Forty is Beginning (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘But I do not like the dress, and the shoes. Impossible!’ said the candid Josette.

  ‘I don’t like them much myself,’ said Miss Marvin, who had been growing more aware of their major disadvantages, ‘and I don’t know what to do about them. They aren’t right, are they?’

  ‘Impossible!’ repeated Josette. ‘I have a little friend, M’lle. Coty, at Maison Celeste.’

  ‘Where do I find Maison Celeste and M’lle. Coty?’ asked Miss Marvin, for now here was her chance.

  Maison Celeste was run by a slender creature called Madame who looked like a swan on water, she seemed to sail, but never to walk. She wore a white gardenia on her dark frock and nothing else save one huge pearl ring. Elegant was the word, and it told you everything that was Madame. She eyed the brogues and the cotton frock (Miss Marvin had had the sense to throw the felt hat over somebody’s fence). Miss Marvin came straight to the point; there was no reason to do anything else. She told the truth. She hated her appearance and wanted to change it. She wanted the right clothes.

  ‘Enchantée,’ said Madame. Aided by M’lle. Coty she produced first the little cyclamen linen suit, with the white lawn blouse, and in an instant a new Miss Marvin was surveying herself in the long slender mirror, surmounted by a gilt statue dressed in black silk stockings, and made of jet. There is no doubt about it, the French do these things well. She had dropped ten years. Nylon stockings supplanted her wool and rayons, and a pair of white shoes that were suggestive of sandals, but not at all of monks and monasteries. A small white hat, of linen clustered with white lilac, was on her head.

  ‘It can’t be me!’ said Miss Marvin, back at her old refrain. It was me! It was the new me, very much the new me.

  She went the whole hog at Maison Celeste, because now she had taken a fancy to the elegant Madame in black with the single gardenia and the enormous ring. She bought a black chiffon frock for the casino, and a couple of blue afternoon frocks, a Chinese coolie coat in sienna, with a tiny burnt straw hat that matched it. A page boy in an absurd pill box hat worn over one ear, with Celeste written on it, escorted her home, carrying the boxes all in coloured packing paper and glistening with cellophane.

  When she re-entered the Bella Vista Miss Marvin saw Madame approaching with a strange look on her face. She enquired if the new guest had booked a room.

  ‘Of course I have! I am Number 19,’ said Miss Marvin, and there was ice in her voice. The right make-up, and the knowledge that she was wearing far better clothes, had put a new power behind her.

  ‘Pardon,’ said Madame, but her eyes almost popped out of her head. Now it seemed that they had changed from sloes to Elvas plums!

  ‘Money here,’ Madame was saying to herself, ‘and I never realised it. I’ve been a fool!’ She still clung to that glazed smile, staring all the time with interest.

  Until now she had not grasped that Miss Marvin was quite so good-looking, and really could not believe that this was true. She should have recognised Miss Marvin, she really should have been more careful. ‘Très charmante,’ she murmured with a gay little gesture of the hand towards the suit, ‘so very very charming.’

  Miss Marvin said nothing. She had not liked Madame, and liked her no better for this. Tonight she intended to dine with Colonel Hewlitt at Les Papillons. Tonight life was starting for her, and she was a new woman. She would wear the new black chiffon frock. The shop had insisted on the purchase of a delightful pair of slippers made of ribbon velvet to go with it.

  The dress looked much better on her now even than it had done in the shop. Looking in the mirror on the wall which reached to the bright honey-gold of the parquet flooring itself, she was amazed at the elegant looking lady whom it revealed. This was only the beginning. The frock was a black chiffon that was delicately made with wispy filet lace here and there, faintly disclosing the delicate line of bust and slender hips. The shoes were ideal, and she decided that she would walk down to Les Papillons it was such a short way, and she knotted her hair in place, polishing it with a silk handkerchief, as Maison Avions had suggested.

  ‘I’m a lucky woman,’ she thought.

