Unclouded Summer (7 page)

“But I never do, Henry, do I now?”

“I know you don't. That's what I said.”

“So you will do something for him, won't you?”

“I suppose I will.”

“And he was quite presentable, now wasn't he?”

“Completely. I only hope that he enjoyed himself.”

“He certainly enjoyed his lunch,” said Allan. “He had two goes at everything.”

“In that case, as we also prevented the Renans from having an open row, I think we can consider our lunch party a success, and now it's time for my siesta.”

“I'm going to show Francis round, then run him back.”

“Why bother to do that? Why don't we take him over to the Foresters? They keep open house. They're always glad to have an extra man. That's a much better idea now surely.”

Judy laughed.

“It would be a much better idea for us, but I'm very sure that Francis has some pretty lady waiting for him in Villefranche.”

Francis shook his head.

“I'm afraid I haven't.”

“So you're being faithful to your sweetheart in America.”

“I haven't got that either.”

“Quite heart-whole then?”

“Completely.”

She hesitated. She looked at Francis thoughtfully. She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind.

“Let's go and look at the house,” she said, “not that there's really anything to see. Will you be all right, Rex?”

“Very much all right. I'm going to have a siesta too.”

“In that case then …”

She had said there was not anything to see, and in a sense there was not. The main addition which had been made to a Provencal cottage, consisted of a single room, long, broad and high, with a row of bookshelves running at shoulder height around it with ornaments arranged along the top, with pictures modern for the most part, widely spaced, with two Epstein heads, with a Chinese screen and with a Spanish cabinet. The one long room was really all that there was to see; the old part containing on the ground floor only Sir Henry's study “And that's really too much of a mess for you to see,” and a dark low-ceilinged raftered dining room which they only used when it was wet or cold, and on the first floor the two bedrooms, hers and Sir Henry's and the one guest room “And Henry's asleep in one and Rex is in the other.” There was nothing to see except the one big room;
in a sense it was not anything, in another it was everything. It was a key to their joint Mf e, hers and his.

“We bought it in ‘19,” she said. “We'd been away all the war, first in the Balkans, then in Rome. I'd been married for three years without seeing Charlton. At first I found it rather overpowering. Look, there's a picture of it, above the writing desk.”

She pointed to an early nineteenth-century print; it was a broad, white three-storied house, with a flamboyant portico. It had a broad gravel courtyard: lawns sloped down from it to a pond that was fringed with rhododendrons. It was backed by what appeared to be a forest. An avenue of chestnuts led away from it.

“I've got to love it now,” she said, “but when I saw it first I didn't see how I was ever going to think of it as home, as my home. The Marriotts themselves haven't had it for so very long. But on the other, the female side, it's been in the family since the flood. It seemed to belong to the past far more than it did to Henry. There were two stepdaughters as well. It had been their home before anyone had ever heard of me. I felt I had to have something that was really mine, that was really ours. Then when I came down here…” She paused: she looked round her with a possessive fondness. “I've made this ours. I've moved down here all the things that are really Henry's. There's nothing here that hasn't a personal association for him or me.”

They walked slowly along the shelves, picking out a book here and there. Many of them were signed copies from their authors.

“You certainly have a great many friends,” he said. She laughed.

“Friends, that's a big word. But nearly everyone comes down to the coast some time or other. We manage to see most of those who do.”

She picked up a copy of Sinclair Lewis'
Arrowsmith.
“This is by one of your compatriots. We saw quite a bit of him in London. I suppose you know him.”

He smiled. “I'm afraid that I move in very humble circles.”

“You won't much longer, painting the way you do.” She paused. She looked at him thoughtfully. “Is that really true about your not being in love with anyone?”

“Quite true.”

Her eyes retained their thoughtful expression for a moment, then she picked out another book. “
Peter Whiffle, His Life
and Works
by Carl Van Vechton. That's another of your compatriots who's bilingual.”

