Guy Renton (34 page)

Certainly at the moment it looked as though the dice were loaded in his favour. He was getting the material that his talent needed. There were two types of Englishmen, Guy reflected; there was the type like himself who had a deep feeling of belonging to the locality of birth, who felt himself and was proud to feel himself cut off by water from the cosmopolitan of the Continent: there was the other type who was fretted by the confines of an island life, who needed a larger scope. The latter type had built the Empire; the former type had maintained the base from which those scattered outposts had been organized, directed, and administered.

There was the same distinction among English artists; there were those like Constable and Girtin, like Morland, Tennyson, and Dickens, who drew their strength from their insularity, the seeing of one thing steadily and whole; there were the others, Turner, Byron, Landor, Browning who could not endure a cabined atmosphere, whose natures needed Greece and Rome, their landscape and their climate; who starved if they were not relinked with the long stream of culture that had fed England in the past. Norman was one of the latter. He was himself here; there was a lightness, a happiness about his painting that had before been absent. No doubt because Norman was himself so happy. He had heard it often argued that art was produced to compensate for personal frustration. Could it not also be an expression of delight, of the sense of wonder which had transfigured life and landscape for the early Italian masters?

“I think you've put a lot into his work, or rather there's a lot more in his work now because of you,” Guy said to Barbara.

“Is there? Have I? I should like to think there was. He's given me so much. I didn't know it was possible to be so happy: to have someone of one's very own; someone who belongs to you, to whom you belong. It's what I've wanted all the time, without quite knowing it. How could I? You can't know until you've had it, can you?”

He nodded. He supposed you couldn't. It was something he couldn't tell, something he had never known; to belong to someone who belonged to him.

“Where were you thinking of having your baby?”

It was not till the fifth day that he asked her that. He felt guilty, impinging upon their paradise.

“October is a long time off,” she said.

“It can be a trying month here: November can be most unpleasant.”

“We may not be here. We don't know where we'll be. That's the whole point of our scheme of living.”

“There's a lot to be said for having it in England.”

“Is there? What?”

“For one thing, Mother. She's alone. It's only a very little while ago that she became a widow. She needs something to fuss over. She's bound to worry about you being all this way away. She doesn't trust French medicine.”

Barbara pouted. “How very old-fashioned of her. There are perfectly good doctors here.”

“I know, but moving around the way you do, you can't be sure of finding the really good ones.”

“A great many English people live abroad. They could advise us.”

“But don't you think you'd be a great deal more comfortable in Highgate? Apart from that it might be a good thing for Norman to show the dealers what he's done. You've been away eighteen months. It doesn't do to get out of touch. You have to go back every now and again. This seems as good a time as ary. The last month anyhow you'll have to stay fairly quiet. Norman wouldn't be able to get much work done. It might make it easier for him. Anyhow, think it over.”

He did not stress the point. He did not want to appear to
interfere. But since he had seen the way in which Barbara and Norman lived, he felt that there was quite a lot, very nearly everything in fact to be said for their going home. Probably they would realize it themselves when the time grew nearer.

On his return he would tell his mother that he believed he had convinced them; he would set her mind at rest, adjuring her not to mention in her letters that there was a possibility of their coming back; then a little nearer the time he would drop a note, recapitulate his arguments. He had planted the seed now.

He had been happy at Mougins with Franklin. He was even happier in Villefranche with Barbara: so happy that he decided to stay on a few more days.

“But you mustn't think you've got to look after me,” he said. “In fact it's high time I did a little browsing on my own. Tomorrow I'm going in to Nice. I'm not sure if I shall be back for dinner. I'll leave you to yourselves.”

They would be glad probably of a day together. As he took his place in the blue bus that swept every half-hour into the Place du Marche, he had no sense of premonition; nothing warned him that he was on his way to meet the second crisis of his life.

