Unclouded Summer

by Alec Waugh

  “What’s happened to the gates?”

  “Taken for scrap. Rather a shame really. Two hundred years old and irreplaceable. As likely as not they’ve never been used either, chucked on some dump heap somewhere. But I suppose you couldn’t have the rich left with their possessions, just because they were works of art, when the poor were having their homes bombed out. I’m glad Henry did not live to see it. He was so proud of them. You’ll find Charlton changed.”

  It was very changed. The paddocks had been dug up and planted with potatoes; half the chestnuts had been cut down for firewood, the lawn ran ragged and untended to the lake; the gravel square before the flamboyant portico was a park for lorries; a squad of recruits was drilling on the tennis court. But the copper beech was still spreading its proud canopy of purple, and the glow of white gold was refracted by the July sunlight.

  It was ten minutes to one when they arrived.

  As they came into the hall, she pulled off her cap. Her hair had been cut short and set in small tight curls. They were almost white.

  “There’ll be a lot of them in the anteroom waiting for the news,” she said. “Would you like to see them?”

  The anteroom was what had been once the drawing room. A complete transformation had taken place. The floor had been stripped of carpets, the walls of pictures; the bookshelves had been boarded over and placarded with maps; instead of the gilt French chairs and sofas was a miscellaneous collection of wicker and leather-covered club armchairs; there was a dart board above the mantelpiece; there were no curtains, but a number of blackout frames had been stacked beside the fireplace. Francis would not have recognized it as the room in which he had acted the charade, in which he had quarreled so bitterly with Judy, had it not been for the window seat and the view beyond it of the small Dutch garden.

  A dozen or so girls, most of them in the early twenties were grouped round the radio. They rose but Judy shook her hand.

  “No, no,” she said, “sit down. I’ve just brought in an old friend to see your anteroom, an old friend who used to visit here when most of you were bowling hoops. You’ve heard me speak of him. The American painter. Francis Oliver. He painted that picture of Villefranche that I’ve got upstairs. You remember what I said about him, that he was the best-looking man who ever painted a good picture. Wasn’t I right now? I think he’s even better looking now. That gray hair suits him and those lines. In fact I think that I had better take him right away or he’ll be upsetting discipline.”

  The girls laughed, easily. It was very clear that they were completely themselves with her. They were of different ages, and of different classes. But there was an ageless, a classless quality to Judy. People of all types could relax with her. It was eighteen years since she had driven him up the high hill road to Mougins, yet she had the same attack on life, the same interest in people, the same generosity, the same capacity to draw out the best in others. It was the old Judy right enough, exercising her old talents, her old capacities under these changed conditions.

  In the hall that had been converted into a lecture hall, and in which bare benches, bare boards and desks presented a curious contrast to the elaborate gallery and staircase, Judy looked up at the service clock that had replaced the large battlepiece oil painting over the door to the cloakrooms.

  “It’s just on one,” she said. “They’ll be starting the second lunch. It’ll be a fearful shambles in the mess, but there’s no formality. We can get away quickly afterwards and have a chat upstairs.”

  “I’ve a tin of turkey in my haversack and a flask of Scotch.”

  At the sound of the word turkey her eyes brightened.

  “In that case let’s picnic in my room.”

  It was more of a shock than he had expected, that first sight of her room again, after all those years. In memory he had lived in it so often. It was just as he remembered it: his Villefranche picture between the Cézanne and the Duncan Grant; the small Sheraton writing desk, and on the mantelpiece between the Staffordshire figures the small silver ship. The “significant” ship that would “tell her that the miles were nothing.” There was a camp bed now under the window, which had involved a still further cramping of the chairs and sofa; one corner had been curtained off to conceal clothes and hangers. There was a new picture, a flower picture beside the door, a Cedric Morris.

