Free The Rendezvous by Evelyn Anthony Page B

and very distinguished. I’m sure they wouldn’t hang a Gainsborough in the lavatory. See if you need more ice in this.’
    â€˜I think there’s enough ice around already,’ Julia remarked to Amstat. She had taken a place beside him as soon as he sat down, and she let one hand rest on his shoulder, casually, with the long painted fingernails showing up like drops of blood against his dark suit. She was smiling, leaning back and looking up at him. ‘This is going to be a hell of an evening, my sweet,’ she said. ‘Our Vera just can’t help being an eighteen-carat bitch. Give me a cigarette, will you?’
    â€˜Mrs. Bradford said they were old friends,’ Amstat said.
    â€˜He is.’ Julia drew on his lighter and inhaled. The others were talking and the incident had passed over now, but the atmosphere was acrid. ‘She apparently hates Terese, God knows why, there’s nothing to hate about her.’
    â€˜No,’ Amstat said, ‘there isn’t. Except perhaps that she’s very beautiful. Maybe that’s what annoys the other woman.’
    â€˜It’ll annoy me too, if you say it like that,’ Julia said. ‘I think she likes you. Every time I look up she’s looking at you.’
    â€˜Darling,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t be ridiculous.’
    â€˜Oh I don’t mind,’ Julia said. ‘I enjoy other women giving you a nod. Just so long as you don’t give it back.’
    â€˜Come on, you two,’ Bob Bradford came over to them. ‘Stop acting like you were married and talk to the rest of us.’
    â€˜We’re not doing anything of the kind,’ Julia corrected him. ‘We’re just acting like very good friends, as that bastard Winchel calls it.’
    She said it for Terese’s benefit, in case she didn’t know that Karl and she were lovers. It was all very pleasant and sophisticated and it said ‘Hands off’. The next moment Amstat had moved away and was talking to Joe Kaplan. The hand Julia had left resting on his shoulder suddenly dropped as its support was taken away. He hated her making their relationship public and he would be angry and they might even have a row, but she had done it just the same. She didn’t like the way Terese Bradford took hold of him as soon as they came in. And she was looking at him, most of the time. Julia was not seriously afraid of losing him. She had enough experience of marriage and lovers behind her to compete with someone like this Frenchwoman, who apparently had never looked at anyone but her own husband. She had just made it awkward for her to monopolise Karl, that was all. The last fifteen minutes before dinner passed without incident. At the table, Amstat found himself on Terese’s right, and he was aware immediately that at last he was going to enjoy himself, that being left with that unpleasant wife of the Jew, or even with Julia, would have meant the party was a total failure. He could look at Terese and talk to her and it would seem quite natural. He admired the way she had reduced Mrs. Kaplan; it was so dignified, so un-American. It showed the same deliberate courage that he had seen in an exhausted girl twenty years earlier when she turned his cup of coffee upside down to show she wouldn’t take his bribe. He could think back on that with pride; he could sit beside her, smelling her expensive scent, making social talk to her and to Kaplan the Jew, on her left, and remember how she had spilt the coffee during that interrogation. The difficulty was to keep the memory from going on, from gathering momentum into the re-living of that early physical experience. That was foolish and dangerous; it could have been enjoyed if it hadn’t been so much a potential on his part. He hadn’t gone to bed with her then; he hadn’t done any more than hold her to him, but the desires were moving in him, waking and beginning to trouble, like