by Alec Waugh
For a week they would be free: to bathe on whatever beach they liked; to drive to whatever restaurant they liked along the Corniche road; to cross into Italy if they chose.
He could scarcely believe that it was true.
‘Let’s have our coffee in the Avenue,’ she said.
Under the lamplit plane trees with the cafés crowded, the tram-cars rattling, the Renaults and the Buicks halting and checking at the corner; with the pavements thronged; the waiters bustling from table to table, it was very like Paris on a summer night; or rather, Paris as one dreams of it and rarely finds it. For a long time they sat there, watching the crowds loiter and hurry by.
‘I can’t believe that it’s you that’s sitting there,’ he said.
‘Didn’t I tell you that in the end it would come right?’
‘We’ll go to the Monte Carlo beach tomorrow.’
‘Then you’ll see what a lovely brown I’m burnt.’
‘We might go to the Palm Beach Casino in the evening.’
‘We might.’
‘There’s a nice restaurant at St Jean where they make bouillabaisse.’
‘I like bouillabaisse.’
‘There’s a René Clair film showing at the Eldorado.’
‘ “The Blue Angel” should be coming in a week or so.’
The world stretched in front of them, prodigal of potentialities. ‘It’s getting late,’ said Faith.
The square was empty as the car swung down into it. There was a light still above the Cabanon, but the awning was up over the Welcome terrace. Such men as were still awake would be seated on the steps of the streets in the upper town. A number of cats were considering each other in the market-place. As Gordon got out of the car, Faith ran the window up. He looked inquiringly at her. She stepped out at his side on to the gravel.
‘I thought I’ld be lonely at the villa,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here.’
‘At the Welcome?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll come and say good night to you,’ she said.
On his balcony Gordon waited. It was very quiet on the quay below. The water in the harbour stretched unruffled towards the dark humped shadow of Cap Ferrat. A moon waning to three-quarters full veiled with its tender light the grey-green olive slopes; the moored boats; the outline of the tribunal; shining into the unlit room at Gordon’s back it lent to the ordinary hotel furniture a sense of grace, of beauty. With his hands upon the ironwork, he waited. Faith’s room was at the far end of the passage. He could see the light behind the shutters. He could see her shadow on the balcony. Then suddenly the light went out. At his back there was a sound of an opening door. In the moonlit room she was beyond speech lovely. She came across to him. She rested her hands upon his shoulders.
‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘do you know we’ve never kissed?’
Five hours later he was standing again upon the balcony. A yacht had come into the harbour; its lighted portholes were reflected in the water. The moon was dying behind the trees. A couple of fishermen were busy with the mooring of their boat. A last car was flashing its way along the Corniche road. He did not see them. ‘Whatever happens to me now,’ he thought, ‘there has been this.’
When he came down next morning, it was to find Faith already on the terrace before her figs and coffee. Seeing her sitting there, calm and smiling and self-possessed, he could hardly believe that only a few hours ago he had held her in his arms.
They greeted one another as though there had been no such passage.
‘You’re up early,’ he said.
‘Roger said he would be putting through a call at ten. I must get back for it.’
The thought that on such a morning she could be thinking of anything but themselves would have fretted him had she not spoken of the call as casually as though it were a matter of giving orders to a cook.
‘We might go to Monte Carlo afterwards and swim.’
‘I think that would be nice.’
By half-past ten she was back in Villefranche.
‘Did the call go through all right?’
‘As right as any call can, along this coast.’
‘Did he say how long he expected to stay in Paris?’
‘He won’t know that till he’s seen some of the people at the Bourse.’
‘You’ll know tomorrow, I suppose?’
‘I guess.’
Question and answer were set as casually as though they concerned the movements of an unimportant guest. There was no suggestion that they were anything more than the fond friends they had been for so many weeks.
It was of indifferent things that they talked, as they drove into Monte Carlo: as they sunned themselves on the shingle beach: as they raced each other in the swimming pool: as they dived for pennies: as they sat on the edge, dangling their toes into the water: as they changed back, he into a dry swimming-suit, she into pyjamas to eat sandwiches and sip iced coffee under the shade of an umbrella: as after a second bathe they drove back to the Casino for Faith to lose eighty and Gordon to win two hundred francs: as with the heat of the day declining, their bodies weary with sun and exercise they returned to Villefranche.
But though through the long day no word of love was uttered, the memory of love made them gentle and tender to each other; the foreknowledge that each minute was bringing them closer to love’s return made their looks linger as they met. There was a new bond between them. Through everything they did and said beat a subtle rhythm; so that the aching to take her in his arms increased; though with no sense of haste. He could afford to wait, who had so long waited. Love’s rhythm should not be hastened; it should be surrendered to. In its own good time it would bring to them the moment when the things that were to be said, should be said rightly; when lovers find their hearts upon their lips.
