Because it was almost September, the wind, temperate though it was, started drifting in from the Adriatic each evening towards six o’clock. The first tendrils of its soft embrace sent Franco, steel-muscled in his white shorts, to his sunset task of lowering and securing the umbrellas of those who had left the beach, shaking and stacking mattresses and retrieving forsaken pages of Die Welt, Corriere della Sera, and the New York Times.
San Rimano, exceedingly chic without being exclusively so, catered to every nationality. The Excelsior Hotel, for whose wide white beach, cabins, and comfort Franco and his wife, Rosetta, were personally responsible, was of the very highest order.
Already, most of the Italians had taken their high spirits and their ball games and departed in their Alfas and Lamborghinis for Genoa, Florence and Rome. A clutch of middle-aged, panama-hatted Americans waded knee-deep into the water daily, discussed ‘back home’, and waited for their coronary thromboses to overtake them. The Dutch and the Germans were still at large, and a few English littered their cabanas with a variety of ill-assorted gear more suited to a safari than to the daily fifty-yard traverse from hotel to shore. The French, with their infinitesimal bikinis and bottles of suntan oil, travelled lightest of all. Only one, at this evaporating end of the season, remained at the Excelsior.
She was very tall, very slim and very beautiful, no longer in the first flush of youth. Leaning a little backwards, as if once she had been a model, she had sauntered down to the beach at the beginning of the previous week, dressed in tan linen slacks and clinging black silk shirt; around her head she wore a canary-yellow scarf. She had smiled at Rosetta but had not asked for a cabana. She had merely arranged with Franco for a mattress, and to this she made her way at exactly the same hour each morning, dressed in precisely the same clothes. Her hair was touched with grey. Prematurely, Rosetta conjectured. Her figure was that of a woman no more than thirty.
Each morning, she followed the same routine. Having greeted Rosetta and Franco, she ignored everyone else, stepped out of the slim pants, which she folded with expertise, whipped the black top over her head, and hung them both neatly over the spokes of the umbrella. This procedure left her in an apology for a yellow bikini, which matched exactly the scarf about her head and which drew, not in the least surreptitiously, some dozen pairs of eyes. Her last chore was the removal of the scarf itself, which was tossed into the wicker basket beside her mattress.
Running pink-painted fingernails through the greying hair, she would walk unhurriedly and elegantly into the sparkling sea and, when she could no longer stand, swim in a leisurely, effortless crawl until she seemed almost to disappear. As languidly as she had gone, she would return, materialising from the water unconcerned about the two sagging strips of her bikini and seemingly unperturbed by the rows of eyes now firmly fixed upon her. Back at her mattress, she would stand, legs slightly apart, comb the hair back from her face, retie the yellow scarf, rub oil into every particle of flesh uncovered by the two strips of canary cotton, apply a dash of scarlet lipstick to her wide, beautiful mouth, and when all was ready, spread a black towel on her mattress and lie down to sleep. By the time she awoke, the sun was usually high in the sky. The colour of her skin had metamorphosed over the days from honey blond to golden cognac.
It was Jasper who christened her the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, but Stephanie who fell in love. Theirs was the umbrella next to hers. Neither of them wearied of watching her turn from time to time from back to front, like some tender roll baking in the oven, without so much as opening her eyes. Occasionally, in her sleep she smiled with the wide scarlet mouth.
On the day of the disturbance, for which Stephanie blamed Jasper and Jasper blamed Stephanie, it was suffocatingly hot. By ten in the morning, the rays of the sun were pitiless.
The trouble began over the comic paper that had arrived that day from England. It belonged, by rights, to Stephanie, whom, at twelve, it intrigued immeasurably; it had been appropriated by Jasper, who, at fourteen, was not above enjoying it when none of his friends was in sight. Stephanie was bored; she was also hot. Tiny drops of perspiration beaded her upper lip. She did not feel very well in the region of her stomach; also, she wanted to read her comic. She reached across to where Jasper lay idly happy on his mattress and grabbed at the paper.
