Alexandra replied to my club:
Darling, I’m so very sorry, and. disappointed to have your news. It’s not to be wondered at, you funking—as you call it—the Awful Moment. I would, if I still, a little bit, cared. Someday perhaps I ought to meet Harriet. I feel I might like her, even though she would probably hate me. Darling, why haven’t you a perfect harridan of a wife who creates scenes and sleeps with other men and defies all sympathy?
When you left me on Friday morning I had a wild impulse to rise, even though it was only five o’clock, and play Jackie’s piano. So by six-thirty I was bathed and tarted up but not at all in my right mind. Picture the early morning sun falling through the french windows at one over-strung girl playing the ‘Barcarolle,’ very badly, on one over-strung Steinway. When Pierre came in at seven he obviously thought I was mad. In fact, with that Gallic perception one hears about, I suspect both he and Louise have smelt out that something is afoot—though, as I do my own bedroom and do it carefully, I believe they can only guess. They most probably think I’m carrying on in the evenings with David McNair.
I leave for Cap-Ferrat on Friday. Can you come down south ever? Even if you brought Harriet when she is able to convalesce, it would be better than nothing; you would be entitled to call on the Fayardes—and I would be there. It would be better than nothing.
All my love.
A.
During the last weeks of July I spent most of my time pretending to work. To be able to retreat into my study was a relief from contact and decision. Harriet began a course of treatment, pills and injections, and went to the hospital twice weekly for exercise and therapy. I heard from my father that he and Helen planned their wedding for September. I wrote and said we could come. The break-up would have happened before then, but it could not be anticipated. It was to be a registry-office wedding. My poor mother.
But no doubt my mother did not know. No doubt my father, having seen so many human beings degenerate and disintegrate into the chemical elements of death, was convinced that she did not know and never would know.
Sometime I must tackle him about his beliefs. It was something which had much perplexed me when, as a young doctor, I had come upon it in its acutest form in walking the wards. The old lady, dying with the serenest confidence and asking for a white rose to be laid on her pillow because this signified the purity of Christ. The young man making plans for leaving hospital next month when we knew he had advanced cancer of the lungs. The old man asking for something to ease his pain when there was nothing left for him but the illegal unobtainable overdose.
That was what I had never been able to stand, the sight of people in pain. Nor the conventional priest mouthing his apathetic consolation. ‘ God in His eternal wisdom.…’ ‘Be sure that God sees you and understands.…’ What understanding, what eternal wisdom was this, that claimed to penetrate to the clinical barrenness of the surgical ward, but was aloof in its pity? How did God become a part of the antiseptics, the anaesthesia and the pain; the humiliation, the shabby degradation of personality?
Yet if not God, what else? The rationalists, the scientists, the humanists, offered no comfort but the comfort of a feeble acceptance. Perhaps it was better to blaspheme and protest.
In mid-August I had a letter from Charisse telling me the chosen theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiens. He also wrote that my play was in three acts, but in Paris much the more usual habit was to have a single interval. Did I prefer to sandwich two acts together, with only a brief curtain in between—this was difficult in my play because the second act was much the longest—or would I prefer to contrive a new curtain midway through the second act?
This was a provoking problem to rear its head and would possibly have taken me to see him in any event. But what left me in no doubt at all was that he wrote from Nice.
Chapter Seven
The shoddy subterfuges I planned to dissuade Harriet from coming were after all not needed. The drugs were upsetting her, and the twice-weekly routine of treatment in hospital was something she did not wish to break. Even the prospect of several days lying on a beach in the sun did not weigh heavy enough. She couldn’t swim, had never been much of a bather, and didn’t enjoy crowds.
Before I left she said: ‘Go and enjoy yourself. But don’t stay too long.’ When I looked up she went on: ‘ Two reasons, Morris. One, I need you. Two, it’s a pity to pause too long when you’re in the middle of a play.’
‘First reason acknowledged. Second I’m not so sure of. I need a break. I keep getting bogged down on the inessentials.’
