Early One Morning (7 page)

Williams had just immersed himself in the tale of a country girl come to a sticky end when he heard the soft tattoo of elegant heels—glued, not nailed, as was the new style—crossing the paved street. Eve, dressed in a simple navy blue suit and carrying a large valise, which she placed on the floor. She signalled for a coffee as if this were a pre-arranged meeting and smiled broadly at him.

‘How did …?’

‘Joe the Bum.’

‘Ah.’ The waiter at the Falstaff, a man with a Brooklyn accent so thick it came out like soup, had long acted as a letter drop for his regulars. ‘Then the concierge at that horrible building you inhabit.’

He laughed. ‘I can see the Rex and the Baths of Neptune from my balcony.’

‘And the whores,’ she said sniffily.

It was true. There were some
hotels
de passé
—the far end of the sexual scale from the brothels that Orpen sometimes frequented—on the rue de la Lune, just up the steps at his side, where the amiable but low-fee prostitutes bantered with prospective clients and each other.

The waiter delivered her coffee and Eve said, ‘And two Aquavits.’ She nodded at the discarded paper beside him. ‘Looking for a position?’

‘Yes. Driver wanted. Must fuck employer’s mistress behind his back.’

She laughed. ‘Feeling guilty?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No, I did it with the entire staff. Every week.’ It took a moment before he realised she was joking. ‘I particularly like gardeners. All those calluses.’ She shuddered with mock pleasure.

‘It still felt like betrayal.’

Eve nodded but didn’t say anything for a moment. It had happened because it had happened. She felt the hand of inevitability in it. Just as all Orpen’s other mistresses had had a natural lifespan, so her tenure had all but run its course.

‘Betrayal? We all betray each other.’

Williams leaned forward and whispered: ‘If you were mine I’d never betray you.’

Eve tried hard to stop giggling at his seriousness. ‘Ha. Am I hearing some happy-ever-after fantasies here?’

He reached over and picked a strand of hair from her face. ‘How could I hurt a beautiful woman like you?’

Eve hurled back her Aquavit and pursued her lips. ‘Show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her.’

Williams let out a roar of laugher, causing the guitarist to falter. ‘So why did you do it? Was it me, or could it have been anyone?’

‘How can you ask?’ she said indignantly. ‘I could have done it with Mr Jessop and been paid into the bargain.’

‘Because I’m insecure.’

She looked into his eyes and saw it was true. He was like a sixteen year old, nervous, indecisive, daring himself to believe what was happening. She realised she hadn’t told him why she had sought him out.

‘Orpen is going back to London. Not permanently, but to renew ties with his family and no doubt Mrs St George.’ Adding, in case Williams didn’t know, ‘One of my predecessors.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It was amicable.’

‘Even after …’

She grinned. ‘I suspect you didn’t get your sense of morality from your French mother. Orpen only raged for a day or two. You would have been forgiven. But you wouldn’t wait. Too English by half.’

Williams had mostly been raised in France, but there were still prayers for the home country and God Save The King at the dinner table. Although only a boy when Edward VII died, he still remembered the black-draped portrait and the household that spoke in whispers for weeks and weeks until he was certain they were losing the power of speech and every now and then he would cycle down the road so he could shout at the top of his lungs. After sipping his drink for a while he said: ‘I didn’t want to be forgiven. I couldn’t have gone back to how it was. Not me servant, you mistress. There are times when it is best to move on.’

The guitarist came over, his hand outstretched, but Williams shooed him away, his pockets empty. The gypsy went back to his more plaintive pluckings.

‘Bill said,’ she lowered her voice into a gruff whisky-soaked Orpen impersonation, ‘I expect you are going to live in some cold garrett with that damn’ chauffeur and starve.’

Williams smirked at the accuracy. In a way he missed the old soak. ‘And are you?’

‘Not quite.’ She reached down to the valise, unzipped it, and brought out a wad of large denomination notes with a gummed band around it and threw it at Williams. He caught it just before it hit his chest, but he missed the second and the third and the fourth. He tried to catch his Aquavit, but it fell, rolled over and smashed on to the pavement.

‘Not quite,’ she repeated, standing and upending the valise on the tables, scores of packets, millions of francs cascading over the table, laughing at the way Williams’ eyes bulged in his sockets.

