"Doesn't everyone?"
Searching for an answer, she again produced the one that arrived first. "But 1 hate them!" she exclaimed.
Louis turned and looked at her more closely. She really was remarkably unattractive. Everything about her was wrong: the great moon face, broad flat nose, awkward figure, and enormous feet added up, not just to the girl least likely to succeed, but the girl least likely to be judged a girl at all. Of course (he had noted the point already) she must spend a fortune on her clothes, even though they looked as if they were hanging out to dry after a rough night in the barn; and the bag from which she now took a cigarette-case was crocodile, and the case itself was platinum, with her initials ("B.B.", for God's sake!) in emeralds. ... He felt rested after his sleep, and he had left Mrs. van Dooren safely committed to a different tour, and it was good to be running his own life for a change. Vaguely he found himself thinking: What the hell? Why not?
"You mustn't feel that way about it," he said, as convincingly as he could, and began to talk—as if they were both plagued by the same kind of problem—of the various methods of picking people up at parties.
Louis could be very amusing when he wanted to; and he wanted to now, for no very clear reason except that the girl must have plenty of spending money and was thus rendered desirable (Confucius say: Parents loaded, girl stacked), that she would never do anything to or for him except run errands, and that this was the way he wanted it now. (She had actually given him a cigarette, and lighted it for him. That was a good switch. . . .) Presently he ordered drinks for them both; it was only ten o'clock, but South African Airways always opened up the bar, any time of the day or night, anywhere in excess of two thousand feet, and their hospitality was tempting. One hour and four martinis later, Bernice Beddington began to come to life.
No one had ever talked to her for so long at one time; the fact that the talker was Louis Scapelli, whom everyone said was so wicked, whom Daddy himself had been overheard to call a woman-chasing wop, was just about the most exciting thing that had ever happened. Indeed, the only thing. . . . Flowering in this fantastic radiance, she had given him her views on teen-age crime, the true and terrible story of her coming-out dance, and her entire life-history to date, by the time their plane began its slow descent towards the mine dumps of the Johannesburg Reef.
Tiptree-Jones, the man in charge of the party, walked down the middle gangway, and paused by their seat. Having had Bernice Beddington, dumb as an ox, at his table for more than two months, he was astonished to see that she was now carrying on an animated conversation, glass in hand, cigarette puffing away merrily. . . . The fact that she was talking to Louis Scapelli caused him a minor pang of uneasiness, but he found it preferable to rise above it. If there was anything wrong, he didn't want to know.
"Are you enjoying yourselves?" he asked heartily.
Bernice Beddington, instead of letting her mouth drop open with embarrassment, actually answered: "Of course!"
"We might have a party or something, when we get to Johannesburg," said Louis, as Tiptree-Jones passed on. "I hear it's quite a town."
"Could we be—you know—by ourselves?" Bernice ventured.
"I don't see why not." Louis turned to smile at her. "Sure you don't want to take Tiptree-Jones along?"
She giggled. "But he's so dull. . . ." Then she put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, I shouldn't say that, should I?"
"Say anything you like," said Louis handsomely.
"I want to go horse-racing, too. And to a native dance. And down a gold mine." It was the martinis speaking, but the ideas were none the worse for that. Nor was the next one. "Daddy always gives me lots of money to spend," Bernice confided. "This time, I'm not going to save any of it!"
Louis thought again, much less vaguely: Why not?
They had three days in Johannesburg, and they spent all of them together, by-passing the regular tours and excursions; while Tiptree-Jones, worried yet relieved, decided that this was much the best way of solving the Bernice Beddington problem. Scapelli might be the most terrible type, but no one else had come anywhere near solving it, so far. ... To begin with, the two of them had hired a car, in most auspicious circumstances.
"Wouldn't it be nicer to have our own car?" asked Bernice, on the first afternoon, when they had taken a very long and expensive taxi drive out to the local country club. "I can drive, if you can't."
"I can drive," said Louis, not too enthusiastically.
Intensely vulnerable still, reacting to the smallest hint of anything that might threaten her capture, Bernice went on pleadingly: "I know it's extravagant. But taxis are extravagant, aren't they? And it's silly not to spend all this money."
"All what money?" asked Louis.
Bernice opened her handbag, and, in one of those enormously awkward gestures which had long been her mother's despair, positively shovelled a wad of bills and travellers' cheques towards him. "All this," she answered. "Let's spend it! It's just wasted, otherwise."
Louis held the money very easily, very openly in his hand. At a rough guess, aided by a discreet touch of the thumb, it was not less than five thousand dollars.
"Gee, honey," he said—it seemed an appropriate moment for an endearment—"do you really carry all this around with you?"
"Not normally." She was, as usual, meeting criticism with humble argument. "But on a trip like this—it just seems to mount up. I haven't had anything to spend it on, so far." She looked at him, almost begging for her chance to give him something, to do something for him. "Please fix up a car, Louis. Then we can go anywhere we want."
"All right." He held out the money. "Here, you'd better have this back."
"No," she said. "I've got lots more in my room, anyway. Daddy likes me to be independent. . . . You be the banker, and pay for things."
"But I can't just spend your money."
"We can take it in turns, then," she suggested, timid once more. "We'll spend some of mine first, and then some of yours. Wouldn't that be all right?"
"I guess so," he agreed, with reluctance. "But don't forget now— fair shares!"
"I won't forget anything about this," she said fervently.
In her delight and excitement, she became, if anything, more ugly than ever; now, at any time of the day, wisps of matted hair lay dankly on her forehead, and her pudgy face shone with a moist rapture which no powder could cope with. She had never had a man-friend before; she had no idea what to do; she had nothing to charm him with—and yet, incredibly, he was there! Life became, for her, a series of ecstatic "firsts", blazing a private pathway of joy. There were times, often, when she would cheerfully and humbly have died for him.
There was the first occasion when he said, meeting her at breakfast-time: "Hi, beautiful!"
There was the time when he held her hand, walking back from a night-club, and he said: "You have very sensitive fingers—did you know that?"
There was a time, in the bar of the Carlton Hotel, when she felt that other people from the Alcestis were staring at the two of them, and probably laughing, and she ventured to say something about it, and he answered: "Forget it, baby—they're just jealous of us.,"
There was a time when he kissed her (only her spectacles rather got in the way), and another time when he stood at the door of her hotel bedroom and said, most movingly: "I mustn't, honey—I respect you too much."
There was the time when he said: "You know, you and I have got to do something about this."
What he did about it was to suggest: "We don't want to go to any old Game Reserve, do we?"; they then cashed the remainder of her travellers' cheques, and drove down to a small hotel in Bloem-fontein, where he disposed of her virginity with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. It was under the influence of the alcohol necessary to confront that broad moon-like face, those myopic, cow-like eyes, and that spreadeagled acreage of body, that he had telephoned to Carl. (Years later, he was to recalclass="underline" "Boy, I sure had to get into the sauce, that night!") But from then on, drifting on golden tides, they organized her entire future life in half a dozen sentences.