Jasper tightened his hold.
‘Give it to me.’ Stephanie was whispering, anxious not to waken the Sleeping Beauty.
‘I’m not finished.’
‘It’s mine!’
‘You can have it in a minute.’
‘I want it now!’
‘Shut up.’
Stephanie made another grab. There were tears in her eyes.
‘Give it to me.’
Jasper folded one knee over the other indolently and continued reading.
The temperature, the tedium, and the unpleasant sensation in her stomach were too much for Stephanie. With one hand she pulled Jasper’s nose good and hard and with the other she snatched the comic.
Jasper howled with pain and rage; he also aimed a kick at his sister, which landed, unfortunately, in the already tender region of her navel. Stephanie lay face down on her mattress and howled.
Jasper saw that he had gone too far.
‘Look, I didn’t mean to kick you.’
The howling did not diminish.
‘I said I didn’t mean to kick you.’ Jasper looked around, embarrassed at the rumpus his sister was creating on the torpid beach.
‘You’ve woken the Sleeping Beauty,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t you belt up a bit? I’ve said I’m sorry.’
It was like talking to the shimmering air.
The Sleeping Beauty was now awake. She was also sitting up. She looked at Jasper and at Stephanie, still on her stomach, sobbing as if her heart would break.
‘Where is your mother?’ the Sleeping Beauty said.
‘We have lost her,’ Jasper said.
‘Mon dieu!’ The Sleeping Beauty leaped to her feet. ‘Franco! Franco!’
‘I mean,’ Jasper said, ‘she is dead.’
The Sleeping Beauty sat down again on the edge of her mattress and faced Jasper. ‘Who is looking after you, then?’
‘Our father.’
She looked vaguely about her. ‘And where is your father?’
‘In Basle.’
The Sleeping Beauty sighed.
‘He will be here at the end of the week,’ Jasper said helpfully.
‘But it is only Monday!’
‘We are quite capable of looking after ourselves for a few days,’ Jasper said with dignity. He followed the glance of the Sleeping Beauty towards the shaking form of his sister, who still whimpered into the mattress.
The Sleeping Beauty turned her over gently. ‘Something hurts you?’ she said.
‘She’s just mad because I swiped her comic paper,’ Jasper said. ‘I said I was sorry.’
Stephanie gave him a scathing look and wiped her tears on her beach towel. ‘I have a stomach ache,’ she said to the Sleeping Beauty, who was now sitting beside her.
‘You eat last night the zucchini?’ the Sleeping Beauty asked. ‘I have something for you in my room.’
They left Jasper on the beach, with sole access to the comic, which he no longer wanted to read. He had promised his father to look after Stephanie. He had failed.
When the Sleeping Beauty returned, she was alone. ‘Your sister is sleeping in my suite,’ she said to Jasper. ‘Too much sun and zucchini. When she wakes up, she will feel better.’
Jasper, looking glumly out to sea, did not answer.
‘You also have the stomach ache?’ the Sleeping Beauty said.
‘No.’
‘What have you?’
‘Nothing. I shouldn’t have teased her. I promised to look after her.’
The Sleeping Beauty told him that it was not his fault at all, but a combination of the heat and the strange food that was responsible for upsetting his sister. ‘Tell me about your mother,’ she said, wishing to distract him.
‘I told you. She is dead. She was very beautiful and always laughing.’ He looked sideways, making a mental comparison, which did not escape unnoticed. ‘Then she became very ugly and did not laugh at all.’
‘It must have been sad for you.’
Jasper shrugged. ‘I was at school.’ It was Mrs Giddins, their housekeeper, who now packed his suitcase; sometimes half the things were missing or unmarked. ‘It’s different for Steph.’
The eyebrows went up questioningly.
‘She’s a girl.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’s the worst of the lot. He sometimes goes to the city in a blue suit with a brown tie; he’s colourblind, you see.’