‘You ought to be relentless, Morris. Relentless in writing it down. Once the bones are there you can drape them and undrape them at will.’
I kept silent, remembering the endless patterns I had drawn on the margins of the paper representing the hours of non-work.
She said: ‘Did you pack those short-sleeved linen shirts? You’ll need them there. Have you got bathing trunks worth looking at? If you arrive in France without them, it’s sure to be early closing day or you’ll be whisked off somewhere out of reach of the shops.’
‘I’ll get a pair on the way to the air terminal.’
‘Ring me as soon as you arrive, as we’ll want to be sure where to find you in case of need. And don’t get blistered. I think people are revolting with skin peeling.’
‘I don’t blister.’
‘I must say you’ve hardly had a chance to find out in the last few years.… I suppose I really have kept your nose to the grindstone, haven’t I?’
‘You have?’ I said. ‘You’ve encouraged me to keep it there. I don’t at all feel like a galley-slave.’
She said: ‘You’re mixing your metaphors, dear. Anyway, have a good time; and don’t forget me. I’ll keep you informed if anything happens.…’
I squeezed in at a hotel in Cap-Ferrat. I had driven from Nice airport with no attempt to make contact with Charisse. That could wait. What I could not wait for was to see Alexandra.
I asked at the hotel where the Villa Alberta was, and it was four o’clock when I walked up the hot shimmering dusty road and turned in at the iron gates with the Belgian coats of arms on them. The Comte and Comtesse were lying panting gently on white plastic chaises-longues on the flagged terrace which looked over the narrow blue tongue of Fosse. The bottles around them suggested they didn’t care for tea.
Oddly, since they sprang from different cultures, they might have been brother and sister. The same shoe-black hair—dyed in each case, but dyed to the original colour—the same square peasant build, ugly but hand tooled to take wear and tear; the same moon-pitted complexion—latest space photo; the same discoloured worldly eyes. They welcomed me warmly as they would have any diversion, vaguely remembering a play with which I was connected and hoping they would not have to name it before I did. They invited me to have a drink, said how hot it was, stretched their bare gnarled legs in the sun, asked when I had arrived and where I was staying and for how long.
Cap-Ferrat is a place for celebrities, and the names of film stars and millionaires floated around like prize goldfish in a bowl. The Fayardes had a large cabin cruiser moored at the slipway below the house, and they had been aboard most of the day. At last the name I was waiting for cropped up.
‘Alexandra? Is that your secretary, the dark girl?’
‘Yes,’ the Countess munched an olive. ‘Sandra Wilshere. Excellent creature. Not so efficient as to get in your hair but always around with the right gestures at the right times.’
‘How long it is we shall keep her now,’ said the Count, picking his front teeth with the nail of his little finger.
‘Is she thinking of leaving you?’
‘We hope not,’ said the Countess, ‘but Trevor Dain’s down here and making a great play at her. But a great play. And he’s between divorces, so he’s running without his proper handicap.…’
A servant came out to refill our glasses; but Jackie refused more.
‘Trouble with my liver today. Can’t play h
ooky with your liver. I mean—you have two kidneys, two lungs, two eyes, etc. But the one-only things you have to watch.’
‘Trevor Dain,’ I said. ‘What’s he doing down here? Making a film of the war in the Mediterranean?’
‘As of here and now, I suspect he’s water-skiing with my pretty secretary, but officially he’s just finished a movie and is taking a rest. They say he may get an Oscar for his last thing, whatever it was. I must say, every moving picture he makes seems exactly like the last to me.’
‘You must let me show you the villa,’ said the Count, still picking his eye-tooth. ‘It has been furnished in the English Chippendale style, but with additions of a more modern idea. We greatly are lacking a swimming pool. Villa Marbella on the other side has the sea-water swimming pool. I say to Jackie, next year we must take that instead.’
‘Yes,’ said his wife, ‘that’s if we come here. I’ve a fancy for Venice. If we could get one of those palazzos on the Grand Canal. I spent the summer of fifty-nine in Venice with Hubert.’