She said it on a note of interrogation. Again he shook his head.

“I don't even know very many painters. I've been too busy working to meet many people.”

“You're very wise. I've kown so many writers who estimate their success by the houses that they dine at. And of course the trouble is that in many walks of life that is the test, the people that one's liked and trusted by.”

She said it carelessly, as though it were a comment of no account in the same way that she had talked the day before of the artist's struggle, of the artist's need for roots. She does understand what one's up against, he thought. He recalled the innumerable essays he had read on the function of the artist, on the position of the artist in society. They had employed a number of impressive words but they had none of them seen pictures as the painter saw them, as the solution or failure to solve a series of direct personal problems. Nothing that he had read in those intimate biographies had given him so much of an insight into the nature of his own difficulties as these casual remarks of Judy's.

They moved along the shelves, looking at the ornaments that were along the top, two green jade dolphins from Gump's in San Francisco, a short curved Malayan knife, some Persian paintings upon ivory; the pictures were arranged with a full two-foot gap between them. She stood ruminatively below a small Van Gogh still life. “It's the best picture in the room. But it hasn't any personal meaning for me. I think it's the one that'll have to make way for one of yours.”

At the end of the shelves, she knelt down beside a pile of albums. She hesitated. “I'd like to show you these. They're my photographs, but I couldn't bear to see you get drowsy over them. Perhaps we'd better have a swim first to freshen us. No, not in the sea, silly, in our cistern.”

The cistern was circular, of concrete, nine feet high and some twenty feet across. It provided the irrigation of the estate. It was set some fifty yards behind the house. A rough path wound up to it through the vineyards. As she tossed off her long white bathrobe at the foot of the iron ladder leading up to the cistern, he gave a start. She was wearing a tight dark-blue one-piece bathing dress. He had had no idea that she would be so beautiful. She noticed his start and smiled.
“That thing you lent me yesterday would fool anyone,” she said.

He watched her entranced as she scampered up the ladder. How old had she said she was, over thirty? She was so vivid, so supple, she had such a zest for living. One barely thought of her as twenty.

“Hurry up,” she shouted. “It's heaven here.”

In Maine, even in midsummer, the water in the cistern would have seemed lukewarm, but here in contrast to the Provencal heat his first plunge into it made him gasp. She laughed. “Isn't this different from your clammy coast? Can't you guess what this does to you every morning, and look at the view, have you seen anything like it ever?”

The west side of the Esterels was cut off by the rising hill, but the whole southeast of the valley was spread below them. They could see the coast, a succession of bays and promontories curving towards Italy, past Nice and Monaco and Menton; with the sea a sapphire blue and the sky paling to white where the horizon cut it, and across the nearer valley, above the vineyards and the terraced olive groves were the white walls of Mougins and the tall cypresses beside its churchyard, and northwards higher in the hills was Grasse.

“Have you ever been to Grasse?” she asked.

He shook his head. He had been once up into the hills, to St. Paul where he had spent a night at the Colombe d'Or, breakfasting beneath its orange trees, but for one who had no car, travel was difficult and rather costly. At the end of a holiday one was at the end also of one's funds. He had been economizing these last days.

“Not been to Grasse! The home of Fragonard and you a painter. Look at it. Don't you feel guilty now?”

They were at the edge of the cistern, side by side, their elbows rested on the rough surface of the concrete. From here, six miles away, it seemed a mere smudge upon the hillside, like the blobs of paint upon a palette, reds and creams and browns. It was impossible to visualize its tangle of narrow streets, its occasional tree-shadowed
place
with fountains playing about a statue. It seemed to have no depth, it had no color. You could not picture the fields of flowers – the violets and jonquils, the roses and mignonette, the jasmin and the tuberoses that fed its factories. Yes, he should have gone there.

“How long is it that you've been here now: in Villefranche, I mean to say?”

“Eight days.”

