A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Yes, Fulke and I sometimes do.’ Caspar was surprised by this sudden question.

  ‘Isn’t it rather muddy and duckweedy? I remember seeing you once – but ever so long ago.’

  ‘It’s all right for swimming, and even for a clean dive in one or two places. But if one gets fooling around it does turn a bit mucky.’ Caspar gave these replies while considering the slight oddity of what he had been told. Fulke and he invariably bathed naked, and he could recall two or three occasions upon which village girls had bobbed up at a wary distance and laughed and shouted in a plebeian but not wholly ungratifying way. But he had no memory at all of what had no doubt been a more mannerly spectatorship on the part of a small girl from the vicarage. Nor was Penelope recalling the incident in other than the most matter-of-fact way now. ‘You know,’ he said impulsively, ‘nowadays people are beginning to go in a great deal for their own outdoor swimming-pools. Filtered and warmed-up and with diving-boards and so on. I think we’d better have my father get busy on one at the Hall. You and your friends could come swimming there. In fact we’d have parties.’ Caspar was astonished to hear himself coming forward with this proposal, since he didn’t really feel that life at the Hall would be rendered more agreeable by the periodic importing of a bevy of brats in pigtails.

  ‘I suppose that would be mixed bathing,’ Penelope said.

  ‘Mixed bathing?’ Caspar understood this curious expression, but wondered whether he had ever heard it uttered before. ‘Well, yes – I suppose it would. Would you say it was any different from mixed doubles – at tennis, that is?’

  ‘Perhaps my father might. He doesn’t like anything fast.’

  ‘Mixed doubles aren’t as fast as men’s doubles.’

  ‘I don’t quite know what he means by fast.’ Penelope had very sensibly ignored this confusing of the issue by a feeble joke. ‘But he said yesterday to old Mrs Crackenthorpe when she came about the church flowers that he was sorry to notice that there is now a fast set almost within visiting distance of Mallows, although fortunately not actually in our parish.’

  Caspar felt that Fulke would have appreciated this accurate piece of reporting. And he almost said, ‘A fast set sounds like tennis too.’ But he thought better of this, and instead asked, ‘Does your father think we’re fast at the Hall?’

  ‘Oh, no – not fast.’ Penelope had put unconscious candour into this emphasis, and Caspar realised that his own recent slight advancement in Henry Rich’s esteem was of very little account. The vicar judged people by what had been happening to them in the sixteenth century – and nobody had a notion of what had been happening to Ferneydales in that interesting period. Penelope, moreover, was probably being fed on that ancient-lineage nonsense now, and might have difficulty in managing herself a change of diet as she grew older. Her very name took you back to earls of Essex and Warwick and Holland, and for that matter to Sir Philip Sidney and the Lord knew who. And it might be said that she was going to stand in need of a knight, or a knight-errant, herself: one who would rescue her from the dragon’s maw of such outmoded social attitudes and release her for a decent life in the modern world.

  This extreme view of the matter remained for a little time in Caspar Ferneydale’s mind after he had taken leave of the child and walked home. He even felt rather glad that she was a child, and not any sort of nubile maiden in distress, so that the knight-erranting would have to be undertaken a good many years ahead and by a younger man. Anything of the sort was no more his line than being funny was. And he doubted (although disposed to dream of fair women) whether he ever wanted a sexual drive to be overmastering in the fashion that is a staple resource of novelists and playwrights. Certainly he didn’t want anything of the kind to prompt him to the taking on of tough and distracting assignments of the dragon-killing or even Young-Lochinvar order. Wasn’t his speculative position still far from clear to him? Wasn’t he becoming conscious that even Father Fisher appeared to point now in one philosophical direction and now in another? Wasn’t Europe – and in these days even America – positively spawning sages whose opaque but conceivably momentous revelations required to be tested in depth – in what was at once an exhaustive and an exhausting way?

  Perpending some of the more imminently looming of these intellectual exercises, Caspar soon forgot his encounter with the little girl from the vicarage. Penelope, however, was to remember it very well.

