Unclouded Summer (16 page)

Halfway up the town, in the Rue de Poilu, a narrow passage of a street, so narrow and so high, that the sun only struck along it in summer at midday and for half an hour, was a small dark café, run by two Italian girls, frequented by fishermen and soldiers. There was a gramophone there and in the evenings the two girls would dance, usually together, sometimes with two
chasseurs Alpins.
In the days before he had known Judy, he had usually come up there after dinner for a glass of beer. It was a fortnight since he had; his welcome was flavoured with reproof. “You have been deserting us, Monsieur Francis,” the girls complained.

“I've been deserting Villefranche,” he replied.

He ordered a Creole Punch, a rhum negrita with lemon juice, a little syrup and a block of ice. It was the way, a traveler had told him, that the French drank their rum in Martinique. The wine on his tongue was sweet and cool and strong. Its warmth tingled along his veins. It was cool and dry inside the café. He could be unconscious here of the clammy heat, of the gray sky and the falling rain. There were many worse ways of spending a long wet day. He took a second and a longer sip. It was very soothing. In forty-eight hours he would be in a ship. In two weeks he would be home. The maple trees along the Connecticut River would be turning red. The air would be clean and cold. All that had happened here during these three weeks would seem like events upon another planet. It was appropriate that he should be spending his last day in Villefranche, here in this quiet café, looking out on nothing, brooding over the past.

In a dark reverie he sat there, slowly sipping at his rum, when, suddenly, his reverie was broken by the noisy entry of two grubby children, and a breathlessly shouted “L'Anglaise est ici, Monsieur Francis. L'Anglaise est arrivée.”

She was carrying a small stumpy parasol which she had used as an umbrella. She was wearing a light oilskin raincoat and a kind of sou'wester hat. She tossed the parasol onto the table, pulled off her hat, shook out her hair. She unbuttoned
the raincoat at the throat. She sat down opposite him.

“The picnic's off,” she said.

He stared at her, astonished.

“Didn't you get my message?”

“Indeed, I did.”

“What made you think then that I'd be here?”

“Feminine intuition. What's that you're drinking? It looks good.” She picked up his glass and sipped at it, appreciatively. “Yes. It's good. I'll have one too. Just what I need after that long drive down. What a day. No wonder all my good resolutions were washed away.”

“Your good resolutions?”

“What else did you think had been the matter with me?”

“That's just what had been worrying me, I couldn't guess.”

They laughed together. The night before he had vowed in his exasperation that if ever again he found himself alone with her, he would be offhand. He could not though. He realized that.

“You must have known there couldn't be any other explanation.”

“I didn't. I thought of so many things.”

“What kinds of thing?”

“All kinds. That you might have been disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“It was everything to me. It was the whole world to me. It might have meant less to you.”

“But surely …” She paused. There was an almost indignant expression on her face. “You're surely not suggesting, are you, that I'm the kind of person to whom that kind of thing is an everyday occurrence?”

He hesitated, then answered her obliquely. “My trouble all along has been that I just can't see what it was you saw in me.”

She smiled and her expression softened. “Oh my dear, and if you only knew. It's just
that
one does see in you.”

Once again there was a rich tenderness in her voice. She sighed.

“If I were married to anybody else.”

She paused and looked away. “I've such respect for him, and such affection. He's been so good to me. I'm his whole life. I couldn't bear to spoil his life. But, oh my dear, I've been so miserable.”

“Miserable.” He echoed the word astonished, and she smiled wryly.

“Did my life look such a picture then? Is that the effect I give? I must be a better actress than I thought.”

“You're always laughing. You are always seeming to have so much fun.”

“I know. I'm gay. I'm vital. Life's an adventure to me. It's only, oh, it's not easy to explain. I didn't know what I was committing myself to when I married Henry. It was in the war. Nothing seems to matter in wartime but the war. I was so proud to be Henry's wife. I was able to help him in his work. His work was so important. It made me feel important. But when the war was over, when everyone started leading their own lives again, when I realized what it was I was committed to -” She paused, hesitating.

“I'll give you a parallel example,” she went on. “I had a friend who lost his leg at Ypres. At first, he was relieved. He was out of the army. Honorably discharged. He was safe. He could plan a future. He thought himself very lucky. But when the war was over, and he went to Oxford, when he saw all his friends rushing about in shorts and flannels and plus fours, playing football, cricket, tennis, he realized then what he'd been cut off from. He'd been robbed of youth. For a whole year he told me, he felt like suicide.

“That's rather how I felt when we got back to England, when I saw all my friends and my contemporaries starting out on their own lives, with faith and hope. I realized then that my life was settled, that I was going to have no young life of my own; that my life from henceforth was to be centered among mature and aging people; I was always to be with important people; I was never to be irresponsible and young. I don't say I haven't had a lot of fun. I have. A great deal of it has been exciting. But, darling, when I met you, well, I just saw what it was I'd missed.”

She took her glass between her hands and sipped it. “We could have such a sweet life together.”

She said it slowly. She said “have,” not “have had.” She put down the glass, rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward, her chin upon her hands.

“We will have a sweet time, won't we?”

She said it with an insistence that made it sound a prayer.

“When is it that you'll be coming over? In the spring? I'd so love to show you Charlton in the spring, when the daffodils are out and all the blossom. There'd be so much for you to paint.”

He hesitated. They had talked so much of his coming to
Charlton in the spring. But surely she must recognize that everything was changed.

“I won't feel that you'll really know me till you've seen Charlton.”

“Yes, but even so …”

She was in no mood to listen to objections.

“No, darling, you mustn't be practical. Not today. Let me have my dream. Let me have my date on the calendar to count hours to. Promise me that it'll be the spring.”

He hesitated. He found a Delphic answer.

