by Alec Waugh
He shook his head.
“When I’ve finished a picture, I lose interest in it.”
“But when you’re actually painting it, don’t you think sometimes of the effect that it will have?”
Again he shook his head.
“Never. I’ve a mood to express, a problem to solve, I’m only concerned with getting the thing down right.”
“Really, is that all? Yes, but I suppose you’re right. If a painter, if any artist once considered the effect his work would have, he’d become obsessed with its importance, he’d come to think that nothing else – certainly not his personal life – mattered in comparison. And of course he’d get misled if he did that. It’s out of his personal life that his work flowers, nothing is more important really than that he should be congenially life-based.”
“Judy, you say the oddest things.”
“Do I. I daresay I do. I chatter on Flippertigibbet, that’s what Henry calls me. I don’t make sense.”
“But you do, that’s just the point. Sometimes when you’re actually talking, it sounds just chatter, but then when I think it over afterwards …”
“So you do think it over afterwards?”
“Of course.”
“It’ll be nice to remember that, when you’re no longer here.”
It was close on six before they got back to Villefranche. He had invited his guests for eight. He had planned to dine, not in the usual first-floor dining room but in front of the bar, in the open, on the waterfront itself.
“I thought,” he explained to her, “that people who are used to villas and smart restaurants would find it more of a change that way. A kind of gone native atmosphere.”
He showed her the menus he had designed. He had painted a special plate card for each guest. He had put no names but a pattern that would be appropriate to the person.
“I can’t wait to see what you’ve done for me,” she said.
A border of tuberoses was set round a gray-green Chevrolet.
“I’ll treasure it,” she said, “forever.”
He showed her his seating plan.
“This is how I thought we’d sit.”
“You’ve put me a long way away.”
“I thought I ought to put myself next to the people I knew less well.”
“If you are going to treat me as your hostess, you should allow me to rearrange your flowers.”
She took a long time over their arrangement. It was after seven before they were free to stroll back onto the terrace. Dusk was falling and the sea was losing its pale white-blue shimmer. The lamps were lit under the plane trees. Sailors in their blue sleeveless maillots were lounging against the railings, watching the tall dark-haired girls who sauntered slowly in couples, arm in arm along the quay.
“Let’s sit at this table,” she said, “it’s the same one we had that first time.”
He ordered her a champagne cocktail.
“I’m having them for everyone as soon as they arrive. I thought it would be easier than taking separate orders.”
“Now you are not to start worrying about this party.”
“I should be feeling so much happier about it if you really were my hostess.”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if I were?”
“That must be one of the best things about a marriage, having parties together, talking about them afterwards.”
“It can be.”
She sipped slowly at her glass. There was a pensive expression on her face.
“You were sitting there,” she said, “in profile. You were reading a newspaper. I saw you as I drove round the corner. I was flustered. I was a little late. When I found the whole place quiet, I thought that the ship must have gone. I didn’t know. I came across to you. You didn’t look French: anyhow you were reading the Herald Tribune. I spoke to you in English. Then when you answered, I knew you were an American. I liked your voice. I thought I’d join you. You offered me a fig. We began to talk. I began to feel … This afternoon while you were painting, I tried to remember what it was I felt. It wasn’t just that you were so good-looking…”
“Good-looking? “
“Surely you don’t need to be told that.”
“I’ve a mirror. I spend a good ten minutes a day looking at my reflection. I must have a pretty good idea of what I look like.”
She shook her head.
“Oh no, you don’t. We none of us know what we really look like. Have you ever seen yourself in a film? You’ll see a group of your friends and there’ll be a stranger among them and that stranger will be you. None of us know what our voices sound like. Have you ever heard your voice on a gramophone record? It’s unrecognizable. The face you see when you are shaving isn’t the face your friends see when you are amused, or interested or depressed. You don’t know what expressions shadow or light up your face. None of us do. But it wasn’t your looks that gave me that queer feeling, as we sat talking here. No, it wasn’t that.” She paused. She looked away again. “When I got back that night to Mougins, I asked myself what it was that had given me that feeling. I suppose it was that look of independence. I couldn’t place you. I told you that the first day we met. Then you said that you were a painter, and I understood.”
“You were surprised, though, when you saw my pictures.”
“I know; but it wasn’t surprise, not really. It was a very mixed feeling – in a way it was disappointment.”
“You were disappointed?”
“Not in the way you mean. I wanted you to be good. I wanted you desperately to be good. I was afraid you wouldn’t be. Most people who paint, aren’t. But when I saw your pictures, when I knew that you were good, yes it was a kind of jealousy. There’s something inviolable about the artist, something entirely his own; he has defenses and reserves that others haven’t. I knew when I saw those pictures that there were sides of you I could never touch, palisades you could withdraw behind. Yes, I think it was jealousy; yes, it must have been.”