  III

  With Fulke Ferneydale at this time – the six weeks which Oxford calls its Easter Vacation – sex was much more definitely an immediate concern. Sex was good for all sorts of jokes, but serious questions had to be asked about it. Were his own answers to them going to be like other people’s? It was to investigating this that he had decided to dedicate part at least of the long holiday available to him.

  In his last years at school Caspar, although dreaming or daydreaming of beautiful girls, had on two or three occasions been involved with younger boys in ephemeral episodes of a juvenile and nakedly concupiscent sort. (It was this activity that had led to his being dubbed, according to Fulke, ‘a boot-cupboard type’.) Fulke, on the other hand, had worshipped first one, and then a second, beautiful youth from afar. These had been romantic and chivalric affairs with a high emotional charge. They had been bewildering and even, in a small way, tragic experiences. Certainly they had left Fulke frustrated, uncertain of himself, confronting what he felt to be unsatisfactory possibilities, and very ready to offer Caspar, or any congenial companion, that reductive view of an almost universal human activity summarised in the statement that sex is all balls. He was aware that his attitude as an objective and dispassionate observer of life’s comedy, and even as the puppet-master contriving those absurd and malicious experiments, were tied up with something he felt to be equivocal within himself. So now he was organising a key experiment.

  Ideally, he supposed, you find a nice girl, perhaps not virginally inclined but not positively cock-teasing, and you excite yourself about her by heavy petting and so on until you’re within an inch of being driven right round the bend. In the nick of time she gets into bed with you. And then – either straight away or after a boss-shot or two – you are having a marvellous and utterly indescribable physical experience. This, by all accounts, was the basis of the whole thing, and ought clearly to be tackled as soon as possible. If it proved to be a fraud – if it turned out that for some people, including himself, it was a bad joke – one would feel a proper Charlie, no doubt. But at least one would know, and there was always strength in knowledge.

  Just this experiment, however, would take time to mount. Months might go by before you found, and successfully chatted up, the proper girl. Even on theoretical grounds, moreover, it might be better to begin more cautiously at the bottom of the ladder. The experiment, in its purity, required that you should be in no danger whatever of falling into the mysterious and unhappy state (which he knew about) of being in love. In other words, he had better start off with a professional.

  Yet there were objections to this course. Fulke had read numerous novels – distinctly démodé, yet informative in their way – in which a very young man, tormented by images of fleshly desire rather cautiously intimated by the author, is carried off by a prostitute into what proves to be an episode either of appalling fiasco and humiliation, or of simply no significance at all: a non-event as one might say if feeling linguistically inventive. But fiction aside, Fulke concluded, you obviously stack the cards against yourself if you contrive your experience briskly for five pounds down. There would be too close an association with the price of a decent dinner at the Ritz. You’d probably recall, as you produced the cash, having heard a labourer in a pub say he’d rather have, any day of the week, a good square meal – and having known at once what he was talking about.

  But even if he were game to go after the thing in that straightforward commercial way (and he didn’t see why not) it was still true that he somehow couldn’t see himself picking up a lurking girl in a side-street in Lond
on’s West End. He might run into somebody quite catastrophic – say his tutor or an aunt – in the very moment of doing so! Fulke, who rather prided himself in possessing (like Henry James, as he had somewhere read) the ‘imagination of disaster’, even found this endowment alarmingly operative when he sketched such an episode preclusively in fantasy. The thing always took a dreadful turn. It would prove, for instance, actually to be one of his aunts – reputed a most respectable woman – who was soliciting his custom.

  He was well aware of the absurdity of all this; of its presenting him, as in a mirror, with an unlicked cub sadly at variance with the sophisticated and incisive young man as whom he disguised himself even to his brother Caspar. But at least this spectacle of a mildly dissociated personality was amusing, and he made some notes on it for future use. He was still making them, indeed, on the train that took him from Calais to Paris.

