Kissing Kin (31 page)

Kim arrived beside her, soundlessly, and lounged against the balustrade, his shoulder touching hers.

“I shouldn’t have said that either,” he remarked in his casual way. “I never did so much apologizing in my life as I’m doing to-night. You do strange things to me, Camilla. When I began this I thought I knew what I was up to, but—I got carried away. I’m not such a bad sort, really—and I’m learning fast, with you. Will you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said wearily, and dabbed at her eyes.

“Nobody else has noticed it,” he murmured.

“That’s very comforting!” she flashed.

“It should be. I wasn’t sure myself till to-night.” Still he lounged, his shoulder firm and persistent against hers. “I shall now cut my own throat by offering gratuitous advice. Get out of here, Camilla.”

“How can you—” She turned on him, angry again, and he faced her, straightening slowly to his full height, which was not much above hers, so that she faltered and was silent.

“Get out of here, I said. Next time it won’t be just old Uncle Kim who sees. Next time it might be the wrong person. You wouldn’t like that, Camilla, not the way you are. In fact, things could happen that would make you pretty sick.
Understand
?” He left a silence, which she could not break, and then went on in his theatrically casual tone. “I don’t know how things are with you—or what your plans are—were. If you do want to come to Paris and sing my songs—I’ll write you some new ones. That’s a promise. Shall we go in now, or don’t you care about your reputation?”

Camilla had been living in the house some days before she discovered the library, a small corner room rather dark and cool in the afternoons, with windows masked by the shrubbery on the east terrace. Nobody used books much at Sally’s, but the library was well up to date with the latest fiction in French and English, and dozens of detective stories. As she was not very good at sleeping, Camilla was becoming addicted to who-dun-its, which could be read in bed with no mental effort.

Sally always disappeared for a siesta between luncheon and tea-time, and her guests were left to themselves. Some went to the Casino, some played golf if it was not too hot, some just sat on the terrace of the Carlton with a drink, and some also took siestas. Anyway, the house seemed quite deserted that
stifling afternoon as Camilla crossed the living-room towards the passage which led to the library, and she savoured her solitude gratefully. Kim had coaxed her to sing again after lunch, and had played a bit of the new song he was devising just for her, he said, and then he strolled away down to the Casino with some of the others, a little vexed because she refused to go along.

“I suppose you either have a headache or want to write letters,” he suggested, putting the stock excuses into savage quotation marks.

Camilla only laughed and would not argue, intending to get a new book and lie down on the chaise longue by her bedroom window, which caught a breeze from the water. She entered the apparently empty library and wandered along the shelves fingering the titles undecidedly, and jumped in a guilty sort of way when a voice said, “I thought you had gone to the Casino.” It was Sosthène, who had risen from a high-backed chair in the corner with his finger holding the place in the book he had been reading.

“No, I—” She glanced at the door, which she had found closed and had closed again behind her.

“Come and sit down.” He laid his book aside and moved towards her and the sofa set facing the flower-filled fireplace which was between them.

Camilla stood still and watched him come, dumb and
waiting
. He paused, and then moved forward again and she was in his arms, their faces pressed together without a kiss, and she felt his hands claiming her, one at her waist, one gripping her shoulder. Neither of them could speak, but after a moment his lips slid down across her cheek and found hers. Camilla gave him the kiss gladly, generously, with a kind of triumph in the reckless response.

“My Camille,” he murmured, still holding her. “What becomes of us like this?”

“I was going to tell you that I think I had better go away.”

“Yes.” He stood looking down at her in his arms, his gaze
travelling slowly over her face like a caressing fingertip. “Yes, now it becomes impossible. You will have to go.”

“Do you want me to go?” she challenged.

“Don’t ask me a thing like that, when you-know the answer so well.” They spoke almost in whispers, their lips close together.

“I was never sure about the answer—till now.”

“You had no
doubt, Camilla, from the beginning. What is it between us that will not starve to death?”

“I love you.” she whispered, and with a little sound like pity he kissed her again, and then could not seem to stop, going from gentleness to violence, and quite suddenly let her go, and sat down on the arm of the sofa, not looking at her, staring at the rug under his feet. Camilla, who had not known quite what it would be like, took a few aimless steps around the room, feeling reckless and ablaze and ready for almost
everything
, until his silence brought her back to him and she laid her arms around his shoulders and her cheek against his and said simply, “Have I made it worse for you?”

