by Alec Waugh
Chapter Four
It was more of a new world than he had imagined possible. In most places life was gay in the late summer of 1926; the world was recovering from its postwar maladies; the League of Nations was in session; peoples were in harmony; the period of slumps and strikes was at an end; in Wall Street stock market prices were climbing hourly to new high levels. In England, the collapse of the general strike had scotched the menace of revolution; Poincaré was to stabilize the franc. As Sir Henry had remarked at that first lunch, the barometer stood set fair. The rentier class could invest its money freely. There was full scope for enterprise. Young women could link their futures confidently to those of the young men who had ambition in their eyes. There was in the summer of 1926 more widespread faith in the future than there had been for a dozen years.
Nearly everywhere that autumn life was gay. But nowhere was it more gay than along the beaches and in the villas and hotels that lined that narrow strip of coast between Menton and St. Raphael. For many indeed that year, looked back on later from the long gray exile of the forties, was to seem the most golden, the most carefree of the four beglamoured summers that divided the immediate postwar world with its doubts and difficulties from the Wall Street crash of October 1929, from the period, that is to say, that was to be seen in retrospect, in the light of later knowledge as the beginning of a prewar period.
For the South of France ‘26 had a special quality that ‘27 ‘28, and ‘29 were to lack. It was the first real summer season. In 1919 when the Marriotts had bought their cottage and made a villa of it, the world of fashion would desert the Riviera at the end of March. The casinos were closed, the hotels along the Croisette were shuttered, and the Bohemians, the artists and the writers, and those lovers of the sun, English and American, who for reasons of health, economy and choice had made their homes there, sat about in berets in deserted cafés, thinking how pleasant it all was without the “smarties.”
As it was in ‘19 so was it to be in ‘24. The hotels were shuttered still, the smart shops and the casinos closed; the sand paths of Golfe Juan wended between pine trees to the sea. Eden Roc was a tea ‘place left over from the winter. There is no mention in the guide books of ‘25 of the Provencal or the Palaise de la Mediterranée. The coast was dead for the social columnist. Only the very perspicacious journalist, and anyhow he would have been somewhere else, would have recognized that the cafés in the Avenue de la Victoire were less deserted; that rather more English was being talked in the Taverne des Allés; that more easels were being set up on the ramparts of St. Paul; that in the squares of Vence and Grasse and Mougins striped ties suggestive of old boys’ clubs were to be more often observed at sunset bending over an evening Pernod; that on more and more cottages in the hills new wings were being built to protect new tiled verandahs from the sun; that more novels containing descriptions of Cassis and Bandol were being published, more pictures of sun-soaked landscapes were appearing on the walls of galleries; and that in consequence many more letters to London and Boston and New York were ending up with a “You’ve no idea how agreeable it is here in summer. We had to stay on because frankly we couldn’t afford not to, but goodness are we thankful now.”
The casual visitor to the South would in the summer of ‘24 have motored the length of the Corniche without being conscious of any changes except such as had been made for winter visitors. Had he returned however in the summer of ‘28, he would have felt himself to have been transported to another planet: -shining cars racing along the Corniche Road; no shutters along the Promenade des Anglais; bright awnings over painted shop fronts; a new pier at the end of the Croisette; bars and restaurants at Juan; the great white facade of the Provencal; the yellow mattresses at Eden Roc; a restaurant like the superstructure of a liner supplanting the modest tea shop; the Negresco and the Ruhl overshadowed by the Mediterranée; to every ten feet of sand its own beach umbrella. No transformation could have been more sudden or more complete.
It was this very suddenness that gave to the year 1926 its special flavor. It was the first real season. The Riviera had been discovered, but not yet by tourism. The coast was crowded but the crowds had not arrived. The beaches and bars, the restaurants and casinos were filled not with strangers but with former visitors and with the friends and acquaintances of residents. It was not so much that a new type of person was coming there as that there were more people of the old type coming. In consequence the season had both an intimacy and a first time feeling that no later season was to have in the same way, quite.
For Francis that next fortnight was a long enchantment. Morning after morning, the gray-green Chevrolet would swing down into the market place; morning after morning the children would scamper towards him shouting gleefully, “L’Anglaise est ici, Monsieur Francis. L’Anglaise est arrivée.”
Invitations flowed in upon the Marriotts. The parties were few, in which they could not include Francis.
There were picnics on the Îles des Lerins; there were excursions into the mountains through the Gorges du Loup; there were buffet lunches on shaded porches; there were dinners, sometimes in private villas, where you sat out under the moon, on terraces, sometimes at one or another of the casinos, at a gala evening where the men would discard their maillots for starched linen and the wrists of the expensive women would be weighed down with jewelry and the sky would be lit with fireworks: at other times they would dine quietly in the hills at La Turbie or St. Paul looking down upon the winding lights of the Corniche: sometimes they would go to a simple exclusively French restaurant, Robert’s in Cannes or the Restaurant du Port in Antibes, where you could get local cooking, tomates provençal and bouillabaisse, and soupes des poissons. Party after party with Francis always as the Marriotts’ guest.
