GAY LIFE. E. M. Delafield

      CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      (1)

      "Maman, j'ai raté l'autobus!"

      The shimmering heat-haze of the afternoon seemed to quiver as the shrill, lamentable announcement of this disaster broke into the silence that lay over the deserted terrace of the Hotel.

      "Ma-man!"

      It was as though a slight shudder pervaded the Hotel—a preliminary to complete awakening.

      "Maman, j'ai raté l'autobus!"

      The announcement, at its third repetition, resembled a shriek of defiance rather than an admission of defeat.

      The young son of the Hotel proprietor, wearing a pale-blue maillot and a large straw hat, ascended the very last of the numerous steps leading from the dusty red drive to the terrace, and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

      "Maman—dites donc—j'ai raté l'autobus!"

      The smooth, black head of Madame appeared from a ground-floor window, and she made imperative signs to her son that he should come in and be quiet.

      But it was too late.

      Mr. Bolham, in No. 16, had indignantly closed his window with a bang. The Morgans' youngest child, who had presumably been asleep, had awakened and was to be heard singing. The French family next door, perhaps in order to drown the sound, immediately started their eternal gramophone. On the top storey, above Mr. Bolham, a window was flung open with an impetuosity that caused the bathing-dress and cloak that lay on the sill to fall below on to Mr. Bolham's little balcony, from whence they could only be retrieved by an appeal to Mr. Bolham, who would resent it.

      In the open doorway of the Hotel on the top of the white steps, there suddenly appeared—like a conjuring trick—a number of figures. The chasseur, who had been dozing in a chair behind the little desk of the concierge, sprang into a state of resentful animation, the concierge himself—who had not been visible at all a moment earlier—snapped his fingers and imperatively said psst in the direction of the waiter from whom tea and iced drinks would shortly be ordered—and madame—frowning at her son Edouard, and simultaneously smiling at the wealthy American gentleman in the blue singlet who was passing through the hall—resumed her endless labours on the big ledger in the bureau.

      Edouard—Dou-dou—said Pardon, mademoiselle, and Bonjour, madame, and made his way through the group of Hotel guests to his mother's little office. Now that it was too late, he carefully lowered his voice as he hung over the desk and related to her the history of his misfortunes with the autobus.

      The visitors, for the most part still rather limp from the afternoon's siesta, dispersed themselves, in small groups, amongst the little tables that stood all along the terrace, each one sheltered by a huge red-and-white striped umbrella.

      The young Moons, who had only arrived on the Blue Train the day before, and whose first visit to the Côte d'Azur it was, looked as self-conscious as they felt, Angie in brand-new beach pyjamas and Hilary in a black-and-green swimming-suit and bath-robe, and both of them shamefully pink-and-white, except where the sun had already made a small scarlet patch on the back of Hilary's neck.

      The Moons sat together in silence. The little that they had ever had to say to one another had been said in the course of an electrically-charged fortnight, two years earlier, when they had fallen desperately in love. The rest had been an affair of dancing, drinking, kissing and violent love-making, marriage, and rapid and complete satiety.

      They bore one another no malice for their present state of mutual boredom, but took it philosophically for granted. Hilary Moon, who was held to be clever by himself and his friends, was already thinking out the aspect of his marriage that he would present to the next woman with whom he fell in love.

      Angie, with even less subtlety, was merely looking carefully at every man within range in the hope of seeing a certain expression, that she knew well, leap into his eyes at the sight of her beauty.

      Angie was, indeed, as beautiful as she could well be. To a lovely slimness she added that length of shapely leg that is usually the prerogative of American women. But her sea-blue eyes, her thick fair hair and peach-blossom complexion, were all English.

      She had everything: even to eyelashes that curled up and curled down, and a dimple at the corner of her lovely mouth. Several people had already looked at her rather intently, but Angie knew, without stopping to think about it, that all these people were entirely negligible.