Imogen

by Jilly Cooper

  Imogen caught her breath. Cable got out her make-up case. Imogen wished she had some of those little cleansing pads which Cable and Yvonne whipped out on every occsion. Even her flannel was packed in her suitcase in the boot.

  ‘There’s Port-les-Pins,’ said Matt.

  Imogen craned her neck. Down below, the hill was thick with little white villas with red roofs and green shutters. Shops, cafés, casinos and pale pastel houses jostled for position along the sea front. A fleet of fishing boats and yachts tossed in the harbour. Some tiny fishing village, thought Imogen.

  Another shock awaited her. She had always believed the French were an ugly race, dumpy with incipient moustaches. But as they drove along the front, she had never seen so many beautiful girls, trailing back from the beach, with their waist-length hair, long limbs and brown faces. No wonder Cable had spent three-quarters of an hour on her face. No wonder Nicky looked like a small boy let loose in a sweet shop.

  Their hotel, La Reconnaissance, was at the far end of the front. Drying bathing dresses and towels hung from every balcony. The fat Madame, accompanied by an even fatter poodle, came waddling out gabbling with excitement and kissed Matt on both cheeks. Imogen was relieved to discover that she and Nicky had a room each.

  Madame combined respectability with avarice, Matt explained in English as they climbed the red-tiled staircase. She got more money for two single rooms than a double, but as long as appearances were kept up, she didn’t mind who slipped into whose room after lights out.

  Imogen’s room was extremely small with a large single bed, no soap, no coat-hangers, no drawer space and the tiniest of face towels. A piece of plastic holly was tucked behind the only picture. Five pink, lurex bulrushes stood in a vase beside the bed. If she leaned right out of the window she could just see the sea.

  She sat down overwhelmed by another desperate wave of homesickness. Her hair felt stiff with dust, her body ached with the inactivity of the long day’s drive. Outside, Yvonne was complaining bitterly that baths cost 10 francs each and Cable was bullying Matt to go downstairs and get the plug changed on her Carmen rollers. I must pull myself together, thought Imogen. She was on holiday, after all, and she must try and enjoy herself. She washed as best she could in stone cold water and put on one of her new voluminous orange kaftans. She wore stockings and high-heeled shoes to make herself look taller and slimmer and took a lot of trouble over her face, before joining the others in the bar on the front.

  Immediately she was conscious of wearing quite the wrong clothes. Most people were in trousers and shirts in soft pastel shades. Girls in dresses wore them fitted or tightly belted, with Greek sandals on their bare feet. She was aware of brown faces laughing at her all around.

  Nicky looked at the kaftan in ill-concealed disapproval.

  ‘Expecting a baby, darling?’ said Cable in her cool, clear voice.

  ‘She looks lovely,’ said Matt, who was filling in the brown identification forms.

  He patted the chair beside him. ‘Come and sit here, baby, and let me take down your particulars. Is your room all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s fine,’ she said gratefully.

  ‘Ours isn’t,’ said Yvonne, ‘I haven’t got a bedside lamp.’

  ‘With all those raw carrots you eat,’ said Matt, ‘I would have thought you could see in the dark.’

  ‘It is rather a dump,’ snapped Yvonne. ‘I had expected something a bit better – like that for instance.’ She waved in the direction of the huge white Plaza Hotel which, with its red and white umbrellas, dominated the bay.

  ‘You can stay there if you’re prepared not to eat or go out in the evening,’ said Matt. ‘One night at the Plaza’ll cost you as much as a fortnight at La Reconnaissance.’

  ‘Well perhaps not the Plaza,’ conceded Yvonne, ‘but there must be somewhere a little less primitive.’

  Matt went on filling in Imogen’s form. For her occupation he put bibliothecaire which sounded very grand.

  ‘Madame was good to Matt in the old days,’ said Cable defensively.

  ‘When I was an undergraduate she let me stay for practically nothing,’ said Matt. ‘She used to be in the Resistance. I’m sure she’ll lend you her revolver if it comes to a shoot out with the cockroaches.’

  Imogen gazed at the Prussian blue sea which glittered and sparkled in the sinking sun.

  ‘What’s the French for “Model”?’ said James trying to bridge an awkward silence and fill in Yvonne’s form at the same time.

