Unclouded Summer (3 page)

“But I don't see what was wrong with that.”

“Darling, I believe you don't, that's just the trouble.”

There had been a mock-tragic expression in Julia's eyes, but the light behind that expression had been very fond. “One day you're going to go absolutely crazy over someone, and there'll be Heaven knows what a conflagration, but in the meantime if you could only give one or two of those poor girls a chance – I mean if you could bring yourself to go just half a yard to meet them. After all, you know, though you may not have a film star's profile, you are quite good-looking; and though you may not be a gossip column personality you do amount to something. There isn't really any need for you to be quite so shy.”

“But I'm not shy.”

Which was true. He wasn't. He was too interested in the world about him, to be shy. When he came into a strange room, he was too conscious of the room itself and of the people in it, to worry about the impression he himself was making. Always everywhere he was an absorbed spectator. It was probably because he was so indifferent to the impression that he was making that he was considered shy. Those who were genuinely shy, created a facade to conceal their shyness.

No, he was not shy; but sometimes he was lonely; lonely because the people among whom he moved seemed to breathe a different air. Fond though he was of them, fun though he had with them, he always seemed to be in part, in essential
part, apart from them. They were all so certain of themselves, of what they were, of what they liked, of what they thought, of what they stood for; certain of their tastes and their ambitions, of their personal future and of their country's. There it stood, the American way of life, self-contained within its unchallenged frontiers, secure in its isolation, inviolable between its oceans, its industries co-ordinated by the march of science, the products of each state accessible to every other state, with vast tracts of country to be developed, with every scope offered for enterprise and for expansion. What could bar its road to the millennium? Everyone was so sure of that, everyone was so sure of everything.

Was it just because he was a painter, because as a painter he was forced to see history in terms, decade by decade, of a readjustment of mistaken values, that he found himself unable to share that certainty, that he found himself continually qualifying his opinions, expressing them with tentative prefaces of “I think” and “It seems to me.” Looking at a picture by Cézanne, he could not understand how criticism had failed to recognize its qualities at the start. He would remember the pictures that had been admired at a time when Cézanne and Van Gogh had been derided. One laughed now at the lifeless academic statuary of Alma Tadema. Yet men of taste and judgment and wide culture had praised Watts and Leighton. Today the successors of those who had jeered at Gauguin were making high sport with Dufy and Matisse. Were they right? Himself, he thought they were. Himself, he thought that the painting that was coming now from Paris was not only decadent in itself, but the expression of a basic and deep-rooted decadence. It was his belief that the Americans who were now creating an
émigré Rive gauche
colony had sold their birthright. He believed that American painters should draw their sustenance from the soil in which their own roots went deep, that American painting should be national and local. But even though he believed that, he knew that he might be wrong. Forty years ago men better qualified to judge than he, had held Cézanne to be a charlatan. It might well be that forty years from now Matisse and Dufy would be seen to have set a standard by which twentieth-century painting was to be judged, in the same way that the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century had set a standard by which every subsequent novelist was measured.

No, he did not feel shy as he entered a new room, but yes, he did feel lonely; at the close, say, of a party in the village,
when he had returned to his own studio, and had recalled as he undressed the contempt with which his contemporaries had derided the painters and writers of the early 1900's, the enthusiasm with which they had acclaimed the rebels of the
Dial
and the Shakespeare Bookshop. If only he could have shared their fervor and their disgust; if only he had not had to sit there, listening, a spectator, interested and inquisitive, interpolating an occasional question. If only he could have shared their certainty.

He had felt lonely then, just as he had felt lonely in Julia's apartment, when he had heard her husband Max explaining the difference between the European and American acceptance of modern mechanical innovations. “If an English or Italian manager discovers a machine that will enable one man to do the work of ten, he will sack nine of his employees and let his savings on his wage bill pay for the installation of his new machine. An American manager on the other hand buys ten machines. He increases his output tenfold. He knows that there's no limit to absorption, provided you maintain high wages and full employment.” Max's eyes would sparkle as he spoke, visualizing the successively higher levels to which the standard of general living would ascend. If only he himself could welcome as wholeheartedly this prospect of more lavish living. If only he could be convinced that life itself would be made richer, keener, by this increase of material benefits. He wanted for himself, naturally, the embellishments of success, large and well furnished rooms, facility to travel and to entertain. But it was as a means not as an end he wanted them. He could not enter completely into Max's dream, any more than he could enter completely into his mother's or his father's dreams.

He would look sometimes at his mother's face as she came back from the altar at early service. It carried a rapt, entranced, mystical expression. She was traveling in a country for which he held no visa. He would have the same feeling as he sat on summer evenings on his father's porch, looking out over the broad curving river, remembering how a Greek philosopher had in the symbol of flowing water interpreted the pattern of human life, listening while his father's friends enunciated in clear firm periods the policies that would ensure their country's supremacy in world affairs. None of them seemed to know what doubt was. Was there nobody besides himself who hesitated, who wondered, who asked questions?

He did not need Julia's telling him that the young women
of her acquaintance found him slow. He knew they did. He had had his flirtations, naturally, and there had been the wild college parties, the inevitable corollary to Prohibition, the hip flasks and the roadhouses and the cars parked outside country clubs. But he had never, he knew it, let himself really go. Something had held him back. His New England conscience had been once or twice flung at him in accusation, but it was not that, though maybe it had contributed, it was something other than that, something that went deeper than that – the feeling that he could never relax, never be himself with people who did not speak his language. Surely, he had thought, there must be somewhere people like himself, who wondered and made reservations, who pondered and withheld judgment, people who wanted to compare opinions, not to enforce their own. He had heard so much argument; so little discussion. Surely there were people like himself who wanted, not so much to inhabit an ivory tower as to stand if not above at least outside the battle. Surely some day he would meet people like himself.

