Unclouded Summer (6 page)

“The trouble about the Germans,” said Ambrose, “is that though they've been causing trouble in Europe for the last two hundred years, they're the only Europeans we English and Americans can unite in liking. They're clean and practical and hard-working. They're straight in business. They've the same ideas that we have, about Christmas, about family life. They're generous and sentimental. The French and English don't really like each other, nor do the English and the Americans, but both English and Americans like the Germans.
Although the Germans with their absurd chip on their shoulder have been upsetting the peace of Europe for two hundred years, in between wars we can't help liking them.”

“They're so good-looking too,” said Madame Renan.

“Good-looking, what do you mean? Square heads, fat jowls.” It was her husband who interjected that. It was the first time that he had spoken since the party had sat down. Like so many writers, he preferred to listen and collect impressions. He spoke now testily. “How can you say that they're good-looking? It's because they're so unattractive-looking that they have this chip upon their shoulders.”

But his wife would not agree with him.

“Now chéri, how can you say that? You are thinking of the Prussians. Prussia is only a small part of Germany. Think of the South Germans, so strong and straight, with their hair like corn and their eyes like cornflowers, think of the Bavarians.”

“And when may I ask have you visited Bavaria?”

“It is not necessary to visit a country to form an impression of its nationals. You have never been to America, but in your last play …”

Renan cut her short with a quick impatient laugh that was practically a snort. “How like a woman. You base a whole philosophy of politics on your personal reaction towards one, I repeat towards one, your personal reaction towards one I admit reasonably handsome gigolo that you meet at two o'clock in the morning in a
boîte.
Because this particular gigolo …”

“But chéri, he was not a gigolo, on the contrary…”

Their voices were upon a danger note. It was very clear to Francis that one of the family rows of which Judy had spoken was about to be enacted. He saw Sir Henry and Judy flash a quick glance across the table at one another, a glance of corroborative interrogation, then Judy nodded. With raised voice she intervened.

“That's a most interesting point you raise, Monsieur Renan, about the Germans having a chip upon their shoulder because they are unattractive-looking. It's rather curious, Henry, but do you remember the German Ambassador in Madrid saying exactly the same thing about the Japanese. He said the Japanese have sufficient aesthetic sense to realize that they are squat and hideous and they resent it. Do you remember how Aleck laughed? I wonder if Mr. Oliver knows him,
by the way, Aleck Moore, he was your ambassador there then.”

She turned to Francis as she said that. It was his cue to direct the conversation out of dangerous waters. He took it quickly.

“I don't know Aleck Moore personally but of course I know quite a bit about him.” As any American would. Aleck Moore was a public figure, a newspaper proprietor, who had become a diplomat; he had been the husband and was now the widower of Lillian Russell.

“I suppose you saw Lillian on the stage,” Sir Henry said.

Judy laughed at that.

“Darling, he's much too young.”

“Oh no, I'm not.”

Sixteen years ago, his father had taken him to see her for his tenth birthday present. “When one's very young,” his father had said, “one should always make a point of seeing public figures who are at the end of their career. It'll mean something to you when you've grown up to say that you saw Lillian Russell.”

They had gone to a matinée. They had lunched at Delmonico's. They had had seats in the fifth row of the orchestra. It was the first musical that he had seen. He was drowsy with a surfeit of éclairs and chicken patties. He had been dazed by the noise and color. He had no idea what the story was about; but he could remember vividly over sixteen years Lillian's trailing skirts and great wide feathered hats and her full clear voice.

“Did you see much of Aleck Moore?” he asked.

Sir Henry nodded. They had been in Madrid the year before. Aleck Moore had become a great friend of theirs, particularly of Judy's.

“How's he taking Lillian's death?” Lady Ambrose asked. “I'd always heard that he adored her.”

Judy nodded.

“He was in love with her all his life. Whenever Lillian was in trouble or unhappy he was the man she turned to. Twice she promised to marry him, then at the last moment, married someone else. It was hard for him to take. But he always knew that in the long run he'd get her; he was right; he did. He was her fourth husband. He was forty-five when he married her. But he had nine years with her. They were the most perfect years that any man could have had, he said.”

“Isn't he very broken up then now?”

Judy shook her head.

“It's the last thing he is. He's very active, very efficient, full of zest for everything, interested in everything, enjoying everything, never tired. He never drinks, never goes to a night club – yet he'll stay up talking till any hour, always wanting to have people round him; taking immense trouble over every American visitor to Madrid; trying to find out and do for them whatever it is that would most make their visit a success.”

“But isn't that a defense mechanism; like the use of a narcotic? One man takes to work as another man might take to drink?”

Again Judy shook her head. “I don't think it is. In fact, I'm quite sure it isn't. He's not an unhappy man. In a way he's the most happy man I've ever known. He had those ten perfect years. He's living in their afterglow. No young couple in the first flush of marriage has given me such a complete sense of happiness in love, as Aleck Moore does as a widower of sixty.” She paused. “I really think,” she added, “That theirs is about as lovely a story as you could find.”

As she said that, a new tone came into her voice, a deeper, richer tone; the whole expression of her face was changed so that Francis looking at her across the table saw her from a new angle, in a new dimension, seeing her for the first time as someone capable of becoming under the touch of love, transfigured and transmuted. For one second, he saw her in that light, then once again she was her former self – gay and frivolous and friendly. But that moment's glimpse had made him think of her in another way.

She's the loveliest person that I've ever met, he thought.

A warm, fond feeling was about his heart. He did not suppose that he would ever see a great deal more of Judy. They lived he and she in such very different worlds. She was wife and hostess to an important person, with only time for such people as fitted into his career. They were on a holiday now, but a man like Marriott even on a holiday was carrying on his public life; there was not room in his life, or in hers, for an obscure American. Maybe I'll never see her again after today, he thought, but I'll never forget her, never never.

