The Villa Golitsyn

by Read, Piers Paul;

  ‘Listen,’ said Priss to Willy. ‘Why don’t you take Simon up to the castle while we do the shopping?’

  Willy sighed. ‘It’s a terrible climb.’

  ‘Go on. It’ll do you good. We’ll meet you here in an hour’s time.’

  Willy and Simon set off through the narrow streets of the Old Town and then climbed the steps which led up the hill. It was warm. Simon removed his jacket. Willy, though taller than his friend, and with longer legs, lagged behind. Simon turned every now and then to wait for him. Willy’s face was flushed but open and happy; and behind him there was an ever widening view of Nice and the Baie des Anges. They came to a small park laid out on what had once been the ramparts. From here they looked down upon the port – the pretty colonnades, the restaurants on the quai, and the large white ferry-boat waiting to set sail to Corsica.

  ‘There’s Clöe,’ said Willy, pointing down at the port.

  ‘Who’s Clöe?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Our boat. She’s blue. Small. Next to that cruiser.’

  It was impossible to tell which of the many boats was his. ‘I didn’t know you could sail,’ said Simon.

  ‘We used to do a lot,’ said Willy. ‘We had a much bigger boat – a yacht – but it meant hiring a crew and being swindled so we sold it and bought Clöe.’

  ‘Can you manage her on your own?’

  ‘Oh yes, if I’m sober. Priss is a good sailor, too.’

  They continued their climb. ‘There’s a place at the top where you can get a drink,’ said Willy solicitously, as if his guest had complained of thirst, ‘unless it’s already closed for the season. We’ll see.’

  The café, when they reached it, was deserted. ‘It’s a little early,’ said Willy, looking at his watch. ‘Perhaps they’ll open later on.’ Breathing heavily he climbed the steps which led on up to the highest point of the citadel – a belvedere built above a cascade. They stood there, facing west, with the water gushing out beneath their feet. In the distance Simon could make out the Cap d’Antibes and the Esterel Hills: then, closer at hand, the airport and the part of Nice where the Ludleys had their villa. Closer still he could make out the tree-lined boulevards of the nineteenth-century section of the city which was divided from the older town by the covered River Paillon. The Old Town itself was directly beneath them – the dome of the Cathedral, the campanile of the town hall, and the terracotta tiles of the many roofs all making it seem more like a miniature Florence than a city in France.

  ‘I’ve grown very fond of Nice,’ said Willy with a tone of affection in his voice. ‘Neither too big nor too small, with enough people to give it life, and the sea and the mountains like two lungs. It’s modest, too. The state is inconspicuous – the Prefecture and the Palais de Justice tucked away between the market and the Cathedral. That’s why Herzen liked it. He hated Paris, just because of its monuments to oppressive regimes – the Louvre, Versailles, Les Invalides. Here the largest buildings are those old hotels …’ He pointed to two or three imposing buildings perched above Nice. ‘That was the Imperial in the Russian quarter where the grand dukes used to stay. It’s a lycée now. And that one in Cimiez was the Regina. Flats now, I think. Queen Victoria stayed there with John Brown.’ He spoke quite casually as if Queen Victoria and John Brown were friends they had in common. ‘We’ll go up to Cimiez,’ he said, ‘and take a look – the Regina Hotel and the Roman arena – the ruins of two empires side by side.’

  ‘Melancholy,’ said Simon.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ruins of Empire – of ours, at any rate.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Willy. ‘It was a dreadful institution – the systematic exploitation of weaker people dressed up with sanctimonious cant about the spread of religion and civilization.’

  ‘You’re glad it came to an end?’

  ‘Yes. I’m glad it’s gone, and all our self-important posturing has gone with it.’

  They turned to go down.

  ‘Why,’ asked Simon, pointing to a plaque in the corner of the cobbled belvedere, ‘is this called after Nietzsche?’

  ‘The French have a passion for giving a name to every little cul-de-sac and alleyway.’

