Vansittart to report for an interview, and now arrived at ten o’clock in the evening instead of the morning. When they reached the villa Mr Cecil began to voice these conclusions, but the man did not appear to understand him.
He was placed in the hall, Jasper and Mr Bloch guarding him just to be on the safe side. The others re-entered the salon and almost, immediately Mrs Vansittart emerged. As she did so, Jasper took advantage of the continuing interruption in order to go to the lavatory. Mr Bloch returned to the salon, where Harry picked up his tray of tea things and proceeded with it to the kitchen.
‘I told you not to come here,’ Mrs Vansittart furiously whispered. ‘I had no idea it could possibly be you.’
‘I tell a little lie, Madame. I say to the men there is arrangement.’
‘My God!’
‘This morning I wait, Madame, and you do not appear.’
‘Will you kindly keep your voice down.’
‘We go in your kitchen?’
‘My husband is in the kitchen. I could not come this morning because I did not wake up.’
‘I am by the lighthouse. It is time to fix the tablecloths but I stand by the lighthouse. How I know you ever come?’
‘You could have telephoned, for God’s sake,’ whispered Mrs Vansittart, more furiously than before. ‘All you had to do was to pick up the damn telephone. I was waiting in all day.’
‘Yes, I pick up the damn telephone, Madame. You husband answer, I pick it down again. All the time Monsieur Jean watch me. “It is no good this time to fix the tablecloths!” he shout when I come running from the lighthouse. My hand make sweat on the tablecloths. I am no good, he shout, lam bad waiter, no good for Grand-Hotel –’
‘I cannot talk to you here. I will meet you in the morning.’
‘This at the lighthouse, Madame?’
‘Of course at the lighthouse.’
All this Jasper heard through the slightly open lavatory door. It was not, he recognized at once, a conversation that might normally occur between Mrs Vansittart and a prospective gardener. As he passed through the hall again his hostess was saying in a clenched voice that of course she would wake up. She would be at the lighthouse at half past six.
‘He’s a waiter from the Grand-Hotel,’ Jasper reported softly in the salon, but not so softly that the information failed to reach anyone present. ‘They’re carrying on in the mornings at the lighthouse.’
Signor Borromeo won that night, and so did Mrs Cecil. At a quarter to twelve Harry carried in a tray with glasses on it, and another containing decanters of cognac and whisky, and bottles of Cointreau, cherry brandy and yellow Chartreuse. He drank some Cointreau himself, talking to Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch about azaleas.
‘Harry dear, you’ve dribbled that stuff all over your jacket!’ Mrs Vansittart cried. ‘Oh, Harry, really!’
He went to the kitchen to wipe at the stain with a damp cloth. ‘Hot water, Harry,’ his wife called after him. ‘Make sure it’s really hot. And just a trace of soap.’
He’d had a bad day, she reported when he was out of earshot. In his Red Indian song Foontimo’s child-wife – the wife who was not real but who appeared to Foontimo in dreams – continued to be elusive. Harry couldn’t get her name right. He had written down upwards of four hundred names, but not one of them registered properly. For weeks poor Harry had been depressed over that.
While they listened they all of them in their different ways disliked Mrs Vansittart more than ever they had before. Even Jasper, who had so enjoyed eavesdropping at the lavatory door, considered it extravagantly awful that Mrs Vansittart’s seedy love life should have been displayed in front of everyone, while Harry washed up the dishes. Mrs Bloch several times tightened her lips during Mrs Vansittart’s speech about the difficulties Harry was having with his creation of an Indian child-wife; her husband frowned and looked peppery. It was really too much, Mrs Cecil said to herself, and resolved that on the way home she’d suggest dropping the Vansittarts. There were all kinds of people in this world, Signor Borromeo said to himself, but found that this reflection caused him to like Mrs Vansittart no more. A
At midnight the gathering broke up. The visitors remarked that the evening had been delightful. They smiled and thanked Mrs Vansittart.
‘She has destroyed that man,’ Mrs Cecil said with feeling as she and her husband entered their villa, the Villa Japhico.
Signora Borromeo wept in the Villa Good-Fun, and her husband, sustaining himself with a late-night sandwich and a glass of beer, sadly shook his head.
‘She has destroyed that man,’ Jasper said to his friend in El Dorado, using the words precisely a minute after Mrs Cecil had used them in the Villa Japhico. In the Villa Hadrian the Blochs undressed in silence.
Mrs Vansittart lit a cigarette. She sat down at her dressing-table and removed her make-up, occasionally pausing to draw on her cigarette. Her mind contained few thoughts.
Her mind was tired, afflicted with the same fatigue that deadened, just a little, the eyes that people are rude about.
Harry sat at the piano in the snug little room he called his den. It was full of things he liked, ornaments and pictures he’d picked up in Europe, bric-a-brac that was priceless or had a sentimental value only. The main lights of the room were not switched on; an ornate lamp lit his piano and the sheets of music paper on the small table beside him. He wore a cotton dressing-gown that was mainly orange, a Javanese pattern.
The child-wife who visited the dreams of Foontimo said her name was Soaring Cloud. She prepared a heaven for Foontimo. She would never leave him, nor would she ever grow old.
Harry smiled over that, his even white teeth moist with excitement. He had known she could not elude him for ever.
The following morning Jasper watched from the rocks near the lighthouse. He carried with him a small pair of binoculars, necessary because the lie of the land would prevent him from getting
