Unclouded Summer (34 page)

“Do you know,” he said, “that this is only the third meal we've had alone together?”

She nodded slowly. “There was that lunch in the café on the day it rained.”

“Then there was that beach lunch at Passable.”

“Was that really all?”

“Unless you count that fig on the Welcome terrace.”

She laughed.

“That fig. How good it was. What wouldn't I give to have one now. And was that really all? To think that we never once dined alone together.”

“Not in all those meals.”

“And I wonder how often we really talked.”

“There was that first day we met.”

She shook her head.

“That wasn't really a talk. That was just a getting to know each other.”

“There was the time when we went into Cannes, to the Taverne des Allées.”

“The time that I made you believe I wanted to collect a dress.”

“Then there was that day before my party.”

“That long and lovely day.”

“The day that we rowed over to Cap Ferrat.”

“The afternoon I watched you painting.”

“There were those rum punches in the garden café.”

“And that was all.”

They referred neither of them to that long moon-silvered night. Her eyes rested upon him fondly.

“Do you know that this is only the second time I've been in this room?” he said.

“Shall I ever forget the first?”

“You were pretty fine that day.”

She shrugged. “Was I? I'd like to think I was. I've sometimes asked myself if I wasn't very selfish.”

“Selfish you, when you took all the blame, when you made it easy for me…”

“When I made it easy for myself.”

“Easy for yourself? I don't follow that.”

“I was in a mess. I had to get myself out of it. I saw only one way of doing that; by getting you married and safe and packed away.”

“Safe and packed away?”

She smiled. “You wouldn't understand. You couldn't because you hadn't the key to our life together, mine and Henry's. Henry was over sixty when you met us. He'd been over fifty when I married him, thirty years older than myself. It didn't seem to matter then. He looked so fine and dignified
and strong. He made all the other men I met seem trivial. He was such a man. I was an inexperienced girl. He was so wise and tactful and considerate. And he was so in love with me. I don't believe that any boy of twenty could have been more in love. Those first three years together … they were the loveliest love affair. But afterwards …”

She paused. She shrugged.

“I needn't dot the ‘i's' for you. There's always something – at least I believe there is – that after a few years goes out of marriage. And Henry wasn't young. Can you understand how when a man's getting old … You can guess can't you … how humiliating well, what shall I call it, weak, tepid, ineffective love-making can become? Particularly when you have been real lovers once; and when it's with someone whom you respect … each time, each attempt – it's a degrading, a denial of the past, a spoiling of one's dearest memories. Better to call the whole thing a day. We never discussed it. We accepted it. We knew that we both felt the same about it. We closed one chapter, and began another. But Henry was nearly sixty. I was under thirty.”

Her lips as she said that, set firmly. There was a look of resolution in her eyes, as though once again in memory she were taking the decision that in real life she had taken quarter of a century ago.

“When I met you, it had been going on that way for about five years. You saw what our life was,” she said. “It wasn't too bad a show. I won't say it wasn't difficult at times, that there weren't moments when I longed to throw the whole thing up. But I'd made a bargain. I was resolved to stick to it. Besides that kind of thing is easier in England than it is with you. There's a European tradition of it. I don't know what Henry thought, what Henry felt. You saw how he was with me, how he called me midget, how he treated me as a child. In a way he made himself seem younger, more important, more in control of things that way. It was also a kind of self-defense, so that he could think of me as a child, so that he could forget I was a woman. It was a compromise; but most things are. It worked well enough, until you turned up.”

Into her voice as she spoke had come that deeper tone that he had heard for the first time all those years ago, when she had spoken of Aleck Moore; into her eyes came slowly that transfiguring light. He listened, held, and the years fell away.

“Then you turned up,” she said, “and it was all quite different. I wouldn't admit it to myself at first. I fooled myself,
I said, It's just a very attractive, very good-looking young man, just another one.' It wasn't though. You were different. You were so young, you were so intent. There was something unspoiled, a kind of integrity about you. Do you remember my saying once that it must be a case of opposites, me being a flibbertigibbet, you so serious-minded? Do you remember that?”

He nodded. He remembered well enough, and how puzzled he had been by it.

“Then there was your painting: that completed you. It gave you a sense of purpose, of direction. You were someone starting out on an adventure. There was the light of adventure in your eyes. I wanted to be bound up with your adventure, to be a part of it. It was something I had never known: the start of a career. You showed me all the things I'd missed. I tried to explain that to you once; do you remember, in the little café?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“But I didn't tell you all. It wasn't only that; it wasn't only the career. It went much deeper.”

She paused; she looked away; her face grew sad.

“We had no children. It was what made me restless. I recognized it in myself. I was on my guard against it. But then you turned up. You made it different, altogether different. It wasn't just that I wanted children; I wanted
your
children; I not only wanted to share your life; I wanted to send on a continuance of your life, our life, yours and mine into the future. I wanted to be a part of you in that way forever.” She paused. She gave a short, wry laugh. “Wasn't that a pretty kettle of fish for me?”

She rose. She walked over to the picture hanging between the Cézanne and Duncan Grant, of the humped outline of Cap Ferrat seen in the framework of a Villefranche window. She stood looking at it, her back turned on him.

“I'd never felt like that before; I've never felt that way since. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to be married to you. I knew I couldn't be. I knew I couldn't let down Henry. I knew that any kind of hole-and-corner intrigue would be impossible. It would have been all wrong with you. I didn't know what to do. I fooled myself. I told myself that if I waited, something was bound to turn up that would put everything to rights. I played for time. I was furious when you wrote that letter from America. You were interfering with my game. You were forcing an issue, trying to make me
decide; the one thing I couldn't do: I had to have time, more time. I think I hated you at Charlton. You wouldn't let me arrange things in the way I wanted. Then when I saw how you were becoming friends with Marion, I was jealous, madly jealous, of course I was … Then we had that quarrel and I exulted, ‘He's going,' I thought, ‘forever. We'll never meet again. I'm free.'

