A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘At last,’ Gaston told Mr Ferneydale on returning from one of his continental jaunts, ‘I’ve seen your son’s house in the Dordogne. It’s a modest affair, but with a magnificent view for that fairly tame part of France. And surprisingly secluded, since its own woodlands appear to extend indefinitely in every direction. I wonder how he found it. Do you happen to know?’

  ‘No I don’t. Fulke had been there for some time before we so much as heard of it.’ Mr Ferneydale appeared to make this announcement more with satisfaction than otherwise.

  ‘He must at least have sent you photographs of the house and the view from it.’ Gaston paused for a moment, as if wondering whether to continue this conversation. He was now glancing with some attention at James Ferneydale. ‘Fulke was a keen photographer, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I know nothing about that, either. Hearing about the existence of the place was the first hint we had that the boy had been doing really well. But I’m surprised to hear that it’s secluded and out-of-the-way. That doesn’t sound to be Fulke’s style.’

  ‘He has certainly been doing really well.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. He was lucky enough to tumble quite early on to an important key to success.’

  ‘What would that have been, Ferneydale?’

  ‘Diversification, Gaston. He hit on that.’ James Ferneydale now spoke on his familiar note of paternal pride. ‘It’s going to be the vital thing, if you ask me, for more than a decade ahead. I insist on it to all my fellow directors in one concern or another. “Diversify,” I say. “Go for cement like mad, if you like. But get a grip on the chemical fertilisers, and on all those new leisure-time enterprises as well.” ‘

  ‘I’m sure that’s wise. But Fulke’s not in cement and nitrates and holiday camps, is he?’

  ‘Of course not. He’d make damn-all of them. With Fulke it’s just novels and the theatre. Not specialising, but keeping going at both. They support one another in that type of market. No over-production in one product or the other.’

  ‘That must certainly be so.’ Gaston glanced curiously at his host – much as a lepidopterist might glance at a particularly fine specimen of a not particularly uncommon butterfly. ‘And as for seclusion and near-solitude, you’re perfectly right. But Fulke doesn’t appear to spend all that time in this villa. He has to be observing people, since he believes that to be his business. But diversifying there, too. At present he seems to be after high life. The jet set, as they say. And he collects his specimens there much further south. St Tropez, for example. It’s going to be the locale of his next play. Sophie and Silvan live in this place in the Dordogne at present, and Fulke comes and goes.’

  ‘What’s the child like, Gaston?’ James Ferneydale’s interest had quickened. He possessed, after all, only one grandchild to date.

  ‘A determined little fellow, I’d say.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. It’s essential, if one’s going to get on. We’re in an increasingly competitive world. Damnably ticklish markets everywhere.’

  ‘But they were all three there when I visited the place. Which made it all the odder.’

  ‘Odder?’ Mr Ferneydale was perplexed, which was not unnatural. Gaston had given this last remark the character of information involuntary and unpremeditated – and had again looked at Fulke’s father sharply at the same time.

  ‘Just the family and a couple of servants.’ This came from Gaston as if it was not in the least an inconsequent reply. ‘Oh, and a young secretary, whose name I forget.’

  Mr Ferneydale frowned. He was clearly wondering whether his son, whom he could scarcely suppose to be by nature strictly monogamous, was undesirably familiar with this nameless female assistant. But he made no further inquiry – with the result that there was a pause in the conversation. When Charles Gaston resumed it, he seemed unconscious of any abrupt change of topic.

  ‘I always think,’ he said, ‘that Fulke’s undoubted success as a writer is the more remarkable in the light of certain limitations he owns in that line. No doubt they have occurred to you.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ James Ferneydale was displeased. ‘It’s not my line, you know. So just what are you talking about?’

  ‘Fulke, as we’ve been agreeing, is endlessly interested in people. There’s a sense in which he’s a tiptop observer. But he’s definitely not an empathic type.’

  ‘What the devil does that mean?’

