by Alec Waugh
“Let’s try one then.”
They put on “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” She danced it with the suppleness and vitality of which only extreme youth is capable: the knees kept close and the feet flying sideways, without effort, without any catch of breath. When the record stopped, the Heathcrofts clapped.
“An encore please,” they said.
Nina and Francis looked interrogatively at one another. At home he preferred the latest dances. But Charlestons seemed out of tune with these old walls and the moonlight on the hills.
“I’d prefer a foxtrot,” he confessed.
“So’d I. Let’s look for one.”
They turned over the latest records. He read out the titles. “Sitting on Top of the World,” “In a Little Spanish Town,” “Breezing Along.”
“No, let’s have this, though it is a waltz,” she said. “Let’s be sentimental.”
As they danced she hummed the words:
What’ll I do?
With nothing but a photograph
To tell my troubles to?
What’ll I do?
She was light, in his arms, but light though she was he was conscious of her being there. Her shoulders were soft but firm under his hand. “There’s another old-fashioned one I saw,” she said.
Once again she hummed the words:
You know you belong to somebody else.
So why can’t you leave me alone?
“I got engaged to this,” she said.
But this time when the record finished she did not seek out another. They had stopped near the parapet, and she turned to rest her hands on it. Below them and beyond them was spread the long panorama of the northern Littoral; the lights of the Middle Corniche curving between the pines and olive groves; the promontories of Nice and of Cap Ferrat dark against the sea; the lights of a yacht reflected in the harbor of Cap St. Jean; the scattered lights of villas in the hills, the two small bays, with Montboron obscuring the Promenade des Anglais, with the Croisette and La Napoule showing beyond its shoulder and beyond them, crowning them the tremendous backcloth of the Esterels, with a moon waxing to its full, flooding and veiling it with shadows.
“You see those last two peaks of the Esterels,” she said. “They’re just like the island of Moorea, the island that you look at from Tahiti.” She paused, she sighed. “One tends to take all this for granted. Then something rather special happens and you see it with new eyes.” She turned, looking at him thoughtfully, then looked away. “It’s all so exquisite, it all looks so peaceful. There’s not one thing in it that one would alter. Yet how many people along this coast at this moment must be looking at it with breaking hearts. Have you ever thought of that? One associates unhappiness with rain and cold and ugliness. Just as one associates unhappiness with poverty. Yet there are people along this coast tonight, people who’ve got health and youth and prospects, who’re wishing they were dead. It’s something that no one shivering in a garret could believe. They couldn’t believe that unhappiness of that kind could be real. Yet it can, of course it can.” She was speaking in a kind of shorthand. “You’re worried, you’re unhappy,” she was saying. “And your unhappiness is no less real because you’re feeling it on a summer night in Eze. You’re unhappy. I’m sorry about it. But there’s nothing I can do.” That was what she was saying and he was grateful to her for saying it in just that way, leaving so much unsaid.
From behind them came the voice of their hostess calling.
“What about some backgammon, Nina?”
It was after one before he was to stand upon the terrace of the Hotel Welcome watching the tail lights of a gray-green Chevrolet swing out of the square, northwards to the Corniche Road. After one, and it was fourteen hours since he had stood here, telling himself that before he stood here next, his fate one way or another would have been settled. Fourteen hours and in those fourteen hours he had not spent one minute alone with Judy. By not one word or look or gesture had she suggested that they were anything more, that they could ever be anything more to one another, than the casually affectionate friends they had been two days earlier.
He turned back to the hotel. It was very quiet. No ship was in. There was no shouting, no foxtrots coming from the bar. A cat crept out stealthily from the dark tunnel of the Rue Obscure, looked round her and then went back again. He rang for the night porter. The night porter was drowsy and uncommunicative. His room once again was filled with moonlight. In the far corner of the ceiling the beam of the lighthouse flashed and passed. He switched on the light. His^ picture was standing upon the chest of drawers. Twenty-four hours ago, he thought.
He walked over to the balcony. It all looked as it had looked last night, as it had looked that first night when he had stood here after that long first day with Judy, as it had looked on all those other nights, anonymous, and undetailed, when he had returned here from this or the other party, his heart light with happiness. Happiness. What had happened to all that happiness? Twenty-four hours ago he had been closer to Judy than he had believed possible for two human being to be to one another, fulfilled and drowned in an intimacy that displaced all other intimacies, that removed the need for any other intimacy. Twenty-four hours ago. He turned away from the window, walked back to the bed, picked up the pillow, held it against his cheek. It was scented still. He had never felt lonelier in his life.
As it began so was it to continue. The second day was a replica of the first. From half-past ten when she called for him with the Heathcrofts until half-past twelve when she dropped him in the cobbled courtyard he was continuously in Judy’s company, yet in all those fourteen hours he was not once alone with her.
She did not avoid him. On the contrary she was friendly, affectionate, “the perfect hostess.” She introduced him to anyone he did not know. She brought him whenever she could into the conversation. She quite often built up the conversation for him. She gave the impression that she was arranging her program so that he would be doing the things that would amuse him most. “We must see that your last days are good ones,” she insisted. She behaved exactly as she had done over the last three weeks, as though nothing had happened to change their relationship to one another; as though she had never said, “Oh my dear, what are we going to do about it?”
