by Anne Weale
‘What’s that you’ve brought her?’ asked Bart, reappearing with a bottle of whisky in one hand and two tumblers in the other. ‘Will you join me?’
‘Not right now, thanks. It’s a laptop computer for Anny to write her stuff on,’ Van told him. ‘That’s a great old typewriter you use, but it’s a museum piece. This—’ he tapped the lid of the laptop ‘—isn’t state-of-the-art, but it’s OK for entry level.’
Anny was overwhelmed. Because it was important to Van, she had looked at computer equipment the last time they were in a place with a shop which sold it. The prices had seemed exorbitant.
Although Van’s father had an important job in the American foreign service and his mother’s second husband had factories near Milan connected with the booming Italian fashion industry, Van did not seem to share in his parents’ prosperity. He had been expensively educated, but from things he’d let drop, it sounded as if what he was paid for his job as a computer programmer didn’t leave him much spare cash after he had paid his overheads.
‘Look, here’s how you do it.’ He showed her.
Watching the screen inside the lid come to life, she said, ‘It’s wonderful, but you shouldn’t have given me such an expensive present.’
‘I got it cheap from a guy who was upgrading. Later I’ll give you a tutorial. Right now, how about breakfast?’
‘Oh, my goodness...the ham.’ She handed the laptop to him and hurried back to the galley.
Later they swam. Although here, in late April, the air temperature was already that of midsummer in northern Europe, when they dived from the deck, for the first few moments under water the sea felt breathtakingly cold. Bart never swam till June, sometimes not till July when the water was as warm as consommé.
Their bodies adjusting rapidly, they struck out to a group of rocks which offered places to sit.
‘Why does your cousin Kate call me “Giovanni’s mermaid”?’ Anny asked, twisting her hair into a skein and squeezing the water from it
‘Once, when we were watching you swimming, Bart said you were the nearest thing to a mermaid I’d ever see. I must have told Kate that. Aah, this feels good.’
As he stretched out on the warm rock, his olive-skinned torso beaded with bright crystal drops, Anny felt another secret flutter. This time his stay was too short for him to tan deeply as he had when crewing.
‘Will you come sailing this summer?’
‘I don’t think so.’
It hurt her that he didn’t sound as disappointed as she felt. ‘Why not?’
‘Lack of time mainly. My collegiate life is over.’
After graduating summa cum laude—the equivalent of a first-class honours degree—he had gone on to do two years of post-graduate work.
‘I’m part of the rat race now...as you will be pretty soon. Enjoy all this while you can. It won’t last for ever.’
‘I don’t want to stay here for ever. It gets boring going round the same places year after year. I want to see Paris and London. But I worry about leaving Bart. I’m not sure he’ll feed himself properly if I’m not around. He taught me to cook but he doesn’t do much himself now.’
Van pulled his shoulders off the rock with the stomach muscles developed while mastering wind-surfing.
‘You probably thought it wasn’t such a good idea to bring him a bottle of booze. But Scotch is better for his liver than cheap plonk full of chemicals.’
Anny sighed. ‘He drinks too much because he’s lonely. An adopted daughter isn’t the same as a wife. He was in love with someone a long time ago. But she wouldn’t live on a boat and he knew the sea was in his blood. Imagine having to choose between the person you love and the only thing you want to do. It must have been awful...for both of them.’
‘Forty years ago most women followed their men to wherever they had to go...darkest Africa... Patagonia...anywhere,’ said Van. ‘Sounds as if she wasn’t really in love with him.’
‘Or she may have known she couldn’t cope. I’ve never been used to anything else so it doesn’t seem strange to me. But it could be a difficult adjustment for someone brought up ashore.’
‘An adjustment you’ll have to make the other way round,’ said Van. ‘I wonder if you’ll like big cities as much as you think.’
‘Nice is a big city.’