Aware of a mournful gaze a few yards down the street, Eve picked up a thin bundle and tossed it to the guitarist who deftly plucked it from the air and burst into rapid fire chords of explosive joy.

‘Dinner at Maxim’s?’ she asked.

‘On you?’

‘On us.’ She leaned across the mound of cash and kissed him.

Eve could not sleep. The supposedly furtive noises she heard from outside were as loud as claps of thunder, the detonation of guns, the fireworks on Bastille Day. The men outside had promised to be as silent as ghosts, but they were the clumsiest spirits she had ever encountered. Still Williams slept on. Since the day on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, several months ago now, Eve had pulled together several strands of her life plan. She had bought a converted watermill on the River Vie in the Pays d’Auge, Normandy, complete with kennels for her Scottish terriers, an apartment in Paris and enough money in the bank to see them through for the foreseeable future.

But Williams, she hadn’t forgotten Williams in her master plan. He deserved something from all the money that came her way after the split with Orpen, a split she now began to suspect Orpen had somehow engineered. He had certainly picked up a new mistress with indecent, and suspicious, haste. And had showered embarrassing riches on Eve with a guilty fervour, as if it was him that had been found in bed with the chauffeur.

Williams had worked hard. He had fixed the place up, pruned the neglected apple trees in the orchard with the intention of making his own cider and calvados one day, built the kennels, helped choose the dogs—they settled on specialising in black Scottish terriers and white West Highland terriers—with an enthusiasm that surprised her, and ingratiated himself with the local village cafés and bars—scrupulously rotating his custom—and the
marie
, important conquests for newcomers to any rural area. Especially unmarried ones.

Winter’s thin dawn chorus had come and gone by the time Williams opened his eyes and rolled over, a sleepy smile on his face. Light headed and exhausted from her long vigil, she kissed him on the cheek, enjoying the rough feel of stubble. ‘Happy birthday, darling.’ Williams kissed her back. ‘I know I should get the breakfast, but would you mind getting the coffee?’

Williams got up, stretched, and wrapped a robe round himself. He threw open the window and looked over the valley floor, to the pastures and orchards of the fertile land, glistening with winter frost, and wondered why the view didn’t make his heart sing quite as much as it should. Possibly the thought of the long months to spring, till the scene blossomed and plumped with fresh greenery. But no, he had to admit even now it had an austere, diamond-hard beauty.

Maybe it was another birthday. Thirty was coming over the horizon fast. By which time he wanted to have made his mark at something other than having a rich lover, no matter how beautiful. Maybe Eve had been partly right. Not that he’d grown tired of fucking her, but somehow it wasn’t enough, there were still missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzle.

Williams went downstairs, selected two large bowls and placed a sugar cube in the bottom of each. He poured in the thick black coffee and then crushed the cube with a spoon. That would be enough for Eve, but he hadn’t quite shaken off the very English need for milk in the morning. He tried the wire-fronted larder, but there was none. Two of the porcelain containers, but empty. Which meant going outside to the cool shed across the courtyard.

Eve paced out his actions in her mind, timing him. Put on coffee, get bowl, fetch sugar, pour coffee, crush cube, discover no milk, go outside, take two paces and …

Williams’ whoop must have been heard in Caen, a window-rattling scream that conveyed disbelief and delirium all in one rush of air from his lungs. She heard him run back, halt, retrace his steps and then a sound like tearing calico, sweeping to a deeper throb as the engine revved.

Leaving it ticking over, Williams sprinted up the stairs and threw himself across the room into her arms and smothered her with kisses.

‘Is it the right one?’ she asked disingenuously, as if talking about a hat or a shirt.

‘A Thirty-five B? Absolutely gorgeous.’ He looked very serious. ‘There is only one thing.’

‘What?’

He listened to that rasping engine note as if something mechanical was bothering him.

‘What?’

He stepped closer. ‘The colour. Blue. Bugatti Blue. It’ll have to be British Racing Green.’ He puffed out his chest with mock pomposity. ‘I am, after all, an Englishman.’

Eve reached up and grabbed him and outside the beautiful sleek Bugatti racing car chugged on, alone and neglected, for another twenty minutes until the new owner came down to take it for a spin.

