Tour de Force (32 page)

I will walk out among them all as Louvaine. I will say – I'll say that I've split the brassiere of my bathing suit, that'll account for the cut where the knife went through and at the same time give me an excuse for ‘disappearing' – hiding away in one of the bathing huts will be best – while Vanda Lane makes ‘positively her last public appearance'. I can dodge up through the salons, up the stairs, into the other room, into Vanda Lane's room: wipe off the make-up, put on the black suit over the Bikini, roll up the red plastic bag with the make-up things in a towel and carry it with me. Reappear again as soon as I possibly can, as Vanda Lane; talk to people, to anyone who happens to be at hand, it doesn't matter who, say something that'll lay a trail to the ‘characters book' prepare their minds for the idea that Vanda Lane was one of those people who make capital out of other people's weaknesses.… Yes, and that'll provide an ostensible motive for the murder, it all works in marvellously, marvellously, it's like one of my own plots.…

Excitement rose in her again, excitement and that sense of power. Down to the rock, and dive. Get them all collected together on the beach, dive again, dive a little crookedly. I can fake that all right, make an excuse to retire. With them all safely down on the beach, I'll be free to nip into a bathing hut – I must leave the towel with the red bag there – strip off the black bathing things, dab on a lot of make-up, fluff out my red hair and dash down to the beach all gay and Loulified. But in case that should fail, in case she should falter in this her first major appearance as the new Louvaine – a word, perhaps, with blackmailing Vanda Lane as they ‘meet' at the top of the diving rock, dark hints afterwards to account for any possible oddness of manner, a pale face, tense expression. Not that she was really afraid: I can do it, it'll work, it's all fitting in too marvellously for it not to work – and look how cool I am, how controlled, look how completely I've taken the whole thing in hand! And after all, I'm used to acting a part, I've been acting a part for ten years, every moment of my life. As for ‘being' Louvaine – these people have known her for a week, casually, impersonally – except for Leo and he's mostly seen her in the evenings, in the half darkness: for the rest of the time he's been busy pretending to ignore her. Louvaine and I were so much alike, really, alike with that family likeness of walk and voice and figure, far more than of face: in the old days I had to practise lowering my voice to a different pitch, I can go back to our ‘family voice' soon enough – and as for the walk, I've deliberately got into the habit of creeping about, I've only to throw back my shoulders, let my stride go free … Besides, who's observed her walk, in these few days, mostly spent sitting in a char-à-banc, who's studied the set of her shoulders, who'll notice in all the fuss after – after it's discovered – any change in the voice of a fellow-tourist they've known for less than a week? But I – I've known her since we were babies together, I know every look, every mannerism, every overworked slang expression, after all, it's been part of
me
. I helped to build it all up, I know the very thought behind everything she did and said and was: I knew into her mind. And after all these years, am I such a fool that I can't, if I set my mind to it, become what in fact was my other self? Besides …

Besides, the rewards were so very great: a new life, freed from the chains that adolescent reserve and diffidence had forged for her, and habit and circumstance ever since imposed – a new life with the beloved of her love-starved heart. And the alternative was death at a hangman's hands.

The eyelashes were the trickiest. Hung by an eyelash! she thought to herself, coolly sardonic; for she dared not appear as Vanda Lane, with Louli's preposterous false eyelashes already in place, and even if she got away with it during her first brief appearance as Louvaine, she could not appear without them when she finally went down to the beach. And surely they would take too long to adjust during her quick change in the bathing hut? Well – she must risk it: the lashes were strung along a line of coarser hair, she had only to lay them along the upper lid and put a dab of adhesive – no time for messing about with the famous white of egg; and if they later came adrift, well, Louli's artificialities were a standing joke with herself and everyone else; and one could produce a hand-mirror and adjust one's make-up every five minutes without exciting comment – Louvaine did, twenty times a day.

One problem remained: how to dispose of the wet black bathing suit, the cap, and the shoes. Vanda Lane would obviously have gone back to her room in them: how then, to return them to the room? I must stow them away in the red bag, I suppose, and keep them with me; some time or other, we shall go back up to the hotel in the ordinary nature of things and I must – yes, I must hitch them over the rail outside her room, that shouldn't be difficult. (And pray that none of them would ask themselves why Vanda Lane, having changed, should wrap them all up in a towel instead of spreading them out to dry!)

