Island for Sale by Vivian Stuart

Author:Vivian Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jentas Ehf
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Steve Walewski yawned, looked at his watch and turned over lazily in the big four-poster bed. It was not quite ten o’clock but dancing had gone on until the small hours of the morning and breakfast, he had been told, would not be served before ten.

He put out a slim brown hand, felt for the packet of cigarettes on his bedside table and lay back, when he had lit his cigarette, to review the present situation.

He had been delighted when Cornelia’s invitation had reached him, in Paris. The exhibition matches he had played there, coming right on top of the French Championships, had been a strain. He was tired, strung up, unaccountably nervy—a few weeks in this luxurious castle would, he reflected, suit him admirably. Steve liked luxury, was becoming accustomed to it now. So much so that, at times, he wondered how he had ever done without it. And yet he had . . .

His childhood had been spent in a Brooklyn slum, one of a large family of New Americans. His father, a hard working Polish refugee, had been a tailor by trade: his mother a pretty, soft voiced Lithuanian, whom Steve had loved deeply but hadn’t seen for—what was it? Almost ten years. Though he still sent her money, when he remembered. He even missed her sometimes.

But—drawing on his cigarette, he frowned. One had to leave one’s family behind, when one was clawing one’s way to the top. It was the only thing to do, if they weren’t able to provide a suitable background. And his family certainly hadn’t been able to do that, Steve thought wryly, so he’d had to invent a non-existent family to take their place, to give him the social standing he needed. His name was his by adoption: he spoke, emotionally, of the Count, his father, and of the Walewski estates on the Czech border, hinting at the tragedy—in which he now almost believed himself—which had wrested these from his possession.

It illuminated him, he found, with a romantic aura that was extremely useful.

The war had given Steve his chance. By dint of lying about his age, he had enlisted in the Air Corps at seventeen, gained his wings and a commission and, following this with a display of reckless courage during the D-Day landings, he had won more decorations than any other officer in his squadron.

A Captain before he was nineteen, he had remained in the army for three years, after the war ended, flying and playing tennis. Only when he realized, as a result of winning the Pacific South West title from unseeded obscurity, that tennis offered him a better opportunity for advancement than flying—only then had he abandoned his army career. It had been a big decision, for the army had given him background and security, a settled future.

And there were moments when he regretted having made it.

He had come very near the top of his chosen tree but somehow he had never quite reached it. Twice a Wimbledon

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