A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Is it really as bad as that?’ Caspar asked.

  ‘It’s just like that. As a playwright you can be living at the Ritz one week – supposing you have any such inclination – and the next week find yourself in a bed-sit as the proprietor of little more than a suitcase. It just so happens that my plays have had the bastards nearly all clapping their little trotters like mad. Not that a few of them didn’t say pretty filthy things.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ In this last remark of his brother’s there had lurked a tone which didn’t so much surprise Caspar as remind him of what in recent years he had come to see clearly enough. And literally to see, at times: a dark flush of sudden uncontrolled resentment that spoke of something deep – and surely far from attractive – in Fulke’s nature. Fulke could be quite desperately vulnerable to slights. One could even suspect that he registered them, docketed them, for a stored up vengeance one day. It was an unexpected facet of personality in one who took so much carelessly and in his stride.

  ‘Yes,’ he heard Fulke now reiterating. ‘Take to the theatre for your living, and it may be indecent luxury one day – demeaning jet-set stuff and being hauled round parties as a celebrity – and something uncomfortably like the dole queue the next.’

  Caspar listened to this circular talk – a characteristic shilly-shally, he judged it, between the market-place and something at least of nobler intention – with what sympathy he could. He genuinely wanted his brother to raise his sights, to trade up. Let Fulke be James Joyce, if he could manage it, and he himself would be perfectly happy as Stanislaus. But he had various doubts about it. The radical doubt, of course, concerned the true reach of Fulke’s endowments. But he also doubted, as being a legend of the romantic decadence, the salubrity, for a major artist, of Bohemian ways and Bohemian harassments. On his more intimate life, too, Fulke was not wholly uncommunicative, and Caspar had arrived at a fairly clear view of an odd sort of desperation attending his brother’s conduct of it. There was something messy about all those women, none of whom Caspar had ever set eyes on. Not that Caspar wasn’t also envious of such facile fornication – and almost certainly adultery, too, for that matter. He wondered at times whether he could set Father Fisher successfully to work on Fulke. It didn’t seem at all a hopeful idea.

  There was also a kind of awkwardness in two utterly diverse literary aspirations proceeding cheek by jowl beneath one substantially isolated and distinctly philistine roof. Two typewriters tapping away at decidedly different tempos! Caspar had no doubt that his brother, once launched on the long novel which appeared to be on his mind, would proceed in a kind of furor scribendi for weeks on end, while the pace of his own philosophical perpendings would be to this as the tortoise’s to the hare’s. It was even faintly ludicrous, like the rival family scribblings of the Brontes in their awful parsonage. Would each read to the other what he had written during the day? Nonsensical thoughts of this kind almost prompted Caspar to pack up his books and periodicals again, and retreat, even in August, to his small oven of a room in Bethnal Green.

  In fact, from the first the brothers got on quite well. Perhaps three or four years earlier than the thought commonly comes to young men, Fulke had arrived at the idea that he was a young man no longer, and that it was incumbent upon him to take measures to keep fit. Caspar found this curious, and a notion which any observer might have judged more likely to incubate in his own, Caspar’s, head. Perhaps it had something to do with standards of sexual athleticism into which it would be indecent to inquire. However that might be, Fulke insisted on a good deal of tennis. They were still reasonably well matched, and still perhaps exhibited those temperamental differences in play upon which the Reverend Henry Rich had sagely commented almost a decade before.

  ‘And you’ve turned up,’ Fulke said on the second day, ‘just in time for my water party. It’s uncommonly useful, because you’ll balance it up. I suppose you possess some bathers?’

  ‘Just what are you talking about?’

  ‘It began with the vicarage girl – Penelope, you know. She has a friend called Dora Something-or-other staying with her until the end of the month. Quite a piece, Dora, in a juvenile way. So I’ve asked them both to come and swim in the lake on Thursday afternoon.’

  ‘How very odd! And also Penelope’s papa?’

