by Alec Waugh
The five people who stood chatting away the quart d’heure which cocktails had long since robbed of its embarrassment, were, in fact, the five of whom in London Gordon was the fondest. Grace Stanley was almost as old a friend of Gordon’s as her husband. Gordon had indeed been at the dinner party eleven years back at which she and Stanley had met each other. It had been at W. L. George’s, on a night of fog. The telephone had been out of order. They had gone searching for a taxi together through inhospitable streets. It was such a party as Gordon, during his months of travel had pictured himself as giving. On liners, on tropic beaches, on the long continental train as it rattled its way across Salt Lake, he had often thought of the first dinner party he would have on his return to London, with those five people as his guests if he could so arrange it. But now, with the party actually a fact, with himself sitting at the head of his narrow table; with Grace Stanley on his right hand and Vera Marsden on his left; with the amber wine bubbling in the long-stemmed glasses and the grey-black cones of caviare piled beside the soft warm squares of toast upon their plates; with Vera Marsden chattering and laughing, her sentences tumbling over one another; with Stanley’s wit, that had the dry, cool, clear, rich quality of Rhine wine, punctuating her; with Haystack periodically interposing his slow, nasally-mumbled comments; with an atmosphere of friendliness and affection round him, he had a feeling of being out of tune; the same feeling he had that afternoon with Gwen; the same feeling that he had had very often in New York when incidents and personalities that he was ignorant of were being discussed. It was not that he had minded his inability to take part in the conversations; he preferred listening to talking, and would often think when the talk was general: ‘Heavens, I’ve not said anything for five minutes. I’m being a bad guest. I’m not pulling my weight here.’ One of the reasons, indeed, that he preferred his own parties to other people’s was that there was no need for him to talk unless the conversation was flagging or one of his guests was silent. But in New York the fact that he had not known the people and events under discussion had produced the same kind of strain that conversation in French imposed. He had to listen with an extra measure of attention to follow the thread of talk, and should he once lose the thread the effort to recapture it was considerable. To his surprise he was experiencing the same sensation in London, in his own flat, in the company of his five closest friends. He was out of the talk. It was not that he did not know the people that were being discussed. He did. Practically every time. But the events that were being discussed in relation to them were strange. He felt himself the whole time wanting to say: ‘Now, what’s that about?’ ‘I don’t follow that.’ ‘What are you referring to exactly?’ Questions that he did not put since they would have broken the current of the talk. ‘I’ve lost touch,’ he thought. ‘I’ve been away too long.’
He felt lost, here among his oldest, closest friends. But even as he thought it, there was Grace Stanley turning to him.
‘You’ve told us nothing about yourself, Gordon,’ she was saying. ‘Have you been having hundreds of adventures?’
For a moment he wondered whether Stanley had mentioned the cablegram signed ‘Faith.’ Then knew that it was foolish of him to have wondered. Stanley was an inscrutable depository of secrets.
‘It’s less important than what he’s going to do now,’ said Julia. ‘You are going to stay over here a nice long time now, aren’t you?’
‘Till February, anyhow,’ said Gordon.
He was going into the country quietly for a little to get a novel started.
‘What kind of novel?’ Julia asked.
‘A Modern Girl novel.’ Then there would be the cricket. A few club matches round London, then an M.C.C. tour in the West. After that he would get busy on his book again.
‘I’ll probably do what I used to do,’ he said. ‘Spend the week-ends in London and go down quietly to Shenley and work during the middle four days of the week.’
By December his novel should be finished. In February his lecture tour in America would start.
‘And that,’ said Haystack, ‘sounds a pretty pleasant programme.’