It was after dinner, as they sat on the Welcome terrace over their coffee, that there came to him the words that all day had been forming themselves on his heart’s tablets. Leant forward across the table, her chin resting on the latticed bridge of her fingers, she listened with a rapt, withdrawn look on her face: a look of unutterable and deep content; as though the words were incense swung before a shrine. Her very vagueness increased his need to impress on her the extent and nature of his devotion.
‘I’ve so wanted you; all these weeks I have so wanted you.’
She smiled; her slow, vague smile. ‘I always knew it would come right,’ she said.
That night framed for them, assured now of one another, the flowering of their love.
It had been a dream courtship: that sitting on the Welcome terrace waiting for a grey-green car to sweep over the Corniche road. It was a dream love-time that they lived on the edge of the little harbour, on the Riviera beaches, in the casinos and restaurants of the azure coast. There are certain places where you can feel isolated and apart from ordinary living; where things exist in and for themselves; are self-created and self-completed. One feels it on islands, on Capri, for example. Villefranche is very like an island.
They did not look ahead during those early days. They did not ask themselves what lay ahead. They were caught up by the timelessness of love. They existed in their love. All their lives seemed to have been a growth towards it. The only important things were the things that had taught them to value, appraise, appreciate this love. They asked each other the eternal questions that all lovers have set each other. What they had felt at their first meeting. When had they first grown aware of love’s approach? What had they thought at such and such a time?
‘I felt frightened when you were so far away,’ she said. ‘I had no hold on you. That’s why I cabled you. That’s why I telephoned you. I wanted to remind you of me.’
It would have been impossible for any one to have been sweeter than Faith was to him through those days. She was affectionate, considerate, unexacting. She was even worried about taking him from his work.
‘You’ve done no work at all since I came over here,’ she complained.
‘I’m not sure,�
� he said, ‘that I’m ever going to do much more work upon this novel.’
‘Oh, Gordon, what a waste of that absurd small writing!’
‘You’ve made it seem rather unimportant.’
She never discussed the future. It was indeed her very unexactingness that terrified Gordon sometimes. If she made so few demands, if she asked no protestations, no forever vows, could she be placing any high value on their love? It was this fear that made him protest with increasing eagerness how much it meant to him.
‘There’s been no one like you. There’ll never be any one else like you. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t give up for you. My whole life’s going to be built round you.’
Thus and thus he pleaded with her.
‘I’ve never loved like this before. I’ll never love like this again. I couldn’t. Because if this doesn’t last, then I’ll not believe that there exists a love that can. I’ll know love’s temporary.’ His eagerness to convince her of his passion for her fed his passion. The fear of losing her grew acute.
‘What’s going to happen?’ he would beseech her sometimes.
She would smile, fondly but carelessly. ‘Why worry about that now? We’re happy here; we’ll find ways. We’ll always be able to find ways.’
‘It’s not going to end here, is it?’
‘Silly, of course it isn’t.’
‘If I thought this were going to be the end I wouldn’t want to go on living.’
‘Do you think I’m going to let you go?’
There was a fond but resolute note in her voice as she said that.
‘It’ll be easier in America,’ she said.
‘But you’re always in crowds there.’
‘I shan’t be now.’
But the thought of that return to America frightened him: the thought of her going back to her husband after this: of his having to share her with that busy, bustling little man. Always, up to now, he had been practical and worldly-wise in love. He had despised jealousy as an unworthy, egotistical, possessive instinct. He had no more right, he had said, to have more than he knew how to take. As no woman had sufficed for his entire life, he did not expect to suffice for any woman. There were many forms of love. But now the thought of Faith’s return to Sweden maddened him. That someone should know her as he during these last days had known her, ardent, responsive, tender; with that purity of which only really passionate natures are capable. Not that he believed that the Faith he knew had been ever glimpsed at by her husband. Just as he was to her something he had been to no other woman, so he believed that to him she was a person other completely from the Faith Sweden that her friends and husband knew. He did not believe that she could have loved her husband.
‘He’s been very good to me,’ she said.
‘Being good doesn’t make one loved.’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Marriage is a funny thing,’ she said. ‘You may marry a man whom you’ld never think of taking as a lover: whom you respect and like. Time passes, you share so many things, you know each other so well, you can be so open with one another, that something has come into your life that you can’t do without.’
‘That sounds like the love coming afterwards that novelists write about.’
‘Novelists aren’t wrong all the time.’
They laughed at that. They were always laughing. But Gordon would not let the subject drop.
‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But there’s a kind of love that never does come afterwards, if it’s not there to start with, at first sight.’
She hesitated. ‘I think,’ she said, love comes and goes in a thousand different ways. But no, there’s one kind of love that if it isn’t there at first sight, never comes.’
‘And if it’s once been there, do you think it ever goes?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not wholly.’
‘Then I don’t see that there’s much chance of my ever falling out of love with you.’
‘Precious!’
But though he had spoken laughingly, he had thought: that bicyclist. Was she thinking of him when she had said that? Would that old attraction that was now slumbering come back if she were to meet him again? And for himself, had Faith ever felt that particular kind of love? He had on his side for her, but had she on hers for him?
