Unclouded Summer (2 page)

“That's all right for you in trunks; what about me?”

She followed him though all the same. Her bathing dress looked different now. It clung, damp against her, reticent, but suggestive, like a Victorian novel.

“Perhaps there was a point in those bathing dresses after all,” he said.

“So you are quite human, after all.”

There was a twinkle in her eye as she said that. This is fun, he thought, we can talk in shorthand. They sat side by side on the shingle. She picked up a pebble and flung it towards a rock that projected into the water. She drew back her shoulder, like a baseball player's as she threw. The pebble carried fifty yards.

“You'd have been one hell of an athlete if you'd been a man,” he said.

Behind them an eastbound train roared out of the tunnel on its way to Beaulieu. The third-class passengers were leaning out of the window. They had been traveling most of the night. They looked dirty and the men unshaven.

“How revoltingly clean we must seem to them,” she said.

She picked up another pebble. “Over the rock this time.” She drew her arm back farther. The stone cleared the rock by a full six inches. With a painter's appreciation he noted the smooth mechanism of the throw. He had never seen anyone more trim.

“I'd give a lot to paint you.”

She looked round quickly when he said that.

“So that's what you are; a painter.”

“That's what I am.”

“And I'd been wondering what you were. I couldn't place you. You had a look of independence. Yet you didn't look a playboy. At the same time you didn't look as though you were someone who had an axe to grind.”

“An axe to grind?”

She nodded.

“Nearly everyone that I meet has some axe to grind except the playboys and they're null. There's nothing emptier than a person who's got no ambition. I didn't think you were a playboy. I didn't know what you were. I couldn't think why you should have given me that impression of independence. So you are a painter. That explains it.”

He smiled at that.

“Painters can be careerists surely? Isn't that what the critics complain about, that we think more of our careers than of our work? They say we're all on the make.”

“I know but it's a very different way of being on the make. You don't get to where you're bound through other people. You have an interior struggle of your own. You don't use other people as the ordinary careerist does.”

Her reply astonished him. It was the last thing that he would have expected her to say. Who on earth was this woman who could speak so knowingly, so understandingly of the painter's problems?

Later as they sat on the terrace, he began to sketch her.

“This doesn't embarrass you?” he asked.

“On the contrary.”

She talked easily and friendlily as he outlined her head and throat, and the positions into which her wrist fell as she smoked.

“Have you got a lot down here?” she asked.

“A number of sketches, and seven or eight finished pictures.”

She rose and crossed behind his chair. As she bent over his shoulder, he was conscious faintly of the scent of tuberoses.

“It's very rough,” he said.

“It makes me want to see those pictures.”

“I'll go and fetch them if you like.”

“I wish you would.”

He had said seven or eight finished pictures. Actually he had a dozen. But he was not quite certain if four of them were finished yet. They were unframed and it was hard to judge a canvas till it had a frame about it. He hesitated, as he set them out along his bed. No one had seen them yet. He thought that they were good. He thought they were as good as he could do but he wondered what she would think of them. Would she be disappointed? What kind of a painter had she expected him to be? Did she expect him to be a very modern painter? Would she consider him ordinary because his pictures were representational? He looked at his pictures through new eyes, trying to see how they would appear to her. There was nothing startling about them in subject or technique. They were landscapes and still lifes, a recording of the scenes and shapes and colors that had appealed to him, an attempt both to present them and interpret them in terms of his own temperament, but maybe to her they would resemble colored
photographs. Hell, he thought, I'm a professional painter. I've got to stand by what I do.

He collected half a dozen landscapes, then as an afterthought, a still life that he had finished only the day before; a picture painted in his room, of a plate of fruit – figs and mandarins and grapes and apples – with a shaft of sunlight striking across a blue and white check tablecloth.

“Here they are,” he said.

She examined them in silence carefully; picking up first one, then another for a second scrutiny. It was hot now on the terrace, and in the center of each of the round blue tables, a pole carrying a sun-umbrella had been set. She arranged the pictures one by one against the pole, walking away, shading her eyes, then walking slowly forward. Finally she turned to him with a withdrawn, self-questioning expression in her eyes. “You are very good,” she said. The tone in which she said it made him laugh.

“You needn't be so surprised.”

“One's always surprised when someone who seems nice turns out to be somebody of talent. My husband must see these. He understands these things. This one in particular he'd like.”

It was the still life. The picture that he had least expected her to like. She picked it up again, looking into it closely then examining the signature.

“Oliver – Francis Oliver. Is that your real name?”

He nodded. “But I don't know yours yet.”

“Marriott – Judy Marriott. My husband's Sir Henry Marriott. He's a diplomat. He was in the Balkans before the war.”

“Does that make you Lady Marriott?”

“It does.”

She was the first titled person he had met. “It's lucky I got to know you before I realized that you were all that important.”

She laughed.

“And I'm glad I got to like you before having seen your pictures. Don't you think that now we've introduced ourselves we might have a drink?”

“That's a fine idea.”

She ordered a vermouth cassis.

Over the edge of her glass, as she sipped at her straw, she looked pensively at a group of grubby urchins who were tumbling over one another in their excited partisanship over a game of bowls which was in progress on a flat stretch of
sand beyond the terrace. The players themselves were taking their game with professional unconcern, but the children yelled vociferously one against the other each time the ball was thrown.

“I can see why you like it here,” she said. She paused, a smile came into her eyes. “Real people leading their own lives. That's how an artist should live, in touch with something real. So many don't, you know, after they've once got launched. That's why their work goes off. They haven't any roots. That's why …” She paused. She smiled again. A very different smile. There had been a slightly wistful quality in the smile with which she had watched the children. But there was nothing but amused and interested friendliness in her expression as she turned back to Francis.

