the cafe and get me some orange squash. Such a funny thing’s just happened,’ she added to Cable. ‘A little French girl came up to me and asked me for my autograph. She’d seen one of my commercials when she was staying in England.’
Matt, looking at her with acute dislike, was about to say something, then turned over and went back to sleep.
Although she was pouring with sweat, Imogen was too ashamed of her white body to go and swim until Cable and Nicky were safely in the sea. Then how cool and sympathetically soothing the water felt to her limbs. Below the dark green surface, she could see the slow moving shape of a fish. Then suddenly someone grabbed her ankles and she was falling. She seemed to swallow half the ocean. Choking, she came to the surface to see Nicky shooting away at a flashy crawl. Later he and Cable played very ostentatiously with a yellow beach ball.
‘I say, that’s rather naughty,’ said James, staring fascinated at a girl whose bikini pants had practically no back to them.
‘I don’t know why she bothers to wear anything at all,’ snapped Yvonne.
‘Why don’t you wear a bikini?’ Yvonne asked Imogen. ‘I’d lend you one, but I don’t think you’d get into it. I really think you ought to do something about your thighs.’
‘Exercises are the best thing,’ said Cable, flopping down on the lilo. ‘Sally Chetwynde lost five inches by bicycling every night.’
Imogen blushed as red as her bathing dress. If Matt had been there she was sure they would never have been so nasty to her. They shut up as soon as he came back.
She watched him oiling Cable, his hands moving steadily over her slim brown body, big practised hands, as skilful at making love as keeping a large car steady on a winding road at excessive speeds.
Her heart suddenly twisted with loneliness. Her skin was already turning as pink and as freckled as a foxglove. Oh, to be as beautiful as Cable, and to be loved by a man like Matt.
She was also worried that although she’d searched her room high and low she couldn’t find her pills. What on earth was Nicky going to say when he discovered she’d lost them? Perhaps she could get some from a chemist. ‘
‘Of course
‘I wouldn’t put on my make-up for twenty-five quid a day,’ said Cable.
Matt sighed and took refuge in a tattered copy of
When Imogen looked at herself in the glass before dinner, she was scarlet. Her head and her eyes ached; she had obviously overdone it. Her hair was stiff with oil, sand and sea water. Sand also seemed to have got into everything: towel, comb, bag, clothes; the floor of the room was just like the Gobi Desert. She lay on her bed and wondered which would be the worst evil, her baggy trousers or her other kaftan. She decided on trousers, which would at least hide her legs. After she had dressed and had another fruitless search for her pills, she wandered into Cable’s room and found her busy combing out newly washed ebony curls.
‘Goodness, you’re red,’ said Cable. ‘Good thing you kept yourself well oiled. Try some of my green face powder. Guess what? James Edgworth’s just made a pass at me. Serve Yvonne right for being so bitchy last night. I can’t think why I liked her in London. And, do you know, she was Purley Carnival Queen when she was 14? James made me promise not to tell anyone!’
In spite of the green face powder, Imogen’s face glowed like a furnace as the evening wore on. After dinner they went to a nightclub. She couldn’t believe how ravishing the girls were with their smooth expressionless faces, and long, long legs. And how beautifully they danced. It was as though the sun had melted their limbs to liquid. Nicky, having drunk too much, spent most of the evening wrapped round Cable. Matt ignored them both, and gabbled away to the nightclub owner. Every so often he smiled reassuringly at Imogen through the soupy darkness.
But later, back in her room, she wondered if she had ever been more miserable in her life. Here she was on the Riviera with the handsomest man in the world — a real daydream situation come true — and she was loathing every minute of it. She winced from sunburn as she climbed into bed. Oh please, God, make him be nice to me tonight.
Much later Nicky came in wearing not the violet dressing-gown which she’d so nearly been sick over last night, but a pair of black pyjamas. His gleaming beauty, after a day in the sun, was overwhelming. Squinting slightly from so much drink, he looked like a dangerous, hungry Siamese cat. He was obviously not going to put up with any nonsense tonight. Her stomach contracted with fear and expectancy.
‘Feeling bridal, darling?’ he said silkily, and pulled her towards him, his fingers biting into her arms. ‘It’s time you stopped playing games.’
His kisses were hard and brutal and gave her no pleasure. She was nearly suffocated by the smell of Cable’s scent.
‘No, no, Nicky, I don’t want to!’
‘Well, this time you’re going to have to, honey child.’
‘But you don’t love me,’ she gasped. ‘Not a bit. You’ve ignored me since we left England.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Nicky. ‘I tried hard enough last night, didn’t I?’
‘I couldn’t help it. Oh, Nicky please, please don’t. I can’t find my pills.’
‘Your what!’ It was like a pistol shot.
‘I’ve looked for them everywhere. I must have left them in that hotel on the way.’
His slit eyes were like dark thread. ‘Jesus, can’t you do anything right? I don’t believe you ever got them in the first place.’
Imogen gave a gasp of horror. ‘Oh, I did, I did. I promise.’
‘Crap,’ said Nicky. ‘You just pretended you had. We can’t do anything to upset Daddy, can we?’
‘I
Nicky, mean with drink inside him, rattled her like a cat shaking a mouse, calling her every name he could think of until someone banged on the wall and told them to shut up in German. Nicky swore back in German and pushed Imogen back against the pillow.
‘I’m s-s-sorry, Nicky,’ she sobbed. ‘I do love you.’
‘Well, I don’t love you,’ he snarled. ‘Get that straight. Nor do I like prissy little girls who string men along just for the sake of a holiday in the sun.’
And he stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
There were four church clocks in Port-les-Pins, and Imogen counted each one chiming the quarter hours through the night, until the crowing cocks brought the morning sun streaming through the shutters.
As she was going downstairs next morning, dark glasses covering her reddened eyes, Cable popped her head out of the bedroom door. ‘I just found these at the bottom of one of my espadrilles,’ she said. ‘I do hope you weren’t looking for them.’ And, laughing, she thrust the mauve card holding the pills into Imogen’s hand.
Laughter, thought Imogen, is the most insidious sound in the world. Cable and Nicky lay on the beach slightly out of earshot from the rest of the party, heads together, laughing and talking in low caressing voices.
The heat of the sun was as fiery as yesterday’s. But a fierce wind was raging. It tore the parasols out of the ground, blew sand in everyone’s faces, and ruffled the green feathers of the palm trees along the front.
‘It’s called a mistral,’ Matt told Imogen. ‘It makes everyone very bad-tempered. Have you noticed how the nicest people become absolute monsters with too much spare time on their hands?’
Yvonne was moaning at James, who was hiding his pink burnt body under a huge green towel. Cable was as snappy as an elastic band with Matt, and Nicky didn’t deign to recognise Imogen’s existence.
A black poodle with a red collar came scampering by, scattering sand. James whistled and made clicking noises with his hand.
‘Don’t talk to strange dogs, Jumbo,’ snapped Yvonne. ‘They might easily have rabies.’
Cable, in an emerald green bikini with a matching turban to keep the sand out of her hair, had never looked more seductive. Matt retired behind
