Unclouded Summer

by Alec Waugh

  They were at the edge of the cistern, side by side, their elbows rested on the rough surface of the concrete. From here, six miles away, it seemed a mere smudge upon the hillside, like the blobs of paint upon a palette, reds and creams and browns. It was impossible to visualize its tangle of narrow streets, its occasional tree-shadowed place with fountains playing about a statue. It seemed to have no depth, it had no color. You could not picture the fields of flowers – the violets and jonquils, the roses and mignonette, the jasmin and the tuberoses that fed its factories. Yes, he should have gone there.

  “How long is it that you’ve been here now: in Villefranche, I mean to say?”

  “Eight days.”

  “There must be so many places then you can’t have seen. Vence and La Turbie and St. Jeannet. Don’t you think that as you’ve got such a short time left you’d be wise to concentrate on just this part?”

  “Maybe I would.”

  “I think you would. Think it over.”

  When she came to join him on the verandah bearing under her arm two albums, she had changed into a more formal dress. It was black with a wide white collar and long loose sleeves with narrow white cuffs that fitted tightly at the wrist. It was made out of very thin material. The silk of her slip showed white beneath it. Her hair parted in the center was brought in two pointed curls before her ears. It made her look like a school girl. She patted the seat beside her. “Let’s look at them here,” she said. As he bent over the album he was conscious again of the scent of tuberose.

  “That’s me at eighteen months,” she said.

  It was the snapshot of a small girl at the seaside. She had a wooden spade in one hand, a small tin bucket in the other. She was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and a long white skirt which reached her ankles, and which from the way it bunched appeared to conceal several similarly dimensioned garments. She was also wearing shoes and stockings.

  “What an amazing amount of clothes,” he said.

  “That was in ‘96.”

  She flicked the pages over.

  “That’s me at four.”

  It was a posed studio portrait. A girl in a sailor cap with H.M.S. Valiant printed on the ribbon was leaning over a wicker gate against a background of sea and cliffs. She was wearing a sailor’s blouse with a broad white and dark collar and a large bow where the blouse fastened. Her lips were parted in a smile, but there were creases between her eyes.

  “Wasn’t I an ugly duckling then?”

  He looked at the portrait closely. It was so dated as to be ridiculous, but there was a resemblance there to Judy.

  “You look very fierce,” he said.

  “I was fierce. I always have been. I still am. Just look at that.”

  On the next page was a boy of about seven, in black tights and a doublet, with a broad-brimmed black-feathered hat. He had a gilt chain round his neck. He was lunging forward with a cane as though he were fencing. “That looks like Hamlet.”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “Is that your brother?”

  “No, it’s me.”

  “You?”

  “I knew Hamlet by heart when I was six. I always took men’s roles at school.”

  “But you aren’t in the least masculine.”

  “No, but I liked bossing things. Look at me then.”

  “Then” was a picture taken several years later of a girls’ hockey team. Judy sat in the center, holding a hockey stick in one hand, in the other a silver cup. All the girls wore the same school uniform, pigtails, a tunic with a badge on the left hand side, black stockings and stout shoes.

  There were several school groups in succession, then there was a picture of a two-storied semi-detached house with a bow window, and a roughcast gable, standing back behind a privet hedge some ten yards from a main road. “That was my home. The next picture’s of it too.”

  The next picture was taken from the other side. It showed a narrow garden, a short strip of lawn flanked by flower beds and screened from the next door by a row of poplars.

  “As you observe it was a very humble home,” she said.

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t know enough about English life to be able to tell that,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you? I suppose you wouldn’t. But that’s what it is: or rather that’s how I see it now. I didn’t think of it as humble then. I loved it. It was in Hampstead. It was the kind of house that in 1906 was occupied by a civil servant earning seven to eight hundred pounds a year.”

  “And that’s your father, is it?”