  “It’s strange that this one room should have stayed like this,” she said. “But I left it just as it was when Henry died. I couldn’t bear to alter anything; then when the Government were taking over Charlton and storing all the furniture, I managed to get camped in here ahead of them. It was a wangle of course. But it’s funny how even in a totalitarian world you can get the things you want if you try hard enough. Provided you know what you want, and provided that you’re not too greedy.”

  She laughed, then with a sigh of relief she tossed her cap onto the bed.

  “Do you mind if I relax? “

  She took off her tunic and set it on a hanger. She undid her tie, unbuttoned her collar, rolled up her sleeves.

  “Oh how I loathe this uniform. You men are used to it, we aren’t,” she said.

  From the bottom drawer of her writing desk, she took out plates, knives and forks, tumblers and a tin containing a cake and a loaf of bread. It was clear from the amount of crockery that picnics were very usual occurrences in this room. He could picture the girls coming in here in the evening, squatting on the floor, exchanging confidences over cigarettes and cocoa.

  She tossed him a tin opener. “You cope with that while I get some water. You won’t need warning that there’ll be no ice.”

  As he opened the tin, she questioned him about his work.

  “I've really heard no news about you for ten years, not since Henry went across.”

  Sir Henry had visited them in ’34 in the seventh summer of their marriage, when England and America seemed to be recovering from the depression, when the effects of the New Deal were at last beginning to be felt, when hope was in the air, and the blue eagles of the N.R.A. were placarded at every corner.

  Sir Henry had been close on seventy. He had aged a lot. He had grown very thin; his collars no longer fitted tightly at his throat, his movements had become very slow; his skin had lost its color, it gave the impression of having been stretched between chin and cheekbone and then glazed. There was an appearance of transparency about his features. His brain was as clear as ever. He expressed his thoughts with his old lucidity. But there was an air of detachment about everything he said and did, as though he were partially pre-occupied with things that were happening somewhere else.

  He spent a great deal of his time with the children. He read to them and told them stories and organized Red Indian games for them.

  “I find it strange and rather pleasant to reflect,” he said, “that at the turn of the century there’ll be someone in the world who has a personal recollection of me.”

  He was delighted with everything he saw, with the house, the garden. He insisted on being taken round to see their neighbors. Everyone was enchanted with him. He was a new type to them: the courtly British diplomat of the old school, a type they had met with on the films but never expected to meet in the flesh.

  It could not have been a happier visit. Yet it was sadly that they had stood, he and Marion, on the pier, waving him goodbye. It was the last time they would be seeing him, they both knew that. Francis had slipped his arm through Marion’s. She pressed it against her side.

  “It’ll be nice to remember him that way,” she said.

  “That visit’s the last first-hand news of you I had,” said Judy. “Henry said everything was going well, that you’d done some stage sets that had made quite a stir.”

  Francis nodded. Van Ruyt and Sir Henry had both proved good prophets. He had never developed a distinctly individual style; he had become identified in the public eye not so much by his manner as by his choice of subject: in later years invariably of exotic subjects: of summered countries and of brown-ski
nned peoples. His biannual exhibitions were advertised as “Francis Oliver in Mexico” or “Francis Oliver in the Caribbean”; he had illustrated a book or two; he had designed the scenery for several musicals; for the seven or eight years before the war, there had been a steady and increasing market for his work.

  “You’ve been successful, wouldn’t you say?” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “These things are relative.”

  He was well known, he had made money, his future was assured, but he had scarcely become the painter that as a young man he had dreamed of being; he had not painted the pictures that as a young man he had dreamed of painting. He was aware now of his limitations; he had come to accept himself.

  “I expect most other people would think of you as a success,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose they’d label me a failure.”

  ‘I’m very sure they wouldn’t from what I’ve heard. Oh but how good this turkey is.”

  He watched her with amusement as she leaned forward above her plate. She ate quickly, with appreciation. She was hungry, and no doubt it was a long time since she had eaten anything as good as turkey. He remembered how on that first morning on the terrace she had bitten into her fig with a childish pleasure. He looked at her more closely. With her bare arms and open throat, she had become very feminine. She had kept her figure. If he had been meeting her now for the first time he would be thinking of her as an attractive woman; the kind of woman who would never go short of beaux.