  ‘Lord, no. Old Rich had a kind of stroke, you remember, a few years ago, and Hurcomb made him go and swim regularly for therapeutic purposes in some horrible public baths. It turned Rich hydrophobic for life. But I’d not have asked him in any case. My water party’s a young people’s water party. At first I meant it to be just the two schoolgirls and myself, because I thought it might be amusing like that.’

  ‘Have you taken to going in for them young, Fulke?’

  ‘Not particularly, Cass.’ Fulke frowned momentarily. He disliked his naturally inhibited brother trying to play up to him in this way. ‘But I found Mother feeling that something more populous would be more decorous. So I’ve asked Hurcomb’s new assistant, Charles Gaston, whom you haven’t met. An Oxford man, and all that – although at some obscure college or other. But livelier than some young medics tend to be.’

  ‘And have you asked anybody else?’

  ‘Sophie Dix – whom you might call the other girl next door. That’s why you balance it up. And Mother is going to send down a picnic tea.’

  ‘I still think it uncommonly odd. And I’m suspicious of that casual dropping in of Sophie Dix. A squire’s daughter, and all that. But isn’t she rather thick?’

  ‘Anatomically, here and there, I’d say yes. And I just want to see her great breasts bulging on the brine.’

  ‘Don’t be so disgusting, Fulke. There are limits, after all.’

  ‘But that’s one of your favourite poets, Cass! Hardy in The Dynasts. Don’t you remember? There are chaps who cry out, “A mermaid ‘tis!” Actually, it’s the captain’s woman. The captain of a man o’ war was free to cart a woman around with him in Napoleonic times.’

  ‘I believe you’ve organised this whole load of rubbish simply because you have designs on this bulging young woman.’ Caspar knew he had deliberately repeated the phrase because it offended him. There was something close to the dead common, surely, in slapping it out – whether from Thomas Hardy or not – about a woman whom one had invited to be one’s guest in a few days’ time.

  ‘Designs?’ Fulke said cheerfully. ‘Oh, very probably. But you’ll come?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll come.’ Caspar said this without any irritating pretence of resignation. He had reservations about Sophie Dix; and about the schoolgirl called Dora he knew nothing at all. But he had a distinct feeling that he liked Penelope Rich.

  VII

  Six young people having a swim is not with any great appositeness to be called a ‘water party’, since the term suggests something more like a stately progress of gilded barges to the music of viols. So Fulke’s use of it must have been mildly ironic, employed to distance a project he had initiated on impulse and was now dubious about. What had put it into his head? One of the three girls who were coming? Or all of the three girls who were coming? He didn’t really know; wasn’t at all sure that it hadn’t the air of a kids’ outing with plenty of toy balloons and ice-cream. Sophie Dix, although so abounding in the flesh, couldn’t be much older than Penelope Rich and her friend. If he had designs on her in the manner Caspar had suggested, they certainly weren’t old-established. The Ferneydales had never much bothered with the Dixes, and he didn’t even know if their daughter was now formally regarded as grown up. The third young man, Charles Gaston, must be about Fulke’s own age, and Fulke had taken to him at a recent meeting seemingly because he had talked intelligently about a few current books. To ask him to come swimming had perhaps been a little out of the way. Fulke had done so before even knowing whether the chap could swim – let alone have any list for doing so in a glorified duck-pond. An invitation to a tennis party would have been rather more in order.

  Perhaps becaus
e of all this, Fulke took a good deal of trouble over his venture – to the surprise of Caspar, who didn’t often see his brother much concerning himself with any recreative activities of a sort sanctioned in the Mallows world. Fulke had a tent put up for the girls, and provided it with this and that which he thought might be useful to them. There being not much shade near the lake, he had an awning to picnic under should the afternoon prove uncomfortably hot. He even rescued an abandoned canoe and had it scrubbed out and given a lick of varnish by a misdoubting gardener, perhaps feeling that this might bring ‘water party’ a little more into the picture. Observing the unexpected to-do, Caspar said that it was sure to rain, so that the party would become a watery one in an unwelcome sense. Fulke replied cheerfully that, in this event, they would all go indoors and play billiards – or ping-pong should the girls disclaim knowing one end of a billiard cue from the other. There was plenty of room in the Hall for any sort of high jinks they had a mind to.

