Tour de Force (2 page)

Mr Fernando met them just inside the glass doors, wearing an enormous label to show who he was. ‘Permit me, I introduce myself, Fernando Gomez, your courier, late undergrad St John's College, Cambridge University …' He was a Gibraltarian, five foot four inches high and very nearly as broad, tapering off, however, into narrow hips and infinitesimal feet which in turn tapered in ornamental brown and white shoes. ‘Permit me, I introduce myself …' He was radiant. His hair shone with brilliantine, his smile shone with gold fillings, his hands shone with polished nails and chippy little diamond and ruby rings; his eyes above all shone bright with enthusiasm and friendliness behind a pair of enormous yellow sun-glasses, keeping a sharp lookout for the one with the Park Lane address. ‘Happy to see you all, happy to welcome you, come all this way, please, we flash through the customs in a jiffy and the coach will be waiting outside. Then a jolly lunch in the town, a glance at the Duomo and off to the Riviera and stay there to-night. Miss Trapp, please, which is Miss Trapp? Miss Trapp, I introduce myself, Fernando Gomez, your guide …' Miss Trapp was the one with the Park Lane address. It was curious that she should wear a hat wreathed in withered brown brussels-sprouts and for a moment his confidence in her identity failed him; but he took off the sun-glasses and saw that the brussels-sprouts were red roses, really, and expensive red roses at that. ‘Come this way, please, Miss Trapp. I see you through the customs myself, we are through in a jiffy!' He picked up her suitcase himself, not waiting for a porter. It weighed half a ton but it was of solid crocodile leather and monogrammed in gold.

Mr Cecil was enraptured. He felt like a sheep, he cried to Louli in his gay, high voice as they lined up to go through the customs room: queueing up to be dipped. And his eyelashes fluttered like butterflies in the wind, for this wonderful Fernando had shoulders like a boxer and did seem a perfect
pet!
But he had somehow got separated from what he called his attashy case and he was distressed about that, so afraid it might be feeling lonely and bewildered, poor thing, and feeling the heat.… With a thousand like fancies he beguiled the waiting flock while Fernando dashed up and down their ranks like a sheepdog, sorting out baggage and owner, guiding both to a vacant spot at the customs counter, leaving them triumphantly there and dashing back for another pair. ‘At any moment,' said Louli, ‘you expect him to lie down full-length with his nose on his paws.'

‘If only he'd put his silly paws on Little Red Attashy Case!'

‘You seem in a flap about it,' said Louli. ‘What's in it?'

There was nothing in it, Mr Cecil said, but drawing-paper and a few coloured pencils. This trip was not merely for pleasure, one was leaving the tour at Rome with a sheaf, but a
sheaf
one hoped, of scribbles inspired by the sunshine of Italy and San Hoowarne; and these would be finished off in the studio of one's Friend in Rome and shown at the exhibition of dress design there in the autumn; meanwhile, being executed in a thousand different exquisite materials for the coming London season. Mr Cecil was quite madly excited about it all and correspondingly worried about the attaché case; but when it turned up at last, he seemed oddly anxious that the customs officials should not see the paper and pencils. ‘You wouldn't get it through for me, ducky? Sangwidged in between all those
Vogues
and things, it wouldn't show at all.'

‘Oh, do you say sangwidged too?' said Louli, delighted. Mr Cecil, who knew no other way of saying it, was mystified but let it go.

The coach waited, true to Fernando's promise, outside the airport and there was a splendid confusion as they all found their seats, for the agency at home had blandly promised each of them a place in the front row, and Mr Fernando, moreover, was holding the seating plan upside down. ‘This single seat in front by the driver is kept free in case anyone may be sick on the journey …'

Everyone immediately assured him that in all likelihood they would be sick during the entire trip, a promise which with several of them was only too faithfully kept. ‘Now, in the front here, please – Miss Trapp; here, Mrs Jones …'

Louli Barker sat amidships, wrapt in gloom, penned against the window by an angular widow with a grievance at having been given a seat on the aisle. She looked round desperately for Mr Cecil or even her little friend of the aeroplane, and saw them sitting quietly in the back row. ‘Mr Cockrill, sir – here!' cried Fernando in a commanding voice. ‘And, Mr Cecil – you're here.'