“Not you, no,”
he answered, motionless. “I have destroyed myself entirely. You had better—go up to your room.”

“Yes. But give me a minute first.”

“That door is not locked behind us.”

“I know, Sosthène—couldn’t we talk—couldn’t we go for a drive together?”

“Alone? There is no excuse. We don’t want her to know, do we.”

“Are you sure she doesn’t?”

“Quite sure—so far.”

“But—you are so close to each other. I wonder she doesn’t
feel
it somehow if—if you feel like this about me.”

“It is not a thing which would ever occur to her—now.”

She left him again, wandering about the room in a ferment. Finally, with her back to him, she spoke again into his silence.

“Sosthène—are you—married to Sally?”

“No.” His answer came without hesitation. “But we have been together longer than most marriages last nowadays.”

“If you were—both the same age—”

“Once it seemed as though we were. If we were, perhaps I could do differently than I must.”

“She depends on you. So I must go away before—”

“Yes.”

“Kim wants me to come to Paris and sing in his cabaret show. Do you think I could?”

“Probably.”

“Could I make a living that way?”

“Oh, yes—if you’re good at it. But you must make up your mind to one thing first—he will be in love with you, and not for marriage, you understand. You must be prepared for that.”

She returned swiftly to the sofa and knelt up on the cushions, catching at his sleeve impulsively, her face against his shoulder.

“Oh, Sosthène, you don’t think for a minute that anyone like that could make any difference between you and me!”

“That door,” he reminded her without moving, “is not locked.”

“Oh, damn the door!” cried Camilla, and flung away from him again, blindly, down the room. “I shan’t be young myself for ever,” she said then, sullenly, and waited. He made no answer. She turned and looked at him, the room between them. He met her eyes again steadily, compassion and
resignation
in the droop of his thin, curving lids. “There isn’t—anything you can say or do, is there,” she realized at last.

“No. Nothing.”

“Then I’ll go to Paris with Kim.”

She walked out of the room, and left him sitting on the arm of the sofa looking after her. Heading heedlessly for the stairs and her own room, she ran hard into Kim coming round the drawing-room doorway. He caught her by the shoulders and his knowing, sympathetic gaze raked her face.

“Not that way,” he said. “You’ll meet them all coming in just behind me.”

“Kim, get me away from here, somehow, quick!” Tears welled up and ran down her cheeks.

“Stop it, I say, they’ve all come back early because of the heat. Do you want that Eugénie cat to see you like this and start guessing at reasons? Here.” He swung her round and pushed her towards the piano bench. “Sit down beside me and play treble.” His fingers were noisy on the keyboard as the other guests flowed into the room fanning themselves and looking for iced drinks. Her right hand followed his listlessly an octave higher, and she gave a piteous sniff under cover of the music. “When shall we start?” he murmured. “Tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, please.”

“What will you tell Dinah?”

“Dinah doesn’t interfere. I’m grown-up.”

“Are you?” said Kim, with an impudent
glissade
which swept her hand from the keys.

“What about my song?”

“You’ll get it. More than one. What about your Delorme career?

“I’ll choose my own career. Can I make a living in Paris?”

“Why not?”

“Singing?
”

He gave her a sardonic sidelong glance.

“Camilla, darling, don’t you trust me?”

“Not altogether.”

“You can,” he said casually. “I’ll never try to corner you. Take your time.”

“Kim, I don’t promise anything—ever. You do understand that.”

“Perfectly.”

“Then why do you bother?”

“Curiosity,” he said, with another
glissade.

“Suppose you’re disappointed.”

“I’ll take what comes.”

“What’s that you’re playing now?”

“Your new song. One of them. Try it.”

She hummed along with the melody, experimentally.

“Pretty low, isn’t it?”

“Your best notes are the low ones. Leave it to Uncle Kim.”

“Has it got any words?”

“Not yet. I’ve got a glimmer, though.”

“I think it’s awfully clever of you to write both the words and the music.”

“Darling, I
am
clever. You’ll see.”

“It’s lucky you were here, isn’t it,” she said thoughtfully after a moment.