A second day exactly like the first.
It was in a different mood however that he was to stand this time upon the balcony. Where the night before he had been puzzled, saddened, hurt, this time he was angry and resentful. He no longer asked himself why Judy had behaved this way; he was concerned solely now with the fact she had. He had asked himself questions the night before. Now he remembered remarks that she had made, remembered things that had been said about her; Nina had talked about “Judy’s crazes.” He remembered how Judy had taken up Rex Allan. Had not Judy herself said “If I wasn’t ever to see you again, I wouldn’t really mind.” Wasn’t a remark like that in keeping with such behavior? The night before, he had asked himself question after question. But now he was past asking questions. He was not concerned with causes but with effects. She had behaved outrageously, that was all that mattered. She had behaved outrageously and he had had enough. He was not going to subject himself to a repetition of those last two days. Definitely and finally he was through. No one was going to treat him like that.
Chapter Six
The next day, his last at Villefranche, broke gray and wet. This made it easier, he thought.
Directly after breakfast he rang up the Marriotts’. To his relief the butler answered him.
“Don’t bother to disturb Her Ladyship, but will you please tell her that I am very sorry but I can’t make the picnic? I have to go down the coast,” he said.
That’s that, he thought. And tomorrow he would be off. He would write to her from the ship; something friendly and affectionate; so that if ever they did meet later they could meet as friends. Yes, that was what he would do.
The rain was falling with a quiet and drear persistence as he set out to swim. He wor
e a mackintosh. It was no day for loitering. He swam for a few minutes then hurried back. The clock was striking ten as he reached his room. Ten o’clock, and a whole day before him. He set out his easel. The sun had been shining when he began this picture. He had been painting happily, his eye upon the clock; Judy was meeting him at noon. Three mornings ago. It was this picture which had stood propped upon the dressing table when he had followed Judy into the room. He closed his eyes. The memory of that next moment, the memory of the moments that had followed ran along his veins in fire. If I live to be a hundred, he thought, I’ll go on missing her.
He rose to his feet; he walked over to the balcony. Yesterday and the day before, she had seemed to have no part in his existence, but here, on this balcony, where they had stood together, he could not believe that he had lost her.
He sat down again before the easel, but he could not concentrate. It had been a different picture three mornings ago, just as it had been a different world, and he a different person, with the loveliest moments of his life ahead and he not knowing it. A different world and he a different person. I’ll probably never finish it, he thought.
He put away his brushes. He had better, he supposed, do something about his packing. He had little to pack, however; he was traveling light, a suitcase and a knapsack. He walked out again onto the balcony. It was raining harder. Rivulets of water that were fast becoming streams were running down the steep cobbled streets from the upper town. A wind was springing up, the boats were rocking against their moorings. The waterfront was a stretch of pavement. No nets were laid out along its stones. Cap Ferrat was invisible across the water. It was not yet eleven. How quickly the time had passed when the sun was shining and she with him. I’d better go into the upper town and have a drink, he thought.
Halfway up the town, in the Rue de Poilu, a narrow passage of a street, so narrow and so high, that the sun only struck along it in summer at midday and for half an hour, was a small dark café, run by two Italian girls, frequented by fishermen and soldiers. There was a gramophone there and in the evenings the two girls would dance, usually together, sometimes with two chasseurs Alpins. In the days before he had known Judy, he had usually come up there after dinner for a glass of beer. It was a fortnight since he had; his welcome was flavoured with reproof. “You have been deserting us, Monsieur Francis,” the girls complained.
“I’ve been deserting Villefranche,” he replied.
He ordered a Creole Punch, a rhum negrita with lemon juice, a little syrup and a block of ice. It was the way, a traveler had told him, that the French drank their rum in Martinique. The wine on his tongue was sweet and cool and strong. Its warmth tingled along his veins. It was cool and dry inside the café. He could be unconscious here of the clammy heat, of the gray sky and the falling rain. There were many worse ways of spending a long wet day. He took a second and a longer sip. It was very soothing. In forty-eight hours he would be in a ship. In two weeks he would be home. The maple trees along the Connecticut River would be turning red. The air would be clean and cold. All that had happened here during these three weeks would seem like events upon another planet. It was appropriate that he should be spending his last day in Villefranche, here in this quiet café, looking out on nothing, brooding over the past.
In a dark reverie he sat there, slowly sipping at his rum, when, suddenly, his reverie was broken by the noisy entry of two grubby children, and a breathlessly shouted “L’Anglaise est ici, Monsieur Francis. L’Anglaise est arrivée.”
She was carrying a small stumpy parasol which she had used as an umbrella. She was wearing a light oilskin raincoat and a kind of sou’wester hat. She tossed the parasol onto the table, pulled off her hat, shook out her hair. She unbuttoned the raincoat at the throat. She sat down opposite him.
“The picnic’s off,” she said.
He stared at her, astonished.
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“Indeed, I did.”
“What made you think then that I’d be here?”
