The Impatient Virgin. ANNE WEALE
than any other nation. They had central heating and showers decades before Europeans. They don’t like insects and draughts and damp-smelling closets. Orengo is stuck in a time warp. It was the height of luxury in its day, but that was a long time ago.’
‘You like it. You’re American.’
‘Not really. Do you know the expression “a citizen of the world”?’
Anny shook her head. Bart had bought her a set of encyclopaedia, but it was out of date by twenty years. As they only ever saw newspapers and magazines which other people had discarded, sometimes there were embarrassing gaps in her general knowledge.
‘It means someone who feels they belong to the human race rather than to any one country,’ he explained. ‘I go a step further. I feel I belong to cyberspace. Right now it’s like the old Wild West...unexplored territory. But one day...’
As he explained his vision, Anny listened intently, as she did to everything Van said. But a lot of it was beyond her comprehension. She wondered if there was a book on the subject she could study before his next visit.
‘If this were New York we could go to Bloomie’s, but here I wouldn’t know which is the best store,’ said Van, on arrival at Nice.
‘That’s no problem,’ said Anny. ‘Let’s have a drink in one of the cafés and when I see someone going past who looks the way I’d like to look, I’ll ask her where she shops.’
The suggestion seemed to amuse him. ‘Do you really have the nerve to do that?’
‘Why not? It’s common sense. Who minds being told you like the way they look? Anyway I can’t afford to be shy if I’m going to be a journalist. I’ll have to persuade other people not to be shy with me.’
They chose a café in one of the pedestrianised shopping streets near the western end of the spacious Place Massena with its public gardens and fountains.
Presently, while she sipped a soft drink and Van had a beer, she saw a couple of girls a little older than herself whose style she wanted to emulate. Flattered by her explanation, they were only too ready to list their favourite shops.
‘There...you see? One easy movement,’ said Anny, returning to their table outside Le Paradis.
‘You should have offered to buy them a drink,’ said Van. ‘The one in blue had excellent legs.’
The remark sapped all Anny’s pleasure in the success of her strategy. She felt furious with him.
‘If you want to pick up girls, you’ll have to do it yourself.’
Van laughed, showing his white teeth and giving her another of those strange little internal tremors. She didn’t like the way his blue eyes were following another girl passing by, one closer to his age than the other two.
She knew that in a white shirt and much laundered jeans she was no match for the local girls, all of whom seemed to have that elusive quality called chic. Their figures weren’t better than hers, and not all were prettier. But they all had something she lacked and was eager to acquire, even though she couldn’t pin it down.
Van finished his beer. ‘When you’re ready, we’d better get started.’
While he paid the waiter, Anny finished her jus d’orange.
The girls to whom she had spoken had explained the location of the shops they recommended. Anny had half expected that Van would remain outside, perhaps suggest meeting her later. Her uncle had given her the impression that, except in places like a ship’s chandler, the male sex was not at ease in shops.
Van, it seemed, was an exception. He not only came inside the shop but suggested they should both trawl the racks and pick out what caught their eye.
‘What size are you?’
Anny consulted an assistant who looked her over and decided she was a 36. Having heard them speaking English, she added that this was the Continental equivalent of an American 8 or a British 10.
After looking at several price tags, Anny went back to Van. ‘These are all very expensive. I don’t think the contessa realises how much dresses cost now. If she’s short of money...’
‘She’s not that short of money,’ he said. ‘She’s a very old lady. She may not be around next year. Let her enjoy being generous.’
Of the three dresses she took to the fitting room, two were possibles and one impossible; but she couldn’t resist trying it on and then showing it to Van, hoping it might make him see her from a new perspective.
It was made of a clingy red fabric with a halter-necked glittery bodice cut in a way that made a bra unnecessary for anyone with firm breasts.
Barefoot, because her sandals spoiled the effect, she walked out of the fitting room, wondering how Van would react. While she was fastening the zip, she had heard the salesgirl practising her English on him.
Seeing Anny got up like a swinger gave Van a curious jolt. He had noticed that morning that she had a very good figure, but now, with every curve emphasised by a low décolletage and hip-hugging skirt, it was hard to believe that here, metamorphosed into a sexy young woman, was the androgynous child he had found acting out a daydream in the belvedere.
In a few years’ time she was going to be drop-dead gorgeous. Right now she was barely sixteen and although she already had a shape that would knock guys’ eyes out if they saw her in that red outfit, to anyone with a grain of intelligence it was obvious that she didn’t have the experience to handle the reactions the dress invited.
‘Uh-uh,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That little number would give Theodora heart failure. Try these two I picked out for you.’
Anny looked doubtfully at his choices, neither of which appealed to her. ‘I’ll show you my other two first.’
‘OK.’ He resumed his conversation with the salesgirl.
Anny had thought he was only interested in computers. But this afternoon he was behaving like what Bart called a skirt-chaser. She didn’t like it. She wanted him to concentrate on her.
When she appeared in the next dress, a more sedate style splashed with pale pink roses on a turquoise background, Van said, ‘That’s pretty, but the shoulders don’t fit and you’d need to replace that tacky plastic belt’
He was equally critical of her third choice, giving Anny the feeling she must have disastrous taste.
Trying on one of the dresses he thought suitable, she had to admit it looked much better on her than it had on the hanger. It was cream cotton, overchecked with white, with cream lace cuffs on the short sleeves and a triangle of lace sewn into the low V-neck. The waist was tight, the full hem almost down to her ankles. Reluctantly, she acknowledged that it was more becoming than any of the previous three.
‘Theodora will like that,’ said Van, when he saw it. ‘How do you feel about it?’
‘It’s all right.’ She wasn’t going to enthuse after he’d been so stuffy about the red dress.
On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Anny took the dress from the hanging locker in her cabin where it had stayed, unworn, since the year before.
Tonight there would be no celebration. The contessa was in a private clinic, having tests. Bart had had to go to England for the funeral of his eldest sister. Anny hadn’t gone with him because they were short of money. Even one air fare had left their resources at a worryingly low ebb.
She was keeping her fingers crossed that an article she had sent to a French magazine would be accepted. They had taken a previous piece and paid her a useful fee. But she couldn’t count on it happening a second time.
She took the dress on deck to give it its fortnightly airing. When, if ever, would she wear it again? she wondered forlornly.
She