‘I see.’
All that day, Stephanie slept. The next, she remained in the Sleeping Beauty’s suite, fed on bread sticks and frequent small drinks of Fiuggi water. By Wednesday, she was quite cured and appeared her normal self, although a trifle pale, on the beach.
During the time that his sister had been indisposed, Jasper had struck up a friendship with the Sleeping Beauty. She was not prepared to lose very much sleep in pursuit of their intimacy, but in her waking moments they discovered a mutual interest in cars, of which she had two, a Buick Riviera and a Ferrari Spyder, and an appreciation of Mario Mariotti, who was to sing in the hotel that weekend. She did not talk much about herself, except to say that her business was with clothes and that each summer she took two weeks off to lie in the sun like a sand lizard and do absolutely nothing.
‘Then I am sorry Stephanie has disturbed you,’ Jasper said, when she revealed this indulgence.
‘It is nothing. I adore children. And I have none of my own.’
It was at that moment that Jasper conceived his plan. He hugged it to himself all day and didn’t reveal it to Stephanie until that evening after they left the beach.
While the Sleeping Beauty slept on, they packed their belongings and exchanged a few friendly remarks with Franco, who always smiled with Rosetta over the bearing and poise of the fourteen-year-old Englishman.
‘I think a little drink before we change,’ Jasper said as they reached the hotel. ‘Don’t you agree, Steph?’
‘I’m gasping.’ She sat down in the shade on one of the white wrought-iron chairs on the wide terrace, where the band played beneath the stars nightly.
Dominic, white-coated, tray in hand, bowed low before them.
‘Good evening, Dominic,’ Jasper said. ‘I’ll have a Negroni.’
Dominic winked. ‘Certainly, sir. And for the young lady?’
‘I’ll stick to Fiuggi,’ Stephanie said.
‘Steph,’ Jasper said, when Dominic had come and gone with his alcohol-less Negroni and Stephanie’s mineral water, ‘I have an idea.’
‘I’ve already had it.’
‘You can’t have.’
‘You aren’t the only one allowed to have ideas.’
‘But I’ve only just had this one.’
‘Well, I had it yesterday.’
‘Perhaps it isn’t the same.’
‘It’s the same.’
‘How do you know?’
Stephanie looked at him. ‘Is it about the Sleeping Beauty?’
Jasper looked at her in amazement.
Stephanie said, ‘I think she’s absolutely divine. But that’s not to say that Father will.’
‘Father and I,’ Jasper said, ‘have similar tastes in women.’ With that, he called for another Negroni.
On Thursday and Friday, they scarcely took their eyes off her; it was as if, like the fairy godmother, they were afraid she would disappear. She remained very much in evidence, however, her golden-cognac tan deepening nicely into tawny port.
When their father arrived from Basle on Friday night, they had decided to play it cool. They told him of Stephanie’s malaise and how a kind Frenchwoman on the beach had looked after her with such solicitude. They phrased it in such a way that he imagined her, as they had intended him to, as a motherly figure with flabby arms and a moustache, surrounded by a brood of children. They were glad the Sleeping Beauty did not appear in the dining room that night and their father’s first sight of her was on the beach.
They were established with their extra mattress well before the customary time of the Sleeping Beauty’s arrival.
‘I hope we have no one noisy next to us,’ their father said, unfolding the Financial Times. ‘I’m looking forward to a little peace and quiet.’
‘No, only the woman who looked after Stephanie,’ Jasper said and, before his father could say a word, asked, ‘What is the price of gold?’
When she arrived and stood beside them, hanging up her neatly folded clothes, Jasper whispered to his father, behind the newspaper, ‘I think we had better introduce you. After all, she was terribly good to Steph.’
His father growled. ‘If you insist. One has, I suppose, to be polite.’ He lowered his newspaper, and the pink pages fluttered unheeded to the soft white sand.
Jasper closed one eye at Stephanie.