‘Nice has the sea on its doorstep. It’s a village compared with Paris and London. Where I want to live is right here. But Orengo needs money spent on it...lots of money...the kind of money Theodora had when she came here.’
It was at his great-grandmother’s wish that he used her first name.
‘What happened to her money?’ Until now Anny had never liked to enquire.
‘The old boy blew most of it. They lived in tremendous style. There were fifteen gardeners and eighteen household staff. They entertained all the great names of their era, the Thirties.’
‘Will you do that when you live here?’ There was no doubt in Anny’s mind that one day Van would be rich and famous.
‘I shan’t have thirty-three people on my payroll, that’s for sure.’ He looked at his waterproof watch. ‘It’s time we were getting back. Theodora wants to see you.’
He sprang up, holding out a hand to give Anny a pull-up. Their hands were only clasped for a few seconds, but the strength in his fingers, and the bulge of muscle in his upper arm as he lifted her to her feet with no effort on her part, reanimated the feelings she had had earlier.
Poised on the edge of the rocks three metres above the pellucid sea, they both inhaled a deep breath. In the first year or two of their friendship, this was a game Anny had always won. In those days she could hold her breath longer and swim further without tiring. Now the propulsion of Van’s long, muscular thighs made him enter the water half a metre ahead of her, increasing his lead as they glided through the sunlit sea.
When Anny came up, gasping, he was still under the surface. She was swimming flat out when his dark head appeared, but he reached the schooner’s ladder lengths ahead of her.
‘It’s time you had a handicap,’ she said, as she stepped on deck with Van coming up behind her. ‘You may not get as much practice, but you’re so much taller and stronger.’
‘OK, next time I’ll give you a five-second start.’ For a moment his blue eyes appraised her slender body in the new American swimsuit which had higher-cut legs and a more revealing top than her old suit.
Brief as it was, the look made her heart do a flip. Then Van turned away to pick up the towel he’d brought rolled round his brief black bathing slip.
Theodora di Bachelli was not in bed but sitting in a chair on the bedroom’s awning-shaded balcony when Anny and Van entered her room.
‘Many, many happy returns of the day, my dear child,’ she said, holding out hands which now bore little resemblance to the bronze cast, made by an artist when she was twenty, on one of the tables in the shuttered salon.
‘Thank you.’ Anny bent to kiss the chamois-soft powdered cheeks.
‘It’s high time you had a dress,’ said the contessa. ‘As I can’t come to help you choose it, Van will deputise for me. You can wear it tonight when you and your uncle dine here.’
‘Uncle Bart hasn’t any formal clothes,’ said Anny. She had no intention of leaving him to eat alone.
‘Neither has Van. Only you and I will dress up. I haven’t dressed up for twenty years, but I shall tonight. A girl’s sixteenth birthday is a special occasion. Imagine, I was only two years older than you when I married. My husband was twenty-five, the same age as his great-grandson.’ After glancing at Van, she went on, ‘But in those days well-bred young men in their twenties spent their time sowing their wild oats. Do you understand that expression?’
‘It means having love affairs, doesn’t it?’ Anny replied.
‘Love affairs of a nature which might be condoned by their fathers but were not approved of by their mothers—if they knew about them,’ said the contessa. ‘Young men would also get drunk and, if they were very wil
d, smoke opium. As the French say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The only difference between my time and your time is that now many good girls do what once only bad girls did and drugs are on sale everywhere.’
Van said dryly, ‘We’re not all doing drugs, Theodora.’
‘I’m sure you have too much intelligence to jeopardise your future. Your only excess, that I know of, is straining your eyes, doing whatever it is that you do on that machine you installed in the tower room.’
She turned back to Anny. ‘You, my dear, have had the good luck not to be exposed to bad influences. I hope you will always stay as unspoiled and lovely as you are today. If I were your fairy godmother, I would use my magic to make sure that when you are a little older you will fall in love and stay in love for the rest of your life. It doesn’t happen very often, but it did to me and I hope it will to you.’