  ‘Catin,’ said Matt.

  Cable stifled a giggle and James solemnly wrote it down.

  A party of Germans sat down at the next table and started banging the table for waitresses.

  ‘This place is awfully touristy,’ grumbled Yvonne.

  ‘Well, you’re a tourist, aren’t you?’ said Matt.

  A slim brunette went by in a lace shirt with the tails tied under the bosom to reveal a beautiful brown midriff.

  ‘Everyone seems to be wearing those this year,’ said Cable. ‘I must get one.’

  ‘What does catin really mean?’ said Imogen to Nicky later, as they strolled along the front.

  ‘Prostitute,’ said Nicky.

  They had dinner in a restaurant overhung with vines. Below, the sea was a wash of blue shadow, sparked by the lights of the fishing boats putting out for the night’s catch. Everyone was hungry and they ate garlicky fish soup and cassoulet. The wine flowed freely. Even Yvonne seemed more cheerful when suddenly she put on her wolf in Red Riding Hood smile and turned to Matt.

  ‘Isn’t it time you and Cable named the day?’

  Everyone stopped talking. Matt looked at Yvonne steadily and said, ‘What day?’

  She waved a playful finger at him. ‘Now don’t be evasive. You and Cable have been going out for nearly two years now. It’s only fair to make an honest woman out of her.’

  Cable flushed angrily. ‘It’s none of your damn business, Yvonne.’

  ‘Darling – I was only interested in your welfare.’

  Matt took Cable’s hand and squeezed it. Then he turned to Yvonne and said softly, ‘Let’s get three things straight. First, I have Cable’s welfare very much at heart; secondly, I agree with her, it’s none of your damn business; and thirdly, you’ve got butter on your chin.’

  There was a frozen pause, then everyone burst out laughing, except Yvonne who went as red as her hair with rage.

  Nicky yawned. ‘God, I’m so tired I could sleep on a clothes line.’

  Matt was gently stroking Cable’s cheek. ‘Early bed, I think, darling, don’t you?’

  She looked at him and nodded gratefully. He’s a nice man, thought Imogen, a really nice man. She was beginning to feel sick. Perhaps that garlic soup hadn’t been such a good idea. Nicky was eyeing a sumptuous blonde at the next table.

  ‘Don’t forget to sleep on the right side of the bed,’ said Cable mockingly to Imogen as she climbed the stairs to her room. She felt sicker and sicker. White-faced, white-bodied, she looked at herself in the mirror. Oh, fat, white woman who nobody loves, she thought sadly, as she put on her nightdress and jumped into bed.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Nicky in a violet dressing-gown and nothing underneath. His black curls fell becomingly, the gold medallions jangled on his chest, aftershave lotion fought with the sweet scent of deodorant. Imogen’s heart turned over. She had never seen such a beautiful man. If only he weren’t going round and round.

  ‘Hullo, darling,’ he said huskily, sitting down on the bed. ‘Thank God we’re alone at last. I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking about you.’

  Or the tomcats or the clocks, thought Imogen. He was kissing her now and his hands started to rove over her body. He put his tongue in her ear, and Imogen, who couldn’t remember whether she’d washed her ears that morning, wriggled away, simulating uncontrollable passion.

  Nicky laughed. ‘Underneath the surface, you’re a hot little thing.’

  Great waves of nausea were sweeping o
ver her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s have that stupid nightdress off.’

  ‘Nicky, I feel sick,’ she said, leaping out of bed and rushing to the bidet.

  ‘You can’t be sick here,’ said Nicky in horror.

  ‘Can’t I?’ said Imogen, and was. And all night long, like the Gadarene swine, she thundered down the passage to the black hellhole of a lavatory.

  Nicky, foiled yet again, went back to his room in an extremely bad temper.

  Chapter Nine

  Next morning, feeling pale and sickly, Imogen staggered down to the beach. The sea was blue and sparkling, the sand hot and golden. Umbrellas stretched six deep, edge to edge, for half a mile along the beach. Bodies lay stretched out hundreds to the acre, turning and oiling themselves like chickens on a spit.