  A garden seat had been posed in the center of the lawn. In one corner of it was Judy. She must have been about eleven at the time. At the other end of the seat was a woman with a high whale-boned collar, and blouse that was ornate with frills. Her waist was very slim and a broad belt with a heavy clasp encircled it. Her hair was worn on the forefront of her forehead in a high puffed roll. Behind the chair was standing a tallish man, in a high-buttoned coat; he looked very stiff and formal in a tall turnover collar halfway down whose length was knotted a narrow thin-ended tie.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s Daddy. It’s a period piece all right.”

  He looked at it carefully. Her father’s clothes and the posing of the garden seat dated the picture far more than her mother’s high collar and tight lacing. One was used to seeing women’s clothes looking dated within two seasons. The photograph was only twenty years old, but it belonged to another world.

  “Tell me about your father,” Francis said.

  She shrugged. “He was the younger son of a younger son. He belonged to what we used to call the gentry. His grandfather was a country squire in Devonshire. His father was a country parson. His uncle had the gift of the living, and gave it to his elder brother. My father was the brains of the family. He went to the local grammar school. There was very little money in the family, but he got a scholarship at Oxford. He got a first in mods. He passed into the Home Civil, if you know what that means. Everyone prophesied big things for him. I don’t know quite what went wrong. I daresay it was having to work in London; he was a countryman; he had no links with London; he had no influential friends; he was very lonely; he fell in love with the first girl he met, one of the junior secretaries in his department. It was a very happy marriage. But my mother came from a very ordinary small suburban family. She had no ambitions except to marry someone like her father. She considered that in marrying Daddy she had got further than she could have ever hoped to get. She adored him. She was immensely proud of him. But she had never heard of such a thing as a careerist. And it’s very easy for a man to cease to be ambitious, when he’s happy. Then I was born. And Daddy so much preferred coming home and reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to sitting at the office over files. He’d been passed in the race before he realized that there was a race for him to enter.”

  “And then?”

  She shrugged again. “I should say that he had a very happy life. He had no idea that such a thing as the big world existed. He didn’t know that he’d missed anything. He was absorbed in my mother and in me. He loved watching my mind grow. He’d take me to plays; he’d read me poems and see how I’d react to them. I owe everything to Daddy.”

  Her voice softened and grew deeper: approximating to the tone that had come into it when she had talked at lunch of Lillian Russell and Aleck Moore. He noticed that while she spoke of “my mother” she called her father “Daddy.”

  “Are they both still alive?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “My mother died at the end of the war, during the flu epidemic.”

  “And what about your father? “

  “Retired. He’s got a cottage on the estate. He’s very happy there with his books and bulbs. He was never at home in London. He never knew what it was all about.”

  “He must be very proud of you.”

  She laughed. “He thinks I’m so remarkable that there doesn’t seem to him to be anything extraordinary in my being where I am. He hasn’t the fainte
st idea that the betting against my landing here was ten thousand to one at least.”

  “And how did you land here?”

  “That’s just what we’re coming to this minute.”

  She flicked over quickly seven or eight pages, then tapped her finger on a postcard showing a view of an urban pond, presumably on the summit of a hill with a flagstaff in the background. The pond was some eighty yards long and forty yards across. Dogs were barking round its edge, boys were sailing boats on it. On the pavement circling it a number of women with broad hats, padded shoulders, trim waists, coats cut long and almost to their knees and wide skirts sweeping the ground were walking in couples or beside male escorts with high stiff collars and low-crowned straw hats. More horsedrawn carriages than motor cars were on the street. “I bet you won’t know where that is,” she said.

  “It might be a hundred places.”

  She smiled. “I suppose it might: nowadays at least. But before the last war, on Sunday mornings, when all the political malcontents came up there to air their grievances, Hyde Park wasn’t in it with the Whitestone Pond. It’s on the top of Hampstead. That’s Jack Straw’s Castle on the right. Dickens said you could get a red hot steak there. It’s there that Daddy used to bring me after church. We’d go to Christ Church, then walk up the hill. I’d get so impatient if the sermon was overlong. It was there that my life really started. But I suppose that you wouldn’t have the least idea who that was.”

