Unclouded Summer

by Alec Waugh

  “That’s settled then,” she was continuing. “You’ll come over to us in the spring. That’s six months. Six centuries. But you’ll write every week. You promise you’ll write every week? Oh, but I feel so happy now. When this day dawned and I saw those gray skies and the mist over the hills, I knew it was more than I could take. When the sun was shining and everything looked gay, it wasn’t so difficult to be firm. There seemed other things in life. But when this morning came, I couldn’t even see the cypresses across the valley, there didn’t seem anything left in my whole world, but you. So I came rushing down …”

  She spoke like a schoolgirl who was playing truant. Which, in a sense and to herself, she was. Sir Henry was so much older than herself. He talked of her as “the midget.” She said she had had no youth. It would be truer to say that one side of her had not grown up, had never become responsible and mature, through joint growth beside someone of her generation. She was five years older than himself, yet he felt protective, almost paternal to her.

  “Darling, I’m so happy,” she was babbling on; “it’s so cosy in this little bar. Couldn’t we send out for lunch, get some sandwiches, some cheese? I feel so safe here, so secluded.”

  It was after three before they left the café. When they did, it was to find, to their surprise, that the sky was blue above them. She caught his arm.

  “Look, the weather’s cleared. It’s a happy omen. Let’s have one last swim together before I drive you back to your goodbye party.”

  “Goodbye party?”

  “Of course. You didn’t think we were going to let you go without one? We’ve been keeping it as a surprise. We’ve asked everybody that you like the best. You’ll love it, I know you will. But, let’s have our last swim first.”

  Chapter Seven

  At Marseilles in his cabin he found a letter waiting. It carried a French stamp and postmark. The handwriting was unfamiliar. It was a round, back-sloping, rather unformed hand. It was a bulky envelope. He tore it open. It was a five sheet letter, with lines widely spaced. “Darling,” it started, “you’ve been gone five minutes.” He did not need to turn to the last page to read the signature.

  He slipped back the letter into its envelope. He did not want to read it here, in a hot, stuffy cabin. He went on deck. He was traveling by one of the smaller ships of the American export line. It carried a bare two-dozen passengers, but a great deal of cargo. The winches were clattering noisily. Longshoremen, many of them colored, were working bare to the waist, their backs glistening under the hot Mediterranean sun; a Frenchman, short and dapper in a Homburg hat, was angrily gesticulating from the quay; an officer from the bridge was shouting orders, his hands raised to his mouth, so that his voice could carry above the din; there was a powerful all-pervading smell of tar. Francis made his way into the bows. Seated on a coil of rope, he took out her letter.

  “Darling,” he read, “you’ve been gone five minutes. Five minutes and it seems five hours. I stood on the terrace watching the headlights of your car, losing sight of them then catching them again, losing them then seeing them swing round that corner. Do you remember it? where I pointed out the villa, that first time you came up here: then, where that main road joined it, there were other cars. I tried to keep track of your lights but couldn’t. I turned away and oh, darling, darling, if you could believe how dreary the terrace looked with its cigarette stubs and its dirty glasses and its crumbled sandwiches. Henry had gone to bed and everything was silent. Everything except the crickets. I was so tired but I couldn’t sleep. I had to talk to you…”

  It was the first letter he had had from her. There had been no need, no opportunity for letters. It was the first time he had seen her handwriting. He had never thought of her in terms of letters. He had never seen her writing. He wondered what she looked like when she wrote, how she held her pen, whether she sat upright or bent low over her paper. He wished that he could picture her sitting there on the terrace on that last night, in that litter of plates and glasses.

  “And to think of tomorrow, oh darling, that’s the worst of all, to wake up in six hours’ time with the sun shining onto those china poodles on the mantelpiece, just as it did yesterday, and the day before and all those other mornings; and there’ll be the same scent of flowers in the room, that mingled scent that I’ll try and split up into its component parts, just as I did yesterday and the day before, and it’ll be so much like yesterday that I’ll think that it is yesterday, with you only a few miles away. And I’ll look at my bedside clock and it’ll be half-past seven and I’ll say “Now hurry, Judy, or you’ll be late. You’ve got to get down to Villefranche before ten’ and then, oh darling, I’ll remember.”

