The Lamorna Wink

them wanted to stop the game, to go back up the cliff.

But it was the young woman who went back up, and then of course they knew. They were trapped at the bottom in water now waist high and they couldn’t move more than a few feet. They wept; they began to howl with fear. The girl kept walking upward.

And then Esme became aware of the boat, shoved a little closer to the cliff by the waves. She grabbed Noah’s hand and lunged for it. If they could reach the boat, it would buoy them up.

Macalvie was standing now. He was watching the kids maneuvering toward the boat (and the boat, as if in silent assent, rocking toward them); he was watching as if this were a story whose ending was as yet unknown. As if the little kids really were actors and the scene was counterfeit.

She made it. Esme was close enough to haul herself into the boat and then to drag Noah in after her, once she-

But the girl went back down the steps as quickly as the slippery surface permitted. She went into the waist- deep water and pulled Esme and Noah out and shoved at the boat, which then turned and floated out of reach.

The children screamed. Macalvie shook his head at this visceral image. They’d been so close to saving themselves. He looked, then, to see their faces, the last view he’d get of their faces before the waves washed over them, and then their two free hands, holding onto each other, raised above the water-

And that was all.

That was the end.

Macalvie crossed his arms on the table, lowered his head to them, and wept.

65

Melrose might have said that Count Franco Giopinno pretty much lived up to expectations, except for his ability to cast a reflection in a mirror and appear without apparent difficulty during the daylight hours and in public at the Jack and Hammer.

That was where Melrose had first seen him, entering with bright daylight at his back, dramatically silhouetted in the doorway through which Vivian Rivington had just preceded him.

Franco Giopinno paused there to light a cigarette he’d extracted from a gold case. If he was posing, it was effective. The contours of his face looked sculpted, chiseled, hardly flesh.

“At least,” said Diane, seated at their favorite table in the window, “he smokes.”

“But what,” asked Joanna Lewes, their local writer of romance stories, “does he drink?”

Trueblood immediately whisked out his money clip, clapped down a note, and said, “Fiver says Campari and lime.”

Melrose pulled out a ten-pound note and slapped that down, saying, “Dry dry dry dry dry sherry. A glass of dust.”

Joanna put down a twenty. “Gin and tonic.”

Diane covered those two bills with a ten-pound note of her own. “Definitely dry dry dry dry, but a martini”-she pondered-“olive, rocks. Though God only knows why anyone would want to water down vodka.”

Even Theo Wrenn Browne, not ordinarily at their table and certainly not ordinarily a betting man (as it cost money), carefully extracted two pound coins from his change purse and put them down. “Red wine, probably burgundy.”

“Theo,” said Diane, “that’s only two pounds.”

“It’s only red wine, too.”

“We’re not buying, we’re betting,” said Joanna.

Diane said, voice low, “He knows how to dress, that’s certain.”

The count had now met two of the Demorney criteria for “amusing.” It was true; he did know how to dress. His suit was of such a fine material that it aroused one’s tactile sense, as if one simply had to touch it. It was a fine soft gray, the color of the ash hanging from the end of Diane’s cigarette.

“Um-um, um-um, um-um,” murmured Diane.

“Armani, Armani, Ar-man-i,” murmured Trueblood.

“He’s coming,” whispered Browne. “Don’t stare!”

Theo then looked everywhere else, as if not seeing this Armani-in-the-flesh bearing down on them, an ashen angel whose presence Vivian didn’t seem to register, for she walked straightaway to the table.

She did remember to introduce him, and quite graciously. One could hardly blame poor Vivian’s nervousness and reticence; she’d taken so much over the years on this man’s account.

The table needed one more chair, so the count wheeled one around and placed it beside Vivian’s.

Small talk about Italy, about Venice, occupied them for the few moments it took Dick Scroggs to make his way over to the table for orders.

“Just a sherry,” said Vivian.

And the count? “Pellegrino.”

Scroggs asked, “You mean the fizzy stuff? That mineral water, like?”

Giopinno nodded.

Scroggs started to move away when Diane said, “And what?”

“Pardon?” The count’s smile was a trifle supercilious.

“Pellegrino and what?”

“Nothing. I always drink water minerale. Good for you.”

Looking at Diane Demorney’s expression, one might challenge that last statement. Melrose hoped she had not gone into a coma, and that hers was merely like that look of wild surmise that Keats attributed to Cortez, or perhaps that seaward look on the face of Hardy’s heroine, “prospect impressed.”

For that of course was what “water” meant to Diane-the sea, a river, something to swim in, to boat on, to idle by. One might wash in it, dip one’s pedicured toes in it, give one’s flowers another measure of it. It even had its uses in tea or coffee, which then ceased to be “water.”

The only thing one didn’t do was drink it. The count contravened that rule, airily pouring the bubbly stuff into the tall glass Dick Scroggs had brought him, and drank it down.

They all looked at the money on the table.

You could have heard a pin drop.

Today was Melrose’s second encounter with Vivian’s intended.

“Where’s our Viv?” asked Trueblood of Franco Giopinno as they sat round the table in the window of the Jack and Hammer.

Giopinno’s smile was knowing and proprietary. “Gone to London.” He exhaled a stream of smoke, thin as his smile. “To see about her dress.”

“Ah,” said Diane. “Then she isn’t going to wear her mother’s?”

Not only did Giopinno raise a questioning eyebrow, Trueblood and Plant did as well.

Diane also blew out a dragonlike puff of smoke. “Mad Maud’s.”

The eyebrows went higher all around the table.

“Well, surely she told you about her mum.”

“No. No, she didn’t,” said Giopinno.

When both Trueblood and Plant seconded this “no,” Diane gave them a blistering look as if she’d seen quicker uptakes. “Don’t tell me you two don’t know about Vivian’s mother.” This was said in such a slow, lesson-for-idiots way that both of them wiped the confusion from their countenances and said, Oh, yes, of course. Sad little story, that.

“And what might that sad little story be?” asked Giopinno.

“Oh, it’s just the family, you know, with this strain of madness which only turns up in the women, for some reason,” said Diane, who then quickly, falsely, took Vivian off the hook of this crazy streak in the Rivington ladies. “I don’t mean that Vivian-”

Pompously, Trueblood put in, “Of course not, no, not Viv-Viv. I certainly wouldn’t say that little episode last