  ‘Say that he lacks a sixth sense. He doesn’t intuitively get into people. So he can sometimes get them wrong. It’s no great disability for his sort of writing. But I suppose it’s what the highbrow critics have a nose for when they rather turn him down.’

  Mr Ferneydale knew nothing about the highbrow critics. But he felt that this young doctor was momentarily one of them. He may have felt, too, that there was an obscurely probing component involved in this whole talk. He was relieved when Charles Gaston took his departure on his morning’s round of domiciliary visiting.

  Gaston’s next call was to be at the vicarage, where Mr Rich was suffering some vexatious minor complaint which he insisted on describing as an attack of the gout. The doctor made his way there on foot, being prompted to the exercise by that mid-thirties’ persuasion that thought must be given to keeping fit. There was no longer much tennis played at either the Hall or the vicarage – and as for bathing in the glorified duck-pond it simply hadn’t happened again since Fulke had contrived that whimsical occasion a dozen years before. Gaston as he walked wondered whether memory and later knowledge were betraying him when he seemed to recall a certain momentary curiosity as having attended that event. And he was further reminded of it now by encountering in the grounds of the vicarage somebody whose acquaintance he had first made round about that time. This was Tommy Elbrow, the vicar’s gardener, who was wheeling a leisured barrow around the place much as he had been doing ever since. Or not quite that, since Tommy had for a short period gone as a soldier, not liked it, and managed to get out. He had brought back with him, Gaston reflected, a touch of cynicism other than of the common rustic sort. But he was a patient – or his wife and child were patients – and the doctor paused to have a word with him now.

  ‘Tommy,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to see some unchanging things at Mallows in this alarmingly changing world. Here’s you and here’s me, both trundling on our rounds as of old. My barrow’s a bit the heavier, perhaps. That’s all.’ Tommy Elbrow, Gaston knew, had a fondness for deeply philosophical reflections of this sort. It might almost be said that, as if infected by his employer’s master interest, his own meditations were of Time and what it did to one.

  ‘Changes of sorts there have been here, too,’ Tommy said, dropping the handles of his barrow with satisfaction. ‘And none for the better, to my mind. Begging your pardon, Doctor.’

  ‘Of just what sort, Tommy? You yourself have got a wife and a fine child now.’

  ‘And not all that more to keep them on. Money’s short among my sort. And among the gentry too, it seems. Look at them at the Hall. Paring the cheese, in a quiet way. Squire – as he likes to be called – keeps losing an outdoor man, and no true explanation offered. It’s why I’m sent to lend a hand there, every so often. “Lend a hand” is Mr Rich’s word for it. But it’s hiring me out, an’ you ask me.’

  ‘Is that so, now?’ No inclination to snub this improper trend in Tommy’s talk was evident in Charles Gaston’s tone. The pre-army Tommy, he judged, would not so readily have disclosed some smouldering resentment in face of the social order. ‘But Mr Ferneydale and the vicar are very old friends. I’d doubt there being any financial motive in your being asked to have a go occasionally at that uncommonly long drive.’

  ‘As you say, Doctor.’ Tommy offered this acquiescence with detect- ably factitious respect, and made to take up his barrow again. But this kind of talk attracted him, and he thought better of it. ‘Not that the rich is to be envied,’ he said, ‘or strung up on lamp-posts as the Commies would have it. They have their own t
roubles, if you ask me.’

  ‘That’s very true. Care isn’t to be banished by having what looks good in a bank.’

  ‘Nor boredom neither.’ Tommy Elbrow surprisingly broadened the discussion. ‘It’s a dull life up there at the Hall, just as it is over here at the vicarage. Take Miss Penelope, for instance, as we used to call her. That gay she used to be – but quiet as quiet now. And vicar and Mr Caspar both glooming round over things too deep for them. That I can see, maybe if others don’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. But quiet lives are often the happiest. The world’s hurly-burly can be not all that fun. And you came out of it yourself in a way when you left the forces and returned here.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Tommy put a hand in a pocket and produced a pipe, no doubt a legitimate mid-morning indulgence. ‘But take the Hall, too, Doctor. With Mr Ferneydale away on his business a power of the time, and his lady more like a mouse than ever, the Big House be like church on weekdays, with no more nor a sparrow or two trapped and fluttering around it. There was more life to it when the young gentlemen were young, and things went on. Even the cricket – but perhaps it was afore your time here – was something.’