  In fact it proved to be a perfect day. Gaston turned up first, in shorts and with a towel swathed lightly round his neck. He might have been on the way, Caspar thought, from his obscure Oxford college to the river, there to take part in the galley-slave exercises dear to undergraduates of the heartier and more bone-headed sort. But to Caspar’s astonishment he referred, as soon as he had been introduced, to a review Caspar had recently contributed to a journal quite as dry as his own. So there must be a little more to Charles Gaston than driving round the district scribbling useless prescriptions for old women. Gaston had by no means wholly approved of the review (the book prompting which he seemed also to have read), and he explained why – briskly and cordially – in the course of five minutes’ chat. Fulke was amused by this, but Caspar himself liked it. To have been noticed by anybody on anything he had anywhere propounded was still something grateful to him at all times.

  The three young women arrived together, and it was evident that Miss Dix was already known to her companions. Fulke received them with the gaiety proper in a host who has organised a chancy affair, even greeting Dora as Juliet and Penelope as Ganymede – which puzzled her until she remembered that it was under this name that she was destined to pass through a good deal of As You Like It. It clearly pleased him to show that he remembered their previous conversation about theatrical activities. About Sophie Dix he seemed to have nothing to recall, but made up for this by briefly turning on a marked moment of gratifying admiration. With Fulke in this mood everything looked tolerably promising – even the pool itself, which he had caused to be skimmed of its more obtrusive vegetable components.

  The elder Ferneydales had refrained from coming down to keep an eye on the scene. Even the tea-picnic was to be transported to the site by a parlourmaid. When that happened the occasion would take on quite the air of a youthful fête-champétre. But first everybody had to disrobe. Gaston chucked his towel on the grass, slipped of his T-shirt, zipped down his shorts, and was ready for action at once, his bathing-trunks being already in situ. The Ferneydales, having rather more to dispose of, went into the hut. The girls, correspondingly, retired to the tent, and took a little longer to emerge. When they did so, a distinction was to be observed between them. Penelope and her friend were in what might still have been called bathing-costumes: well removed, indeed, from the drab affairs probably standard at their school, but nevertheless clothing the greater part of their persons. Sophie wore a bikini, the two parts of which didn’t markedly differ in hue from Sophie’s own pelt, which might have been described as pleasingly honey-coloured rather than pink or pinko-grey.

  ‘C’est ravissant, cela,’ Fulke murmured to his brother. ‘Un anéantissement de la surface vetue; une minimisation extrême de la pudeur.’

  Caspar might have replied, ‘A kind of vulgarisation of Renoir,’ if he hadn’t been thoroughly annoyed. To be thus speaking in an undertone about a guest was surely the height of bad form – or, rather, the abysmal depth of it – and it signalled the possibility that Fulke might be in the mood to perpetrate some freakish outrage at any time. But nothing of the sort occurred. Fulke’s behaviour was impeccable and gay. He sang out Eenee, meenee, mainee, mo by way of determining who should dive in first, and improvised competitive events in a suitably casual manner. Above all, he had no appearance of keeping an eye on anybody, or of justifying that former impression of Dora Quillinan’s that he had the habit of wondering how he might drop you into a future work of fiction. Caspar, to whom he still talked occasional nonsense about creative writing and experimental psychology, was at least reassured that no experiment was being set up.

  But if the bathing was a success it was probably because it didn’t go on too long, climaxing in a kind of water polo sufficiently boisterous to stir up more mud than was agreeable at least to the girls. So they all returned to dry land, and found that Fulke had provided tubs of clear water to sponge down from. The picnic arrived while they were getting dressed.