  She had turned the page and was pointing to a photograph cut from a magazine of a young woman in the early twenties with dark eyes and a full mouth and thick dark hair; across her blouse was a broad sash bearing the words “Votes for Women.”

  “That’s Sylvia Pankhurst. If you could have seen how her eyes shone, how her voice glowed when she was roused.”

  Into Judy’s voice too had come a glow, fond and reminiscent and valedictory. Behind them on the stonework of the verandah, came the soft pad of a rubber sandal. There was a smile on Sir Henry’s face as he leaned over the back of the seat.

  “Ah, that album again, and Sylvia. I lunched at the Asquiths’ in the autumn of ‘13, just before going to the Balkans. I remember the P.M. saying that there was one person in the world that he really wanted out of it, no it wasn’t the German Emperor or Carson either, it was that young woman. She had a personal magnetism that immunized her followers against punishment or argument, he said. It was at the time when the militants’ campaign was getting out of hand. They had just destroyed the greens of my favorite golf course. I was inclined to agree with him. I had no idea how much at that very moment I was indebted to that young woman.”

  “Now Henry.”

  “But it’s true, you know it is; if you hadn’t met Sylvia Pankhurst, if you hadn’t, what is the phrase, embraced the cause, there’s no doubt whatsoever that a young flippertigibbet like yourself, would the moment she reached the age of consent have eloped, and almost certainly, with the most appalling cad. Nothing could have saved you from that fate. As it was you heard Sylvia Pankhurst speaking on Sunday morning at the Whitestone Pond and the light of divine revelation descended on you, and straightaway you cast aside your nets and followed after, and instead of making a private exhibition of yourself in the divorce courts, you made a public exhibition of yourself assaulting policemen, pouring paraffin into letter boxes, smashing post-office windows, tearing up cricket pitches, going on hunger strikes in Holloway. In fact, keeping yourself generally busy until you had the good fortune to come under my good influence. If it hadn’t been for that lucky Schwarmarei …”

  “Now Henry, it wasn’t that.”

  “Wasn’t it?” and his eyes were twinkling.

  “You actually were a suffragette?” Francis asked.

  Judy turned the album over. Two pages later, there was another photograph cut from a daily paper; a blurred and smudgy photograph of a squad of policemen struggling with a number of women who appeared to be chained to a row of railings. The roofs and spires of Westminster were in the background.

  “You can’t see very clearly but I’m second from the left,” she said.

  He stared, incredulous. The woman second from the left was hatless, her hair streaming over her shoulders; one stocking was loose over her shoe; one policeman was holding her by the wrists, a second held her by the ankles, while a third was trying to file off the chain. He looked at the date upon the newspaper. October 12, 1913. Thirteen years ago, when she was still in her teens. It was hardly credible that such things could have happened to anyone so young.

  “Did you go to prison?”

  “For two years Holloway was the likeliest address for her,” Sir Henry said.

  Judy tapped the album. “It’s all there,” she said. “All the accounts of all my trials. I laugh sometimes when I hear people talking about that last marvelous summer of 1914 – the unending sunshine, the balls in travesti. I remember what my summer was. They had a thing called Cat-and-Mouse Act going. It was a very pretty game. When we went on hunger strike, they’d feed us forcibly or try to. It wasn’t so easy with some doctors, but we usually got our way. They had to let us out. But that wasn’t the end of the story, not by any means. As soon as we were fit again, they would rearrest us. That’s why we called it the Cat-and-Mouse Act. During that last golden summer, as the novelists call it now, I was in and out three times. The last time I came out I was so weak that my father insisted on sending me abroad. A long way too, so that I could forget the movement for a time. That was in July ‘14. Now you understand.”

  “And now you understand,” said Sir Henry, “why I on the third of August when I went round to the consulate and found this eccentricity sitting with a whole crowd of indignant applicants clamoring for passages to England, decided that she’d be causing much less nuisance if she stayed where she was than if she went back home.”

