Unclouded Summer (11 page)

She smiled.

“You could tell me some of them.”

He shook his head. They had been complex thoughts. She had the glamour for him that film stars and royalty have for others. She symbolized and typified a world of glamour; a world in which he moved now as a guest, but in which one day he would move, through his painting, in his own right, on his own credentials; a world of elegance and of achievement, whose rewards were the spur to his own ambition. She
typified all that; yet she was more than that; she was herself, with all her idiosyncrasies, her waywardness, her impulsiveness, her generosity, her sensibility. He had never met anyone so many-sided, anyone in whom he could respect so many things. To think that such a person as this should be his friend, such a close friend too. Never had he felt so in tune with anyone as he had that day with her. He was so proud to be her friend.

He had felt all that as he had sat at the head of the table looking down at her. But it was all too involved for his powers of expression. He could have said it in paint, but not in words.

“It was just that I was thinking you the most marvelous person I had ever met. That's what it added up to.”

They were standing on the terrace to which the party had moved back at the end of dinner. It was barely a quarter-past eleven.

“You don't need to go back do you, right away?” he asked.

“Not right away.”

He turned back to the table they had risen from. It was littered with dirty glasses and cigarette stubs.

“It's messy here,” she said.

“We could go down to the bar.” A ship was in and a gramophone was playing there. “It can be quite fun there when a ship is in.”

She shook her head. “It starts getting grubby about now. Let's go up to your balcony and watch the moonlight.”

On his dressing table, the canvas on which he had been at work that morning was propped against the wall. It was a picture of Cap Ferrat seen through his bedroom window. She looked at it. “It's very good,” she said, then blinked.

“That light,” she said, “it spoils the view.”

He switched it off. But she did not move over to the balcony. She stood in silhouette against the sky.

“Oh my dear,” she said, “what are we going to do about it?”

In her voice, to his astonishment, was that same rich tone that had come into it when she had spoken of Aleck Moore, when he had seen in a moment of premonition how love could transfigure and transmute her.

There was a moment of taut silence, then turning she opened her arms to him.

She was close against his heart; the scent of tuberose was in her hair; her lips were soft on his. His arms tightened about her shoulders. He was conscious simultaneously both of their strength and softness; the satin smooth texture of her skin, the trimness of the blades beneath it, the muscles between skin and bones. She sighed. She drew back her head; she was still in silhouette against the window. He could not read the expression on her face. His heart was thudding against the thin cotton of his
maillot
but it was an excitement not of the heart and senses only but the nerves. He who had never felt shy in the most crowded drawing room, was the victim of shyness now, suddenly overwhelmingly. What was it that was happening? It was so unprepared, unplanned for. It was something that he had never dreamed of. He was lost, helpless, without defenses.

She sighed. She drew away.

“Haven't you anything I could wear, no, not that heavy bathrobe.”

He handed her a thin foulard dressing gown. She turned away bending forward as she pulled her dress over her head; as she straightened, she moved into a shaft of moonlight; the ribbons of her shoulder straps were white against the sunburned back. She kicked off her shoes as she pulled the dressing gown about her. It was a double bed. She lay full length on it, one hand underneath her head. She patted the space beside her. “Why so far away?” she said.

He came towards her. He knelt upon the bed. His shyness had become terror now: a helpless, improvident apprehension. He took her hand. Its fingers closed over his, with a gentle sureness. He must say something. But he could not concentrate his thoughts. He stared at her. The moonlight did not touch the bed. Her face lying back against the pillows was in shadow. The dressing gown was much too large for her, only her hands and her feet showed white beneath it.

Her fingers gave his a sudden squeeze. “Why all those clothes?” she asked.

He turned away, his hands were trembling as he undid his belt. His nervousness had become all enveloping. He had heard of men feeling like this at such a moment. A predicament such as his was the subject of innumerable stories that he had laughed over in locker-rooms, older men had guffawed when he asked incredulously, “But can that really happen?” One could not believe that anything like that could happen
to oneself. That it should happen of all times now, with Judy. How she'd despise him, how she'd hate him, everything was spoiled.