  Penelope, whose decision to accept Fulke’s proposal for swimming together had precipitated the whole affair, found that she had enjoyed it very much, including the virtual romp at the end. She didn’t even greatly mind when Fulke, who was (perhaps significantly) a keen photographer, insisted on their all posing for him in turn in their wet and dishevelled state. Nevertheless, she was relieved when they had all become young ladies and gentlemen again, properly habited and sipping their China tea. The ethos of the vicarage still went round with Penelope quite a lot, and she felt glad that it hadn’t occurred to her father to stroll into the park and observe the scene. He would have been aware that young people, male and female together, engage in such activities – at least if decently bred – without any disabling self-consciousness of a sexual sort – or at least with an entire masking of anything of the kind. But he would certainly have judged Sophie Dix to be ‘fast’. In fact Penelope doubted her being anything of the kind. She was merely rather stupid, and had believed her indecorous costume to be figuratively as well as actually in the swim. Of Charles Gaston Mr Rich would certainly have approved, since he believed that cultivated persons in the minor professions (such as the medical) were becoming noticeably rare. And in Dora’s comportment he would have found nothing to qualify his approbation of a future ambassador’s daughter. The young Ferneydales were a little different. Her father regarded Caspar with some respect, as a serious person who had unfortunately fallen into grievous doctrinal error. But of Fulke he seemed to have heard things that he didn’t like at all. It was probable that, on balance, he would have been rendered uneasy by this slightly odd occasion.

  Caspar’s conversation at tea was addressed at first to Penelope. Perhaps not very appropriately, he began telling her about his projected book.

  ‘Of course it’s miles away,’ he said, ‘from Fulke’s sort of thing. I couldn’t write plays, or any sort of fiction, for toffee.’

  ‘Would you like to?’ Penelope asked. ‘It seems that a lot of people are anxious to become authors.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I am anxious to be that. But “authorship” can be made to cover a good deal, you know. Kant or Spinoza could be called an author. Or, for that matter, St Catherine of Siena, although it would sound a bit rum.’

  To Penelope these were merely names – but names, she knew, slightly surprising as turning up after water polo. So she said nothing, but looked at Caspar with the grave attention she felt to be appropriate. This encouraged him.

  ‘Not that I’ll be steering altogether clear of imaginative writing. The archetypal myths I want to deal with often live on, you see, in unlikely places. Even, conceivably, in one of Fulke’s amusing plays, although without his being conscious of the fact. It’s a testament to their vitality. And that vitality derives – and this will be my grand point – from their relationship, again often hard to discern, to the central myth of all: the one that comes to us in the Western World under the colours of Christian dogma.’

  Naturally enough, this again held Penelope silent. It might even have had this effect on Father Fi
sher, had it happened that he too had been playing water polo. It is unlikely that the distinctly disturbing word ‘colours’ had escaped Caspar as yet when discussing his projected opus magnum with his spiritual director. Penelope could see only that Caspar was serious and truthful, but had got her age a little wrong, and consequently her present intellectual horizons. She was pleased, all the same. It was her ambition to take a thoughtful and sober view of life, which she had already discovered to be a vastly mysterious affair, and one unquestionably daunting to look at squarely. Perhaps the grand test consisted precisely in being able to do that. And whoever Kant and Spinoza had been, it was evident that Caspar (decidedly unlike his brother) was of one mind with her here. It had been a philosopher who, distinguishably a shade conscientiously, had been punching a rubber ball around the Ferneydales’ bathing place. But it also appeared evident to her that it was without conscientious effort that Caspar’s glance turned every now and then to the ample, and at the moment recumbent, form of Sophie Dix. Because Penelope enjoyed looking at picture books illustrating the history of art, there even came fleetingly into her head the dim image of a painting of Titian’s called something like Sacred and Profane Love. She didn’t in the least see herself as Sacred, but felt that Sophie could stand in as Profane very well.