by Ursula Bloom
Mein Herr brought up the meal, set the tray down, and handed Ann the newly-laundered lingerie, with a rather embarrassing attention to detail. ‘I put them how you wear him,’ he explained, and laid them out along the ottoman sofa.
Ann found herself reddening, though she ought to have become accustomed, really she ought. To these foreign people underclothes and bedrooms and general intimacy were not things of which you were ashamed. You accepted them. Mein Herr arranged the garments with admirable knowledge of their sequence and, smiling encouragingly, he departed again. He never gave it a second thought.
But you could not go on with this distressing shortness of attire. On the third day Ann toiled all the way down to the village to send a cable to the purser at Ragusa entreating him to hurry up and to send her her luggage. She toiled down the mountain side, through the forest, taking care not to slip, and it was very difficult. When she arrived at the little cottage, which was also labelled ‘Polizist’ and in an outer shed of which the fire-engine was housed, she remembered that the ship would have left Ragusa for England. All this walk and for nothing, only herself to blame which made it a little more maddening. The toil back to the hostel was not easy. It was a good deal steeper going up than it had been coming down. The late afternoon seemed to grow disobligingly hotter instead of cooler. It seemed to her that the distance came no nearer, walk as she would. Instead of it being cool under the fragrant boughs of the Tannenbaum she found it far hotter. In the steepest parts she was reduced to going upwards clinging to the dry tufts of grass above her. She was very late indeed, and very cross. When she eventually got back to the inn she found a letter from Cuthbert. Cuthbert was outraged. He could not understand what had come over his sister; he could only think ‒ and he stated this quite baldly ‒ that she must have gone a little queer in her head. To behave like this! Such a reflection on his life, and on Eleanor’s life, and on poor dear Gloria’s life too! Blighted in the bud, so to speak.
Ann could not follow his line of argument at all. His letter had the effect of egging her on to do worse. It incensed her. On the veranda she saw Pablo straddling the balustrade and singing softly to himself.
He said, ‘Good news, I trust?’
‘No news from my home is good,’ and then wearily, ‘I went to the village to cable for clothes, and then remembered the ship had sailed. What am I to do?’
‘But you look most nice. You are pretty. I like you like that. I not mind if you haf no clothes,’ and he went on singing.
He did not seem to understand that he had said something quite dreadful. Or did he? She had a vague suspicion that perhaps he did. She turned, feeling her colour coming, and she went into the house.
Chapter 3
I
Sex is a strange factor in life.
It was just as though it had taken Ann and Pablo and had shut all the rest of the world away; they had to act out their own romance, come what would. She felt it coming, and she was afraid of the new Ann who lived inside the old Ann, and who acted so bewilderingly. She did not understand how far the new Ann might go.
Pablo’s outrageous remarks; his calm acceptance of life in the more intimate phases. For instance that morning when the old priest came to the inn. The old man was doing a walking tour clad in a time-greened cassock and propped by a stout ‘stock’. He came in for a rest and was irritable and demanding, sending mein Herr running this way and that, and complaining to the Frau about the badness of the beer and the poorness of the kleine Kuchen. Nothing suited him.
‘A thoroughly cross old man,’ said Ann when they watched him depart.
‘He what you call celibate,’ Pablo explained, ‘it make man angry. Man not meant to live without woman. It good for him and make him more pleasant to his fellows.’
She should have been shocked, but queerly enough she was only surprised at the frankness of his admittance of the male need. ‘People do not talk like that in England,’ she told him.
‘Oh nein. In England,’ and he laughed, ‘there are no men and no women in England. No love, no making love, just all pretend.’
‘You shouldn’t say things like that.’
‘Why not? They are true.’
He refused to argue. She felt that she ought to pull him up, but unfortunately it was not so easy as that. Besides, he fascinated her; he fascinated her by his strange contrast to the world that had been hers. She told herself that Eva should not have left her so much alone with Pablo. Eva Temple was one of those women who love new friends. She loved making new acquaintances, enquiring into their lives, learning all about them, and then, when she had sucked their store of information dry, passing on to pastures new. Perhaps she had learnt all that she wanted to learn of Ann. Anyway the first few days at the inn she was not seeing much of her.