  The words, black against the paper, moved him in a way that even her voice had never done. It was the first real love letter that had been written him. It was the first kind of letter that as a schoolboy he had dreamed of reading. But as a schoolboy he had not bothered to envisage the girl who would have written it. He had never imagined that someone like Judy would be writing it. The fact that Judy had written it placed it upon another level, made the reality so much lovelier than the dream.

  “And to think that I’ve got to spend another week here,” she went on. “Another week seeing the places that we’ve seen together, meeting the people that we’ve met together; everything will be so full of you, this villa, every beach, each turn of the Corniche Road, all the little restaurants and all the grand ones. It’s so much easier for you. You’re going to fresh places. But to be the one that’s left…”

  The handwriting as the letter progressed grew longer, the characters less firmly formed; as though she were writing faster, under the impulse of stronger feeling.

  “If only I could see the outcome to all of this. Where will it all end? How will it all work out? Where does the solution of our problem lie? Here in this world now, or in some other sphere, some other day: beyond stars and time and many waters.”

  He repeated the last phrase to himself. “Beyond stars and time and many waters.” It was odd, flamboyant, Biblical; unexpected like the jewelry she sometimes wore. But strangely like her. No one else would have used that phrase. He repeated it slowly, rolling each word upon his tongue like a sip of port. It had come surely from her heart. It could not, could it, be just one of “Judy’s crazes”? She must mean it; surely she must mean it. And if she meant it; was he not then bound to her, committed to this adventure?

  For the third time, as the ship drew slowly from the harbor, he read the letter, The sun was glinting on the gilt madonna that stood high on his left, at the summit of the hill which watched over the “vieux port.” For how many Frenchmen on their way to the long exile of colonial service had not that gilt figure on that white dome been the last sight of their loved homeland? How many of them must not, under its shadow, have read as he was reading now a last despairing love letter, a letter promising an eternity of faith, devotion, loyalty? How many of them must not have come to see in retrospect the reading of that letter as the climax, as the high peak of their love affair? Separation, like rust on iron, scarred the bright blade and scabbard. This letter, though he was reading it now, thirty-six hours later, had been written within half an hour of his leaving, was part of the mood that had sustained Judy through that long, long day. The writing of that letter was the natural, the obvious climax to that day. He pictured her rising from the table with a sigh, fastening down the flap of the envelope, pressing the heel of her hand against it, saying to herself “that’s that.” Had she not said to him in his room at Villefranche, “If I never saw you again, I wouldn’t really mind”? He remembered how she had taken up Rex Allan, then dropped him out of her life completely: there was that cricketer man – Muspratt. She had forgotten who he was when he turned up to lunch, even though she had helped him afterwards. One of Judy’s crazes, that was all he was. Surely that was all he was.

  But at Gibraltar there was a cable waiting, “The coast is desolate without you.”

  On a mil
d October morning shortly after nine, his ship steamed slowly up from quarantine; a light mist hung low over the spires of Manhattan, with the sunlight streaming in long irregular dust-laden drifts of amber down the long steep canyons of the downtown skyscrapers. The docking of such a ship had no news value. There was no throng of photographers and pressmen along her decks. Her two-dozen passengers were at liberty to lean against the taffrail and savor quietly the excitement and relief of homecoming. It was a moment to which all his life Francis had looked forward. As a boy on a Staten Island ferryboat he had heard his father say, “You may think that beautiful, and it is, but think how it would seem to you on a return from Europe, after being away from America for months or years.” He had always remembered that. As Englishmen responded to “the white cliffs of Dover,” so did Americans to the skyline of New York. As an American he longed to know that moment. But now that it had come for him, he was not sharing its mixed mood of pride and purpose, excitement and anticipation with his fellow-passengers; he was in the saloon reading a letter written in a round back-sloping, unformed script, a letter that dispatched by a faster boat had passed him on the Atlantic.

