William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

I watch her lying there, immobile beneath the iridescent rain of ultraviolet. It is definitely not warm — even in my jacket and scarf I shiver slightly in the fresh breeze. How can she be bothered? I wonder, but at the same time I have to admit there is something admirable in such single-mindedness, such ludicrous dedication.

Eventually I take my first girl to the Club to meet Preston. Her name is Ingrid, she is in my class, a Norwegian, but with dark auburn hair. I don’t know her well but she seems a friendly, uncomplicated soul. She speaks perfect English and German.

“Are you French?” Preston asks, almost immediately.

Ingrid is very amused by this. “I’m Norwegian,” she explains. “Is it important?”

I apologize to Preston when Ingrid goes off to change into her swimming costume, but he waves it away, not to worry, he says, she’s cute. Ingrid returns and we sit in the sun and order the first of our many drinks. Ingrid, after some prompting, smokes one of Preston’s Merit cigarettes. The small flaw that emerges to mar our pleasant afternoon is that the more Ingrid drinks, the more her conversation becomes increasingly dominated by references to a French boy she is seeing called Jean-Jacques. Preston hides his disappointment; he is the acme of good manners.

Later we play poker using cheese biscuits as chips. Ingrid sits opposite me in her multicolored swimsuit. She is plumper than I had imagined, and I decide that if I had to sum her up in one word it would be “homely.” Except for one detail: she has very hairy armpits. On one occasion she sits back in her chair, studying her cards for a full minute, her free hand idly scratching a bite on the back of her neck. Both Preston’s and my eyes are drawn to the thick divot of auburn hair that is revealed by this gesture: we stare at it, fascinated, as Ingrid deliberates whether to call or raise.

After she has gone Preston confesses that he found her unshavenness quite erotic. I am not so sure.

That night we sit in the Club long into the night, as usual the place’s sole customers, with Serge unsmilingly replenishing our drinks as Preston calls for them. Ingrid’s presence, the unwitting erotic charge that she has detonated in our normally tranquil, bibulous afternoons, seems to have unsettled and troubled Preston somewhat, and without any serious prompting on my part he tells me why he has come to Nice. He informs me that the man his mother remarried was a widower, an older man, with four children already in their twenties. When Preston dropped out of college he went to stay with his mother and new stepfather.

He exhales, he eats several olives, his face goes serious and solemn for a moment.

“This man, Michael, had three daughters — and a son, who was already married — and, man, you should have seen those girls.” He grins, a stupid, gormless grin. “I was eighteen years old and I got three beautiful girls sleeping down the corridor from me. What am I supposed to do?”

The answer, unvoiced, seemed to slip into the Club like a draft of air. I felt my spine tauten.

“You mean—?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I didn’t want to speak, so I think through this. I imagine a big silent house, night, long dark corridors, closed doors. Three bored blond tanned stepsisters. Suddenly there’s a tall young man in the house, a virtual stranger, who plays tennis to Davis Cup standard.

“What went wrong?” I manage.

“Oldest one, Janie, got pregnant, didn’t she? Last year.”

“Abortion?”

“Are you kidding? She just married her fiancé real fast.”

“You mean she was engaged when—”

“He doesn’t know a thing. But she told my mother.”

“The, the child was—”

“Haven’t seen him yet.” He turns and calls for Serge. “No one knows for sure, no one suspects …” He grins again. “Let’s hope the kid doesn’t start smoking Merits.” He reflects on his life a moment, and turns his big mild face to me. “That’s why I’m here. Keeping my head down. Not exactly flavor-of-the-month back home.”

The next girl I take to the Club is also a Scandinavian — we have eight in our class — but this time a Swede, called Danni. Danni is very attractive and vivacious, in my opinion, with straight white-blond hair. She’s a tall girl, and she would be perfect but for the fact that she has one slightly withered leg, noticeably thinner than the other, which causes her to limp. She is admirably unself-conscious about her disability.

“Hi,” Preston says. “Are you French?”

Danni hides her incredulity. “Mais oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.” Like Ingrid, she finds this presumption highly amusing. Preston soon realizes his mistake and makes light of his disappointment.

Danni wears a small cobalt bikini and even swims in the pool, which is freezing. (Serge says there is something wrong with the heating mechanism but we don’t believe him.) Danni’s fortitude impresses Preston: I can see it in his eyes as he watches her dry herself. He asks her what happened to her leg and she tells him she had polio as a child.

“Shit, you were lucky you don’t need a caliper.”

This breaks the ice and we soon get noisily drunk, much to Serge’s irritation. But there is little he can do, as there is no one else in the Club who might complain. Danni produces some grass and we blatantly smoke a joint. Typically, apart from faint nausea, the drug has not the slightest effect on me, but it affords Serge a chance to be officious, and as he clears away a round of empty glasses he says to Preston, “Ça va pas, monsieur, non, non, ça va pas.”

“Fuck you, Serge,” he says amiably, and Danni’s unstoppable blurt of laughter sets us all off. I sense Serge’s humiliation and realize the relationship with Preston is changing fast: the truculent deference has gone; the dislike is overt, almost a challenge.

After Danni has left, Preston tells me about his latest money problems. His bar bill at the Club now stands at over four hundred dollars and the management is insisting it be settled. His father won’t return his calls or acknowledge telegrams and Preston has no credit cards. He is contemplating pawning his watch in order to pay something into the account and defer suspicion. I buy it off him for five hundred francs.

I look around my class counting the girls I know. I know most of them by now, well enough to talk to. Both Ingrid and Danni have been back to the Club and have enthused about their afternoons there, and I realize that to my fellow students I have become an object of some curiosity as a result of my unexpected ability to dispense these small doses of luxury and decadence: the exclusive address, the privacy of the Club, the pool on the roof, the endless flow of free drinks …

Preston decided to abandon his French classes a while ago and I am now his sole link with the Centre. It is with some mixed emotions — I feel vaguely pimplike, oddly smirched — that I realize how simple it is to attract girls to the Club Les Anges.

Annique Cambrai is the youngest of the Cambrai daughters and the closest to me in age. She is only two years older than me but seems considerably more than that. I was, I confess, oddly daunted by her mature good looks, dark with a lean attractive face, and because of this at first I think she found me rather aloof, but now, after many Monday dinners, we have become more relaxed and friendly. She is studying law at the University of Nice and speaks good English with a marked American accent. When I comment on this she explains that most French universities now offer you a choice of accents when you study English and, like 90 percent of students, she has chosen American.

I see my opportunity and take it immediately: would she, I diffidently inquire, like to come to the Résidence Les Anges to meet an American friend of mine and perhaps try her new accent out on him?