Unclouded Summer Page 11

  “I’m very sure he would. Tunney is a new type in boxing; he’s worked out his career from the start, as a lawyer or politician does. He first worked out his strategy, then adapted his tactics to the particular problem that he had to face. If he had had to win the championship in fight-to-the-finish matches, he would have learned when he couldn’t settle the issue with a knockout, how to wear down his opponent with weakening body blows till the man collapsed in sheer exhaustion. Tunney does not do anything by chance. He’s thought it all out from the start.”

  The Major developed his theme with the considerate un-contentiousness to which a female guest would consider herself entitled, but with the authority that befitted his military experience and training. He was a medium-sized man, broad-shouldered, with a slight, but only a slight, paunch. His hair was dark and short-cut. It was growing gray about his ears. He wore a short close-clipped mustache. He was bronzed by the sun. He was clearly a man who needed to shave twice a day. He looked handsome, dignified, and healthy with his bare throat and white cotton bathrobe. He had a firm manly voice. There was nothing “queer” about him, any more than there was anything “queer” about the Captain. To any American they would have appeared typical British Army types.

  Francis looked away towards Judy’s table. She had almost cleared the plate that had been brought to her. But her wineglass was three-quarters full. He could have understood if she had felt the need of alcohol on a day like this, but that she should have such an appetite. If she had needed to fortify herself, to gain “Dutch courage” … but there she was with her glass barely sipped, talking away with her usual indefatigable animation. No one else at the table seemed to be saying anything. The other three were leaning forward listening, laughing, prompting her. She was turned away from him; she was wearing a hat whose brim, fitting tightly at her neck, low on the forehead, spread out like wings above her ears. He could not see her face; it was only by the movement of her hands that he could tell that she was talking. She was smoking, the cigarette as was her habit, held low against her knuckles. But although she was talking, although she was smoking, she was progressing steadily with her meal. One of the men had risen to his feet, had taken her plate away, was returning with* another laden with cake and trifle. That she should have such an appetite when he had barely managed half a dozen mouthfuls. What was she thinking, what was she feeling? Was she putting on an act? Or was she really enjoying this party in the casual happy-go-lucky way in which she had enjoyed all the other parties with which her life was littered. How was he to know?

  He returned his attention to his own table. They were still discussing sport but they had switched to cricket. England had just won a test match, had recovered something that they called the Ashes, after losing three rubbers in succession; a victory over the Australians which convinced the Major that the day of the British Lion was not yet ended. “It took us some little time to get reorganized after the war,” he said. “But I always knew that we should come through at last. I never lost faith in England, not even in the darkest days, when Armstrong’s sides were making mincemeat of us.”

  The darkest days; not 1914 when the Germans were advancing upon Paris, not 1917 when submarines had brought England to the borders of starvation, not 1918 when Ludendorff had broken through, but 1921 when England lost eight test matches in succession. The darkest days! The English were incomprehensible. In America, people who were “like that” looked it, such few as there were, or else they concealed it carefully. But this Major, who looked and talked like a Broadway portrayal of the British military type; the Major who believed that cricket kept the Empire together, the Major who would have passed anywhere in America, as the typical “British Bulldog” was in point of fact the antithesis of everything that that type stood for and respected; an expatriate with an equivocal ménage, which everyone recognized and everyone accepted, because presumably it had been established outside England; in France “where that kind of thing did not matter!”

  He looked at the Major carefully. What was he really like beneath that facade? In America hp had acquaintances, one or two like that: they looked it and he knew where he was with them. They were real in their own way. They were in keeping with their natures. He could feel at ease with them. But this Major, who did not look in the least like that, whose whole training and tradition was opposed to his being that; what a maze of contradictions and inhibitions and conflicting allegiances must lie under that conventional exterior. How impossible it would be for an American to understand him. He looked across at Judy. Twelve hours ago he had felt closer to her than he had to anyone that he had ever known. Was it possible that she in her different way was as basically incomprehensible to him as the Major was? Could the Americans and English ever understand each other? They spoke the same language, but what else had they in common, bred as they were to a different tradition? Was it any use his wondering what she thought or felt; must it all be guess work?

  He watched her from where he sat, barely joining in the conversation at his table. The moment that he saw her rise, he moved across to her. But already she was intent on her backgammon. “I’ve got to get this game finished before I leave,” she said.

  He sat on a chair beside her, watching her. She did not speak as she played. She scarcely lifted her eyes from the board. It seemed unbelievable that on such a day she could be so absorbed in the throwing of some dice. What was it Nina Ambrose had said about “Judy’s crazes”? Had he been “a craze,” had last night been “a craze,” just as this game of chance was now? Did indeed her magic secret of attraction, lie in this capacity of hers to throw herself into whatever was of immediate interest to her as though nothing else in the world existed? Last night she had been completely his. This afternoon she was concentrating every faculty upon this game. Though nothing could have been friendlier, more affectionate even, than the way every now and then she looked up and smiled, he was existing for her now simply as a spectator of her game.