As the party left the table, he moved across to her. “Do tell me who everybody is,” he said. “What does Lord Ambrose do? Who's Mr. Muspratt?”

She laughed at that. “I'd put that question the other way round. Who's Lord Ambrose and what does Mr. Muspratt
do? I've been asking myself that last question for the last two hours. Mr. Muspratt plays some game but I can't remember what and I know there's something that I can do for him. I must go and find out what it is. The poor man's sat like a mute through the whole of lunch. As for Lord Ambrose, he has a place in Devonshire, he's mixed up in a hundred and one things. We couldn't like him more. Come over and talk to Nina. You've hardly had a word with her.”

Lady Ambrose greeted him with a smile. She was very lovely, lean, and lithe like some jungle creature, proud and dangerous and exotic, and possibly beneath her façade extremely shy. He thought again how remarkable it was that in spite of her slacks and her short-cut hair one should be so vividly aware of her femininity.

“I've been wanting to say it to you all through lunch,” she said, “but it would have sounded so silly to bawl it across the table. I did think your pictures good.”

“I'm glad you did.”

“But it seems so silly not to be able to say more than that. I never know what to say to painters. One can talk to musicians about passages in their pieces and to novelists about their plots and characters, but what can you say to a painter except that you like his pictures?”,

“I don't know that there's much more that one can say.”

“When I read notices of exhibitions, they never seem to tell me anything. They discuss a great many ‘isms' but that doesn't tell me anything about the pictures.”

“They've never painted themselves probably.”

“I expect that's the trouble. ‘I've seen a great many pictures but I'd never be able to explain why I know that some are good and some aren't. I was very curious to see the kind of picture that you painted. Judy was so enthusiastic over them last night.”

“She was?”

“She could talk of nothing else. There were we waiting to do honor to her film star and all she did was babble away about the marvelous young American painter she had met. She almost put us off you she was so enthusiastic. It was a great relief to find you were, well what you are.”

There was warmth and there was friendship in her smile. Though no one could have been more different from Judy, they had, she and Lady Ambrose, this in common, that they provided a complete contrast to his preconceived idea of the Englishwoman. Though he had never been to England and
had met hardly any Englishmen, he had always felt vaguely antipathetic towards the English of the upper classes. He had imagined that the women were dowdy, cold, long-necked, and hoity-toity, and that the men were starched and arrogant and overbearing, idle, reactionary, and vain, leading luxurious lives on the proceeds of the beggarly wages that were paid to Welsh miners and to Indian Coolies. No four people could have failed to fit that preconception more completely than the Marriotts and the Ambroses.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Judy did tell me quite a lot but I must confess I didn't listen very carefully. I thought ‘another of Judy's crazes' and began to plan out a dinner party.”

In a letter the phrase “Judy's crazes” might have read cattily, but it was not said that way, but on a note of affectionate raillery that made it possible for him to ask without disloyalty. “Does Judy specialize in crazes?”

Lady Ambrose laughed. “Look at her now.”

On the opposite side of the verandah, Judy was curled up on a round leather cushion, of the type that is sold by Algerians out of small boats to tourists, looking up at Mr. Muspratt with the most rapt concentration. If the phrase “Drinking in his words” could ever be used appropriately, it could be now.

“She throws herself into friendships as other women throw themselves into love affairs,” she said. “It's an engaging trait. She's so generous, so open-hearted. She's always doing things for people. But occasionally of course she makes mistakes. That's, I'm afraid, why I didn't listen as carefully as I should, so please will you start telling me all that I should have heard last night.”

It was not a conventionally polite making of conversation. She was interested, genuinely. The questions that she asked him told him that. He found it easy to talk to her, and all the time as he was talking, his eye, his painter's eye was noting her long-limbed grace, the effortless, unstudied poses that she assumed. The minutes passed quickly into quarters.

“You must come over and see us before you go,” she said.

“You're at Villefranche, aren't you? But I can always get in touch with you through Judy.”

As the party began to take its leave, he took a slow, all-inclusive look about him, taking a mental inventory of the scene, fixing it, detail by detail, on his memory. This house,
this terrace, this verandah, would symbolize for him forever, a way of life he may never have known before, and maybe would never know again, a rich and lovely way.

He was sad as he walked across to Judy.

“There's no need for you to drive me back,” he said. “I'm sure one of the others could drop me somewhere on the main road where I could pick up a bus.”

She shook her head.

“It's all right. I've got to go down to Nice. Besides I want to show you the house first.”

When the last guest had gone, she sighed. “Now we can relax,” she said.

There were the four of them left on the verandah, the Marriotts, himself and Allan. With an amused, avuncular smile Sir Henry turned to Judy and put an arm about her shoulders. “And now, my dear, suppose you tell us all about your Mr. Muspratt. Do you realize that he did not make one remark during the entire day? Who is he?”

“He's a cricketer.”

“Is he! Why yes of course he is, E. K. Muspratt. He plays for Warwickshire.”

“That's it.”

“If you'd only told me that, I'd have found a lot to talk to him about.”

“I know, darling, but I simply could not remember. I knew it was a game, but I couldn't remember which; all through lunch I was trying to remember. Thank heavens, you know who he is. There's something we can do for him. He's a schoolmaster, at Sevenham. And he's not happy there. He wants to change. You're one of the governors at Fernhurst. Couldn't you get him on the staff there, since he's so good at cricket?”

“My dearest Judy, where did you pick him up?”

“At Monte Carlo in the Sporting Club after that party of Donita's. We had a most interesting talk all about cricket. I remember it completely now.”

“If I didn't know you so well and if this wasn't the fifteenth time that something like this has happened I should be inclined to wonder if you hadn't had too much to drink.”