Which it was, of course, and Gordon knew it to be. Writing imposes a greater nervous strain than most kinds of work. The profession of writing is uncertain. The temptations it offers are numerous. But the rewards of it are many. Apart altogether from the actual feeling of completion, of self-fulfilment that writing brought, there was no profession which allowed such freedom. He would consider himself during the next six months to be extremely hard at work. Yet three days of every week would be devoted to amusement, and four clear weeks of cricket would be found room for there. It was a pleasant life, a pleasant programme. But to Gordon, fretted by the feeling of being home, yet not where he belonged, the word ‘pleasant’ seemed the least satisfactory label for a life. It was well enough, of course, to play cricket and give dinner parties; to travel and form such rapid impressions of countries as a reviewer did of the books he skimmed through; to write novels describing how the modern girl felt when a man asked her to have dinner at his flat alone, and to have girls saying to him afterwards: ‘I can’t think how you know so exactly what a woman feels.’ It was well enough. But there should be more, surely, to life than that. There was something, surely, that he had had a glimpse of once, as he had stood on a balcony, looking over a green garden to a brown river and wooded banks with the sound of church bells in his ears. He had had a glimpse of something that was more than pleasantness. He had glimpsed it and mislaid it somewhere.
It was as he was thinking that, that the telephone bell began to ring in the next room. A moment later James was bending at his side.
‘It’s the American Transatlantic Service, sir. They want to know if you’ll accept a call from New York at half-past ten.’
‘From New York? Whoever from?’
‘Mrs Roger Sweden.’
‘Mrs Roger Sweden!’ he echoed the name, startled. Then nodded his head quickly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Tell them that it’ll be all right, James.’
At the other end of the table a discussion of the cricket championship had started. He scarcely heard it. That Faith should have rung him up! In heaven’s name, what could have happened to make her do that? What could be wrong? Had her husband been making difficulties. What was there for him to make difficulties about? That cable? It was eight days old. Letters? He hadn’t written to her. She had insisted upon that.
‘Letters are unlucky things. They get misread. They are written in one mood and read in another. One searches for meanings that were never there. Besides, I can’t write. You should know that.’
She wrote left-handed: drawing the pen towards her, with the paper pointed west to east. When she went into banks and turned the cheque round, the cashier would never believe she was going to sign in the right place.
‘I can’t write letters, and you shan’t,’ she had said. ‘This isn’t going to be one-sided. We’ll just cable each other now and then. Then we can begin where we left off.’
There were no letters to be discovered. What was it then that could be wrong? Was she ill? Was she in trouble? In what trouble could she be? ‘In forty minutes,’ he thought, ‘I shall hear her voice.’ He wondered what time it would be there. Four hours earlier. Five o’clock about. She would be at tea somewhere, or at a cocktail party. She would glance at her watch, thinking: ‘I must leave in a minute or two for that call.’ Or maybe she was in the country, at Hyde Park, sitting on the porch, looking out over the green and gold of the garden, with all that wealth of beauty spread before her, and in her heart despair over some grief that she wished to share with him. Interminably the evening took its course. The women rose to leave the men alone to their cigars and brandy. Quarter of an hour later there was a re-grouping round the fireplace. It looked very cosy, with one lamp lit on the yellow table, with the fire-light flickering on to the leather and cloth bindings of the two high sets of shelves; and the women in their soft loose dresses. It was such an eveni
ng as he had upon his travels often dreamed of. But he was far less there actually than he had been when he had been many miles away. Though he sat at Grace Stanley’s side, talking of books and friends, his thoughts were beside a slow-voiced woman who was waiting three thousand miles away to talk to him.
At ten James brought in a tray of drinks. Gin and whisky, ginger-beer and ice and soda-water. In America, where gin cost three dollars and whisky eight dollars a quart, gin—although it was more likely to be pure—was considered a sordid drink, and the girl who was fed gin was inclined to think a man a tight-wad. In London, where gin was as expensive as whisky, women when they did drink anything after dinner, as often as not, preferred it. Julia and Grace asked for gin and ginger-beer. Vera drank ginger-beer alone.
