“You know,” said Jack, as if Netta knew, “the look of amazement on a girl's face…”
Well, that same incandescence had suffused Jack's father when he thought his wife had died, and it continued to shine until a taxi deposited dotty Vera with her cheerful announcement that she had certainly brought off a successful April Fool. After Jack's father died she became violent. “Getting away from her was a form of violence in me,” Jack said. “But I did it.” That was why he was secretive; that was why he was independent. He had never wanted any woman to get her hands on his life.
Netta heard this out calmly. Where his own feelings were concerned she thought he was making them up as he went along. The garden smelled coolly of jasmine and mimosa. She wondered who his new girl was, and if he was likely to blurt out a name. But all he had been working up to was that his mother — mad, spoiled, devilish, whatever she was — would need to live with Jack and Netta, unless Netta agreed to giving her an income. An income would let her remain where she was — at the moment, in a Rudolph Steiner community in Switzerland, devoted to medieval gardening and to getting the best out of Goethe. Netta's father's training prevented even the thought of spending the money in such a manner.
“You won't regret all you've told me, will you?” she asked. She saw that the new situation would be her burden, her chain, her mean little joke sometimes. Jack scarcely hesitated before saying that where Netta mattered he could never regret anything. But what really interested him now was his mother.
“Lifts give her claustrophobia,” he said. “She mustn't be higher than the second floor.” He sounded like a man bringing a legal concubine into his household, scrupulously anxious to give all his women equal rights. “And I hope she will make friends,” he said. “It won't be easy, at her age. One can't live without them.” He probably meant that he had none. Netta had been raised not to expect to have friends: You could not run a hotel and have scores of personal ties. She expected people to be polite and punctual and to mean what they said, and that was the end of it. Jack gave his friendship easily, but he expected considerable diversion in return.
Netta said dryly, “If she plays bridge, she can play with Mrs. Blackley.” This was the wife of the doctor who had first said “Moslem wife.” He had come down here to the Riviera for his wife's health; the two belonged to a subcolony of flat-dwelling expatriates. His medical practice was limited to hypochondriacs and rheumatic patients. He had time on his hands: Netta often saw him in the hotel reading room, standing, leafing — he took pleasure in handling books. Netta, no reader, did not like touching a book unless it was new. The doctor had a trick of speech Jack loved to imitate: He would break up his words with an extra syllable, some words only, and at that not every time. “It is all a matter of stu-hyle,” he said, for “style,” or, Jack's favorite, “Oh, well, in the end it all comes down to su-hex.” “Uh-hebb and flo-ho of hormones” was the way he once described the behavior of saints — Netta had looked twice at him over that. He was a firm agnostic and the first person from whom Netta heard there existed a magical Dr. Freud. When Netta's father had died of pneumonia, the doctor's “I'm su-horry, Netta” had been so heartfelt she could not have wished it said another way.
His wife, Georgina, could lower her blood pressure or stop her heartbeat nearly at will. Netta sometimes wondered why Dr. Blackley had brought her to a soft climate rather than to the man at Vienna he so admired. Georgina was well enough to play fierce bridge, with Jack and anyone good enough. Her husband usually came to fetch her at the end of the afternoon when the players stopped for tea. Once, because he was obliged to return at once to a patient who needed him, she said, “Can't you be competent about anything?” Netta thought she understood, then, his resigned repetition of “It's all su-hex.” “Oh, don't explain. You bore me,” said his wife, turning her back.
Netta followed him out to his car. She wore an India shawl that had been her mother's. The wind blew her hair; she had to hold it back. She said, “Why don't you kill her?”
“I am not a desperate person,” he said. He looked at Netta, she looking up at him because she had to look up to nearly everyone except children, and he said, “I've wondered why we haven't been to bed.”
“Who?” said Netta. “You and your wife? Oh. You mean me.” She was not offended; she just gave the shawl a brusque tug and said, “Not a hope. Never with a guest,” though of course that was not the reason.
“You might have to, if the guest were a maharaja,” he said, to make it all harmless. “I am told it is pu-hart of the courtesy they expect.”
“We don't get their trade,” said Netta. This had not stopped her liking the doctor. She pitied him, rather, because of his wife, and because he wasn't Jack and could not have Netta.
“I do love you,” said the doctor, deciding finally to sit down in his car. “Ee-nee-ormously.” She watched him drive away as if she loved him too, and might never see him again. It never crossed her mind to mention any of this conversation to Jack.
That very spring, perhaps because of the doctor's words, the hotel did get some maharaja trade — three little sisters with ebony curls, men's eyebrows, large heads, and delicate hands and feet. They had four rooms, one for their governess. A chauffeur on permanent call lodged elsewhere. The governess, who was Dutch, had a perfect triangle of a nose and said “whom” for “who,” pronouncing it “whum.” The girls were to learn French, tennis, and swimming. The chauffeur arrived with a hairdresser, who cut their long hair; it lay on the governess's carpet, enough to fill a large pillow. Their toe- and fingernails were filed to points and looked like a kitten's teeth. They came smiling down the marble staircase, carrying new tennis racquets, wearing blue linen skirts and navy blazers. Mrs. Blackley glanced up from the bridge game as they went by the cardroom. She had been one of those opposed to their having lessons at the English Lawn Tennis Club, for reasons that were, to her, perfectly evident.
She said, loudly, “They'll have to be in white.”
“End whayt, pray?” cried the governess, pointing her triangle nose.
“They can't go on the courts except in white. It is a private club. Entirely white.”
“Whum do they all think they are?” the governess asked, prepared to stalk on. But the girls, with their newly cropped heads, and their vulnerable necks showing, caught the drift and refused to go.
“Whom indeed,” said Georgina Blackley, fiddling with her bridge hand and looking happy.
“My wife's seamstress could run up white frocks for them in a minute,” said Jack. Perhaps he did not dislike children all that much.
“Whom could,” muttered Georgina.
But it turned out that the governess was not allowed to choose their clothes, and so Jack gave the children lessons at the hotel. For six weeks they trotted around the courts looking angelic in blue, or hopelessly foreign, depending upon who saw them. Of course they fell in love with Jack, offering him a passionate loyalty they had nowhere else to place. Netta watched the transfer of this gentle, anxious gift. After they departed, Jack was bad-tempered for several evenings and then never spoke of them again; they, needless to say, had been dragged from him weeping.