‘Thank you, Contessa...and thank you for the dress.’
It was the prospect of going shopping with Van, rather than the dress itself, that made Anny’s eyes sparkle.
‘Why do the rest of your family never come here?’ she asked, on the train which ran from a station near the palazzo to Nice, sometimes snaking into tunnels where the mountains came down to the sea and re-emerging into the sunlight above bays where the clear water showed where the sea-bed was sandy and where it was covered with dark green weed.
‘They couldn’t very well come here and not stay at Orengo. By their standards it’s falling to bits,’ Van told her. ‘Americans are accustomed to a higher level of comfort than any other nation. They had central heating and showers decades before Europeans. They don’t like insects and draughts and damp-smelling closets. Orengo is stuck in a time warp. It was the height of luxury in its day, but that was a long time ago.’
‘You like it. You’re American.’
‘Not really. Do you know the expression “a citizen of the world”?’
Anny shook her head. Bart had bought her a set of encyclopaedia, but it was out of date by twenty years. As they only ever saw newspapers and magazines which other people had discarded, sometimes there were embarrassing gaps in her general knowledge.
‘It means someone who feels they belong to the human race rather than to any one country,’ he explained. ‘I go a step further. I feel I belong to cyberspace. Right now it’s like the old Wild West...unexplored territory. But one day...’
As he explained his vision, Anny listened intently, as she did to everything Van said. But a lot of it was beyond her comprehension. She wondered if there was a book on the subject she could study before his next visit.
‘If this were New York we could go to Bloomie’s, but here I wouldn’t know which is the best store,’ said Van, on arrival at Nice.
‘That’s no problem,’ said Anny. ‘Let’s have a drink in one of the cafés and when I see someone going past who looks the way I’d like to look, I’ll ask her where she shops.’
The suggestion seemed to amuse him. ‘Do you really have the nerve to do that?’
‘Why not? It’s common sense. Who minds being told you like the way they look? Anyway I can’t afford to be shy if I’m going to be a journalist. I’ll have to persuade other people not to be shy with me.’
They chose a café in one of the pedestrianised shopping streets near the western end of the spacious Place Massena with its public gardens and fountains.
Presently, while she sipped a soft drink and Van had a beer, she saw a couple of girls a little older than herself whose style she wanted to emulate. Flattered by her explanation, they were only too ready to list their favourite shops.
‘There...you see? One easy movement,’ said Anny, returning to their table outside Le Paradis.
‘You should have offered to buy them a drink,’ said Van. ‘The one in blue had excellent legs.’
The remark sapped all Anny’s pleasure in the success of her strategy. She felt furious with him.
‘If you want to pick up girls, you’ll have to do it yourself.’
Van laughed, showing his white teeth and giving her another of those strange little internal tremors. She didn’t like the way his blue eyes were following another girl passing by, one closer to his age than the other two.
She knew that in a white shirt and much laundered jeans she was no match for the local girls, all of whom seemed to have that elusive quality called chic. Their figures weren’t better than hers, and not all were prettier. But they all had something she lacked and was eager to acquire, even though she couldn’t pin it down.
Van finished his beer. ‘When you’re ready, we’d better get started.’
While he paid the waiter, Anny finished her jus d’orange.
The girls to whom she had spoken had explained the location of the shops they recommended. Anny had half expected that Van would remain outside, perhaps suggest meeting her later. Her uncle had given her the impression that, except in places like a ship’s chandler, the male sex was not at ease in shops.
Van, it seemed, was an exception. He not only came inside the shop but suggested they should both trawl the racks and pick out what caught their eye.
‘What size are you?’
Anny consulted an assistant who looked her over and decided she was a 36. Having heard them speaking English, she added that this was the Continental equivalent of an American 8 or a British 10.
After looking at several price tags, Anny went back to Van. ‘These are all very expensive. I don’t think the contessa realises how much dresses cost now. If she’s short of money...’