“Yet I knew I wasn't. I couldn't be free as long as you were free, as long as you were somewhere on the earth, a bachelor, accessible. I'd be thinking all the time, ‘I'll be meeting him again, somewhere, somehow. It'll all be as it was.' I wouldn't have known a moment's peace. I couldn't know a moment's peace till you were out of my life irrevocably: till you were accessible no longer. As I sat in this room talking to you and Marion I thought – they're young, they're half in love. They'll meet in London. They'll fall right in love. They'll marry. He'll be Henry's son-in-law. He'll be out of reach, inaccessible. I'll be here. I'll know peace again! I've often thought that that speech to you and Marion was the most selfish act in my whole life.”

All the time as she had spoken, she had stood with her back turned to him. Dark thoughts, dark memories were crowding on her. She would not want him to see her face when she was the prey of them. She turned now facing him; and her eyes were fond again.

He smiled. “Selfish or unselfish, it's turned out very well. I've been very grateful.”

“You have: it has. I'd heard it had. I'd wondered. I'd asked myself if you weren't too young to marry, if you shouldn't as an artist have had a longer
Wanderjahre
. I've felt very guilty sometimes.”

“You needn't have. I've been very happy.”

“You have, you really have. It's good to hear it.”

Her back was to the light. He could not read the expression of her face. He wondered for a half-second whether a shade of regret was not in her voice. Whether she would not have rather heard that his marriage too had been a compromise. He wondered that for a moment, then dismissed the thought. Judy was not like that.

She moved away from the wall, back to her chair. The sunlight streaming from behind a cloud flung a thin dark shadow along her cheek. The sudden glare made him half close his eyes. Behind their lowered lids he seemed to be seeing not the new Judy that the years had made, but the old
Judy who had driven a gray-green Chevrolet.

“And tell me, how many children is it, you have now?” she asked.

“Three, boy, girl, boy.”

“And that house of your father's; is that where you live? “

He nodded. In their first years of marriage they had lived in a smaller house nearer to New York, near Stamford. But on his father's death, they had moved back to his old home.

“And do you still travel as much as ever? You were always going on trips so Henry told me.”

“Before the war we did.”

Every winter they had gone off somewhere, partly for pleasure, partly in search of subjects, to the West Indies, to Central America, once to the South Pacific.

“And does Marion always go with you?”

“Always.”

Those trips together were the happiest section of their marriage. An eager light would come into Marion's eyes when the time came round each year to spread out the travel folders. “I'm so excited to think I'm going to have you all to myself again,” she'd say.

Her company made his trips for him. She was an easy traveling companion. She never fussed or fidgeted. She was good with luggage. She traveled light yet she always had the right clothes for each occasion. She was punctual but not ahead of time. She neither missed trains by three minutes nor caught them with an hour to spare. She never needed to be entertained. She was always restful yet was always vaguely occupied.

She was good with people too. Getting to know new people in hotels and ships was for him an effort, though when he had got to know them, he enjoyed it. For Marion, on the other hand, it was an adventure. At Charlton she had seemed unsociable and aloof. But away from Charlton, she had showed the same interest in the social comedy that her father had. She was always rushing up to him with a, “Darling, I've met the most amusing couple. They've asked us to have drinks with them this evening.” People were much friendlier to him than they had been. “That's because you're a success,” she'd tell him. “They like to have a chance of saying, ‘Francis Oliver was telling me.'” And in part, of course, that was true, he knew. But in far greater part, certainly, in the case of the new friends that he respected most, that greater readiness on their part to like him was due to her. “Everything must be
right with anyone who's got a wife like that,” they'd say.

Every winter they went together, somewhere.

“I'm surprised that you haven't ever come back here,” said Judy. “Doesn't Marion feel homesick ever?”

“Dreadfully, at times, or at least she did. She's too many roots here not to. I don't think she wants to think about it more than need be.”

“But she doesn't regret her choice?”

He shook his head. “She never really fitted here.”

Judy nodded. “That's what Henry said about her. There's a certain English type that can't adjust itself to the English pattern, that feels confined here and pressed in upon. In many ways it's our finest type, he said. It's the type that built up the Empire.”

“Marion said a strange thing to me, her first day over there. ‘If Shakespeare were to come back today,' she said, ‘I wonder where he'd feel least at home, here or in modern London.' “

Judy smiled. “It all sounds perfect. A young marriage that has turned out happily; and that's so rare these days, when everyone seems to be divorcing. Yet even so,” she paused. She looked at him thoughtfully. “Yet even so, I wonder how different essentially your kind of marriage is from the kind of marriage that ends in the divorce courts. Is there any real difference except that you decided to hold on?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Simply the law of personal relationships. After a few years of living together something goes. That's the rock isn't it, that wrecks most marriages; that something going? It happened to you, didn't it? Didn't something go?”

He hesitated. He had never discussed his marriage, not with his best man friends, certainly not with any woman. The bulwark which supported marriage, was the front with which you faced the world, the assumption that it was “Happily ever after.” Ordinarily he would have resented such a question. With Judy it was different. It was unlikely that they would ever meet again. Between them there was that freedom to speak that comes to two strangers in a train, who do not know each other's names or each other's friends, who are getting off at different stations, in different states, who will never see each other again when they have left that Pullman. There was that knowledge of security, of safety between himself and Judy; but deeper and more potent was that close knowledge of each other that went beyond the need for secrecy. There was nothing they could not say to one another,
nothing now. She had spoken out of her heart, without reserve, but there were still things that he, on his side, had to say to her.