  ‘There used to be cricket, did there?’

  ‘Aye – and we all had to turn out for it. And there was always a bit of gossip about goings-on over there. Not that Mr Caspar was ever what you’d call a bright spark. Too religious for it, folk said. Mr Fulke – him that we seldom see glimpse of now – he was different.’

  ‘I suppose he was.’ Dr Gaston had a prudent instinct to break off this not quite seemly talk, but failed to obey it. He was interested in what the Mallows world had once thought of the young Fulke Ferneydale. ‘It’s only natural we don’t see much of Mr Fulke now,’ he said. ‘He’s having a great success these days.’

  ‘I don’t know as how he was all that successful then. Not that there weren’t girls about the village who were plain mad about him.’

  ‘Were there, indeed.’

  ‘Yes – but they weren’t always the ones he was after. There were some as shied away at once; who wouldn’t stand for so much as a quick cuddle with him – like a housemaid in a corridor of the Hall, it might be.’

  ‘It’s the privilege of a woman to pick and choose, Tommy.’ Gaston made this return to philosophic generality with an encouraging intention. ‘Mr Fulke couldn’t have been too upset by that.’

  ‘By one thing or another he was often upset, if you ask me. Of the kind that isn’t at ease with himself, Mr Fulke is.’

  ‘You’re recalling him at an awkward age. He probably has more self-confidence now, and is the easier as a result.’ Gaston didn’t add that he had himself lately had an opportunity to judge. Such a statement of sustained familiarity with the subject of their discussion might shut Tommy up. And this he didn’t want quite yet.

  ‘But he had his resources,’ Tommy said suddenly. ‘Versatile, Mr Fulke is.’

  This term struck Gaston as a surprising one for Mr Rich’s gardener to command, and a moment went by before he recalled a sense it carried in current demotic speech. So here was a small investigation abruptly concluded. He offered Tommy no more than a few further casual words, and resumed his walk to the vicarage.

  Penelope Ferneydale was in her father’s bedroom when Dr Gaston was shown in. She had of late made it part of her business to transcribe or type – and where possible to set in some sort of order – such notes towards his great work as Mr Rich jotted down from time to time. This she had been engaged in now, but she at once gathered her papers together, as if not eager that the vicar should rummage among them for a topic of discourse. She did not, however, then hurry to leave the room, it being clear to her that her father’s ailment was in no need of urgent medical attention.

  Mr Rich proved, among other vexations, to have been kept awake by a nightingale, although he managed jocularly to admit that disapprobation of such nocturnal entertainment was a reaction wholly unsanctioned in literature.

  ‘Ah!’ Dr Gaston said. ‘The nightingale you’d like, vicar, is the one in Yeats’s poem.’

  ‘Ah!’ Mr Rich echoed cautiously. ‘Yeats’s poem. I’m not sure that for the moment the memory of it doesn’t escape me.’

  ‘I take his bird to be an automaton, so you could switch it off and on as you pleased. And it sings to lords and ladies of Byzantium, you’ll remember, very much your sort of thing. Of what is past, or passing, or to come.’ Achieving this little joke, Gaston had to wonder whether the vicar’s daughter liked her father being made fun of even in this gentle way. Certainly Penelope remained entirely grave. But, unlike her father, she knew the poem.

  ‘Set upon a golden bough,’ she said. ‘It’s a little excessive in the Faberge fashion. And I wonder how many of those Byzantine lords and ladies were to find what was to come anything much to make a song about.’