He stared at her, astonished.
“I had no idea you were feeling like that about me.”
“If you had, I shouldn’t have felt that way.”
She looked at him, intently, self-questioningly.
“How soon,” she asked, “can you come to England?”
“I didn’t know that I was coming.”
“Didn’t you? Then how did you think we were going to meet again? Were you expecting me to come over to America? I could of course. But it would be rather difficult. It would be much easier for you to come to me, or wouldn’t it?”
She spoke banteringly; treating a serious subject lightly, in the way he liked, refusing to be intense. “There’s so much more point, isn’t there, in your traveling than in mine?” she said. “You need new subjects. That’s true now, isn’t it?”
Yes, he admitted, it was very true.
“And you remember, don’t you, what Henry said, about getting your pictures shown at a London gallery? It would be a good opportunity, wouldn’t it, of fixing a second string to your bow?”
Yes, he admitted. It would be that all right.
“Then how soon can you come over, in time for Christmas?”
He laughed. He shook his head. There would be a great deal to settle up when he got back. He would have to make arrangements with his New York dealer. He had spent on this trip nearly all the money he had saved. He would have to start saving up again. It would take quite a time before the result of his economies had accumulated to a point where he could consider transatlantic passages.
“Even if you work very hard?”
“Even if I work very hard.”
“But you will work very hard.”
“Of course I shall.”
“And once you got over, well it would be a great economy.”
“What about all that tipping in your country houses?”
“Ah, there’d be that of course.”
“How many servants have you got?”
“I’ve never counted, but
there aren’t more than three that you would need to tip.”
They were still talking on the same bantering note when a car swung down from the Corniche Road into the square. “There’s your first guest,” she said. “Now don’t be nervous. It’ll be all right.”
It was all right. It was very much all right; but it was due to her in large part, almost in whole part that it was. Not that she played the hostess, she played the guest, the perfect guest; the guest whose enjoyment of the party was infectious, who so completely gave the impression that she was at the perfect party that the other guests came to feel that they were too. Never had he seen her more radiantly high-spirited.
Minute by minute his gratitude to her, his admiration for her increased. There was no one like her in the world. If only he could find the words to tell her what she meant to him.
On his right was Lady Ambrose. “I can’t really believe you are leaving us,” she said, “as I said to Bob this very evening, it won’t seem the same place with Francis gone.”
Her use of the word Francis touched him. It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name.
“But Judy tells me that you’re coming over in the spring,” she said.
“I wish I could.”
“Surely if you really tried, you could. If you made your coming over the one thing to aim at. You always can you know; bring off one thing, I mean.”
“Can you?”
“Provided you don’t try to do too many things. Aim for one target, and one target only. Charlton is a dream of a place. You’d love it there. And you must be sure to stay with us. Our place can’t compare with Charlton, but it’s cosy.”
She meant it, he thought. She genuinely did. And to think that a month ago he had not known any of these people. How astonished he would have been had he known that morning when he walked down from the station along the waterfront, intending to stay a week in Villefranche, that before he came to leave he would be the host here at a party such as this. Had he known would not his first thought have been: What a fine story this’ll make when I get back home? He remembered how he had thought just that, the first time that Judy had driven him up to lunch at Mougins. Now it was the last thing he thought. This whole month, these hours that he had spent with Judy and her friends were his personal and treasured property, not to be shared not to be talked about, with people who would not appreciate the particular quality of these times and talks. It was not so much that he had met a number of prominent and important people as that through Judy he had been introduced to a new world, to a new way of living. Never had his admiration for Judy glowed more warmly.
It was not, however, till the last guest had gone, that he had a chance to speak to her.
“You were marvelous,” he said. “You made the party. If only I could tell you all the things I thought tonight, as I sat looking down the table at you.”
She smiled.
“You could tell me some of them.”
He shook his head. They had been complex thoughts. She had the glamour for him that film stars and royalty have for others. She symbolized and typified a world of glamour; a world in which he moved now as a guest, but in which one day he would move, through his painting, in his own right, on his own credentials; a world of elegance and of achievement, whose rewards were the spur to his own ambition. She typified all that; yet she was more than that; she was herself, with all her idiosyncrasies, her waywardness, her impulsiveness, her generosity, her sensibility. He had never met anyone so many-sided, anyone in whom he could respect so many things. To think that such a person as this should be his friend, such a close friend too. Never had he felt so in tune with anyone as he had that day with her. He was so proud to be her friend.
He had felt all that as he had sat at the head of the table looking down at her. But it was all too involved for his powers of expression. He could have said it in paint, but not in words.
“It was just that I was thinking you the most marvelous person I had ever met. That’s what it added up to.”
They were standing on the terrace to which the party had moved back at the end of dinner. It was barely a quarter-past eleven.