  ‘But why Nietzsche?’

  ‘He must have come up here. He thought of Zarathustra while walking up to Eze from the sea.’ Willy started down the steps towards the café.

  ‘I would never have associated Nietzsche with the South of France,’ said Simon.

  ‘No one does. They only think of Somerset Maugham and Scott Fitzgerald. But other writers came here before they did. Before Nietzsche too. Smollett started the whole thing off in the eighteenth century. I can’t think why. It hasn’t inspired me to write a thing.’

  The café was still closed. Willy pressed his nose against the glass of the door like a child at the window of a toy shop. A middle-aged woman was sweeping the floor. When Willy rapped on the door she looked up and shook her head. He lifted his hand and elbow to mime a man taking a drink. She shook her head again. He knocked again. She shrugged her shoulders and let them in. They sat at a table and a few minutes later Willy was served with a glass of cognac and Simon with a cup of coffee.

  ‘Some people are like camels,’ said Willy with a sigh, ‘but I seem to have been born without a hump. I need continuous replenishment.’ He emptied his glass and called for another one. The woman brought over the bottle to fill it: there was no expression on her face, as if the exigencies of an alcoholic were part of her everyday life.

  ‘Do you read Nietzsche now?’ Simon asked Willy.

  ‘I never read. It gives me a headache.’

  ‘You used to read him.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘He had quite an influence on your life.’

  Willy drank from his glass and sniffed.

  ‘And ours,’ said Simon.

  ‘How was that?’ He seemed a little bored.

  ‘Well, you convinced us all that God was dead.’

  ‘Madame,’ Willy shouted, ‘Encore un cognac, s’il vous plaît.’

  ‘That Christian virtues were human vices …’

  ‘S’il vous plaît, madame …’

  ‘That it was cowardly and contemptible to live on the moral capital of Christianity if you didn’t believe in its tenets.’

  The woman came to their table. She glanced at Simon with no expression in her eyes. She filled Willy’s glass.

  ‘You said that Nietzsche’s superman was beyond good and evil; that he makes his own morality.’

  Willy sipped his brandy sparingly, as if he had decided that this was the last glass. ‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘But how can you remember that from so many years ago?’

  ‘It made a strong impression.’

  ‘They were vivid years, weren’t they? I thought everything was possible.’

  ‘And permissible?’

  ‘Yes. Possible and permissible.’

  ‘And have you changed since then?’

  He did not answer but turned to Simon and asked: ‘And you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Is everything possible now?’

  ‘If you set your mind to it.’

  ‘And permissible?’

  Simon hesitated. ‘No, I suppose not. I think it’s wrong to hurt others.’

  ‘But that’s all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you hurt?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Didn’t your wife leave you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I was hurt.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Simon shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s over now.’

  ‘It isn’t easy to get on with women,’ said Willy with a sympathetic smile.

  ‘You never know what they want.’

  ‘They often don’t know themselves.’

  ‘If you’re nice to them, you’re weak; and if you assert yourself, you’re a bully.’

  ‘At least you have a son,’ said Willy. ‘I envy you that.’

  ‘I’d rather have a
wife,’ said Simon.

  ‘One always wants what one hasn’t got.’

  ‘You’ve been lucky with Priss.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘She puts up with a lot.’

  ‘She’s different from the general run of women, isn’t she?’

  Willy did not answer his question. ‘Before Priss,’ he said, ‘in my last year at Cambridge, and later in London, I was very much in love with another girl. We were engaged – privately, not publicly – until someone told me that she was sleeping with another man. She apparently wanted to marry me for my money but found I was no good in bed.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I asked her if it was true. She denied it. She swore on the Bible, on her mother’s grave, on everything, that it was a lie. Then I pretended that I’d been sleeping with other girls – that I wanted an open, modern marriage – so she admitted that she’d been sleeping with this other fellow since Cambridge, not because she loved him – she still insisted that she loved me – but because she needed him … needed him physically, you understand.’

