So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  There are certain bays, however, certain villages and beaches, that invasion has passed by or overlooked. It has scarcely touched the cluster of houses that between Nice and Beaulieu face the humped outline of Cap Ferrat, where grubby-kneed, grubby-faced children tumble day-long over one another down the gutters of the narrow, mounting streets; chasing each other through the long, cool chasms down which the sun strikes only at midday; where fishermen dawdle over their nets along the quay, and in the evenings sit in their maillots and blue trousers over their beers and panachés and menthes à l’eau watching the dark-haired, dark-eyed girls saunter arm-in-arm along the waterfront.

  Villefranche has a South Sea atmosphere; an atmosphere of changelessness; of self-completion and self-fulfilment; of reliance upon self. With the broad stretch of the Corniche high above it, and the trains burrowing into the hill behind, you have the feeling that this one place will remain permanently overlooked by the ebb and flow of the tide of fashion. It is not for everyone, but those who do love it, love it dearly. It has, in its different way, the same personal appeal that Martinique has and San Francisco and Tahiti. It lays a hold upon the imagination and upon the heart.

  It was with a sense of escape, of having left behind him everything that constituted life for ninety-nine per cent of the people that comprised his world, that Gordon, who had lingered at Villefranche many times before, drove on a late July afternoon, down the narrow, winding road to the Welcome Hotel. As the train had loitered along the coast, losing its loads of passengers at Saint Raphael, Cannes, Juan, Antibes, Nice, he had had the sensation of loosing one by one the links that bound him to conventional Europe, as he had seen group after group of passengers conducting their discussions with porters and interpreters. As he had seen the train curving on towards Beaulieu, Monaco and Mentone, he had had a ‘good-bye to all that’ sensation. There it went, taking on with it all that was left of normal life, leaving him alone on the platform. Which it had done, after all, he told himself; he had left his world behind. He had come down here to wait for a woman who was to sail out of the New World, across three thousand miles, to meet him.

  Pallid against a darkening sky, a waxing moon was curving towards the plane trees. In a few hours’ time it would be casting its ghostly light upon Cap Ferrat.

  Before that moon had waned, the Conte Grande would have sailed past the Battery on its way to the warm waters of the South. Before another new moon had risen, he would be seeing Cap Ferrat not as a humped shadow in the moonlight, exquisite and impersonal, but the patch of ground whose surface guarded and held that woman.

  With what feelings would he be watching that new moon die into the sea by Eze?

  That evening, after dinner, he strolled up the main street to the Summer Bar. He was sockless, coatless, tieless. He wore white espadrilles, grey flannel trousers, a silk and sleeveless shirt. On the steps groups of young men in maillots and blue trousers were chattering together. ‘Bonsoir, Monsieur Gordon,’ they called out as he went by. Gordon was not the first person to see a resemblance between Villefranche and Tahiti. In both you were received with the same affectionate anonymity that is implied in the loss of a surname. Here, as in Tahiti, he was not Gordon Carruthers who wrote novels and articles, whose reception depended on the sale and prominence of those novels. He was a familiar and friendly face.

  The majority of his evenings he spent in the Summer Bar. It was run by a tall, light-haired, mule-faced woman in the middle thirties, with bright eyes and an open smile. She was as respectable a woman as ever attended a meeting of the Girls’ Friendly Society in Weston-super-Mare. She was, however, a fallen woman. As femme de chambre at the Columbiers, the summer-long visit of an Austrian painter had left her with a child. The patronne of the hotel, possessing a son of marriageable age, terrified lest the paternity of the child should be attributed to her family, had promptly expelled Armantine and published her fame abroad. Heterosexually, Villefranche is unpromiscuous. The family is respected. The obvious end for a girl with a baby and no husband is the Rue d’Algers, Nice. Armantine, however, had character. The francs that the Austrian had left behind him were invested in a bar that very soon became the most amusing bar in Villefranche.