Once Francis protested against the number of these invitations.
“I can never return any of this hospitality,” he said.
Sir Henry laid his hand upon his shoulder.
“You mustn’t think of it in that way,” he said. “Think of yourself as our guest, which you would be if this villa of ours were less minute. It is such a delight for us to have you here. The midget needs someone of her own age to play with. She gets so bored, poor thing, with all these old fogies that I foist on her.”
Sir Henry was constantly accentuating Judy’s youthfulness in contrast to his own age.
“She looks so much younger than my two daughters that when I see the three of them together, I feel it is almost indelicate to be married to her,” he would say.
He always referred to her and Francis as “the children.” “Now I suppose ‘the children’ will be wanting to exhaust themselves at golf.”
By his references to the disparity of age between himself and Judy, he contrived to make himself seem younger and Judy and himself more of a team.
To Francis he could not have been friendlier. He bought one of his pictures in the easiest manner.
“I quite agree with Judy that that still life is your best, but I would prefer one that had a more personal association with your stay among us. I’d be very grateful if you’d let me buy that picture of Antibes, the one of the old town with the mountains in the background.”
“I’d much rather make you a present of it.”
Sir Henry laughed.
“If a friend of mine were to run a garage I wouldn’t ask him to loan me his cars and petrol. No, my dear fellow, I’m looking on this transaction as a hard-boiled investment. I’m getting in on the ground floor. I wonder what would be the right figure for it. Values in America are higher than they are in London; how about 4000 francs?”
It was a figure which struck so exact a line between a just and a generous price that Francis could feel that Sir Henry was making a serious and considered purchase.
From the first, moreover, Sir Henry had shown a genuine interest in his work.
“I don’t know if you are thinking of showing any of your work in London when you come over, as I hope you will be, to stay with us in the s
pring, but if you do – and I am very sure I could persuade one of the galleries to show your work -I might suggest as a beginning that you allow yourself to be given some kind of label. Most Englishmen picture America exclusively in terms of New York City. And most English painters who go to America, paint nothing but the southern tip of Manhattan Island. As you were brought up in New England, I would suggest that you start in London with a series of New England canvases. It is a bit early yet for you to identify yourself to the public with originality of treatment. I think you should try and identify yourself with originality of subject.”
It was sound advice and Francis realized it. He had not, he knew, a personal style as yet
“One would think that your husband was specially putting himself out to be nice to me,” he said to Judy.
“But he is.”
“What do you mean?”
She chuckled. “Whenever he sees me interested in a man, he asks him up to the house, interests himself in him, finds out if there is anything he can do to help, usually finds there is, and within a week has the poor fellow utterly unarmed. That’s his technique. It’s rather subtle.”
“But I don’t quite see…” As he paused, she burst out laughing.
“I often ask myself what it was that made me fall for you. It must be the attraction of opposites, I suppose. It must be your serious-mindedness.”
“But even so …”
“Skip it,” she said, “it doesn’t matter.”
And the days went by, warm and colored under the blue skies and heavy sunlight, warm and scented under the long starlit nights. Life was effortless and gracious. Everyone looked well. Everyone felt well. The quest of pleasure was the quest of health. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. Every sense was charmed. It was hard to believe he had a trouble in the world except that the day of his sailing was growing closer.
“I can’t bear to think that on Friday week I’ll be saying goodbye,” he said.
“How do you think I feel?”
“But it’s different for you. This life will be going on the same.”
“It’s not the life that matters, it’s the friends you share it with.”
“But you’ve so many friends.”
“Have I?” She said it with a half-smile that was half affectionate, half ironical. He was insistent though. “It’s going to be altogether different for me. I’ve never had a friend like you, someone with whom…” He hesitated. There was so much he wanted to say; but he did not want to say it unless he could say it right. He was used to expressing himself in paint not words. If only he could tell her what she had meant to him, if only he could tell her all that he had thought about her.
As he paused, she caught him up.
“You must have any number of friends in your own country. Women friends too, I’m sure.”
“Well, naturally, there are some.”
“I know. Of course there are. I wouldn’t want there not to be. It’s funny, I want to know about them and yet I don’t. Better to know too little than to know too much. Let me freshen that drink for you.”
For the Monday before he sailed he had arranged to give a dinner. He had asked eight people, chiefly as a gesture towards Sir Henry. On the morning, however, Judy rang up to say that he had been called away.
“It’s one of those official things that he can’t avoid; people who can’t meet at any other time and Henry’s advice is needed. He’s just left for Saint Raphael. He won’t be able to get back until tomorrow. He sent you endless apologies. He was so sorry to miss your party. I’ve taken the liberty of asking Phil Smayle instead so as to keep your numbers even. I’m at a loose end myself. I think I’ll come down and waste your day for you.”
Within an hour her car had swung into the square. He had never seen her in higher spirits.