  By the time she had finished, the far greater number of the guests had gone. “Heavens,” she said, “half-past three. And I must have a siesta before we start out this evening.”

  There were five of them to be got back to Mougins.

  She looked pensively at the Chevrolet. Its rumble seat was packed with the Heathcrofts’ luggage.

  “It was a terrible squash coming here,” she said. “I think it would be best, Henry, if you took Margaret and Frances in your car, and Andrew were to come in mine.”

  Judy drove much faster than her husband. By the time that Sir Henry’s car reached Mougins, Sir Andrew was dozing over a book on the verandah.

  “Judy’s gone to lie down,” he said. “No one’s to expect her till half-past six.”

  Half-past six and it was now half-past four. There was another long chair on the verandah. He had already dozed off twice on the way up. If he didn’t get some sleep, he would collapse before the night was over.

  He was woken by a hand shaking him and by Judy’s voice. “It’s after six. Don’t you want to have a bathe before we start?”

  She was wearing a green Chinese coat, and green silk pajama trousers; the loose sleeves, and the severe high-buttoned collar made her look very young. It was the first time he had ever seen her in a Chinese coat.

  “I keep wishing I was a portrait painter.”

  “I’ve been keeping this as a surprise for you.”

  She was smiling at him, fondly, tenderly. She was standing very close beside him. The other chair was empty. If only he could have put his arms about her, drawn her down onto the chair beside him, found through her closeness to him the words that would have testified to his devotion.

  “There are so many things I want to say,” he said.

  “There are a great many things I want to hear you say.”

  “Thank heavens we are alone at last.”

  “I’m never alone, darling. I’ve told you that.”

  From a window above came the sound of Sir Henry calling her.

>   “You see,” she said.

  Resentfully his eyes followed her. Surely she need not have gone. Surely she could have made some excuse.

  Puzzled, disturbed, he climbed up the narrow path between the olive trees to the round cistern. This might be the last time that he would ever bathe in it. He remembered the first time that he had bathed here, at the end of that first lunch. How happy he had been then, how carefree. How different was his present mood. Yet between that former and this present mood lay the loveliest hours he had ever known. He leaned on the rough cement parapet just as he had leaned that first time, and how many times since with Judy. It was the first time he had been here alone. Dusk was falling – the swift Mediterranean dusk – along the deep green gorges. Lights were showing between the cypresses that guarded Mougins. But higher up the valley, the sun was shining still. The roofs of Grasse, the red-brown tiles and yellow stucco were glowing in its amber light like a wall of apricots. Purple was settling on the hills behind. In his nostrils was the warm rough smell of sun-soaked earth mingled with the rich sweet smell of tuberose. The frogs had begun their cackle. If only he knew what Judy had in mind.

  The party was at Eze. He had no idea what kind of party it would be. The only previous time that he had been there had been for cocktails, a large impersonal gathering of some fifty guests that had no doubt later in the evening become small and intimate, but that the Marriotts had had to leave early so that they could dine at Beaulieu. He hoped that tonight’s party would be a large one too. It would give him a chance to be alone with Judy. The house was of the kind where it would be easy to be alone It was a rambling house built out of five other houses. It had odd nooks and corners. Perhaps it was because she had known that it was to this kind of place that they were going that Judy had made no attempt to be alone with him this afternoon.

  From the terrace below, leaning forward over the wheel, she was calling up now to the rest of them. “You come with me, Margaret. We’ll let Francis sit with the two men behind.”

  How efficient, how composed she was. One would imagine that she had nothing on her mind beyond her duties as a hostess. He was impressed by, he was grateful for her efficiency. But at the same time he resented it. It was he not she who should have carried the situation off. I’ll show her I can be detached too, he thought. He had rarely been more loquacious than he was during the long drive along the Moyenne Corniche.

  Like a Saracen castle, rather than a village, the gray battlements of Eze stood out in silhouette. The heavy masonry of the gate, with its suggestion of moats and of portcullises opening onto a maze of cobbled alleys, of narrow streets and dark-arched passages seemed to be admitting them not to a cluster of private houses, but to a single integrated unit of existence; steep rutted stone steps led to the flat tiled terrace which seemed with its castellated parapet to be linked with, to be an extension still of the buttressed buildings of the gables and the roofs beyond, that had once formed the ramparts of a citadel.

  Along the edge of the terrace was the usual pattern of small chairs and pouffes and tables, the invariable appurtenances of the rounds of cocktails that preceded any Riviera party. But at the back of the terrace, instead of the buffet he had expected was a formally laid table of eighteen covers. Ordinarily he would have welcomed a change from manipulating a fork and plate without support: it made conversation easier, more natural and more flowing. But tonight it constituted another obstacle. He moved away from the group to which he had attached himself on his arrival. He walked over to the table. Place cards had been set out. He was next to Lady Heathcroft and a Captain somebody. Judy was on the other side of the table, three places away. There was a great deal of cutlery and four glasses beside each place. It was clearly going to be an elaborate dinner. Six or seven courses. It was eight o’clock now. It would be half an hour before they sat down to it. It would be well after ten before they rose. Over two hours: two hours more of this uncertainty.

