happy as that, and everything she said simply made him start worrying about his future instead of not thinking at all about it, which was
what he had been doing before.

Just as he was going to ask her whether John and she were going to marry, she said, ‘So you see, in spite of your fears, I haven’t had to fall back on a chimpanzee: John says he
prefers
women with furry arms, and he says he’ll never let me be anybody’s bridesmaid –’

He decided not to ask: it was a woman’s question, anyway.

They had their bathe, and lay on rocks in the sun, until Elizabeth said Oliver was too new to lie about without blistering, even though she had rubbed what she described as marvellous stuff all
over his back.

‘Anyhow, John may be finished with letters.’

She had sprung to her feet.

‘So?’

‘I don’t want to miss any of him,’ she said.

They walked slowly back up the terraced cliff path to the villa. It was now very hot: their wet heads steamed; cicadas had reached their seemingly endless zenith; the smells of hot thyme,
juniper and resin from the pines thickened the hot and dazzling air. They slipped on sharp, slippery stones as they climbed: geckos froze into gracefully heroic attitudes as they approached, and
then, when they got too near, disappeared with jerky speed – like odd pieces of silent film pieced together; butterflies loitered, bees zoomed, there were no birds, no fresh water and no
shade. ‘A foreign land,’ thought Oliver, watching his sister climbing the path ahead of him. All morning, he had been seeing her for the first time as an outsider might regard her; a
sturdy body, slender still, because she was so young, but all a matter of neat, solid curves; she could never have passed as a boy.

When they reached the swimming pool, all the breakfast had been cleared away and the pool was blue and absolutely still except for one large moth trapped and drowning. Elizabeth, of course,
would rescue it if she noticed it, and he hoped that she wouldn’t but she did, so he helped by picking a fig leaf for the creature to rest and dry out on. ‘You realize how furry they
are when they’re wet,’ Liz said anxiously. She had gone into the pool and collected the moth on her dark glasses. ‘Fig leaves are awfully prickly, do you think it
minds?’

‘It’s about like us lying on coconut matting, but think how pleased you’d be with a piece of that if you’d been drowning.’

She looked at him gratefully. ‘Of course you would.’

‘Swimming pools always make me think of
The Blue Lagoon
.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t you read
any
thing? Or at least hear about things that other people read?’

‘Now I do. John reads every day of his life. Novels as well.’

‘A civilized man – not a ghastly specialist for a change,’ he said, but seriously, because he meant it, and not to hurt her feelings. But she simply picked up the fig leaf,
saying, ‘I think I’ll take this moth up with me.’

When they were on the move again, he asked, ‘What novels does he read?’

‘People called Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor. They’re his three favourites. He tries a new one from time to time, but he says they never seem to be so
good.’

‘Have
you
tried them?’

‘He reads them to me in bed sometimes. I really like it,’ she added looking nervously at him to see what he thought.

‘Fine, so long as it isn’t all you do in bed,’ he said and she stared at him with a mixture of shyness and bonhomie that was, or would be, if you weren’t her brother,
entirely irresistible.

‘It isn’t.’

The local hotel turned out to be Eden Roc, so Oliver realized that he might well meet Ginny before he was brown, and (worse) soon enough after Ginny’s arrival there for
her to think that he had followed her. Oh well, he thought while showering. Oh well, to hell with it, he thought half an hour later, when all three of them were having one drink on the terrace
before setting off. John wore a pair of dark linen trousers and an unremarkable silk shirt, open at the neck, but decorated with a silk scarf. That was the trouble. He was trying to get Elizabeth
to knot it, and she, of course, had not had enough practice at that kind of thing, Oliver thought, laughing inside from his kindly hide of adult experience.

‘Never mind,’ John said, ‘I’m probably too old for this kind of thing. Too balding and paunchy.’

‘You’re nothing of the kind,’ cried Elizabeth. ‘You just don’t hold yourself properly.’

‘
You
hold me properly,’ he replied in a low voice which was neither teasing nor intense: and over her head, met Oliver’s eye seriously, and then smiled: the smile
changed his face completely and Oliver realized that he might be old and not particularly good-looking, but that in his case, neither of these things mattered.

