A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  But the afternoon presented a problem she had been quite aware of as likely to keep turning up. Here she was, a young English widow, transported to a scene with which her sole connection was that of a legal ownership arbitrarily imposed on her by the will, or whim, of a man she hadn’t seen for years; of a man, indeed, to whom her last remembered utterance had been a monosyllabic ‘No.’ It was true that Fulke Ferneydale, whose talents had earned him riches, could be seen as having done no more than his duty in making a generous bequest to his brother’s widow. The second Mrs Henry Rich, who had herself been a widow left in circumstances so narrow that she had been obliged to become a professional governess over a substantial period of years, had been right in insisting upon the propriety of Fulke’s behaviour. Nevertheless the form of his gift, and the unexpected obligation by which – although without legal force – it had proved to be accompanied, had landed her in what she was bound to feel as a deracinated condition. It might be true, as André had declared, that the Dordogne was stuffing with leisured English people, and that she might eventually find some society among these. Le Colombier itself she did feel she might come to love. But it would be only an idle sort of life that she could create there. It would be a life, surely, devoid of duties – and she had been brought up to feel, with Wordsworth, that Duty was the stern daughter of the voice of God. It had never, perhaps, been uttered to her in that magniloquent way, but at least she had been taught to put her back into the daily round and common task. As she washed up a single plate and a single knife and fork it came to her suddenly and clearly that Le Colombier was going to be no more than an episode in her life.

  Penelope was taking a walk through the woods – probably her own woods – when the fact came back to her with renewed force. This time it was so incontrovertible that she wondered why it had not come to her sooner than it had done. The answer to this, she told herself in an almost alarming moment, might be Bernie Huffer. ‘She had walked into a house of her own, something hitherto quite foreign to her experience, and there had been a young man, alien in the same degree, but almost instantly interesting and attractive on the very score of this fact.

  Rationally viewed, there didn’t seem a great deal to be said for Bernie. He had revealed himself as having no high regard for the genius of his late employer, and his own ambition didn’t even lie in the field of literature. A seriously dedicated young painter, Penelope believed, would not have opted for a certain amount of security at the expense of the distracting business of being secretary to a popular and quirky author.

  Still, Bernie Huffer was fun – and thus commanded something which Penelope was conscious of as having been in rather short supply for a good many years past. Her acquaintance with him had been of only a few hours’ duration; yet she was actually missing him now. She wished she had brought Dora Quillinan as a companion on this exploration of her unexpected inheritance. Or did she? Hadn’t she spoken truly when she had said to Dora that she wanted nobody nudging her in one direction or the other when she came to make up her mind about Le Colombier? Of course that resolution must be taken to cover Bernie Huffer, too, however amusing she found him. He was young and therefore probably callow; he knew next to nothing about her; once Fulke’s papers were tidied up he would depart and she would never see him again. Bernie was no sort of factor in any decision she might have to make.

  During these ruminations Penelope had wandered on without much regarding where she was going, and presently she awoke to the realisation that she was lost. In the woodland through which she had been walking there was plenty of traversable ground between the trees, and she had seen nothing that could be distinguished as a path for some time. She couldn’t, of course, be far from the villa, but even its general direction was unclear to her. Moreover she hadn’t seen a soul during her wanderings, and even were she to do so there would be something absurd, she felt, in asking the way back to her own house. It might prove to be within a hundred yards of where she stood. So she walked on again at a venture. She must soon come either on a road or a glimpse of the great river in the valley below which would give her a chance of orienting herself. Meanwhile, her solitude was agreeably romantic. What she might meet was a hermit or a pilgrim (who would really be a magician in disguise), or even a knight in armour who would warn her of the vicinity of an obnoxious dragon. These excessively childish fancies were in her head when the trees thinned out before her and she found that she was looking at that colombier from which her house took its name. The house itself, however, was only just to be glimpsed through a further screen of trees.

  Bernie, she remembered, had urged her to inspect ‘the lair of the monster’ – which was another piece of nonsense out of romance. It had been, all the same, a genuine injunction, and she told herself that he would be pleased to learn that she had complied with it. Moreover, she was curious about the young man’s manner of providing for himself. So she walked up to the dovecot, found its single door casually ajar, pushed it open, and entered this odd abode.

