The Last Match Read Online Free

were established, tested and firm; so firm that she could tolerate my trying to bore through them. I never bored too hard or too persistently. She’d have taken my insolent peasant hide off in strips if I had.
    She never used my name. Sometimes I was Curly or Curlilocks, more often, You, there, or, Oh, it’s you again, or some other term of affection. In return I took to calling her Hon, which she detested. Not Hon as in honey but Hon. as in Honorable, only with the “H” sounded instead of silent.
    Once she asked me how I had found out she was an Honorable, since she had never mentioned it. I told her I had done research on her.
    “Why?” she asked sharply. She reacted to something like that the way a barnyard chicken does to the shadow of a hawk wheeling overhead.
    “Oh, I thought we might be related somewhere along the line. My grandmother was a Forbes.”
    “Never fear,” she said, looking down her aristocratic nose. ‘Nevah feeyah’ is more like it. I know I promised not to try to reproduce her accent, but a lot of her frosty flavor is lost without it.
    “Still, wouldn’t it be neighborly if we turned out to be distant cousins or something, Hon?”
    “It would be unbearable. And stop calling me Hon. I’ve spoken to you about it before.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “And stop saying Yes, ma’am! You sound like a schoolboy.”
    “I used to be one, ma’am. Before they drafted me.”
    “What did you do in school? Rob lockers?”
    You know how it goes. Love talk.
    Then, by God, perseverance, pluck and American grit began to show signs of paying off. I’d never tried to speak to her anywhere except on the beach, and then only when she was alone. I had a feeling I’d be pushing too far too fast if I presumed upon our acquaintanceship to try to mingle socially without invitation. The time wasn’t yet ripe for that, and anyway our paths didn’t cross much off the beach. We traveled in different circles since I had moved from the Martinez to a cheap pension where the food was good. But one day while we were on the sand throwing the usual barbs into each other a chasseur came down from the hotel with a telegram for her. When she had read it she said in a tone of great annoyance, “Oh, dash it! How perfectly bloody!”
    “Blue blood, no doubt,” I said with courteous interest. “Somebody in the family?”
    It didn’t even rate a comeback, so I knew something fairly serious had happened. I suppose it really was fairly serious from her viewpoint. She had been stood up on a date; like any common shopgirl, as she might have put it. What was worse, the date was for the following evening and the occasion was the biggest social bust-out of the year on the Cote d’Azur: the charity ball at the Summer Sporting Club in Monte Carlo annually presided over by Prince Rainier and his lady-of-the-moment. (This was a year or so before Grace.) Everybody who was anybody in the Riviera rat-race was going; the ladies in their special-occasion diamonds, not the ordinary wash-day icing, with gowns created for the occasion; the men flashing all the decorations, medals, royal orders, crosses, bangers, gongs, ribbons and other chest ornamentation they were entitled to wear and some they were not. Admission was by princely command, champagne corks were said to pop like machine-gun fire, the dancing went on until dawn or later, and if you weren’t with it when the starting trumpets went ta-ra-ra-ta-ra you were socially extinct. Non-attendance meant either that you didn’t have the money to throw in the pot with the Onassises and the Niarchoses and the Benitez-Rexachs when the poorhouse plate was passed, or that you were persona non grata around Monaco.
    I didn’t learn all the details there on the beach, of course. The Hon. Reggie wasn’t the type to break down and spill her troubles to a peasant in public. But she had her invitation and her new gown—it had cost a real bundle, as was obvious when I saw her in it— and she was