by Simon Raven
Very well then, assume the task successfully completed, an agreement arrived at, what followed? Obviously that it was Trito who had gathered all the information, — and his position for the task was unrivalled — from the past history of Sandra's husbands to the present engagement of himself as tutor; and furthermore, that in all probability he, Trito, had been consulted by Chynnon about the advisability of employing Esme as an extra hand, had presumably (if reluctantly) consented, and had then proceeded to withhold vital information from Esme (witness the absence of Gomery from the list he had been given), information which in any case he was probably going to keep to himself, lest Chynnon should trace the secret by his own efforts and thus see no necessity to produce a reward. As for his complicity with Esme — well he might indulge it! It was hardly likely that Esme would start carrying tales of any sort, even if he believed himself unsuspected in his own particular line. Take it a little further: somehow or other Trito had also got on Gomery's trail, had taken good care, as he believed, to see that Esme didn't, and was not, unnaturally, extremely anxious to get to Biarritz on his own account. Terence at Biarritz was just where Trito wanted him — had he not announced his intention of following them with Sandra? Meanwhile the innocuous Esme, as Trito conceived it all, would be fiddling about in blissful ignorance of Uncle Bill's importance and to no good effect whatever, and would finally be sent home, forty odd pounds to the good, but otherwise no further on.
But this raised an objection. Why had he, Esme, been employed at all? Granted Chynnon still thought he had a real if slender chance of solving the mystery, wasn't it enough to have Trito working for him — especially if the addition of Esme gave Trito cause for annoyance? This it would almost certainly do, what with the possibility both of competition and interference. And if they so far distrusted him that they had employed him without telling him he had an ally, why hadn't they just observed him for a few weeks, instead of committing Mr Chynnon to expense and perhaps to risk at the moment of his commencing as tutor and on the strength of his not really very villainous past?
Still, if this new hypothesis created a minor difficulty, it solved many major ones. It solved the whole problem of Trito's behaviour: and it settled the question of the very arbitrary list Chynnon had given Esme. For he no longer had any worries on Chynnon's score: indeed it was Chynnon who was being taken for the ride by Trito. Yes, that was obviously it. In the same way as he himself, for various reasons, had told Chynnon nothing at all, Trito, likewise, was holding out on the old man — hoping no doubt to produce the information as a fait accompli and collect his prize on the spot. They neither of them, Esme or Trito, wanted Chynnon muddling round Uncle Bill and getting the story for himself.
But if from the point of view of logic this was all highly satisfactory, from other points of view it was quite the reverse. So far Esme had believed that, on the whole and despite the possibility of Chynnon's duplicity, he, Esme, was the only man living on the trail of the Acre secret. Even so things were quite hard enough. But under the newly developed Trito hypothesis, the doctor's hitherto unexplained zeal for the toys to visit Biarritz could now be interpreted in one light only. Trito also was on the track of Uncle Bill. True, he had given Esme, whom he did not know to be in the running, an odd seven days' start; but now, instead of assessing the position with care and getting slowly and tactfully to work, Esme would have to blast the secret straight out of Uncle Bill and have it safely in Chynnon's hands, all, if his success was to be assured, within a week. It was a discouraging prospect. He could only be thankful that his revelation, though late, was not too late. At least he knew how he stood. They were now about two hours off Biarritz: the two hours would expire — and then the race was on.
XIV
As they arrived very late it was not until the next morning that they had a chance to examine their surroundings.
The Hotel du Palais started life and ended it as a royal residence. It is now a morgue. But a particularly interesting morgue, because in it you are enabled to observe every stage of living death, from incipient atrophy of the mental organs up to total paralysis through inertia.