  This was a reflection on the sombre side, but Penelope offered it with composure and a faint smile. She was a woman who was never to be charged, it seemed to Gaston, with any hint of discontent before what even Tommy Elbrow – and from a vantage-point no nearer than his wheelbarrow – could distinguish as a damnably dull life. At least she had managed to develop all the appearance of a mature personality, finding her rewards and fulfilments where she might. The doctor had a poor idea of Caspar Ferneydale as a reward and fulfilment. But, of course, he was prejudiced, and one never really knew. Marriage was very much a mystery. A scribbler like Caspar’s brother could write whole plays and novels purporting to reveal its depths and shallows while yet being as much at sea as anybody before one or another specific instance of the conundrum.

  ‘ “Of what is past, or passing, or to come”,’ Mr Rich repeated from his unnecessary sick-bed. ‘That is very fine. I must consider corresponding with him.’

  ‘With Yeats? I’m afraid it would be a little late in the day, vicar. He must have died round about the year in which Penelope was born.’

  ‘Dear me! There are matters, I fear, in which I am becoming sadly out of date.’ Mr Rich said this not at all as if any sadness actually afflicted him; indeed almost with the complacence of an ageing man resigned to grasping senescence as his bride. But Gaston was annoyed with himself, there having been something clumsy in even an oblique reference to Mrs Caspar Ferneydale’s age. Penelope, although still a young woman in any common count, was well advanced within a woman’s normal child-bearing span. But Penelope was unoffended. Things had so fallen out, Gaston believed, that the nature of his feeling for the vicar’s daughter must remain unexpressed for ever. But perhaps Penelope herself suspected it, and treated him in consequence with a circumspect warmth of regard. There was something of this in her present bearing. She remained easily talking to him for a few minutes before quitting the room so that medical consultation could begin.

  It was an unnecessary ritual, but would cost Mr Rich a guinea, all the same. There was nothing wrong with the man – or nothing immediately wrong. But Gaston didn’t share his predecessor’s view that the vicar was booked for any notable longevity. Several further small cerebral incidents were on the record since the one that had occasioned the child Penelope’s first alarm. And listening to the vicar’s latest piece of valetudinarian talk now, Gaston found himself speculating on what financial circumstances would attend his patient’s sudden death. Had Caspar Ferneydale any money to speak of as his own? Penelope, he had heard it surmised, would be not without a jointure – if that was the correct term – of something more than the pin-money order. But it mightn’t be much. There might even come a state of affairs when she was simply her father-in-law’s pensioner, and thus necessarily a participant in what Tommy had called the cheeseparing at Mallows Hall.

  ‘Do you know,’ Mr Rich suddenly asked – his interest in his own inside lapsing for a moment – ‘that the faster an aeroplane travels the shorter it becomes from tip to tail? There’s considerable theoretical significance in that. I must think about it.’

  ‘If it travelled very fast
indeed would it reach a kind of vanishing point, or even a state of non-existence?’ Gaston put this question as seriously as if he were addressing Albert Einstein, or some scientist of similar calibre. He was accustomed to receiving from the vicar just this sort of muddled resultance from dabbling in matters astronomically beyond his understanding. ‘Turn over on your tummy for a moment, will you? And take a long breath and hold it.’

  This got Mr Rich successfully back to the more urgent business on hand, and in a few more minutes the doctor was able to leave him in a reasonably contented condition. But the old man’s mind, he judged, was undoubtedly destined to go pop one day. Meanwhile, he couldn’t be a housemate of the easiest sort. Gaston found himself indulging a sharp urge to contrive some chivalric means of rescuing Mrs Caspar Ferneydale from this dead-end place. Penelope had, of course, the resource of being active in good works around the parish, as must many clergymen’s daughters more or less similarly stranded. But Gaston felt impatient and irritated. It was in this mood that he ran into Penelope’s husband.

  Caspar was taking a turn in the vicarage garden. He had a drab-coloured journal under his arm. It doubtless contained, Gaston thought, this serious scholar’s own sort of nonsense, remote from anything concerning the variable length of aeroplanes.