by Alec Waugh
‘It is impossible like this, my darling. You must see it is. What can it lead to but deceit, and strain?’
‘That’s what I’ve always felt.’
‘You can’t be two men’s wife.’
‘No.’
‘And it’s not anyhow else but as a wife I want you.’
‘Sweet.’
With her hand held tightly in his he pleaded with her. It was nonsense, all this talk about free love, he said to her. You didn’t love, you weren’t loved, unless you had bonds laid on you. Love itself was a bond, a needed bond. There was only one way to love: to make of your two lives one life; to face it together for good or bitter chance.
‘I’m so glad that you feel like that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if you did. I so longed for you to.’
‘Then you will come?’
‘Oh, my dear!’
She had risen to her feet. With one hand rested upon the balcony, the other laid upon his shoulder, she looked out over the twilit landscape. They must go right away at once, he said. They would make their plans tomorrow. They would go to Marseilles and catch a boat from there. They might go to Tangiers. He had seen Tangiers from the boat on his way to the South Seas. It had looked so calm and lovely; its white houses climbing back into the hills. They could be so happy there.
‘I think that we could be happy anywhere,’ she said.
‘And we’ld stay there quietly till the divorce was over.’
‘I’ld have to come back for a divorce.’
That would be silly, he said. There would be no need; they could just stay there, till the fuss was over.
She shook her head.
‘America’s not like England,’ she said. ‘Americans don’t divorce their wives.’
‘He’ld let you divorce him then?’
‘He might forgive me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But what did you mean?’
‘Darling, what does it matter what I meant? We could have that time together.’
‘Then you are coming?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Gordon, I don’t know.’
Her back was turned to him. As she stood silhouetted in white against the sky’s dark velvet, he could not think what thoughts were passing behind that lovely mask.
‘If I were only twenty-two,’ she said at length. Then, after a pause: ‘If it was any other man that I was married to.’ She seemed to hesitate. With every power of persuasion that he possessed he urged his case to her. They were the same arguments that he had heard used in plays a hundred times: arguments that came in books so easily to the lips of lovers, that the punctilious novelist was afraid to use them. That talk of the right to happiness, of love making its own laws, of the fleetingness of youth.
‘I suppose one owes something to oneself,’ she said. Then turning back to him. ‘You’ll be good to me,’ she said. ‘You’ld be all I’ld have.’
She had stopped him before he could answer.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said. ‘Make love to me. Maybe I will.’
Later, after she had gone back to her own room, with the promise that she would come, wrung from her, he sat very still on the veranda, thinking.
He was too practical, too advanced in life not to know the seriousness of the course that he was taking. He had been always up to now, circumspect and worldly-wise in the ordering of his life. He had tried the ground before he had put the full weight of his body on it. And now that he was abandoning caution, he knew the manner of the risk he ran. He knew the shock that he would cause his parents; the wrong that he would be doing Sweden; the difficulties that he would be creating in America for himself and Faith; the damage he would do her reputation. He knew how the situation was going to be complicated by Faith’s child: by the permanent presence on account of that child, of the man that he had wronged. He recognized, too, how very different would be Faith’s position as his wife from what it had been as Sweden’s. She would have far less money, she would not be able to entertain on a lavish scale. There would be an end to that amusing life of week-end parties. He knew all that. The reasons against any such step were stronger and more numerous than any of those that had been sufficient at other crises to deter him. Had any one of his friends come to him in a similar predicament, he would have counselled him not to be an idiot. ‘Don’t sacrifice what’s irreplaceable,’ he would have said, ‘for something that you’ve outgrown once, and in all human probability will outgrow again.’ But this one time, this once in many times, he told himself, it would not be like that. Just as Faith meant so much to him that he was ready to sacrifice for her sake all the practical considerations that had controlled and directed his life before, so he believed would he be able to make up to Faith for all that she would be losing by coming to him. By the measure of his love, he was judging hers. On Faith’s account he felt no guilt; and for the others: for his parents and for Sweden, in a way, too, for the child—well, someone had to pick up the bad hand in every deal.
Sitting on his balcony, looking out over the empty bay, it was less of that he thought than of the more immediate problems that were involved in the decision. For they in themselves were quite serious. In novels, undoweried lovers eloped and supported existence for months on an occasional article to a high-brow weekly. Life was not quite so simple. He knew that a trip to North Africa would be exceedingly expensive; that his own bank balance was nearer than was comfortable to the point at which the bank sends letters telling you that your account appears to be overdrawn: and that no substantial sum would be paid into it till he had delivered to his publisher the novel with which he was so out of humour: that money is the last thing by which an eloping woman expects to be worried. Calmly, in no mood of panic, he confronted the situation. He had to have at least three hundred pounds within thirty-six hours. A cable to London might achieve a sending of it; but it would amount to a loan from Stanley. He did not know in what position Stanley’s finances were. It would be difficult in a telegram to explain the extreme urgency of the request. He did not feel that he could rely upon a cable. He could, however, persuade Masters to cash a post-dated cheque for him, write at length to Stanley explaining what had happened, so that Stanley could arrange for funds to have been paid into his bank before the cheque was presented there.