  It amused him, too, that what was for Caspar the city of Monsieur Sartre was for him the city of the unknown harlot. He tried this in French, and as a title. La ville de laputain inconnue. He nursed for a few minutes a grandiose plan to master French so thoroughly that he could write verse in it with elegance, like T. S. Eliot, or prose like Julian Green. At least his present French was good enough to enable him to make what he conceived to be some necessary purchases in a chemist’s shop.

  The sexual initiation thus so unpromisingly put in train began as dismally as the sternest moralist could desire. Fulke was so alarmed that he barely looked at his chosen girl until they were engulfed in what he supposed must be une maison de tolérance. The girl turned out to be of mature years and not at all good-looking. She also appeared to be in a hurry, and even resisted Fulke’s suggestion that she should fully undress. It wasn’t, she said, necessary. Fulke was in a hurry of his own, but he was offended, all the same. Indeed, he was humiliated after a fashion in which the moralist would again rejoice, since he was sensitive enough to perceive that here was a kind of vestigial prudery coming into play when a woman in this situation believes herself to be landed with a mere schoolboy or a notably cold fish.

  All these depressing circumstances, however, failed to culminate in an edifyingly disillusioning close. For suddenly something latent in Fulke took hold of the situation, so that its squalid and dismal aspects (which were undeniable) became irrelevant, or at least cynically acceptable. It didn’t matter that the tart’s low moans and little animal cries and so on were probably no more than a routine turn, switched on once she had, for some reason, decided to give him the appearance of his money’s worth. What mattered was that in this very specific and utterly physical activity he had discovered himself at a first go to be thoroughly efficient and securely in charge. And although the indescribable was there all right, and to an effect that entirely confused and mingled the physical and heaven knew what, it was still this identifiable sense, a sense of dominance, that was chiefly important. In something under ten minutes he’d got through what for primitive adolescents in the jungle it takes months of Mumbo-Jumbo to achieve. He’d passed his virility test and joined the warriors of the tribe! There ought to be a little badge to signalise the fact – the equivalent of an ivory skewer or silver ring through lip or nose. The kind of thing coveted by Boy Scouts.

  It was on the following morning that this thought came to Fulke, and he got it into his note-book, since it seemed rather neat. But this utilitarian moment wasn’t characteristic of his state. He wandered about Paris, Paris in spring, in a kind of muddled euphoria which seemed every now and then to give way to moments of extreme clarity. Two or three times he sat down in a café, ordered un filtre, and considered his future as if it were unrolled like a map on the little table before him. What had happened to him on the previous night wasn’t going to happen to him a second time; never again, that was to say, would he tumble on a bed with a common whore. He wasn’t proposing to be particularly virtuous, but he wasn’t going to be a mere low womaniser either. Just as in the writer’s craft which was to be his, he’d always be trading up, but not in the vulgar sense of perpetually being on the look-out for a fresh mistress showier than the last. Not that a bit. It would all be a matter of the more and more subtle exploration of the inexhaustibly amazing – as it plainly was – erotic side of life. And it would be in aid of something. It would be quite tremendously that! His note-book would, in a manner of speaking, always be under the pillow. He might become the English Proust.

  This last thought got Fulke to his feet in his final café and prowling again – but in a way he vaguely felt to be wastefully self-absorbed and unnoticing when the place he was prowling through was Paris. No – he told himself – he mightn’t trade up quite as far as that. In fact he was aware he wouldn’t; aware of it with a damaging self-awareness he had come to accept as among the facts of life. But at least he knew his Proust, whereas a great many people just talked about him. And every now and then as he walked, and did become alert to his surroundings, it was to pick up random associations from the interminable book. What had been Swann’s address in Paris – an address judged so inadequately fashionable by Odette? And ought he not to have a look at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, where the young Marcel had been so proud to walk beside that shady lady?