The absence of Eva flung Ann into the friendship with Pablo. It grew on the instant. It was big and blooming before she could cut it down inside herself. The moment she had realized its bigness, it was too late. She could not stay it.
He had sex attraction. He had the physical beauty of youth that she had never met before. The friends of her father and Cuthbert had not been beautiful, they had been hideously clothed. They had not been developed. In the office there had only been Londoners, muffled in smart overcoats, nothing to attract, nothing that she had found noticeable, just people. But Pablo was a personality. To her he was a god.
‘I shock you, you tell me,’ he said, ‘but then you are so virgin. So shy.’
‘You say things you should not say.’
‘About love? Ah well,’ and he laughed. ‘Tell me, do you not sometimes theenk of love?’
‘Never,’ she said, and thanked heaven that it was ‒ or rather until recently it had been ‒ true.
He took her arm in his hand, and he shook it a little. ‘What if I make you theenk … what if I make you …?’
Providence mercifully aided her.
They heard the rumble of wheels on that rough road which twined through the last part of the forest to the hostelry. It had been made one winter, mein Herr said, and he was proud of it. It was rough in the extreme, it had no surface at all. Horses slipped on it, cars refused it, yet every now and then some vehicle more intrepid than the others would come up from the village bringing new guests to the inn. Instantly Pablo was all thrilled. He peered forward with a childlike interest.
‘Mein Herr said new peoples come to-day.’
He pointed through the break in the trees to where a dilapidated old car had come to an unoiled standstill. An Englishman, wearing the peculiar clothes Englishmen on holiday do wear, had alighted. He was expostulating with the driver. Standing in the car, collecting smart patent-leather luggage together, was a young girl.
‘But she is schönste,’ said Pablo admiringly.
Ann stared. Fuzzy gold hair, not guiltless of peroxide; a too red mouth, plaintive blue eyes. She decided that she did not like her.
‘No brain,’ said Pablo, ‘nuzzing but the body.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How I say? She knows love. She understand love and what love would ask, thees Mrs. Temple.’
‘Mrs. Temple? But that’s Eva?’
‘Nein, thees is also Mrs. Temple. It not matter.’
A horrid thought darted through Ann’s brain. The world is small; surely this could not be Herbert Temple and his chit?
She looked chittish enough in all conscience, and had not Pablo himself admitted that she was all body?
‘You don’t think …?’ she began.
‘Ya?’
‘You don’t think that it could be Eva’s husband and his second wife? It … it’s rather dreadful, but she divorced him.’
Pablo nodded. He did not think it was dreadful at all, it was just the usual thing, and he could understand any man sickening of Eva. Much too prim. A prude. Far too proper, ‘Oh ya,’ he said, ‘divorce, I see.’
But the world is bigger than that, Ann told herself. It must be. She watched them as they entered
the inn. They would be safe enough at the moment for Eva was out painting, and would not be back until the shadows grew long. Ann waited until she thought that the register would be signed, and the form of identification and all the rest of the paraphernalia which was insisted on, then she tip-toed into the salon. Mein Herr and the Frau had escorted the new arrivals upstairs, where there seemed to be some little discussion about the bedrooms in progress. Seeing that they were a married couple, mein Herr, who had all the good Teuton belief in a comfortable double bed, and no nonsense about it, had put one room aside for them. It appeared that they wanted two. The chit ‒ if of course it were the chit ‒ did not wish to sleep with Herbert ‒ if it were Herbert. She was explaining quite frankly that he snored too much for that, and she couldn’t stand it. She must have another room and she would prefer a choice. So mein Herr, the Frau, and the chit were peeping into all the unoccupied rooms, while the despised Herbert, left entirely to himself, rather ruefully proceeded to unstrap his luggage. He had apparently no interest in the room the chit chose, seeing that he would not be allowed inside it.
