A sand-yacht was beached in the shallows. Beside it a bare-chested young man watched with hands on hips. His powerful thighs stood out under his white shorts in the darkness, the thermal surf breaking the dust into ripples around his feet. With his broad face and smashed Michelangelesque nose he resembled some dark beach-angel. He waited as I approached, then stepped forward and walked past me, almost brushing my shoulder. The oil on his back reflected the distant lights of Vermilion Sands as he moved among the dunes towards the nightclub.
After this rendezvous I assumed that we would see no more of Raine Charming, but the next morning when I arrived at the shop in Vermilion Sands I found Georges waiting nervously by the door.
‘Mr Samson, I tried to telephone you — Miss Channing’s secretary has been calling, everything she bought has gone berserk! Nothing fits, three of the gowns are growing out of weave—’
I managed to calm him down, then spoke to Raine’s secretary, a tarttoned Frenchwoman who sharply informed me that the entire wardrobe of two evening gowns, a cocktail dress and three day-suits which Raine had purchased from ‘Topless in Gaza’ had run to seed. Why this should have happened she had no idea. ‘However, Mr Samson, I suggest you drive out immediately to Miss Channing’s residence and either replace each item or reimburse the total purchase price of six thousand dollars. The alternative—’
‘Mlle Fournier,’ I insisted stiffly with what little pride I could muster, ‘there is no alternative.’
Before I left, Georges brought out with elaborate care a cyclamen sports-suit in a shantung bio-fabric which he had ordered for one of our millionaire customers.
‘For my good name, Mr Samson, if not for yours — at moments such as these one should show the flag.’
The suit clung to me like a willowy, lace-covered cobra, shaping itself to my chest and legs. Its colours glowed and rippled as it explored the contours of my body. As I walked out to my car people turned to look at this exquisite gliding snakeskin.
Five minutes after our arrival at Raine Channing’s villa it had quietened down considerably, hanging from my shoulders like a wounded flower. The atmosphere at the villa seemed set for disaster. The young chauffeur who took my car whipped it away with a snarl of tyres, his eyes moving across my face like razors. Mile Fournier greeted me with a peremptory nod. A sharp-faced Frenchwoman of about forty, she wore a witchlike black dress that seethed around her angular shoulders with the movements of a shrike.
‘An entire wardrobe ruined, Mr Samson! Not only your own gowns, but priceless originals from Paris this season. We are out of our minds here!’
I did my best to calm her. One danger with bio-fabrics is that they are prone to stampede. Moments of domestic crisis, a cry of anger or even a door’s slam, can set off a paroxysm of self-destruction. My own suit was already wilting under Mlle Fournier’s baleful eye. As we went up the staircase I smoothed the ruffled velvet of the curtains, settling them into their niches. ‘Perhaps they’re not being worn enough,’ I temporized. ‘These fabrics do need human contact.’
Mlle Fournier gave me a surprisingly arch glance. We entered a suite on the top floor. Beyond the shaded windows was a terrace, the painted surface of the sand-lake below it. Mlle Fournier gestured at the open wardrobes in the large dressing room. ‘Human contact? Precisely, Mr Samson.’
Everywhere there was uproar. Gowns were strewn across the facing sofas. Several had lost all colour and lay blanched and inert. Others had felted, their edges curled and blackened like dead banana skins. Two evening dresses draped over the escritoire had run rogue, their threads interlocking in a macabre embrace. In the wardrobes the racks of gowns hung in restive files, colours pulsing like demented suns.
As we watched I sensed that they were uneasily settling themselves after some emotional outburst earlier that morning. ‘Someone’s been whipping them into a frenzy,’ I told Mlle Fournier. ‘Doesn’t Miss Channing realize one can’t play the temperamental fool near these fabrics?’
She gripped my arm, a barbed finger raised to my lips. ‘Mr Samson! We all have our difficulties. Just do what you can. Your fee will be paid immediately.’
When she had gone I moved along the racks and laid out the more damaged dresses. The others I spaced out, soothing the disturbed fabrics until they relaxed and annealed themselves.
I was hunting through the wardrobes in the bedroom next door when I made a curious discovery. Packed behind the sliding doors was an immense array of costumes, faded models of the previous seasons which had been left to die on their hangers. A few were still barely alive. They hung inertly on their racks, responding with a feeble glimmer to the light.