“
I
think so.” He was humming the new melody himself, “Especially just now. What happened, anyway? None of my business!” he answered for her before she could speak. “All right, all right, don’t tell me, I can guess.”

“I’d rather you didn’t guess. You’ll get it all wrong.”

“Does it matter, to us?”

“Yes, it does,” she said earnestly. “I don’t want you to think—”

“After we leave here tomorrow,” said Kim, “I swear never to think again.”

“You know, half of what you say doesn’t mean anything at all,” she accused. “Like musical comedy dialogue.”

“Thank you, Camilla,” said Kim, inclining his head with dignity while he played. “This is my first act finale. Like it?”

C
AMILLA FOUND THAT
it was possible to keep very busy in Paris, and being busy is the next best thing to being happy, and sometimes amounts to the same thing. She was always welcome in the lavish Kendrick household where Kim St. Clair was already entirely at home. The young
international
set who were the Kendricks’ friends adopted her with enthusiasm and she sang nightly at their favourite dance club just off the Champs Elysées, and appeared in a rather mixed Paris revue which caught on for a time.

Not overnight, but almost imperceptibly, she and Kim became an established fashion, and parties were given especially so that newcomers from overseas might hear them, and their devotees might hear again their own choice among the songs. Admiration, pursuit, even, was a pleasant novelty to Camilla, and in a way she did thoroughly enjoy herself. It wasn’t long before her professional engagements with Kim provided enough legitimate excuses not to return to Cannes.

When she went to England for a few weeks in the summer of 1925, it was rather like Cinderella coming back to her chimney-corner, for Kim was left behind and she played her own accompaniments in the British drawing-rooms where
Winifred’s parties and Virginia’s were somewhat different from the lively gatherings across the Channel. Camilla’s hair, short now, with curls, and her make-up and her clothes all became a little extreme when seen against a London
background
, and a good many of the more popular numbers had to be omitted from her repertoire.

The family were proud of her glitter and success, but at the same time a trifle wary. They could not help but wonder just how far the sophisticating process had gone, and they felt a certain responsibility, though they were privately agreed that Camilla was by now certainly old enough to take care of herself. But with Sally’s spectacular record before them, it did just occur to them to wonder. Bracken and Dinah, entertained at her comfortable flat on the Boulevard Suchet in Passy, had reported everything in outward good order, at least; unless, Bracken’s conscientious postscript ran, one took exception to a slightly
bijou
drawing-room with
chartreuse
highlights. But even Kim seemed entirely under control. Of course she had met him at Sally’s in the first place….

Kim could have told them, if he had chosen, that they needn’t have worried about that part of it. Camilla had not promised anything when they left Cannes, and he wasn’t sure even now that he had actually expected anything. His main consolation was that nobody else appeared to succeed with her any further than he could, and he knew plenty of other people himself who were more obliging, and he was not one to pine. Their partnership at the piano was financially profitable to both, and was artistically satisfying to his creative side. He still made love to her when he got the chance, and took No with good grace. They had had a few dust-ups, but no reproaches, and on the whole their very informal,
laissez-faire
association was mutually beguiling.

When she got to London that summer Camilla lost no time about hunting up Jenny Keane, and found her a little thinner and more plainly dressed than before, a little quieter, a little pathetic, still absorbed in the work at St. Dunstan’s. The old
Duke had died the winter before, and her Cousin Godfrey had inherited, and had at once put Overcreech up for sale. Jenny had found a small flat on the less fashionable edges of Regent’s Park to be near St. Dunstan’s, and she lived there alone with only a daily char to look after her, and not even a cat to keep her company. How different we are, in the way we take it, Camilla thought. Both of us left dangling, without the thing we want most—but Jenny is at least some good in the world. “Whenever I see you I feel ashamed of myself,” she said suddenly, as they sat drinking tea in Jenny’s rooms.

“That’s a dreadful thing to hear from your best friend,” Jenny objected lightly. “And it doesn’t make any sense. Look at you!” Her eyes went wistfully over the groomed, exotic figure, dressed by Vionnet with an almost arrogant elegance and restraint, sitting on her sofa with a buttered scone in its manicured fingers. “You make me feel and look like a sparrow, if it comes to that!”