  He walked back across the terrace, not to the group with which he had been before, but to the one where Judy was. Four or five people were standing round her. There was a momentary pause in the talk as he came up.

  “I’ve just been looking at the table plan. I’m sitting a terribly long way away from you,” he said.

  He said it as bravado. He kept his voice light and casual, resolved to show her that he too could throw up a facade, that he too could act as though there was nothing out of the ordinary about this day, nothing special between herself and him.

  She laughed. “Are you? I was afraid you might be. But look at all the amusing new people there are for you to meet. I don’t believe for instance that you’ve met Jean Silvi.”

  Jean Silvi was a French film actor whose work Francis had seen and had admired.

  “I don’t expect, Monsieur,” she was going on, “that you’ve had a chance yet of seeing any of Mr. Francis Oliver’s work. But Henry’s convinced that he’s one of the most promising American painters whose work he’s seen. When you come over and see us I’ll show you a picture of his that Henry’s bought.”

  At any ordinary time Francis would have been grateful to Judy for introducing him to Jean Silvi, and also for the way that having introduced him, she had turned away, leaving them together, giving them a chance to talk. That was one of the things that he had liked most about her. She never monopolized her friends; she wanted to share her friends in such a way that the friends should form separate relationships between each other. But today he would have preferred her to be possessive. He would have liked her to have shut him off from other contacts, circumscribing him within the enchanted circle of their own sufficiency for one another. There was no need for her this one day to have been “the perfect hostess.”

  Not that he was going to let her see that he was wishing that. Taking his lead from her he half turned his back on her, isolating Silvi from the group, embarking on an animated discussion of the separate qualities of French and German films.

  “I saw a number of Ufa films when I was in Germany,” he said. “They were very good technically; and they were all good entertainment value, but they all dealt with abnormalities of one kind or another. They none of them had that normal quality which, I don’t know how you feel about it, has always seemed to me to be the great quality of the best French films; however sensational the central plot may be, the background to a good French film, the behavior and manners of the minor characters, is recognizable as ordinary French life.”

  He spoke with an animation that he rarely summoned, that was histrionic. He was going to talk well, he was resolved; he was going to talk a lot. And he was going to keep dead cold sober.

  It was in a mood of belligerence that he decided that. And it was with the self-confidence of success that at the dinner’s close he moved round the table towards Judy. He was no longer taut and nervous. He had been listened to, he had made people laugh; he had shown Judy that he could play her game. The moment of his reward had come. Now at last he and she could slip away to one of the many quiet corners that a house built out of five others held, so that at last he could tell her all that last night had meant, so that he could vow himself, not as an abject suppliant but as a man vindicated and assured. Whatever the outcome he was prepared to meet it. Never had he felt more certain of himself.

  She turned as he came towards her.

  “We’re trying to arrange some bridge. Do you play?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t play very well.”

  “In that case I don’t think it would be fair to inflict these robbers on you. So I suppose,” she said, turning back again to her hostess, “that that leaves our usual four.”

  “That’s certainly all right by me.”

  It happened so quickly that he did not realize that it was happening. Stupefied, he stood watching the four of them move into the house. Bridge on a night like this. And from what he knew of bridge, certainly of Judy’s bridge, that four would constitute a final pocket of resistance when
the guests dispersed. Bridge, tonight! What chance now was there of his seeing her? He stared, stupefied at the doorway through which they had passed. How could she have? To behave as though tonight were any night.

  A voice spoke at his elbow.

  “There’s not a thing you can do about it.”

  He turned. It was Nina Ambrose. Her smile was mocking, but it was friendly too. He was touched at her saying that, just as he had been touched the night before when she had called him Francis. She could not know the full nature of what was in his mind. But she could guess at it in part. It was a sympathetic smile. It was not however the kind of remark or smile that invited confidences. He changed the subject.

  “It’s the first time I’ve seen you in real evening dress,” he said.

  It was a girlish dress, light-blue, with a tight fitting bodice and a flounced skirt, spreading out from the waist with a curtailed panier effect, into a fluttering fringe of silk about her knees.

  “One day I’ll show you what I looked like in court dress,” she said.

  “Was your hair short like that?”

  “Good heavens no. It was four years ago. It was bobbed. I don’t know how one would manage those feathers with an Eton crop.”

  From the far side of the terrace came the first notes of a gramophone. It was playing “Always.”

  “I like this tune,” he said. “Let’s dance.”

  “All right.”

  It was the first time they had danced together. The old tiling of the terrace was worn and smooth. From the first gliding step their steps fitted in an easy harmony.

  “I like your scent,” he said.

  “It’s very old-fashioned I’m afraid. ‘It’s ‘Quelques fleurs.’“

  He was very conscious of her scent; he was conscious of her legs, straight and slim, moving against his. She smiled as the record ceased.

  “What a relief a waltz is after all those Charlestons.”

  “Can you dance the Charleston?”

  “Of course I can.”