Evan Hunter - Lizzie

“Not all of them speak English, you know,” Albert said, obviously proud of his bargaining in the native tongue.

“How happy that some of them understand l’idiome britannique,” Alison said.

“Yes, some of our countrymen do fracture the language,” Albert answered, blithely unaware of her sarcasm — or perhaps simply ignoring it. Lizzie felt, all at once, that Albert was — for all his exterior bluffness — a very sad man. The thought saddened her as well, and she sat in silence as the carriage made its way along the coastal road to the Golfe Juan, and then up the valley to Vallauris, some two hundred fifty feet above the sea.

The gentle hills were covered with heather.

“Reminds me of home,” Albert said, and again Lizzie felt this sense of ineffable sadness about him.

There was mimosa everywhere, growing along the roadside ditches. On foot they crossed a bridge just a little below Massier’s pottery and then ascended a broad dusty road to the Observatoire, where they looked out over the Alps and the country about Bordighera toward the coast. There were few visitors beside themselves.

They ate omelettes aux pommes de terre frites in a small restaurant in the town itself, forsaking the heavier fare offered at the Observatoire, and although Lizzie was enormously attracted to the flawless quality of the pottery being offered everywhere for sale, she wisely decided that buying any would be risking certain damage on the long journey ahead. She still had no real concept of when she would be rejoining her friends, but surely it would be within a week or so. Alison, after all, had only extended her invitation for a fortnight.

They returned to Cannes via the Corniche, down onto the Boulevard de Californie, and thence to the villa itself. Oddly, for the day had been a leisurely paced and tranquil one, she felt exhausted.

The Russians had been to Monte Carlo the day before.

There were two of them at the Ashton villa that Sunday afternoon. Both of them were titled — one a count, the other a baron. Both were wearing beards and mustaches and white uniforms hung with medals. They both owned villas in Nice, but they had never before visited the Riviera during the summertime. The overseeing of extensive renovations to the count’s villa was the cause of their presence here now, at such a “not so gay time”, as he put it in his heavily accented English. The count’s name was Popov. Lizzie found this amusing, but she managed to hide her mirth behind her fan. He was much more at home in French than he was in English, but in deference to his hostess and the other guests — all of them English, with the exception of Lizzie — he struggled with their language, “so full of too many vords,” he said.

The baron’s last name was unpronounceable. He suggested to Lizzie that she simply use his given name, Yakovlevich, which she found equally difficult. His English was only a trifle better than Popov’s, and he frequently lapsed into French when describing their excursion to Monte Carlo in the “uff sizzon”, as he called it.

“There vas so few pipple at les tables, you know? Why they are remain open at all is le grand mystère, n’est-ce pas? You know?” He had spent a pleasant hour or two shooting pigeons in the company of some Englishmen on the green beneath the casino terrace, and then had returned to the roulette table, where a young woman was in distress over what had just happened to her. “I am sure they have chitt her, you know?” he said. “She have lost all but twenty francs. Elle lui jette les vingt francs... she is throw the money to le croupier, and she say, ‘ Le numéro quatre ,’ the number four, you know? Lui, feignant de ne pas entendre... He pretends not to hear, you know? He places her bet instead on le zéro. La bille venait justement de partir. The ball has already start to go, yes? The lady says she does not understand. Le croupier, avec un geste de mauvaise humeur ... he is in a bad temper now, the croupier, and so he push the piece au numéro quatre, to the number four, as she wishes. Au même instant, son collègue ... in the same time, his colleague announces le zéro, where the ball has stop.”

“Why, they were trying to help her, not cheat her!” Albert said, fascinated by the tale.

“You believe so?” the baron said.

“Well, certainly,” Albert said. “Everyone knows the wheels are manipulated. They have a gadget of some sort under the table, and they have absolute control over the ball.”

“It is what I say, no?” the baron said. “They have chitt her. I much prefer le trente et quarante, but vhere vas there pipple to play? Abandonné, monsieur, complètement abandonné.”

The terrace upon which they sat was the least cluttered spot in the Ashton villa. One would have thought that every stick of furniture, every painting, every piece of bric-a-brac in the brimming drawing room, as Mildred Ashton insisted on calling it, had been transported directly from their London home. Whereas Lizzie had found the jumble in Alison’s Kensington house somehow — well, cozy wasn’t the proper word... enclosing? comforting? — such a decorative scheme seemed entirely out of place here on the Riviera. Equally unsuitable was the fashionable clothing all of the guests wore; Lizzie was beginning to appreciate the more casual costumes, sometimes resembling little more than a petticoat and chemise, Alison wore in her own home. There was a sense of artificiality here, of conversation too polite, of manners too carefully rehearsed, all out of keeping with the brilliance of the sunshine, the distant murmur of the sea, the fragrance of blossoms on the salt-laden air.

Popov was explaining that a countrywoman of his had lived in Nice for a long time, had indeed begun her recently published journal there when she was but a child and “madly in luff” with the Duke of Hamilton. Lizzie realized all at once that he was talking about Marie Bashkirtseff, whose studio Alison had taken her to in Paris. (That incisive face, the disdainful, determined and inquisitive look about the eyes.) Popov was quoting from the published diary now, telling of how Miss Bashkirtseff had once hurled a plate of pasta to the floor and then set fire to a chair, “perhaps vun or two chairs”, because an expected invitation to a ball had not arrived. “She vas a little bit dérangée, I tink,” Popov said. “She writes one time... wrote?... about she runs to throw a clock in the sea. Fou, sans aucun doute, n’est-ce pas? But, oh, how she luffs this Nice! She says, ‘Nice is my country. Nice made me to grow. Nice gaves to me the health and the beautiful couleur. C’est magnifique, Nice.’ ”

After lunch, which had been served rather late, the men retired to a room of the villa Mildred had set aside for her husband’s “enjoyment of cigars”, and the ladies sat alone on the terrace and asked Lizzie innumerable questions about America and about her recent visit to Paris, and seemed charmed by every word she uttered. They were properly sympathetic when they learned of her bout with influenza (“A horrid disease,” Mildred said) and agreed that a little time in the sun here would do wonders for her.

“But you’re so fair, Miss Borden,” one of the ladies said. “Won’t you burn to a crisp? With your complexion and that red hair? She has beautiful hair, hasn’t she, Alison?”

“Yes,” Alison said.

She had been oddly quiet throughout the afternoon, offering little by way of comment, her usual garrulity strangely checked, her spirited sarcasm entirely and mysteriously absent.