  Willy had turned a little pale. He shook his head. ‘I tell you, Simon, it was enough to put me off love and sex and the whole damn thing.’

  ‘Until Priss came along.’

  ‘I knew where I was with Priss.’

  They stood and went to the bar where Willy paid the bill. ‘I’m very glad you came out here, Simon,’ he said. ‘I’ve often thought about you and wished you were here.’

  ‘It was you who left us, Willy.’

  ‘I know. And it was a mistake. I greatly underestimated the importance of friendship.’

  ‘You could have made some friends out here.’

  ‘No Frenchman has the qualities I missed in you.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Your common sense. Your practical idea of right and wrong.’

  ‘But that’s just what Nietzsche despised – people living according to a conventional, Christian morality without believing in Christ.’

  ‘But you never felt you had to live up to Nietzsche.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You never felt you had to confound conventional morality.’

  Simon smiled with his lips turned down. ‘No. I left that to my wife.’

  ‘That’s almost conventional, nowadays,’ said Willy, ‘to run off with someone else.’

  ‘Conventional, but hardly Christian.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Done anything to confound conventional morality?’

  ‘Oh yes, in my time.’ He looked away. ‘I’ll tell you about it one day, but not now. We’re late as it is and Priss hates waiting.’ After saying this he strode ahead, staggering down the hill, his long legs stiff like stilts.

  NINE

  Willy was shouting drunk at lunch – ad-libbing lines from his Herzen in a preposterous German accent, knocking over the gravy-boat, and clasping ‘Natalie’s’ (Helen’s) knees under the table as she ate her pudding. Helen was embarrassed. Priss looked cross. Once or twice she glanced irritably at Simon, as if he was to blame for the cognac in the café; and since he was reluctant to be in her bad books, Simon tried to make up for his failure as a chaperone by trying to amuse her with his conversation. She did not pay much attention to what he said. Charlie joined in the conversation but he too seemed nervous of Priss and did not want to seem too friendly to Simon if Simon was in disgrace. Helen winked at him in commiseration: it was as if they were all back at school.

  After lunch they had coffee, then went to their rooms for a siesta. Instead of sleeping or reading Herzen, Simon lay on his bed thinking about Willy – about the differences and similarities between the middle-aged drunk living here in Nice and the golden-haired hero he remembered from school.

  At first sight they had nothing in common; but there in the café, when they had talked about Simon’s divorce, Willy had talked to him with just that concern which had led Simon to adore him as a boy. People who knew him a little called it ‘Ludley’s charm’, but it was more than charm – a deep sympathy, a concentration of kindness, that Simon had never known in anyone else. He felt, when Willy considered him in this way, like a sick child whose father or mother touches his brow and brushes back his sweated hair.

  How then had it happened, Simon asked himself, that someone who had inspired that trust – whom once he would have followed into Hell itself – had changed from a hero into a drunk? The only one of his generation to have believed that a man must shape his destiny by the exercise of his will, he was now like the gnarled root of a great tree carried down by the River Var, left stranded on the stony beach of the Baie des Anges.

  Why did Willy live in Nice? He had given a dozen different reasons in the past twenty-four hours – to walk on the Promenade des Anglais, to avoid income tax, because Nietzsche had lived there, because Herzen had lived there, because there was cheap wine, fresh vegetables, an atmosphere of the forgiveness of sins: but behind it all was the clear understanding that Willy lived in Nice because he could not live in England.

  And why could he not live in England? Not, certainly, because he drank: there were plenty of fellow alcoholics in the British Isles. It must be because of Djakarta. He was afraid or ashamed to return to the country he had betrayed, and remorse for what he had done to a friend had led him to drink. The treason explained the drinking and the drinking confirmed the treason. The more Simon thought about it, the more probable it seemed that Willy in his twenties had only affected the detachment of a diplomat and had inwardly raged to see the American marines land in Vietnam; that he had felt humiliated by the supine support of his own government for the Americans, and had linked the struggle of the Vietcong in Indo-China with the Indonesians’ undeclared war against Britain in Malaysia.