  “Darling, you hadn’t the foggiest notion who I was.”

  “I may not have. But I’m trained to recognize trouble at a glance. One glance was enough to warn me.”

  “Was it? You took half a dozen. You stood there in the door. I’m sure I was the first person that you noticed. You started and you stared. Then you thought you shouldn’t stare. So you looked away and had a good stare at everybody else. Then you thought you were justified in having another stare at me. I’ll swear you did that half a dozen times before you worked up the courage to come and speak to me.”

  She turned back to Francis. “It really was quite a romance you see. The beggar maid being rescued by the Prince. There was I in a strange capital, no friends, hardly any money, with war a few hours distant, thinking that Holloway would seem like heaven compared with the kind of prison in which I was likely to find myself in a few hours’ time. And then suddenly this tall, impressive-looking man comes into the room, starts staring at me, then finally comes across and says, ‘I wonder if you can type and take down in shorthand. Do you speak any foreign languages? I shall be needing a few extra secretaries on my staff.’ Here comes my deliverer, I thought.”

  “You know you thought nothing of the kind. You thought I had the worst intentions.”

  “I’m not sure you hadn’t. I often wondered what was really in your mind that first time you asked me out to dinner.”

  “I don’t think that any man knows quite what’s in his mind the first time he asks a girl to dinner.”

  “Doesn’t he? Wasn’t I lucky then?”

  “It seems to have turned out all right.”

  He laughed easily, his arm was about her shoulders and he squeezed them fondly.

  And all this, thought Francis, happened twelve years ago. And here they were now on these friendly affectionate terms with one another; the main stress of their lives behind them, her battles as a suffragette, his years of service abroad in dangerous places; with a successful issue to the causes that they had had at heart; both their wars won; women not only voting but in Parliament, the entente victorious: they could look back now on genuine achievement. Yet there was no sense
of retirement about their lives; they were active, vivid, in the arena still; they were happy, they had earned happiness, and they spread happiness. They were important people, yet they gave themselves no airs. He had never felt more at ease in any house. He had never met anyone he could respect so much.

  “Shall I tell you what I’m trying to persuade Francis to do?” she said.

  “You tell me.”

  “He’s sailing for America next month. He was planning to potter down the coast, stopping two days here, three days there. I was telling him that he’d do much better to stay on at Villefranche. It’s a good central spot. Then we could take him round to all the places that he ought to see. There’s much more to be seen here than there is round Toulon. Don’t you agree?”

  “I think he’d be very wise to stay on here. I know it would be most agreeable for ourselves.”

  “Do you think you could be persuaded then?”

  It was said with the friendliest smile. No one had ever smiled at him in quite that way before; he had never before felt himself so much liked and wanted, yet there was nothing possessive about the smile.

  “I think I could,” he answered.

  “Fine, that’s settled then.”

  “And what day do you actually sail?” asked Judy.

  “The eighth, that’s three weeks Friday.”

  “Three weeks. We must make the best of them.”

  At that moment they were joined by Allan. “Listen,” he said. “Last night I met Phillips Oppenheim. I will read you the list he gave me of the six best modern painters.”

  It was midnight before he was back at his hotel. He walked out onto the balcony. The waterfront was dark and quiet. On the humped outline of Cap Ferrat a window here and there shone between the pines. An occasional car swept the Corniche with its headlights. Otherwise, all was still. Waking early, as was his wont, to paint when the air was fresh, he would ordinarily by now have been asleep two hours. He was not sleepy though. Too much had happened to him during the last twelve hours and his brain was racing. He had been admitted into a world of whose existence until now he had been ignorant – to which he had been given the passport of a rich new friendship. Tomorrow Judy would be calling early. They were to bathe and lunch at Eden Roc. Later there was to be a dinner at Monte Carlo. The following day they were to picnic at Ste. Marguerite. “And I am sure,” she had said, “that there’ll be plenty of other things happening over the next three weeks that we might be able to coax you to.” He had entered a whole new world. A whole new life was opening for him.