Unclouded Summer (33 page)

The letter was written on a sheet of cheap block notepaper, but to his surprise it was addressed from Chariton. “Darling, what lovely news,” it said, “you must come down and see me. As you'll see, I'm still living here. The strangest business, but I'll tell you all about that when you come. What about lunch next Friday? I'll meet you at Basingstoke. The 11.30 from Waterloo.”

Friday. It was a warm and a sunny morning, as warm and sunny as the September day on which he had taken this same train from London on his wedding day. Seventeen years – it all looked very much as he remembered it. The Thames flowing broad and brown past Westminster, the squalid slums
along the tracks, the trim suburban villas, then open country; heather and pines and golf courses.

Seventeen years. What was it that Judy had said on that last Sunday morning? “Aleck Moore waited twenty years for Lillian Russell.” How indignant he had been. How immeasurably remote on that May morning had seemed the year 1947. He smiled wryly. How quickly those years had passed. Forty sounded a great age when you were twenty. Himself he had been forty-three last month. He felt very little different, he did not know that he even looked so very different from the young painter who had sat over a copy of the
Herald Tribune
on the terrace of a beach hotel.

Seventeen years, gone like an afternoon. Perhaps he had been very lucky not to have known on that May morning how quickly twenty years could pass.

As he stepped out of the train at Basingstoke, he looked about him. That, too, looked just the same – the bookstall where he had bought
The Times
; the refreshment room where he attempted his first glass of English beer. There was a big notice board now, with R.T.O. on it; and on the benches khaki-clad figures were dozing beside their kit. Otherwise unaltered.

From behind Mm came a familiar voice, a deep contralto voice that had once set every nerve cell tingling. “Francis,” it said. He turned quickly, eagerly, to pause perplexed.

From a short, trim, khaki-clad woman with junior subcommander's stars upon her shoulders came a delighted chuckle. “I knew you wouldn't recognize me. It's the cap. I should have warned you. But I couldn't resist seeing your surprise. It's me all right though; come along.”

A jeep was waiting in the station yard.

“Thank heavens you're in uniform,” she said. “I might have had trouble with the M.P.'s if you hadn't been.”

As the jeep bounced its way along the narrow high-hedged lanes, she rattled into a description and explanation of her present life.

“It's all been the strangest business. You knew, didn't you, about my being cornered in the South of France. I had quite an amusing hush-hush job. Though I suppose I shouldn't talk about it, even now. Anyhow, it was hush-hush enough to make me feel that I'd better get back here quick before the Germans came. I was at a loose end then of course. But through my old links with Henry I knew a good few of the big shots
at the war house. When I heard that they were looking for a place to train A.T.S. cadets, I said, ‘Why not Charlton and me as the Welfare Officer?' It meant pulling a few strings, of course, and in Heaven's name why not? There couldn't have been a better place. So that's where I am now; in my old room too. I have the girls up there in the evenings for ‘heart-to-hearts'. I'll show you.”

As she rattled on with her old eagerness, her old vitality, something of her old spell was cast on him. Yes, she was Judy right enough. There was no one like her. As the car swung out of the narrow lane onto the common, turning to the right towards the house, he noticed that the wrought-iron gates guarding the drive were missing.

“What's happened to the gates?”

“Taken for scrap. Rather a shame really. Two hundred years old and irreplaceable. As likely as not they've never been used either, chucked on some dump heap somewhere. But I suppose you couldn't have the rich left with their possessions, just because they were works of art, when the poor were having their homes bombed out. I'm glad Henry did not live to see it. He
was
so proud of them. You'll find Charlton changed.”

It was very changed. The paddocks had been dug up and planted with potatoes; half the chestnuts had been cut down for firewood, the lawn ran ragged and untended to the lake; the gravel square before the flamboyant portico was a park for lorries; a squad of recruits was drilling on the tennis court. But the copper beech was still spreading its proud canopy of purple, and the glow of white gold was refracted by the July sunlight.

