The Impatient Virgin. ANNE WEALE
call me “Giovanni’s mermaid”?’ Anny asked, twisting her hair into a skein and squeezing the water from it
‘Once, when we were watching you swimming, Bart said you were the nearest thing to a mermaid I’d ever see. I must have told Kate that. Aah, this feels good.’
As he stretched out on the warm rock, his olive-skinned torso beaded with bright crystal drops, Anny felt another secret flutter. This time his stay was too short for him to tan deeply as he had when crewing.
‘Will you come sailing this summer?’
‘I don’t think so.’
It hurt her that he didn’t sound as disappointed as she felt. ‘Why not?’
‘Lack of time mainly. My collegiate life is over.’
After graduating summa cum laude—the equivalent of a first-class honours degree—he had gone on to do two years of post-graduate work.
‘I’m part of the rat race now...as you will be pretty soon. Enjoy all this while you can. It won’t last for ever.’
‘I don’t want to stay here for ever. It gets boring going round the same places year after year. I want to see Paris and London. But I worry about leaving Bart. I’m not sure he’ll feed himself properly if I’m not around. He taught me to cook but he doesn’t do much himself now.’
Van pulled his shoulders off the rock with the stomach muscles developed while mastering wind-surfing.
‘You probably thought it wasn’t such a good idea to bring him a bottle of booze. But Scotch is better for his liver than cheap plonk full of chemicals.’
Anny sighed. ‘He drinks too much because he’s lonely. An adopted daughter isn’t the same as a wife. He was in love with someone a long time ago. But she wouldn’t live on a boat and he knew the sea was in his blood. Imagine having to choose between the person you love and the only thing you want to do. It must have been awful...for both of them.’
‘Forty years ago most women followed their men to wherever they had to go...darkest Africa... Patagonia...anywhere,’ said Van. ‘Sounds as if she wasn’t really in love with him.’
‘Or she may have known she couldn’t cope. I’ve never been used to anything else so it doesn’t seem strange to me. But it could be a difficult adjustment for someone brought up ashore.’
‘An adjustment you’ll have to make the other way round,’ said Van. ‘I wonder if you’ll like big cities as much as you think.’
‘Nice is a big city.’
‘Nice has the sea on its doorstep. It’s a village compared with Paris and London. Where I want to live is right here. But Orengo needs money spent on it...lots of money...the kind of money Theodora had when she came here.’
It was at his great-grandmother’s wish that he used her first name.
‘What happened to her money?’ Until now Anny had never liked to enquire.
‘The old boy blew most of it. They lived in tremendous style. There were fifteen gardeners and eighteen household staff. They entertained all the great names of their era, the Thirties.’
‘Will you do that when you live here?’ There was no doubt in Anny’s mind that one day Van would be rich and famous.
‘I shan’t have thirty-three people on my payroll, that’s for sure.’ He looked at his waterproof watch. ‘It’s time we were getting back. Theodora wants to see you.’
He sprang up, holding out a hand to give Anny a pull-up. Their hands were only clasped for a few seconds, but the strength in his fingers, and the bulge of muscle in his upper arm as he lifted her to her feet with no effort on her part, reanimated the feelings she had had earlier.
Poised on the edge of the rocks three metres above the pellucid sea, they both inhaled a deep breath. In the first year or two of their friendship, this was a game Anny had always won. In those days she could hold her breath longer and swim further without tiring. Now the propulsion of Van’s long, muscular thighs made him enter the water half a metre ahead of her, increasing his lead as they glided through the sunlit sea.
When Anny came up, gasping, he was still under the surface. She was swimming flat out when his dark head appeared, but he reached the schooner’s ladder lengths ahead of her.
‘It’s time you had a handicap,’ she said, as she stepped on deck with Van coming up behind her. ‘You may not get as much practice, but you’re so much taller and stronger.’
‘OK, next time I’ll give you a five-second start.’ For a moment his blue eyes appraised her slender body in the new American swimsuit which had higher-cut legs and a more revealing top than her old suit.
Brief as it was, the look made her heart do a flip. Then Van turned away to pick up the towel he’d brought rolled round his brief black bathing slip.
Theodora di Bachelli was not in bed but sitting in a chair on the bedroom’s awning-shaded balcony when Anny and Van entered her room.
‘Many, many happy returns of the day, my dear child,’ she said, holding out hands which now bore little resemblance to the bronze cast, made by an artist when she was twenty, on one of the tables in the shuttered salon.
‘Thank you.’ Anny bent to kiss the chamois-soft powdered cheeks.
‘It’s high time you had a dress,’ said the contessa. ‘As I can’t come to help you choose it, Van will deputise for me. You can wear it tonight when you and your uncle dine here.’
‘Uncle Bart hasn’t any formal clothes,’ said Anny. She had no intention of leaving him to eat alone.
‘Neither has Van. Only you and I will dress up. I haven’t dressed up for twenty years, but I shall tonight. A girl’s sixteenth birthday is a special occasion. Imagine, I was only two years older than you when I married. My husband was twenty-five, the same age as his great-grandson.’ After glancing at Van, she went on, ‘But in those days well-bred young men in their twenties spent their time sowing their wild oats. Do you understand that expression?’
‘It means having love affairs, doesn’t it?’ Anny replied.
‘Love affairs of a nature which might be condoned by their fathers but were not approved of by their mothers—if they knew about them,’ said the contessa. ‘Young men would also get drunk and, if they were very wild, smoke opium. As the French say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The only difference between my time and your time is that now many good girls do what once only bad girls did and drugs are on sale everywhere.’
Van said dryly, ‘We’re not all doing drugs, Theodora.’
‘I’m sure you have too much intelligence to jeopardise your future. Your only excess, that I know of, is straining your eyes, doing whatever it is that you do on that machine you installed in the tower room.’
She turned back to Anny. ‘You, my dear, have had the good luck not to be exposed to bad influences. I hope you will always stay as unspoiled and lovely as you are today. If I were your fairy godmother, I would use my magic to make sure that when you are a little older you will fall in love and stay in love for the rest of your life. It doesn’t happen very often, but it did to me and I hope it will to you.’
‘Thank you, Contessa...and thank you for the dress.’
It was the prospect of going shopping with Van, rather than the dress itself, that made Anny’s eyes sparkle.
‘Why do the rest of your family never come here?’ she asked, on the train which ran from a station near the palazzo to Nice, sometimes snaking into tunnels where the mountains came down to the sea and re-emerging into the sunlight above bays where the clear water showed where the sea-bed was sandy and where it was covered with dark green weed.
‘They