He kicked his shoes across the room. He turned back to her. He caught her hand desperately between his.

“I can't believe that this is happening. It's the last thing that I'd imagined possible,” he said.

She laughed.

“I knew it would. From the first day. I didn't know when or how but I knew it must.”

There was happiness in her voice, there had been despair in his. The dramatic irony of their different tempers flayed him. Her voice was glowing. If only he could evoke in himself the mood to match it. If only this spell were not upon him. Fiercely his fingers pressed about her wrist. She would despise him, hate him. Another moment and she would know the truth. Gently, but very firmly, she pulled away her hand. She raised her arm, she rested her hand upon his shoulder. In shamed and terrified foreboding he pictured the imminent revelation, the incredulous questions, the stammered answers, her hand would move along his shoulder, behind his head, pulling him down, and then …

It didn't though. She lifted her arm again, rested the palm of her hand against his cheek, patted it twice gently.

“Light me a cigarette,” she said.

As he held the lighter to her face, he could read the expression in it. It was fond and tender. “You have one too,” she said.

As he drew the smoke into his mouth, inhaling it into his lungs, he had the sense of release as a man long imprisoned might when he breathes fresh air for the first time. He was reprieved. Gratefully he stretched himself beside her.

“No,” she was saying, “no, that isn't true. I didn't know that first day, how could I have. I didn't know anything about you. For all I knew you were in love with someone. No, I didn't know till after that first lunch party. Did you know why I drove you into Cannes that day?”

“To pick up a dress I thought.”

She shook her head. “Silly, when I didn't even bother to pick it up. I went there to make the drive last longer. This may be the only time that I shall ever spend with him, I thought. I wanted it to be something to remember always, for you to remember always.”

Her voice was deep, reaching beyond those tones that had
come into it at that first lunch when she had talked of -Lillian Russell. And as she talked, as he lay there listening, as he drew the smoke into his lungs watching the red tip of her cigarette glow and darken, he began to relax, feeling his tautness loosen; forgetting his shame and terror, as her voice flowed on.

“I wanted you whenever you thought of Juan to remember that you had driven past it with me,” she said. “Whenever you thought of Cannes I wanted you to remember having drunk a vermouth cassis with me at a café there.”

As she spoke, memory carried him back to that first drive; he remembered things that she had said, things that he had noticed for the first time because she had shown them to him; he saw her again, bending over her glass. He was back into the past, back where he had been at ease; sure of himself and confident. He was no longer the abject creature whose fingers had trembled at his belt.

“That's why I kept you back when lunch was over. So that I could show you my house. I wanted to be remembered by you against the background of my house. I wasn't sure that I should ever see you after that one day.” She laughed, a gay and merry laugh. “I was in a funny mood that day, not knowing if it was the last. I was happy-sad. Sad because it might be the last time, happy because I was with you. Then when you told me that there wasn't anyone in Villefranche or even in New York, oh, darling, what a reprieve that was.” She laughed again, a laugh that seemed to spring from a deep well of happiness, a laugh that transported him to the enchantment of that first afternoon.

“I knew then, darling, that everything was going to turn out all right. As it has,” she said.

She raised herself upon her elbow. As she leaned across him to stub out her cigarette, he was conscious, through the thin silk, of her breasts' rounded firmness. His arms went round her. “And to think,” he said, “that it's taken all this time for me to discover that I was in love with you.”

The use of the word “love” with all its memoried associations, its freight of boyhood's dreams, served as a charm, an amulet against his fears. The mood, the temper that quarter of an hour earlier he had sought unavailingly to evoke, was on him now, unbidden. His hands slid along her shoulders, pulling the thin silk from under her. She raised herself upon her elbows. “Oh my dear,” she said, “my darling.”