  A dovecot is normally a sort of high-rise dwelling into which a very numerous population can be crammed. But now, under a low ceiling, was a single apartment which afforded a considerable sense of space, even although the walls had been left pitted appropriately for their former inhabitants. In its centre rose a modern and elegant spiral staircase, giving access to perhaps more than one chamber above. And what was immediately revealed to her was at once a living-room and a studio. But the lighting seemed not very suitable for the latter purpose, which was perhaps why, when he betook himself to pigments, Bernie seemed to have formed that habit of working in the main sitting-room of the villa. One segment of the ancient structure was adequately fitted up as a kitchen, and what furniture there was in the rest was of a simple sort well-adapted to bachelor ease. There weren’t many books, and there were no pictures on the walls, although a good many canvasses, some of them still virgin on their stretchers, were stacked up against them here and there. But on several tables, and even scattered carelessly on the floor, were numerous sketches in a variety of media – the favourite appearing to be pencil on damp paper. Without exception, they were of female nudes.

  Penelope found herself studying some of these evidences of Bernie Huffer’s industry with care. In two or three cases as many as half-a-dozen sketches displayed the same figure in slightly varying forms of the same pose. The effect was of a considerable tenacity and seriousness of intention in the artist. And artists, she believed, don’t commonly produce that sort of thing straight out of their heads. They work from the life. Penelope wondered where the models came from. Presumably it was from the local rural populace. And this fact might explain Mme Saval’s not very well understood talk about filles and fillettes.

  These thoughts signalled to Penelope that her interest in this unfamiliar place was not a matter wholly of aesthetic consideration. She felt suddenly an intruder – and a disconcerted intruder at that. So she took herself out of the lair of the monster at once, closing its door behind her. She closed it, in fact, with a bang. For she was somehow displeased with Bernie for having suggested an exploration of what seemed to her to be an almost obsessive interest in female anatomy. Returning to the villa, she made herself a cup of tea provided en mousseline by Messrs Jacksons of Piccadilly. Her reaction to Bernie’s labours was philistine, no doubt. But it was strong in her, all the same.

  And in the course of the next few days several young women – all local peasant girls – turned up at Le Colombier, boldly rang the big bell at the front door, and were clearly disconcerted by the appearance of an unknown and presumably unsuspected English woman instead of the late owner’s secretary. Two of them ventured upon speech, and were answered by Penelope in as matter-of-fact a fashion as she could contrive. Two others, who came together, merely turned to one another giggling, and then still giggling ran away. Penelope found herself particularly offended by the fact that none of these female visitors was particularly good-looking – or none in the conventional sense in w
hich good-looks are judged by what is visible above the neck. But all were in other respects detectably personable. So it could be charitably assumed that their call was in a professional capacity as artists’ models, and that they could thus be linked with the sketches so freely on display in Bernie’s dovecot. Penelope knew very little about the habits of artists, but had a notion that as soon as they got a young woman stripped and perched on some sort of platform before them anything in the nature of an erotic response to the spectacle thus afforded banished itself in the interest of aesthetic feeling. But what about before and after? And what was the inference to be drawn from that unintelligible chatter of Mme Saval’s on the subject of filles and fillettes? Penelope caught herself once or twice as lingering over these speculations; and she magnified this curiosity, inevitable and harmless in itself, into a charge of being very improperly obsessed by it. Was it conceivable that a primitive jealousy was at work in her? The mere possibility of this made her feel that she had come a long way from respectably resigned widowhood in the vicarage of Mallows.

  Then a further realisation came to her. During the last few days she had fallen into the way of holding a good deal of casual talk with the only slightly more-than-adolescent André. This again was surely innocent enough. André’s English was elementary but nevertheless useful. His French, unlike the old woman’s, wasn’t difficult to follow. During Bernie’s absence he was the only person for miles around to whom she could talk at all. Yet little that he said was of any substantial interest in itself, and so this attractiveness – which wasn’t in the least overmastering – had to be viewed as of a very simple girl-and-boy order. This was comical rather than disconcerting. She had a memory of once having made a joke to Dora to the effect of her heart being touched by Tommy Elbrow when Tommy was much of André’s age. But she wasn’t a young girl now; she had for some time been habituating herself to the fact that middle age was looming well up on her horizon. So she oughtn’t to be noticing that André owned one very simple sort of appeal more pronouncedly, perhaps, than the majority of boys of his age. The fact appeared to be that she had landed herself in an unwholesome near-solitude. She even began to feel that she would welcome Bernie Huffer’s return from visiting his friends at Le Bugue.