‘Do you ever hear of that bicyclist?’ he asked.
‘You know that I don’t write letters.’
‘That doesn’t stop you receiving them.’
‘He sends me clippings about himself.’
‘How long is it since you’ve seen him?’
‘Three years.’
‘I wonder how you’ld feel if you were to see him again.’
‘I’ve wondered that.’
They laughed again. Gordon kept his manner light. But jealousy tore at him. What had that man meant to her life? What could he still mean? He knew so little of her for all that he knew so much. Were these days here in Villefranche a unique experience in her life, or was he one of many? In a way she had been so casual and yet so resolute in the conduct of this passage; she had known what she wanted from the start; she had controlled the direction of their relations. Would a woman inexperienced in intrigue have been so watchfully resolute? Or might not that very resolution be a proof of her inexperience? He did not know. Desperately he followed the coil of argument.
But every hour he grew more frightened at the knowledge of how soon that daily reprieve of the telephone would be at an end: with Sweden back again: and the old routine of the daily visits taken up. There would be a brief while of that. Then in the spring there would be New York, with its noise, its lack of privacy, its endless parties; with constant meetings at other people’s houses of Faith and her husband; with the acceptance on his side of her husband’s hospitality; or else a refusal of it so marked that it would excite comment. It would be an impossible situation: intrigues were impossible as a permanent background to a life. Such a situation must in the end degrade their feelings for each other: must force them to despise each other and themselves. The strain of such a situation would inevitably kill their love. Seeing it dispassionately, he knew that, ultimately, there would be only two courses open to them: to separate, or to run away together.
It was the alternative that was invariably presented to unhallowed lovers, and it was there that the truth lay in the old adage ‘the husband holds all the cards.’ A husband had only to play a waiting game to drive the lover to accept one or other alternative. And ninety-nine times in a hundred the lovers separate. There was one point in every love affair when the lovers would be eager for an excuse to cut and run. That moment once passed, they would only run if their hands were forced. A policy of passive resistance was universally successful. Gordon knew that. He was certain that unless he himself forced the issue now, he would lose Faith for ever.
It was at the end of a long, tranquil and very happy day that this realization rose overpoweringly within him. It had been the kind of day in which nothing happens, in which everything happens. A description of it would read like that of any other day. That two lovers happy in the memory of love sat under plane trees drinking their coffee, peeling purple figs; that they read the papers to one another, saying ‘Isn’t this too absurd? Madge Garrick’s gotten herself divorced for the sixth time.’ ‘I see Noel’s got a new play coming on next month’; that they idled an hour talking desultorily, with children clustering round them; that they hired a boat and rowed across to Lutitia, with the rowing making them so hot that every five minutes they would want to bathe. ‘We’ll never get across at this rate,’ they would say; that by the time they had reached the shore, tired with swimming and rowing, it was time for lunch; that they lunched, perched upon stools, off tomato and egg sandwiches and German beer; that afterwards laid out on the sand under an umbrella, they fell asleep, not waking till the sun had begun to western above Villefranche; waking not as one wakes usually after a sleep in the afternoon, with hot eyes and swollen tongue, but fresh and
laughing. ‘We must be terribly well,’ they said, ‘to feel as well as that!’
It was after six before they were back on the Welcome terrace.
‘We’ll go into Nice,’ they said, ‘and not by car, by bus.’ They climbed the hill together, like very simple lovers. They sat in a hot and crowded bus; and entered into a conversation with an old woman who was carrying a basket of fish that smelt abominably. In a café in the Avenue de la Victoire they played over their aperitif the ridiculous ‘I spy’ game in which one says: ‘You will observe the Prince of Wales walking towards that bus in a grey check suit.’ ‘Across the road you may observe the Archbishop of Canterbury curiously invested in a maillot, watching him with some concern.’ They ordered at the Negresco an absurd dinner that began with tomate provençale, and ended with caviare. It was the kind of day that might have been a very ordinary day. They did nothing that any two quite casual friends on any chance afternoon might not have done. Yet the sense of intimacy between them made every hour of that day a miracle. They were so in harmony that they were one person. It is a sensation that comes rarely, if ever in a lifetime, for more than moments. When it comes, it makes everything else in life seem unimportant. ‘If I can keep this feeling in my heart,’ you say, ‘ambition can go, and prominence, and all that is supposed to constitute the sum of happiness.’ It was at the end of such a day, as they sat side by side on their balcony, that Gordon said quietly and tenderly:
‘Faith, isn’t this something too good to let go out of our lives for ever?’
She turned slowly towards him. The moon had not yet risen. Her face in the half-light was very lovely.
‘What do you mean, Gordon?’
‘Don’t you think that if we were wise and brave, we’ld forget about everything in the world except ourselves, and go out and begin a life together?’
She looked at him very steadily.
‘Are you meaning, why don’t we run away together?’
He nodded.
She sighed softly.
‘Sweet one. I’ve been so longing for you to ask me that!’
Her voice was soft; her face averted.
