A Writer's Notebook (84 page)

The day's food. In the morning black coffee, bread and butter. At noon, when at home, soup, steak or veal, the vegetables that have gone to make the soup, and potatoes. They drink beer which is often made at home and is almost nonalcoholic; it has a peculiar taste that you have to get used to. At supper, coffee again and bread-and-butter, and if flush, a slice of ham.

In none of the houses is there any sign of comfort, nor does there seem any desire for it. They are content with their wages and all they ask is that things should remain as they are. Work, food, sleep, the radio: these are their lives.

The manager warned me that a visitor thinks the work much harder than it really is. Habit makes it, if not easy, at least tolerable. He is a young man, short, clean-shaven, dapper,
with a prettyish wife with a long nose, in a red dress, and two children. He is enthusiastic about the business and seems intelligent, sympathetic and well-read. His wife's father,
procureur général
at Amiens, is staying with them, a smallish, elderly man, with a grey square beard. He is a fluent talker and tells you with great conviction what everyone has been saying for the last hundred years as though it were a considered opinion he has arrived at after intensive reflection. A thoroughly honest, worthy, narrow and boring man.

Murder on the Riviera. Jack M. was in bed with pneumonia when a telegram arrived telling him that his mother, Mrs. Albert M., who had been living in a hotel at San Rafael, had been murdered. Since he could not move, his wife flew out in his place. Of course she was shocked, but at the same time could not but feel a blessed sense of relief. Her mother-in-law had made life almost intolerable to her. She found fault with Mary because she liked to go to parties and dances, because she spent good money on her clothes; she disapproved of the way she ran her house and brought up her children. What made it worse was that Jack admired and adored his mother. In his eyes she could do no wrong. Mary could never have stood the strain but for Mrs. Albert's habit of spending every winter at San Rafael.

The plane put her down at Cannes, where an English lawyer, to whom Jack M. had wired, met her. As they drove to San Rafael he gave her the facts.

“You'll have to know them sometime. The local papers are full of the case.”

Mrs. Albert had been found dead in her bed, strangled, and her money and her pearls had been stolen. She was stark naked.

“You know, the Riviera sometimes has an unfortunate effect on these lonely middle-aged women who come here from England and America.”

Mrs. Albert was well-known at San Rafael. She was in the habit of frequenting bars and cafés where they danced, and it was with the lowest of the riff-raff that she hob-nobbed. She was a generous old girl always ready to stand drinks, and though they laughed at her they liked her. Two or three times a week she would take one of the roughs back to her hotel and he was always sure of a thousand francs in the morning. It was evidently one of her lovers who had killed her.

Mary listened to the story with consternation and yet with exultation. Now she would be able to get even with the woman who had tormented her for years. It would be a wonderful revenge to tell Jack that this pattern of all the virtues whom he had held up as a model for her to follow was just an old rip.

“Do they know who did it?” she asked.

“No, it might be any one of a dozen. She was pretty promiscuous.”

“It'll be a blow to my husband.”

“Need he ever know? They'd be glad to hush the whole thing up here and let it go for burglary and murder. A nasty scandal wouldn't do any good to a wintering-place like San Rafael.”

“Why should it be hushed up?”

“Well, for all your sakes and for your mother-in-law's. I daresay she led a pretty dull life in England. Are you going to blame her very much because she wanted to have a bit of fun before she died?”

Mary was silent for a long time. Then she said something that surprised herself.

“I hated the old bitch. I could have killed her myself and sometimes I wonder why I didn't. But now I know all I do know, for the first time since I married my husband I think I've got a sort of sneaking affection for her.”

Pasquier dying. He had a small café in one of the side streets of Nice, with a small, airless room at the back in which people
danced. He owned or rented the house above the café, and you entered by a side door. He lived there, but he let the rooms for an hour or a night to the men who had picked up a woman in the café. Now that Pasquier was so ill it was being run by his son, Edmond, and his son's wife. Edmond had married one of the women who frequented the café and Pasquier, outraged at the
mésalliance
, had turned them out of the house, but he was not one to let honour conflict with interest, and since Edmond was useful to him, he soon took him back. That night when I went in the place was crowded. The fleet were in and they were doing land-office business. I asked Edmond how his father was and he told me the doctor had given him up and he could not last more than a day or two longer. He asked me to go and see him. I went round, and Jeanne, the woman who showed clients to their room, took me up to him. He was lying in a huge four-poster, a little old man in a night-shirt, his face sallow and puffy, and his hands swollen.

“Je suis foutu,”
he said to me.

“Nonsense,” I said, with the false cheerfulness one puts on with the sick, “you'll get well.”

“I'm not afraid. How is it downstairs? Full?”

“Crammed.”

He perked up.

“If I had twice the number of rooms I could fill them tonight.” He rang his bell. “It's terrible I should have to lie here and can't look after things myself.” The maid came in. “Go and knock on the doors,” he told her, “and tell them to be quick. Others are waiting.
Mon Dieu
, it doesn't take all night to do what they've come here to do.” And when the maid went out: “When I think of my poor wife I'm glad she's dead; she'd have died with shame when Edmond married a tart. And mind you, we gave him a good education. Do you know what they're going to do when I'm gone? They're going to clear the women out and let the rooms by the month to clerks and shop-assistants. They can't make money like that. And, why couldn't he marry a
bourgeoise
, the daughter of decent tradespeople, who
understood that business is business? It's hard to lie here and know that this business I've built up will go to pot as soon as I'm dead and buried.” Two heavy tears rolled down his cheeks. “And for why?” he sniffled. “Because the dirty bitch wants to be respectable. Do people pay you money because they respect you?
Merde
.”

He died two or three days later. The hearse was loaded with flowers and quite a number of the girls who frequented the café went to the funeral. “It shows that they have good hearts,” Edmond's wife said to me afterwards.

Romance. The Duke of York, a brother of George III, came to Monaco on his yacht and there fell very seriously ill. He asked the ruling prince to receive him and this the prince consented to do, but refused to receive the mistress whom the Duke had brought with him on the yacht. She took a house at Roquebrune and every day went out to the point to see if the flag was still flying over the palace. One day she saw it at half-mast and knew her lover was dead. She threw herself into the sea.

The other day, after dinner in Grosvenor Square, I listened to an author, no longer young, complaining of the small esteem in which men of letters are held in England today. He compared it unfavourably with the position they had in the eighteenth century when they were arbiters of taste in the coffee-houses and the munificence of patrons saved them from having to prostitute their gifts for filthy lucre. I wondered it didn't occur to him that in the eighteenth century, if he and I had been in that house at all we should have come up the back stairs, and if we had been given a meal it would have consisted of a tankard of beer and a cut off the cold joint in the housekeeper's room.