Kissing Kin (36 page)

“Yes—I know,” said Camilla.

“And now go and wash and rest and put on some more make-up. And send Bracken here to me.”

“Thank you—for everything,” Camilla whispered, and kissed Sally’s cheek, and left the room with a backward glance and a smile at the door.

And she never saw Sally again.

A
LMOST AGAINST HER WILL
, Camilla took her legacy seriously. After what Sally had said that day, it was impossible to sell the house, or give it away. She felt responsible now for keeping it cheerful and amused. It weighed on her mind like a duty to a living thing. At first she made hard work of living in Sally’s house—later the task took on the ease of habit. The Kendrick family helped her, by spending time there with their travelling nursery, and their legion of transatlantic friends. Kim helped her by enlisting his own rather various acquaintances for house parties. The family helped her by running over from London with its young and acquiring a tan on the rocks between the garden and the water. Sometimes this programme required a nice adjustment of time-tables and schedules, so that Virginia’s daughters did not encounter Kim’s more exotic associates, and the smaller children came at a time when it was convenient for them to have the run of the house. There was, however, one fixture which the family was expected to take in its stride, and at which it never openly boggled—Kim was always there, or had just gone, or was about to arrive.

Camilla had at last learned the geography of the house, but
she occupied the same comfortable room with its blue-tiled bath and the balcony facing the sea to which she had been assigned on her first visit years before. Sally’s own rooms, with Sosthène’s bedroom opening on to the same balcony, were not closed off, but nobody ever used them. Their doors stood open to the passage, their windows admitted the sun and sea air, their vases were kept full of fresh flowers, and fires were laid in the grates and sometimes lighted to keep out the damp. It was just that nobody ever sat down in them. There were plenty of other rooms, and Camilla had also resisted a cowardly impulse to lock up the library. Its door was always open, the contents of its shelves were regularly added to, and its books came and went at the whim of any guest who wished to read in bed.

There were no haunted chambers in the house, no ghosts, no echoes, for that was the way Sally had wanted it. And Camilla, as Sally had foretold, was happier there than she had expected to be. She was not angry any more, though she still felt bitter and a little raw, and preferred not to think much, and sometimes made rather a business of keeping her mind occupied with trivial daily things and a perpetual chatter about nothing.

Almost imperceptibly, almost to her own surprise, Sally’s pattern of existence at Cannes enfolded her. She became more and more the hostess, the queen bee, and spent less time in Paris, for Paris began to come to her. She gave up regular singing engagements, and invested some of Sally’s money in a new revue for which Kim had written the songs, though she did not appear in it herself. The show was a success, and they did very well out of it financially, and an Anglicized version went to London and did better still. Kim and Camilla went along, of course, to attend rehearsals, and she was not really surprised, and certainly she never shed a tear, when Kim fell in love with the leading lady there. By then a very presentable but stage-struck young man newly escaped from Cambridge who would one day write very good plays wanted to marry
her, but Camilla said she was old enough to be his mother, which was far from true, and after a few months they parted friends.

Camilla’s partnership with Kim in show business continued to be mutually profitable, and their respect for each other and an abiding affection and understanding survived the end of their love affair. They did another revue in London together the following year, and Kim changed leading ladies, to Camilla’s tolerant amusement.

Johnny and Bracken both came to Paris for the signing of the Kellogg Pact in the summer of 1928—sixty-two nations agreed therewith to outlaw war. But Johnny said it was very difficult to find any difference between the new Pact and the original League Covenant which had been signed at Versailles, and again at Locarno—and as usual it contained no single word about what measures were to be taken, or ever could be taken, against its violators. Why, asked Johnny inconveniently in the midst of so much international satisfaction, should it have to be all carefully written out and piously signed again? Where, Johnny wanted to know, not for the first time, was the Big Stick?

Germany was in the League now. Tremendous foreign
investments
had been poured into the country until Germany could no longer with a straight face claim that she could not afford to pay reparations, to
the great chagrin of people like Dr. Schacht. The evacuation of the Rhineland had been begun ahead of time, in the Allies’ eager efforts to please their defeated enemy, who showed no gratitude for concessions nor penitence for past misdeeds, and who were known to be constructing submarines in a Spanish shipyard, as such activities were still technically forbidden in home waters. They were training army officers in military manoeuvres in Russia, and in return for this hospitality trained Russian troops in the same Prussian methods. But of course nobody would ever go to war again. The Pact of Paris said so.