He had waited, he had looked. He had not met them. Perhaps after all they did not exist. Perhaps he was a freak. Perhaps it was this apartness in himself that had made a painter of him, that had turned him away from one of the obvious careers – scholarship, commerce or the law – for which his training had been designed. So he had argued with himself over these last two years, but now …

Before him was spread the panorama that of all those that he had seen since he had left America, had seemed most suited to a painter's brush. Behind him the sun was sinking: the shadow of Montboron was striking diagonally across the port: another hour and the water would have lost its blue, would have assumed the luminous, lavender effect of wine that Homer wrote of: another hour and that combination of contrasting colors that he had hoped to fix upon his canvas would exist no longer. He must hurry if he was to capture it. But though the panorama was before his eyes, he was not seeing it. His thoughts were distant.

What was it that Judy Marriott had said about the artist having an interior struggle, and later what was it that she had added about artists needing to be in touch with something real, that the work of artists who hadn't roots went off. He remembered the puzzled expression on her face when she had stood looking towards the empty harbor; he remembered the youthful enjoyment with which she had bitten
into the fig; he remembered how her arm had swung back like a baseball player's into the socket of her shoulder; he remembered how she had laughed; and how deep her voice had been, almost a contralto. Anyhow, he had met her halfway. She had sat at his table, true. But he had bought the figs for her, it was he who had suggested that they should swim, he who had borrowed the bathing dress. He had met her halfway, yet it had never occurred to him that he was doing that. He had acted spontaneously, because he had felt at ease, utterly at ease with her, from the beginning. He had known intuitively that she had known those things about the artist, about his interior struggle, his need for roots. He had known, without knowing that he had known, that they talked the same basic language, that they could discuss, not argue, comparing points of view.

He would probably never see her again after tomorrow. She was very busy, she moved in a world not his; her roots were in another country. Her invitation to lunch had not meant that she wanted to begin a friendship. She had invited him in the same way that she had invited Rex Allan because it amused her to meet new people. Some people might resent that trait in her, might dislike being treated as an exhibit, being collected. Himself, it was a trait that he respected; he admired her avidity for life. It flattered him that she should have been interested in him, that she should have wondered about him before he had told her that he was a painter. Before he had told her that he was a painter, she had recognized that he was not the playboy that he might well have seemed to be. Surely there was an affinity in that.

He might never see her again after tomorrow. She had talked of her Riviera life, of the succession of parties with which her days and nights were occupied. Her diary would be black with dates. This lunch tomorrow presented probably her one free moment in the week. And by the end of the week, he would have left Villefranche, would have continued his slow itinerary along the coast, to St. Tropez and Toulon, to Bandol and to Cassis. He might never see her again; but because he had met her these two times, he would never be lonely in the same way again. He would know now that there were other people in the world like himself, people who talked his language, who were not dogmatic and self-assertive. He might not see Judy Marriott again, but he knew now that there were waiting for him in the world, friendships into which he could relax.

Slowly the shadow of Montboron crept across the harbor, robbing first the barracks, then the yachts, finally the fort of color. The sea lost its purple and assumed a white, a silken glassiness. The air grew cool. His canvas had scarcely altered since he had set it on his easel two hours before. Another picture was interposed. With the eyes and with the ears of memory he recalled ways that she had looked, ways that she had moved, and tones that had come into her voice.

She arrived next morning shortly before eleven. At the sight of her low gray-green Chevrolet swinging down from the Corniche Road into the square, a group of the untidy urchins, who are forever tumbling over one another up and down the streets, came rushing to the corner of the harbor where he had set out his easel.

“L'Anglaise est ici, Monsieur Francis. L'Anglaise est arrivée,” they called out.

She had on a short-skirted tunic dress, the arms bare from the shoulders. She was wearing sandals and a wide-brimmed floppy hat. She did not look fifteen. “Now you've got to bring every picture that you've got, not only the ones you showed me,” she insisted.

“Some of them I'm not too certain of.”

“Bring them all the same. Artists are often wrong about their work. And besides one often learns a lot about an artist from his half-successes, the things he's tried at and only half brought off.”

It was a typical Mediterranean day; the sky was cloudless, but a cool breeze was blowing off the sea. She pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rumble seat beside his pictures.

“Our villa's at Mougins, barely an hour's drive,” she said. “It's very simple. A converted cottage. But it's so much our own. We've made it ourselves; everything in it we chose ourselves. I feel much more at home there than I do at Charlton.”

“Charlton?”

“Our home in England. It's an impressive place, one of the houses that are always being reproduced in articles. But it's something that's been handed down. It's not so personal. Charlton and you've never heard of it. But of course you
wouldn't. Don't you think that makes it rather exciting, our having become friends without knowing anything about each other?”

She turned and looked at him. There was an eager sense of adventure in her voice, but she was wearing sun glasses; he could not read the expression in her eyes.

“Do you mind if we go the long way via Cannes?” she said. “There's a dress I'm wanting to collect.”

She chattered gaily as she drove past cypresses and fir trees along the lower road, pointing out laughingly the absurd pink crenelated villa on the summit of Montboron.

“It used to be called ‘Smith's Folly.' It's had a notice board up as long as I can remember. I wish someone I knew would take it so that I could see what it's like inside. I've always been meaning to get the keys from the agent and have a look.”