It was practically the holding of a pistol at Stanley’s head. A saying: ‘Here’s this cheque being presented. Money must be found somewhere to meet it.’ Even Stanley’s marmoreal calm was likely to be ruffled when the letter reached him. He would be making an infernal nuisance of himself. But just once in one’s life, he supposed, one was justified in doing that. Otherwise what was friendship for? With his mind at peace he went to sleep.
He slept late. So late that the sun was high when he came downstairs, and on the terrace were the remains of an abandoned breakfast. Faith had breakfasted and gone, was on her way back for her morning telephone call from Paris. Well, it was the last time that she’ld be doing that, he thought, as he sat over his figs and coffee, turning the pages of his paper, waiting for the squat facteur to come hobbling along with his load of the morning’s mail.
He read the paper casually. It was surprising how dull a newspaper became in late September. During the summer cricket made every day’s issue interesting. There was always definite and progressive news. By October, one had got used to the absence of sporting interest on every day but Sunday. Late September was a period of unsatisfactory adjustment; when you expected to find excitement and had to resign yourself to disappointment. Without any great interest he turned the pages. There was trouble in India. There were difficulties in Australia. Spain was in a state of uncertainty. The Stock market was wobbling again.
The facteur arrived bearing with him a copy of the New Yorker. It contained one of Peter Arno’s liveliest drawings. He was still chuckling over it when there was a crunch of wheels on the gravel. ‘C’est l’américaine,’ a small child said. Before she had said a word to him
he could tell that there was something wrong. For the first time in his life he saw a harried expression on her face.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I’ll tell you. Order me coffee. I’ve got to go to Paris. No, after the coffee’s come I’ll tell you.’
It was the wobbling of the Stock market to which in the Daily Mail there had been so casual a reference.
‘I don’t quite know what’s happened. The line was very bad. But Roger wants to go back to New York straight away. He’s booked passages on the Bremen. It sails the day after tomorrow. I’ve got to catch the morning train from Nice.’
‘But you said. . . .’
‘I know, I know, but this changes everything. He’s in trouble. He needs me. I’ve got to go.’
For the first time in his life he saw her half fretful, half impatient. She drank her coffee in two quick gulps.
‘You might ask them to get my bill ready. I must go upstairs and pack,’ she said.
She had not much to pack. It was only a small weekend dressing-case that she had brought over from Cap Ferrat. The bulk of her luggage was already stacked upon the car.
‘You’ll come into Nice with me?’
‘Of course.’
They drove in silence along the road so long familiar to them. It was happening so quickly that Gordon could not realize it was for the last time that he was seeing at her side the absurd rococo castlelet upon Mont Boron.
And this was the way, he told himself, that things should end. The way one wanted them to end, if one was to preserve romance. This was the way he had arranged in his stories for them to end, coupé net en plein ardeur, with no loss of faith in one another. And this was the way it was, and his heart was breaking.
He had no time to think. There was the merciful haste of tickets to be bought, sleeping-cars ordered, magazines and Tauchnitz novels to be stacked in a corner of the carriage. With scarcely two minutes left, they were standing on the platform’s edge with nothing to say to one another, with her mind preoccupied, already planning for things he would not share. The whistle went. She turned to him. There was the old fondness in her eyes, the old tremor he loved so in her voice.
‘Don’t worry, precious. It’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘And come and join me over there, quick, quick!’
‘You’ll write?’
‘You know I’ll not.’
Even at the last they could afford to laugh.
‘Maybe I’ll telegraph,’ she said. ‘But hurry. Don’t leave me alone too long there.’
Another second and the train had gone. He could not believe that it had happened. An hour earlier he had been sitting on the terrace of the Welcome, wondering how early he could ring up Masters; phrasing the letter he would write to Stanley; the letter he would write his parents; dreaming of the unutterable happiness of a life shared openly with Faith. Only an hour ago. And there was the train whirling her heaven knew where. In a week’s time she would be three thousand miles away. He stood staring at the empty rail-tracks. It was a little after ten. The day had scarcely begun. Twelve hours stretched in front of him. There was no reason now why he should not go to Antibes and see Masters, or to bathe at Monte Carlo, or dawdle along any of the bays that fringed that lovely coast. The occasion for his imprisonment was over. His freedom had been handed back to him. What was there for him to do, though, with it? It was a coin that had no currency in his heart’s country. Staring there at the empty rail-road, the whole world seemed empty. ‘How soon,’ he thought, ‘shall I be able to follow her?’
Part Three
Chapter One
That afternoon Gordon arranged in Nice for a passage two days later on a Japanese boat sailing from Marseilles to London. He had need with his life free and empty for the freedom and emptiness of the sea. As he sat on the inevitable Basso balcony with the inevitable dish of bouillabaisse in front of him, he remembered the last time he had sat there on the eve of his sailing for Tahiti. It was only a year ago. But that evening seemed to belong to another period of existence. It was with a prescience of adventure that he had looked then across the shipping of the vieux port to the narrow mounting streets behind the Cannebière. Now in the full flood of that adventure there was assurance of continuity in the unchangingness of this old city. So much of his own adventure had begun and ended here: his voyage to Bali; his voyage to the South Seas; it was past the Château d’lf that he had sailed on his way back from Africa—just as so much of the world’s history had begun and ended in the city that Greek traders had named Masilia.