  It contained a variety of clients. There were the chasseurs alpins in their putteed legs, their blue uniforms, their gold lanyards. There were the tourists from the Welcome and the Bananiers in various stages of fashionable undress. There were masons from the upper town, and fishermen from the beach. Bare, muscled elbows and soft brown arms leant side by side across the marbled tables. Custom was good. ‘I think the boy will have a good legacy,’ she would say.

  When she was asked when she proposed to present the child with a stepfather, she shook her head. She was not going to marry, she said. Men were agreeable, but tiresome, she suggested. She could get along very well without them. She worked hard, and at the end of the day was glad enough to sleep. Her welcome of Gordon was affectionately, indifferently cordial. She was glad to see him, but would not have minded, he suspected, if he had never set foot within the bar again. There were a number of his old friends there. They were playing a game called cochon, with dice and cards, a game of chance in which the man who threw a six followed by a five and four unblushingly scooped the pool. From the table a cheery voice was raised in welcome.

  ‘Ho, there, mon brave,’ it called. ‘Come here and join us.’

  The call came from a young sunburnt person. He had not shaved for thirty-six hours and his chin was black. He was a vegetable gardener, who each morning went early into Nice to buy vegetables for the market. He was called Rolo, and was the local Casanova. Gordon was fond of him. He knew all that was to be said against him. How a rich Nicoise presented him with suits, arranged holidays for him, and settled the instalments upon his Renault. Gordon disliked as much as anyone Rolo’s self-conscious swagger, his familiarity with women, his constant preening of himself. He was not unlike some of the Mulattoes with whose characteristics Gordon had grown familiar in the Caribbean and during the Bloomsbury Blackbird season of 1927, when London hostesses had thought it smart to give parties for coloured singers. But beneath that veneer, there was an openness of spirit. And Gordon knew how that good-heartedness had been corrupted; how painters had made him pose for them when he was a boy; how women had told him that he had fine eyes; how, later, they had more than told him that. With his looks and in that setting he had not stood a chance. Gordon was always ready to defend Rolo when visitors to the Welcome ran him down. Very readily he took his place at the table, let Rolo fill his glass for him, shook the dice and waited for the six to be followed by the five and four; thinking that by half-past nine next morning he would be seated on the terrace by the hotel, under the dappled shadow of the plane trees, with the sounds of the market at his back, with a horde of small children round him, avaricious for what was left of his figs and breakfast, while on his knees would be the blue exercise book in which he would have written: ‘These, Our Women.’ Part I. Chapter I.

  To Stanley and to Julia, Gordon had described his new book as a modern girl novel. Himself, he thought of it as a magazine article worked out in fiction form. He was planning to present through the story of three generations the changing attitude of the Victorian and Georgian women towards love and marriage and careers. There would be first the mid-Victorian woman, living in an age of caution and convention, of prudent and parentally-arranged marriages; an age that held open no careers for woman; when a woman’s nearest approach to independence lay through marriage. There would be her daughter reacting against that age; maintaining that love was the one thing that mattered, refusing the various men that her parents suggested for her, eloping with a good-looking, clever, but improvident barrister, to find that by marriage to a man who was poor and improvident she had cut herself off from all that was most varied and entertaining. She could not travel. She was not in a position to meet interesting people, to be part of a main current. Her horizon was limited by children, nurses, cooks, by the budg
etings of weekly books. Marriage had led her into a back-water. She had married for love, however. That had been her bargain. She had sacrificed the world for love, and when love passed, when it ceased to be rapture and became routine, she grew resentful. She felt she had been cheated, that she had not had her bargain kept. By banking upon love, she had asked more of love than love had to give. In consequence, she became a nagging wife.

  The daughters of that marriage would naturally react against such a world-well-lost-for-love attitude. They would be born into a world where women could earn their livings; where love could be enjoyed outside marriage, provided it was enjoyed quietly. A world that said, ‘A row’s a row, and damned disgraceful; where there’s no row nothing can be disgraceful.’