Johnny and Bracken visited Cannes that summer, when
they left Paris. It was one of the wilder weeks there, with the Kendrick family in the house and some of Kim’s set as well. Johnny quite entered into the spirit of things, Camilla thought, and got along very well indeed with a golden-haired countess who had a Hungarian name and had done film work at the Ufa studios in Berlin, and who was returning there shortly for another engagement—the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Camilla remarked without malice to Bracken, who looked at her sidewise and said she would soon out-Sally Sally if she didn’t watch out. But when Johnny said Goodbye he took Camilla’s hand in his warm, hard grip and said gravely, “This has been great fun. May I come again?”

Two years went by before he came again, and it was
September
, and the recent German general elections had left everyone in Europe a little stunned by the seemingly sudden eruption to prominence of the man called Hitler, the man with the funny moustache who was always talking—and people had begun to ask, “Who
is
this fellow?” and “What does Nazi
mean?
”
Johnny knew who Hitler was, and Johnny told them what Nazi meant—militarism—uniforms—the goose-step again—blood-red banners with a black crooked cross—and the slogan,
Germany,
awake!
It meant the end of disarmament everywhere, it meant no more reparations, no war guilt, no Versailles, no security in Europe. It meant revenge. It could mean war.

“But, man alive, they’re in the League, they’ve promised to be good!” objected the film actor from Hollywood who was lying on his spine wearing nothing but scarlet bathing-trunks in the garden chair next to Johnny. “And there’s this Kellogg Pact, whatever it is, they signed that like everybody else!”

“Did you ever hear of the scrap of paper?” Johnny asked ironically. “Or are you too young?”

“I wouldn’t take Hitler too seriously if I were you,” said a dark young man also clad only in bathing-trunks who was sunning himself on a beach-mat laid on the grass at Camilla’s feet. “We need him—for a while—to keep the Communists
in order. Later, we shall get rid of him, but he doesn’t know that.”

There was a slightly uncomfortable pause. Owing to Camilla’s easy way with introductions, Johnny had no idea what the young man’s name was, and he spoke English with hardly any accent, but he spoke, apparently, as a German.

“Aren’t you rather overdoing it recently?” Johnny
suggested
. “Isn’t Hitler rather a risk from now on?”

“You mean because of his army? Nah!” It was an ugly sound of disgust. “The old army will take care of that, when the time comes. The men of my father’s generation are not asleep, I can promise you!”

“Victor’s father was on the Kaiser’s staff,” Camilla explained to Johnny. “You may have heard of him—Prince Conrad zu Polkwitz-Heidersdorf.”

The name struck Johnny with an almost visible jolt. He sat looking down at the outstretched form of the young German lying in arrogant golden-tanned beauty at Camilla’s feet—a truly superb specimen, not typically Teuton, for his hair and eyes were dark. But now Johnny thought he could see a resemblance in the jutting nose and heavy, well-chiselled lips. He wondered if his own name would mean anything to Victor, and how much Prince Conrad’s son had ever learned about his English mother. It was fifteen years since Johnny had driven up to the Schloss at Heidersdorf with a crinkle of nerves at the pit of his stomach, commissioned to discover what had become of the woman who had been Rosalind Norton-Leigh, and who was then cut off by the war from any communication with her former home in London. But Johnny in the sunlit garden at Cannes could still feel the Zenda-like atmosphere of the Schloss in war-time, and the preposterous interview with Prince Conrad, who explained so logically and amiably why it was impossible for his wife to make a visit in neutral
Switzerland
just then—Johnny had forgotten no single theatrical detail of Rosalind’s subsequent flight from Germany, veiled and luggageless and fantastically composed, in his charge. It
might be interesting to know how much Victor knew—Rosalind had never had a word from Germany since her departure, not even in the form of a divorce action.

“It was His Highness’s mother that I knew best,” Johnny said experimentally, and Victor sat up with a jerk, leaning on one hand to face him.