In the same way that his life had loitered there, not touching it, not knowing it, so had history flowed through and past and over it; submerging temporarily but never conquering the heart of this city so gallant, so assailable, that had with improvident recklessness given herself to beaten causes; that had survived and changed and grown; yet had remained herself; secret, and apart, like a woman who takes but does not give; who is the repository of secrets but whose lips are locked. So much of life during two-and-a-half thousand years, had lingered along these harbour sides. So many foreigners had found a home here; had been conscious on this alien soil of something that understood them, that they understood. The main bulk of the shipping had been moved westwards, but it was the vieux port still that sheltered all that was most personal in the city’s life. Below him, as he sat, edging the masts and funnels, the fluctuant heterogeneous throng moved and wavered under the autumn sun. They had come, many of them, from very far: from the rice fields of Indo-China, from the high green hills of Madagascar, from the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, from the sugar plains of the Antilles, from the parched wastes of Northern Africa. They spoke strange tongues. They moved with the gaits of other climates. Yet they walked as though it were familiar and well-loved soil they trod.
As his ship drew away that afternoon into the Gulf of Lyons, and the houses on the coast grew indistinct, he knew that a dream chapter was at an end. Reality had broken upon his Eden. Lovers might dream their rich and long delight, but got their winter-seeming summer’s night. Eden was a forbidden country. It was no longer in a dream-world that he was living. It was by a practical problem that he was faced. A problem with clear-cut alternatives. He knew very well the thing he had to do. To get finished a novel with all the speed he might, and with his bank balance stabilized return to Faith, to ask her, not as a dream lover would, but as a practical inhabitant of the twentieth century, in which direction her happiness really lay.
Now with the outline of the coast a vague shadow on the horizon, he was not sure that it was not for the best that this break should have come; that she should not have been rushed into a decision that subsequently she might regret. It was her happiness that mattered. He knew which way his lay. It might or might not be along the same road that hers lay. They had now a pause in which to think. It would be at least three months before they could meet again. The novel on which he had been at work at Villefranche was three parts finished. But with that story he was out of patience. In love, he did not want to write of the substitutes of love. He needed a subject that could be impersonally self-expressive, of which Faith, when she read it, would be able to say: ‘This is how he felt, this is how he thought.’ He wanted to find some parallel instance of star-crossed lovers. And as he paced the decks of the Suwa Maru during the slow-passing hours of his journey towards Gibraltar, a scheme for a novel that he had considered three years back and put aside, came to him from a different angle.
It was the story of a Malayan planter, a man in the early thirties, returning to London for his second leave. The first chapter would give a picture of Malayan life: of its large-heartedness, its problems, its climatic and scenic setting; of how the life of the English there is built round the idea of a return to England, either on leave or in permanent retirement. The first scene would be the account of a meeting between the hero and a man who has recently returned from leave. The man just back is talking boastfully of his adventures, particularly of his love adventures. The
hero listens enviously. He is just due for leave. On his previous leave no such experiences came his way. But he was younger then, he tells himself. Women are only interested in very young men if they are radiantly handsome. And he had not been that. Now that he is older, that he has the poise of experience and exercised authority; now also that he has a reasonable sum of money, the result of prudent spending and a run of luck in rubber, things should be different.
The book would recount the contrast between what he had expected and what he found. It was not easy for him to establish contacts. His former friends either were established in life, with families and homes; or else had drifted into failure. The failures would depress him and sponge on him. The successful scarcely succeeded in concealing their embarrassment over his return. He could not join in their common talk. His sense of humour was untopical. His slang was not theirs. His interests were not theirs. He would find himself more and more driven to the society of those men with whom he could discuss the interests that were his own; men such as himself on leave, or retired from the Far East. He found himself spending more and more of his time inside the Sports Club. The love affairs that he had dreamed of did not materialize. The light-hearted girls found him heavy-handed. The girls who would have been ready to consider marriage were unattracted by the prospect of a life far from their friends and country. He would be driven to the resort of most men who have no part in a city’s life. As the weeks turned into months he would find himself actually looking forward to the end of his leave.
Gordon, as he had originally planned the book, had meant to end the story with the planter’s return; with a scene, suggested by Daudet’s ‘Figurez-vous en plein Sahara,’ in which the hero would begin boasting in the Penang Club to a young planter due for leave of the marvellous time that he had had in London and of his lucky passages in love.
It was a story in which he had planned to show how much is sacrificed by those on whose energy and industry and courage the Empire’s fortune most surely rests. He had thought also that an amusing picture of London life could be presented out of the contrast between the London the hero expected and remembered, and the London that he found. It would be a presenting of modern London, and in particular the modern Londoner, through new eyes. It would also, in the final scene in the Penang Club, have a satiric conclusion in the uncompromising refusal of human beings to admit that they have failed. That was how he had planned the book. Then another, more interesting scheme, presenting itself, he had put it aside, meaning to return later to it.