  It was the story of the three daughters that Gordon proposed to tell. He would recount their separate attempts to adjust their needs to modern conditions. They would each start with the same resolutions. They would be independent. Life was varied and amusing. They would touch it at as many points as possible, till they felt the need for a home, children and a husband, as a background to their development. They would live their lives as bachelors did theirs. That was how they planned. Each in her separate way would set about the realizing of those ambitions. The story would move swiftly, explaining itself through incident. Of the various incidents that would comprise the story he was as yet uncertain. When Gordon began a book he had no more than a vague outline of the actual plot, but he always knew how long the book would be, and he knew what the last sentence was. The simile he took was that of a cross-country walk, when you saw far on a hill the home that you were headed for. You knew roughly how long it would take to reach it, but you had no idea of the road you would have to take till you had got down into the valleys and saw how the land twisted.

  ‘These, Our Women’ would be, Gordon adjudged, between seventy and eighty thousand words; and he knew what the last scene would be. It would be between the mid-Victorian who had seemed to her grandchildren so stuffy, and the Edwardian who had seemed to her daughters so ineffectual. They would be alone. One of the daughters would have just announced her engagement to a young man with more future and more past than present. The grandmother had been extremely enthusiastic over the matter.

  ‘I don’t know why you should be so confident,’ the mother had said.

  ‘Because hereditary traits usually skip a generation.’

  ‘Was his grandfather so very much?’

  ‘He knew how to make a woman happy.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘By having been his mistress for fifteen years.’

  It would be a bright, topical piece of work. He did not imagine people would any more want to read it in six years’ time than they would want to read a contemporary magazine article. But he did not regard that as a criticism. He saw no reason why a writer should always write as though his work were in danger of immortality. One was of one’s day. One had opinions on the problems of one’s day. The fact that those problems would have ceased to be problems tomorrow did not prevent a writer from expressing his opinions on them now. Why should one hanker after the approval of one’s grandchildren? In a fast-changing world the best one could do was to tackle what lay to hand. It was to his own people, to the people of his day and hour, that Gordon wished to be of service.

  Happily and contentedly he worked on it during the three weeks that had to pass before the white prow of the Conte Grande cut its way into the blue silk of the little harbour. His life was in a way a repetition of the island routine with which he had grown familiar in Malaya and Polynesia.

  He woke with the sea’s reflection flickering upon the ceiling. As he walked along the quay to the shingled beach the fishermen at work upon their nets called out to him. The water was cool and clear. As he bathed he would see the train from Genoa go puffing northwards. Sleepy-eyed men with unshaven chins would be looking through the windows. As he walked back to the hotel the market-place would be crowded with old women, their baskets upon their arms, haggling over the price of vegetables. At one or other stall he would select the six bursting figs that they would allow him for forty sous. At the tobacconist’s at the corner he would buy his Daily Mail and Chicago Tribune. At the blue iron table on the terrace, under the shadow of the plane trees, with his breakfast finished, his papers read, the appetite of the urchins appeased, he would sit writing quietly the morning through; before his eyes the unchanging changefulness of the sea, the flow of life along the quay; the unceasing passage of cars along the Corniche road; in his ears the chatter of the market-place, of the sailors at work upon their nets, of dogs chasing one another into the dark archways.

  In the afternoon when the sun grew hot upon the terrace he would work in the cool of his room, watching the colour of the bay grow softer, more luminous, more varied; as the water in Papeete had. With his work finished, he would stroll out again to bathe. The shingled beach would be crowded now. Music would be playing on the rickety wooden platform which was Villefranche’s idea of a fashionable bar. They would be French and Italians, for the most part, who would be bathing there. There would be none of the nudities of Cannes and Monaco. Rolo in a smart white and blue bathing-suit would be eyeing the women appraisingly. Gordon would not linger there for long. Quite early in the afternoon the shadow of Mont Boron fell across the bay. It was pleasanter back in the town, with the terrace bar of the Welcome crowded, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed girls sauntering along the waterfront arm-in-arm; while the young men grouped on the water’s edge looked backward over their shoulders at them.