  She walked out into the loveliness of the evening. The first thing that sharpened her wits was that an onion boy paused, bowing over-politely to her, his admiring eyes both astonished and adoring. It might only be an onion boy, but it was wonderful to Miss Marvin that anyone should have done it! She walked down the street, and she felt stimulated. As she approached Les Papillons she realised that she regarded it with new eyes and noticed how much more attractive it was than the Bella Vista. At least Les Papillons was an hotel, with a charming little patio before it and a twinkling fountain playing delicately, whilst a plumbago wreathed the wide glass doors with a maze of pale blue. Across the hall there was a view of the opposite side, of green lawns and palms and the sea itself. People were still bathing there, the sands still occupied and gay.

  She saw the Colonel waiting for her, now dressed in a dinner jacket, well brushed and groomed and very much the ideal English gentleman. She glanced at him, well pleased that he should look like this.

  But if she was well pleased, he was a good deal more so.

  ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ he asked before he could stop himself.

  ‘I thought it was high time I took myself in hand, and I bought a few clothes.’

  ‘You’ve done it very well.’ All the time his eyes were watching her with admiration in them. She felt embarrassed, yet elated. A miracle had happened; the swan had suddenly appeared and the ugly duckling had gone; she was swimming ahead to gay adventure, and she could not believe that this was happening to her.

  ‘Come and get a drink,’ he suggested.

  He led her away from the public rooms into an intimate little bar. There were a couple of white-coated waiters serving aperitifs on pastel tables painted with delicate sprays of flowers; about the place was the air that one never seems to get in England, and Miss Marvin was attracted by it. She sat down with a drink and looked about her with very definite approval in her eyes.

  ‘This is much nicer than the Bella Vista,’ she remarked.

  ‘Yes, but the trouble is that it needs money put into it. I sunk everything I had got in it when I started and what with the difficulties of the exchange and one thing and another, I’ve been handicapped. There have not been as many guests as I had hoped to have. It needs extra money, and that is something I haven’t got.’

  ‘You mean that it isn’t paying?’

  ‘Oh, it’s paying, but it could go further and make someone a little mint. I wanted to build on a swimming pool of my own, which would be an immense attraction; we have got our private way to the plage, which is a help, but I want to enlarge that, and I haven’t been able to do much.’

  ‘It looks wonderful to me,’ she said, ‘but then after Brestonbury everything looks wonderful. Brestonbury is very dull.’

  ‘You’ve got to remember that people expect a lot out here.’

  ‘I daresay they do, but it seems to me that they get a lot if they come to Les Papillons.’

  Miss Marvin sat here with the lavish background of peach and eau de Nil, and she was wishing that she had come here in the first place instead of the Bella Vista, which had been Mr. Swinnerton’s idea.

  ‘Well, why not move in?’ asked the Colonel.

  ‘I couldn’t face a row like that with Madame. I don’t think she likes me anyway, and if I tried to leave she would like me a great deal less.’

  ‘She is a trifle anti-English, I think,’ he said, ‘but don’t let that worry you, for I could settle her. Nobody gets enough to eat at the Bella Vista and she is pretty well used to her visitors getting out, she ought to expect it by now.’

  Miss Marvin giggled, and it sounded very girlish. For a moment she was surprised at herself, then she pulled herself together abruptly. ‘No, no, I don’t think I could do that,’ she said.

  Colonel Hewlitt was an extremely polite man and he did not press the point. They
sat over the aperitifs and went in to dinner fairly late.

  They dined at his special table in the restaurant, which was a little away from the others. She had to admit that the food was excellent. Also, there was enough, which was a great relief after the sparseness of Madame’s diet at the Bella Vista. What a joy it was that she was past the age of worrying if she would grow fat, for she was being offered the most absurd amount; fish in white wine, chicken and sweet corn, meringues with coffee cream ‒ so attractive that she had two of them. They took coffee afterwards sitting on a verandah which was hung with pale blue fairy lights, giving it an ethereal appearance. The scent of the orange trees came sweetly, mixing with the heliotropes and verbenas in the border just below.

  ‘What about more casino?’ he asked at last with a smile in his eyes.