  Nearly everyone, Imogen realised to her horror, was topless. Cable, as brown as any of them, was wearing the bottom half of the briefest bikini – two saffron triangles, held together by straps of perspex. Her small perfect breasts gleamed with oil. Her hair hung black and shiny over the edge of her lilo. Nicky lounged beside her, slim, lithe and menacing. He totally ignored Imogen when she arrived. Matt lay on his back, his eyes closed, his powerful chest curved in an arch above his flat heavily muscled stomach. Having sallow skin, he was already going brown.

  He opened a lazy eye and grinned at Imogen. ‘Come and join the oppressed white minority.’

  As she struggled into Lady Jacintha’s red bathing dress, she tried to protect herself with a small face towel.

  ‘There’s masses of room on my towel if you need it,’ said Matt who had been watching her struggles with unashamed amusement. He rolled over and went back to sleep. Imogen lay in silence, bitterly ashamed of her whiteness.

  ‘Christ,’ said Nicky, who was reading a copy of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, ‘Nastase was knocked out in the first round.’

  ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ said Matt suddenly. Everyone looked up. ‘Here comes Mrs Set-your-teeth-on-Edgworth and the prospective candidate for Cockfosters.’

  Yvonne was picking her way daintily across the miles of tangled brown flesh. Behind her staggered James weighed down by towels, lilos, snorkel masks, picnic baskets, a large parasol and Yvonne’s make-up case, but still managing to cast excited glances at the naked bosoms around him.

  ‘They look as though they’re going on safari,’ said Cable. ‘There’s something rather prehistoric about James’s shorts.’

  ‘He looks as though he’s crossing the foot hills,’ said Nicky.

  ‘What a crowd,’ sighed Yvonne. ‘You get such lovely deserted beaches in the Bahamas. No, put the lilo there, Jumbo, with the towel spread over it. I don’t want to perspire. And put the parasol so it keeps the sun off my face. Can you move just a fraction of an inch, Imogen? Yes, that’s lovely. When you’ve finished, James, just pop over to the café and get me some orange squash. Such a funny thing’s just happened,’ she added to Cable. ‘A little French girl came up to me and asked me for my autograph. She’d seen one of my commercials when she was staying in England.’

  Matt, looking at her with acute dislike, was about to say something, then turned over and went back to sleep.

  Although she was pouring with sweat, Imogen was too ashamed of her white body to go and swim until Cable and Nicky were safely in the sea. Then how cool and sympathetically soothing the water felt to her limbs. Below the dark green surface, she could see the slow moving shape of a fish. Then suddenly someone grabbed her ankles and she was falling. She seemed to swallow half the ocean. Choking, she came to the surface to see Nicky shooting away at a flashy crawl. Later he and Cable played very ostentatiously with a yellow beach ball.

  ‘I say, that’s rather naughty,’ said James, staring fascinated at a girl whose bikini pants had practically no back to them.

  ‘I don’t know why she bothers to wear anything at all,’ snapped Yvonne.

  ‘Why don’t you wear a bikini?’ Yvonne asked Imogen. ‘I’d lend you one, but I don’t think you’d get into it. I really think you ought to do something about your thighs.’

  ‘Exercises are the best thing,’ said Cable, flopping down on the lilo. ‘Sally Chetwynde lost five inches by bicycling every night.’

  Imogen blushed as red as her bathing dress. If Matt had been there she was sure they would never have been so nasty to her. They shut up as soon as he came back.

  She watched him oiling Cable, his hands moving steadily over her slim brown body, big practised hands, as skilful at making love as keeping a large car steady on a winding road at excessive speeds.

  Her heart suddenly twisted with loneliness. Her skin was already turning as pink and as freckled as a foxglove. Oh, to be as beautiful as Cable, and to be loved by a man like Matt.

  She was also worried that although she’d searched her room high and low she couldn’t find her pills. What on earth was Nicky going to say when he discovered she’d lost them? Perhaps she could get some from a chemist. ‘Avez-vous la pilule pour arreter les bébés?’ But wasn’t France a Catholic country which forbade the pill anyway? If only Yvonne or Cable were more cosy she could have asked them.

  ‘Of course Vogue pay peanuts, only twenty-five quid a day,’ Yvonne was saying.

  ‘I wouldn’t put on my make-up for twenty-five quid a day,’ said Cable.

  Matt sighed and took refuge in a tattered copy of Brideshead Revisited.