In twenty-five minutes he would know. Never had the passing of any period of time appeared so endless. But it was in less than that time that the bell began to ring. It was the warning signal. Was he ready for the call to come? Yes, he was ready. Would he wait by the telephone then? There was a minute’s delay. He sat on his chair, staring at the steel instrument that in a moment would have been transmuted marvellously into a living presence. And there, three thousand miles away, was a woman waiting as he was waiting. The bell rang again. Eagerly he caught up the receiver. But it was a man’s voice that answered him. Atmospheric conditions were unfavourable, it was explained. In a moment or two he would be rung up again.
It might be three minutes. It might be thirteen. But Gordon could not, in that atmosphere of suspense, go back into the other room; play the host, enter into impersonal conversation. He remained seated in the chair beside the telephone.
On the table beside it was placed a small pile of letters. It was the evening’s post. He picked it up, sorting out the envelopes. Two of them bore an American post mark. They were typewritten. One from Columbus and another from Atlanta, Georgia. They were requests for autographs. There was a note from his bank saying that his account appeared to be overdrawn. There was a statement from Stanley, showing that some seventy-odd pounds would be paid into his bank next day. There was a card for an exhibition of pictures at the Leicester Galleries. There was a card from Lord’s, stating that he had been chosen for the Wessex Tour; and that the first match was in the first week in August.
Looking at the card it seemed as though it had been someone in another existence who had been so anxious to be selected for that tour. With the same detachment that he had talked in the drawing-room a few moments back, he pictured the happiness of those carefree cricket days when you woke to sunshine and the sound of birds. When you came down in flannels to your breakfast to be greeted there by the half-dozen or so other members of the side who were staying at the same hotel; to loiter afterwards over the morning papers; then at about half-past ten or so to motor out through country that contained the heart of England, to grounds that symbolized all that was best in England, to the game that of all others was an expression of England’s spirit. There would be leisure there, and friendliness, and honest effort. And at the end of the day there would be tired limbs and quiet, casual talk, and a long early-taken sleep. He saw it clearly, as one sees on the screen the life of another person. At his side the telephone bell rang again. Was he there? it asked. The call was just coming through. Would he hold the line? There was silence, then a queer buzzing. Then a masculine voice saying, ‘Now then, now you’re through.’ A pause. Then the masculine voice again. ‘You’ve started. Talk to one another.’ Then, as he himself said ‘Hullo!’ he heard the slow, drawled voice, faint but clear, coming through to him:
‘Gordon is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me. What happened?’
‘Nothing, Gordon. Why?’
‘But your ringing up—’
‘I just wanted to hear your voice. It’s been so long and you’re so far. Say something, Gordon.’
He had so much to say that he could not think of anything to say.
‘It’s been raining all the afternoon,’ he said.
‘It hasn’t here. I’m in the country. I’ve just motored down. I suppose you’ve finished dinner?’
‘Two hours ago.’
‘Isn’t that funny? I’m just going to have mine. I’m feeling so hungry. Don’t you wish you did?’
‘I had such nice champagne with mine.’
‘And I shall be drinking water.’
‘I’ll feel so sorry for you.’
‘But we’ll be drinking lots of beautiful champagne together at Cap Ferrat. When are you going down there?’
‘I’m not certain yet.’
‘But you must hurry. We’ll get in on the first week in August, and you’ll have to find out all the amusing places for me.’
‘I’ll see you come sailing past Nice into the bay.’
‘I’ll be wearing a green scarf so that you’ll recognize me.’
‘I wish it were tomorrow.’
She laughed: across the Atlantic he could hear the gold in it.
‘Will it be very hot there, do you think?’
‘Very.’
‘I’ll get lots of light frocks, then. Have you missed me much?’
‘Terribly!’
‘Will you be glad to see me, very glad?’
‘Don’t you think I shall?’
‘Oh, Gordon! Now I must go and eat.’
‘And I must look after my guests.’
‘I just had to hear your absurd voice first. Good night.’
There was a click, a buzz, iron was iron once again.
She had rung up over three thousand miles to hear his voice! A moment ago she had been in this room talking to him. Now she was in a room that looked out over a green garden. She had taken him with her though. An hour earlier he had the feeling of belonging nowhere. He knew better now. Wherever she was, he belonged.
