Tour de Force by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page A

been erected; the upper terrace ended in a short curve of steps leading through a tunnel of flowering jasmine down to the huts. In the angles where the rock nose joined the face of the mainland, rough, steep little paths had been worn, tippling down to the beaches below.
    The beach was deserted but there were sounds of movement in the rooms strung out along the balcony and at the window of number four, Louli Barker stood with her bright head in a Tiggy-winkle of curling-pins, drying her hair in the sun. She bobbed back when she saw him and simultaneously Leo Rodd and his wife appeared and, nodding to him, went off down the balcony steps to the terraces, turned to their left and disappeared beneath the bright flowers and twisted grey boughs of the bougainvillea that roofed it in. Deprived of her elegant clothes, she looked unattractively thin: her narrow shanks met the close-fitting legs of her bathing dress like the wooden limbs of an old-fashioned Dutch doll, joining its painted body. Leo Rodd carried a pair of rubber frog-feet and a mask with a small, bent, corked tube for underwater swimming; and over his shoulder was thrown, as though carelessly, a towel which covered the stump of his severed arm. Cockie had observed during their bathe that morning on the beach, the unobtrusive protectiveness with which his wife had gone to the water’s edge with him and taken the towel at the moment that he plunged into the sea and let the blue waters close over his disfigurement – meeting him with it again, chucking it casually to him, just as he emerged. He wondered briefly if Leo’s new love would be so constantly, so loyally, so ever delicately, at his irritable beck and call: and concluded, without much caring either way, that Louli would be more likely to bestow upon him one of her gay, sweet, careless smiles and say that honestly, ducky, nobody would care two hoots about his arm not being there, so not to fuss …
    She emerged at this moment, red head gleaming, restored to its shoulder-length mass of curls, red poppies flaring on a diminutive white satin Bikini bathing suit. She looked at him, he thought, a trifle furtively, standing fiddling with the strap of her brassière. ‘Hallo, Inspector. Have – have the chaps gone on?’
    â€˜Gone on?’ said Cockie.
    â€˜To watch La Lane diving.’
    â€˜Oh, I’d forgotten,’ said Cockie. At luncheon Vanda Lane, one eye on Leo Rodd, had promised to give an exhibition of her skill. Louli had turned pea green at the bare thought of anyone running out along the high razor-back of the rock and actually looking down – let alone leaping off into the sea; and he was a little surprised that she should contemplate watching the demonstration. He said, however, that yes, Leo Rodd had just gone along, adding, somewhat to his dismay in a faintly warning tone: ‘ And Mrs Rodd.’
    It checked her. She had started to move off without another word but now she stopped abruptly and her hand jerked on the narrow strap. ‘Oh, blast! – now I’ve split the thing.’ She stood looking down uncertainly, chin humped on breast, and finally moved on down the steps, one hand holding the split white satin together, the other swinging a gay red plastic beach bag. He saw the flicker of the red and white Bikini passing under the grey bougainvillea boughs. At the far end of the lower terrace, the Rodds emerged from the jasmine-tunnelled steps leading down to where the rock jutted out from the sea.
    Miss Trapp and Mr Fernando appeared, popping out of their doors like a couple of cuckoos from synchronized cuckoo clocks. They presented a curious contrast, he stripped except for a pair of bright orange satin shorts on his narrow hips, enormously broad of shoulder, once-splendid muscle rippling under the sun-burned skin; she with a round rubber bath cap pulled down to her eyebrows, her stockinette bathing-dress almost down to her knees, tripping along,