  Occasionally he would go into Nice. Except along the Promenade des Anglais it had been little altered by the Riviera’s change of fortune. French for less time than any town along the coast, it was more French than any town except Marseilles and Toulon. The Avenue de la Victoire had a Parisian atmosphere. The trams clattered down it friendlily. The Ford seemed less in place there than the Renault. The pavements were crowded with black-coated Frenchmen. The open shirts, and bare arms of English fashion were still slightly out of place.

  Once or twice he went over to lunch at Antibes. Frank Masters, an old school friend with whom he had once made a trip to the West Indies, was summering there in his villa on the Garoupe side. The view from the foot of the garden was as lovely as anything that Gordon had ever seen. At his feet the blue Mediterranean; in the foreground the Saracen towers of Old Antibes; across ten miles or so of water the white houses of Nice climbing back into the hills; and beyond it all the white summits of the Alps.

  But much as he enjoyed the lunch at Antibes and the afternoon at Nice, it was always with a feeling of relief that he left the little tram that ran from the Place Massena, and walked back into the town.

  Calmly and happily passed the days that were bringing the hour nearer when he would see a white ship swing round into the bay.

  He awaited the hour calmly.

  Since his decision, suddenly taken by the telephone, with the sound of that drawled voice within his ear, he had not considered much what lay ahead.

  On the train journey from Poughkeepsie; as the Aquitania had ploughed its way through the Atlantic; after he had received Faith’s cable and had sent his own half-true answer, Gordon had weighed carefully the contingencies that a visit to Villefranche would create. A story-teller, he had a glimpse of what was likely to mature out of a given situation. He had set himself certain questions. ‘Did he want to run away with Faith?’ ‘Did he want to fall in love with her?’ ‘What would be the result of such a running away? Of such a falling in love to her, to him, to everyone?’ Knowing her, her husband and himself, what were the three alternatives? An elopement with the breaking of a home; a platonic love affair; or a hole-and-corner intrigue, a deceiving behind their backs of people who had trusted them?

  He had set himself those practical and worldly questions. The answer to them had decided him against a visit to Villefranche. Then across three thousand miles the magnet of a slow, drawled voice had be
en stronger than any practical considerations.

  The decision taken, he had not looked ahead, had made no attempt to figure out the cost. But as he walked back from the Summer Bar on the last evening before Faith’s arrival he was very conscious of standing at a signpost. What he was now, he would not be again. To this moment he foresaw his memory would return: regarding this evening as the last of a discarded self’s. A foreknowledge that made him want to fix the moment, to associate with it some person close to him; some person whose friendship he could not spare, that must be taken with him into the new life.

  ‘I’ll write to Stanley,’ he thought.

  So he took a sheet of the elaborately decorated Welcome paper, and wrote a long, casual, flippant letter to Adelphi Terrace, telling Stanley the local gossip, asking how the cricket went, reminding him of a certain bad joke that they had shared.

  ‘And that’s that,’ he thought, as he wrote PRIVATE AND PERSONAL across the envelope.

  Chapter Two

  In travel articles Gordon had often remarked the habit of people to carry their national characteristics into foreign lands. He had compared the French atmosphere of Polynesia with the English atmosphere of Malaya. ‘We carry ourselves with us,’ he had said. The number of articles he had written on that note had not, however, prepared him for the vigour of the American invasion that was to be launched on Villefranche on the following afternoon.

  As usual, Faith Sweden had brought a crowd with her: such a crowd, indeed, that at first he wondered whether she and Roger had not chartered the entire ship as a private yacht. The Customs shed, round which certain of Gordon’s Summer Bar companions were clustered in the hope of tips, was crowded with oddly attired transatlantics demanding whether ‘they shouldn’t have checked their luggage some place else?’ Faith was so surrounded with people asking her what they should do next, that for Gordon she had scarcely more than a smile above their heads.