The earlier stages are the more interesting (wholesale collapse tends to obscure diagnosis) and are instanced, very largely, by the more recent Continental set, whose decay has been retarded for ten years by the intervention of the war. But perhaps laboratory is a better word than morgue. For if the specimens exhibited are gangrenous, no one could say they are obsolete. They have the recommendation of representing a life force. For let there be no mistake in this matter — the Continental set is no more on its way out than the internal combustion engine. If anything far less so, because the slackening of its social standards (which were admittedly never very high) has led to the recruitment of a magnificent selection of socialist politicians, Greek syndicateurs, and Near-Eastern catering magnates with a profitable sideline in drugs. Every breed is strengthened by new blood: the blood now flowing into the Continental set has the perennial robustness of corruption; and thus the diseased stem of the international pleasure-finance world is putting forth blooms more exotic and vicious than have ever before been observed.
These latter remarks may be taken (since both politics and finance are easily subsumed under crime), to refer to the criminal section of the haute monde of the pleasure grounds. This section has the advantage of being amusing, tolerant, and necessary. Drugs, drink, sex, socialist doctrine, and armaments are all required to keep the world revolving at its usual merry pace. Again, the members of this section only begin to decay above the neck when they finally decide on retirement. Far more objectionable, and totally without any function other than the admittedly vital one of being exploited by the criminals, is the second, and obverse, and more obviously moribund, section of this world, the people who tend to come to the Hotel du Palais (the criminal's tendency is for the Miramar) and in whom the dominant feature is the hebetude which first prompted these observations. Their friends from the Miramar are, of course, often to be seen busy fleecing them in the entrance lounge of the Palais, but the residential support of the latter hotel springs largely from this second, duller, more odious, and morally more worthy class, namely the passive half of the European smart set. They are the hosts of the parasites (though they mingle, of course, on terms of social equality), and it is admittedly a purely personal taste that is expressed in the form of a preference for the slickness of the parasites as against the passive stupidity of the hosts. As has indeed been remarked it is the infiltration of a new and peculiarly venomous genus of parasite into the actual realms of social activity that has ensured the continual survival of the Continental set in toto. They suck in blood, the parasites, but their excrement is the very stuff of the ground on which they drop it.
Now it was the custom of His Grace the Duke of Panton to settle for a month or so every summer in the Hôtel du Palais, and there to gather round him possibly the most nauseating specimens that pertain either to the parasitical class or its obverse. His particular fondness was perhaps for the obverse; and during the month in which the Palais enjoyed his patronage, the full flower of the Church-bound Spanish nobility, the money-bound English nobility and the hide-bound French nobility were to be seen in Biarritz. This was good for trade and excellent for advertisement: so that after the Duke had continued in this habit through the early thirties the local syndicate undertook to pay his entire expenses (an offer they renewed after the war) conditional only on his repeating every year for the benefit of the local paper how preferable was Biarritz to Cannes, how infinite in diversion, and how incomparable in matters both of hygiene and natural beauty.
(It was His Grace who made the noted and poetical comparison of the surf-swept beach to sweating pelote players).
It was then the 'Duke's month' that provided the Palais with the bulk of its annual profits and the entire flavour of its atmosphere. It was slap in the middle of the 'Duke's month' that Terence and Esme arrived: so that they found the whole building, the whole staff, the
whole cuisine, and the whole tone more pointedly itself than at any other time. The whole place, in short, was more efficiently geared than ever to fulfil the requirements of the pomp and circumstance that attend ineptitude. The a la carte menu was longer, the virs du jour were poorer, the waiters took more tips, the page-boys suffered more winks, the maids discovered more truths and the manager told more lies, than at any other period of the year.
And so it was that, on a fine Wednesday morning in the first week of August, they awoke to find themselves with rooms facing the old and voracious Atlantic in one direction and the almost equally old and voracious ocean of fashionable squalor and fanatic procrastination in the other.
The first thing Esme told Terence that morning was that they must get in touch with his Uncle Bill.
'Aw, hell,' said Terence, 'there's plenty of time for that. You seem to have Uncle Bill on the brain.'
'Your mother would be very angry if she knew we were under the same roof and hadn't done anything about it.'
'Since when are you worrying about her?'