It gave Ann a noble opportunity, and she went to the corner of the salon, which was screened off by a dilapidated screen labelled Bureau in large inked letters on a cardboard box-lid. There on the little desk lay the register open and still wet. Mr. Herbert Temple. No occupation. Nationality, British. Aged forty-nine. From Budapesth. Mrs. Gwynneth Dolores Temple. No occupation. Nationality, British. Aged twenty-three. Also from Budapesth.
It did not help very much, for, as Ann told herself, there must be lots of Herbert Temples in the world. Yet she was still suspicious. It would be so awkward and just the sort of thing that the fates delight in. She felt that she ought to protect her friend just in case. Eva and Madame Heriot had taken sandwiches and were out to lunch in the forest, therefore Mittagsessen was a very friendly affair. Mr. and Mrs. Temple, Ann and Monsieur Heriot, and Pablo. Everyone was very amiable with each other except perhaps Mr. Temple and his wife. He had been distinctly galled by the affair of the bedroom. So humiliating, that, and as if it could matter how much anyone snored just for a couple of nights!
Gwen had taken to Pablo, just as Pablo had taken to Gwen. They talked animatedly and quickly together, and their voices were not raised loud enough to permit of the rest of the table hearing, for Monsieur Heriot, who was a distinctly French eater ‒ almost as bad as the young Frenchman on the cruise ‒ rather drowned any but the loudest noises.
Mein Herr ran to and fro as fast as his fat legs would go. Finally when the meal had arrived at the fruit and coffee, he heaved a sigh of relief. When there were so many it made it more difficult, but more money, and the money went a long way.
‘We shall be rich,’ the Frau assured him, ‘our inn is getting known more and more, soon the whole world will know of heem.’
And she liked to imagine the whole world pouring in to be housed there, and mein Herr running about on his funny little fat legs trying to get them served.
Afterwards, while Pablo showed young Mrs. Temple the first threshold of the forest with the red and white lilies, and the great gentians and the columbines, Ann talked to Herbert Temple. She tried to pump him, but he told her little. No, they had not been married long, and he had always been interested in travelling. He had found it very pleasant wandering about Europe with someone gay and young and enthusiastic like Gwen. They had been everywhere together. Iceland, and Norway, Holland and Germany, Italy, Hungary, and now here. Gwen had always wanted to come to the Dolomites, but he had not been anxious.
‘But why not? It is such a beautiful part of the world?’ Ann urged.
He said, a little apologetically, ‘You see, I’ve been married before ‒ not very happily ‒ and my first honeymoon was spent in the Tyrol.’
Then Ann knew that he was the Herbert Temple!
II
Ann went out among the trees. ‘I will stay here,’ she promised herself, ‘and when I see Eva coming, I’ll call her aside, and tell her. It would be dreadful for her to come bursting in on this scene unexpectedly.’ Whilst she was sitting there on a fallen log waiting, Pablo and the chit went by. They did not see her. They were entirely occupied with themselves. That hurt Ann, to see them like that. She had not believed that man could be so fickle, for so recently Pablo had appeared to be attracted by her. She had woven her own dreams about him. She had hoped … Silly, of course, but you cannot help your dreams. They are a cobweb illusion thrown about your brain.
Now he was looking at the chit in the same languorous way as he had looked at Ann. And he had admitted the chit had no brain, only a body. It sent cold shivers down her back, it hurt her a little more than that. She had a sudden longing for the security and peace of that rut and routine of Henrietta Street and South Kensington, where this sort of thing did not happen.
