Unclouded Summer (30 page)

He paused, listening. There were voices in the passage, voices that were moving towards the door. Another moment and they would be in the room.

He gasped, the full implications of the moment startlingly apparent. This was the last time he would be alone with her, these were the last words that he would ever speak to her. From now on until the Monday morning she would be a hostess, apart, avoiding him. The enormity, the finality of what he had done, appalled him. He should have known, he should have understood. His knowledge should have made him patient. Hadn't he realized all those months ago in Villefranche that there was a part of her that never had grown up, and wasn't her charm in large part due to that part that had remained a child, her vitality, her generosity, her perpetual effort to do things for her friends … was not the one the complement of the other? He should have known that, he should have been patient, should have made allowances. He had failed her completely, hopelessly; and this was the end, inexorably, inevitably the end.

Lunch that day was for Francis the most grim experience in a month that had been well-stocked with grimness. It was a large and noisy lunch party. Richard Marriott who had appeared late with the announcement that he was suffering from an all-time high in hang-overs, had compromised with his hang-over to the extent of three Martinis and was now in the highest spirits. From her place at the foot of the table Judy matched him with badinage and repartee. Her eyes were sparkling. Her laughter rang out, clear and frequent. She did not seen to have a trouble in the world. No one could have believed that ninety minutes earlier she had been involved in a nerve-shattering scene. Had she forgotten it already; did she possess also a child's capacity to dry its tears, to lose itself in, to adapt itself to the minute, or was she as she had called herself at Villefranche, a better actress than she knew? “I was so miserable under the surface,” she had said. Was she that now?

With an aching heart he looked at her. She looked so exactly as she had at Mougins, when she had dazzled him in those early days, with her charm, her vitality, her background of wealth and prominence, sweeping him off his feet with her generosity, her interest in him, her capacity to set him at his ease, to draw him out. He had been so proud then of her friendship. To think that the climax to all of that should have been that wretched squabble in the drawing room.

Opposite him two places away across the table as silent as himself sat Marion. Their eyes had not met since they had spoken in the hall. But they were acutely conscious of one another. From time to time he glanced at her. Never had she seemed to him more fine. With a heavy heart he remembered that first look that they had exchanged across the lunch table, remembered the sense of confederacy that had grown up between them on the golf course, the eagerness with which she had taken him into her confidence, her courage when he had told her the truth about her pictures. He recalled the easy carefree comradeship that had ripened day after day, growing deeper, tenderer, ripening till it had blossomed into the kiss that should have set the seal on it. The physical memory of that kiss was an acute ache along his senses; but even more acutely bittersweet was the appreciation, only now fully grasped, of the complete unqualified trust in him that had been implicit there. She had gone into his arms, courageously, with open eyes, with open heart, without reserve, believing herself to be at last where she belonged. To think that he should have betrayed that trust.

Slowly with its chatter and its laughter the meal dragged its way through the succession of heavy courses – the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the apple tart, the port and Stilton – that characterize an English Sunday lunch. It was close on three before they left the table. Never again, he told himself; never, never again. For no inducement that earth had for making would he sit through another meal like that. He was desperate, in a mood for which there was one cure only – alcohol in masculine society. In his room he had a full fifth of Scotch. It was Parker's evening off. They would settle down over that flask after tea and make a night of it. He wouldn't come down for dinner. He'd send down a note that he had a headache. He was looking round for the butler to send a message to Parker that he needed him, when a hand fell upon his elbow; he turned and there was Judy there.

“Could I have just a word with you,” she said, “and Marion?”

She took them upstairs to the room on the first floor that she called “her room”: the room of which she had written to him in her letters. It was the first time that he had been inside it. He looked quickly round him. It was a small room, overfull of furniture. He noted a small Sheraton desk, the desk at which she had written him those many letters, an enlarged framed photograph of a young woman with dark hair parted in the center, a white, green and purple ribbon, the suffragette colors, was draped about it. Sylvia Pankhurst, he supposed. Along one wall, pictures were crowded frame to frame. Between a Cézanne and a Duncan Grant was his own Villefranche canvas. The whole of another wall was lined with bookshelves. It looked a heterogeneous collection, all types and sizes, the cross shelves sagging beneath their weight. On the mantelpiece between two Staffordshire figures was a small silver ship.

