According to Robin Maugham, his uncle had owned the villa for more than thirty years. It was the type of place you could easily imagine a novelist writing about except that no one would have believed it, for the house seemed even more elaborate—inside and out—than I could have expected. Anne French was renting a nice villa. This one was magnificent and underlined Maugham’s international fame, his enormous wealth, and his impeccable taste. It was painted white, with green shutters and tall green double doors, horseshoe windows, a Moorish archway entrance, and a large cupola on the roof. There was a tennis court, a huge swimming pool, and a beautiful garden full of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and lemon trees that lent the evening air the sharp citrus scent of a barber’s shop. Inside were ebony wood floors, high ceilings, heavy Spanish furniture, gilded wooden chandeliers, blackamoor figures, Savonnerie carpets, and, among many others, a painting by Gauguin—one of those heavy-limbed, broad-nosed, Tahitian women that looks like she must have gone three rounds with Jersey Joe Walcott. Over the fireplace was a golden eagle with wings outspread, which reminded me of my former employers in Berlin, while all the books on a round Louis XVI table were new and sent from a shop in London called Heywood Hill. The soap I used to wash my hands in the ground-floor lavatory was still in its Floris wrapper, and the towels were as thick as the silk cushions on the Directoire armchairs. The Grand Hôtel felt like a cheaper version of what there was to be enjoyed at the Villa Mauresque. It was the sort of place where time and the outside world were not welcome; the sort of place it was hard to imagine could still exist in a ration-book economy that was recovering from a terrible war; the sort of place that was probably like the mind of the man who owned it, an elderly man in a double-breasted blue blazer that looked as if it had been made by the same London tailor as Robin’s, with a face like a Komodo dragon lizard. He stood and came to shake my hand as his nephew made the introduction, and when he licked the lips of his thin, broad, drooping pink mouth, I would not have been surprised to have seen a tongue that was forked.

“Where have you been, Robin? We’ve delayed dinner for you, and you know I hate that. It’s most inconsiderate to Annette.”

“I dropped into the Voile for a drink and met a friend of mine. Walter Wolf. He’s German and he’s a keen bridge player and he was at a loose end so I thought I’d better bring him along.”