by Alec Waugh
They were going to Juan, she said, to the Garoupe beach. They would be there from eleven till late at night. As midday had approached he had thought that it would be amusing for a change to take the autobus into Monte Carlo and lunch there. As he was waiting by the octroi for a bus, a harsh loud voice hailed him.
‘Hullo there, what a long time since we’ve met. Now, where are you bound?’
It was Gregory, speaking from the wheel of a brand-new Renault. Francis was at his side. They were béret-headed, bare-armed, their zip tricots open at the throat. They were of an Abyssinian blackness.
‘I’m going to Monte Carlo,’ he told them.
‘All alone?’
‘All alone.’
‘Then in that case you come along with us to Juan, and we’ll have lunch together at the Garoupe.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m lunching with friends in Monte Carlo.’
‘Are you now? But that’s just too bad. And we haven’t seen you in weeks. Now, let’s see. . .’ he paused, then turned to Francis, ‘. . . now, look here, why shouldn’t we go into Monte instead of Juan?’
‘Why not?’
‘We can have a nice talk with young Gordon here on the way in, and . . . let’s see now, how long will you be over lunch?’
‘That’s hard to say.’
‘Till somewhere between three or four, I suppose?’
‘Roughly that.’
‘Then look here, this is what we’ll do. We’ll run you into Monte, drop you where you’re lunching, then we’ll pick you up afterwards at the Café de Paris, between three and four. How does that strike you, Francis?’
‘Swell!’
‘That’s how it strikes me. Jump in, young Gordon, quick!’
There was no way in which Gordon could avoid their offer.
‘I’m in a fine mess now,’ he thought, as Francis made room for him in front.
No sooner had the car started than a rattle of talk started. Had he seen anything of the Swedens? He had. Well, that was fine. Regular people, they were. Wished they could see more of them themselves. But they’d been busy. Had they been busy? Well, they’ld say they had been busy! Was there a dive between St Raphael and Mentone that that little old Renault hadn’t parked outside? Yes, there was that one. And it was just nobody’s business why they’d given that the go-by. Was Gordon working? He was. Well, that was fine! When would his book be out? Not till September year? Why, that was just too bad. They were crazy to get their hands on it. Were they? They’ld say they were. So the talk rattled on.
As they mounted the road past the harbour to the Casino, Gordon touched Gregory on the shoulder.
‘It’s been terribly kind of you,’ he said. ‘Can you drop me here.’
‘No, no, no. We’re taking you right to the very door.’
‘You needn’t bother.’
‘It’s not a bother. It’s a duty. C.O.D. and at the door.’
‘It’s very kind of you.’
It wasn’t kind at all, they said. And where exactly was it that they were taking him to lunch. The rattle of conversation had been so rapid that Gordon had not had time to prepare a plan of action. Where was he lunching? If he named some restaurant they would be as likely as not to eat in it themselves. They’ld see he was by himself. And that would spill the beans. He thought with a desperate rapidity. A friend of his had a flat in the Boulevard Citronniers. He was almost certain to be in Paris. If he were to be dropped there, he could climb up the stairs, wait outside the door till the Renault had driven off, then slink out somewhere quietly to lunch. That seemed the safest plan.
‘No. 7, Boulevard Citronniers,’ he said.
‘And we’ll pick you up—or rather, you pick us up, at the Café de Paris between three and four.’
‘I don’t know why you should bother to do that?’
‘No bother. We’ll be lunching there anyhow.’
‘It’s very kind of you.’
Wishing their kindness the other side of the Atlantic and himself safely ensconced at a table in the Welcome, he climbed the stairs of No. 7, Boulevard Citronniers. As he reached the head of the third flight, the door of the flat opposite him opened and his friend appeared.
‘My dear Carruthers!’