A clock struck and it was an hour and a half since first the sunshine had been blocked out in the doorway: one hour and a half since Louvaine had come into the room and stood there smiling in the white satin bathing dress. And now it was she, Vanda Lane, who stood in the white satin bathing dress – not smiling. She stood before the looking-glass on the little dressing-table, and looked long and earnestly into the obediently smiling face – a face that so many and many and many a time had looked back into hers: but not from a looking-glass. The same face: the very face: eyes widened and slanted with eye-shadow and pencil to match the slant of the upward pencilled brows, cheeks rouged and shadowed to a new contour, mouth painted to a gash of scarlet – all in a frame of flagrantly dyed red hair. The same face: the same smiling painted face that a thousand times had smiled back into her own: nothing to choose between them but the ghastliness of the smile.

She tore her eyes from the mirror and flung open the window above it to let the bright sunshine stream in on the drying red curls; and somewhere a door slammed, and Inspector Cockrill strolled out on to the balcony.…

‘You won't want me to explain it to you in detail,' said Inspector Cockrill when at last, half-fainting, she had been dragged to her feet and taken away to the waiting car outside. ‘She showed it all to us – when she decided after her false accusation of Mrs Rodd, to tell the truth and give herself up to the politio. And she did tell the truth – only we none of us recognized it. She walked through the part of Vanda Lane pretending to be Louvaine: and stupid blind fools that we were, we took it that she was acting the part of Louvaine pretending to be Vanda Lane. It was the curl that did it – the curl of red hair blowing across her face from under the black rubber cap: the curl deceived us all, none of us thought for one moment that it really
was
“dead” Vanda Lane. But she didn't know that: she walked on through the part, she would have executed the two dives, she would have gone through the whole thing: only then something happened. She was doing it because she thought Leo Rodd hated her for what she had done to Mrs Rodd; she was confessing to us all – because she thought he no longer loved her and therefore she had nothing left to lose – that she was Vanda Lane; and then, when she was just about to give herself up to the Gerente, Mrs Rodd stepped in and saved her, and Leo Rodd said, “I shall be grateful to you for ever, Helen, because of what you've done for Louvaine.”
Because of what you've done for Louvaine
. It was not true, after, all, that Leo Rodd no longer loved her, she had something to live for still; and – we all still believed that she was Louvaine.'

Mr Cecil sat, chin in hand, on the straight-backed chair against the white-painted wall of the little room with its rows of straight-backed chairs against white-painted walls. ‘That day, afterwards, when she was lying down, I was talking to her about it and she said – yes, that's right, she said, “You'll never know, no one will ever know, what those words meant to me.”'

‘They meant that she was “Louvaine” again; and no doubt with a growing sense of power because now, really, she must have seemed to herself to be indestructible, the whole imposture must have seemed, after such an escape, as though it were “meant”. And we were all deceived anew. Puzzled: but still deceived. Puzzled because we had all in our varying degrees been fond of Louvaine – absurdly fond of her,' admitted Inspector Cockrill gruffly, ‘considering that we had known her a matter of days. But we somehow couldn't be fond of the new Louvaine. All of a sudden her extravagances seemed cheap and silly, she was often unkind where the real Louvaine wouldn't have been unkind, and – she called Mrs Rodd “ducky”. Louvaine called everyone “ducky” but not Mrs Rodd – she was injuring Mrs Rodd, deceiving her and injuring her, the real Louvaine had too much true delicacy to force that sort of friendly familiarity on Mrs Rodd. As for Mr Rodd …'

Leo Rodd sat beside Helen on the straight-backed chair against the poster-plastered white wall. ‘I was utterly bewildered. I knew I had loved Louvaine. I knew that Louvaine was – well, a person to be loved; and all of a sudden, I couldn't love Louvaine. I tried, I actually tried to force myself back into being in love with her, but – I couldn't understand it, but it just wouldn't work. It was not a falling out of love, it wasn't the petering out of an ordinary affair.' He did not touch his wife, he did not look at her but he knew that for all the pain the understanding cost her, she would understand. ‘I was in love with Louvaine, I couldn't help myself, it was something that happened to us both and there it was. And suddenly – it wasn't there any more.' And he looked down at the spot where she had lain slavering at his feet and said: ‘Thank God I never loved her, thank God I never held her in my arms. God damn her soul to hell for daring to think that to me she could be – Louvaine.'