  “I wonder you haven’t married again,” he said.

  “I know. I meant to. I was engaged. But then the war came. I haven’t seen him for five years. He’s been in Cairo, living on the fat of the land, the brute.”

  “But you plan to marry him when he gets back.”

  She shrugged. “Five years is a long time. Heaven knows how we shall strike each other.”

  And you wanted me to wait twenty years he thought, but did not say it.

  “Perhaps I’m better on my own,” she said. “It’s rather a relief. You know – not being responsible to anyone.”

  Yes, she had a magic still. She was vivid and alert. Her voice had its rich inflections. Yet even so he could not quite see her as the Judy that he had known. She was Judy and yet not Judy. He had the sensation of being not so much with Judy as with someone that he could talk to about Judy, in the way that with Judy herself he never could have done.

  “Do you know,” he said, “that this is only the third meal we’ve had alone together?”

  She nodded slowly. “There was that lunch in the café on the day it rained.”

  “Then there was that beach lunch at Passable.”

  “Was that really all?”

  “Unless you count that fig on the Welcome terrace.”

  She laughed.

  “That fig. How good it was. What wouldn’t I give to have one now. And was that really all? To think that we never once dined alone together.”

  “Not in all those meals.”

  “And I wonder how often we really talked.”

  “There was that first day we met.”

  She shook her head.

  “That wasn’t really a talk. That was just a getting to know each other.”

  “There was the time when we went into Cannes, to the Taverne des Allées.”

  “The time that I made you believe I wanted to collect a dress.”

  “Then there was that day before my party.”

  “That long and lovely day.”

  “The day that we rowed over to Cap Ferrat.”

  “The afternoon I watched you painting.”

  “There were those rum punches in the garden café.”

  “And that was all.”

  They referred neither of them to that long moon-silvered night. Her eyes rested upon him fondly.

  “Do you know that this is only the second time I’ve been in this room?” he said.

  “Shall I ever forget the first?”

  “You were pretty fine that day.”

  She shrugged. “Was I? I’d like to think I was. I’ve sometimes asked myself if I wasn’t very selfish.”

  “Selfish you, when you took all the blame, when you made it easy for me…”

  “When I made it easy for myself.”

  “Easy for yourself? I don’t follow that.”

  “I was in a mess. I had to get myself out of it. I saw only one way of doing that; by getting you married and safe and packed away.”

  “Safe and packed away?”

  She smiled. “You wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t because you hadn’t the key to our life together, mine and Henry’s. Henry was over sixty when you met us. He’d been over fifty when I married him, thirty years older than myself. It didn’t seem to matter then. He looked so fine and dignified and strong. He made all the other men I met seem trivial. He was such a man. I was an inexperienced girl. He was so wise and tactful and considerate. And he was so in love with me. I don’t believe that any boy of twenty could have been more in love. Those first three years together … they were the loveliest love affair. But afterwards …”

  She paused. She shrugged.

  “I needn’t dot the ‘i’s’ for you. There’s always something – at least I believe there is – that after a few years goes out of marriage. And Henry wasn’t young. Can you understand how when a man’s getting old … You can guess can’t you … how humiliating well, what shall I call it, weak, tepid, ineffective love-making can become? Particularly when you have been real lovers once; and when it’s with someone whom you respect … each time, each attempt – it’s a degrading, a denial of the past, a spoiling of one’s dearest memories. Better to call the whole thing a day. We never discussed it. We accepted it. We knew that we both felt the same about it. We closed one chapter, and began another. But Henry was nearly sixty. I was under thirty.”

  Her lips as she said that, set firmly. There was a look of resolution in her eyes, as though once again in memory she were taking the decision that in real life she had taken quarter of a century ago.