While they talked I glanced out at the willow pattern of the sea, and coming round the rocky headland was a speedboat cleaving a white line like a crack in a plate.
Jules de la Fayarde was inviting me to go in. It seemed that he collected historic manuscripts and wished to talk about them. I didn’t listen very attentively, and presently there were voices on the terrace; and through the french window I saw Alexandra in company with a sharp-nosed handsome man of about forty whom I recognised as the hero of half the heroic war-films of the last decade.
The Count, having no knowledge of my best interests, led me on and away from the terrace and for an interminable ten minutes around the villa. Once from an upstairs window I heard Alexandra laughing. When we got down again she had disappeared and Trevor Dain was sitting sprawling in a chair beside the Countess sipping a whisky and water. We were introduced.
Alexandra came back. It was clear from her manner that she already knew I was there, for with off-hand politeness she greeted me and sat down and joined the general talk. I knew immediately again on sight of her that my love for her was no delusion, but it was hard to believe that I had ever possessed her. Those days in Paris were a wild man’s dream. I saw Trevor Dain taking her in: red-strapped sandals, brown smooth bare legs, rounded white-clad thighs—soft young stomach, scarlet shirt deep cut to show the valley between the breasts, columned neck slightly sore with the sun, dark hair falling on shoulders and fine-formed gracious smiling face half masked by sun-glasses. My love.
No one else’s. Not Trevor Data’s. My love.
‘The Bourse,’ said Jules de la Fayarde, adding a smell of garlic to those cubic inches of the Mediterranean air to leeward of him, ‘is not for me. The great companies, Mr. Scott, they no doubt are well managed, well ordered. But they are out of the investor’s control. Is that not so? For me, I prefer some hand in my own affairs. So I buy and sell for myself. See? Not motor stock, oils, textiles or the like. Manuscripts, paintings, medals, even sometimes books. These I know and understand a little. These I can possess. And although they pay no stock interest, they go always up. If properly bought they go always up. If they are historical then every year they become older and so more valuable. Does it not stand to sense?’
Trevor Dain was going to Monte Carlo that evening to gamble, and wanted Alexandra to go with him. She said she had letters to write, and anyway Jackie might want her. Jackie said she was going to gamble too. Jules looked surprised on hearing this and clicked his teeth and shook his head. Casting counters upon a table for high stakes was not for him. What about me? I shook my head. I had been in England at midday and was sleepy.
At six four other people arrived, and I took the opportunity to go. I had already let the company know where I was staying. Sure enough when I got into the hotel the telephone was ringing and the receptionist said: ‘For you, monsieur.’ It was Alexandra to say she would be free at nine.
We met on the quay and walked together through the little town, which was murmurous with people. Cars probed the narrow streets like medical isotopes in a bloodstream; in the harbour the big private yachts winked at each other and the thick water shimmered with their broken reflections. It was warm, and a half moon hung in a suitable part of the sky.
She said: ‘If I’d known you were coming … You didn’t write.’
‘No, there was hardly time.’
‘How is Harriet?’
‘Still having treatment.’
We were both a little hesitant to put out the contacts again.
‘Can you stay long?’
‘Three or four days. Charisse was down here and it gave me the opportunity.… Alexandra, it’s seemed an age.’
‘Yes … You haven’t told Harriet yet?’
‘No.’
We had walked through the square, past the Syndicat d’Initiative building and left the last of the shops behind. Written halfway up the sky were the road lights of the Moyenne Corniche. I struggled for honesty. Trevor Dain’s presence this afternoon sapped one’s courage.
‘Alexandra, Harriet has got arthritis of the spine. I didn’t—couldn’t exactly explain that by letter. It means not that she’s going to be acutely ill for a short period so much as chronically ill for a long period. Of course we don’t know yet, can’t be sure; she may suddenly react to treatment and be much better; but it’s uncertain. I’ve spent this month in a hell of indecision. There must come a moment to tell her about us, but it hasn’t come yet.’