This was a difficult one.
'Anyhow,' said Esme, 'he sounds very interesting. There are his novels, and — '
'Now for the last time I'm telling you: Uncle Bill would have gone under as a pulp writer. It's only his cash that keeps him going with more or less decent houses. His books would make a fish squirm.'
'Have you read any?'
'Sure I've read some. He sends them all to Mother — he even dedicated one to her. The Cheese in the Trap he called that one.'
'What was it about?'
'A small boy at school in the Middle West, who used to go to his fairy glade for the weekend. One Saturday he found a real, live fairy there — '
'I think I've got it,' said Esme hurriedly: 'how did it end?'
'Well, this Saturday in fairyland turned the boy right up. He ran loose around the woods and the rivers, and one day plunged right in a lake because it was so "pure and cool". He was looking for purity, see, after what happened in the glade. Well, he couldn't get himself out again, so he just drowned in the moonlight.'
'How sad,' said Esme.
'About as sad as a heap of dung,' said Terence: 'Uncle Bill's books make me retch.'
'But isn't he quite pleasant just to meet?'
'Fruity, that's what he is, as fruity as Grade I ketchup. He'll just drop off his tree one of these dap and burst on the floor in a big red mess.'
'Fruitiness implies some sort of tang,' said Esme self-consciously. 'Uncle Bill's got as much tang as Dead Sea fruit,' said Terence. 'Well, we're going to ring him up and ask him to dinner anyhow,' announced Esme firmly: 'then, we'll do whatever you like for the rest of the day.'
'That's if you can get him,' replied Terence: 'he'll probably be busy gumming himself to the Duke of Panton's evening breeches.' Esme attached himself to the telephone and asked to be put through to Monsieur Gomery. A girl's voice answered — a very young girl's voice — and said it would fetch its Uncle Bill at once.
'Hullo, there,' said a syrupy boom.
'Mr William Gomery?'
'That's right,' said Uncle Bill with satisfaction.
'Well, this is Terence Fox's tutor here. I understand you're a great friend of Mrs Fairweather's, and Terence and I hoped you'd come and have dinner with us tonight.'
'So Terence is right here in Biarritz?' said Uncle Bill. 'Sure I'd just love to see him again. Bellamy too?'
'No, Bellamy's gone to Scotland.'
'Swell, the kid always liked Scotland, I guess the tang the heather gets inside him. But you're asking me to dinner?'
'That's it,' said Esme.
'Well, I'd love to come, but you'll have to let me bring Maisie along. Maisie and I go everywhere together. The poor kid'd cry her pretty eyes out if I left her alone for the evening.'
'That's all right,' said Esme, 'Terence and I would love to meet Maisie. Eight o'clock in the bar for a drink. All right?'
'Great,' said Uncle Bill as though his mouth was full of pawpaw, 'that's great. So long.'
'Well?' said Terence.
'He's coming, and so's Maisie.'
'Who in hell's Maisie?'
'Well, if it was Maisie that answered the 'phone, she sounds about fifteen. It seems they go everywhere together and Maisie would cry her eyes out if she was left alone. She calls him Uncle Bill too.'
'Sounds like another of Uncle Bill's sham nieces,' said Terence cynically. 'Sure he hasn't any nephews stringing along?'
'He didn't say so.'
'Well, he will have when he's parked Maisie. It's six and half-a-dozen with Uncle Bill.'
'What do you suppose happens to Maisie?'
'No one quite knows,' said Terence. 'He say's he likes young people around to remind him of his youth. I guess a lot of people say that. I reckon Maisie gets bathed and kissed and put to bed.'
'But how long's this been going on?'
'Since the war. It makes Mother mad. She says Uncle Bill's had a change of life.'