  “When I met you, it had been going on that way for about five years. You saw what our life was,” she said. “It wasn’t too bad a show. I won’t say it wasn’t difficult at times, that there weren’t moments when I longed to throw the whole thing up. But I’d made a bargain. I was resolved to stick to it. Besides that kind of thing is easier in England than it is with you. There’s a European tradition of it. I don’t know what Henry thought, what Henry felt. You saw how he was with me, how he called me midget, how he treated me as a child. In a way he made himself seem younger, more important, more in control of things that way. It was also a kind of self-defense, so that he could think of me as a child, so that he could forget I was a woman. It was a compromise; but most things are. It worked well enough, until you turned up.”

  Into her voice as she spoke had come that deeper tone that he had heard for the first time all those years ago, when she had spoken of Aleck Moore; into her eyes came slowly that transfiguring light. He listened, held, and the years fell away.

  “Then you turned up,” she said, “and it was all quite different. I wouldn’t admit it to myself at first. I fooled myself, I said, It’s just a very attractive, very good-looking young man, just another one.’ It wasn’t though. You were different. You were so young, you were so intent. There was something unspoiled, a kind of integrity about you. Do you remember my saying once that it must be a case of opposites, me being a flibbertigibbet, you so serious-minded? Do you remember that?”

  He nodded. He remembered well enough, and how puzzled he had been by it.

  “Then there was your painting: that completed you. It gave you a sense of purpose, of direction. You were someone starting out on an adventure. There was the light of adventure in your eyes. I wanted to be bound up with your adventure, to be a part of it. It was something I had never known: the start of a career. You showed me all the things I’d missed. I tried to explain that to you once; do you remember
, in the little café?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “But I didn’t tell you all. It wasn’t only that; it wasn’t only the career. It went much deeper.”

  She paused; she looked away; her face grew sad.

  “We had no children. It was what made me restless. I recognized it in myself. I was on my guard against it. But then you turned up. You made it different, altogether different. It wasn’t just that I wanted children; I wanted your children; I not only wanted to share your life; I wanted to send on a continuance of your life, our life, yours and mine into the future. I wanted to be a part of you in that way forever.” She paused. She gave a short, wry laugh. “Wasn’t that a pretty kettle of fish for me?”

  She rose. She walked over to the picture hanging between the Cézanne and Duncan Grant, of the humped outline of Cap Ferrat seen in the framework of a Villefranche window. She stood looking at it, her back turned on him.

  “I’d never felt like that before; I’ve never felt that way since. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be married to you. I knew I couldn’t be. I knew I couldn’t let down Henry. I knew that any kind of hole-and-corner intrigue would be impossible. It would have been all wrong with you. I didn’t know what to do. I fooled myself. I told myself that if I waited, something was bound to turn up that would put everything to rights. I played for time. I was furious when you wrote that letter from America. You were interfering with my game. You were forcing an issue, trying to make me decide; the one thing I couldn’t do: I had to have time, more time. I think I hated you at Charlton. You wouldn’t let me arrange things in the way I wanted. Then when I saw how you were becoming friends with Marion, I was jealous, madly jealous, of course I was … Then we had that quarrel and I exulted, ‘He’s going,’ I thought, ‘forever. We’ll never meet again. I’m free.’

  “Yet I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t be free as long as you were free, as long as you were somewhere on the earth, a bachelor, accessible. I’d be thinking all the time, ‘I’ll be meeting him again, somewhere, somehow. It’ll all be as it was.’ I wouldn’t have known a moment’s peace. I couldn’t know a moment’s peace till you were out of my life irrevocably: till you were accessible no longer. As I sat in this room talking to you and Marion I thought – they’re young, they’re half in love. They’ll meet in London. They’ll fall right in love. They’ll marry. He’ll be Henry’s son-in-law. He’ll be out of reach, inaccessible. I’ll be here. I’ll know peace again! I’ve often thought that that speech to you and Marion was the most selfish act in my whole life.”