Unclouded Summer (35 page)

He nodded his head slowly.

“Yes,” he said, “something went.”

“And then, I suppose there were other women.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “there weren't.”

“You mean there was nothing serious.”

“No, I mean there were no other women.”

She stared at him, incredulously.

“You've been married for seventeen years. Are you telling me that you've been faithful to Marion all that time?”

“I am”.

The stare grew more incredulous.

“I'm astonished,” she said. “Knowing you as I do. With all the temptations that a painter has; the leisure, the opportunities, all that living upon one's nerves; the need that an artist has, for his work's sake, for fresh experience. I can't understand it. How did it come about?”

He paused before he answered. He too would have been surprised had he been told eleven years ago, that he would be able still after seventeen years of marriage, to describe himself as a faithful husband.

It was eleven years ago shortly before the birth of his youngest child, that he had come to recognize that something had gone out of his marriage, that happy though he was with Marion, that much though he loved Marion, their marriage was a love affair no longer. He had faced the recognition stoically. It was the human lot. It was something that always happened he supposed. No one could live forever on those high levels. The air there was too keen. He had breathed it for six years. That was a long time. Longer than most men had. He should account himself lucky and should leave it there; should resign himself to more prosaic living.

It had been hard though to resign himself. He was thirty-two : as capable of falling in love as he had ever been. As a painter he had opportunities denied the ordinary man. He had leisure and the separate premises of a studio. Not only had he the painter's desire to create but the artist's desire for his art's sake, to re-create himself; he had had the knowledge, too, that love does rejuvenate the artist. Yes, he had known all that. Yet even so over these eleven years something had held him back.

And it was because it had, he knew it now, that his marriage
with Marion had remained a real one. Judy had said a few moments back that there was something humiliating, degrading about tepid love-making between two people who had been real lovers once. She had referred then to an ageing husband, but precisely the same situation would occur, he was very sure, when a mature husband began to be unfaithful, and in consequence made love to his wife half-heartedly, almost reluctantly out of a sense of duty: “the unblessed kisses that upbraid the full waked sense” roused shame in both. Better to call the whole thing a day. And though such a marriage might survive, though husband and wife might remain good friends, loyal comrades and associates, bound together by mutual interests and respect and common ties, the real man and woman relationship would be at an end. The marriage would have ceased to be a marriage.

To Marion and himself that had not happened. Though their marriage had ceased to be a love affair, they had remained lovers still. Though they had outgrown their first dizzy honeymoon intoxication, they could still find often enough for it to sweeten and enrich their lives, that old delight in one another, so that they could still feel bound to their youth through one another, since their past, their youth, were incorporate and continued in their present, in their middle age; so that they could see their life together as an abiding pattern; so that at moments, moved by memory, by the poetry of a summer evening, by a piece of music heard over the radio, by a glance exchanged across a crowded room, drawn together by one of those sudden affinities that can make of a happy marriage a life-long adventure, they could be still exultant and transported in each other's arms, to feel that there still lived on in them the boy and girl whose knees had parted for each other's, under a Soho lunch table.

“I don't know how that can have come to happen,” Judy said.

He smiled. He knew now how it had come to happen; or rather knew now for the first time fully how it had come to happen. For it was compounded of many factors, that something which had held him back. There was the long tradition of his New England training, an influence which Judy the product of another system could scarcely estimate; a training and tradition that had acted as a cement for the strongly built bastion of his love for Marion; it was compounded too of his gratitude and loyalty to Marion, of his resolve not to cause her pain, of his oath to honor her. The one had been the
complement of the other, or so until this moment he had believed.

But now back again in Judy's presence he knew that there was another influence. Sitting here in this familiar room with the sound in his ears of that deep almost contralto voice, with the scent of tuberoses once again about him, and before his eyes the sails of a small silver ship and the picture of a sun-soaked promontory, here with the wheels of the years revolving, he could recognize that other factor, and in that recognition, he knew too why it was that seventeen years ago as he drove south from Charlton, he had had that feeling of unsaid things between them; only then he had not known what they were.

How had it come to happen? He answered her obliquely.

“I had a friend who scored a touchdown, a winning touchdown after a fifty-yard run in the last minute of the Yale-Princeton game. It was a run that would become a legend, of which people would talk twenty-five, thirty years ahead. He would never do anything more spectacular in his life. He would always, he knew it well, be spoken of as the man who had scored that touchdown. He told me that he wanted to live up to that big moment. He vowed that there should never come a time when someone in a bar should point out a drunken failure and remark ‘You wouldn't believe it but that wretched creature over there once scored a touchdown in the Yale-Princeton match that people talk of still.' Can you understand how he could have felt that way?”

“Yes, I can understand.”

“Can you understand then too how a man could feel about a woman whom he could not marry? The situation was impossible from the start. They were only together once, for a few hours. Yet those few hours, that single night were so exquisite, were such a revelation, that he vowed to remain worthy of it. Can you imagine him saying to himself, Til never do anything that could make her say, were she to hear of it, “How could I have?” ' Can you understand his feeling that?”

“Yes, I can understand.”

He hesitated. He looked at her very straight. It was not only an inherited reserve which made him speak in the third person, had made him speak in allegory. For it was not true, how could it be, that he had been faithful to Marion out of an involved sense of loyalty to Judy. But it was true that the memory of that one night at Villefranche had set a standard. He had wanted to remain worthy of that night. And who was
to say that its memory working subconsciously in the background of his mind had not acted at some point of crisis as a last straw, as a final factor holding him back from one of those brief encounters that however temporally revivifying, would in the long run inevitably have robbed his marriage of that certainty and trust and depth of sweetness that had given a purpose and significance to his life with Marion.

He had not until this moment realized that, but it might well be true. Who could estimate the strength and exact nature of those dark influences that worked below one's thoughts?

It might have been, he could not tell. There was one thing, though, that he knew and knew for certain: knew now what it was that he had to say to Judy, the thing that would explain and justify the long enchantment of that unclouded summer, the thing that would round off their love affair, would make it complete at last; the thing that would put him right with Judy.

“Can you understand,” he said, “how that one night, the memory of those five perfect hours could run like a refrain through a man's whole life, making certain things impossible for him; so that though that woman had gone out of his life forever, she was always, in all that mattered, an integral part of it; staying with him to the end, perhaps beyond the end.” He paused and out of the past her own words came back to him. “Beyond stars and time,” he said. “Beyond stars and time and many waters.”

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © 1948 by Alec Waugh
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ISBN: 9781448200375
eISBN: 9781448201693
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