‘Oh, but, my dear, no, I'm here,' protested Mr Cecil. ‘And madly comfy, please don't make one move.'

‘This is a good seat I give you, Mr Cecil, in the back is not so good.'

‘Then nobody else will want to come here, so please be a kindy and let one stay!'

‘Why can't they sit where they're told?' said the angular widow, who had fought and bled to avoid her place on the aisle. She handed a large straw hat to Louli and a folded coat. ‘I wonder if you'd mind having these on your lap? There's no room on the rack: someone's got a large red tablecloth up there and it's taking up all the space.' The lady in front had brought her wardrobe on hangers, apparently, and now engaged herself in hooking them up along the window. A hand came over the back of her seat and tapped Louli on the shoulder. ‘Need we have these clothes hung in front of us? We shan't be able to see.'

‘We'll just have to sit and read the labels,' said Louli. She rose abruptly to her feet. ‘Mr Fernando, could I sit at the back please?' She waited for no answer but hitched down the tablecloth from the rack, dumped hat and coat upon their owner and marched up the aisle where, in the privacy of the rear seats, she and Mr Cecil collapsed into a communion of effervescent giggling. The coach driver, suddenly getting fed up with the lot of them, started the engine, engaged his gears with a jerk that threw them all backwards, and, considering them now to be seated, triumphantly drove off. Fernando produced a hand microphone and, unconscious that his voice was being distorted to a meaningless bellow, described the passing scene. Inspector Cockrill stared glassily out at it, and longed for home.

One of the Simply Impossibles was Miss Trapp. She shared a luncheon-table in the restaurant in the broad arcades of Milan with a quiet young woman called Miss Lane. They were both on their own. ‘I prefer to travel by myself,' said Miss Trapp, snapping her tight, prim mouth. She wore the expensive, if somewhat out-of-date, hat with the red brussels-sprouts and a depressing brown silk dress, and clutched tight up under her chin in one thin hand a large brown leather bag. She looked like somebody's housekeeper, spending the savings of five years of slavery on a so-far not very successful Holiday Abroad; but the bag was of real leather and bore a monogram which, if indecipherable, was at least of gold. Miss Lane looked round at the Jollies and the Vulgars, at the Experienced Travellers (loudly demanding Bitter Campari and Risotto Milanese) and the Inexperienced Travellers, nervously eyeing their plates and hoping there wouldn't be all that nasty garlic, and asked if one could really describe this as travelling alone …?

Miss Trapp folded her lips, hugging the big brown bag. She changed the subject abruptly. ‘Do you live in London?'

Something secret drew down over Vanda Lane's face. She replied, however, that yes, she lived in London. She had a flat.

‘Oh, a flat,' said Miss Trapp.

‘In St John's Wood.'

Miss Trapp seemed not to have heard of St John's Wood. She herself lived in Park Lane –
quite
a small house. ‘I think the air is better there …'

Vanda Lane did not care two hoots about the air of Park Lane. She sat toying with her spaghetti and covertly watching the man with only one arm. She was in love. He was ugly and angry-looking and in a million years he would never so much as glance her way; but she was in love. ‘I'm the slave type,' she thought, ‘and he's the master type; and he's the only person in the world that I would want to be my master.' After all the years of existing upon vicarious romanticism, barren of personal relationship, suddenly, totally unexpectedly, out of the blue had come fulfilment – to worship like a dog at the feet of a man with a bitter face and sullen, contemptuous eyes. She dropped her own eyes before his casual glance: a secret creature with a closed secret face – with leaf-brown hair kept secret under a tight-fitting hat, with a good figure kept secret in a repression of corset and brassière, with clothes whose excellence was so discreet that none but Mr Cecil would trouble to look at them twice: with far more good looks than ever the flamboyant Louli Barker could boast, kept secret beneath an apparently almost deliberate under-emphasis – devoid of make-up, tight lipped, unsmiling, chill. She lifted her eyes again and again dropped them before his glance; and Leo Rodd said to his wife that dear God, now there were two of them longing to sympathize with him over his arm; and added that there was one thing about all this pasta and stuff, he didn't have to have it cut up for him publicly.