'Hm,' said Esme. 'Well, we'll get a good look this evening.' And so they did. Uncle Bill, on his arrival at the bar, made an instant impression of immense size and a kind of squelchy boyishness. Maisie was rather pretty, loaded up with sex, and was probably about nineteen: since, however, the way to Uncle Bill's heart was through an unceasing demonstration of adolescence, she was doing her best — and though highly artificial, it was a good best — to reproduce the pouts and whimsies, the dress and makeup, of a girl of sixteen. What gave her away was the omission of any sort of gawkishness or shyness. To say the least of it, she was adroit — so adroit that all the artlessness of all Mary Webb's heroines put together could not have disguised the fact. Uncle Bill, however, had evidently been too busy worrying about the permanency of his wave to notice this.
'It was swell of you to ask l'il Maisie along,' he said in a voice like a bar of Ex-Lax, 'she just knows no one in these parts — do you, my little lonely one?'
'I know a few people thanks to dear Uncle Bill,' said Maisie. The cockney just came through the lisp.
'So when I told her about tonight,' went on Uncle Bill, 'she opened her big blue eyes at me and said, "Gee, Nuncle Bill" — just like that — "Gee, Nuncle Bill, it's so exciting, please buy me a new dress to meet them with." So we spent a great day in the shops, Maisie and I, and we've bought her some dandy outfits.'
Which would doubtless, thought Esme, come in handy when Maisie was, as Terence put it, parked.
Aloud he said, 'Now what will you all have to drink? Miss Maisie?'
'You must call me just Maisie,' she said with a simper, 'an' I'd like a nice citron drink with plenty of sugar.' Her eyes were hungry for a cocktail.
'Maisie don't drink much,' said Uncle Bill, 'not yet — but she's crazy about champagne, aren't you, honey?'
'Have some champagne now,' suggested Esme.
'No, not yet,' pouted Maisie, putting her head on one side like Shirley Temple, 'I have to be very careful still — don't I, Uncle Bill?'
'Of course, baby,' said Uncle Bill, 'at your age I should say you do.'
But if Maisie didn't drink much, Uncle Bill made up. It took 2,000 francs worth to get him in to dinner, and he showed no sign whatever of letting up. Esme ordered the most expensive meal he could pick out, and told the waiter to bring a bottle of champagne and keep three more on ice. If this was what they were in for, he was as game as Uncle Bill. And how Trito would approve when he heard! The champagne alone was going to set Sandra back for a clear 12,000 francs.
They made short work of the first bottle. Uncle Bill was undeniably in good form. His wave was coming down over his forehead more boyishly than ever.
'See that table over there?' he said, 'that's the Dook's table. I reckon the band are starting, and that means the Dook will be here any minute.'
Esme noticed that the drunker Uncle Bill became, the more champagne went quietly down Maisie's pretty throat and the less she troubled with the Peggy Ann Garner act.
'There's the
Duke now,' she said. He had just come in with the Duchess and a handful of the nastiest people in Europe. The Duchess (an American of low extraction) gave a great wave at Uncle Bill, the Duke smirked, and the nastiest people in Europe sneered. The band struck up triumphantly. Uncle Bill got up to bow, managed it, but sat down again on the floor. Esme helped him to his scat.
'That's all right,' said Uncle Bill, 'that's just l'il Maisie with her cute little tricks, moving my chair — wasn't it, honeybee?' he said with a leer, and took a great clutch at her thigh.
'You know I'd never play a mean joke like that on Nuncle Bill,' said Maisie, in a subtle and, Esme thought, purposeful, parody of her own manner, 'you just cat your lovely fritters and have some more champagne.'
What with the drink and the band and the heat, excitement was mounting all round. The waiter brought a third bottle, and Esme warned him to keep at least two more handy. The band, as a matter of fact, was really a pretty sickly affair, but just then it went on to play a romantic number from South Pacific, which, as Uncle Bill explained, just caught him in the throat. Great tears began to ooze over his flabby cheeks, and he looked at Maisie as though he wanted to button her into his waistcoat. Maisie was getting a sickener of Uncle Bill that evening, but managed a girl-wife smile.