He was a man of seventy; a retired civil servant and a bachelor; a man of extremely punctilious habits, who arranged his diary in advance, who issued invitations and accepted them by post, who was in constant revolt against the informality of Riviera life. And even on the informal Riviera five minutes to one was, Gordon reflected, an unusual hour at which to pay a call. An expression of the most complete surprise lifted the old man’s wrinkled eyebrows.
‘Were you coming to see me?’ he asked.
The proprieties had been so manifestly outraged by this call that Gordon hesitated to say ‘Yes.’ At the same time, as there was no higher flat, there was no one else that he could have been visiting.
‘I was just passing through,’ said Gordon, ‘I was wondering whether you couldn’t come over to Villefranche one day next week to lunch?’
A mollified expression came into the old man’s face. It was a curious way to issue an invitation, but then these were curious days, and it was nice of a young man to ask an old man to lunch with him.
‘My dear fellow, but that’s very kind of you, very kind indeed. I shall love to naturally. Let me think now. I haven’t my diary with me. I’ll write. Yes, that’ll be best. I’ll write to the Welcome Hotel tonight. It’s charming of you, my dear fellow, charming, charming!’
They had walked down the stairs as they were talking.
‘You’re lunching in Monte Carlo?’ the old man asked. Across the street was a quiet Italian restaurant Gordon had often noticed and felt curious about.
‘Yes, over there.’
‘Be careful of the shell-fish.’
And if that isn’t a warning against leaving Villefranche, Gordon thought, as he climbed the steps leading to the terrace.
‘Hullo there!’ a voice called out. His heart sank. In the centre of the room Gregory and Francis were studying a flimsy piece of paper across which trailed a sequence of smudged characters in purple ink.
‘I thought you were lunching at the Café de Paris!’
‘We thought we were till we saw this. It looked so quaint that we parked the old flivver round the corner and came straight in. What’s your trouble?’
‘Only that my idiot of a host mistook the day.’ And so indignant did Gordon feel against the mishandling of fate, that he began a genuinely convincing assault on the informality and casualness of Riviera life.
‘People’s brains get addled with the sun,’ he said. ‘They lose sense of time. They don’t answer letters. They forget their promises. They think it an excuse to say they were drunk when they made the promise. And with the French telephone service what it is, how can anything be got clear! It really is intolerable!’
‘So we could have gone to Juan, anyhow.’
‘We could have gone anywhere, anyhow.’
‘Well, anyhow, it’s a lot of luck that we picked you up on that road and saved you lunching by yourself. Here’s a menu. Tell us what’s good, and the meal’s on us.’
Gordon felt desperate. He ran his eye down the blurred sheet of paper vaguely.
‘Langouste,’ he said, ‘langouste à l’américaine.’
It was a good langouste and it was a good lunch; but its virtue was, Gordon suspected, the good hours of an ague. It proved to be.
‘And now,’ said Gregory, ‘I think we might do much worse than go over to Juan and have a swim.’
‘Why don’t we swim here?’ said Gordon.
‘Too soon after lunch. Forty minutes in a car will put us in fine shape for a sun-bath and a swim. In you get, Gordon.’
As the car rattled along the winding road, Gordon debated what excuse he could find for not coming on to Juan that would not offend these very open-hearted fellows. He was not going to appear churlish; at the same time he was not going
to let himself be led into a Sweden-conducted party. As he saw from the high road by Beaulieu the nestling waterside of Villefranche, he felt like a chased hare that spies its burrow. At all costs he had to get down there into safety. And within three minutes he had to find the excuse that would take him there. He thought with a desperate rapidity.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I tell you something I don’t believe you fellows have seen here.’
‘And what may that be?’
‘A Chasseurs Alpins bar.’
‘And what may that be?’
‘A bar where the soldiers go.’
‘I don’t believe we have.’
‘Then why don’t we drop down in Villefranche now and see one? It’s something that you shouldn’t miss.’
‘We ought not to miss anything, ought we, Francis?’
‘I’ll say we oughtn’t.’