He stared at the instrument that had been her voice. Then at the black and white card in his hand. ‘V. Bridport—August 2nd,’ he read, ‘11.30.’
But on August 2nd he would be at Villefranche watching from Mont Boron the white prow of the Conte Grande swinging round into the bay.
Part Two
Chapter One
When Gordon had first visited the French Riviera in the summer of 1922, the Croisette was a succession of shuttered windows. The harbours were little more than quarter full. The Casinos were closed. His hosts, who lived in a converted cottage on the terraced olive-slopes half-way between Cannes and Grasse, had apologized for the paucity of entertainment they could offer him. Cannes was dead, they explained. There was no one there except a few expatriates who would be bankrupt or in gaol if they went home.
‘All the same,’ they had said, ‘you may quite like it here.’
Gordon had. It was very pleasant bathing before breakfast in the round cement cistern that husbanded the scanty supply of rain water; looking from its round rim across four miles of valley to the straggling white roofs of Grasse. It was fun idling the hot hours of a day upon a cool veranda, and in the late noon motoring down to Cannes to bathe on a hot empty beach with a heat haze lying along the coast, veiling the Estrelles with lavender.
During the fashionable months, the moment the sun had set, a dangerous cold would steal down from the snowbound Alps, but in August, after dining in a restaurant like Robert’s, where French food was served you in a French fashion, where you could eat the Provençal dishes, the soupe de poissons, the tomates farcies, the bouillabaisse, you walked out into the warm, lamplit dusk of the plane-treed avenue, to find comfortable, lazy people with nothing to do with their time but pass it, loitering over their pousse café at the tables of the Taverne des Allés. You had leisure in which to talk. You had not that restless feeling that you were missing something if you stayed in one place for longer than twenty minutes.
‘It really is much pleasanter here in the summer than in the winter,’ Gordon’s host maintained.
It was a discovery that a great many Englishmen and not a few Americans were to make during the next few years
. A hundred francs went further on the Riviera than did five pounds in London. With income-tax and death duties soaring, with the value of stocks decreasing, with dividends growing smaller with each balance-sheet, with the tardy realization coming that depression was in fact normality, many Englishmen decided to sell out and move their homes permanently to the sunlight.
In the same way that in the 1930’s the English made a winter pleasure-ground, so in the 1920’s they made a summer playground of the Côte d’Azur. The many who settled there out of necessity wrote and spoke with such enthusiasm of their discovery that those who were under no necessity to abandon London decided that a holiday might be spent more pleasantly sun-bathing at Eden Rock than shivering in chiffon at Lord’s and Ranelagh and Ascot. No place in the world has changed more in a decade. The shutters have been taken from the windows, the lights of the Palm Beach Casino flash through the morning hours; long rows of cars are parked along the Croisette and the Promenade des Anglais, the harbours are crowded with yachts and speedboats. Night-long the wail of the saxophone emerges from commissionaired entrances. From Saint Raphael to Monaco the beaches are crowded with half-nude figures glistening with sweat and oil. Ten years earlier Gordon had been stared at when he had walked in bare sleeves down the Avenue de la Victoire. Now the fashionable streets at Juan are thronged with women in pyjamas and men in sleeveless maillots.
It is a curious life that has been built up there.
In its forefront there are the tourists, English and American, leading the fashionable night-club life which exists with such invariable sameness in Deauville, Paris, London and New York, a life so trans-Channel and trans-Atlantic that one is surprised to hear French spoken. At the back, interwoven with it, is the established life of the expatriates, simple or affluent as its needs may be: an uprooted, irresponsible life; without obligations, without ambition; a going native. And hidden beneath this somewhere is the native Provençal life, which has accepted this flood of wealth, in the same passively responsive spirit that those who are rooted to the soil accept their good and evil fortunes: the frosts, the rain, the droughts that define and redirect their fortunes.
