Olura Read Free

air of authority and I suspected that he might be a General. In the absence of any experience entitling me to recognise French Generals, it is
probable that I was merely going by the respect which Commandant Vigny paid to him.
    When I came downstairs after changing damp shirt and sweater, I found Vigny in the bar, endeavouring to be polite to the weather while leaving no doubt that he thought it a deliberate insult to
the French. He had the same attitude to the lunch hour. He complained that eating at 2.30 made him drink too much too early. Evidently he had only recently arrived in Spain. Des Aunes, on the other
hand, had no more objection than I to lunching even at three, which suggested that he had been longer in the country. It was a fair speculation that he might have belonged to the O.A.S and found it
healthier to live in exile.
    I joined Vigny at the window, placing my
fino
on the sill alongside his Cinzano.
    ‘I see that you are very English after all,’ he said. ‘You can amuse yourself in the rain.’
    ‘In our cloistered existence,’ I replied, ‘we keep our first youth longer than the military.’
    ‘Take it from me, Professor—you won’t have any luck.’
    It was never any good explaining to him that I was not a professor, merely a Fellow of my College. And I dislike the everyday use of the doctorate, especially when on holiday among the English.
One tends to be cornered at the bar by comparative strangers and asked secretively if any reliable remedy is known for piles.
    ‘I haven’t given a thought to the possibilities,’ I said, not quite truly. ‘But why shouldn’t they be there?’
    ‘Her tastes are notorious.’
    I was surprised that he knew anything about her. He had never made any remark when he saw her passing through the lounge.
    ‘You don’t read your papers then?’ he asked.
    ‘Recently, no.’
    ‘You should have seen her photograph often enough in the last three years.’
    ‘I have an incurable habit of reading. It leaves me little time to look at the pictures. Who is she?’
    ‘Olura Manoli,’ he said.
    ‘Olura. Let me see. Yes. She sits in the street, and her father is a wealthy Bolivian. Or is she the movie star who is so remarkably casual about having babies?’
    ‘She does sit in the streets. Her father was Sir Theodore Manoli. And she has no babies.’
    ‘My dear Commandant, that’s not my fault,’ I said, observing that my ignorance of Miss Manoli had thoroughly annoyed him. ‘And I have at least heard of her
father.’
    ‘She is a lot more important than that old plutocrat.’
    It was my turn to be annoyed, for I remembered that Sir Theodore was a rich Greek shipowner who had taken British nationality some time in the nineteen-thirties and had splendidly deserved his
knighthood which no doubt meant far more to him than the rest of us. He had worked himself into the grave for his adopted country and had—or so his biographer maintained—direct access
to Churchill on any question of merchant shipping during the war.
    ‘At her age importance can only depend on the effrontery of one’s public relations officer,’ I replied.
    Vigny gave a short military laugh and looked as if he would like to spit.
    ‘I endure you,’ he said, ‘only because your smile reminds me of the more unpleasant portraits of Voltaire.’
    ‘Another Cinzano?’ I suggested.
    ‘Thank you. No.’
    ‘Well, what’s she famous for?’
    ‘She has a marked sympathy for Africans.’
    ‘Political or personal?’
    ‘Woman is never wholly a political animal.’
    A typically closed and Gallic remark! I shouldn’t have invited it.
    ‘Africans should be encouraged to see the pleasantest possible aspects of our civilisation,’ I said, ‘if, as it appears, they insist on adopting it. Personally I hope they will
invent something of a more genial simplicity.’
    ‘Such as new forms of famine and disease, for example? But there appears, thank God, to be some lunch,’ he said and left