‘And if you went by yourselves,’ said Gordon, ‘you’ld go into the wrong bar. There are so many bars in Villefranche.’
‘There’s something to be said for that, now, isn’t there?’
‘I’ll say there is.’
‘And this is the time to go there,’ lied Gordon resolutely. ‘They’re off parade just now.’ ‘And I pray heaven,’ he added to himself as they walked up the narrow streets to the Summer Bar, ‘that we shall find some Chasseurs Alpins there.’
He did: a couple of them. And he asked them over to their table, with such persuasiveness that the habitual reserve of the soldiers was overcome. They agreed; and a round of drinks was ordered, then another. By the time they had left the bar, the sun was too low in the sky for the Garoupe.
‘We must go there another day,’ said Gregory. ‘We’ve had a grand time.’
‘We certainly had that. What a bit of luck our meeting you.’
‘And what a bit of luck my friend having made a muddle of the days.’
‘It certainly was that!’
Very heartily, very friendlily they said their good-byes in the Place Polonais.
‘And that’s that,’ thought Gordon, ‘and never again, never once again,’ as he saw their gleaming mudguards curve up the road towards the hill.
It was just not worth it. The coast was too congested. A car could get too quickly from one end to the other of the Corniche road. At no point along it was he safe from being swooped down upon by one of the many Americans to whom Faith had introduced him, and swept off to the particular beach on which her husband was exercising his capacities as a host. There were so many of them: Gregory, Francis, Trumper and the rest. He was only safe as long as he stayed below the level of the road.
And so, day after day Gordon would lead his secluded life on the Welcome terrace. He never went up in the evenings to the Summer Bar. He never went to Nice to see the pictures or across to Antibes for a sun-bath or a lunch with Masters. His whole life, apart from the story he was at work on, had become a waiting for a grey-green car to swing down the road past the fort into the square; for a white figure to step its way slowly across the terrace; for the children round his table to say: ‘Monsieur Gordon, c’est l’américaine!’
It was a situation that no one except a writer or a painter could have accepted; and that Gordon could only have accepted at a time when isolation was necessary to him. He was content enough to cut the threads that bound him to the normal sequence of a routine. In England, when he went into the country to write, he invariably gave instructions that no letters were to be forwarded. He did not want to have his thoughts distracted. He wanted to shut himself away with the current of his own ideas. So here he surrendered gladly to what amounted to an imprisonment. He welcomed it, indeed; abandoning without effort one by one the ties to what is generally called life. He might have been on an island in some far ocean. The morning issue of the Daily Mail, that arrived a day late from Paris, seemed to come from a distant country, as did the letters from his parents, from Stanley, and such friends, English and American, as he kept in touch with. His entire life was concentrated upon his work and upon Faith. In no other place and to no one who had not a capacity for concentration and a need for isolation would such a situation have been possible. Any other active man would have thought, ‘This is intolerable; I’m not going to stay here like a slave, imprisoned in this fishing village, waiting upon her whims, upon her hours of freedom.’ In one way or other he would have forced the issue. But the very armour that protected Gordon at ordinary times betrayed him here. What was his strength ordinarily, became his weakness. He could indeed draw a curious satisfaction from the fact of his imprisonment. In the same way that Swann had deemed it a privilege to be forbidden by Odette from going to a certain place on a certain day, since that refusal was a singling out of him, a making of him special and unique, since anyone else who wanted, could go on that particular day to that particular place, since lists of trains were actually published to enable them to do so, so Gordon was amused by his inability on account of Faith to seek the road that was free to any sailor-boy in Villefranche, to any motorist along the coast. The situation was in harmony with his temperament. He had always thought of Villefranche as something unreal and fairylike; something divided from ordinary living. He was able to accept therefore a situation that was intrinsically unreal, that in London or New York would have been impossible.
