Unclouded Summer
Authors: Alec Waugh
Summer
Alec Waugh
Chapter One
Shortly after eight on a bright Mediterranean morning in the early September of 1926 a young American painter who had been born in East Haddam, Connecticut, when the century was a few days old, was finishing his breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel Welcome, Villefranche-sur-mer, when a small gray-green Chevrolet swung down from the main road into the square and a youngish woman, with red-brown hair jumped out from it. She paused, looking round her, puzzled; then walked across to him.
“It looks terribly quiet here. Don't tell me that the ship's come and gone,” she said.
He shook his head. An Italian liner had been due to arrive early, but it had been delayed. It would not dock now until eleven.
“Not till eleven, and it's barely eight and I got up at seven to be here to meet it. I've lost two hours' sleep. I've now three hours to fill in. I've already had one breakfast. It's too early to start cocktails. Oh well, I suppose I had better order myself a coffee.”
She pulled up a chair and sat beside him. He took a quick, a painter's look at her. She was small and slim and graceful. She was not exactly pretty, but she was vivid and alert; a light-coloured handkerchief that was knotted about her head struck the right note of contrast to her hair; and in its flowered-pattern, there was a shade of red that exactly matched her nail polish and lipstick. She spoke with an English accent. From her appearance and from her nationality he would have expected that her voice would be high-pitched. He would have expected that her predicament would have rendered its tone petulant. It was on the contrary deep and cheerful. He did not feel that she was really in the least put out.
“Shall I order you some coffee?” he asked.
“That would be very kind.”
“A croissant too?”
She shook her head. “I have to watch my figure.”
He rose and crossed to the hotel.
The narrow cobbled square behind the terrace which served in the evenings as a car park was also the
Place du Marché
, where a number of rickety stalls were set out each
morning. It was garden produce that was for the most part sold there, but a certain amount of cheap haberdashery was displayed as well â stockings and ties and belts from the Galeries Lafayette,
maillots
and
espadrilles
, the sandals and the sleeveless vests that the local fishermen wore in summer and that recently had become fashionable among American and English visitors. At one of the stalls a basket of figs was offered. He bought half a dozen, carrying them across to her between his hands on a bed of leaves.
Her eyes brightened at the sight of them.
“Now that is thoughtful.”
She had neat practical hands. There was something very unfussy about the way in which she peeled the fig. He noticed, as she bit into the fruit, how even and how white her teeth were.
“These are very good,” she said; and there was an engagingly youthful note of enjoyment in her voice.
He wondered who she was. She was wearing, he had noticed, a thin platinum ring on the fourth finger of her left hand.
“Have you come down to meet somebody?” he asked.
“Yes, someone who's coming to stay with us. Rex Allan.”
He started at the name.
“You don't mean the film actor?” he asked.
She nodded. “The very one.” He stared, impressed. Since the death of Valentino, Rex Allan had been acclaimed in four continents as co-equal with John Gilbert, the greatest lover on the screen. Himself, he had never been to Hollywood. He had never met a film star. In spite of the many articles he had read about their houses and their hobbies, their friends and marriages, he could never quite believe that they led real lives. He never expected them to mix with anyone he knew.
“Do tell me about him. What's he like?” he asked.
“I barely know him.”
“But if he's going to be your guest ⦔
She laughed. “I've only met him once, at a London party. I asked him if he couldn't come to lunch, but he was leaving the next morning to make a film in Capri. âThat's very near to Cannes,' I said. âIf you've ever a day or two to spare come across to see us.' To my surprise he wired three days ago saying that he was on his way. He was amusing enough that one time but Heaven knows what he'll be like over a four-day visit, and we'll have to take him about with us Wherever we've been invited. Not that I suppose it matters, much.
People are always pleased to meet that kind of person â once.”
She spoke unconcernedly. Nothing seemed to worry her, being late for a boat or too early for a boat, having a film star to stay with her, or having her parties endangered by a stranger's presence. Yet her unconcern was not, he was very sure, the outcome of apathy or indifference. It was due, on the contrary, to a superabundance of vitality which enabled her to take everything as it came, confident that if one thing turned out badly, something else would in compensation turn out well. Everything had its obverse side, and life itself was a party not to miss. I've got to see more of her, he thought.
“If you've nothing to do for the next two hours, why don't we swim on that
plage
below the railway bridge,” he said.
“I've brought no bathing things.”
“I could raise you some in the hotel.”
“I'd look an awful fright.”
But she was ready enough, it was very obvious, to accept, even though it was an exceedingly old-fashioned garment, with not only sleeves and a skirt, but a broad tessellated collar, that he borrowed from the wife of the proprietor. “But I have got you a bathrobe of my own, so that you won't have to walk along the front in it.”
It was a large and white and fleecy bathrobe. She looked very much like a rabbit in it, as she came down the stairs to join him.