“I promise that I'll come to England in the spring.”

She clapped her hands, triumphantly.

“And you'll work hard, really hard this winter. Just as Henry said? You'll bring some pictures over. Henry'll arrange an exhibition. That's one of the nicest things about being married to him. One's really able to do something for one's friends.”

It was one of the most self-revealing things that she had ever said. She set little store for herself on the relative wealth and the quite real social prominence that her marriage to Henry Marriott had brought her. But she did value the opportunities it gave her to help her friends. She regarded those opportunities as a responsibility. There was nearly always something that could be done for everyone. In the light of that responsibility, she threw herself eagerly into each new friendship, looking for the one thing, whatever it might be, that she could do for each new person that she met. He remembered how she had helped that cricketer man – Muspratt – to a new appointment.

Yes, that was the way it was and was it not the irony of fate that, for himself, the person whom she wanted most to help, whom she could, in fact, help more than she could the vast majority of her friends, for himself, she would be unable to do one thing, because that help would have to come to him through her husband, and he could no longer accept help or hospitality from her husband. The irony of fate, the spite of heaven! Not that this was the time to tell her that. Let her have her dream. Let them both have their dream. Let this little hour in the cool dark caf6 be a brief and hallowed respite, a blessed pause between those two days of friction and the inevitable difficulties that must lie ahead. How could he be practical, now on this last day?

“That's settled then,” she was continuing. “You'll come over to us in the spring. That's six months. Six centuries. But
you'll write every week. You promise you'll write every week? Oh, but I feel so happy now. When this day dawned and I saw those gray skies and the mist over the hills, I knew it was more than I could take. When the sun was shining and everything looked gay, it wasn't so difficult to be firm. There seemed other things in life. But when this morning came, I couldn't even see the cypresses across the valley, there didn't seem anything left in my whole world, but you. So I came rushing down …”

She spoke like a schoolgirl who was playing truant. Which, in a sense and to herself, she was. Sir Henry was so much older than herself. He talked of her as “the midget.” She said she had had no youth. It would be truer to say that one side of her had not grown up, had never become responsible and mature, through joint growth beside someone of her generation. She was five years older than himself, yet he felt protective, almost paternal to her.

“Darling, I'm so happy,” she was babbling on; “it's so cosy in this little bar. Couldn't we send out for lunch, get some sandwiches, some cheese? I feel so safe here, so secluded.”

It was after three before they left the café. When they did, it was to find, to their surprise, that the sky was blue above them. She caught his arm.

“Look, the weather's cleared. It's a happy omen. Let's have one last swim together before I drive you back to your goodbye party.”

“Goodbye party?”

“Of course. You didn't think we were going to let you go without one? We've been keeping it as a surprise. We've asked everybody that you like the best. You'll love it, I know you will. But, let's have our last swim first.”

At Marseilles in his cabin he found a letter waiting. It carried a French stamp and postmark. The handwriting was unfamiliar. It was a round, back-sloping, rather unformed hand. It was a bulky envelope. He tore it open. It was a five sheet letter, with lines widely spaced. “Darling,” it started, “you've been gone five minutes.” He did not need to turn to the last page to read the signature.

He slipped back the letter into its envelope. He did not want to read it here, in a hot, stuffy cabin. He went on deck. He was traveling by one of the smaller ships of the American export line. It carried a bare two-dozen passengers, but a great deal of cargo. The winches were clattering noisily. Longshoremen, many of them colored, were working bare to the waist, their backs glistening under the hot Mediterranean sun; a Frenchman, short and dapper in a Homburg hat, was angrily gesticulating from the quay; an officer from the bridge was shouting orders, his hands raised to his mouth, so that his voice could carry above the din; there was a powerful all-pervading smell of tar. Francis made his way into the bows. Seated on a coil of rope, he took out her letter.

“Darling,” he read, “you've been gone five minutes. Five minutes and it seems five hours. I stood on the terrace watching the headlights of your car, losing sight of them then catching them again, losing them then seeing them swing round that corner. Do you remember it? where I pointed out the villa, that first time you came up here: then, where that main road joined it, there were other cars. I tried to keep track of your lights but couldn't. I turned away and oh, darling, darling, if you could believe how dreary the terrace looked with its cigarette stubs and its dirty glasses and its crumbled sandwiches. Henry had gone to bed and everything was silent. Everything except the crickets. I was so tired but I couldn't sleep. I had to talk to you…”

It was the first letter he had had from her. There had been no need, no opportunity for letters. It was the first time he had seen her handwriting. He had never thought of her in terms of letters. He had never seen her writing. He wondered what she looked like when she wrote, how she held her pen, whether she sat upright or bent low over her paper. He wished that he could picture her sitting there on the terrace on that last night, in that litter of plates and glasses.

“And to think of tomorrow, oh darling, that's the worst of all, to wake up in six hours' time with the sun shining onto those china poodles on the mantelpiece, just as it did yesterday, and the day before and all those other mornings; and there'll be the same scent of flowers in the room, that mingled scent that I'll try and split up into its component parts, just as I did yesterday and the day before, and it'll be so much like yesterday that I'll think that it is yesterday, with you only a few miles away. And I'll look at my bedside clock and it'll be half-past seven and I'll say “Now hurry,
Judy, or you'll be late. You've got to get down to Villefranche before ten' and then, oh darling, I'll remember.”

The words, black against the paper, moved him in a way that even her voice had never done. It was the first real love letter that had been written him. It was the first kind of letter that as a schoolboy he had dreamed of reading. But as a schoolboy he had not bothered to envisage the girl who would have written it. He had never imagined that someone like Judy would be writing it. The fact that Judy had written it placed it upon another level, made the reality so much lovelier than the dream.