GAY LIFE. E. M. Delafield
or elderly men whom she, at twenty-four, never took into serious consideration at all.
Presently, however, two young men appeared. One of them, indeed, was so young that he might be called a boy—perhaps even a schoolboy. Angie's experienced eye dismissed him, and passed on to his companion. This was a dark, rather thick-set young man of seven-or eight-and-twenty, with brown, bold eyes and remarkably beautiful teeth. There was something faintly unusual in the animation of his face and manner, and the frequency of his smile.
Angie instantly perceived that he had noticed her the moment he came on to the terrace, and that the ease and sprightliness with which he was now talking to his companion was entirely directed towards herself. With a tiny little sigh of relief, she settled back in her chair, relaxing completely.
"What are you going to have?" Hilary asked.
"Orangeade. Iced. Ask if they've got any biscuits."
Hilary gave the order, frowning slightly. His French was better than Angie's, but it was not good, and he disliked doing anything that he did not do well. By a natural transition, his thoughts immediately turned to something that he did do well.
"Shall we go down to bathe, afterwards?"
"Yes. I wish we had a car."
"We might be able to hire one while we're here."
"Oh, could we?"
"I expect so," said Hilary negligently.
There was no reason why the Moons should not hire a car, except that they had no money. They were, however, accustomed to having no money, and they did not allow the lack of it to stand in their way when they wanted cars, or clothes, or drinks, or restaurant meals, or trips to the South of France. They were, of course, in debt, but so were their friends and contemporaries, and still all of them went on spending money that wasn't there, and somehow, miraculously, evading the continually threatening crash.
"There's a garage at the bottom of the drive—quite a big one."
"That's no good. One would have to go to Cannes, or Nice, or somewhere like that, for a decent car," said Hilary. "I'll ask the concierge."
"We might go in to-morrow morning. I want to get some things," Angie said eagerly. "Cannes would be better than St. Raphael for shopping, wouldn't it?"
She had decided, within the last two seconds, that she needed a large straw hat, of shiny red-and-blue straw, and a wide pair of white silk trousers, and one of those triangular coloured handkerchiefs that went over one's head, and tied at the back.
Hilary had decided with equal promptitude that he must get hold of a car somehow—a swift, high-powered car with chromium-plated fittings.
They sipped through straws at the orangeade in their tall glasses, absorbed in these agreeable fancies.
Angie, however, did not cease to be aware of the dark young man at the next table, and presently she saw him half-stand up, as a woman in rose-coloured tussore pyjamas came and sat down between him and his companion.
The sight was faintly disagreeable to Angie, and became more actively so when she discerned that the woman, although not young, was good-looking in very much her own style—fair, and slim, and big-eyed—and with that indefinable air of self-assurance peculiar to a woman who has always been attractive to men. Angie directed Hilary's attention to the next table by a slight movement of the head.
"What do you think they are? Mother and sons?"
"Sons? She's much too young to be the dark one's mother," said Hilary tactlessly. "She might be his wife."
"He couldn't possibly be the boy's father."
"Well—no. Perhaps he's her second husband."
"She wouldn't be making eyes at him like that, if he was."
They gazed at the trio. The boy was silent, and looked faintly bewildered, but the other two were talking and laughing noisily with an air of great intimacy.
"They aren't interesting—particularly," at last said Hilary—meaning that the woman was not the type that attracted him. He looked up and down the terrace and then said, with a shudder:
"My God—children. You'd think English people would have the sense not to bring children to the South of France in August."
Hilary, however, had overrated the sense of his compatriots. They had with them three children, of the fatal ages of eight, ten, and fourteen years old.
It was nothing to Hilary, or to his wife either, that the three children were good-looking, in a clear-cut, distinguished way, with beautifully bronzed skins and heads of golden hair that gleamed in the sun.
The Moons knew that all children were undesirable. They cost money, they interfered with every adult form of enjoyment, they attracted attention that should have been bestowed elsewhere, and they not infrequently gave rise to the type of conversation most disliked by the Moons, since it was neither flippant, suggestive, amorous, nor scandalous.
"I hope to God," said Hilary disconsolately, "that a few amusing people are going to turn up in this hole. Otherwise it won't have been worth coming."
"There are the people in the villa," suggested Angie—but languidly, for she knew that the people in the villa, one of them a friend of a friend of Hilary's, were unescorted women and therefore uninteresting to herself.
"We might look them up after dinner."
"Or before dinner."
"Too obvious, a bit. They'll have to ask us to a meal, anyway, and there's no sense in rushing things."
"Well——"
Angie's eye roved away once more, as a noisy group of French people came up the steps, talking and laughing. The women were young, fat, dark, and wore very smart bathing-dresses and sandals. The men were dark and fat, too, and full of animation. They all looked hard at Angie, and, having passed, looked back again. The impression that she had obviously created pleased her faintly, but the group was too evidently a family one. There was little satisfaction to be got out of the admiration of a middle-class Frenchman taking a holiday with his wife and—probably—sisters-in-law.
Angie's thoughts, followed by her glance, slid round again to the dark young man, and she saw that he—or more probably his companions—had been joined by two other men, one of them of some age between forty-five and fifty, an obvious American, and the other one fair and undersized, and very much younger.
The place, Angie decided, wasn't going to be hopeless at all.
"I'm going to have another orangeade," said Hilary. "What about you?"
"All right."
She didn't want the orangeade, but drinking it would be something to do, and it was worth while sitting on for a bit, letting all these men watch her, more or less surreptitiously, and giving them the chance of realising that she and Hilary were staying at the Hôtel d'Azur, and that they could get to know her without any difficulty at all.
(2)
Mr. Bolham, having been roused from some extremely serious reading that was his form of relaxation, looked with slight, habitual distaste at his elderly form and bald head reflected in the mirror, approved at the same time his beautiful white flannels, and went downstairs.
He walked, in preference to using the lift which had, three days earlier, stuck half-way down, imprisoning Mr. Bolham tête-à-tête with Mrs. Romayne, the lady now sitting, in pale pink pyjamas, on the terrace below. This misadventure, although it had only lasted for the space of seven minutes, had led to Mrs. Romayne's assuming an intimate and proprietary air towards Mr. Bolham ever since, and this, in its turn, had occasioned in Mr. Bolham a complex in regard to the use of the lift. He walked down the shallow white marble stairs.
At the Hotel entrance, he stood on the top step of another flight that led on to the terrace, and