She pointed towards two chairs. “Won't you sit there, so that I can see both of you while I'm talking?”

There was a puzzled expression on Marion's face as she took her seat, but also there was a “defensive one, an expression that he had not seen there previously, whose presence there accentuated his sense of guilt. Marion had no longer that same bright faith in things and people which had enabled her to meet each new eventuality with candor. Today she was on her guard; her eyes watching Judy carefully as she began to speak.

“I've asked you here,” Judy said, “because I owe you both an apology for the way I behaved last night. And I owe you, Marion, an explanation; an explanation that I want you, Francis, to listen to. I want to explain why things happened the way they did, why I behaved in the way I did. For what you don't know, Marion, is this; last summer in the South of France there was between Francis and myself, I won't call it a flirtation but a
tendresse
; it was the kind of thing that can happen very easily in a place like that. It is very easy to say foolish things on a warm terrace in the moonlight, and it is very nice to have foolish things said to you, particularly if you are an elderly and married woman and they are said by a young and an attractive man. It is very easy for two people to misunderstand each other in that atmosphere and it is particularly easy for English and Americans to misunderstand each other; certain words have not the same connotations, the
same undermeanings for them both. I've an idea that Francis went back to America feeling he was under some kind of obligation to me. Possibly I encouraged him to have that feeling, because as I said it is very easy and very agreeable to talk and listen to nonsense in the moonlight, and because I knew that it would be six months before we met again and because I remembered that most things cancel themselves out in that time.

“Apparently on my side, though, six months was not as efficacious a medicine as I had expected, so that when Francis came here and I saw that he preferred, very naturally and properly, the company of a young and an attractive girl, I found myself to my annoyance and surprise becoming jealous. I told myself that for a woman of my age that was most absurd. I tried to pretend to myself I didn't feel that way. I did my best to throw you into each other's company, but I'm afraid the cure didn't work. I behaved caddishly. I allowed Francis to remember that at one time he had thought himself under an obligation to me: so that last night when he should have spoken, he stood tongue-tied. I behaved caddishly to you both and I apologize to you both; and I wanted you to hear, Francis, the explanation that I made to Marion.”

She paused. If the confession had cost her anything, she did not show it. She was friendly and composed. She smiled good-naturedly.

“That's all,” she said, “except just one thing more. That scene last night must have been a shock, a painful shock to you. It was to me. Francis tells me that he's leaving here tomorrow. That's a good thing, I think. But before he goes, I want you to promise me one thing. I'm not a matchmaker. I don't know how you two feel about each other. You've all of your lives ahead of you. But I don't want you two young things out of hurt feelings or false pride to slip out of each other's lives without a reason. You've never been alone down here. You've been in crowds, with elderly people round you. I want you to promise me just this, that one day this week you'll lunch together, just the two of you in London; then if you have anything to say to one another you can say it.”

In the half-dusk of the passageway outside, they paused, Marion and Francis, looking interrogatively at one another. There was one thing that it would be fatal to do now – he knew it well – to make any reference to what Judy had just said.

“It's early. It's a fine day. Why don't we shoot some golf?” he said.

“I think that would be a good idea.”

They played for the most part in silence, steady concentrated golf, the best golf that they had played since his first day at Charlton. Though they scarcely spoke, the rhythm of the game brought them back into harmony with one another. Though they were playing against each other, their play was a joint enterprise. As she stood on the tee, watching his ball curve straight and far over the center of the fairway, she felt as she had felt on that first afternoon that his ball was a magnet leading hers to follow it. When they checked up their scores on the last green they found that he had broken 80 and that she had gone round in 86.

“That's the best by two whole strokes that I've ever done,” she said.