“You look about ten years old,” he said.
“And actually I'm three times that, and a little more.”
“Over thirty!”
“It's nice of you to be surprised.”
Outside by the entrance of the hotel, past the archway opening on to the dark tunnel of the Rue Obscure, a short steep flight of steps dropped from the
Place du Marche
to the waterfront. On the level of the waterfront was the Welcome Bar. It was shuttered over now, but later an awning would be lowered and tables set out along the pavement. On evenings when a ship was in, there would be dancing in the room behind.
“Cocteau did a ballet about this bar,” he said.
“I know. I saw it.”
She paused, at the foot of the steps, looking back at the long broad flight that mounting into the upper town, served as the main and central street from which a series of narrow tributary passages wove among the maze of houses. On the
pavement in from the bar, nets had been laid out to dry; the wives and daughters of the fishermen were at work on them. On the right was the
Tribunal du Pêche
where the morning's catch was daily assembled and assessed. A couple of old men were sleeping in its shadow. Half a dozen urchins were throwing tops. Sheltered by a breakwater and jetty a number of fishing boats were swaying gently against their moorings. The sun, its full heat and height not yet attained, was throwing over the whole scene a soft rich radiance. The water was very blue.
She looked slowly round her.
“This is the first time I've been here at this time of day,” she said. “I've only been on parties, late, or when the fleet's in; it's a riot then. I never knew it could be so restful. I never knew anywhere along this coast could be so restful.”
“That sounds as though you led a dashing life.”
She shrugged. “You know What the summer season's becoming now, one party after another.”
He did not know; his own summer in the Riviera had been very different. He had started at Portofino and had been moving slowly up the coast, out of Italy into France, painting as he went. Most nights he had been in bed by ten, so that he could wake fresh and early, when the air was cool and the first lights were upon the water. He had hardly been to a party since he had left New York. But he did not want to tell her that, at least not altogether that.
“Villefranche is rather cut off for that kind of thing, if one hasn't got a car,” he said. “It's a ten-minute walk to the trams, and a pretty hot climb at that; they're not very fast trams when you've got to them; they don't run often and anyhow they only take you as far as Nice. One tends to get rather lazy here.”
“That's how it was along the whole coast in summer when I came here first.”
As they strolled along the waterfront, she kept looking to the left, away from him, noting as though she were seeing for the first time the succession of little bars, the ochre and pink houses, the faded notice of the
Reserve
, the blue Dubonnet sign.
“I've looked down at this place from the road so often. It's always looked so charming. I've always meant to come down for lunch one day. I can't think why I never have. Perhaps ⦔ She paused, and her face grew thoughtful. “I think
that perhaps I'm rather glad I saved it up till now.”
She had said she would look a fright in any bathing dress that he would be likely to borrow for her in a French hotel; she had burst out laughing when he had held up for her inspection the garment that he had acquired from the proprietor, but when she tossed the white bathrobe onto the stretch of pebbles that ran down to the water from the railway bridge it was his turn to be abashed. At one moment wrapped round in his high-collared bathrobe that had trailed after her feet, dragging in the dust like an unsupported train, the red-brown of her hair, the olive-brown of her nose and her forehead, the thin line of her penciled eyebrows and the deep coral of her lipstick, had appeared like the mask of a child's fancy dress; the next moment eyebrows, shingled hair and lipstick were presenting themselves in absurdly anachronistic contrast to a bathing dress that bought before the war, belonged now not to another decade but to another century.
At the sight of his astonishment, she burst out laughing.
“My vanity impels me to rush into the sea at once,” she said.
The shingle sank gradually under shallow water. The “tideless sea” had in this sheltered harbor made little inroad against the shore. A child could paddle in it for twenty yards. As she ran forward, her billowing skirt and flapping collar made him feel that he was watching an early Keystone film; he expected to see a couple of policemen, with high-crowned, low-brimmed helmets come cantering along the beach, brandishing their truncheons; he expected to see emerge from behind a buttress of the bridge an overgrown fat man swinging a cream tart. But then suddenly, when the water was about knee-high, her hands went up, her finger tips stretched forward, her head was lowered between her arms, her ankles kicked back and upwards as she dived, and there was no question any longer of its being a Keystone film.
Jumping to his feet, he ran and followed her. “I'm hidden now,” she said.
He did not answer. Swimming at her side, he admired the firm lift of her arm, the poise and rhythm, the effortless power behind each stroke. She swung over on to her face, her arms plowing forward in the crawl, her feet beating on the water, throwing up a churn of foam, like the rat-tat-tat of drums.
“You could beat me in a race,” he said.
“We'll have to try one day.”
But it was no time now for racing: the water was tepid: the sun was high above the hills. “Let's go back and sunbathe,” he suggested.