It was ten minutes to one when they arrived.

As they came into the hall, she pulled off her cap. Her hair had been cut short and set in small tight curls. They were almost white.

“There'll be a lot of them in the anteroom waiting for the news,” she said. “Would you like to see them?”

The anteroom was what had been once the drawing room. A complete transformation had taken place. The floor had been stripped of carpets, the walls of pictures; the bookshelves had been boarded over and placarded with maps; instead of the gilt French chairs and sofas was a miscellaneous collection of wicker and leather-covered club armchairs; there was a dart board above the mantelpiece; there were no
curtains, but a number of blackout frames had been stacked beside the fireplace. Francis would not have recognized it as the room in which he had acted the charade, in which he had quarreled so bitterly with Judy, had it not been for the window seat and the view beyond it of the small Dutch garden.

A dozen or so girls, most of them in the early twenties were grouped round the radio. They rose but Judy shook her hand.

“No, no,” she said, “sit down. I've just brought in an old friend to see your anteroom, an old friend who used to visit here when most of you were bowling hoops. You've heard me speak of him. The American painter. Francis Oliver. He painted that picture of Villefranche that I've got upstairs. You remember what I said about him, that he was the best-looking man who ever painted a good picture. Wasn't I right now? I think he's even better looking now. That gray hair suits him and those lines. In fact I think that I had better take him right away or he'll be upsetting discipline.”

The girls laughed, easily. It was very clear that they were completely themselves with her. They were of different ages, and of different classes. But there was an ageless, a classless quality to Judy. People of all types could relax with her. It was eighteen years since she had driven him up the high hill road to Mougins, yet she had the same attack on life, the same interest in people, the same generosity, the same capacity to draw out the best in others. It was the old Judy right enough, exercising her old talents, her old capacities under these changed conditions.

In the hall that had been converted into a lecture hall, and in which bare benches, bare boards and desks presented a curious contrast to the elaborate gallery and staircase, Judy looked up at the service clock that had replaced the large battlepiece oil painting over the door to the cloakrooms.

“It's just on one,” she said. “They'll be starting the second lunch. It'll be a fearful shambles in the mess, but there's no formality. We can get away quickly afterwards and have a chat upstairs.”

“I've a tin of turkey in my haversack and a flask of Scotch.”

At the sound of the word turkey her eyes brightened.

“In that case let's picnic in my room.”

It was more of a shock than he had expected, that first sight of her room again, after all those years. In memory he had lived in it so often. It was just as he remembered it: his Villefranche
picture between the Cézanne and the Duncan Grant; the small Sheraton writing desk, and on the mantelpiece between the Staffordshire figures the small silver ship. The “significant” ship that would “tell her that the miles were nothing.” There was a camp bed now under the window, which had involved a still further cramping of the chairs and sofa; one corner had been curtained off to conceal clothes and hangers. There was a new picture, a flower picture beside the door, a Cedric Morris.

“It's strange that this one room should have stayed like this,” she said. “But I left it just as it was when Henry died. I couldn't bear to alter anything; then when the Government were taking over Charlton and storing all the furniture, I managed to get camped in here ahead of them. It was a wangle of course. But it's funny how even in a totalitarian world you can get the things you want if you try hard enough. Provided you know what you want, and provided that you're not too greedy.”

She laughed, then with a sigh of relief she tossed her cap onto the bed.

“Do you mind if I relax? “

She took off her tunic and set it on a hanger. She undid her tie, unbuttoned her collar, rolled up her sleeves.

“Oh how I loathe this uniform. You men are used to it, we aren't,” she said.

From the bottom drawer of her writing desk, she took out plates, knives and forks, tumblers and a tin containing a cake and a loaf of bread. It was clear from the amount of crockery that picnics were very usual occurrences in this room. He could picture the girls coming in here in the evening, squatting on the floor, exchanging confidences over cigarettes and cocoa.

She tossed him a tin opener. “You cope with that while I get some water. You won't need warning that there'll be no ice.”

