Unclouded Summer

by Alec Waugh

  All the time as she had spoken, she had stood with her back turned to him. Dark thoughts, dark memories were crowding on her. She would not want him to see her face when she was the prey of them. She turned now facing him; and her eyes were fond again.

  He smiled. “Selfish or unselfish, it’s turned out very well. I’ve been very grateful.”

  “You have: it has. I’d heard it had. I’d wondered. I’d asked myself if you weren’t too young to marry, if you shouldn’t as an artist have had a longer Wanderjahre. I’ve felt very guilty sometimes.”

  “You needn’t have. I’ve been very happy.”

  “You have, you really have. It’s good to hear it.”

  Her back was to the light. He could not read the expression of her face. He wondered for a half-second whether a shade of regret was not in her voice. Whether she would not have rather heard that his marriage too had been a compromise. He wondered that for a moment, then dismissed the thought. Judy was not like that.

  She moved away from the wall, back to her chair. The sunlight streaming from behind a cloud flung a thin dark shadow along her cheek. The sudden glare made him half close his eyes. Behind their lowered lids he seemed to be seeing not the new Judy that the years had made, but the old Judy who had driven a gray-green Chevrolet.

  “And tell me, how many children is it, you have now?” she asked.

  “Three, boy, girl, boy.”

  “And that house of your father’s; is that where you live? “

  He nodded. In their first years of marriage they had lived in a smaller house nearer to New York, near Stamford. But on his father’s death, they had moved back to his old home.

  “And do you still travel as much as ever? You were always going on trips so Henry told me.”

  “Before the war we did.”

  Every winter they had gone off somewhere, partly for pleasure, partly in search of subjects, to the West Indies, to Central America, once to the South Pacific.

  “And does Marion always go with you?”

  “Always.”

  Those trips together were the happiest section of their marriage. An eager light would come into Marion’s eyes when the time came round each year to spread out the travel folders. “I’m so excited to think I’m going to have you all to myself again,” she’d say.

  Her company made his trips for him. She was an easy traveling companion. She never fussed or fidgeted. She was good with luggage. She traveled light yet she always had the right clothes for each occasion. She was punctual but not ahead of time. She neither missed trains by three minutes nor caught them with an hour to spare. She never needed to be entertained. She was always restful yet was always vaguely occupied.

  She was good with people too. Getting to know new people in hotels and ships was for him an effort, though when he had got to know them, he enjoyed it. For Marion, on the other hand, it was an adventure. At Charlton she had seemed unsociable and aloof. But away from Charlton, she had showed the same interest in the social comedy that her father had. She was always rushing up to him with a, “Darling, I’ve met the most amusing couple. They’ve asked us to have drinks with them this evening.” People were much friendlier to him than they had been. “That’s because you’re a success,” she’d tell him. “They like to have a chance of saying, ‘Francis Oliver was telling me.’” And in part, of course, that was true, he knew. But in far greater part, certainly, in the case of the new friends that he respected most, that greater readiness on their part to like him was due to her. “Everything must be right with anyone who’s got a wife like that,” they’d say.

  Every winter they went together, somewhere.

  “I’m surprised that you haven’t ever come back here,” said Judy. “Doesn’t Marion feel homesick ever?”

  “Dreadfully, at times, or at least she did. She’s too many roots here not to. I don’t think she wants to think about it more than need be.”

  “But she doesn’t regret her choice?”

  He shook his head. “She never really fitted here.”

  Judy nodded. “That’s what Henry said about her. There’s a certain English type that can’t adjust itself to the English pattern, that feels confined here and pressed in upon. In many ways it’s our finest type, he said. It’s the type that built up the Empire.”

