So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  ‘One only goes to Casinos when one’s with women,’ Masters said.

  ‘And consequently,’ said Gordon, ‘never appreciates the food or view. I thought it would be fun to go there, just the two of us.’

  ‘It’s your lunch,’ said Masters.

  Nervous and excited Gordon walked up the ample corridor to the vast pink restaurant. One sweeping glance of the crowded room punctured his restlessness and exhilaration. They might just as well have gone to Robert’s.

  ‘Garçon,’ he said, ‘a table.’

  It was a bad table in the very centre of the room. Its view was obscured by the cluster of sunburnt backs. But he did not argue, he did not care. She was not here. The sooner he were back in Villefranche and nearer to her the better.

  ‘What are you going to have?’ he said.

  Masters studied carefully the long embossed menu. There was a lunch at forty francs, but he ignored that.

  ‘I’ll have eggs in aspic,’ he said; ‘a salade laitue and fraises du bois. I’m dieting,’ he explained.

  ‘What cocktail will you have?’

  ‘None. A citron pressé. I’ve given up alcohol before six.’

  An unalcoholic meal is never particularly exciting. The eggs in aspic, being ready, arrived immediately. Gordon’s omelette aux champignons took twenty minutes to prepare. Neither was eating at the same time. Conversation was forced and hesitant.

  They had abandoned the attempt to make it minutes before the bill arrived. Each was angry with the other.

  ‘I think,’ said Gordon, ‘that it would be easier if I picked up a Nice bus here, where it’ll be empty.’

  ‘I’ll run you back to Villefranche.’

  ‘Oh, no, why should you?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to do.’

  ‘I’ll be fooling about in Nice, probably, for a little.’

  ‘Very well, then.’

  It was four o’clock when Gordon reached the Welcome.

  ‘A lady with an American voice rang you up three minutes after you had left,’ they told him, ‘but she left no message.’

  ‘I’ll ring her up.’

  He paced the lobby impatiently during the ten minutes’ delay over the call. When at last it came through, it was to tell him that Madame Sweden was out; that she had left early that morning; that she had taken a large picnic lunch with her.

  ‘And she had wanted me to join her,’ Gordon thought. ‘If only I’d waited!’

  He went up to his room to see his manuscript book staring back at him. A couple of hundred words trailed illegibly across the ten top lines. He re-read them irritably. In ‘Twenty-Five’ Beverley Nichols had described how Michael Arlen made a practice of re-copying every morning the last page he had written on the night before, to work himself back into his earlier mood. Gordon, when his nerves had grown too irritated for concentration, played on his portable gramophone the record that he hated most: ‘Banana Oil.’ It was his equivalent for Crowley’s cure by disgust. He sat listening to every treacly chord. Then he played it through again. By the time he had played it through six times his irritation with it was great enough to have submerged all his other irritations. With his nerves finally tranquillized by silence, he sat down to work.

  That evening he went as his wont was to the Summer Bar. It was just as it had always been; there was Armantine’s sound common sense; there was the friendliness of the soldiers and the masons; there was Rolo’s extravagant admissions. But the restlessness that had fretted him in the morning was with him still. He could not adjust himself to the game of cochon and the quiet talk. He kept turning his eyes towards the door, half expecting every time he heard the sound of voices in the street to see framed in the doorway that slim pliant figure.

  * * *

  The same mood of nervousness was with him on the following day. From his seat on the terrace beneath the trees he could hear the telephone bell ringing in the Welcome office. Every time he heard it ring, his heart leapt. It was bound to be for him, he thought. He would listen anxiously to the conversation; waiting for the ‘Who’s that? Yes. . . . Who do you want?’ to change into a ‘Mr Carruthers? Yes, he is here. I will go and fetch him.’ When it was some other name that was asked for, or some order for a table to be booked, he would turn wearily back to his book. Every time that he heard behind him the sound of a car, he would turn excitedly, expecting to see the grey-green Chrysler swing round the road into the square. His eyes would search eagerly the flow of cars along the Corniche road, wondering whether one of them was bringing Faith to him. He found it increasingly hard to focus his attention on his book.

  When he came back from his bathe he looked quickly and interrogatively at the patronne to know if there was any message for him. He was almost afraid of going for his swim for fear that he should miss a message.

  Apart from his swim he did not move from the radius of the Welcome terrace. He did not dare to. He was afraid of missing her if he went into Nice or rang up and visited one of the several friends that he had along the coast.

  For three days it went on like that. He made no attempt to see her; he did not want to force himself upon her. Moreover, there was the sense of growing irritation between Roger and himself. On the fourth day, however, he decided to invite them across to dinner with him. He rang up at about ten. It was Faith’s voice that answered him.

  ‘Is that you, Gordon? I was just going to ring you up. We’re going to swim. We’ll be picnicking on the beach all day. Get a boat and come across. You will? Fine! Come over as soon as you can manage it.’

  Lutitia is an agreeable beach. It is small, the sand is good. There are diving boards and rafts. It is more French than Juan and La Garoupe. It was only the time that a journey across there took that had prevented Gordon from going there more often. As his boat drew close to the beach he was hailed by Sweden.