“Feminine intuition. What’s that you’re drinking? It looks good.” She picked up his glass and sipped at it, appreciatively. “Yes. It’s good. I’ll have one too. Just what I need after that long drive down. What a day. No wonder all my good resolutions were washed away.”
“Your good resolutions?”
“What else did you think had been the matter with me?”
“That’s just what had been worrying me, I couldn’t guess.”
They laughed together. The night before he had vowed in his exasperation that if ever again he found himself alone with her, he would be offhand. He could not though. He realized that.
“You must have known there couldn’t be any other explanation.”
“I didn’t. I thought of so many things.”
“What kinds of thing?”
“All kinds. That you might have been disappointed.”
“Disappointed?”
“It was everything to me. It was the whole world to me. It might have meant less to you.”
“But surely …” She paused. There was an almost indignant expression on her face. “You’re surely not suggesting, are you, that I’m the kind of person to whom that kind of thing is an everyday occurrence?”
He hesitated, then answered her obliquely. “My trouble all along has been that I just can’t see what it was you saw in me.”
She smiled and her expression softened. “Oh my dear, and if you only knew. It’s just that one does see in you.”
Once again there was a rich tenderness in her voice. She sighed.
“If I were married to anybody else.”
She paused and looked away. “I’ve such respect for him, and such affection. He’s been so good to me. I’m his whole life. I couldn’t bear to spoil his life. But, oh my dear, I’ve been so miserable.”
“Miserable.” He echoed the word astonished, and she smiled wryly.
“Did my life look such a picture then? Is that the effect I give? I must be a better actress than I thought.”
“You’re always laughing. You are always seeming to have so much fun.”
“I know. I’m gay. I’m vital. Life’s an adventure to me. It’s only, oh, it’s not easy to explain. I didn’t know what I was committing myself to when I married Henry. It was in the war. Nothing seems to matter in wartime but the war. I was so proud to be Henry’s wife. I was able to help him in his work. His work was so important. It made me feel important. But when the war was over, when everyone started leading their own lives again, when I realized what it was I was committed to -” She paused, hesitating.
“I’ll give you a parallel example,” she went on. “I had a friend who lost his leg at Ypres. At first, he was relieved. He was out of the army. Honorably discharged. He was safe. He could plan a future. He thought himself very lucky. But when the war was over, and he went to Oxford, when he saw all his friends rushing about in shorts and flannels and plus fours, playing football, cricket, tennis, he realized then what he’d been cut off from. He’d been robbed of youth. For a whole year he told me, he felt like suicide.
“That’s rather how I felt when we got back to England, when I saw all my friends and my contemporaries starting out on their own lives, with faith and hope. I realized then that my life was settled, that I was going to have no young life of my own; that my life from henceforth was to be centered among mature and aging people; I was always to be with important people; I was never to be irresponsible and young. I don’t say I haven’t had a lot of fun. I have. A great deal of it has been exciting. But, darling, when I met you, well, I just saw what it was I’d missed.”
She took her glass between her hands and sipped it. “We could have such a sweet life together.”
She said it slowly. She said “have,” not “have had.” She put down the glass, rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward, her chin upon her hands.
“We will have a sweet time, won’t we?”
She said it with an insistence
that made it sound a prayer.
“When is it that you’ll be coming over? In the spring? I’d so love to show you Charlton in the spring, when the daffodils are out and all the blossom. There’d be so much for you to paint.”
He hesitated. They had talked so much of his coming to Charlton in the spring. But surely she must recognize that everything was changed.
“I won’t feel that you’ll really know me till you’ve seen Charlton.”
“Yes, but even so …”
She was in no mood to listen to objections.
“No, darling, you mustn’t be practical. Not today. Let me have my dream. Let me have my date on the calendar to count hours to. Promise me that it’ll be the spring.”
He hesitated. He found a Delphic answer.
“I promise that I’ll come to England in the spring.”
She clapped her hands, triumphantly.
“And you’ll work hard, really hard this winter. Just as Henry said? You’ll bring some pictures over. Henry’ll arrange an exhibition. That’s one of the nicest things about being married to him. One’s really able to do something for one’s friends.”
It was one of the most self-revealing things that she had ever said. She set little store for herself on the relative wealth and the quite real social prominence that her marriage to Henry Marriott had brought her. But she did value the opportunities it gave her to help her friends. She regarded those opportunities as a responsibility. There was nearly always something that could be done for everyone. In the light of that responsibility, she threw herself eagerly into each new friendship, looking for the one thing, whatever it might be, that she could do for each new person that she met. He remembered how she had helped that cricketer man – Muspratt – to a new appointment.
Yes, that was the way it was and was it not the irony of fate that, for himself, the person whom she wanted most to help, whom she could, in fact, help more than she could the vast majority of her friends, for himself, she would be unable to do one thing, because that help would have to come to him through her husband, and he could no longer accept help or hospitality from her husband. The irony of fate, the spite of heaven! Not that this was the time to tell her that. Let her have her dream. Let them both have their dream. Let this little hour in the cool dark caf6 be a brief and hallowed respite, a blessed pause between those two days of friction and the inevitable difficulties that must lie ahead. How could he be practical, now on this last day?
