So he crept back and accepted every electric moment Miss Jardin deigned to bestow, thrashing feebly in his exquisite misery like a flea-ridden hound being scratched by his mistress.
Being totally blind to the subtleties of feminine conduct, Walter did not perceive that Miss Jardin was also going through a trying experience. But Rhys Jardin, physically a father, had had to develop the sixth sense of a mother in such matters.
“Your golf is off six strokes,” he said sternly one morning as Pink mauled and pounded him on the rubbing table in the gymnasium, “and I found a wet handkerchief on the terrace last night. What’s the matter, young lady?”
Val viciously punched the bag. “Nothing’s the matter!”
“Filberts,” jeered Pink, slapping his employer. “You had another fight with that wacky twerp last night.”
“Silence, Pink,” said her father. “Can’t a man have a private conversation with his own daughter?”
“If that punk calls you a ‘parasite’ again, Val,” growled Pink, digging his knuckles into Jardin’s abdomen, “I’ll knock his teeth out. What’s a parasite?”
“Pink, you were listening!” cried Val indignantly. “This is one heck of a household, that’s all I can say!”
“Can I help it if you talk loud?”
Val glared at him and plucked a pair of Indian clubs from the rack in the wall-closet.
“Now, Pink,” said Rhys, “I won’t have eavesdropping... What else did Walter call her?”
“A lot more fancy names, and then she starts to bawl, so he hauls off and kisses her one.”
“Pink,” snarled Val, swishing the clubs, “you’re an absolute louse.”
“And what did my puss do?” asked Rhys comfortably. “A little more on the pectorals, Pink.”
“She give him the chorus girl’s salute — like she meant it, too. I mean, that was a kiss.”
“Very interesting,” said Val’s father, closing an eye.
Val flung one of the Indian clubs in the general direction of the rubbing table, and Pink calmly ducked and went on kneading his employer’s brown flesh. The club cracked against the far brick wall.
Val sat down on the floor and wailed: “I might as well entertain my friends in the Hollywood Bowl!”
“Nice boy,” said her father. “Nice lad, Walter.”
“He’s an oomph!” snapped Val, jumping up. “He and his ‘social consciousness’! He makes me sick.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Pink, massaging. “There’s something in it. The little guy don’t get much of the breaks.”
“Pink, you keep out of this!”
“See what I mean?” complained Pink. “This master and man stuff. I should keep out of it. Why? Because I’m a wage slave. Turn over, Rhys.”
His employer docilely turned over and Pink set about trying to crack his spine. “You don’t have to see the boy, Val — ouch!”
“I should think,” said Val in a frigid voice, “that I’m old enough to solve my own problems — without interference.” And she flounced off.
And Walter was a problem. Sometimes he romped like a child, and at other times he positively snorted gloom. One moment he was trying to break her back in a movie kiss, and the next he was calling her names. And all because she wasn’t interested in labor movements and didn’t know a Left Wing from a Right, except in fried chicken!
It was all very confusing, because of late Val had had practically to sit on her hands; they had developed a sort of incorporeal itch. Either they wanted to muss his unruly black hair and stroke his lips and run over his sandpaper cheeks — he always seemed to need a shave — or they yearned to hit him on the point of his dear longish nose.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Solomon Spaeth and her father had gone into business together. Rhys Jardin in business, after all these splendid idle years! Val could not decide whether she disliked rubicund Solly more for his oozy self than for what he was doing to her father. There were tedious conferences with lawyers, especially a wet-faced little one by the name of Ruhig — arguments and contracts and negotiations and things... Why, Rhys neglected his yachting, golf, and polo for three whole weeks — he barely had time for his Swedish exercises under Pink’s drill-sergeant direction!
But that wasn’t the worst of it. It was what happened at Sans Souci after the contracts were signed.
Sans Souci dated from the careless, golden days. It occupied half a dozen acres high in the Hollywood hills and was designed for exclusiveness, with a ten-foot fence of stout peeled-willow stakes all round to keep out hucksters and trailer tourists, and a secondary paling of giant royal palms to make their envious mouths water.
Inside there were four dwellings of tile, stucco, plaster, and tinted glass which were supposed to be authentic Spanish and were not.
The development was shaped like a saucer, with the four houses spacing the rim and all the rear terraces looking down upon the communal depression in the center, where the democratic architect had laid out a single immense swimming pool surrounded by rock gardens.
Rhys Jardin had bought one of the houses because the realtor was an old acquaintance in need — an empty gesture, for the bank foreclosed promptly after the depression began and the realtor shot his brains out by way of his mouth. Valerie thought the place ghastly, but their dingy expensive shack at Malibu and their bungalow-villa on the Santa Monica Palisades always seethed with people, so Sans Souci’s promise of privacy attracted her.
The second house was occupied by a male star with a passion for Dandie Dinmonts, whose barking made life a continuous agony until their owner suddenly married an English peeress who carried him and his beasts off to dazzle the British cinema public, leaving the house happily unoccupied except for brief annual visits.
The third house was tenanted for a time by a foreign motion picture director who promptly had an attack of delirium tremens at the edge of the pool; so that worked out beautifully, because he was whisked off to a sanitarium and never returned.
The fourth house had never been occupied at all.
That is, until Solly Spaeth bought it from the bank “to be nearer my associate,” as he beamingly told Valerie, “your worthy and charming father.”
And when the insufferable Solly moved in, Walter moved in, too.
There was the rub. Walter moved in. The creature was so inconsistent. He didn’t have to live there. In fact, he had been living alone in a furnished room in Los Angeles until his father took the Sans Souci estate. The Spaeths didn’t get along — small wonder, considering Walter’s ideas! But suddenly it was peaches and cream between them — for a whole week, anyway — with Solly bestowing his oleaginous benediction and Walter accepting it glumly and moving right in, drawing board, economic theories, and all.
And there he was, only yards away at any given hour of the day or night, making life miserable... preaching, criticizing her charge accounts and décolletage and the cut of her bathing suits, fighting with his father like an alley cat, drawing inflammatory cartoons for the Independent under the unpleasant nom de guerre of WASP, heatedly lecturing Rhys Jardin for his newly assumed “utilities overlordship,” whatever that meant, scowling at poor Pink and insulting Tommy and Dwight and Joey and all the other nice boys who kept hopefully bouncing back to Sans Souci... until she was so angry she almost didn’t want to return his kisses — when he kissed her, which wasn’t often; and then only, as he hatefully expressed it, “in a moment of animal weakness.”