‘No, thanks. I’ll go to bed. Wine always makes me sleepy.’
‘Just as you wish, my dear.’
The dining room was crowded, and the scene a gay and animated one.
Angell eased his stomach against the table and said: ‘What an extraordinary lot of people there are in this hotel. Abroad, I think the English are seldom seen to advantage – and this stratum of English society shows up almost the worst: that is the well-to-do lower middle-class. Of course one has to admit that most of the people here are enjoying the benefits of a package deal, so that they are experiencing a higher quality of hotel than they are normally used to—’
‘Like us,’ said Pearl, to tease.
He frowned but was not put out. ‘Ours is a special case. What I was endeavouring to say was that these English people show up so badly against the other people here. The women’s dress is quite appalling, the men tip the head-waiter and then expect to be treated like lords. They fuss about the food as they would never dare to do at a comparable hotel in England, they complain as if they were used to something better instead of something worse. They talk in loud voices, they try too hard to impress. They have no taste. Above all they have no taste.’
Pearl looked at him in affectionate amusement. She hadn’t seen it like that, but now it was pointed out she did see it like that. Yet it was not so long since he used to talk loudly in restaurants. This was one of the ways in which she had been able to influence him. They learned from each other. Her own taste, she thought now, had been pretty awful two years ago. It was fantastic how far and how quickly one progressed. Wilfred, she thought, must have been more badly smitten than one realized, to have overlooked her gaucheries at that time and have married her in spite of them.
Wilfred was still muttering. ‘I suppose it’s more difficult to judge other nationalities, but there are not more than ten English in this hotel I would care to talk to. One wonders at the acreage of prosperous desolate suburbs in which these people breed.’
They were near the end of the meal when the two Frenchmen were shown in to a recently vacated table. The big one, Gaston, half bowed to Pearl as he was sitting down, but she averted her eyes.
Wilfred said: ‘I think of these very pleasant things we have to go back to. How lucky we were to get that Queen Anne snuffbox. It’s in such rare condition – and the price was reasonable. Someday we must try to get one of the Archbishop Sancroft type. Although they are so dear, one is almost certain of a continuing rise.’
‘There was a George III box in a shop in Beaumont Street. But it had bits of gold on it and it seemed overpriced.’
‘Oh, that’s a Linnit. You should get one of those for £250.’
‘That’s what it was! How clever of you to know. But I thought for George III it was a bit much.’
They finished their meal.
She said: ‘Are you playing bridge tonight?’
‘Yes, I told you.’
‘Who is it with?’
‘The Wests and the Rowlands. They’re civilized people. But I told you that too.’
‘Did you? Sorry. I think I’ll go to bed. All that scrambling over rocks.’
He took out a cigar. ‘One of the signal virtues of collecting silver is that it has an intrinsic value apart from its value to the collector. The intrinsic value of a painting, to put it crudely, is the value of the frame and the canvas. Values of the paintings themselves can therefore fluctuate with the taste of the time. Values in antique silver can hardly depreciate, (a) because only so much of it has ever been made, and (b) because the price of the metal is constant or more frequently rising.’
‘Wilfred,’ she said, ‘when we get home let’s go over all your things once again, piece by piece, just to see if there is anything you can part with – to sell at a good profit. Unless we buy a new house there just isn’t going to be room for anything more.’
He looked at her speculatively over the top of his glasses, which he had put on to cut his cigar. He noticed that she was wearing the diamond clip he had recently bought.
‘We’ve been over this before, my dear. You know how I hate to lose something I’ve grown fond of.’
They were still looking at each other, and the words came to be double charged.
She smiled. ‘Well, yes, but there are things. Apart from me. That lacquer secretaire, for instance. If we selected a few things carefully it might give us a couple of thousand to spend on something new.’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘ We could do it together.’
‘Yes, we could do it together.’
He lit his cigar and said expansively between puffs: ‘I think we should try a French wine tomorrow. This is a pleasant table wine but it lacks finesse.’
Pearl finished her glass, gulping it rather quickly. ‘All right. What I would like now, though, is a liqueur. Would they have a green Chartreuse?’
‘Of course.’ He ordered the liqueurs and she sipped it appreciatively. Her eyes were lighting up.
He said: ‘ We have ten more days here, with really nothing to do except sit in the sun. Do you think you will be bored?’
‘No, oh no, I’ll not be bored! If you aren’t. I adore getting brown!’
‘I think I like you looking sun-tanned,’ he said.
They sat in silence while he finished his cigar. When it was nearly gone his table napkin slipped off his knee. The waiters were all busy so he bent to pick it up for himself. As he did so Pearl happened to meet the eye of the big Frenchman sitting at the nearby table. He was eating lobster, and his white teeth seemed very much in evidence.
He again inclined his head slightly at Pearl, and this time she smiled back at him over her husband’s shoulder quite, quite brilliantly.
Copyright
First published in 1970 by Collins
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Angell, Pearl and Little God Page 46