Mr Fernando jollied them all out and into the bus again. ‘Come along, come along, off now in a jiffy to lovely Rapallo on the glorious Mediterranean coast …' He knew that they would hate the glorious Mediterranean coast with its horrid dark grey sand carefully boarded off from its flashy little towns, and would compare it unfavourably with Tenby and Frinton and Southend-on-Sea, the cruder spirits even murmuring among themselves that they could have gone far more cheaply to any or all of those places – but to Mr Fernando nothing connected with Odyssey Tours could be less than perfect and he could not forbear from extolling the joys to come, while there was yet a chance of doing so uncontradicted. ‘Hurry up, hurry up, where now are all our ladies?' Their ladies were queueing up before the door of the single lavatory where indeed the gentlemen had recently been in a queue of their own, embarrassingly close. They arrived, breathless and blushing, in ones and twos, Miss Trapp last of all, hurriedly adjusting the khaki silk dress and the brussels-sprouts hat. The driver looked round impatiently, saw only one passenger still standing, and drove off with his customary jerk and she sat down with unexpected abruptness in her place; but not before Mr Cecil, rising from his seat in the rear had cried out, high and gay: ‘Why goodness, Miss Trapp – I do believe you're wearing a Christophe hat!'

Now whatever was there in that, thought Inspector Cockrill, to have made the poor lady turn so pale?

Chapter Two

T
HAT
very first night in their terraced hotel at Rapallo, already you could see the party sorting itself out, forming into groups: the Vulgars and the Jollies getting together over Americanos, the Timids being taken over by the Seasoned Travellers, the Neurotics turning pale together at the sight of heaped dishes of death-dealing green figs and peaches, the Hearties calling loudly for lo nachurelle and assuring each other that a smattering of French would take you all over the world.… There was a spinster aunt standing treat to a handsome niece who she was obscurely determined should remain as desolately maiden as herself – Grim and Gruff, Mr Cecil and Louli called them; and already a member of the party had been christened, for obvious reasons, Mrs Sick.…

Inspector Cockrill remained aloof from it all. He left the hotel and went inland in search of a pub; there were no pubs but he found a small square with chairs outside a café and sat down and asked for a bitter. The waiter brought him a Bitter Campari and, disillusioned, he stumped back angrily to the hotel. Louli Barker was sitting alone on the balcony. ‘Hallo, Mr Cockrill. Where are all the chaps?'

‘I met Mr Cecil going along the front.'

‘He's in hot pursuit of Fernando; but I'm afraid it's no dice, poor pet, because Fernando is after La Trapp.'

‘Well, I'm going up to bed. If you can call it a bed,' said Cockie, gloomily.

Their hotel was not only first, but luxury class. ‘What's wrong with your bed?' asked Louli, surprised.

‘I don't know yet. I shall very soon find out.' But he lingered a little. He could not help liking her: there was about her something as friendly and well disposed as about a nice child. Under all this silly, false exterior, he thought – she's real. Not like that other closed-in, secret creature with her unhappy mouth and hooded, downcast blue eyes. Louli's eyes were blue too, but by no means downcast, or if they were it was from the weight of her new eyelashes. You stuck them on with white of egg, she confided to him, and he could have no idea how hard it was to ask a chambermaid for white of egg in Italian! The trouble was that, what with the egg and all, they were as heavy as hell and she simply couldn't keep awake. From his balcony above, he later observed that she had, indeed, fallen into a little cat nap, sitting bolt upright on a white metal chair.

Most of the others had come in and gone up to bed by the time Louli awoke; nor had the cat nap been so profound that she had not been able now and again to open a wary eye and mark their departure. Only the man with the one arm remained, standing looking out across the dark bay. She got up and stretched and went over and stood beside him and said, ‘Hallo.'

He started. He said, irritably, ‘I thought everyone had gone to bed?'

‘Not me, yet. So I thought I'd come over and say hallo to you.'

‘Well, hallo,' he said, getting it over, as to a tiresome small child.

‘I thought we might as well meet one another, as I suppose we shall be travelling together …'

‘Why should you suppose that?'

She ignored the obvious reply that they were in fact travelling together. She said, refusing to be snubbed: ‘Well, let's say then that I
hope
we'll be travelling together.'

‘When you get to know me better,' he said, ‘you will not regard that as a matter for optimism.'