  Yet to be satisfied with a hypothesis was not to prove it. Simon knew that while he was in Nice he must extract a confession from Willy which would settle the question of the Djakarta leak once and for all; and if Simon felt some slight anxiety as to whether it was honourable or not to stay in the house of a friend just to trap him into an incriminating admission of guilt, he calmed it now with the thought that by identifying the source of Willy’s remorse, he might help him to give up drinking.

  There was a tap on the door. Simon asked whoever it was to come in, and Helen’s head appeared between the door and the jamb. ‘Are you asleep?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to go for a swim? Priss and I thought we’d go down to the beach.’

  ‘Is it warm enough?’

  ‘Oh yes. Come on. If we were in England we’d think it was boiling.’

  Simon heaved his body off the bed. ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ he said.

  When she had left him, he put on his bathing trunks beneath his trousers and then came downstairs to find Helen and Priss waiting for him in the hall.

  ‘It’s really quite nice at this time of year,’ said Priss as she led the way down the steps. ‘The crowds have gone, but the sea is still warm.’ She seemed to have forgiven Simon for the cognac in the castle.

  ‘Does Willy ever swim?’ Simon asked.

  ‘He used to, when we first came out here, but he doesn’t like the topless girls.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Ask him.’

  They walked down the steps of the boulevard, and on down past Les Grands Cèdres – the large block of flats which stood between the Villa Golitsyn and the sea. They crossed the Promenade at the traffic lights and went down onto the public beach. Priss pitched camp by throwing down her towel about five yards from the sea, and then flicked off her skirt and blouse and lay back in her bikini. Simon and Helen changed more cautiously, but then Priss had a slim figure and brown skin whereas the newcomers were both white and less sure of their bodies – Helen because of the adolescent plumpness which still filled out her limbs, Simon because of the slack flesh around his stomac
h.

  Helen soon lost her selfconsciousness and went into the sea. Simon watched her splashing around like a porpoise, thinking how like her movements were to his daughter’s in Norfolk that summer. At the same time, despite her childishness, and the modesty of the one-piece bathing dress that covered half her body, he saw that she was prettier than she had seemed on the train.

  Pretty as she was, she did not compare to Priss, who lay next to him on the shingle. A body expresses character like a face, and while Helen’s pubescence betrayed a charming but empty personality, Priss’s arms and legs – her elbows, shoulders and neck – had the same strong and graceful shape as her character – the human equivalent of a racing yacht where Helen was more like a dinghy.

  It was warm. Priss faced away from him, so Simon could study her figure without impropriety. Normally nothing is less erotic than a semi-dressed body laid flat on the beach, but with his emotions already engaged by her personality, Simon imagined himself next to Priss on a bed. She lifted herself up, turned, and sat for a moment with her knees near her chin, studying the toenails: and Simon, with his eyes half-closed and concealed in any case behind his sun spectacles, had a clear view from only a few inches of the underside of her body – her delicate bosom, neither large nor small; the neat wrinkling of her concave stomach with its long, slim silver scar; and the smooth-sided canyon between her legs.

  He raised his torso and turned as if to bronze the side of his body: sexual desire was an uncomfortable sensation for a man lying face-down on a pebble beach. For a moment he watched Helen frolicking in the sea; then he turned to Priss and said: ‘I’m sorry about this morning.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. I should have warned you.’

  ‘Even if you had, I don’t see how I could have stopped him.’

  ‘I think you could.’

  ‘How?’

  She turned her gaze from her toenails to look at Simon. ‘He respects you,’ she said. ‘If you told him how awful it is for everyone …’

  ‘I’m sure he knows.’

  ‘He knows, but he doesn’t care. He thinks it’s contemptible to bother about what other people think of him.’

  ‘I remember.’