  It had been written four days after he had left. “Yesterday, darling, we lunched at Beaulieu, with the Montagues, you remember them, don’t you? They were at Eldred’s the day the mistral blew; it was such a lovely day and as we drove back, we saw Villefranche nestling under its cliff and there was what you used to call “one of those greyhound cruisers” anchored in the harbor. It all looked so cosy and familiar. I thought that my heart would break. I’ll never be able to go down there now, not ever. And, darling, I can’t tell you how glad I am that this time next week we shall be back in England. I can’t bear going round all these places where we’ve been together, with everything to remind me of you, with everyone talking about you, and you not here.

  “It’ll be oh so much easier in England. I’ll be living in the future then, not in the past. I’ll be thinking of you coming over in the spring, I’ll be thinking of things to show you and things that we can do together. You’ll love Charlton. I know you will. When are you coming over? Soon, very soon. And you’ll work hard, won’t you, very hard? You paint so well. Everyone who comes here admires your picture. I feel so proud of you. We’ll soon build up a name for you in London…

  “Oh, darling, if you knew how I was missing you. If I were married to anybody else, how quickly I should be scampering to the first and fastest boat. But the day will come. We’ll have such a sweet time together. I’ll make up to you for everything…”

  He read it through slowly for a second time; then squared his shoulders. She did care, she must care. It couldn’t be just a craze. A resolve half formed when he had read that cable at Gibraltar, became now a definite intention.

  An hour later in the grand hall of the Grand Central Station, he was looking up trains to Saybrook. There was one in the early afternoon that would give him all the time he needed. He wrote out a telegram to his father. He checked in all his luggage except his case of canvases; that he took with him to a taxi. “Drive up Madison,” he said. “It’s in the late Forties on the right hand side. I’ve forgotten the number. I’ll tap on the window when we reach it.”

  It was outside a small antique shop that he stopped.

  “I shan’t be a minute,” he told the driver.

  He knew what he wanted. He was pretty certain that he could get it here.

  “I want a small silver ship,” he said.

  They had one, two inches high. “That’s exactly it,” he said. Across the accompanying card he wrote “To remind you that the miles are little.”

  Within three minutes, he was back again, inside the taxi. “East Fifty-seventh Street,” he said, and gave the number of the Granby Gallery.

  The owner of the gallery, Eric Van Ruyt, was a plump, medium-sized man, middle-aged, clean-shaven, with a boyish pink and white complexion, and thick white hair. His clothes that had been made in Savile Row were heavily padded on the shoulders, and fitted tightly at the waist and wrist. His white silk shirtsleeves were rather long; so long that almost the entire cuff was showing, giving full effect to square-cut white gold links, on one side of which was a monogram, on the other a small round ruby. He swayed his shoulders as he moved and he spoke with a fluted voice. He was the son of a rich Amsterdam jeweler who had opened a branch in New York and subsequently become a citizen.

  Had Eric Van Ruyt been born and educated in Holland he would, Francis reflected, almost certainly in a European atmosphere have drifted into some such ménage as “the Major and the Captain” shared at Antibes. Brought up however in America, he had never recognized the implications of his tastes and mannerisms. He had married young, was the father of four children, had led an exemplary domestic life, and had never occasioned a word of scandal. He was a generous patron of the arts. His protégés were invariably young, masculine, and handsome.

  He welcomed Francis with a squeak of delight, jumping from his chair, and tripping forward with outstretched arms, taking Francis’ hand between both of his.

  “My dear boy, what a surprise, what a happy surprise. So sunburned, how it suits you. And what is in that case? Not pictures. How more than a surprise. I thought you were on a holiday. I must see them, but at once.”

  Van Ruyt’s office opened out of the main, three-roomed gallery.