“There must be so many places then you can't have seen. Vence and La Turbie and St. Jeannet. Don't you think that as you've got such a short time left you'd be wise to concentrate on just this part?”

“Maybe I would.”

“I think you would. Think it over.”

When she came to join him on the verandah bearing under her arm two albums, she had changed into a more formal dress. It was black with a wide white collar and long loose sleeves with narrow white cuffs that fitted tightly at the wrist. It was made out of very thin material. The silk of her slip showed white beneath it. Her hair parted in the center was brought in two pointed curls before her ears. It made her look like a school girl. She patted the seat beside her. “Let's look at them here,” she said. As he bent over the album he was conscious again of the scent of tuberose.

“That's me at eighteen months,” she said.

It was the snapshot of a small girl at the seaside. She had a wooden spade in one hand, a small tin bucket in the other. She was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and a long white skirt which reached her ankles, and which from the way it bunched appeared to conceal several similarly dimensioned garments. She was also wearing shoes and stockings.

“What an amazing amount of clothes,” he said.

“That was in ‘96.”

She flicked the pages over.

“That's me at four.”

It was a posed studio portrait. A girl in a sailor cap with H.M.S. Valiant printed on the ribbon was leaning over a wicker gate against a background of sea and cliffs. She was wearing a sailor's blouse with a broad white and dark collar and a large bow where the blouse fastened. Her lips were parted in a smile, but there were creases between her eyes.

“Wasn't I an ugly duckling then?”

He looked at the portrait closely. It was so dated as to be ridiculous, but there was a resemblance there to Judy.

“You look very fierce,” he said.

“I was fierce. I always have been. I still am. Just look at that.”

On the next page was a boy of about seven, in black tights and a doublet, with a broad-brimmed black-feathered hat. He had a gilt chain round his neck. He was lunging forward
with a cane as though he were fencing. “That looks like Hamlet.”

“That's exactly what it is.”

“Is that your brother?”

“No, it's me.”

“You?”

“I knew
Hamlet
by heart when I was six. I always took men's roles at school.”

“But you aren't in the least masculine.”

“No, but I liked bossing things. Look at me then.”

“Then” was a picture taken several years later of a girls' hockey team. Judy sat in the center, holding a hockey stick in one hand, in the other a silver cup. All the girls wore the same school uniform, pigtails, a tunic with a badge on the left hand side, black stockings and stout shoes.

There were several school groups in succession, then there was a picture of a two-storied semi-detached house with a bow window, and a roughcast gable, standing back behind a privet hedge some ten yards from a main road. “That was my home. The next picture's of it too.”

The next picture was taken from the other side. It showed a narrow garden, a short strip of lawn flanked by flower beds and screened from the next door by a row of poplars.

“As you observe it was a very humble home,” she said.

He smiled. “I wouldn't know enough about English life to be able to tell that,” he said.

“Wouldn't you? I suppose you wouldn't. But that's what it is: or rather that's how I see it now. I didn't think of it as humble then. I loved it. It was in Hampstead. It was the kind of house that in 1906 was occupied by a civil servant earning seven to eight hundred pounds a year.”

“And that's your father, is it?”

A garden seat had been posed in the center of the lawn. In one corner of it was Judy. She must have been about eleven at the time. At the other end of the seat was a woman with a high whale-boned collar, and blouse that was ornate with frills. Her waist was very slim and a broad belt with a heavy clasp encircled it. Her hair was worn on the forefront of her forehead in a high puffed roll. Behind the chair was standing a tallish man, in a high-buttoned coat; he looked very stiff and formal in a tall turnover collar halfway down whose length was knotted a narrow thin-ended tie.

“Yes,” she said, “that's Daddy. It's a period piece all right.”

He looked at it carefully. Her father's clothes and the posing of the garden seat dated the picture far more than her mother's high collar and tight lacing. One was used to seeing women's clothes looking dated within two seasons. The photograph was only twenty years old, but it belonged to another world.