  ‘Oh no! I don’t want to lose what I made last night!’

  ‘I suggest you take a certain amount, enough to make a pleasant evening, and when you have lost it, then you can come home. I suppose you really can’t expect beginners’ luck to last a couple of nights.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t want to go,’ she confessed, but all the time there was that teasing little prickle of expectant pulses which was really very pleasurable. Something was changing Miss Marvin; she was not the worthy school teacher who had started forth from Brestonbury, set upon a nice little holiday. She had other ideas.

  ‘If you hate the thought, then we could go along the Grande Corniche in my car? We shall probably have an accident, for all the crazies and drunks are out at this time of day, and they make it very dangerous.’

  ‘I think I’d prefer the casino.

  ‘I’m daft,’ she told herself when she recovered from having suggested it, ‘of course I’m mad, but after all I shall never be on the Riviera again and I might as well have my bit of fun! I was going to manage without all this money, and I’ve bought a few nice things, so that really I needn’t bother if I do lose it.’

  ‘Clever girl!’ said he.

  They drove off.

  The casino had much the same atmosphere as it had displayed last night. It was full of people and obviously very busy; but then it was always busy. The air was heavy, and the croupiers sat in place with the same deadpan faces that had no single bit of expression on them; the chips were being raked about as though they were mud in a country lane. They sat down. In the seat alongside was an attenuated young Englishman who was apparently suffering from advanced anaemia, and had pale blue goggle eyes. But his evening dress was beyond reproach ‒ broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, in the buttonhole a dark red clove carnation, and in the breast pocket the merest suggestion of a red silk handkerchief, exposing the monogram F.L. on its corner. Soigné is the word, thought Miss Marvin, very very soigné.

  Perhaps he saw her looking at him, for he spoke to her, and she replied, though Miss Marvin’s people had very definitely taught her not to talk to strangers. But this was different; besides, she herself was different, and that was most important.

  His name was Francis Lorimer, and he was losing his last sou, he said. Wasn’t life a bore? Wasn’t it a blight?

  Miss Marvin advanced her stake with infinite caution. She won. She advanced more, and won, and yet again, and as the moments progressed, once again she was clutching at a pile of those silly little chips. Inside herself, she knew that she was wildly elated, for the beginners’ luck was continuing, and she heard Colonel Hewlitt chuckling beside her.

  ‘You’re breaking the record,’ he said. ‘Once in a blue moon a man or a woman comes here who cannot make a dud venture; luck is with them. Take a chance, you have got luck on your side. Risk some more.’

  Although it was agitating, she risked more, and she won yet again. Much later, a little drunk with surprise, she went out into the casino gardens which ran down to the sea; she had the Colonel on one side of her, and Francis Lorimer (who had now developed the trait of the limpet) on the other. It was one of those brilliant nights that she would never forget; the moon had cast itself an amber ribbon across the face of the water, a ribbon only slightly rippled. The stars were five-pointed topazes, and they shone cleanly against a cloak of pure velvet.

  ‘You realise that you are a very rich woman?’ asked Colonel Hewlitt.

  ‘Yes, yes, rather!’ reiterated Francis Lorimer, ‘think what you can buy with it!’

  ‘The income tax will take it all,’ murmured Miss Marvin.

  ‘Then don’t go back! Stay here for ever! Come and have some more champagne, and make up your mind never to return. You could live here for the rest of your life, and let that silly girls’ school go to hell,’ said the Colonel in a rash moment.

  After that, Miss Marvin had only the haziest idea of what happened. When she woke very late next day with the suggestion of a headache and a curiously bemused sense of inactivity in her limbs, she vaguely remembered sitting drinking champagne and everyone patting her hand and saying that she had been very clever; and the Colonel insisting that she must put some of the money into his safe until she could invest it.

  ‘It can’t be me!’ she thought.

  She lay there dully, and became aware of the fact that a man was in the room.

  That did pull her together.

