He put down his glass, took her by the arm, and steered her firmly and skillfully into an eddy that was flowing towards the exit. The frustrated wolf pack was still standing on its heels as they jostled into the line that was babbling thanks and goodbyes.
“Oh, don’t go yet,” Fay protested. “We’re going to have some food presently.”
“But Lona’s husband might get better tomorrow, and I’d never get her all to myself again,” Simon said with a leer.
“Well, behave yourselves.”
“There should be a taxi waiting below.” Dick Van Hessen said helpfully. “Send him back from wherever you’re going, for the next customers.”
Then they were down the stairs, and the steep narrow driveway, and a taxi was waiting as predicted at the foot of the steep slope where the house perched. Simon put her in and said, “The Caravelle.”
“I ought to go home, really,” she said, “and see if there’s any message.”
“Which I suppose you’ve been doing for the last two days. If you’re out, he could leave a message, couldn’t he?”
“Yes — the caretaker promised he’d be around and listen for the phone.”
“Then you can call in and ask for news later. Meanwhile, you’ve got at least as much right to be out as he has.”
“But—”
A Bermuda taxi is not a vehicle in which to discuss anything confidential. Being derived from any miniature English car by the sole process of attaching a taximeter to the dashboard, the driver and passengers are huddled together as cozily as olives in a jar. The Saint nudged Lona Dayne gently, and pointed expressively at the back of the driver’s head, which he was trying not to bump with his knees.
“What’s this about a caretaker?” he said innocuously. “Aren’t you staying at a hotel?”
“We started in a hotel, of course, but we moved into this house just the day before Hav disappeared. You see, we were talking to the caretaker, and he happened to mention that his boss had just written and told him to try to rent it. The owner lives up in Canada and only comes down here in the winter, then Bob — that’s the caretaker — goes to Canada and takes care of his house there. Usually the house here just stands empty, but it seems as if the owner suddenly decided he might as well make a few dollars out of it. It’s absurdly reasonable, really, and Bob didn’t see why he couldn’t let us have it just for a month, while he’s waiting for someone who wants to take a longer lease. After we saw it, we simply couldn’t turn it down — it’s on a little island all of its own, the sort of thing you dream of. Only if we’d stayed in the hotel, perhaps we’d have been safer… But it’s the most romantic spot…”
Simon let her go on chattering trivialities, preferring to have her overdo it rather than go on with the important subject until they were safe from any uninvited audience, or at least until he knew how seriously they should be thinking of safety. He kept her headed off from any reference to her husband until they were settled at a table in a corner of the terrace overhanging the water, and had ordered a chicken in white wine and a bottle of Bollinger to go with it.
“What am I supposed to be celebrating?” she objected half-heartedly.
“I’m prescribing it to give you a lift, which I think you could use.”
He lighted their cigarettes, and settled his elbows squarely on the table, looking at her with sympathetic but disconcertingly penetrating detachment.
“Now,” he said with sudden bluntness. “What is this all about?”
“Have you heard of Roger Ivalot?”
He winced slightly.
“No,” he said. “And if I had, I wouldn’t believe it.”
“Why?”
“The name sounds even more improbable than your husband’s.”
“If you’d been in England lately—”
“I’m sorry. It’s already established that I’ve been spending my time in the wrong places. Just enlighten my ignorance.”
There was, however, some excuse for regarding anyone who had not heard of Roger Ivalot as benighted, as he soon learned.
In a country which is not by tradition or temperament adapted to the breeding of spectacular playboys, Mr Ivalot had succeeded in racking up a number of probable records. One of these could certainly be claimed for the rocket-like trajectory of his ascent from obscurity. Nobody, in fact, seemed to have known of his existence before the day less than two years ago when he had sent engraved invitations to the entire casts of the three most popular musicals then playing in London, bidding them to a champagne supper and dance in the Dorchester’s biggest private ballroom, for which he also hired the most popular orchestra available. While some of the stars were snooty or suspicious enough to ignore the offer, almost six hundred guests (including several uninvited escorts) showed up to sample the hospitality; and when a somewhat notorious soubrette, professing indignation because no one had been asked to take a champagne bath, peeled off her clothes and had herself showered from bottles held by a flock of eager volunteers, nothing less than the simultaneous outbreak of World War III could have prevented Mr Ivalot becoming a celebrity overnight.
“I just wanted to meet a lot of people who liked to have fun,” he said to the newspapers, which (of course with the exception of The Times) could hardly fail to note such goings-on, “and throwing a big party seemed the quickest way to do it.”
Perhaps because he happened at a time when England, reacting from the longest hangover of post-war austerity that any European country had had to endure, and flexing the muscles of a new self-confidence, was ripe for any hero who struck a dizzy enough contrast with the drab years behind, Mr Ivalot was just what the circulation managers ordered. Although he threw no more parties of such indiscriminate grandiosity as the one which launched him into London’s café society, from then on he never lacked a convivial entourage, about three-quarters of it feminine, for his almost nightly forays into the gayest cabarets and bottle clubs; and in an otherwise dull season the more uninhibited journals were delighted to adopt him as a gratifyingly reliable source of copy.
The news value of his extravagances was enhanced by an occasional quixotic touch. The celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in London that year was materially enlivened by Roger Ivalot, who drove through the East End in a large truck loaded to the toppling point with fireworks, which he distributed to incredulous urchins on a succession of street corners. Nothing like the resultant bedlam of fire and explosion had been seen in that area since the last visit of the Luftwaffe. And at Christmas he rode through the slums again, this time on a stage coach which he had resurrected from somewhere, accompanied by three music-hall beauties, all of them in Dickensian costumes, tossing bags of candy from a seemingly inexhaustible supply to all the children who turned out to stare.
“All it took was money,” he told the reporters. “And I’ve a lot of that.”
He liked making corny jokes of that kind about his improbably cognomen. “I’ve a lot of living to do yet,” was another. But the nickname that stuck, with his enthusiastic endorsement, was “Jolly Roger.” His acceptance was made official by the huge skull-and-crossbones flag which draped his box at the Arts Ball on New Year’s Eve, where he and his whole party appeared in some version of a pirate costume, even though some of the female members had startlingly little material to work with between their top boots and cocked hats. He even tried to adopt the same pattern for his racing colors, to put on a horse he bought which was entered in the Grand National, but here the stewards of the Jockey Club drew the line. Within six months of his debut, he had become practically an institution, and when he announced that he was leaving to have a fling in Paris and continue from there on a trip around the world, a noticeable gloom overspread the bistros.