“You don’t need to go back do you, right away?” he asked.
“Not right away.”
He turned back to the table they had risen from. It was littered with dirty glasses and cigarette stubs.
“It’s messy here,” she said.
“We could go down to the bar.” A ship was in and a gramophone was playing there. “It can be quite fun there when a ship is in.”
She shook her head. “It starts getting grubby about now. Let’s go up to your balcony and watch the moonlight.”
On his dressing table, the canvas on which he had been at work that morning was propped against the wall. It was a picture of Cap Ferrat seen through his bedroom window. She looked at it. “It’s very good,” she said, then blinked.
“That light,” she said, “it spoils the view.”
He switched it off. But she did not move over to the balcony. She stood in silhouette against the sky.
“Oh my dear,” she said, “what are we going to do about it?”
In her voice, to his astonishment, was that same rich tone that had come into it when she had spoken of Aleck Moore, when he had seen in a moment of premonition how love could transfigure and transmute her.
There was a moment of taut silence, then turning she opened her arms to him.
She was close against his heart; the scent of tuberose was in her hair; her lips were soft on his. His arms tightened about her shoulders. He was conscious simultaneously both of their strength and softness; the satin smooth texture of her skin, the trimness of the blades beneath it, the muscles between skin and bones. She sighed. She drew back her head; she was still in silhouette against the window. He could not read the expression on her face. His heart was thudding against the thin cotton of his maillot but it was an excitement not of the heart and senses only but the nerves. He who had never felt shy in the most crowded drawing room, was the victim of shyness now, suddenly overwhelmingly. What was it that was happening? It was so unprepared, unplanned for. It was something that he had never dreamed of. He was lost, helpless, without defenses.
She sighed. She drew away.
“Haven’t you anything I could wear, no, not that heavy bathrobe.”
He handed her a thin foulard dressing gown. She turned away bending forward as she pulled her dress over her head; as she straightened, she moved into a shaft of moonlight; the ribbons of her shoulder straps were white against the sunburned back. She kicked off her shoes as she pulled the dressing gown about her. It was a double bed. She lay full length on it, one hand underneath her head. She patted the space beside her. “Why so far away?” she said.
He came towards her. He knelt upon the bed. His shyness had become terror now: a helpless, improvident apprehension. He took her hand. Its fingers closed over his, with a gentle sureness. He must say something. But he could not concentrate his thoughts. He stared at her. The moonlight did not touch the bed. Her face lying back against the pillows was in shadow. The dressing gown was much too large for her, only her hands and her feet showed white beneath it.
Her fingers gave his a sudden squeeze. “Why all those clothes?” she asked.
He turned away, his hands were trembling as he undid his belt. His nervousness had become all enveloping. He had heard of men feeling like this at such a moment. A predicament such as his was the subject of innumerable stories that he had laughed over in locker-rooms, older men had guffawed when he asked incredulously, “But can that really happen?” One could not believe that anything like that could happen to oneself. That it should happen of all times now, with Judy. How she’d despise him, how she’d hate him, everything was spoiled.
He kicked his shoes across the room. He turned back to her. He caught her hand desperately between his.
“I can’t believe that this is happening. It’s the last thing that I’d imagined po
ssible,” he said.
She laughed.
“I knew it would. From the first day. I didn’t know when or how but I knew it must.”
There was happiness in her voice, there had been despair in his. The dramatic irony of their different tempers flayed him. Her voice was glowing. If only he could evoke in himself the mood to match it. If only this spell were not upon him. Fiercely his fingers pressed about her wrist. She would despise him, hate him. Another moment and she would know the truth. Gently, but very firmly, she pulled away her hand. She raised her arm, she rested her hand upon his shoulder. In shamed and terrified foreboding he pictured the imminent revelation, the incredulous questions, the stammered answers, her hand would move along his shoulder, behind his head, pulling him down, and then …
It didn’t though. She lifted her arm again, rested the palm of her hand against his cheek, patted it twice gently.
“Light me a cigarette,” she said.
As he held the lighter to her face, he could read the expression in it. It was fond and tender. “You have one too,” she said.
As he drew the smoke into his mouth, inhaling it into his lungs, he had the sense of release as a man long imprisoned might when he breathes fresh air for the first time. He was reprieved. Gratefully he stretched himself beside her.
“No,” she was saying, “no, that isn’t true. I didn’t know that first day, how could I have. I didn’t know anything about you. For all I knew you were in love with someone. No, I didn’t know till after that first lunch party. Did you know why I drove you into Cannes that day?”
“To pick up a dress I thought.”
She shook her head. “Silly, when I didn’t even bother to pick it up. I went there to make the drive last longer. This may be the only time that I shall ever spend with him, I thought. I wanted it to be something to remember always, for you to remember always.”