  Miss Marvin had the most cut and dried ideas about men, especially men in bedrooms. For a woman nicely brought up and living always on the highest religious principles, her knowledge of sex was peculiar, to put it mildly. She sat upright and stared, believing that the worst was about to happen.

  ‘Madame,’ said a voice, ‘attention!’

  It was the postman. Here he was back again in the room which had no key to it. He delivered all letters to people in bed. His bright beady eyes were alertly gay, his moustaches crinkling up the corners of his lips, like the whiskers of some enterprising prawn.

  He indicated the stamp. ‘Pas assez, madame.’

  ‘What is the matter? You want some money?’

  He bowed graciously. ‘Excusez …’

  She could excuse nothing, for now a spear had been spiked through her head, she was sure, and whenever she turned in bed it spiked harder and throbbed more.

  ‘Take what you want,’ she said, indicating a small petit point bag, with a delicate tracery of pink roses and forget-me-nots in a Victorian design. Obviously this was something she must have acquired last night; she had a hazy idea of somebody saying that the bag she carried was detestable, and then it had disappeared; they had visited one of those fascinating little shops that never close; dimly she remembered that. Francis Lorimer had liked this particular one, saying that it was distingué. She pulled out a couple of notes. ‘Take what you want.’

  The postman took both. She must say that the French accepted money far more graciously than the English, and were particularly careful not to give you the opportunity of saying that that was not entirely what had been intended.

  The postman bowed profusely, and went off with the notes and the rest of the letters, whilst Miss Marvin was too bewildered to stop him.

  An hour later she looked at the letter. It had come from the firm who ran the pools. She had achieved another win, and had got a prize of four pounds ten shillings. ‘As though it matters!’ she thought, for in the last few days Miss Marvin had travelled a long way beyond silly little items like four pounds ten shillings.

  ‘Pooh!’ said she.

  She dressed languidly and then went out into the sunny day. Miss Marvin went to the shops walking on the shady side of the street, and the air made her better. She bought a pair of embroidered suede gloves, for already she had come to understand that the French had got what it takes when it comes to les gants.

  When she returned to the Bella Vista, Madame was still watching her with those awfully hard sloe-like eyes of hers. Miss Marvin knew quite well that in a few moments dejeuner would be served, and that a good déjeuner would be helpful; at the same time she had a pretty good idea that a good déjeuner was not what she was going to have.

  Jeanne gaily rang a
bell, and the old ladies and decrepit gentlemen traipsed into the salle à manger, looking apprehensively at the menu. But the menu told them very little, because that was the idea of it. In French everything sounds so very much more intriguing! It gives a meal a delicate flavour, and Madame intended to make the most of it.

  The young came up from the beach, showing all they had got of deliciously tanned skin, wearing the sparsest bathing kit.

  Madame did not seem to be annoyed at the lack of clothing in her salle à manger, which was somewhat surprising; but most certainly she enjoyed lack of food.

  Today it was oeufs, or rather half an oeuf, delicately garnished with a tiny piece of shredded endive, and a mere soupçon of tomato and green pepper, served on an absurd little triangle of toast. The oeuf was followed by a tiny cream cheese elegantly arranged with mashed potato, so that it rose in a piquante pyramid capped by a grape. After that there arrived a pertly bijou gold basket in which a couple of ripe green figs reposed.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ said Miss Marvin to herself, and as soon as she had taken her coffee (more cup than coffee) she walked down to Les Papillons.

  She did not bother herself that this was the hottest part of the day when only ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’ went out in the midday sun. When she entered the pleasant portals of Les Papillons, it was the siesta hour.

  ‘I want to see the Colonel,’ she said.

  Colonel Hewlitt had retired to his own study after finishing a noble déjeuner. He had told the clerk that he intended to work there, but really he was reposing in a sturdy easy chair, his feet up on a fire stool covered by exquisite petit point, and the London edition of The Times lay across his lap. He had dabbled with the crossword puzzle, a private and consuming vice of his and now the tender wooing of the midday sun had lulled him to sleep. He was snoring in the truest English fashion when one of the garçons disturbed him.