by Alec Waugh
‘You’ve not been to the French Riviera?’
‘I’ve not seen the Mediterranean.’
‘Then that’s the next item on our programme.’
To show her the Mediterranean, to show those lovely places to someone who had only read of them, only seen them on the cinema, those quiet little tucked-away fishing villages like Cassis; the majestic curve of the Promenade des Anglais; the yachts at Cannes with their white masts swaying against the sky; the mountain villages like Eze and St. Paul de Vence with their narrow streets, that once stood as citadels against the Saracens; to show these places to someone with her capacity for enjoyment. She brought back his youth to him. ‘When is the Rally?’ she was asking.
‘In the middle of May. We’ll get there soon after Easter. We’ll motor down the Rhône, taking it quietly … Avignon, Orange, Nîmes, Tarason.’ He lingered over the words, like a Moslem with his yellow beads. Her eyes grew brighter. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.
Their half-bottle of champagne was finished. It was close on half past six.
‘If we have the other half, we shall have to hurry over getting dressed,’ he said.
‘That’s very true.’
There was a twinkle of mischief in her eye.
‘It’s better to be leisurely after all that snow and sun.’
‘Much better.’
‘On our way then. Yes?’
He paused outside her door. ‘Can I come and talk to you, in about ten minutes?’
‘Do that,’ she said.
An hour and a half later he stood in his own room, his father’s letter in his hand. It was a short letter. ‘My dear son,’ it began, ‘it is time that you came back to your own country.’ It was a command, among a people where the father’s word was law. Rhya put the letter down. A Latin tag crossed his memory. Lusisti satis. You have played enough. He walked over to the window. The shutters had not been closed. He pulled back the curtains. It was a cloudless night. The Eiger stood remote, majestic, against the sky. The moonlight glazed its flanks; a shining, polished surface, reaching to the soft snow of the lower slopes. Snow, shall I ever see snow again? he thought. Would snow, the memory of snow, become a symbol of everything that he had loved in Europe, everything that he was exiled from?
2
A short staircase led from the main lobby to the bar. Rhya and Annetta always met there before dinner. He arrived a quarter of an hour earlier than he had arranged. He wanted to give the wine time to cool. He also wanted to savour the last-time feeling of the occasion. His father had not insisted on an immediate return. But Rhya was not the man to prolong a moment. There was no reason why he should not go at once. Best take his medicine quickly.
At the sight of Annetta at the stairway’s head, his heart ached suddenly. He had been thinking only of himself and not of her. How was she going to take this? At any rate there was no money problem. She was self-sufficient. There would be no awkward discussion about the extent or period of an allowance; no equivalent for alimony. She would value, for its own sake, whatever piece of jewellery he gave her as a farewell token. They had exchanged no vows, made no ‘forever’ promises. For that very reason, he felt the more strained now. He went straight to the point.
‘I’ve had a summons from my father. He wants me back.’
‘How soon?’
‘Right away.’
‘Then Monte Carlo’s off?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘Well …’ She smiled. ‘I’ll see it on the film and think of you.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘It’s funny, but I’ve never really pictured that life of yours out there. I knew you’d have to go back one day, but it was a long time off. I … What’s it really like?’
‘You’ve seen films of the Far East?’
‘Yes, but films are different. You don’t feel you’re there, not even in Technicolor. The heat, for instance. It is very hot there, isn’t it?’
‘It’s very hot.’
‘Hotter than the hottest day in England?’
‘Hot in a different way. There’s the humidity: but it’s never stifling as it is in London in a heat wave.’
‘I read about so many degrees of heat, so many degrees of cold; it doesn’t convey a thing to me. When I’m cold I can’t remember what being hot is like.’
Never see snow again, he thought.
‘Then there’re the scents. It’s something that one can’t imagine when one hears someone recite ‘Mandalay’, the drowsy tropic smells and the tinkly temple bells. One thinks that one hears and smells it, but one doesn’t, does one?’
‘No, not really.’
How could you explain it, he thought, that mingling of so many scents? The flowers and the joss sticks, the cooking and unwashed bodies; the pungent scents and sweet scents. When the aeroplane descended at Singapore, he would breathe it in with a slow deep relish. Home again, he’d think.
‘Do you live in a great palace?’ she was asking. ‘Do you have slaves and concubines?’
‘Darling, this is the twentieth century.’
‘It may be here, but it isn’t there. What about Ibn Saud and all his wives? Have you any photographs of your home?’
She was talking about his return with so much enthusiasm that he began to feel himself excited. She had a contagious quality of enjoyment.
‘It’ll seem very strange to you after being here so long. You’ve become a part of our life. I suppose that’s why I never tried to picture your life out there, or perhaps it’s just me. I live in the minute. My father keeps on complaining. “Don’t you ever look ahead?” he asks. I don’t see why I should. It was fun yesterday. It’s being fun today. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be fun too tomorrow.’
