Another novel beginning from Eton, pseudo-Poe

Soleil D’Or

Everything could be ruined this afternoon, I thought in the early morning. But of course you have to remember that everything could be ruined most afternoons. It very often is, but I suppose we survive somehow, jettisoning dignity or comfort or earnestness or morality or pride. Yet I had no wish to behold any such unravelling; to be present when a certain pair of my friends I had rather not meet each other met each other; when certain truths I had rather not be illumined were illumined. I felt a great deal less shame in the act of a coward, ringing the Soleil D’Or Hotel, Cannes, than I would have done at the supper of Pervis, and Grunte, and the shared knowledge of Grunte, and Pervis.

For such reasons I took my holiday. The time was not irregular, fortunately enough; the schools were disgorging their burdens, and, though I had no children, the egoism of the parents who smugly hold the power of this world would easily forget this, and assume that, as they were compelled to move at half-term, so too was I.

I wondered for some minutes if I ought not to take with me a companion. But the chaperone I found most congenial was the cause of my migration in the first place, and I am no Antony to flaunt my Cleopatra; indeed I always hoped to be more of an Octavius. Even Octavius had an Imperial Cupboard filled with skeletons; I was only unfortunate in that my Imperial Cupboard had rattled the harder. Besides my little Corinna of Drury-Lane (you see I am a well-read man! enough to condemn anyone in the City), I could have chosen my sister; but that would, I think, have been a metaphorically masochistic course, (dear Corinna verges on the physical) for we are that type of sibling that scourge each other to reassure ourselves of the affinity of our blood.

I resolved, then, to go to Cannes alone. It was of crucial importance for my peace of mind, of course, that I should have left England by the time I knew Pervis to be meeting Grunte, so I left on one of those absurd airlines that still present you with tattered “frills”, coleslaw and Red Leicester around lunchtime, but have the great merit that they have been altogether abandoned by the banking classes. I departed with a fairly secure hope that I would be observed by no one who mattered. I was not quite sanguine enough to be sure that I would not meet someone; but this was the situation I aimed for, equipping myself with a newspaper and a volume of the Letters of Queen Victoria. I have long traced with affection the harmony of that Monarch’s mindset with some of the more sensational reporters.

Thus I was irritated, and unnerved too, I must own, to be addressed by name at the check-in desk. I looked up reluctantly from a condolence letter to Louis-Philippe, and nodded in acknowledgement, but I was relieved when I recognised the face.

“Why, Edward, it has been some time.”

“You haven’t changed,” the other replied. There was justifiably much of envy in his voice, for the same could not be said of him. I had left Edward Mutton a sharp graduate, ambitious and original. He had made an Acherontic descent, into schoolmastering; he was inflated and gnawed down at the same time, his cheeks shining with involuntary tears. But most happily of all, he was of no consequence. He might even, I thought with a little anticipation, prove amusing.

“You’re going to Pisa?” I suggested, thinking of a likely destination for a man of refined taste. Pisa is the gateway to Florence, that lodestone of Inglesi italianati.

“No, to Cannes,” he corrected laughingly. “I’m on your flight.”

This confounded and irritated me out of measure, though I tried not to make that perfectly obvious. Cannes? What would Edward’s kind do in Cannes? Cannes was for the rich and the dissolute; those who fell outside that lofty class could find no real satisfaction there, only a great deal of debt. Perhaps Edward wanted to be rich and dissolute, but that was a separate state altogether, best provided for, I reflected, by Nice.

“Ah. Where are you staying?”

“Oh, I don’t know the town well...I followed some recommendations...a little place called the Soleil D’Or...I wonder if you know it?”

It was that reply which made me realise that my escape was to assume a very different form from that which I had envisaged. Edward Mutton was a schoolmaster, but fate had shifted me into a position where I could not but educate him.