It was providential that she did not speak German, for while she was sitting here awaiting the return of Eva, more than a little disturbed as to how her friend would take the news, mein Herr and Sophie were in the wood shed, which was alongside. They were conversing freely, for the Frau would be resting, and they believed that the land lay clear. The Frau was large and ample, and she found it convenient to rest a little during the late afternoon before occupying herself with the evening meal, therefore there was no need for caution on their part. Mein Herr and Sophie carried on their liaison mainly in the wood shed, and though not very comfortable they found it acceptably shadowy. It was really quite convenient. Their voices were raised a little. ‘Liebchen, Liebchen, aber du bist meine …’
And from Sophie, ‘Nein, nein, kommst du …’
All of which conveyed nothing at all to Ann who was sitting there awaiting Eva Temple. Finally she came. She carried her easel heavily, as though she were very tired, and she did not look too well pleased to see Ann there in an attitude of patient resignation.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I was hoping to see you first. I want to have a word with you. Things have been happening in the inn.’
‘Things?’
‘Yes. There are two newcomers, I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘Their name is Temple, too.’
Eva gave a start. ‘You don’t think it could be Herbert? I mean Temple is quite a common name, but ‒’
Ann gulped, ‘His name is Herbert, because I looked in the register. He put it down as Herbert Temple, and he is forty-nine.’
‘My God,’ said Eva, ‘it is Herbert!’
‘And her name ‒’
‘You don’t mean that she is here too? That chit?’
‘Yes, she is.’
‘Oh, but this is monstrous!’ Eva flung the easel down and stood there armed only with a camp-stool, and staring a little wildly. ‘What a horrible thing for them to do! How on earth did they come to hear of this place? It isn’t the sort of place where you’d expect to have your divorced husband turning up, is it?’
‘Well, no, of course not.’
All Ann’s early training said, ‘Only why have a divorced husband at all? Why not have tried to make the best of your marriage, instead of letting it come to this?’ But of course she could not say it aloud. She could do nothing but sit there, very still, and rather quiet, and try to help as best she could. It was a dreadful situation for Eva.
‘What’s she like?’ asked Eva after a moment, womanly curiosity stifling her natural reluctance to speak of the chit.
‘She’s rather common-looking. Yellow hair …’
‘Dyed, of course.’
‘I rather thought so.’
‘I know the type. Blue baby eyes, and cheap rouge and all that. Where is she now?’
‘She’s been out walking with Pablo.’
‘She would be. That nasty physical young man who looks like a cheap musical comedy thrill would be her sort. Poor Herbert! Still, it serves him right for having brought her here. They must go. They must go right away. I never heard of such a thing.’
But she still showed a diffidence in approaching the inn. And as she stood there, maudlin sentiments mouthed in German suddenly pierced her comprehension from the wood shed.
‘Oh, mein Becchützelein.’
And then tenderly, ‘Möcht ich mit dir …’
‘I suppose the chit isn’t in there?’ demanded Eva hotly, pointing to the wood shed with the business-end of the camp-stool.
‘No, I think it is mein Herr.’
‘Then he ought to be ashamed of himself. I suppose it is that fat kitchen-maid again; still, that’s no concern of ours. Let’s get into the house without being seen, then I had better make sure that it is Herbert. Not that there is any doubt, and then, well, perhaps a note.’
‘I could take him a note,’ said Ann helpfully; ‘it is most awkward for you, and having her here too.’
‘Except that at the moment she isn’t here, and if I know anything of that type of young woman, she won’t be here until after dark. Not seeing who she is with.’
Ann was hurt that Eva should think like that of Pablo. She had been particularly injured by the allusion to him as a ‘nasty physical young man who looked like a cheap musical comedy thrill’, but she adopted an air of Christian forgiveness. After all, Eva was in such a position that quite possibly she did not know what she was saying. She needed friendship. Together they approached the hostelry.
It happened that Herbert Temple, who felt the heat and had gone to lie down during the hottest period of the afternoon, had just decided that his chit’s absence was a little prolonged. He had gone to her room, and had found it in that superb state of chaos in which she habitually left it. Intimate underwear lying about, a lot of blue bows and écru lace scattered everywhere. There was the pervading essence of Patchouli scent, which she frequently used and in far too large quantities, and which he disliked intensely. The chit herself was missing. Marriage had taught Herbert that she was very seldom missing alone, and so he had come downstairs with the idea of seeing who was to blame this time.