‘She’s not that short of money,’ he said. ‘She’s a very old lady. She may not be around next year. Let her enjoy being generous.’
Of the three dresses she took to the fitting room, two were possibles and one impossible; but she couldn’t resist trying it on and then showing it to Van, hoping it might make him see her from a new perspective.
It was made of a clingy red fabric with a halter-necked glittery bodice cut in a way that made a bra unnecessary for anyone with firm breasts.
Barefoot, because her sandals spoiled the effect, she walked out of the fitting room, wondering how Van would react. While she was fastening the zip, she had heard the salesgirl practising her English on him.
Seeing Anny got up like a swinger gave Van a curious jolt. He had noticed that morning that she had a very good figure, but now, with every curve emphasised by a low décolletage and hip-hugging skirt, it was hard to believe that here, metamorphosed into a sexy young woman, was the androgynous child he had found acting out a daydream in the belvedere.
In a few years’ time she was going to be drop-dead gorgeous. Right now she was barely sixteen and although she already had a shape that would knock guys’ eyes out if they saw her in that red outfit, to anyone with a grain of intelligence it was obvious that she didn’t have the experience to handle the reactions the dress invited.
‘Uh-uh,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That little number would give Theodora heart failure. Try these two I picked out for you.’
Anny looked doubtfully at his choices, neither of which appealed to her. ‘I’ll show you my other two first.’
‘OK.’ He resumed his conversation with the salesgirl.
Anny had thought he was only interested in computers. But this afternoon he was behaving like what Bart called a skirt-chaser. She didn’t like it. She wanted him to concentrate on her.
When she appeared in the next dress, a more sedate style splashed with pale pink roses on a turquoise background, Van said, ‘That’s pretty, but the shoulders don’t fit and you’d need to replace that tacky plastic belt’
He was equally critical of her third choice, giving Anny the feeling she must have disastrous taste.
Trying on one of the dresses he thought suitable, she had to admit it looked much better on her than it had on the hanger. It was cream cotton, overchecked with white, with cream lace cuffs on the short sleeves and a triangle of lace sewn into the low V-neck. The waist was tight, th
e full hem almost down to her ankles. Reluctantly, she acknowledged that it was more becoming than any of the previous three.
‘Theodora will like that,’ said Van, when he saw it. ‘How do you feel about it?’
‘It’s all right.’ She wasn’t going to enthuse after he’d been so stuffy about the red dress.
On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Anny took the dress from the hanging locker in her cabin where it had stayed, unworn, since the year before.
Tonight there would be no celebration. The contessa was in a private clinic, having tests. Bart had had to go to England for the funeral of his eldest sister. Anny hadn’t gone with him because they were short of money. Even one air fare had left their resources at a worryingly low ebb.
She was keeping her fingers crossed that an article she had sent to a French magazine would be accepted. They had taken a previous piece and paid her a useful fee. But she couldn’t count on it happening a second time.
She took the dress on deck to give it its fortnightly airing. When, if ever, would she wear it again? she wondered forlornly.
She hadn’t seen Van since last spring because, although he had been to Orengo in the interim, she and Bart had been away. At least when they were at sea Bart drank less, but to Anny it had been deeply frustrating to be somewhere else while Van was at the palazzo.
On one of his visits, he had left a portable printer for her. By then she had mastered the word processor and, with the addition of the printer, was able to produce professional-looking typescripts.
Bart wouldn’t hear of her leaving home before she was eighteen. Meanwhile she was working hard to build up a portfolio of freelance published work to show to prospective employers when she applied for staff jobs.
Since the contessa’s admission to the clinic, Anny had been hoping that Van might come over to see her. Her relations in America knew where she was because she herself had called her younger sister in Boston to tell her about the tests. Anny had dialled the number for her on an old-fashioned daffodil telephone with the numbers in holes in a metal disc the contessa found awkward to use now that her knuckles were swollen.