TRIALS DAY, MONACO, April 1929

R
OBERT BENOIST SAT
on the terrace of the Café de Paris and watched the cars come round the Casino Square as they powered through the gap between the casino itself and the Hotel de Paris, checking the braking and handling of each one, paying particular attention to the Bugattis. Trial day, the first time most of the cars had run this new street-racing circuit. Already it was taking its toll—Benoist had seen two cars limping round, their mechanicals or engines unsettled by such a low-revving, convoluted and bumpy course.

Benoist wasn’t convinced by this circuit. He liked big sweeping autodromes, like Montlhery and Avus in Germany, where the driver could go flat out. Here, he doubted if any of them could get into top gear, and rattling over cobblestones and tram lines put extreme stress on tyres and chassis. He as much as anyone would concede that Ettore Bugatti was a genius, but mechanical reliability was not his strongest suit when it came to race models. He knew there were other dissenters, too—the
Autocar
magazine had editorialised that such a Grand Prix was ‘astonishing’ and ‘dangerous’.

Behind him his brother Maurice scanned the crowd, the faces at the hotel windows, those on the makeshift grandstand across the way and played his own running commentary.

‘Josephine Mannion. You know all about her. I think that is her sister with her. Very different proposition. They say you need a car jack to get her legs apart. Ah, look, Kiki with some ugly artists. I hear Mistinguett is coming tomorrow. See, Noghes has got a few famous faces down here.’ Antony Noghes was the cigarette tycoon who had bankrolled this attempt to start the Monte Carlo season early by running what he hoped would become the most fashionable motor race in the world. Maurice lowered the glasses. ‘And shouldn’t you be in the pits?’

‘Ettore banished me. Says I intimidate the drivers.’ Maurice laughed. He could just imagine his brother, eyes so piercing you felt as if he could see into your soul, making the young blades feel uneasy, as if they weren’t up to the job of filling his shoes. Which, as far as Robert was concerned, they weren’t.

A light drizzle had started and Robert watched the big seven-litre Mercedes of Rudi Caracciola roar into the square, pass the Hotel de Paris and slide into the bend, with Rudi having to steer it like a boat. Robert wondered how Rudi was coping with the Station hairpin and the demanding Gasworks bend.

As if to show how it should be done, a Bugatti came into view, power as full on as the driver dared in a fresh fall of rain on cobbles, and nimbly took the bend, straightening and flooring the pedal up the Avenue des Spellugues towards the downhill zig-zag to Monte Carlo station. Perfect. But something wasn’t quite right with number 12. Then it struck him. It had been green. Not blue. It was a green Bugatti 35B. How could Ettore allow this?

Robert looked at Maurice. ‘Who is that?’ But it was gone. ‘Number twelve.’

Maurice consulted his
liste de engages.
‘Williams. Englishman.’

‘Do we know him?’

‘Some talentless peasant.’

Robert brooded until, three minutes later, Williams came by again and he watched the same mix of looseness and precision guide the car through the bends. ‘Peasant maybe …’ he mused.

‘Look. Over there. In navy blue.’ Maurice’s attention, as usual, was elsewhere.

Robert picked up his binoculars and scanned the sparse crowd on the opposite side of the square. ‘Where?’

‘At the top. Blonde.’

Robert focused on a mass of curly hair framing a face made even more beautiful by its lack of makeup. ‘That’s his woman.’

‘Whose?’

‘Williams,’ said Maurice in triumph.

‘And what do we know about her?’

‘Sucks like a nanny goat.’

Robert lowered his binoculars and gave Maurice one of his powerful stares. ‘Meaning you have tried and got nowhere?’

Maurice grinned. ‘Something like that.’ In fact, nothing like that. He’d introduced himself and been greeted with a I’ve-just-stepped-in-a-dog-turd expression from the woman.

Robert raised the glasses again, but she had gone, off to find another vantage point. Robert watched the Alfas, Maseratis and Bugattis come round one more time, followed by Rudi’s Mercedes, now making its way through the field as its talented driver got the measure of the track. ‘Where are they holding the draw for the start positions?’

‘The Salles Touzet in the casino. Tomorrow night.’

Robert ordered another glass of wine and thought about the blonde. ‘Make sure we’re there. I’d like a closer look.’

RACE DAY, MONACO, APRIL 1929