It was a coolish sunny day and he took things quietly. As he was sauntering from the Place Massena, northwards up the Avenue de la Victoire, thinking that it was almost time for lunch, his attention was caught by a crowd gathering noisily in a side street. Crossing to investigate he saw standing by a taxicab, a suitcase in each hand, a tall and youngish girl who did not look French, and was clearly the centre of attraction.

He pushed his way through the crowd.

“Now what's all this about?”

He set the question in English first and then in French. But before the girl could speak, the taxi driver and three friends of the taxi driver, had embarked on a simultaneous and corroborative explanation. They had been cheated, grossly cheated. They had brought the young lady all the way from Monte Carlo. They had brought her to the address that she had given. Now she refused to pay. They could not think why she should refuse to pay. She seemed an affluent young lady. She had tried to explain,
but they could not understand her French. Young ladies who could not speak French should not engage taxicabs. They were suggesting that in payment of the fare they should take one of her suitcases or perhaps the wrist-watch, which might or might not be made of gold. They spoke as Mediterranean taxi drivers do on such occasions with a mixture of moral indignation and crafty avarice. He turned towards the girl.

“It's quite ridiculous,” she said.

She spoke with an American accent. At close quarters she looked even younger than she had from across the street. She could not be much more than twenty. She was slim and fair-haired and tall, with a fresh complexion. Her cheeks were a little flushed. She was possibly a little angry. But there was no sign of alarm upon her face.

“It's quite ridiculous,” she repeated. “I was in Monte Carlo. Last night I lost all the money I had with me, at the tables. I'd only enough for my hotel. But I had authority to cash cheques at this bank in Nice. I thought the best thing was to hire a taxi and drive over. When I got here I found the bank was closed.”

“You would. It's a public holiday.”

“Oh.”

“So I think I'd better settle up this taxi now, then we can decide what's best to do.”

Ninety francs were marked upon the meter. He gave the driver a hundred and picked up the suitcases. They bore the name Eileen Burrows.

“After all that, we'd better have a drink,” he said.

“That's how I feel.”

They chose a café in the Place Massena.

“Do you know anybody here?” he asked.

She shook her head over her vermouth cassis. “There must be someone. But who or where I've no idea.”

“Then as there's no chance of your being able to get any money until to-morrow, I suggest that you regard yourself as my guest till then.”

“That would be the best thing, wouldn't it?”

“Have you booked a room?”

“Not yet. I thought I'd look around till I saw some place I liked.”

“I'm at Villefranche. At the Hotel Welcome. You might as well come there.”

“It looked delightful from the train.” She spoke cheerfully but calmly, accepting the unusual situation with an engaging equanimity.

“To an Englishman like myself, it seems very strange to see a young girl travelling all over Europe by herself,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Whatever harm could come to me in Europe?”

“You'd got yourself into a bit of a mess this morning.”

“Being rescued is rather fun,” she said.

He had planned originally to lunch at one of the Alsatian restaurants, off Sauerkraut and pickles and cold ham. But a hot Brasserie in the centre of the town was no place for a companion such as this. He directed the
fiacre
to the left, to one of the small low-roofed restaurants on the front along the Quai des Etats-Unis.

“It's Italian. But Nice was Italian once,” he said.

He ordered her salade Nicoise, a
loup
and zabaglioni. A small boy with a guitar perched himself on the sea wall in front of them and played extracts from Italian opera. She chattered away easily and friendlily, telling him about herself. She had been born, she told him, in New York “which very few New Yorkers are”, her parents had an apartment in the East Nineties between Madison and Park and a small farm in New Jersey where they went each summer. “Nothing elaborate, just a picnic place; no servants or anything.” She herself, she told him, had just left Vassar. She was going to start working soon, but an aunt had left her a legacy of two thousand dollars which wasn't enough to invest, “so I decided to spend it on a trip.”

She had crossed tourist on the
Ile de France.
She had come down the Rhine. She had ‘done' Austria and Italy and Switzerland. She was going to stay a fortnight in the South of France, then a week in Paris, spending what little money she had left on clothes; then she was catching the
Lafayette
from Havre.