On the way to the hotel he told them about Ginny Mole – casually, but he didn’t want Liz letting him down by any display of vicarious enthusiasm or too much sisterly curiosity,
supposing that Ginny was lunching there and they
did
meet . . . supposing that she was lunching there which she easily might not be . . .

They went through the splendid, luxuriously cool hotel and on to the western terrace. The walk down its tremendously wide and shallow steps and gravel drive to the sea, Oliver thought and then
said, was very like anybody’s dream of the kind that they thought interesting but their audience invariably found dull. John agreed, and then went on that if you didn’t know enough
people who had boring dreams like that
and
told you about them, you could always go to a French film. In fact, a lot of those films were simply made by power-conscious dreamers who had hit
upon a method of mass boring people.

‘Still you can always leave a film: one couldn’t get away from her – jerking his head towards his sister – ‘and she went through a frightful period of telling you
every morning – following you about and telling you.’

‘When did I do that?’

‘It started when you were about ten. Morning after morning, we had accounts of your flimsy, indecisive,
interminable
sagas –’

She turned protesting to Cole, who took her arm saying, ‘I like the morning after morning part anyway.’

Oliver said, ‘Why
are
they so indecisive, I wonder? Other people’s dreams I mean –’

Elizabeth immediately said, ‘Because one’s forgotten the vital part: that’s why you want to tell it to people – you hope you’ll automatically remember. I can even
remember feeling that part of it: that something particularly marvellous had happened to me and somehow I couldn’t remember what it was.’

John said, ‘We must see to it that you don’t
always
feel that . . .’

Oliver said, ‘There’s Ginny! I mean,’ he added a moment later as they looked in vain, ‘it was someone who looked jolly like her. She came out of that gate there, and went
over there.’

‘Then she’ll be at the pool. We’ll go and have a look at it, to see if our hosts, the Dawsons, are still there.’

The swimming pool, cut out of the natural rock and slung above the sea, intensely blue and sheltered and sunny, was not thickly populated: most people had gone to change and drink and eat, but
just as they were leaving, a figure rose from behind a rock whom Oliver immediately identified as Ginny.

Ginny was coming towards them on her way out, but she was doing this so moodily, that she did not see them until the last minute when Oliver accosted her with elaborate coolth, as Elizabeth
afterwards pointed out to John. She wore a bikini and sun glasses, both white. She was very small, and delicately made; a sharply indented waist, small, pointed breasts, and arms and legs that gave
the impression that their owner hardly ever used them in case they broke. All flesh visible was the colour of heather honey: her hair was black and long.

‘Oh Oliver,’ she replied, rather as though she had known he would be there, but as an afterthought.

‘What an amazing thing,’ she added looking up from the minute pebble that she had been scuffing along with small bare feet.

Oliver explained that Elizabeth was his sister, and John Cole was John Cole.

‘John
Cole
?’ Ginny said, and pushed her huge dark glasses on to the top of her head. ‘You’ve got a villa up the road haven’t you? The one Mummy used to have
when she was married to Jean-Claude?’ Her eyes were like horizontal diamonds from a pack of cards and the colour of dog violets. ‘You must be Jennifer’s father.’ She looked
at him, at Elizabeth, and back to him with distinct interest.

‘Come and have a drink with us,’ said John easily. ‘And tell me where you met Jennifer.’

‘We were at Lausanne together and we would have gone to Florence only Mummy was having such ghastly trouble over my maintenance. One thing I’ll never do and that is get divorced in
Mexico – it may seem the simplest thing in the first place, but there’s no end to the complications. I say, I can’t have a drink with you,’ (she had seized Oliver’s
wrist and twisted his watch towards her) ‘I’ve got to change and have lunch on some filthy yacht with the most boring people in the world. Do you think if one
fined
people like
that for being boring they’d get better? A hundred quid an hour and a bonus if they laughed at their own non-joke? ’Bye then.’ She dropped Oliver’s wrist as though it was
some kind of barrier and prowled lightly away.