  ‘There you are!’ he said. ‘It’s fine that you’ve managed to come across. Dive in and I’ll race you to the shore.’

  The shore was two hundred yards away. Gordon was a poor swimmer. At school, because of the Fernhurst tradition that swimming put out one’s eye for cricket, he had not been to the swimming-bath more than two or three times a term. Sweden on the other hand was an extremely good swimmer. He beat Gordon by a clear thirty yards, and reached the sand as though he could have maintained the pace for another two hundred yards. Grodon on the other hand was panting badly.

  Sweden was boisterously hearty. ‘There’s life in the old boys yet,’ he said.

  Faith was sitting on the sand. She was wearing a pale blue Annette Kellermann. It was the first time that Gordon had seen her in a swimming-suit. She was so lovely that he caught his breath. She was leaning forward, her hands clasped round her knees. There was not a fold in her body’s curve. She made no sign of being aware that the race to the sand had been for her benefit. She gave no sign of being aware that there had been a race. He knew that she was aware, though: that she accepted it as she accepted so much else as a homage due to her.

  ‘I was so sorry to have been out when you rang up the other day,’ he said.

  ‘I was sorry, too. We went to Monte Carlo. We had fun.’

  ‘I’d gone three minutes before you rang up.’

  ‘We wanted you to go out with us yesterday. We were starting so early that I tried to get round to you the night before. I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘I was up-town.’

  ‘You couldn’t expect me to go round all the bars in Villefranche looking for you.’

  ‘I’m never anywhere but at the Summer Bar.’

  ‘Perhaps I don’t very much like going into the Summer Bar.’

  ‘But, Faith, I thought you liked it.’

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘They all so liked you.’

  She made no reply. Once again he had that sense of passive and tenacious acceptance in her; that assumption of her right to service.

  ‘What are you writing, Gordon?’

  He told her. Usually he found that
when he began to tell the plot of a story he was at work on, the plot promptly began to sound impossible. He had noticed that when writers talked about their work it was usually the less effectual writers who made their narratives sound convincing. But as he talked to Faith his story became more real to him than it had before. He suddenly got an idea that he had not seen before. She listened carefully.

  ‘If you really believed in that story you could make a lot of it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m finding with it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I’m not believing as much in it as I did when I began.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because of you, perhaps.’

  She looked steadily at him. He had never known a person who could make silence so eloquent and so self-expressive: who could change a subject and open one so abruptly.

  ‘I was re-reading one of your very early books the other day.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘ “The Ungainly Wise.” ’

  ‘I was so proud of it at the time.’

  ‘There are nice things there,’ she paused. ‘I don’t know if you will get what I’m driving at,’ she said, ‘but there’s the same thing about your London novels that there is about most other London novels, about most Paris novels and most New York novels. You describe people who aren’t doing anything.’

  ‘That’s what the reviewers said.’

  ‘Did they? I wonder if they pointed out to you why you were. Your work at the most, you see, needs not more than six months’ solid work a year. When you want to work you go away into the country quietly or you come down here, and seclude yourself for so many hours from people living a holiday life. When you’re in a city you’re spending your whole time with leisured people. You aren’t in an atmosphere of work, though you yourself are working, you’re always among people who aren’t working. That’s why your London novels seem unreal. And that’s why your travel stories seem so much more real: because in the tropics there are no leisured people. You spend your whole time among people who really work. And there’s no point to a book that’s about people who are doing nothing. Isn’t that the way it is?’

  It was the first time that he had seen it from that angle. He had not before considered the fact that a writer living in a city does almost inevitably find himself a part of a superficial and parasitic world. The average working man, whatever his occupation, spent seven hours a day in an atmosphere of work. But he himself did his work in concentrated periods of intense activity. The actual marketing of it took him very little time. He would see his publisher twice or three times a year. He would write him a dozen letters. His meetings with Stanley rarely included a discussion of business. Except when he was actually working, he spent his days in a holiday atmosphere. It was only when he was in the tropics that he spent his entire time in a working atmosphere. He wondered whether as a result of this, his travel stories had a greater measure of reality than his London work. He wondered whether the fact that the work of so many novelists deteriorated after success was due less to the baleful influence of money, than the fact that their early work written when they were obscure, in the spare hours wrested from a working life, was produced out of an atmosphere of work: whereas their later work was produced in a world where incomes were not earned but spent. He wondered if that were so. And wondering it, he thought: That she should have thought of this, that she should have understood me better than I should have understood myself, that she should have made this effort to understand me! And he thought: If only one could have a woman like that beside one all one’s life!

  He looked at Sweden as he stood on the water’s edge airing his trim spruceness. Did he appreciate what he had? Did he need Faith? Was she anything more than an accessory to his life? Had this bustling, busy little man room in his crowded life for personal emotion?

  Gordon watched him closely as he marshalled his half-dozen or so of guests towards the restaurant. Was he fancying it; was it the distorted eye of jealousy, or was Sweden in actual fact overacting the part of host: being the professional good fellow; slapping this fellow on the shoulder, whispering this joke into the other’s ear, ordering drinks so as to make it quite clear that it was he that ordered them? Was there a change in Sweden’s manner? Was the strained relationship that this half-fancied situation was creating, intensifying in both him and Sweden what was in normal circumstances their strength and quality, turning his own reserve into sullenness; turning Sweden’s generosity and open-heartedness into ostentation?