His whole life there had a poetic and dream-like quality—sitting under plane trees, with the sunlight pouring out of a blue sky on to a blue sea, on to boats gently awash within a harbour, on to kindly-eyed fishermen at work upon their nets, on to women arguing in the market-place about the price of vegetables, on to grubby, dirty, laughing children who chattered and tumbled in the dust; waiting, at work upon a love story, to be joined by a loved woman; lifting his eyes from the manuscript to the trail of cars along the Corniche road, trying to distinguish the bonnet of the grey-green Chrysler, asking himself: ‘Is it that or the other one?’ listening for the sound of a car on the hill behind, turning each time there was the scrunch of wheels on gravel; waiting for the moment when a white-dressed figure would walk languidly across the terrace to him.
And it was easy in such a setting, with his whole life an isolation, his life of relatives, of clubs, of love-affairs, of games, of debts abandoned, to accept the isolation of these moments in the life of the woman that he waited for, to forget that she had a husband he was at odds with; that she was come from a far country to which soon she would return; that the atmosphere of wealth in which she lived was as native to her as was to him an atmosphere of struggle, of uncertainty, of periods of enforced economy that had been, were and in all probability, would always be the framework of his existence. He did not look ahead. He did not ask whither they were drifting. He forgot all that, waiting for her beneath the plane trees.
Their conversation, too, had the unreality of a dream. They never seemed to be talking about anything very serious, but afterwards, when she had gone, he could remember phrase for phrase almost everything that had been said; recalling how one idea had been bridged by this sentence or another. They would talk in the casual manner of two people who had known each other all their lives. It was intimate, yet at the same time it was excitingly potential. They knew, both of them, that there was drama on its way to them. They were content to wait. It was like sitting in the stalls, waiting for the curtain to rise upon a play. And later when she had gone, with a hand waved lightly, he would walk slowly along the quay to the Reserve, the sound of her voice in his ears, and the sight of her before his eyes, and he would say to himself: ‘I have thought this about women, and that, and I have written articles and novels, and I have ridiculed the Victorian idea of home and fidelity. But I know very well that there is only one way in which I would want that woman; for myself and to myself, and for the ages; that, if I had her, everything else would seem unimportant, because what I felt for her would include all things: ambition, success, prominence, adventure. She would give them all, or at least, the equivalent for all.’
An unreal, a dream-like situ
ation, in which each forgot what was the background of the other’s life, and what was waiting for each of them behind those moments.
Chapter Five
It was at the close of a dream-like September day that returning from his swim he found her seated on one of the blue chairs on the Welcome terrace. She was leaning forward, her cheek held on her closed hand. Her cotton beach hat was tossed on to the table. Her buttercup-yellow hair lay in a long wave across her forehead. There was an abstracted look upon her face. She turned her head slowly to Gordon as he came up to her: and her eyes smiled.
‘I thought you weren’t going to be able to come across today,’ he said. ‘I heard you had gone somewhere in the car.’
‘I did,’ she said; ‘I went into Nice to catch a train. Roger had to go to Paris suddenly. He had a cable that worried him. Something to do with stocks.’ She paused. ‘I felt lonely over in the villa by myself. I thought I’ld come over and have dinner with you. Would you like me to drive you somewhere?’
She made the announcement as simply as on other evenings she had said: ‘Roger’s busy. I thought I’ld come over for an hour.’
He replied as casually.
‘We might go into Nice,’ he said.
It was the first time they had been out together: the first time they had ever had a meal alone together. It seemed strange to be sitting there side by side at a table on the level of the little street, so famous in the Empire period for its gaming houses and gay ladies, with the cars passing by in front of them; and the lighthouses of Antibes and Cap Ferrat flashing alternately to each other across the bay. So strange that they found it easier to look away from each other in silence across the water. At other times when they had been together they had filled eagerly, greedily with talk the few free moments; but now with so much of time ahead, there was no hurry. They could savour quietly the moment’s peace.
‘How long will Roger be away?’ asked Gordon.
‘I don’t know. A week, at least,’ she said.