“It’s only skin deep,” sighed Camilla, with a restless movement which set thin silver bracelets tinkling on both wrists. “I should have found something worth while to do, I suppose.”

“Except for my blind,” Jenny said slowly, “the world still needs pretty ladies and music and fun. You make people laugh and relax and forget their troubles. That’s good enough, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know—is it?” Camilla brooded a moment. “What’s become of Gerald?” she asked irrelevantly, and Jenny smiled.

“He’s round and about.”

“Not married yet?”

“No.’

“You don’t mean to say he learned a lesson!”

“Perhaps he did. It was about time, wasn’t it!”

“Jenny, you wouldn’t—wouldn’t be going out of your way to teach him—and rather overdo it?”

“Et tu, Brute?” said Jenny, but she still smiled.

“Was there ever a word about Raymond?”

“Never. We moved heaven and earth, and ploughed up Geneva, but he was gone.”

“I might be playing an engagement in New York this winter. And I was just thinking—would you like me to go up to that town he came from—what was its name?”

“Indian Landing.”

“Lake Champlain, wasn’t it? I could run up there—they might have heard something.”

Jenny shook her head.

“Well, I only thought it might put your mind at rest a little,” Camilla said apologetically. “I’d have gone there on my own before I left America if I’d had any idea that you were still—that you’d go on feeling this way.”

“I don’t think about it much,” Jenny said after a moment. “Not any more. I keep pretty busy.”

“But—perhaps there might be somebody else, if only you—”

Jenny shook her head.

“But, Jenny, it’s not even as though you’d been married to him—”

“Darling, don’t get any idea that I’m eating my heart out over a ghost, or anything like that.” Jenny set down her cup and tried to speak levelly. “Raymond’s gone. I’m used to that now. I don’t—grieve for him. But if there was ever anyone else, he would have to be—
more
than Raymond. And I’ve just never seen anyone half as big as he was. That’s all.”

“So you’d rather do without.”

“Well, what about yourself?” Jenny demanded. “What about this Kim St. Clair I hear so much about? How does he look beside Sosthène?”

“Rotten.”

“So you’re doing without, too,” Jenny pointed out, with no triumph.

“Yes—but nobody’s very sure of that except you and Kim! And as for me—just possibly—there’s some hope some day. I try not to think about it, but it’s there, all the same.” She
grinned ruefully into her empty cup. “So I keep pretty busy too,” she said.

“Well, there we both are, then,” said Jenny, and lit a cigarette.

“Just a couple of old maids,” Camilla remarked reflectively, and Jenny laughed.

“You look it!”

“Anyway, we haven’t got that war yet,” said Camilla, reaching for a petit beurre and biting into it.

“Give us time.”

“How much time?”

“Nobody knows that, but Bracken says we won’t be ready. He and Dinah took me with them to the Air Pageant at Hendon last week. The King on the ground spoke to the pilots in the air and directed manoeuvres by his voice. Wireless telephony. That was one of the things Raymond used to write about from France—directed communication with the ground, for a lost pilot, or an injured one—a way to guide a plane home through cloud or fog by question and answer, when there was no visibility. It was one of the things he wanted to work out.” Jenny sat a moment, looking back. “I thought of that at Hendon. If Raymond had lived he would have spent all his time on things like that—not on bigger bombs or—or chemical warfare. He was thinking about ways to make flying safer for the pilots, not deadlier for the people below. Next time if they drop gas on us from planes—apparently it can be done now—nothing can function at all behind the lines. Trains, hospitals, anti-aircraft defence—it would all be completely paralysed, and all they’d have to do is land.”

“And bury us.”

“It would be tidier, yes.”

“Does Bracken think it will happen?”

“He thinks it
can.
He says the Germans are flying all over the place, under the heading of sport and commerce. All their big cities are linked by air lines, passenger and freight. Their schools teach aeronautics, like mathematics. They won’t let
other countries fly commercial routes over German territory—you have to get out at the border and change to a German plane. And we let them!”

“Jenny, are they going to try it
again?
”

“Bracken thinks they will, because we are not handling them right. He says we’re letting them get away with murder, and it’s becoming the fashion to coddle them. They don’t
understand
our excessive sense of fair play, to them it’s just a sign of weakness, an invitation to take advantage of us, because they haven’t got any such thing themselves. He says they’re a lot smarter than we are—and a thousand times more ruthless.”