  “Marion said a strange thing to me, her first day over there. ‘If Shakespeare were to come back today,’ she said, ‘I wonder where he’d feel least at home, here or in modern London.’ “

  Judy smiled. “It all sounds perfect. A young marriage that has turned out happily; and that’s so rare these days, when everyone seems to be divorcing. Yet even so,” she paused. She looked at him thoughtfully. “Yet even so, I wonder how different essentially your kind of marriage is from the kind of marriage that ends in the divorce courts. Is there any real difference except that you decided to hold on?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Simply the law of personal relationships. After a few years of living together something goes. That’s the rock isn’t it, that wrecks most marriages; that something going? It happened to you, didn’t it? Didn’t something go?”

  He hesitated. He had never discussed his marriage, not with his best man friends, certainly not with any woman. The bulwark which supported marriage, was the front with which you faced the world, the assumption that it was “Happily ever after.” Ordinarily he would have resented such a question. With Judy it was different. It was unlikely that they would ever meet again. Between them there was that freedom to speak that comes to two strangers in a train, who do not know each other’s names or each other’s friends, who are getting off at different stations, in different states, who will never see each other again when they have left that Pullman. There was that knowledge of security, of safety between himself and Judy; but deeper and more potent was that close knowledge of each other that went beyond the need for secrecy. There was nothing they could not say to one another, nothing now. She had spoken out of her heart, without reserve, but there were still things that he, on his side, had to say to her.

  He nodded his head slowly.

  “Yes,” he said, “something went.”

  “And then, I suppose there were other women.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said, “there weren’t.”

  “You mean there was nothing serious.”

  “No, I mean there were no other women.”

  She stared at him, incredulously.

  “You’ve been married for seventeen years. Are you telling me that you’ve been faithful to Marion all that time?”

  “I am”.

  The stare grew more incredulous.

  “I’m astonished,” she said. “Knowing you as I do. With all the temptations that a painter has; the leisure, the opportunities, all that living upon one’s nerves; the need that an artist has, for his work’s sake, for fresh experience. I can’t understand it. How did it come about?”

  He paused before he answered. He too would have been surprised had he been told eleven years ago, that he would be able still after seventeen years of marriage, to describe himself as a faithful husband.

  It was eleven years ago shortly before the birth of his youngest child, that he had come to recognize that something had gone out of his marriage, that happy though he was with Marion, that much though he loved Marion, their marriage was a love affair no longer. He had faced the recognition stoically. It was the human lot. It was something that always happened he supposed. No one could live forever on those high levels. The air there was too keen. He had breathed it for six years. That was a long time. Longer than most men had. He should account himself lucky and should leave it there; should resign himself to more prosaic living.

  It had been hard though to resign himself. He was thirty-two : as capable of falling in love as he had ever been. As a painter he had opportunities denied the ordinary man. He had leisure and the separate premises of a studio. Not only had he the painter’s desire to create but the arti
st’s desire for his art’s sake, to re-create himself; he had had the knowledge, too, that love does rejuvenate the artist. Yes, he had known all that. Yet even so over these eleven years something had held him back.

  And it was because it had, he knew it now, that his marriage with Marion had remained a real one. Judy had said a few moments back that there was something humiliating, degrading about tepid love-making between two people who had been real lovers once. She had referred then to an ageing husband, but precisely the same situation would occur, he was very sure, when a mature husband began to be unfaithful, and in consequence made love to his wife half-heartedly, almost reluctantly out of a sense of duty: “the unblessed kisses that upbraid the full waked sense” roused shame in both. Better to call the whole thing a day. And though such a marriage might survive, though husband and wife might remain good friends, loyal comrades and associates, bound together by mutual interests and respect and common ties, the real man and woman relationship would be at an end. The marriage would have ceased to be a marriage.

  To Marion and himself that had not happened. Though their marriage had ceased to be a love affair, they had remained lovers still. Though they had outgrown their first dizzy honeymoon intoxication, they could still find often enough for it to sweeten and enrich their lives, that old delight in one another, so that they could still feel bound to their youth through one another, since their past, their youth, were incorporate and continued in their present, in their middle age; so that they could see their life together as an abiding pattern; so that at moments, moved by memory, by the poetry of a summer evening, by a piece of music heard over the radio, by a glance exchanged across a crowded room, drawn together by one of those sudden affinities that can make of a happy marriage a life-long adventure, they could be still exultant and transported in each other’s arms, to feel that there still lived on in them the boy and girl whose knees had parted for each other’s, under a Soho lunch table.