He nodded. If you had a sunny nature, you expected life to go on being good, and life rewarded you, paying you in the currency you’d earned. She was disappointed about the Monte Carlo Rally: but by the time May arrived she’d have found something to take its place. What would happen to her next? Sooner or later there’d be a successor. Sooner, more probably than later … or maybe not. She had never talked about her lovers. He had no idea whether there had been few or many. A woman had once said to him, ‘One of the nicest things about starting a new affair is breaking off an old one.’ Had it been like that with her, had his arrival in her life given her the resolution to snap off something that had been dragging on out of indolent good nature? He did not know, he did not want to know, but he felt his nerves twitching at the thought that she might watch the Monte Carlo Rally with someone else.
‘Letters are a mistake,’ she was saying, ‘they become an obligation. So you must tell me all you can before you leave. I want to be able to picture you.’
‘Why not come out and see for yourself?’
She shook her head. ‘I’d feel very lost there.’
‘Not if I were there.’
‘Oh yes, I should. You’d be very busy. You’d never know when you’d be free. It would be worse than having an affair with a married man, and enough of my friends have made that mistake to warn me.’
‘Then why not marry me?’
A second before, it was the last thing that he had meant to say. Not once had marriage to her occurred to him. Now that it had, he was amazed by his obtuseness. What had he been thinking about all these weeks?
‘Marry you? But … I don’t think you mean that, do you?’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Well, why?’
‘Because …’ Before he had realized what he was doing, he had begun the kind of speech that the heroes of late Victorian novels made when they proposed. ‘I can give you twenty reasons, but I’ll start with three. I’ve never had so much fun with anyone before. You’re the most attractive woman that I’ve ever met. I think you’re the nicest, too. I’ve never heard you say a mean thing about another person. I sincerely believe that you are incapable of doing anything that isn’t straight. Aren’t those three reasons very good?’
‘I’d like to hear the oth
er seventeen.’
She listened, with head bowed and an indulgent smile, in a pose that might well have been employed in a Victorian picture called ‘The Proposal’, though some of the reasons proffered would have failed to bring a blush to Victorian cheeks only because they would have been incomprehensible to Victorian ears. ‘And twentieth,’ he concluded, ‘because I want you to.’
She smiled. ‘That’s all very reassuring; even so …’
She paused. She looked at him, steadily, and her eyes and lips lost their smile. Her voice changed its tone, ceasing to be flippant.
‘When most of us marry, we of my generation, though we make very solemn vows before an altar, we make mental reservations. We say, “This is for ever,” to each other, but to our secret selves we say, “There’s a second chance. This isn’t final. There is divorce.” But with you it would have to be for keeps.’
‘And that’s my twenty-first reason, and the best one. You’re the one person with whom I’d want it to be that way for keeps; besides, there is a twenty-second, I’ll be needing you.’
His voice too, had changed its tone; deepening and growing tender.
‘I’m going to feel very lost,’ he said. ‘I’ve put down roots here. They won’t come up easily and I don’t want them to. I’ll be different from all of them, and if I haven’t someone with me who’ll understand why I’m different, someone …’ he checked. ‘I can’t say more than that, I’ll need you.’
‘In that case then, why then of course it’s “yes”.’
Later, a long time later, in a room looking on to the Eiger, she stretched her arms lazily above her head. ‘Love in the tropics, love under the Southern Cross, they talk so much about it; will it really be any better than love in Switzerland? It’ll need to be very good.’
Chapter Six
It is one thing to propose marriage and to be accepted. It is quite another to get married: particularly if you are a Prince and a Buddhist from the China Seas, striving to ally yourself to an English Anglican of the Galsworthian classes. Annetta’s parents were anxious for a wedding in the Highgate Parish Church. Protocol and the Buddhist faith demanded a very different ceremony. A service of some kind would have to be held under Buddhist rites to make the union acceptable to the Karakis. Grace Kelly was quoted as a precedent. (Grace Kelly’s parents had naturally been anxious to have their daughter’s marriage in their home, in Philadelphia, but royal blood imposed its obligations.) It was finally recognized in Highgate that the wedding would have to take place in Karak.
No sooner had that been decided than a second difficulty arose. The Karakis held strong views on the modesty of their womenfolk. They divided women into two classes, the daughters of the peasantry and of the aristocracy. Virtue was not expected of the former; their duty was towards their family and if their charms could contribute to the support of their parents it was proper to employ them so; it was highly satisfactory when such employment could create for their possessor a dignified and comfortable way of life, but dignity and comfort were corollaries. The essential factor in the transaction or series of transactions was the welfare of the parents.
A daughter of the aristocracy was in a different category. Her first duty was to her parents, but for her a serious marriage was expected to the son of a family equal in standing to her own. This would entail obligations to his family as considerable as those towards her own. In her case the demands of the parents and the family of her future husband were synonymous. She was, that is to say, brought up as a daughter and as a future wife. Her responsibilities as a future wife demanded strict discipline and regard for the proprieties. She was closely chaperoned as a debutante and her marriage was arranged for her by her parents. She was never alone with her fiancé before they were engaged, and even after her betrothal, she was chaperoned in public. On the man’s side, there was admittedly a degree of choice. He saw a varied number of young women, made his choice and presented his credentials to the young lady’s parents. The young lady herself had the option of refusal, but she did not exercise it often. She was conscious of the attentive glances of a number of young men, but usually the first definite intimation of their intentions came to her from her parents. All this was explained to Annetta.
