“There you are,” Gabriel called, wading laboriously out of the surf. “Come on in, the water’s lovely.”
He walked up the beach to join her, shaking his head and wiping the water from his arms. Beside the bodies of the guides baigneurs Gabriel’s arms and shoulders looked very white and pink. She saw drops of water glistening in the wiry curls of chest hair that were visible above his costume top. The dark wool of his costume was shining and heavy from the water, sticking closely to his body. Charis didn’t dare let her eyes wander lower than his chest.
“Oh yes,” Gabriel said, admiring her bathing costume. “Very ultra-modern. Come on, let’s get it wet.”
He seized her hand and pulled her protesting down the beach. They ran into the waves, Charis gasping with shock as the water splashed on her warm skin, letting out a half-stifled shriek as the first sizeable wave thumped into her midriff, rocking her back on her heels.
“Gabriel!” she cried, catching hold of him for support. She felt his hands grip her waist. Beneath her palms the skin on his shoulders felt cool and fine.
“Steady, old girl,” he shouted, his square face smiling happily into her own, settling her on her feet. “You’re on your own now,” he said, then he turned and plunged into the throat of an incoming breaker.
♦
That night as she dressed for dinner, Charis thought about the perfection of the day. The swim, luncheon, a visit to Deauville racecourse to see the horses training, tea at the Eden-Casino, then back to the hotel and a delicious bath. It had been marvellous fun, Gabriel joking and laughing, giving her surreptitious kisses and hugs whenever they found themselves unobserved, calling her ‘old Mrs Cobb’.
She checked her reflection in a looking glass. Her hair was up, an ivory satin band around her head, her hair brushed low across her brow. She took a tiny spot of rouge on the tip of her little finger and rubbed it into her lips. She was wearing a new dress for the first time, part of her trousseau, an ankle-length dress in black velvet with silver beadwork on the bodice and sleeves. She walked out into the main room of their suite. Gabriel stood there in his evening suit, smoking a cigarette.
“Good Lord,” he said. “My, you look a swell, Mrs Cobb. Ain’t I the lucky chap.”
Charis smiled, a little automatically, she realized. She half-wished Gabriel didn’t feel he had to keep up this relentless joking and gaiety. It wasn’t necessary, they didn’t always have to be laughing and playing about. But Gabriel would persist. Now he clicked his heels and offered his arm as if he were a Prussian officer.
“Shall we see what’s for grub?” he said.
People looked round as they walked into the dining room. It was busy but not full up. August was the most popular month in Trouville, coinciding with the race meeting. It was Paris-by-the-sea then, she had read.
During the meal Gabriel ordered champagne which, she noticed, he drank considerably more of than her. Indeed, his mood grew steadily more subdued as the meal progressed; he spent a lot of time gazing around the room as if unwilling to catch her eye. Charis understood. She felt the same sensations in her chest: a kind of breathlessness, as if foreshadowing the onset of a panic. To calm them both down she started talking about the times they had had when they first met in India.
Charis had been born there. Her father was a railway engineer. Her mother had died of some fever or other when Charis was very young, so young that she retained no memory of her whatsoever. Charis had been promptly sent back to England to stay with a family who took care of ‘Indian children’. From there she had gone to Bristol to live with her Aunt Bedelia (her father’s sister) and attend the small private school for girls she ran. However much she had loved Aunt Bedelia she had been ‘bored blue’ by life in Bristol, and consequently at the age of eighteen went out to India to live with her father. For a year her father was based in Bombay, which she had thrived on, with its exotic cosmopolitan life — its yacht club and taxi-cabs, natives in European clothes, its box-wallahs and millionaire merchants.
But then he was posted up the line to a small garrison town and, if anything, Charis was bored even bluer than she had been in Bristol. Like it or not, she became one of the Railway People — no matter how elevated her father’s position as chief engineer — and therefore distinct from Canal People, Army People or Government People. It was true that senior Europeans in the four groups happily intermingled at tennis parties, sales-of-work, polo matches and regimental sports days, but Charis soon grew aware that try to ignore or overcome it as she might, she carried the categorization with her wherever she went.
The only time she felt she left it behind was when the European population moved up from the garrison town on the plains to the popular hill station of Mahar Tal. There were no Railway People in Mahar Tal as the railway stopped at the foot of the hills. Charis stayed with a friend, Eleanor, the daughter of a District Commissioner, and attained, by association, Government People status.
It was during her second summer at Mahar Tal that she met Gabriel. He had been seconded from his regiment to be a ‘bear leader’ to the son of a local rajah. This involved teaching the young boy how to ride, how to play cricket, tennis and badminton and generally inculcate all the social airs and graces of an English gentleman.
Charis met Gabriel at an ‘At Home’ given by one of the senior officials’ wives. Some tennis was played, tea and lemonade were drunk. The hill garden in which the ‘At Home’ took place was devoid of turf but full of English flowers and surrounded by oak and pine trees. Gabriel had been quite a ‘catch’. Since then Eleanor and she had never been quite such close friends.
Charis shook herself out of her reverie and looked across the table at him. Gabriel was cutting up a peach with meticulous surgical care, his head bowed over his plate. In India everything had possessed a wonderful dreamlike quality. Somehow, back in England it proved hard to sustain. Perhaps it was meeting Gabriel’s curious family: all those sisters and brothers-in-law, his batty Aunt Mary and his eccentric mother, the very peculiar little major, and Felix, ‘clever’ Felix, of whom Gabriel spoke most fondly, but who had seemed to her, if she were honest, an odious little prig.
No, she told herself, don’t criticize. Not tonight, of all nights. It was an ordinary family, just like most people’s. Only Gabriel’s perfection showed them up rather.
Gabriel looked up at this point and caught her smiling at him. He smiled back, a little uneasily, she thought.
“Fancy the Casino, Carrie?” he asked, pouring the remains of the champagne bottle into his glass. “Shall we see if we can make our fortune?”
The Casino! she thought. What on earth was he talking about? “I don’t think so, Gabriel,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow night.”
“Fine,” he said, “fine,” and drained his glass.
They went into the hotel lounge where Gabriel ordered brandy and a cigar. When he finished these he suggested a walk, but Charis again demurred. He had another brandy before they went upstairs to their room. Once there, Charis found Gabriel’s lack of composure beginning to affect her too. As she sat before her dressing table in the dressing room her hands shook slightly as she removed the pins from her hair.
In the bedroom Gabriel cleared his throat loudly and said he was going down the corridor to the bathroom. Charis wondered for a moment why he wouldn’t use the one attached to their small suite but realized that this was a kind of ruse to give her a moment or two of privacy.
She felt a pulse beating in her temple and a tightening of her throat. She pulled a nightdress over her underclothes, without putting her arms through the sleeves, and removed her corset and knickers beneath it, as she had done all her life. It was curious, Charis suddenly thought, but she had never seen her naked body in a mirror. She put her underclothes away and climbed into bed, lying on the left hand side. That was where she had lain last night: she didn’t know if Gabriel had any preference.