It was a peace beyond anything that he had dreamed; a
smoothing away of every doubt, a wrapping about of every cherished dream; the release of every hesitation. It was a peace, a canceling, a homecoming, a fulfilment; it was a sense, far more than it was passion, of being at last where he belonged.

“I never knew it could be like this,” he said.

Once again she laughed; a laugh into which seemed to be gathered every mood of happiness that her life had known, that her dreams had cherished.

“Darling, I seem to be ahead of you in everything.”

In silence they lay side by side; moonlight was streaming now across the bed, onto the dressing gown tangled with the rumpled counterpane beside her feet. Every few seconds the beam of the Nice lighthouse swept the far corner of the room. In the bar below a gramophone was playing. On the quay a group of half-drunken sailors were chanting out of tune with it, “Valencia, Valencia.” He watched, as he had watched earlier, the tip of her cigarette grow red and darken. The little fingers of their hands were interlocked. For several minutes now she had not spoken. He had never known her to be quiet for so long. He was grateful to her for her silence. He was grateful to her for her tact, her patience, for her appreciation of his mood, grateful with a gratitude that crossed the borders of adoration. Peace was upon him, peace and pride. He felt fulfilled and justified, with every nerve cell soothed.

He lifted himself upon his elbow. She was lying in the classic pose with one knee raised. Her beauty was beyond anything that he had dreamed. Slowly, in a long caress, he passed his hand over the long curving line between her knee and shoulder, slowly, possessively, as though inch by inch he would imprint upon his finger tips that line of beauty.

“How little I guessed when I saw you in that first bathing dress that you could look like this,” he said.

She chuckled. “But you did half-guess, didn't you? Didn't you say something about your being able to see the point in those Victorian bathing dresses?”

“So you remember my saying that.”

“Do you remember what I said in answer?”

“That it was nice to know that I was human.”

“I was beginning to feel quite hopeful then.”

They laughed together. It was lovely that they could laugh about it all, that they had not to be intense and solemn.

“But that first afternoon when we bathed up at your cistern.”

“Darling, do you think I didn't notice?”

“I could hardly take my eyes off you.”

“I began to feel rather more than hopeful then.”

“But even then I had no idea that anyone could be so beautiful.”

Once again in a long intimate caress his hand passed over her, slowly, lingering as it passed.

“I had no idea you could be so beautiful. I had no idea that there could be such beauty in the world.”

“Is that all your Guggenheim fellowship has done for you? Didn't you see any statues in all those galleries?”

“I didn't think they were real; that they were portraits of real women I mean to say; I thought of them as composite creations. One feature borrowed here, another there. I never believed that any one single person, I never believed that there could be a you.”

He could manage to keep light still the actual words he used, but he could not control the tremor in his voice. In his finger tips as they fluttered over her, there was a new fierce urgency.

“Do you need to smoke that cigarette right to the very end?” he asked.

She did not answer, or at least not in words. She lifted her arms, clasping her hands behind her neck. He took the cigarette from between her lips and stubbed it out. He pulled the pillow from beneath her head. She half closed her eyes. “Tell me,” she whispered, “tell me.”

This time it was very different. His words not hers had played the prelude. Where before he had been guided, now he led. Before it had been the entering of a long-searched-for garden, the turning of a key, the opening of a door, the sudden bewildered flooding of eyes and nostrils with new scents and colors; the excitement of arrival blending with the relief at a long journey's end, the need to relax, to rest, to be restored.

That was how it had been then. Now it was very different. Now it was a tireless search, a cataloguing of every path and plant, an enchanted recognition of each new scent and color, a turning from one flower bed to another in the resolve to leave no taste unsavored; it was a discovery of new, a return to old delights; it was a drowning, a saturating of every
sense in the ruthless refusal to forget any former delight in the discovery of any new one; in the insatiable attempt to encompass in one blended, culminating instant every enchantment of light and shade, of taste and smell and color that the garden offered. It was breathless, wild, tempestuous, yet beneath its surface fury was the profound tranquility of a deep swift river.