Frontier Passage by Ann Bridge

Author:Ann Bridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1944-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

This Side—St.-Jean-de-Luz

During Milcom’s absence the Condesa and Rosemary had seen a great deal of one another. Adolescent girls in love are rarely jealous, and the instinctive sympathy and liking which had grown up between them was if anything nourished by the fact of their both loving the same man. It may be doubted whether Raquel de Verdura in fact realised that Rosemary was in love with Milcom, though she was certainly sensitive enough to have taken such a feeling seriously if she had realised it. But they liked being together, they liked talking about him—and did, a great deal; and Rosemary had a boundless appetite for hearing about the Condesa’s own life: her girlhood in Spain, her parents, her married life, Pilar’s childhood, her experiences in Madrid, and above all and woven through it all, Juanito, Juantio, Juanito. The girl prompted these confidences, partly out of a perfectly spontaneous interest in other people’s lives, which made her an ideally sympathetic listener, partly out of a self-protective instinct, half unconscious, to build a sort of ring-fence of other interests with which to defend herself against too many thoughts of Milcom.

This self-protectiveness led her in other directions beside the Condesa—made her in fact snatch at any occupation which would rescue her, if only for a time, from her own pain; and one of the things at which she so snatched was the Count de Barrial and his boats.

The Count de Barrial was one of those French residents at St.-Jean-de-Luz whose social circle overlapped with that of the permanent British colony, into which Mrs. Oldhead had penetrated; she met him and his pretty intelligent literary wife at a number of those little lunches, little cocktail parties—and she introduced him to Rosemary one day at the cinema. Talking afterwards, her Mother—with a slight envy of the child’s extraordinary ease and skill in personal contacts—heard Rosemary eliciting from him the fact that he was a passionate amateur yachtsman; that he had a thirty-ton cutter with an auxiliary engine in which he sailed to England, to Portugal, and to Morocco, as well as a speed-boat and a tiny sailing-boat. And the next thing was that Rosemary and the Count—for all that the official sailing season was over—were scooting about the bay in the speed-boat, and sailing down to Hendaye in the small sailing-boat. The de Barrials had a pretty old villa with thick walls and vaulted ceilings out at Socoa, quite near the yacht-club, and after an afternoon’s sailing the girl often went in for a meal, before being driven back to the Grande Bretagne in the Count’s Chevrolet. Those days at sea were the best alleviation for a sick heart that could have been devised; and between the Count’s boats and the Condesa’s past life, Rosemary did herself pretty well in the way of a ring-fence against grief.

It was of course natural that she should have been almost the first person to whom the Condesa showed Milcom’s telegram.

“See—he says ‘Good news of both’; that must mean that he has news of Juanito too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.