“I babble on,” she said. “I can't think why I do. There are times when I don't know how to stop myself. I can't think why I'm talking now, when all I want to do is to hear you talk, to hear you tell me about yourself, why you are here, what you are doing; tell me, are you very famous?”

He shook his head. No, he wasn't famous at all he told her. He was at the very start of his career. He doubted if anyone who did not know him personally had ever heard of him. He had had the luck to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. That's how he came to be over here.

“A Guggenheim fellowship, what's that?”

He explained. Some members of the Guggenheim family had formed a trust fund to aid young artists at the start of their careers. You had to be vouched for. You had to give a proof of promise. Then you had to submit a “project.”

“If you're an author, you may need a clear period of six months to undertake some research, or you may need to visit certain libraries to study certain manuscripts; a musician might want three months without financial worries to work upon an opera that won't earn him any money.”

“And what was your project?”

“I wanted to see the picture galleries of Europe.”

“You don't seem to be seeing them just now.”

“I have. I spent four months among them. Then I decided to give myself two months of painting.”

“This is the end then of your trip.”

“I'm sailing from Marseilles next month.”

“I see.” She looked at him, thoughtfully. “But this isn't your first time in Europe.”

“The very first.”

“Then where did you learn to paint? I thought everybody went to Paris.”

“I know. That's why ‘I decided not to. I thought that too many Americans had gone abroad and been Europeanized. I thought that I'd stay American.”

“That may have been very wise. But how did you get started? You told me that someone had to vouch for you.”

“I was very lucky. A dealer whom my father had been kind to when he was young let me exhibit in his galleries. I've had a lot of luck.”

“I see.” In the town behind them, the clock was striking. Round the corner of the low-humped promontory of Cap Ferrat a smallish five-thousand-ton liner was swinging into the long deep leg-of-mutton shaped bay of Villefranche. Boats laden with carpets, under the charge of red-fezzed Algerians, were rowing out to meet it. Customs officials were getting busy by the Douane.

“Listen,” she said, “if I know anything about this place, it'll be a pandemonium for the next half-hour; Rex Allan will probably be on edge and Henry'll be fussing at the villa; I'll just have to get back home as fast as I can manage. Tomorrow, though, what about tomorrow? If you can get yourself free for lunch, I'll come down and drive you out. You can; that's splendid. I'll be with you early; and don't forget; we'll take your pictures with us. I shan't be able to rest till I know what Henry thinks of them.”

In addition to the small harbor for fishing boats in front of the Hotel Welcome there was a larger harbor, a half-mile to the west, containing a dry dock, where sailing boats and yachts could anchor. Between this larger harbor and the hotel was an eighteenth-century fort, from the prow of whose battlements grew a single palm tree. It had an air of Africa. The barracks which served this fort lay on the north side of the harbor. For three days now Francis had been at work upon a picture, painted from the far side of the dry dock, with the harbor and the barracks in the foreground, the fort and the bay in the middle distance, and the Alps snow-tipped at their summit towering in the background above Beaulieu.
Technically it presented a series of interesting problems in perspective, and there were attractive colour contrasts, the blue of the bay, the sand-brown of the fort, the snow upon the mountains, the fresh green of the pepper trees, the gray-green of the olives, the drab green of the single palm. He had hoped to get the picture finished that afternoon, but though he went out there early after lunch, he could not concentrate upon his work. Between his canvas and his brush intruded memories of the morning.

He had never met anyone like Judy Marriott. He had never imagined that any Englishwoman could be in the least like that. He had always heard that the English were standoffish, cold and aloof and starched. He had been warned against that at home. “You may have some success with the French,” his sister Julia had said, “but you won't get to first base with those cagey Englishwomen unless you're rather more forthcoming.”

His sister was three years younger than himself but she had been married for two years and had a six-months-old baby. She had also a husband whose activities in Wall Street maintained a seven-room Park Avenue apartment and a summer cottage. Her husband was only two years older than himself, but his success and wealth, and the aura of self-confidence that accompanies success, made Francis think of him as an uncle rather than a brother-in-law. There were times, even, when he thought of Julia as an aunt.

Indeed it was very much as an aunt that she had taken him to task shortly before he had sailed.

“Darling, you must really make more effort,” she had said. “It isn't enough to be tall and dark, and to look fairly strong. Girls nowadays are prepared to come halfway to meet a man, but they do need
some
encouragement. Take the case of Marda.”

“What about Marda?”

Marda was a friend of Julia's; a blonde of Dutch descent of whom he had seen quite a lot during the preceding winter, who suddenly, unaccountably had taken to being vague when he had tried to tie her down to dates. After a number of rebuffs he had assumed that she had another “beau” and had let it rest. But he had wondered sometimes.

“What about Marda?” he repeated.

“Weren't you at all surprised when she stopped making dates with you?”

“As a matter of fact I was.”

“Well so was I. What's wrong,' I asked her, ‘between you and Francis?' She laughed. “I wish I knew,' she said. ‘I simply can't make him out. Everything started off all right. We always had a good time together. But somehow we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. It began to get on my nerves. I didn't know where I was, what was expected of me. It was up to me to find out, I thought. I chose the right moment too; fairly but not too late at night; soft lights and Helen Morgan singing: “Francis,” I said, “Do you know that we've been going around now for a full half-year, and I don't think I know you any better now than I did on the first day we met?” That's what I said and how do you think he took it. He looked at me very thoughtfully for a minute, then he said “No, Marda, I suppose you don't.” After that, well it didn't give a girl much hope, now did it?' So you see, Francis darling, don't you?”