Unclouded Summer

by Alec Waugh

  Judy nodded.

  “He was in love with her all his life. Whenever Lillian was in trouble or unhappy he was the man she turned to. Twice she promised to marry him, then at the last moment, married someone else. It was hard for him to take. But he always knew that in the long run he’d get her; he was right; he did. He was her fourth husband. He was forty-five when he married her. But he had nine years with her. They were the most perfect years that any man could have had, he said.”

  “Isn’t he very broken up then now?”

  Judy shook her head.

  “It’s the last thing he is. He’s very active, very efficient, full of zest for everything, interested in everything, enjoying everything, never tired. He never drinks, never goes to a night club – yet he’ll stay up talking till any hour, always wanting to have people round him; taking immense trouble over every American visitor to Madrid; trying to find out and do for them whatever it is that would most make their visit a success.”

  “But isn’t that a defense mechanism; like the use of a narcotic? One man takes to work as another man might take to drink?”

  Again Judy shook her head. “I don’t think it is. In fact, I’m quite sure it isn’t. He’s not an unhappy man. In a way he’s the most happy man I’ve ever known. He had those ten perfect years. He’s living in their afterglow. No young couple in the first flush of marriage has given me such a complete sense of happiness in love, as Aleck Moore does as a widower of sixty.” She paused. “I really think,” she added, “That theirs is about as lovely a story as you could find.”

  As she said that, a new tone came into her voice, a deeper, richer tone; the whole expression of her face was changed so that Francis looking at her across the table saw her from a new angle, in a new dimension, seeing her for the first time as someone capable of becoming under the touch of love, transfigured and transmuted. For one second, he saw her in that light, then once again she was her former self – gay and frivolous and friendly. But that moment’s glimpse had made him think of her in another way.

  She’s the loveliest person that I’ve ever met, he thought.

  A warm, fond feeling was about his heart. He did not suppose that he would ever see a great deal more of Judy. They lived he and she in such very different worlds. She was wife and hostess to an important person, with only time for such people as fitted into his career. They were on a holiday now, but a man like Marriott even on a holiday was carrying on his public life; there was not room in his life, or in hers, for an obscure American. Maybe I’ll never see her again after today, he thought, but I’ll never forget her, never never.

  As the party left the table, he moved across to her. “Do tell me who everybody is,” he said. “What does Lord Ambrose do? Who’s Mr. Muspratt?”

  She laughed at that. “I’d put that question the other way round. Who’s Lord Ambrose and what does Mr. Muspratt do? I’ve been asking myself that last question for the last two hours. Mr. Muspratt plays some game but I can’t remember what and I know there’s something that I can do for him. I must go and find out what it is. The poor man’s sat like a mute through the whole of lunch. As for Lord Ambrose, he has a place in Devonshire, he’s mixed up in a hundred and one things. We couldn’t like him more. Come over and talk to Nina. You’ve hardly had a word with her.”

  Lady Ambrose greeted him with a smile. She was very lovely, lean, and lithe like some jungle creature, proud and dangerous and exotic, and possibly beneath her façade extremely shy. He thought again how remarkable it was that in spite of her slacks and her short-cut hair one should be so vividly aware of her femininity.

  “I’ve been wanting to say it to you all through lunch,” she said, “but it would have sounded so silly to bawl it across the table. I did think your pictures good.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “But it seems so silly not to be able to say more than that. I never know what to say to painters. One can talk to musicians about passages in their pieces and to novelists about their plots and characters, but what can you say to a painter except that you like his pictures?”,

  “I don’t know that there’s much more that one can say.”

  “When I read notices of exhibitions, they never seem to tell me anything. They discuss a great many ‘isms’ but that doesn’t tell me anything about the pictures.”

  “They’ve never painted themselves probably.”

  “I expect that’s the trouble. ‘I’ve seen a great many pictures but I’d never be able to explain why I know that some are good and some aren’t. I was very curious to see the kind of picture that you painted. Judy was so enthusiastic over them last night.”

  “She was?”

  “She could talk of nothing else. There were we waiting to do honor to her film star and all she did was babble away about the marvelous young American painter she had met. She almost put us off you she was so enthusiastic. It was a great relief to find you were, well what you are.”

  There was warmth and there was friendship in her smile. Though no one could have been more different from Judy, they had, she and Lady Ambrose, this in common, that they provided a complete contrast to his preconceived idea of the Englishwoman. Though he had never been to England and had met hardly any Englishmen, he had always felt vaguely antipathetic towards the English of the upper classes. He had imagined that the women were dowdy, cold, long-necked, and hoity-toity, and that the men were starched and arrogant and overbearing, idle, reactionary, and vain, leading luxurious lives on the proceeds of the beggarly wages that were paid to Welsh miners and to Indian Coolies. No four people could have failed to fit that preconception more completely than the Marriotts and the Ambroses.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Judy did tell me quite a lot but I must confess I didn’t listen very carefully. I thought ‘another of Judy’s crazes’ and began to plan out a dinner party.”

  In a letter the phrase “Judy’s crazes” might have read cattily, but it was not said that way, but on a note of affectionate raillery that made it possible for him to ask without disloyalty. “Does Judy specialize in crazes?”