Mr Cecil burst into the silence, spilling over with gossip and chatter and exclamation like a champagne bottle at long last uncorked. And going for Mrs Rodd like that – and that business of the patchwork skirt, too utterly fascinating, so simple and yet really quite brilliant on the spur of the moment, when you came to think of it …

‘The skirt?'

‘The patchwork skirt – my dears, you do remember? She was wearing it at the funeral, Vanda Lane's funeral – well, her own funeral really when you come to think of it, too macabre and yet rather fascinating, she must have got a sort of dreadful kick out of the whole thing in a way.' But actually poor darling Louli's funeral, he added more sombrely; and when one thought of that, one was so glad one had gone to all that expense about the mourning (which anyway, though he did not say so, was going to come in very handy for
intime
little parties, come the long winter evenings) and had felt quite dreadfully melancholy among all those dreary cypresses. ‘But the skirt. She wore it to the funeral and then coming home in the
vaporetto
she had a bit of a tizzy with Mr Rodd, I know it, Mr Rodd, because I was watching you, and then you left her and came over to Mrs Rodd who was sitting with me at my table, and asked her to take a splinter out of your hand. Well, that must have made her mad – Vanda Lane, I mean. She walked away down to the end of the boat, the prow, the van, whatever you call the thing, and my dears, her
face!
She was frightened then; and she was angry. She must have been asking herself how she could be revenged on Mrs Rodd because Mr Rodd always turned back to her like that; and she must have seen then, how at one stroke she could be revenged – and at the same time prevent Mrs Rodd from helping him, drive him to turn to herself when he needed that kind of assistance. As Mr Cockrill says, she was getting sense of power.'

‘She has a bad heredity,' said Cockie, briefly.

‘So she entered like anything into our “dispersal party” when we got off the boat, and as soon as she was alone, nipped off into the shop and bought a second knife. And afterwards Inspector Cockrill asked if a girl had bought a knife who was wearing a skirt they simply couldn't have missed – a bright patchwork skirt. And they said that no such person had been into the shop.' He eyed them beadily. ‘A patchwork skirt – lined with scarlet.'

‘All right, all right,' said Cockie crossly. ‘She turned it inside out: we know that now.'

‘Yes, we know it
now
,' said Cecil. But poor Mr Cockrill had had a horrid time and one mustn't be a tease. ‘And so then she made an assignation with Mr Rodd for the siesta hour “as soon as his wife was asleep”. And as soon as he'd left the room, she slipped in and met him later, under the pines. You see – we all wondered how the attacker could have missed the heart so hopelessly: why the stab should have gone into the right shoulder. It was meant to go into the right shoulder: it was intended to disable – not to kill.'

‘And yet – why not kill while she was about it?' suggested Fernando. ‘Mrs Rodd was in her way too.'

‘I don't think we can know all that really went on in her mind,' said Helen. ‘By that time she was probably – well, half mad.'

‘A bad heredity,' said Cockie, again.

Mr Fernando sat close to Miss Trapp on the small chair, his heavy thigh pressed warmly against her own. She would never get used to it – never; the easy familiarity of the flesh, the unprivacy of it all, the – the earthiness. But there was so much more, so much that transcended these unimportant physical shrinkings and she sat, quietly happy, by his side, grieved for these others with their past pains and their remaining problems, but for herself content. ‘But, Inspector Cockrill, you didn't know this all along? When did you know?'

A face raised to look up from the terrace, far, far below the topmost tower of the palatio on the hill; an arm stretched forth to take a pair of sun-gasses from a breast pocket; a hand flung out to catch at a falling attaché case …