This room might have been a room in one of the cheaper hotels in Switzerland to which he had sometimes been with his parents.
It was clean, threadbare and sordid.
Not even Charley’s ardent imagination could invest it with mystery.
He unpacked his bag disconsolately.
He had a bath.
He thought it rather casual of Simon, even if he could not be bothered to meet him, not to have left a message.
If he made no sign of life he would have to dine by himself.
His father and mother and Patsy would have got down to Godalming by now; there was going to be a jolly party, Sir Wilfred’s two sons and their wives and two nieces of Lady Terry-Mason’s.
There would be music, games and dancing.
He half wished now that he hadn’t jumped at his father’s offer to spend the holiday in Paris.
It suddenly occurred to him that Simon had perhaps had to go off somewhere for his paper and in the hurry of an unexpected departure had forgotten to let him know.
His heart sank.
Simon Fenimore was Charley’s oldest friend and indeed it was to spend a few days with him that he had been so eager to come to Paris.
They had been at a private school together and together at Rugby; they had been at Cambridge together too, but Simon had left without taking a degree, at the end of his second year in fact, because he had come to the conclusion that he was wasting time; and it was Charley’s father who had got him on to the London newspaper for which for the last year he had been one of the Paris correspondents.
Simon was alone in the world.
His father was in the Indian Forest Department and while Simon was still a young child had divorced his mother for promiscuous adultery.
She had left India and Simon, by order of the court in his father’s custody, was sent to England and put into a clergyman’s family till he was old enough to go to school.
His mother vanished into obscurity.
He had no notion whether she was alive or dead.
His father died of cirrhosis of the liver when Simon was twelve and he had but a vague recollection of a thin, slightly-built man with a sallow, lined face and a tight-lipped mouth.
He left only just enough money to educate his son.
The Leslie Masons had been touched by the poor boy’s loneliness and had made a point of asking him to spend a good part of his holidays with them.
As a boy he was thin and weedy, with a pale face in which his black eyes looked enormous, a great quantity of straight dark hair which was always in need of a brush, and a large, sensual mouth.
He was talkative, forward for his age, a great reader, and clever.
He had none of the diffidence which was in Charley such an engaging trait.
Venetia Mason, though from a sense of duty she tried hard, could not like him.
She could not understand why Charley had taken a fancy to someone who was in every way so unlike him.
She thought Simon pert and conceited. He was insensible to kindness and took everything that was done for him as a matter of course.
She had a suspicion that he had no very high opinion either of her or of Leslie.
Sometimes when Leslie was talking with his usual good sense and intelligence about something interesting Simon would look at him with a glimmer of irony in those great black eyes of his and his sensual lips pursed in a sarcastic pucker.
You would have thought Leslie was being prosy and a trifle stupid.
Now and then when they were spending one of their pleasant quiet evenings together, chatting of one thing and another, he would go into a brown study; he would sit staring into vacancy, as though his thoughts were miles away, and perhaps, after a while, take up a book and start reading as though he were by himself.
It gave you the impression that their conversation wasn’t worth listening to.
It wasn’t even polite.
But Venetia Mason chid herself.
“Poor lamb, he’s never had a chance to learn manners.
I will be nice to him.
I will like him.”
Her eyes rested on Charley, so good-looking, with his slim body, (“it’s awful the way he grows out of his clothes, the sleeves of his dinner-jacket are too short for him already,”) his curling brown hair, his blue eyes, with long lashes, and his clear skin.
Though perhaps he hadn’t Simon’s showy brilliance, he was good, and he was artistic to his fingers’ ends.
But who could tell what he might have become if she had run away from Leslie and Leslie had taken to drink, and if instead of enjoying a cultured atmosphere and the influence of a nice home he had had, like Simon, to fend for himself?
Poor Simon!
Next day she went out and bought him half a dozen ties.
He seemed pleased.
“I say, that’s jolly decent of you.
I’ve never had more than two ties at one time in my life.”
Venetia was so moved by the spontaneous generosity of her pretty gesture that she was seized with a sudden wave of sympathy.
“You poor lonely boy,” she cried, “it’s so dreadful for you to have no parents.”
“Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I daresay I don’t miss much.”
He was seventeen when he said this.