“Then Calvert and Raymond might just as well not have
fried!
” cried Camilla. “They might just as well still be
here.
”

“They might be here,” Jenny said realistically, “but it wouldn’t be the same world it is now, you know—if Germany had won the war and walked in.”

“But then by the time Jeff is grown up, and Nigel—and Evadne—”

“Let’s not think,” said Jenny. “Our statesmen are still trying. Sir Austen Chamberlain seems to have some sound ideas. There’s another conference coming in the autumn. Bracken is staying for it. They’re going to Salzburg in the meantime.”

“I know,” nodded Camilla. “Reinhardt and the
Miracle.
They want me to come and I think I will. Why don’t you come too? You must need a holiday.”

“We’ll see,” said Jenny, for she had long since learned the convenience of that ambiguous promise which from Raymond had always made her furious.

Camilla always forgot about war till she saw Bracken again. He was not a Cassandra, but neither did he have any belief in general European Couéism about conferences. Johnny Malone had returned to her Berlin post at the end of the war, and was under no delusions concerning the German state of mind, which he said was entirely unrepentant and quite
indistinguishable
from the state of mind which had resulted in the declaration
of war in 1914. Except that it was worse, if anything, for now it was necessary for the Germans to prove to themselves the universal German myth that their army had not been beaten at all in 1918, but had merely been betrayed by a home front weakened in morale by the starvation imposed upon it by the inhuman Allied blockade. More even than in 1914, the
Germans
desired to assert their own superiority to all the rest of the human race, in order to make up to themselves for any vague shadows of doubt which they had experienced before the Armistice, and because they had now convinced themselves in their colossal
amour
propre
that they had been
wronged,
but that they had never been
wrong
.

Johnny Malone came down to Salzburg to see his boss, and was waiting on the terrace of the Oesterreichische Hof when Bracken’s party arrived there by motor. Jeff had had an illness—no one seemed quite sure what it was—but he was still something of an invalid, rather pale and listless, with spurts of energy which left him overtired. They were all sick of the London doctors, who only mentioned frightening things like rheumatic fever, and advised rest and good air—no exercise, no study, no excitement. Bracken had taken a house on the shore of one of the blue lakes near Salzburg, where the rest of them could swim and climb and Jeff could lie in the sun and breathe mountain air—and where, if they took the trouble to drive into the town, they could hear superb music. They hoped that this would put Jeff right again, and incidentally he would have a chance to pick up German. Dinah was determined not to fuss and make him think of himself as fragile, but the family was much concerned about him, and Camilla could see that the illness had been serious.

The journey to Salzburg was made in easy stages with delightful stops along the way, and nobody but Jeff was tired when they arrived in the middle of a sunny August afternoon. They were spending the night at the hotel, and Dinah took him away to rest upstairs on his bed, and the others sat down at Johnny’s table on the terrace and ordered fresh coffee, and
Camilla looked down at the river and began to feel relaxed and glad she had come—though they had not been able to get Jenny to budge from St. Dunstan’s.

Camilla had heard about how people could sit for hours over coffee at a table in Salzburg, too contented to move, and she began at once to see how that would be. The mountains which ringed the dreamy little town were turning pink in the afternoon light, and the fortress on its crag rose sharply in the middle distance. There was a faint lingering fragrance in the warm, still air—woodsmoke, or was it incense, hot tar, coffee, and something else which might be cowsheds. And then the vesper bells began to ring from all the churches.

Gradually, almost unwillingly, she became aware of the conversation going on beside her.

“Don’t for one minute think I’m being an optimist,” Bracken was saying, his hands cupped round the lighted match above his pipe, “but if this meeting at Locarno can bring
Germany
into the League, it’s just possible that Russia might get lonely enough to want to come in too—if invited. I don’t say that it would get us anywhere if she did, but it might. Nor I don’t say that we want the Russians in the League, but Europe now consists of ex-allies, ex-enemies, and Russians. Maybe—just maybe—if the ex-enemies and the Russians were allowed to join our club and play on our team in our game, they would find themselves without a grievance. They’d hate that, of course—but it might be an interesting experiment.”

Johnny shook his head.