  “I don’t know how that can have come to happen,” Judy said.

  He smiled. He knew now how it had come to happen; or rather knew now for the first time fully how it had come to happen. For it was compounded of many factors, that something which had held him back. There was the long tradition of his New England training, an influence which Judy the product of another system could scarcely estimate; a training and tradition that had acted as a cement for the strongly built bastion of his love for Marion; it was compounded too of his gratitude and loyalty to Marion, of his resolve not to cause her pain, of his oath to honor her. The one had been the complement of the other, or so until this moment he had believed.

  But now back again in Judy’s presence he knew that there was another influence. Sitting here in this familiar room with the sound in his ears of that deep almost contralto voice, with the scent of tuberoses once again about him, and before his eyes the sails of a small silver ship and the picture of a sun-soaked promontory, here with the wheels of the years revolving, he could recognize that other factor, and in that recognition, he knew too why it was that seventeen years ago as he drove south from Charlton, he had had that feeling of unsaid things between them; only then he had not known what they were.

  How had it come to happen? He answered her obliquely.

  “I had a friend who scored a touchdown, a winning touchdown after a fifty-yard run in the last minute of the Yale-Princeton game. It was a run that would become a legend, of which people would talk twenty-five, thirty years ahead. He would never do anything more spectacular in his life. He would always, he knew it well, be spoken of as the man who had scored that touchdown. He told me that he wanted to live up to that big moment. He vowed that there should never come a time when someone in a bar should point out a drunken failure and remark ‘You wouldn’t believe it but that wretched creature over there once scored a touchdown in the Yale-Princeton match that people talk of still.’ Can you understand how he could have felt that way?”

  “Yes, I can understand.”

  “Can you understand then too how a man could feel about a woman whom he could not marry? The situation was impossible from the start. They were only together once, for a few hours. Yet those few hours, that single night were so exquisite, were such a revelation, that he vowed to remain worthy of it. Can you imagine him saying to himself, Til never do anything that could make her say, were she to hear of it, “How could I have?” ’ Can you understand his feeling that?”

  “Yes, I can understand.”

  He hesitated. He looked at her very straight. It was not only an inherited reserve which made him speak in the third person, had made him speak in allegory. For it was not true, how could it be, that he had been faithful to Marion out of an involved sense of loyalty to Judy. But it was true that the memory of that one night at Villefranche had set a standard. He had wanted to remain worthy of that night. And who was to say that its memory working subconsciously in the background of his mind had not acted at some point of crisis as a last straw, as a final factor holding him back from one of those brief encounters that however temporally revivifying, would in the long run inevitably have robbed his marriage of that certainty and trust and depth of sweetness that had given a purpose and significance to his life with Marion.

  He had not until this moment realized that, but it might well be true. Who could estimate the strength and exact nature of those dark influences that worked below one’s thoughts?

  It might have been, he could not tell. There was one thing, though, that he knew and knew for certain: knew now what it was that he had to say to Judy, the thing that would explain and justify the long enchantment of that unclouded summer, the thing that would round off their love affair, would make it complete at last; the thing that would put him right with Judy.

  “Can you understand,” he said, “how that one night, the memory of those five perfect hours could run like a refrain through a man’s whole life, making certain things impossible for him; so that though that woman had gone out of his life forever, she was always, in all that mattered, an integral part of it; staying with him to the end, perhaps beyond the end.” He paused and out of the past her own words came back to him. “Beyond stars and time,” he said. “Beyond stars and time and many waters.”

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © 1948 by Alec Waugh

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  ISBN: 9781448200375

  eISBN: 9781448201693

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