Her cheeks were aglow with exercise and health and pleasure in her performance. They were happily in tune as they drove back to Charlton. It was easy for him to say now, as the car swung down the drive. “Is there any day next week when it would be possible for you to lunch with me in London?”; easy for her to answer, “I think I could manage Thursday if that suits you.”

That evening for the first time since he had come to Charlton, Judy made it easy for him to talk to her. When the men joined the women in the drawing room, she rose from the group about the fireplace and crossing to the window seat, patted the cushion at her side. It was impossible to believe that ten hours earlier within ten yards of that window seat they should have fought so fiercely.

“That was pretty decent of you,” he said.

She smiled, a fond and valedictory smile. “Why shouldn't I be pretty decent where you're concerned?”

“Well, after what I said this morning.”

She raised her hand, shaking it in denial before her face.

“It was my fault. I shouldn't have put you in the position of having to say those things. I should have realized, from the start, that there could never be any happiness for you that way. I can't ruin Henry's life. He's done too much for me; he's too dependent on me: besides he's an important man, he has important work to do; I make it possible for him to do that work. I couldn't let him down. I thought there was a way by
which I could make a life for both of you. It was silly of me. I see now there wasn't. But my not being able to make a life for you, doesn't mean that I've got to ruin it for you. Pretty decent of me, oh no, my dear. It was just the repaying of a debt.”

She was smiling, gently: they were close again, as close as they had been at Villefranche on that rain-soaked morning when they had talked in the little café. But over the moment now was a hush, the luminous hush of twilight. This
was
the end; he had thought that this morning when they had quarreled. But every quarrel held within itself the seed of reconciliation. There was a finality about this moment that that earlier one had never had. In calm blood, tenderly, she was taking her leave of him, was loosing him from that long bondage which had held him since her gray-green Chevrolet had swung into the square.

She had loosed her hold, and a feeling, a series of feelings that he could not analyze was about his heart. Was it relief, a sense of release and freedom? In a way it was. It was something, this situation, that he had never willed, had never planned, that he had stumbled into; in which he had been out of character, never wholly in focus with. He had been out of his depth with her. A string of mixed metaphors confused him. It had been a bondage, yes, but a beglamoured bondage. Would he ever meet anyone again so varied, with such a capacity for friendship, such a generosity in friendship? Would he ever again know such a giving person, with so much to give? He thought of that one night in Villefranche; would he ever again know a night which would hold that quality of revelation?

Next morning over his packing, he discussed with Parker the most suitable London restaurant for a lunch in female company that was to be intimate but unostentatious. Parker was pontifically judicial.

“I'll take it that expense is of no account,” he said.

“On this occasion, no.”

“How do you think you would be most at ease; at one of those sofa tables, or sitting side by side in chairs, or sitting opposite?”

“I think I'd rather be sitting opposite.”

“Then that would rule out most of the West End restaurants. You'd be sitting side by side in them. If you prefer sitting opposite I think I should recommend Soho. Yes, I know
the place for you, sir. The Isola Bella, it's in Dean or Frith Street. It's an arty kind of place. It's got real pictures on the walls.”

He had invited Marion for half-past one. He was there before quarter-past. He wanted to get the feel of the place before she came. He did not order himself a drink. He sat at the table, watching the door, rehearsing the things that he would say to her. He had it all planned out. He would be gay, chatty, entertaining: doing all the talking to begin with, putting her at her ease. He had thought out the things that he would say. He had been noting during the last days the various little differences that there were between New York and London, thinking as he made mental notes, “That might amuse Marion, I could make an anecdote of that.” Everything that he had done during the last three days had had this lunch table as its objective. No travel journalist had ever sought more conscientiously for copy. Marion was bound to feel embarrassed, lunching alone for the first time with him, particularly after that last week end. It was up to him to put her at her ease: to keep her amused and laughing. It would not be till the end, till the very end, till they had reached the coffee that he would say the things that it was the whole purport of the lunch to say.