As he opened the tin, she questioned him about his work.

“I've really heard no news about you for ten years, not since Henry went across.”

Sir Henry had visited them in '34 in the seventh summer of their marriage, when England and America seemed to be recovering from the depression, when the effects of the New Deal were at last beginning to be felt, when hope was in the air, and the blue eagles of the N.R.A. were placarded at every corner.

Sir Henry had been close on seventy. He had aged a lot.
He had grown very thin; his collars no longer fitted tightly at his throat, his movements had become very slow; his skin had lost its color, it gave the impression of having been stretched between chin and cheekbone and then glazed. There was an appearance of transparency about his features. His brain was as clear as ever. He expressed his thoughts with his old lucidity. But there was an air of detachment about everything he said and did, as though he were partially pre-occupied with things that were happening somewhere else.

He spent a great deal of his time with the children. He read to them and told them stories and organized Red Indian games for them.

“I find it strange and rather pleasant to reflect,” he said, “that at the turn of the century there'll be someone in the world who has a personal recollection of me.”

He was delighted with everything he saw, with the house, the garden. He insisted on being taken round to see their neighbors. Everyone was enchanted with him. He was a new type to them: the courtly British diplomat of the old school, a type they had met with on the films but never expected to meet in the flesh.

It could not have been a happier visit. Yet it was sadly that they had stood, he and Marion, on the pier, waving him goodbye. It was the last time they would be seeing him, they both knew that. Francis had slipped his arm through Marion's. She pressed it against her side.

“It'll be nice to remember him that way,” she said.

“That visit's the last first-hand news of you I had,” said Judy. “Henry said everything was going well, that you'd done some stage sets that had made quite a stir.”

Francis nodded. Van Ruyt and Sir Henry had both proved good prophets. He had never developed a distinctly individual style; he had become identified in the public eye not so much by his manner as by his choice of subject: in later years invariably of exotic subjects: of summered countries and of brown-skinned peoples. His biannual exhibitions were advertised as “Francis Oliver in Mexico” or “Francis Oliver in the Caribbean”; he had illustrated a book or two; he had designed the scenery for several musicals; for the seven or eight years before the war, there had been a steady and increasing market for his work.

“You've been successful, wouldn't you say?” she said.

He shrugged.

“These things are relative.”

He was well known, he had made money, his future was assured, but he had scarcely become the painter that as a young man he had dreamed of being; he had not painted the pictures that as a young man he had dreamed of painting. He was aware now of his limitations; he had come to accept himself.

“I expect most other people would think of you as a success,” she said.

“I don't suppose they'd label me a failure.”

‘I'm very sure they wouldn't from what I've heard. Oh but how good this turkey is.”

He watched her with amusement as she leaned forward above her plate. She ate quickly, with appreciation. She was hungry, and no doubt it was a long time since she had eaten anything as good as turkey. He remembered how on that first morning on the terrace she had bitten into her fig with a childish pleasure. He looked at her more closely. With her bare arms and open throat, she had become very feminine. She had kept her figure. If he had been meeting her now for the first time he would be thinking of her as an attractive woman; the kind of woman who would never go short of beaux.

“I wonder you haven't married again,” he said.

“I know. I meant to. I
was
engaged. But then the war came. I haven't seen him for five years. He's been in Cairo, living on the fat of the land, the brute.”

“But you plan to marry him when he gets back.”

She shrugged. “Five years is a long time. Heaven knows how we shall strike each other.”

And you wanted me to wait twenty years he thought, but did not say it.

“Perhaps I'm better on my own,” she said. “It's rather a relief. You know – not being responsible to anyone.”

Yes, she had a magic still. She was vivid and alert. Her voice had its rich inflections. Yet even so he could not quite see her as the Judy that he had known. She was Judy and yet not Judy. He had the sensation of being not so much with Judy as with someone that he could talk to about Judy, in the way that with Judy herself he never could have done.