  “Let us take them through to the window. We shall see them better there.”

  The gallery was on the seventh floor facing north. Its walls were papered in faint primrose yellow, the pictures hanging by pale-green cords from a long gilt rail. The pictures were separately lit and widely spaced. Van Ruyt waved his arm towards the center of the middle wall. “Your seascape, you see, in its place of honor still.” “What about that one of the Old Lyme church?” “Sold it, my dear boy, as I knew I should; at a very pleasant profit too, and that other one of the opera house you did, and that one of the old cemetery just above your home. You are going to be a very profitable investment to me. I’m sure of that. Let’s see what you’ve brought back with you.”

  There were eight pictures in the case. Van Ruyt nodded his head appreciatively as he looked them over.

  “Very good. Yes, very good, that one in particular, that passage there. The lavender and then the mauve, and the contrasted lighting. Very adroit, very, very adroit. That’s clever too: in a new way for you. No, clever’s the wrong word. Spirituel: have we a word in English? No, I think we haven’t. Spirituel. Yes, that’s it, and this one of the plage, delightful, let me see where is it? No, don’t tell me. Yes, I know. Antibes, on the Garoupe side of course, I know it. Charming, my dear boy, charming. You can leave them all here. Every one of them. I don’t fancy they’ll be here for long. And now what are your future plans?”

  It was to discuss his future plans that Francis had come round to the gallery right away. “When I was in the South of France I met an Englishman, an ex-ambassador, Sir Henry Marriott. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “Sir Henry Marriott? The name sounds familiar, but no, no, I can’t quite place it.”

  “He’s a rich man. He’s supposed to be a good judge of pictures. He has influence in London. He was anxious that I should come over in the spring, and show some pictures there. He said that it would be a good idea for me to have two strings to my bow.”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  “But I was wondering where you would come into that arrangement.”

  “I was wondering that myself.”

  “So I was wondering whether it might not be possible for me -I was planning to let my studio – to go up to my parents’ house, spend the fall and winter there working hard – Marriott was particularly anxious that I should do a series of New England pictures – I was wondering if I worked really hard if I mightn’t produce enough pictures to leave you with as many as you can use and take the remainder with me to England.”

  “Provided you don’t take all the best with you.”

  “We could mak
e the selection between us, couldn’t we?”

  “We could.”

  “And then we could make some arrangement about your taking a share of whatever profit I made in England.”

  “We could.”

  There was a twinkle in Van Ruyt’s eye as he made his successive answers. He was a very easy person to do business with. As a boy he had worked in his father’s office. He was a good man of business. He was not the man to make a foolish bargain. But equally he had the indifference to money that often comes to those who are born with it and have not had to earn it. He asked for réclame not profit from his gallery. He was well content if he did not lose money there.

  “We shall have no difficulty in coming to terms,” he said, “when the time comes for me to see your winter’s work. And now tell me more about your trip, no, not about the old masters, I have seen all of them. Tell me about the moderns. What about Dufy?”

  Francis was glad to change the subject. He had been grateful for his sunburn, as he had outlined his plans. Otherwise he might have blushed. His plans were not quite as he had stated. It was a relief to be able to talk impersonally.

  “I was rather worried by some of those French pictures. Some of them made me feel old-fashioned. I wondered whether anyone would want the kind of pictures that I was painting.”

  Van Ruyt smiled.

  “I would not let that worry you, dear boy. There are so many ways of being modern. I was looking at a picture of Peter Blume’s the other day. You should go and see it. It’s at Daniel’s. It’s symbolic. But completely representational. It was painted, I should say, in Maine. There’s a shingled weather-beaten coast. Then there’s a nude in stockings. Oh yes, quite a seductive one; she’s sitting on a soapbox, holding a police dog on her lap. And in the background there’s a fierce stern male coming out of a house. No, no I can’t say what it was meant to mean. But I’m sure it was very modern. Yet the painting was perfectly direct. There are so many ways of being modern. You don’t need to worry.”