Tour de Force by Christianna Brand

birth certificates, no diplomas, no marriage lines …’
    â€˜No police records,’ said Cockie.
    â€˜Exactly,’ she said. ‘Reborn. Reborn just for a couple of weeks, with a whole, new spick and span character to present to a whole new world. Starting with casual little showing-off lies to strangers – then the strangers become acquaintances, become friends, become patrons, perhaps, or even prospective employers, and it’s too late to go back on the lies, they have to be strengthened, they have to be built up by other lies until at last there’s a whole, great terrifying structure of lies to be lived up to for the whole, long holiday, perhaps even after the holiday, perhaps to the end of one’s life …’ She looked into their faces with cold, blue, disagreeably sneering eyes. ‘Don’t you agree?’
    â€˜You’re a student of human nature, Miss Lane,’ said Inspector Cockrill smoothly.
    â€˜I find it a profitable study.’
    â€˜On holiday?’ he suggested.
    â€˜And after. I keep up with my holiday acquaintances, Inspector.’
    â€˜No doubt it pays to do so,’ said Cockie.
    She gave him a brief, cold, secret smile as though at some private joke all of her own. ‘Perhaps!’ She shrugged lightly; but he saw that her hands now were tightly clenched on the wooden rail.
    Below them and to their left, they could see the little row of bathing huts and the base of the great rock nose where it jutted out from the forehead of the land. The Rodds were standing there chatting in their civil, impersonal way to Fernando and Miss Trapp. Cockie gestured towards them. ‘For example …’
    â€˜Oh, them!’ She shrugged again, lightly. But suddenly the mask slipped, she said with a predatory gleam: ‘All of them with money, their own or somebody else’s. All of them with secrets, all playing parts. Each one of those four people – hugging a despicable secret, deceiving the rest. That creature Fernando – if they did but know why we went to that albergo in Siena! And Miss Trapp – hoarding up her miserable fortune in a gold-monogrammed bag. And the other two – pretending; she looking into his eyes and pretending that she doesn’t know what he’s planning to do to her, he looking back, accepting her pretences, pretending there’s nothing to know. All of them, all four of them, all the others on this tour, that Mrs Sick, pretending to be delicate and interesting when all the time at home she’s as strong as a horse, that woman with the niece, Gruff and Grim as you call them, pretending to be generous and kind when all she wants is to get the girl under her jealous influence and force her life into a groove as solitary and sour as her own.… All of us, acting: all of us struggling to keep our mean little secrets, ready to die to protect them, ready to fight and cheat and lie …’
    â€˜And pay,’ suggested Inspector Cockrill pleasantly.
    She whipped away from them, running off abruptly down the wooden steps on soundless, rubber-soled feet, and away under the bougainvillea boughs. They saw her emerge from the tunnel of jasmine that covered the steps from the upper terrace to the lower, pause for a moment to fling her white towel into one of the bathing huts, and run out along the ridge of the diving rock, bounce once on the springy board and soar out – out and down to the blue water, twenty feet below.
    The sea sent up a feather of triumphant spray: and closed in over her.
    *
    Sharply, as a razor blade slitting through stretched blue satin, her white hands cut their way up through the surface of the water. She swam back to the shore immediately, shaking the drops from her shining black costume. ‘I hope she feels – cleaner,’ said Mr Cecil, still standing at the balcony rail, staring down at her.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Cockie. He thought it over. ‘What a very