A Wreath for the Enemy , livre ebook

Rare Treasure Editions - Pamela Frankau

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

129 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

When Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, meets the well-behaved middle-class Bradley children, it is love at first sight. But their parents are horrified by the Wells' establishment - a distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera - and the friendship ends in tears. Out of these childhood betrayals grow Penelope, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm, and Don Bradley, in rebellion against the phillistine values of his parents. Compellingly told in a series of first-person narratives, their stories involve them with the Duchess; the crippled genius Crusoe; Crusoe's brother Livesey, and the eccentric Cara, whose brittle and chaotic life collides explosively with Penelope's.

Sujets

Coming of Age

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	Rare Treasure Editions
Date de parution	11 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781774644720
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Wreath for the Enemy
by Pamela Frankau

First published in 1954
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
Trava2909@gmail.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

A Wreath For The Enemy

by PAMELA FRANKAU

To

JOHN VAN DRUTEN

In loving gratitude for all the years
and all the moods of our friendship.

I THE DUCHESS AND THE SMUGS Told by Penelope Wells
I sat still at the table, with the blank paper before me. I wentback; I remembered; I thought my way in. It was the sensationof pulling on a diver’s helmet and going down deep.
Presently, on the sea-floor, I began to find lost things; toraise the moods that were mine when I was fourteen years old,sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology of Hates.
I would begin there.

I
There had been two crises already that day before the cook’shusband called to assassinate the cook. The stove caught firein my presence; the postman had fallen off his bicycle at thegate and been bitten by Charlemagne, our sheep-dog, whosepolicy it was to attack people only when they were down.
Whenever there were two crises my stepmother Jeanne said,“ Jamais deux sans trois .” This morning she and Francis (myfather) had debated whether the two things happening to thepostman could be counted as two separate crises and mighttherefore be said to have cleared matters up. I thought thatthey were wasting their time. In our household things went onand on and on happening. It was an hotel, which made thedoom worse: it would have been remarkable to have two dayswithout a crisis and even if we did, I doubted whether the rulewould apply in reverse, so that we could augur a third. I wasvery fond of the word augur.
I was not very fond of the cook. But when I was sitting onthe terrace in the shade working on my Anthology of Hates,and a man with a bristled chin told me in patois that he hadcome to kill her, I thought it just as well for her, thoughobviously disappointing for her husband, that she was off forthe afternoon. He carried a knife that did not look particularlysharp; he smelt of liquorice, which meant that he had beendrinking Pernod. He stamped up and down, making speechesabout his wife and Laurent the waiter, whom he called a salaudand many other words new to me and quite difficult to understand.
I said at last, “Look, you can’t do it now, because she hasgone over to St. Raphael in the bus. But if you wait I willfetch my father.” I took the Anthology with me in case hestarted cutting it up.
I went down the red rock steps that sloped from the gardento the pool. The garden looked the way it always looked,almost as brightly coloured as the postcards of it that you couldbuy at the desk. There was purple bougainvillæa splashingdown the white walls of the hotel; there were hydrangeas ofthe exact shade of pink blotting-paper; there were huge silver-greycacti and green umbrella pines against a sky that wasdarker blue than the sky in England.
I could not love this garden. Always it seemed to meartificial, spiky with colour, not quite true. My idea of a gardenwas a green lawn and a little apple orchard behind a grey stonehouse in the Cotswolds. It was my Aunt Anne’s house in thevillage of Whiteford. I saw that garden only once a year, inSeptember. I could conjure it by repeating inside my head—