“All the way down I’ve been thinking of the things I’d like most to do: all the things that we’ve never done before. There are so many things that would be fun, but do you know what in the end I decided would be the greatest fun? To hire a boat and row over to Passable and bathe. Then after lunch’ for me to sit in the sand beside you and watch you paint. It would be something for me to remember afterwards, that once I spent a whole afternoon sitting beside you while you worked.”
She was as excited as a child at the start of a long-planned expedition.
“I do hope that’s what you’d like,” she said. “It’s so exactly what I want myself.”
Passable was a half-hour’s row away. It was a small and cosy beach. It had real if imported sand. It was smart in the way that a fifteen-tabled foreign restaurant can be. It had a small café bar, where they sat under the shade of an umbrella eating fried eggs and drinking lager.
“Do you know,” he said, “that this is the first meal we’ve had together.”
She laughed.
“It’s more than that. It’s the first time we’ve been alone since that first day we met, except in cars, and then we were always hurrying to get somewhere or to get back from somewhere. That’s what my life is. I am never alone, not even with Henry often. There are always people everywhere. It’s the same at Charlton. You’ll see when you come and stay with us. Henry’s life is people. He has no private life. So I can’t have one either. I can see the point of that Riviera life of yours, pottering on from one place to another as the spirit moves you. To think that in three whole weeks we shouldn’t once have sat quietly together over a table, just ourselves. If Henry hadn’t had to go away today that first time would have been the last.”
He had brought, as she had asked, his easel with him. He started work after lunch on a picture which he had long planned, of Villefranche seen from across the bay.
“It looks absolutely flat, set back there against its cliffs,” he said. “You wouldn’t think it had any depth at all; you could never imagine from here that all those narrow streets were hidden there. I was wondering if I could show it in a picture, both looking flat, yet having that depth as well.”
She sat at his side watching him.
“It would be very restful being a painter’s wife,” she said.
He smiled.
“Painters aren’t usually considered to make good husbands.”
“Perhaps that’s their wives’ fault. Perhaps they don’t make themselves companions. I think it would be the greatest fun going around on a succession of casual tours, just like your Riviera life before we met, going out on picnics, taking our lunch with us; then you suddenly saying, ‘I’ll paint this’; and me just sitting there watching the picture come to life; till you said, I’m hungry’ and then me getting the lunch; perhaps cooking up something on a primus stove; then your saying “How good this is,’ and me saying, ‘But your picture’s better.’”
“Is that how you think it would be? “
“Mightn’t it be, if the two liked each other?”
He looked at her as she sat beside him, cross-legged like a Bedouin with her heels tucked under her. Marriage was something that he had not considered much. He had been too busy painting. He had thought of it as something that would come a good deal later; he had thought of it in terms of his parents’ marriage; in terms of a home and children; as something you came back to. He had not seen it in terms of a ragamuffin gypsy comradeship, a living in suitcases, a wandering from coast to coast. She looked up at him and smiled. Yes, it could be pretty nice, that kind of marriage.
Slowly the afternoon wore on. For the most part she sat in silence watching him. Though she did not speak, he was conscious of her company. It did not disturb him, nor distract him; nor was it exactly soothing. It had a curious quality of stimulation. He had a sense of working with a lighter heart. At length she got to her feet, and stood up behind him, looking at the canvas.
“It’s strange to think of what may happen to that picture,” she remarked. “If I were a novelist, I’d like to write a story about that, about a picture’s destiny.”
“What do you think is the destiny of this picture, to ch
ange hands one day for ten thousand dollars? “
He said it with a laugh, but her face was serious. “It may do so, but I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of all the people who will see it, of all the people whose lives may be affected by it. You spend, as its painter, perhaps five days on it. You send it to an exhibition; it’s sold, very likely, to somebody that you don’t know. In all human probability you’ll never set eyes on it again. You’ll probably forget all about it, you’ll be busy with other pictures, with better pictures. Yet all the time that picture will be existing somewhere, being seen by people. A picture’s a substantial object after all. It isn’t something that one throws away. Once sold it’ll hang on a wall somewhere. Every day of the year someone will be looking at it. Thinking about it, perhaps being influenced by it. Have you ever thought of that?”
“Not in that way exactly.”
“I have so often. There’s a picture in one of our guest rooms at Charlton. It was painted some time in the 1840’s. None of us know who painted it. Probably it’s by someone who never came to anything. It’s imitative, in the Morland style. A pond and a paddock and a few sheep with a farm in the distance and a hedge with honeysuckle. Maybe it’s not very good. But it’s a happy picture. Every time I look at it, I feel that the world’s a more cheerful place. I think of all the week-end guests who must have looked at it. I wonder what effect it may have had on them. I’ve wondered how many lives may not have been altered by it. I’d like to write a book of stories about the different effects that it might have had on different people, how it might reconcile an urban husband to a life lived away from cities, how its sentimentality might exasperate a bored wife into deserting a bucolic husband. Twenty people might be affected in twenty different ways. That may happen to the picture that you’re painting now. Over the fifty or so years you’ve got to live, twenty or thirty lives may be altered by that picture. Have you ever thought of that?”