  Lady Ambrose laughed. “Look at her now.”

  On the opposite side of the verandah, Judy was curled up on a round leather cushion, of the type that is sold by Algerians out of small boats to tourists, looking up at Mr. Muspratt with the most rapt concentration. If the phrase “Drinking in his words” could ever be used appropriately, it could be now.

  “She throws herself into friendships as other women throw themselves into love affairs,” she said. “It’s an engaging trait. She’s so generous, so open-hearted. She’s always doing things for people. But occasionally of course she makes mistakes. That’s, I’m afraid, why I didn’t listen as carefully as I should, so please will you start telling me all that I should have heard last night.”

  It was not a conventionally polite making of conversation. She was interested, genuinely. The questions that she asked him told him that. He found it easy to talk to her, and all the time as he was talking, his eye, his painter’s eye was noting her long-limbed grace, the effortless, unstudied poses that she assumed. The minutes passed quickly into quarters.

  “You must come over and see us before you go,” she said.

  “You’re at Villefranche, aren’t you? But I can always get in touch with you through Judy.”

  As the party began to take its leave, he took a slow, all-inclusive look about him, taking a mental inventory of the scene, fixing it, detail by detail, on his memory. This house, this terrace, this verandah, would symbolize for him forever, a way of life he may never have known before, and maybe would never know again, a rich and lovely way.

  He was sad as he walked across to Judy.

  “There’s no need for you to drive me back,” he said. “I’m sure one of the others could drop me somewhere on the main road where I could pick up a bus.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s all right. I’ve got to go down to Nice. Besides I want to sho
w you the house first.”

  When the last guest had gone, she sighed. “Now we can relax,” she said.

  There were the four of them left on the verandah, the Marriotts, himself and Allan. With an amused, avuncular smile Sir Henry turned to Judy and put an arm about her shoulders. “And now, my dear, suppose you tell us all about your Mr. Muspratt. Do you realize that he did not make one remark during the entire day? Who is he?”

  “He’s a cricketer.”

  “Is he! Why yes of course he is, E. K. Muspratt. He plays for Warwickshire.”

  “That’s it.”

  “If you’d only told me that, I’d have found a lot to talk to him about.”

  “I know, darling, but I simply could not remember. I knew it was a game, but I couldn’t remember which; all through lunch I was trying to remember. Thank heavens, you know who he is. There’s something we can do for him. He’s a schoolmaster, at Sevenham. And he’s not happy there. He wants to change. You’re one of the governors at Fernhurst. Couldn’t you get him on the staff there, since he’s so good at cricket?”

  “My dearest Judy, where did you pick him up?”

  “At Monte Carlo in the Sporting Club after that party of Donita’s. We had a most interesting talk all about cricket. I remember it completely now.”

  “If I didn’t know you so well and if this wasn’t the fifteenth time that something like this has happened I should be inclined to wonder if you hadn’t had too much to drink.”

  “But I never do, Henry, do I now?”

  “I know you don’t. That’s what I said.”

  “So you will do something for him, won’t you?”

  “I suppose I will.”

  “And he was quite presentable, now wasn’t he?”

  “Completely. I only hope that he enjoyed himself.”

  “He certainly enjoyed his lunch,” said Allan. “He had two goes at everything.”

  “In that case, as we also prevented the Renans from having an open row, I think we can consider our lunch party a success, and now it’s time for my siesta.”

  “I’m going to show Francis round, then run him back.”

  “Why bother to do that? Why don’t we take him over to the Foresters? They keep open house. They’re always glad to have an extra man. That’s a much better idea now surely.”

  Judy laughed.

  “It would be a much better idea for us, but I’m very sure that Francis has some pretty lady waiting for him in Villefranche.”

  Francis shook his head.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  “So you’re being faithful to your sweetheart in America.”

  “I haven’t got that either.”

  “Quite heart-whole then?”

  “Completely.”

  She hesitated. She looked at Francis thoughtfully. She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind.

  “Let’s go and look at the house,” she said, “not that there’s really anything to see. Will you be all right, Rex?”

  “Very much all right. I’m going to have a siesta too.”

  “In that case then …”

  She had said there was not anything to see, and in a sense there was not. The main addition which had been made to a Provencal cottage, consisted of a single room, long, broad and high, with a row of bookshelves running at shoulder height around it with ornaments arranged along the top, with pictures modern for the most part, widely spaced, with two Epstein heads, with a Chinese screen and with a Spanish cabinet. The one long room was really all that there was to see; the old part containing on the ground floor only Sir Henry’s study “And that’s really too much of a mess for you to see,” and a dark low-ceilinged raftered dining room which they only used when it was wet or cold, and on the first floor the two bedrooms, hers and Sir Henry’s and the one guest room “And Henry’s asleep in one and Rex is in the other.” There was nothing to see except the one big room; in a sense it was not anything, in another it was everything. It was a key to their joint Mf e, hers and his.

  “We bought it in ‘19,” she said. “We’d been away all the war, first in the Balkans, then in Rome. I’d been married for three years without seeing Charlton. At first I found it rather overpowering. Look, there’s a picture of it, above the writing desk.”