Now that we were out of the town the shadowy moonlight had a chance of giving Alexandra’s expression the mature shadowy beauty I remembered in the taxi that night in July.
‘Does it mean you may never tell her?’
‘That is the one thing it doesn’t mean—I swear.’
‘But if she doesn’t get better. May it not mean she’ll become an invalid, a cripple, in pain? How could you tell her then?’
We stopped at a balustrade overlooking the bay and I turned her towards me. ‘I promise you. Look, I’m not a saint—isn’t that guarantee enough? I want you. I want only you. I want to marry you and I have only one life. However hard it may be, I have to tell her—and sometime soon. D’you believe me?’
‘Yes.’
When I kissed her her lips were cold with the night air. I said: ‘This illness has been as much of a shock to her as it has to me. Imagine being told what she has been told, at her age—she’s only thirty-nine. But in time she’ll either get better with the treatment or adjust herself to the idea. In either case I can break with her then. But it’s almost impossible to kick a man when he’s first down—still less a woman one owes so much to.’
‘I suppose I should like you better for not being ruthless.’
‘And don’t you?’
She shivered slightly. ‘I only know I don’t like this hole-in-corner business—the whisperings and the secret meetings.’
We walked slowly on, along the path to Beaulieu.
I said: ‘What about this man Trevor Dain?’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, he’s pretty good-looking—’
‘So are you.’
‘And he can turn on the charm like a klieg light. When I saw you together I had a horrible moment of alarm—of jealousy.’
She squeezed my arm. ‘You shouldn’t have had.’
‘No, I shouldn’t have had. Because already I should know you too well to suppose you’d be interested in someone else only a month after Paris.’
She was silent a moment. ‘ I should tell you that David McNair’s down here too. He’s staying at Cap-d’Ail.’
‘And there is more danger from him?’
‘I didn’t say so. But if he should turn up while you’re here I wouldn’t want you not to know.’
The following morning I joined her and the Fayardes and Trevor Dain and three others on board their large motor launch. We separated for lunch because Alexandra was meeting a school friend in Villefranche in the afternoon, and I th
ought I would take the opportunity of seeing Charisse in Nice. We arranged to meet again after dinner, about nine.
I took a chance on finding Charisse in, but he was away, fishing in the Porquerolles, and would not be back until the morrow. I went to a garage and was lucky enough to find a hire-Renault free. By five o’clock I was edging a tentative way back towards Cap-Ferrat among the massed traffic of the Basse Corniche. When I got to the fork to Villefranche there was a traffic jam, and when it came time to move I took the right fork down the hill towards the old port. Time for seeing Alexandra was so short that any opportunity was better than none; and by now she might be finished with her friend and ready for a lift home. Following a Peugeot and pursued by two Citroëns, I reached the bottom of the snaky hill and drove along the quay, glancing along the tables of the cafés to see if she could be spotted.
But it wasn’t easy to drive and look at the same time, so I found a gap at the end of the quay and parked the car and walked back.
No luck all the way along until I passed the Cocteau Chapel. Then I saw an open sports car, a grey Ferrari, turn slowly out of the car park. Alexandra was in it. She was just tying an Italian silk scarf round her head. The driver was Trevor Dain.
I got back to the hotel and squeezed the Renault into the drive in front. Then I went upstairs and lay on the bed and smoked for a while. Then I put on bathing trunks and swam off the end of the quay. The water was warm and still, except for the ripples caused by speedboats from La Reserve. I got out and lay on the boulders in the rays of the declining sun. When the heat had gone I walked back to the hotel and rang the Fayardes to say that after all I’d like to take them up on their invitation to dinner.
At eight I walked up their drive among the noisy cicadas. The rising moon lit up a wisp of hair in the sky dropped by a Caravelle on its way to Paris.
Jackie de la Fayarde was in Chinese pyjamas, and her cigarette holder was as long as a blow-pipe. ‘Darling, that’s neighbourly of you to come. What’ll you drink: Haig, Bourbon, Gordon’s, Stolichnaya? Sandra’s not home yet.’
After the Act Page 7