‘How does this affect me?’ she asked.
‘In this way: the Karakis would consider it highly shocking for us to travel out together.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. They must know it is different here. They must have read books, seen films.’
‘Of course, but there are some things they prefer to shut their eyes to, just as you English do. The French call that hypocrisy. I call it common sense. The Karakis prefer to think that I met you in a London drawing-room, that I was struck by your looks and your intelligence, that, anxious to see more of you, I made myself agreeable to your parents; that I was invited to dinner at their house; that I then invited them and you to a theatre; finally satisfying myself that you were a young person not only of outstanding charm, but of adequate social graces to adorn the high position that I planned to offer you. They want to think of me as being on my way home to prepare for you a suitable residence with my family until our nuptials can be celebrated in the Karaki custom.’
‘I see.’ She frowned, then smiled. ‘After these ceremonies are performed am I going to sit in a golden cage beside a lily pond?’
‘On the contrary, you’ll be so free that I shall employ a private detective to see that you don’t misbehave. Think of it as a French marriage. It’s not unlike that.’
And so the Crown Prince returned alone, to be followed three weeks later by his future bride.
2
It was the first time Annetta had been out of Europe. Her holidays had been limited by the amount of foreign currency allotted by the Bank of England. She had had to ask herself whether it was better to spin out her allowance frugally for a month or do herself regally for a fortnight. She and her companions had worked out daily sums to see how they were ‘managing’. They had discussed money half the time. Rhya’s indifference to money had been a great relief. For him there were no currency restrictions. He never needed to wonder what a thing cost, he had only one criterion, ‘What would it be the most fun to do?’
Many different thoughts had passed through her mind when she looked for the first time at the engagement ring upon her finger. One of them was, I shall never again have to worry about the price of anything. But the predominant thought was, I can’t really believe that this is happening to me.
That thought was again predominant when she opened the envelope containing her Pan American air ticket, when she pasted the labels on her suitcases, when she arranged in the small nightcase that the line had given to her as a first-class passenger the few necessities that she would require on the journey and the light cotton frock into which she would change as soon as they reached the tropics.
This can’t be happening to me, she thought, as she drove out from the air terminal to the airport.
Everything looked so familiar as she drove through Richmond, with its childhood memories of picnics in the park and maids-of-honour cakes, turning on to the main arterial road, with its two-storied semi-detached villas in whose carefully tended gardens crocuses were already showing their yellow and mauve flowers; houses that were so uniform that were you to be dropped there blindfolded you would not, when you took off the bandage, have any idea where you were, except that you were in England.
It was shortly after breakfast on one of those bright April mornings that delude you into a belief that summer has already come. The sky was blue, the few clouds that trailed across it were high and feathery, the air was buoyant, the city workers hurrying to their suburban stations, their papers under their arms, swung their umbrellas as though their limbs had already lost their winter stiffness. For them it was a day like any other.
It was the lack of drama that made the morning so dramatic. The weighing of the luggage, the payment of the excess on it; the waiting in the anteroom, were all s
o familiar. In just this way had she set off on those short unambitious trips for Paris, Madrid, Geneva, from which she had returned inside three weeks. There were thirty-five to forty other passengers. Whither were they bound? Outside Europe, almost certainly, or they would have travelled by one of the Continental lines. Ought not they to look different from her fellow passengers on those other flights? Those had been mostly tourists, but the passengers on a flight to the Far East were travelling on business or officially; V.I.P.s bound to a conference, civil servants on return from leave, technicians to open some new project: all of them were on expense accounts. She was probably the only one who had actually bought a ticket.
She took stock of these fellow passengers. On a Continental flight there would be as many women as men, young couples and families going on their annual holiday. But here there was a far greater proportion of men. Firms sent out directors but wives stayed at home. There was only one other young woman, a rather pretty redhead who seemed to be alone; a junior secretary in an embassy, she guessed. The men on the whole were unexceptional: they were of all ages from sixty-five to twenty-five. There were three very shabby men in mackintoshes whom she supposed to be oil company technicians; but the others were nondescript and noncommittal in their urban uniform of felt hat and dark overcoat. Only one or two had an air of prominence. One in particular, a man of about forty, tallish, dark, youthfully middle-aged, who seemed to be aware of her own presence. She looked at him with curiosity. You never expected to see again your fellow travellers on a Continental flight, but some of these surely were going to her world. Would they seem very different East of Suez? She had read in a pre-war novel how dingy the planters of Malaya looked on their return journey when the ship passed Port Said and they exchanged their tropical ducks for ill-cut London suits.