“And you name is—?”

“Malone,” said Johnny, meeting the aggressive stare of the man on the grass, and saw that the name rang a bell.

“You know her still?”

“I haven’t seen her since she went back to England. She is well and happy, I believe.”

“Living with that British officer for whom you once acted?”

“Colonel Laverham had nothing whatever to do with my action. I came to Heidersdorf at the request of Phoebe Sprague, who was your mother’s girlhood friend.”

“I know all that. But she went to him.”

“Eventually. Why not?”

“It is shameful.”

“There is such a thing as divorce. But apparently your father has not seen fit—”

“Naturally not.” Victor rose to his feet, scowling, but moving with grace and dignity, and turned to Camilla. “I apologize for discussing my personal affairs in this way. Mr. Malone took me quite by surprise.” And he made a majestic little bow, clad only in bathing trunks, and stalked away towards the house.

“
Well!
” said the actor from Hollywood, a second too soon. “What was that all about?”

“I never even knew he had a mother,” said Camilla, dazed.

“Most people do,” said the Hollywood man wittily. No one laughed.

“To think I’ve picked up Rosalind’s son,” said Camilla. “What will Phoebe say?”

“Where did you get him?” Johnny asked.

“Kim brought him. I suppose they met in Paris originally.
Everybody does. I rather liked him, for a German, he’s not got a straight back to his head.”

“Darling, he’s much too young for you,” objected the Hollywood man, who was more mature.

“Well, there’s no need to turn him out of doors because of Rosalind,” said Johnny. “She wouldn’t mind your fraternizing, I suppose. His father is still alive, obviously.”

“Oh, yes, Victor often speaks of him. You mean Rosalind and Charles Laverham can’t get married until he dies.”

“Or gives her a divorce.”

“Which he won’t do.”

“Naturally not,” said Johnny with a German
r
. “Though it would doubtless pain him to realize that everybody over there in England has forgotten that they weren’t married years ago.”

“It would never get by the Hayes office,” said the
Hollywood
man, and yawned luxuriously in the sun. “You seem upset, Camilla, what is this young Hun to you?”

“Oh, dry up, Bimbo, there’s a dear,” said Camilla
impatiently
. “I’m trying to figure things out.”

“It’s too hot,” said Bimbo comfortably. “Does this make Victor illegitimate, or what?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. The censors wouldn’t stand for that.”

Johnny was watching Camilla’s face. He had grown very fond of her face, with its high cheek-bones and long, sensitive mouth and arching brows, and the way all its moods came through her make-up and were visible to the naked eye. The women of this family have a fatal fascination for me, Johnny thought ruefully. More than anything in the world, I would like to see Camilla happy. But she isn’t. I don’t think she ever has been. I thought it was Raymond she wanted, that time at Salzburg, and it was Sosthène all the time. There’s no blinking the fact that Kim consoled her a little, but that’s over now. Who else? Who next? It’s the old Sally pattern, so
incomprehensible
in Williamsburg, U.S.A. What about this Victor, he isn’t good enough. If I were ten years younger….

“He’s a Monarchist, I think,” Camilla was saying slowly, to herself. “There are all sorts of wheels within wheels in this Nazi business. Do you think the Monarchists have a chance, Johnny?”

“Not one in a million now. He’d better drop that very quickly if he wants to live to a ripe old age.”

She looked at him protestingly.

“He’s not an agitator, Johnny.”

“Hitler’s gang will shoot first and ask about that afterwards.”

“But surely it’s better than the Communists! Look what Mussolini has done in Italy!”

“I know, I know, he’s made the trains run on time,” said Johnny wearily.

“Victor says a man like Hitler can’t last in Germany. He’s an outsider, to begin with.”

“Anybody who gits thar fustest with the mostest men can last—especially in Germany!”

“What does Hitler want, do you think?”

“The earth,” said Johnny.

“You are the
gloomiest
person!” Camilla objected with affection. “Are you and Bracken still prophesying another war?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

“When Germany is ready to start it. We aren’t doing
anything
to prevent her. And don’t tell me about the Kellogg Pact!” he added raising his voice.

“Johnny, don’t signed agreements mean
anything?
”