Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

He made it all sound like a long day in the cricket field.

“What about you, Walter?”

“I was well behind our lines and quite safe in Berlin. A man without honor, I’m afraid. Too old for all that. I was a captain in the Intendant General’s Office. The Catering Corps.”

“Ah. I begin to see a pattern.”

I nodded. “Before the war I worked at the Hotel Adlon.”

“Right. Everyone stays at the Adlon. Grand Hotel . The film, I mean. Vicki Baum, wasn’t it? The Austrian writer.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thought so. I’m a writer myself. Books, plays. Working on a play right now. A comedy that’s based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. It’s about a man who has three daughters.”

“There’s a coincidence.”

Maugham laughed. “Quite.”

“I suppose it would be too much of a coincidence if you were not related to the other Maugham who lives around here.”

“He’s my uncle. Matter of fact, he used to know Vicki Baum, when he was living in Berlin before the first war.”

The drinks arrived and Robin Maugham grabbed his glass of white wine off the waiter’s tin tray with the impatience of the true drunk. I should know; my own greenish glass had taken on the aura of the holy grail.

“He likes Germans, too. Willie. That’s what we call the old man. Speaks it fluently. On account of the fact that before med school he spent a year at the University of Heidelberg. Uncle Willie loves Germany. He’s particularly fond of Goethe. Still reads it in German. Which is saying something for an Englishman, I can tell you.”

“Then we have something in common.”

“You too, eh? Jolly good.”

It was easy to see that Robin Maugham was a playwright. He had an easy way of speech about him, a talky, bantering sort of chat that concealed as much as it revealed, like a character you knew was going to prove much more consequential than he seemed if only by virtue of his prominence on the theater bill.

“You know, what with the bridge and the German, perhaps you’d like to make up a four at the Villa Mauresque one night. The old man is always keen to meet interesting new people. Of course, he’s notoriously private, but I’ll hazard a guess that the concierge at the Grand Hotel-not to mention someone who worked at the famous Adlon-well, that person must be used to keeping a few confidences, what?”

“I’d be delighted to come,” I said. “And you needn’t worry about my mouth.”

I thought about Anne French and what she might say when I told her I’d been invited up to the Villa Mauresque. It was possible she would perceive my invitation as an affirmation of her own strategy: to learn bridge in order to meet Somerset Maugham. But it seemed equally possible that she would see it as some kind of betrayal. And while for a brief moment I considered simply not telling her in order to spare her feelings, it seemed to me that my being there at all could only help to facilitate her own invitation. Alternatively, I might be her spy and report on how things really were at the Villa Mauresque, providing her with the color she needed for her book.

“But I feel I ought to read one of his novels,” I said. “I’d hate to have to admit that I haven’t read any. Which one would you recommend?”

“A short one. My own favorite is The Moon and Sixpence . Which is about the life of Paul Gauguin. I’ll lend you my own copy if you like.”

Robin Maugham looked at his watch. “You know, it occurs to me that we could still make dinner at the villa. That is if you haven’t already dined. Willie keeps a very good table. Annette, our Italian cook, is wonderful. Willie was in a good mood today. Rather absurdly, an invitation to the forthcoming wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly in Monaco seems to have left him as delighted as if he was getting married himself.”

“I got an invitation myself but sadly I shall have to decline. It would mean finding all my decorations and buying a new suit, which I can ill afford.”

Robin smiled uncertainly.

I looked at my own watch.

“But sure. Let’s go. I don’t mind interrupting my alcohol consumption with some food.”

“Good.” Robin drained his wineglass, scooped up the terrier, and pointed toward the end of the terrace. “Shall we?”

I climbed into my car and followed the Englishman’s red Alfa Romeo up the hill and out of the town. It was a lovely warm evening with a light sea breeze and an edge of coral pink in the blue sky as if some nearer Vesuvius were in fiery eruption. Behind us the lightly clad myrmidons of Hermes filled the many waterside restaurants and narrow streets, while the miniature Troy that was the little port of Cap Ferrat bristled with innumerable tall masts and hundreds of invading white boats that jostled for undulating position on the almost invisible glass water, as if it mattered a damn where anyone was going or anyone came from. It certainly didn’t matter to me.

Approached along a narrow, winding road bordered by pine trees, the Villa Mauresque stood on the very summit of the Cap and behind a large wrought-iron gate with white plaster posts on one of which was carved the name of the house and what I took to be a sign against the evil eye, in red. It didn’t slow me down and I drove through the gates in Robin Maugham’s dust as if I had the nicest baby blue eyes in France. The place couldn’t have looked more private if King Leopold II of Belgium had been living there with his pet pygmy and his three mistresses and his private zoo, not to mention the many millions he’d managed to steal from the Congo. By all accounts he had quite a collection of human hands, too, lopped off the arms of natives to encourage the others to go into the jungle and collect rubber, and I think the king could have taught the Nazis a few things about cruelty and running an empire. Unlike Hitler, he’d died in bed at the age of seventy-four. Once, he had owned the whole of Cap Ferrat, and the Villa Mauresque had been built for one of his confidants, a man named Charmeton, whose Algerian background had left him with a taste for Moorish architecture. I knew this because it’s the sort of detail a concierge at the Grand Hotel is supposed to know.

According to Robin Maugham, his uncle had owned the villa for more than thirty years. It was the type of place you could easily imagine a novelist writing about except that no one would have believed it, for the house seemed even more elaborate-inside and out-than I could have expected. Anne French was renting a nice villa. This one was magnificent and underlined Maugham’s international fame, his enormous wealth, and his impeccable taste. It was painted white, with green shutters and tall green double doors, horseshoe windows, a Moorish archway entrance, and a large cupola on the roof. There was a tennis court, a huge swimming pool, and a beautiful garden full of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and lemon trees that lent the evening air the sharp citrus scent of a barber’s shop. Inside were ebony wood floors, high ceilings, heavy Spanish furniture, gilded wooden chandeliers, blackamoor figures, Savonnerie carpets, and, among many others, a painting by Gauguin-one of those heavy-limbed, broad-nosed, Tahitian women that looks like she must have gone three rounds with Jersey Joe Walcott. Over the fireplace was a golden eagle with wings outspread, which reminded me of my former employers in Berlin, while all the books on a round Louis XVI table were new and sent from a shop in London called Heywood Hill. The soap I used to wash my hands in the ground-floor lavatory was still in its Floris wrapper, and the towels were as thick as the silk cushions on the Directoire armchairs. The Grand Hotel felt like a cheaper version of what there was to be enjoyed at the Villa Mauresque. It was the sort of place where time and the outside world were not welcome; the sort of place it was hard to imagine could still exist in a ration-book economy that was recovering from a terrible war; the sort of place that was probably like the mind of the man who owned it, an elderly man in a double-breasted blue blazer that looked as if it had been made by the same London tailor as Robin’s, with a face like a Komodo dragon lizard. He stood and came to shake my hand as his nephew made the introduction, and when he licked the lips of his thin, broad, drooping pink mouth, I would not have been surprised to have seen a tongue that was forked.