  She pointed to an early nineteenth-century print; it was a broad, white three-storied house, with a flamboyant portico. It had a broad gravel courtyard: lawns sloped down from it to a pond that was fringed with rhododendrons. It was backed by what appeared to be a forest. An avenue of chestnuts led away from it.

  “I’ve got to love it now,” she said, “but when I saw it first I didn’t see how I was ever going to think of it as home, as my home. The Marriotts themselves haven’t had it for so very long. But on the other, the female side, it’s been in the family since the flood. It seemed to belong to the past far more than it did to Henry. There were two stepdaughters as well. It had been their home before anyone had ever heard of me. I felt I had to have something that was really mine, that was really ours. Then when I came down here…” She paused: she looked round her with a possessive fondness. “I’ve made this ours. I’ve moved down here all the things that are really Henry’s. There’s nothing here that hasn’t a personal association for him or me.”

  They walked slowly along the shelves, picking out a book here and there. Many of them were signed copies from their authors.

  “You certainly have a great many friends,” he said. She laughed.

  “Friends, that’s a big word. But nearly everyone comes down to the coast some time or other. We manage to see most of those who do.”

  She picked up a copy of Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith. “This is by one of your compatriots. We saw quite a bit of him in London. I suppose you know him.”

  He smiled. “I’m afraid that I move in very humble circles.”

  “You won’t much longer, painting the way you do.” She paused. She looked at him thoughtfully. “Is that really true about your not being in love with anyone?”

  “Quite true.”

  Her eyes retained their thoughtful expression for a moment, then she picked out another book. “Peter Whiffle, His Life and Works by Carl Van Vechton. That’s another of your compatriots who’s bilingual.”

  She said it on a note of interrogation. Again he shook his head.

  “I don’t even know very many painters. I’ve been too busy working to meet many people.”

  “You’re very wise. I’ve kown so many writers who estimate their success by the houses that they dine at. And of course the trouble is that in many walks of life that is the test, the people that one’s liked and trusted by.”

  She said it carelessly, as though it were a comment of no account in the same way that she had talked the day before of the artist’s struggle, of the artist’s need for roots. She does understand what one’s up against, he thought. He recalled the innumerable essays he had read on the function of the artist, on the position of the artist in society. They had employed a number of impressive words but they had none of them seen pictures as the painter saw them, as the solution or failure to solve a series of direct personal problems. Nothing that he had read in those intimate biographies had given him so much of an insight into the nature of his own difficulties as these casual remarks of Judy’s.

  They moved along the shelves, looking at the ornaments that were along the top, two green jade dolphins from Gump’s in San Francisco, a short curved Malayan knife, some Persian paintings upon ivory; the pictures were arranged with a full two-foot gap between them. She stood ruminatively below a small Van Gogh still life. “It’s the best picture in the room. But it hasn’t any personal meaning for me. I think it’s the one that’ll have to make way for one of yours.”

  At the end of the shelves, she knelt down beside a pile of albums. She hesitated. “I’d like to show you these. They’re my photographs, but I couldn’t bear to see you get drowsy over them. Perhaps we’d better have a swim first to freshen us
. No, not in the sea, silly, in our cistern.”

  The cistern was circular, of concrete, nine feet high and some twenty feet across. It provided the irrigation of the estate. It was set some fifty yards behind the house. A rough path wound up to it through the vineyards. As she tossed off her long white bathrobe at the foot of the iron ladder leading up to the cistern, he gave a start. She was wearing a tight dark-blue one-piece bathing dress. He had had no idea that she would be so beautiful. She noticed his start and smiled. “That thing you lent me yesterday would fool anyone,” she said.

  He watched her entranced as she scampered up the ladder. How old had she said she was, over thirty? She was so vivid, so supple, she had such a zest for living. One barely thought of her as twenty.

  “Hurry up,” she shouted. “It’s heaven here.”

  In Maine, even in midsummer, the water in the cistern would have seemed lukewarm, but here in contrast to the Provencal heat his first plunge into it made him gasp. She laughed. “Isn’t this different from your clammy coast? Can’t you guess what this does to you every morning, and look at the view, have you seen anything like it ever?”

  The west side of the Esterels was cut off by the rising hill, but the whole southeast of the valley was spread below them. They could see the coast, a succession of bays and promontories curving towards Italy, past Nice and Monaco and Menton; with the sea a sapphire blue and the sky paling to white where the horizon cut it, and across the nearer valley, above the vineyards and the terraced olive groves were the white walls of Mougins and the tall cypresses beside its churchyard, and northwards higher in the hills was Grasse.

  “Have you ever been to Grasse?” she asked.

  He shook his head. He had been once up into the hills, to St. Paul where he had spent a night at the Colombe d’Or, breakfasting beneath its orange trees, but for one who had no car, travel was difficult and rather costly. At the end of a holiday one was at the end also of one’s funds. He had been economizing these last days.

  “Not been to Grasse! The home of Fragonard and you a painter. Look at it. Don’t you feel guilty now?”