Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers
Reputedly the wickedest woman in London — small, pale, and immaculately rude, she arrives late in the book to find Dick Diver with no defences left.
Amusement, and the right to provoke anyone she likes without ever being made ridiculous herself.
The book
At a glance
- British aristocrat in Mary Minghetti's circle
- The wickedest woman in London, according to Tommy Barban
- Ridicule delivered as effortless superiority
- Golding's yacht off Cannes, and the Antibes police station
- Bijou O'Conor, in part — an aristocratic acquaintance of Fitzgerald's, known for her wit and her difficult social force · 1903–1981 · London, England
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNicole first sees her as a small, pale, pretty young woman with lovely metallic hair, almost green in the deck lights, sitting on the other side of Tommy Barban and losing his attention with what was once called ill grace. Asked who the woman in white is, Tommy supplies the name and the standing: she is now the wickedest woman in London, and whenever he comes back to Europe there is a new crop of them. Her conversation carries across a deck without being raised — a man is a scoundrel but a cat of the stripe, they sat up all night at two-handed chemin-de-fer, and he owes her a mille Swiss.
She is a friend of Mary Minghetti — the former Mary North, remarried to an immensely rich papal count — and travels in that circle. Nicole's assessment is that her force comes neither from character nor from personality but from the sheer strength derived from an attitude, and that she is formidable on that basis alone. Dick meets her at the worst possible moment, at a dinner where he has drunk too much and lost the timing his irony depends on, and she takes him apart in a low clipped voice pitched to be audible to the whole company.
How the book draws them
- Small and paleNearly everything about her is physically slight, which concentrates the aggression rather than softening it. Her hair reads almost green under the deck lights.
- The deafening whisperDick complains that he does not like innuendo in these deafening English whispers. She walks back to him and asks, at volume, whether that is a deafening whisper, or whether it simply deafens him.
- She does not argueShe categorises. Her method is to behave as though no reply could possibly lower her position, and on the evidence of that dinner it works.
- Nothing wantedShe needs nothing at all from Dick, which is what distinguishes her cruelty from everyone else's demands on him. It is exercised for recreation.
- Merely a larkHer account of the night in the cells: they were pretending to be sailors on leave and picked up two silly girls, who got the wind up and made a rotten scene in a lodging-house.
- Waiting for the fleetIn custody she has the outraged air of a Briton who expects the Mediterranean fleet to steam up to her assistance at any moment.
She and Mary are arrested at Antibes , and Dick Diver is the one who fixes it: he wakes Gausse, the old hotel-keeper, out of an Alsatian coma, tells him to clean out his cash drawer, and drives him to the police station. Gausse grumbles that he does not like doing something for that Anglaise. Dick invents a genealogy for Mary on the spot, tells the chief of police that arresting her would be like arresting a great royalty of England, and buys the rest.
She leaves the episode unchanged and ungrateful, which is the point of her. The gift Dick once had for rescuing people has become a reflex he performs for strangers who neither understand nor value it. He is torn, sitting there like a priest in the confessional, between ironic laughter and a wish to order fifty stripes of the cat and a fortnight of bread and water.