  If this sort of thing hadn’t been going through Fulke’s head, and if his late adventure hadn’t left him in a state more disturbed than he knew, there wouldn’t now have befallen him an incident that was very odd indeed. He certainly wasn’t in any sort of kids’ zoo, he hadn’t gone near the Bois, so there was no close topographical link at work. He was simply walking down a broad boulevard – distinctly posh and not much frequented – when there, suddenly, the incredible presence was. He was gazing at her with an acuteness of perception all the more overwhelming in contrast with the exalted woolliness of his previous state. His first persuasion was that she was marvellously dressed in the height of fashion, and his second that she was totally beautiful in rather a queer way. And then he found that he had said to himself on the instant, ‘Why, it’s Odette de Crècy!’ That this was the lady’s identity didn’t disconcert him, so that afterwards he was to reflect that it was a little like seeing a ghost. He didn’t feel surprised or frightened or incredulous, and it is just the absence of such reactions that is remarked by persons acquainted with the literature of supernatural appearances. And certainly he wasn’t entertaining himself to a bookish joke. It was simply as if Charles Swann’s wife and former mistress were already slightly known to him, and now here she was – precisely where you might expect, any day, to run into her.

  An aberration of this kind can’t last long. Fulke was just mastering it – although noticing, indeed, that the apparition a few yards in front of him did possess sharp features and out-size eyes – when the apparition, which was standing by a kerb, raised a gloved hand and beckoned to him. Or so Fulke (going off his rocker again, as he later knew it to be) thought. And he now walked straight up to her, and said in English, ‘I say, how delightful of you to remember me!’ By the time he had achieved this impertinence, he had another and slightly more rational theory in his head. The beckoning lady was to be described not as Odette but as an Odette. She was an absolutely top-class courtesan, as remote from his companion of the night as a Field Marshal from a private in the pay corps. And she had taken a fancy to him on sight.

  She beckoned again – rather imperiously this time – with the result that a chauffeur-driven limousine which had been parked in a convenient space on the other side of the boulevard now started into motion and within seconds drew up beside her. To Fulke himself there had been no summons at all! This abasing fact had just dawned on him when the lady turned to him and spoke.

  ‘Perhaps’ – she said in a very upper-class foreigner’s English – ‘it would be as well if you went home?’

  ‘I haven’t got a home. I mean I’m in a hotel. I’m a tourist.’ Fulke heard himself say this – and, in particular, utter that last and incredible word – with dull astonishment. There had been an understanda
ble chilliness in her voice. She supposed him to be drunk: a callow English boy on a spree in Paris. It was quite horrible. If he only had been drunk, his gaffe would have been less unintelligible. Had those three or four filtres been three or four fines, his behaviour might have been excused. Indeed, it might have been radically better, since he believed himself not too bad at carrying his liquor like a gentleman. As it was, all he could do was to mutter some sort of apology and shamble away. He’d never felt so cheap in his life, and precipitate retreat was the only course open to him.

  But before Fulke could manage even this something startling happened. The offended lady, after no more than a further quick glance, slightly raised her chin, and laughed at him. Fulke, although indeed startled, was far from resentful. It couldn’t have been called a frank or friendly or good-humoured laugh, but it certainly wasn’t rude or crude either. There may have been a hint of mockery in it, but what it chiefly conveyed was a kind of acknowledged complicity in mischief. It was almost as if some telepathic force was at work, conveying to the awareness of this total stranger the fact and even perhaps the quality of Fulke’s recent initiation. The laugh lasted only a moment, and was so softly uttered that one could almost have believed one had imagined it. But Fulke had never heard anything so bewitching in all his experience (which was not, indeed, extensive) and he was instantly swung back to the notion that it was unquestionably one of Paris’s supreme filles de joie or high-life hetairai that was in front of him. A woman who with a mere chuckle could do to a man’s spine what she was doing to his couldn’t have escaped or failed to accept such a destiny.

  ‘Then I think I had better take you there,’ the lady said. ‘To your hotel, that is. Are you, perhaps, at the Chatham?’