  When Imogen looked at herself in the glass before dinner, she was scarlet. Her head and her eyes ached; she had obviously overdone it. Her hair was stiff with oil, sand and sea water. Sand also seemed to have got into everything: towel, comb, bag, clothes; the floor of the room was just like the Gobi Desert. She lay on her bed and wondered which would be the worst evil, her baggy trousers or her other kaftan. She decided on trousers, which would at least hide her legs. After she had dressed and had another fruitless search for her pills, she wandered into Cable’s room and found her busy combing out newly washed ebony curls.

  ‘Goodness, you’re red,’ said Cable. ‘Good thing you kept yourself well oiled. Try some of my green face powder. Guess what? James Edgworth’s just made a pass at me. Serve Yvonne right for being so bitchy last night. I can’t think why I liked her in London. And, do you know, she was Purley Carnival Queen when she was 14? James made me promise not to tell anyone!’

  In spite of the green face powder, Imogen’s face glowed like a furnace as the evening wore on. After dinner they went to a nightclub. She couldn’t believe how ravishing the girls were with their smooth expressionless faces, and long, long legs. And how beautifully they danced. It was as though the sun had melted their limbs to liquid. Nicky, having drunk too much, spent most of the evening wrapped round Cable. Matt ignored them both, and gabbled away to the nightclub owner. Every so often he smiled reassuringly at Imogen through the soupy darkness.

  But later, back in her room, she wondered if she had ever been more miserable in her life. Here she was on the Riviera with the handsomest man in the world – a real daydream situation come true – and she was loathing every minute of it. She winced from sunburn as she climbed into bed. Oh please, God, make him be nice to me tonight.

  Much later Nicky came in wearing not the violet dressing-gown which she’d so nearly been sick over last night, but a pair of black pyjamas. His gleaming beauty, after a day in the sun, was overwhelming. Squinting slightly from so much drink, he looked like a dangerous, hungry Siamese cat. He was obviously not going to put up with any nonsense tonight. Her stomach contracted with fear and expectancy.

  ‘Feeling bridal, darling?’ he said silkily, and pulled her towards him, his fingers biting into her arms. ‘It’s time you stopped playing games.’

  His kisses were hard and brutal and gave her no pleasure. She was nearly suffocated by the smell of Cable’s scent.

  ‘No, no, Nicky, I don’t want to!’

  ‘Well, this time you’re going to have to, honey child.’

  ‘But you don’t love me,’ she gasp
ed. ‘Not a bit. You’ve ignored me since we left England.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Nicky. ‘I tried hard enough last night, didn’t I?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it. Oh, Nicky please, please don’t. I can’t find my pills.’

  ‘Your what!’ It was like a pistol shot.

  ‘I’ve looked for them everywhere. I must have left them in that hotel on the way.’

  His slit eyes were like dark thread. ‘Jesus, can’t you do anything right? I don’t believe you ever got them in the first place.’

  Imogen gave a gasp of horror. ‘Oh, I did, I did. I promise.’

  ‘Crap,’ said Nicky. ‘You just pretended you had. We can’t do anything to upset Daddy, can we?’

  ‘I did get them,’ said Imogen, bursting into tears. ‘Oh, why won’t you believe me?’

  Nicky, mean with drink inside him, rattled her like a cat shaking a mouse, calling her every name he could think of until someone banged on the wall and told them to shut up in German. Nicky swore back in German and pushed Imogen back against the pillow.

  ‘I’m s-s-sorry, Nicky,’ she sobbed. ‘I do love you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t love you,’ he snarled. ‘Get that straight. Nor do I like prissy little girls who string men along just for the sake of a holiday in the sun.’

  And he stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  There were four church clocks in Port-les-Pins, and Imogen counted each one chiming the quarter hours through the night, until the crowing cocks brought the morning sun streaming through the shutters.

  As she was going downstairs next morning, dark glasses covering her reddened eyes, Cable popped her head out of the bedroom door. ‘I just found these at the bottom of one of my espadrilles,’ she said. ‘I do hope you weren’t looking for them.’ And, laughing, she thrust the mauve card holding the pills into Imogen’s hand.

  Laughter, thought Imogen, is the most insidious sound in the world. Cable and Nicky lay on the beach slightly out of earshot from the rest of the party, heads together, laughing and talking in low caressing voices.