  As the afternoon passed, he became more and more conscious of the arrogance of Sweden’s manner. ‘He’s trying to overwhelm me,’ he thought. ‘He’s rich, he’s among friends. He’s got every trump in the pack. He’s playing them down one after another with a slap upon the table. He knows he can make me feel uncomfortable.’

  The more conscious of this manner Gordon became, the more he withdrew himself. Was Faith aware of the atmosphere? There was no sign of an appreciation of it in her manner. She had that same withdrawn look upon her face. She seemed to be the impartial judge of the contest for which she was the prize. Was this the modern equivalent of the old Arthurian contests he wondered, as the afternoon, after the manner of so many other Riviera days, took its tranquil course.

  Out of a blue sky the sun shone ceaselessly on the yellow beach, on the water, green pale at its sanded edge, grey-blue as it deepened to the bay: on the bathing-dresses, mauve and green and pink and orange: on the silk dressing-gowns: on the tinted sunshades: the yellow mattresses: the backs brown and pink that gleamed and glistened in the sun. Across the water the shadows of Mont Boron lifted slowly over the squared and rounded walls, over the red and terraced roofs of Villefranche, darkening the quay and the moored boats and gradually inch by inch the bathers below the railway.

  ‘It’s time I was going back,’ said Gordon.

  The others put up their barrage of protests; not very seriously, since it was time for them to be going back, to be preparing for the next stage of a Riviera day, the dinner at this or the other casino; the dancing; the spinning of the wheel, the ‘Faites vos jeux’; the drifting as the hour grew late to the Étoile, or the Boeuf.

  ‘But we must see you again,’ said one of them. ‘Look here now, we’ve a party tomorrow, bathing and lunch at Monte. Can you manage that?’

  ‘Of course he can manage that,’ said Sweden.

  It was said loudly, genially; but to Gordon it had a grating sound. There was a note of contempt below it, or at any rate, a desire to feel contempt. The contempt of the man who gives for the man who takes; of the man who believes that everything is for sale; who can buy everything; and despises the man who sells to him. ‘Oh, yes, he’ll come. He wants to hang around my wife. He’ll go wherever she is; provided that someone else gives the party.’ That was how Gordon read the implication. He flushed uncomfortably.

  ‘When are you coming over to dine at Villefranche?’ he said to Sweden.

  Sweden laughed his hearty, professional good-fellow laugh and brought his hand down heavily on Gordon’s shoulder.

  ‘My dear young fellow,’ he said, ‘the one thing I like about this place is that one hasn’t to make arrangements days ahead. People like yourself, who’re free, don’t know what it means to wake up in the morning and think, “I’ve nothing fixed up for me today. I can do what I like, when I like, where I like.” That’s what the word holiday means to me. So just don’t start asking me to tie myself down to anything. We’ll come over all right one day. You can be sure of that. And in the meantime with regard to this party down at Monte. Shall we call for you at about eleven?’

  ‘It’s very nice of you,’ said Gordon, ‘but I’ve just remembered.’ And turning to the man who had invited him, he explained that he had promised to stay at the hotel. A friend was motoring through from Marseilles to Naples.

  ‘Why not bring him along, too?’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’ll arrive in time.’

  ‘Why not telegra
ph him?’

  ‘I don’t know what hotel he’s stopping at.’

  ‘Then you can’t manage it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Now that really is too bad.’ Sweden’s face bore an expression of the friendliest concern; but his eyes as they met Gordon’s were combative. ‘So it’s that way, is it?’ their grey look said. In the exchange of that look a challenge was made and taken. ‘And I suppose,’ thought Gordon, ‘that this is about as near as one gets to a duel in the twentieth century.’ And thinking that, he wished himself back in those simple days when men settled their quarrels out of hand; when they weren’t driven to the weapons of finesse; to the strategy of creating situations. For that was what lay ahead of him, he knew that.

  Chapter Three

  Next morning, waking to the knowledge that all day Faith would be at Monte Carlo, he felt free, happily uncomplicated. He worked steadily the long day through, making up for the hours he had missed. He was tired when the evening came. He would have been grateful for the un-exacting companionship of the Summer Bar. He did not go, however. There was the chance that Faith might come. So instead he sat on the balcony of his room, watching the headlights of car after car sweeping the long length of the Corniche road, asking himself ‘Is that hers, or that, or that?’ starting eagerly as a car swept down on to the quay, peering eagerly for the lifted bonnet of the grey-green Chrysler. He waited till close upon eleven. But she did not come.

  For the next two days it was like that. Then, just as Gordon was preparing at the end of his morning’s work to go upstairs and change into his bathing things, with a sudden purr the grey-green Chrysler swept into the square, and Michael Trumper’s voice was saying: ‘Now, you can put away that manuscript, young man. We’re taking you out to lunch at the Gorge de Loup.’