‘And autumn leaves of blood and gold
That strew a Gloucester lane.’
Then the homesickness for the place that was not my homewould make a sharp pain under my ribs. I was ashamed tofeel so; I could not talk about it; not even to Francis, withwhom I could talk about most things.
I came to the top of the steps and saw them lying around thepool, Francis and Jeanne and the two novelists who had comefrom Antibes for lunch. They were all flat on the yellowmattresses, talking.
I said, “Excuse me for interrupting you, but the cook’shusband has come to assassinate the cook.”
Francis got up quickly. He looked like Mephistopheles.There were grey streaks in his black hair; all the lines of hisface went upward and the pointed moustache followed thelines. His body was dark-brown and hairy, except that thescars on his back and legs, where he was burned when theaeroplane was shot down, did not tan with the sun.
“It’s a hot afternoon for an assassination,” said the malenovelist as they ran up the steps together.
“Perhaps,” said Francis, “he can be persuaded to wait untilthe evening.”
“He will have to,” I said, “because the cook is in St. Raphael.I told him so.”
“Penelope,” said my stepmother, sitting up on the yellowmattress, “you had better stay with us.”
“But I am working on my book.”
“All right, chérie ; work on it here.”
The lady novelist, who had a sparkling, triangular face likea cat, said, “I wish you would read some of it to us. It will takeour minds off the current bloodcurdling events.”
I begged her to excuse me, adding that I did not anticipateany bloodcurdling events because of the battered look of theknife.
Jeanne said that the cook would have to go in any case, butthat her love for Laurent was of a purely spiritual character.
I said, “Laurent is a smoothy, and I do not see how anybodycould be in love with him.”
“A certain smoothness is not out of place in a head waiter,”said the lady novelist.
I did not tell her my real reason for disliking Laurent: hemade jokes. I hated jokes more than anything. They camefirst in the Anthology: they occupied whole pages: I had dozensand dozens: it was a loose-leaf book, so that new variations ofhates already listed could be inserted at will.
Retiring from the conversation, I went to sit on the flatrock at the far end of the pool. Francis and the male novelistreturned very soon. Francis came over to me. I shut the loose-leafbook.
“The cook’s husband,” he said, “has decided against it.”
“I thought he would. I imagine that if you are really goingto murder somebody you do not impart the intention to others.”
“Don’t you want to swim?” said Francis.
“No, thank you. I’m working.”
“You couldn’t be sociable for half an hour?”
“I would rather not.”
“I’ll write you down for R.C.I.,” he threatened.
R.C.I. was Repulsive Children Incorporated, an imaginaryfoundation which Francis had invented a year before. It cameabout because a family consisting mainly of unusually spoiledchildren stayed at the hotel for two days, and were asked byFrancis to leave on the third, although the rooms were bookedfor a month. According to Francis, R.C.I. did a tremendousbusiness and there were qualifying examinations wherein thechildren were tested for noise, bad manners, whining, andbrutal conduct. I tried to pretend that I thought this funny.
“Will you please let me work for a quarter of an hour?” Iasked him. “After all, I was disturbed by the assassin.”
“All right. Fifteen minutes,” he said. “After which youqualify.”
In fact, I was not telling him the truth. I had a rendezvousat this hour every day. At four o’clock precisely I was sure ofseeing the people from the next villa. I had watched them forten days and I knew how Dante felt when he waited forBeatrice to pass him on the Ponte Vecchio. Could one, Iasked myself, be in love with four people at once? The answerseemed to be Yes. These people had become a secret passion.
The villa was called La Lézardière; a large, stately pinkshape with green shutters; there was a gravel terrace, plantedwith orange trees and descending in tiers to a pool that didnot sprawl in a circle of red rocks as ours did, but was of smoothgrey concrete. At the tip of this pool there was a real diving-board.A long, gleaming speedboat lay at anchor in the deepwater. The stage was set and I waited for the actors.
They had the quality of Vikings; the father and mother weretall, handsome, white-skinned and fair-haired. The boy andgirl followed the pattern. They looked as I should have preferredto look. (I was as dark as Francis, and, according tothe never-ceasing stream of personal remarks that seemed tobe my lot at this time, I was much too thin. And not pretty.If my eyes were not so large I knew that I should be quite ugly.In Francis’ opinion, my face had character. “But this, as MissEdith Cavell said of patriotism,” I told him, “is not enough.”)
Oh, to look like the Bradleys; to be the Bradleys, I thought,waiting for the Bradleys. They were far, august, and enchanted;they wore the halo of being essentially English. They wereDad and Mum and Don and Eva. I spied on them like ahuntress, strained my ears for their words, cherished their time-table.It was regular as the clock. They swam before breakfastand again at ten, staying beside the pool all the morning.At a quarter to one the bell would ring from the villa for theirlunch. Oh, the beautiful punctuality of those meals! Sometimeswe did not eat luncheon until three and although Jeannetold me to go and help myself from the kitchen, this was notthe same thing a