Love Beach by Leslie Thomas

Author:Leslie Thomas [Thomas, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 9780140144277
Publisher: Penguin Books Canada, Limited
Published: 1981-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Before dinner Conway spent two hours going through the sheafs of manuscripts and blocks of books that Mr and Mrs Flagg had accumulated during their native studies. Mrs Flagg closed the doors and lit the lamps in the big room. She gave him two schooners of Australian sherry, which she said she kept for special occasions and had two schooners herself. She padded about the place, arranging the table setting, and getting her Vietnamese chef and his assistant, a Wallis Islander, advancing with the dinner. lle St Mark's houseboys, constantly tucking their cocoons inside their army belts with the same habitual movement as a fat man keeps pulling up his slacks, moved about the house helping Mrs Flagg.

Sometimes she moved over to the alcove where Conway was studying the papers, leaning over him like a cow over a byre, letting her splendidly hanging right breast rest significantly on his shoulder. She had changed into a fresh dress, a Marks and Spencer's green and floral pattern which her sister had sent from Watford. As she leaned near him Conway could smell a peppery perfume which she had added to her neck. Some of the papers were of great use to him, detailing life on St Paul's, the traits of the natives, the history of the tribal leaders right up to Lazarus who had so disappointingly failed to recover from being dead. Each time he found some item of particular interest he called Mrs Flagg and she came over, moving cheerfully and quickly like a farmer's wife at a square dance, hung across him, and discussed the point.

They enjoyed an excellent dinner of fish soup, tinned duck from Australia, yams, rice, tinned tomatoes in juice, and mangoes, with two bottles of Queensland Reisling which Mrs Flagg brought out in preference to French wines from Noumea in deference to her visitor. They had a strong pot of Typhoo afterwards and following that drank a lot of Mr Flagg's superlative Denis‑Mounie cognac which Sir Wiiliam, the Governor, had received in error, and passed on to Mr Flagg as a spot prize at a masque ball held in Government House. Both Conway and Mrs Flagg had a lot of stories to tell and they laughed like a crowd, sitting on the billowing cushions of the damask couch. The chef and his assistant went home to get some reasonable food, and the little men from St Mark's, after busying themselves around the table and wiping up the crumbs and other pieces from the floor, went off into the deep night to talk for a while with their skulls.

Conway and his hostess laughed so much when they realized that they had finished half a bottle of DenisMounie, that they somehow tumbled together on the couch, and decided immediately to make a start on the second half. They were both demonstrative laughers. They threw themselves about a lot. Even if a laugh began as a snigger, with the person sitting upright and proper, it was not long before a second snigger ignited the whole thing and they were rolling over each other on the stormy sofa.

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