‘Listen, you’ve got this all wrong, Dr Golkorn,’ Hugh said.
‘I wouldn’t have said so, sir.’
‘Your patients would be all over the neighbourhood. You admitted that yourself. They would be free to wander in the village –’
‘I see now, sir, I should have told a lie. I should have said these unhappy people would be safely behind bars; I should have said that no suffering face would ever disturb the peace of your picture-postcard village.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Emily asked, unable to restrain curiosity.
‘Because with respect, madam, it is not in my lifestyle to tell lies.’
They had to agree with that. In all he had said to the Allenbys and at the meeting last night he had been open and straightforward about what he had intended to do with Luffnell Lodge. He might easily have kept quiet and simply bought the place. It was almost as if he had wished to fight his battle according to the rules he laid down himself, for if lies were not his style deviousness made up for their absence. He knew that if they approached the Allenbys with the second thoughts he was proposing the Allenbys would not hesitate. Deliberately he had let the rowdier opposition burn itself out in righteous fury, and had accepted defeat while seeing victory in sight. His eyes had not strayed once to Emily’s tulip-shaped birthmark, nor lingered on her spectacles or her dumpiness, as such eyes might so easily have done. He had not sought to humiliate Hugh with argument too fast and clever.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘all three of us know. You are decent people. You cannot turn your backs.’
In Luffnell Lodge the women would be comforted, some even cured. Emily knew that. She knew he was not pretending, or claiming too much for himself. She knew his treatment of such women was successful. He was right when he said you could not turn your back. You could not build a wall around a pretty village and say that nothing unpleasant should be permitted within it. No wonder she had dreamed of butterflies mourning the human race. And yet she hated Golkorn. She hated his arrogance in assuming that because his cause was good no one could object. She hated his deviousness far more than the few simple lies he might have told. If he’d told a lie or two to the Allenbys all this might have been avoided.
Hugh wanted him to go. He didn’t need Golkorn to tell him he had misled the Allenbys. In misleading them he had acted out of instincts that were not dishonourable, but Golkorn would not for a second understand that.
‘I have my car,’ Golkorn said. ‘We could the three of us drive up to Luffnell Lodge now.’
Hugh shook his head.
‘And you, Mrs Mansor?’ Golkorn prompted.
‘I would like to talk to my husband.’
‘I was hoping to save you petrol, madam.’ He spoke as if, at a time like this, with such an issue, the saving of petrol was still important.
‘Yes, we’d like to talk,’ Hugh said.
‘Indeed, sir. If I may only phone you from the hotel in an hour or so? To see how you’ve got on.’
They knew he would. They knew he would not rest now until he had dragged their consciences out of them and set them profitably to work. If they did not go to Luffnell Lodge he would return to argue further.
‘You understand that if we do as you suggest we’d have to leave the village,’, Hugh pointed out.’We couldn’t stay here.’
Golkorn frowned, seeming genuinely perplexed. He gestured with his hands. ‘But why, sir? Why leave this village? With respect, I do not understand you.’
‘We’d have been disloyal to our friends. We’d be letting everyone down.’ ‘You’re not letting me down, sir. You’re not letting two elderly persons down, nor women in need of care and love –’
‘Yes, we’re aware, of that, Dr Golkorn.’
‘Sir, may I say that the people of this village will see it our way in time? They’ll observe the good work all around them, and understand.’
‘In fact, they won’t.’
‘Well, I would argue that, sir. With respect –’
‘We would like to be alone now, Dr Golkorn.’
He went away and they were left with the dying moments of the storm he had brought with him. They did not say much but in time they walked together from the house, through the garden, to the car. They waved at Colin Rhodes, out with his retrievers on the green, and at Miss Cogings hurrying to the post-box with a letter. It wasn’t until the car drew up at Luffnell Lodge, until they stood with the Allenbys in the hall, that they were grateful they’d been exploited.
The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs Vansittart
‘You couldn’t trust those eyes,’ people on Cap Ferrat say, for they find it hard to be charitable where Mrs Vansittart is concerned. ‘The Wife Whom Nobody Cares For,’ Jasper remarks, attaching a tinselly jangle to the statement, which manages to suggest that Mrs Vansittart belongs in neon lights.
At fifty-four, so Jasper has remarked as well, she remains a winner and a taker, for in St Jean and Monte Carlo young men still glance a second time when the slim body passes by, their attention lingering usually on the rhythmic hips. Years ago in Sicily – so the story is told – a peasant woman spat at her. Mrs Vansittart had gone to see the Greek ruins at Segesta, but what outraged the peasant woman was to observe Mrs Vansittart half undressed on the grass, permitting a local man to have his way with her. And then, as though nothing untoward had happened, she waited at the railway station for the next train to Catania. It was then that the woman spat at her.
Mrs Vansittart is American, but when she divides her perfect lips the voice that drawls is almost that of an English duchess. Few intonations betray her origins as a dentist’s daughter from Holland Falls, Virginia; no phrase sounds out of place. Her husband, Harry, shares with her that polished Englishness – commanded to, so it is said on Cap Ferrat, as he is commanded in so much else. Early in their marriage the Vansittarts spent ten years in London, where Mrs Vansittart is reported to have had three affairs and sundry casual conjunctions. Harry, even then, was writing his cycle of songs.
The Vansittarts live now in the Villa Teresa just off the Avenue du Sémaphore, and they do not intend to move again. Their childless marriage has drifted all over Europe, from the hotels of Florence and Berlin to those of Château d’Oex and Paris and Seville. To the Villa Teresa the people from the other villas come to play tennis twice a week. In the evening there is bridge, in one villa or another.
Riches have brought these people to Cap Ferrat, riches maintain them. They have come from almost all the European countries, from America and other continents. They have come for the sun and the bougainvillaea, purchasing villas that were created to immortalize the personalities of previous owners – or building for themselves in the same whimsical manner. The varying styles of architecture have romance and nostalgia in common: a cluster of stone animals to remind their owners of somewhere else, a cupola added because a precious visitor once suggested it. Terracotta roofs slope decoratively, the eyes of emperors are sightless in their niches. Mimosa and pale wistaria add fairy-tale colour; cypresses cool the midday sun. Against the alien outside world a mesh of steel lurks within the boundary hedges; stern warnings abound, of a Chien Méchant and the ferocious Sécurité du Cap.
In her middle age Mrs Vansittart’s life is one of swimming pools that are bluer than the blue Mediterranean, and titles which recall forever a mistress or a lover, or someone else’s road to success, or an obsession that remains mysterious: Villa Banana, Villa Magdalene, Morning Dew, Waikiki, Villa Glorietta, Villa Stephen, So What, My Way. The Daimlers and the Bentleys slide along the Boulevard Général de Gaulle, cocktails are taken on some special occasion in the green bar of the Grand-Hotel. The Blochs and the Cecils and the Borromeos, who play tennis on the court at the Villa Teresa, have never quarrelled with Mrs Vansittart, for quarrels would be a shame. Jasper is her partner: her husband plays neither tennis nor bridge. He cooks instead, and helps old Pierre in the garden. Harry is originally of Holland Falls also, the inheritor of a paper-mill.