“You aren't coming to England then?”

She shook her head.

“Everyone tells me the same thing about it, that it's no good going unless you've got friends to show you around.”

“You've me.”

“Your wife might not like me.”

“I haven't got a wife.”

“What, not married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“Not even that. A bachelor from the start.”

“Why, are you very poor?”

He laughed. “Do you imagine that the only reason for not marrying is that one can't afford it?”

She joined him in his laughter; a fresh and jolly laugh. “I'm sorry, but it surprised me rather. I won't say that you look married, but you don't look the kind of man who wouldn't marry.”

It seemed to him that there was a new interest for him in her eyes and when he told her that he was a wine merchant, she began to question him with curiosity.

“That is very interesting. In America of course we don't know anything about wine yet. We've all been brought up under prohibition. It's been highballs and cocktails. Now we've got repeal, you see what we won't do with our New York State vineyards.”

She asked him question after question. She had the same vivid interest in everything that Barbara had. Her enthusiasm was contagious. It was three o'clock before they finished lunch.

“And now,” he said, “for a drive along the cliffs to Villefranche.”

He ordered a
fiacre
to make the drive last longer; though the sun was high there was a cool breeze blowing off the mountains. They put the hood of the cab back and arranged her suitcases as a footstool. He pointed out the villas along the way. She asked him where the Duke of Connaught's villa was but he did not know. “Do you see though, that white building on Cap Ferrat, like a solid block among the pines, that's the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham lives. When we get to Villefranche, I'll show you Paul Morand's house.”

But when eventually the cab turned down from the Corniche to the steep narrow hill leading to the harbour, she was far too excited over the narrow mysterious alleyways that opened out on
either side of her, to bother about fashionable villas. “It's marvellous. I've got to see every inch of it before it's dark!” she said.

The moment she had booked a room, before she had even unpacked, she insisted on being taken on a personal tour of the village that, cut into the rock itself, rose high and sheer from the waterfront to the Corniche road. So eager was she to see it all, that she kept bounding ahead of him as they climbed the steep flagstoned road up to the church. She was resolved to let nothing miss her. She peered down the dark arched avenue of the Rue Obscure; she traversed the whole cobbled length of the Rue de Poilu, that narrow corridor of a street running parallel with the sea, down which only at midday and for an hour or so can the sun's rays strike. She examined café after dim lit café, wondering which ones she would visit that evening after dinner. Below the last house along the waterfront by the blue Dubonnet sign he showed her the vast lobster reservoir.

“It's heaven. Now for a swim,” she said.

Villefranche was in shadow as they walked in dressing-gowns along the waterfront. But the sun was shining still onto the humped promontory of Cap Ferrat and the strip of shingle below the railway line. After they had swum in the warm and waveless water, they sat out sunbathing, throwing pebbles into the sea. She had only been a few days on the coast. She was barely sunburnt yet. As she flung the pebbles, the skin of her shoulder-blades was vividly white against the dark blue of her bathing dress. He watched the play of muscle beneath the clinging damp material. Seeing her in a light summer frock, he had not realized how firmly built she was.

“I should think you were good at tennis,” he remarked.

She shrugged. “We can all play a bit, you know.”

A train went chunking above their heads to the station frontier, she waved her hand at the grimy third-class passengers. “That's the train I came in. I thought how lovely it all looked. I vowed to come back, I never thought I should under such gay conditions.”

As they walked back to the hotel, the fishermen's wives were busy gathering up the nets that they had left out to dry. The water had taken on the pale mauve-pink hue that had made Homer write of the wine-coloured sea. They sat in their dressing-gowns at a small, round, blue table on the terrace, watching the
local girls with their dark hair falling loose over their shoulders, stroll slowly arm in arm along the harbour side, while the young fishermen in their peaked caps and sleeveless
maillots
lounged by the steps, their eyes following them. In the bar-room behind the terrace a gramophone was playing. It was
jour de fête
and Villefranche was preparing to go gay. Pensively, she sipped her cocktail.