They watched them, the ebony reed in the two strips of yellow cotton and the upright figure of their not undistinguished-looking father, walk down the beach and out into the gentle sea.
When they returned, the Sleeping Beauty was invited to join them for lunch, but did not accept, preferring to sleep; it was as if she hoped to digest the sun.
Their father’s mind was on neither the prosciutto nor the lasagne on which they lunched. Usually he took a nap in his room. Today, for some unfathomable reason, he opted for the beach.
‘You will burn,’ Jasper warned.
‘I shall ask Franco to shift the umbrella.’
Saturday night at the Excelsior was gala night. In addition to the residents of the hotel, the elite of the surrounding district put on their finery and dined there or came later to dance and enjoy the cabaret on the fairyland of a terrace.
At first, Jasper and Stephanie were afraid she would not appear.
‘You two are exceptionally quiet,’ their father said, suffering just a little from prolonged exposure to the sun. ‘Is something troubling you?’
Not in the least,’ Jasper said.
‘We feel remarkably fit,’ Stephanie added.
‘I was not enquiring after your health,’ their father said. ‘Something is up. I feel it in my bones.’
They were seated at a table on the terrace, not too far from the band, when she appeared. Exquisite women at the Excelsior, in particular on gala nights, were like so many grains of sand. The Sleeping Beauty was the jewel of them all. She was dressed in pale-blue satin, the sleeveless top cut plain like a shirt and edged with amber, the floor-length skirt divided into wide pyjamas; her waist was very, very small. Followed by all eyes, she came to join them. She was the most splendid sight Jasper and Stephanie had seen.
‘Our favourite singer,’ she said to Jasper, as Mario Mariotti took the mike.
‘Shall we dance?’ their father said.
She was very tall indeed, but their father was taller. They moved over the smooth marble floor as if they had been dancing together all their lives. Now and again she leaned back her head and laughed. They seemed to be very happy.
At midnight, Stephanie and Jasper were sent to bed. Their father took the Sleeping Beauty to the discothèque, where it was very dark, very crowded and exceedingly noisy.
Although they had said goodnight, Jasper and Stephanie stayed talking to Dominic for a while alone in his deserted bar, then decided they had better go up.
‘Let’s just go and have a peep,’ Stephanie said.
‘What for?’
‘You know perfectly well,’ Stephanie said, ‘I want to see how things are going.’
The music assaulted their eardrums; their eyes were scarcely able to pierce the gloom. It was some moments before, on the packed floor, they were able to distinguish their father and the Sleeping Beauty.
They needed no more than a peep. Head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, they were rocking to and fro in each other’s arms, close together from head to foot, their eyes tightly shut.
Well satisfied, Stephanie and Jasper went upstairs.
Considerately, they did not wake their father on Sunday morning. Imagining him to have danced away the night, they scarcely expected him on the beach before lunch. They were a little surprised, however, that the Sleeping Beauty’s mattress remained empty, too. They had somehow expected her to be made of sterner stuff.
Weary themselves, they dozed off in the sun, which seemed for the first time to be losing some of its intensity. When they awoke, their father, surrounded by Sunday newspapers, was lying beside them.
‘Good morning, chickens,’ he said. ‘I thought we might go water-skiing. The sea looks as smooth as a millpond.’
Jasper looked at Stephanie, both looked at the still-empty mattress beside them. Their father followed their gaze. They looked up and down the beach, sure that somewhere they would see the scarlet mouth, the yellow scarf.
‘Gone home,’ their father said. ‘Her husband is meeting her in Milan.’ He hid himself behind the business section.
For a long moment, his children were speechless. Then Jasper whispered indignantly, ‘She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’
‘Wanted to get her fingers brown,’ Stephanie whispered back, with a sudden flash of that feminine intuition which is the higher form of logic.
‘Oh, well,’ Jasper said, with a certain philosophical melancholy. ‘It isn’t long until Christmas. Perhaps we shall do better at Gstaad.’