‘Are hunchbacks?’
‘I was thinking of old Eadie Twyborn.’
‘Poor Eadie! We know what she’s been through.’ Mrs Golson felt she must be looking pale under the faintest dash of rouge she was wearing out of deference to France.
‘She’s got quite a reputation.’
‘Eccentric, we know.’
‘Bruce Benson swears he’s seen Mrs Judge Twyborn dressed in her husband’s pants, ordering drinks in the Australia winter garden.’
‘Are you sure she wasn’t wearing the Judge’s wig as well?’
Curly nearly split himself. ‘He didn’t say …’
‘I wouldn’t put it past a male gossip.’ Then, as Curly mopped his face, ‘Eadie is my friend, and I won’t have her traduced by Mr Benson or anybody else,’ Mrs Golson asserted sententiously, while hoping the impressive word she had used in poor Eadie Twyborn’s defence meant what she thought it did.
‘What he did say,’ muttered Curly into his handkerchief, ‘was that she’d corked on a bloomin’—moustache;’ and he was off again in the handkerchief.
Mrs Golson announced that she was going to the English Tea-room and Library to look for a novel before the rain set in.
It was a blustery day, by far the most unpleasant since their arrival on the Coast. The wind slapped at her, and worried the tails of her lesser sables. It made her feel nervy, on top of the scene with her husband. Mrs Golson could not be accused of telling a lie in defending her friend; there are the occasions when it is necessary to smudge—‘smudge’ somehow made it look dirty — to blur the truth. That way Joanie could feel justified, if still unhappy for the blurred thought that she had been defending herself every bit as much as Eadie.
Foolishness no doubt. She composed her mouth, raised her chin, only to be confronted with the image of the pink villa netted in stereoscopic detail by her veiclass="underline" through branches of olive and almond the faded blue of eaves and shutters, the tumbledown gate, the clumps of lavender and southernwood, the blobs of red or pink pinks. The scene with Curly made what should have appeared romantic, poetic, a refreshing recollection, take on tones which she could only see as sinister. She closed her eyes to dismiss the image, and with it, she hoped, the direction her train of thought might take. There had never been anything the least bit sinister about Joanie Sewell Golson, Daddy’s blue-eyed girl, Curly’s wife, and Eadie Twyborn’s loyal friend.
None the less, she was relieved to arrive at the English Tea-room and Library, except that, as she turned in, she caught sight of a pouting, heavy, middle-aged woman, over-dressed for a walk through a provincial town. (Plate-glass, she reminded herself, never tells the truth; it was a well-known fact.)
Mrs Golson got up her best manner for Miss Clitheroe presiding behind the counter which dispensed rock-cakes and scones together with culture.
Mrs Golson had brought her Hall Caine to exchange for an Edith Wharton long coveted but never secured.
Miss Clitheroe barely glanced at the shelf. ‘Edith is out. More probably stolen. She means so much to us at St Mayeul.’
Rather glumly Mrs Golson accepted The Hand of Ethelberta while trying to console herself with the thought that some considered Mrs Wharton ‘sarcastic’.
Miss Clitheroe was the kind of Englishwoman established in foreign parts who made people grateful for any of the smaller mercies she vouchsafed. She was so thin, so high-toned, so assured, and had lived abroad so long she could afford to be patronising. Her French exhibited a fluency that nobody, not even the French themselves, would have dared reject, its timbre reminiscent of a struck gong.
Mrs Golson would never have admitted that Miss Clitheroe terrified her. She did not know, poor thing, that others, not only Colonials, but fairly intrepid English, had experienced the same terror while ordering their tea and scones or exchanging their library books. Nor were they reassured by her smile, if she deigned to subject them to it, while staring through her gold-rimmed spectacles along the ridge of what could have passed for a high-born nose, in which was rooted, above the swell of the right nostril, a small but noticeable, tufted mole. Miss Clitheroe was familiarly, and always spotlessly dressed, in a pale brown, or what she herself referred to as a ‘biscuit’ smock.
Mrs Golson dipped her eyes before the Englishwoman’s superior stare. Far too much had happened today; little did she know that more was to happen.
Miss Clitheroe might have known from the way she kept glancing at the clock and tapping her ring on the counter — a father’s signet, Joanie realised, such as Eadie wore.
Such an air of prescience in the proprietress made the customer swivel on her heels, and there was the charming young creature of the pink villa walking past the English Tea-room’s bow-window.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Golson began to churn it out, ‘who is that young person — just walking past — Miss Clitheroe?’ She heard herself generating the unpleasant sound of phlegm she associated with the thick enunciation of certain men, her husband included.
‘That is Madame Vatatzes,’ Miss Clotheroe replied without hesitation.
Mrs Golson confided, ‘I’ve seen her — or so I believe.’ Then, regrettably, she giggled.
Miss Clitheroe went on tapping her father’s ring on the counter. ‘A charming young woman.’
‘Charming — yes, charming.’
They were on about it, ratatattat.
Miss Clitheroe said, ‘I can’t say I’m acquainted with her. Nor her Greek husband, who is somewhat — well, eccentric.’
Miss Clitheroe paused in her tattoo.
Mrs Golson said how interesting—‘A Greek!’
‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Clitheroe replied, ‘we’re near enough to the Near East.’
After which they both fell silent.
Till Mrs Golson asked, ‘What is she? I mean, of course, her origins.’
Miss Clitheroe hesitated. ‘She could be English. She is very well-spoken. But one can’t always tell, can one? in a world like this.’
She looked at Mrs Golson, who feared that she was being lumped among the undesirables.
But what the deuce, as Curly might have said. She was obsessed by her vision of the young woman in the velvet toque, the rather ratty stone-marten stole, in transit past the tea-room window. The reflections in plate-glass would never distort Madame Vatatzes as they are reputed to, and do distort those who are in for punishment.
Although Madame Vatatzes was not wearing them, she had left behind her, Mrs Golson thought she detected, the scent, the blur of violets.
Oh, ridiculous!
While Miss Clitheroe had begun a recitative from behind the counter. ‘They are out at “Crimson Cottage”.’ She gave it a French pronunciation, and nobody, least of all Mrs Golson, would have disputed her right to do so: she had lived so long on the Coast, and besides, the spit which flew out through the gaps between her teeth defended her bona fides. ‘They rent the place from Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu — slightly Welsh through the Llewellyns of Cwm. Her husband, Monsieur Boieldieu, didn’t recover from an accident.’ Here Miss Clitheroe glanced at the clock. ‘Are you acquainted with Madame Boieldieu?’
Mrs Golson was going at the knees. ‘I know nobody,’ she confessed feebly, and ordered a pot of strong tea.
Miss Clitheroe was not amused; she called, ‘Geneviève? Un thé.’
‘Pas de scones? Pas de rock-kecks?’ Geneviève called back from the depths.
‘Rien d’autre’ Miss Clitheroe was very firm about it. ‘Je suis en retard. You will understand,’ she told her customer, ‘an invalid friend is expecting me.’ She began throwing a handful of rock-kecks into a cardboard box.