  And promptly on the Friday morning Bernie did turn up again. His car was heard on the drive; the engine stopped, a door banged, and his voice made itself audible round a corner of the house. He was shouting to André, cheerfully but imperiously, to come and wash the old crate down at once, since it was smothered in dust. The effect came to Penelope as that of a young squire in some Victorian fiction, confidently committing his horse to the attentions of a groom. Fleetingly, she wondered how much Bernie felt that he owned the place – with André and herself thrown in. But his manner as he joined her on the terrace, although remaining cheerful, became decently tinged with deference at once.

  ‘Well, now you know, Penelope,’ he said. ‘You’ve had Le Colombier to yourself for a bit, and made up your mind about it. Are you going to like it? That’s the grand question. And I’ve no doubt that Fulke in the shades is waiting anxiously to hear your reply.’

  ‘I can give only a provisional one, so far.’ Penelope had somehow not liked this particular fancy. ‘It’s rather unconnected with anything I’ve ever known, you see. I have a sense of this terrace as a stage, and the house behind it as an elaborate piece of stage carpentry. There ought to be a cast of not more than half a dozen people, entering and exiting through these various French windows, and building up rather a trivial leisure-class comedy.’

  ‘In other words, a typical Fulke Ferneydale effort. Have you seen many of his plays, or read many of the novels?’

  ‘None at all, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Hush, hush, for heaven’s sake! Remember who’s listening.’

  Penelope failed to look amused, since she disliked Bernie’s keeping up this particular joke. And it struck her that what she had revealed in so matter-of-fact a tone was really rather odd – particularly as coming from one who had been appointed to turn over the late playwright and novelist’s literary remains. Why had it never so much as occurred to her to get one of Fulke’s books out of the county library, which sent a van full of contemporary literature to park on the village green at Mallows every week? Why had Caspar never so much as suggested her taking a look at this or that, nor – so far as she could remember – kept anything of his brother’s on his own shelves? Bernie must judge the Mallows Ferneydales and Riches an uncommonly provincial crowd. Penelope had, in fact, read a good deal, but mainly in those earlier fields of literature with which she had become familiar at Oxford at a time when that University had officially regarded the entire book-making industry as having come to a stop with the death of George Meredith in 1909.

  ‘What enchanting news!’ she now heard Bernie saying. ‘You come with an absolutely virgin mind to that odd job of ours. Have you taken a dekko at any of those papers yet?’

  ‘I haven’t had the chance, so far as I can see. I assume they are all locked up in what must be rather a big room upstairs, which I don’t seem to have the key to.’

  ‘Stupid of me – and I’m so sorry. The key’s in my pocket now. The Cézanne’s up there, you know, and worth a huge fortune on its own. And the Sophie and Silvan affair turned me very security-minded.’

  ‘Sophie’s been here again, so I haven’t been entirely on my own. But she wasn’t interested in papers. It was just the Modigliani again. She feels that her son ought to have it for his rooms in Cambridge.’

  ‘I don’t believe that young lout will ever see Cambridge. I hope you were firm about it.’

  ‘I was – very. I may even have been rather rude. The woman is Fulke’s widow, after all.’

  ‘And had to put up with a great deal, no doubt.’ Bernie seemed to regret this graceless speech even as he uttered it. ‘But I don’t hold much of a brief for Sophie. Pots of money, and never done an honest day’s work in her life. Not that there isn’t a great deal to be said for money – particularly when you’re inconveniently quite without it.’

  Penelope almost said that Bernie couldn’t be in that position now, since he had not so long ago had several thousand pounds from his late employer. But it was probably true that nobody much wanted to buy his pictures, and that penury had taken a peep at him early in his career. There seemed, indeed, no other explanation of his accepting such a blind-alley job as that of secretary to a popular writer.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that we ought to begin taking a look at those papers this afternoon. And I feel that quite a brief survey of them will tell me that I’m unlikely to be of any use at all about them.’ Penelope said this with a good deal of conviction. ‘Have you started doing anything about them yourself?’

  ‘I’ve calendared them in a rough and ready way. That means getting them into as much of a chronological order as seems possible. If Fulke is going to have some sort of posthumous vogue or permanent reputation – which seems unlikely to me – all that will come to be judged terribly important. Fortunately, you know, it’s all typescript; there’s scarcely a page of holograph anywhere, so far as I can see. And Fulke wrote a vile hand, so that painfully deciphering his false starts and abortive notions and great thoughts generally would be quite too awful for words. Not that there mayn’t be plenty of clever writing here and there. Fulke was clever. I came to feel that more and more as I worked for him. It’s not something it would occur to one to say about Tolstoy or any of the real swells.’

  Penelope agreed that Fulke had been clever, but refrained from making Bernie’s further assertion a subject of debate. Bernie was undoubtedly clever too, and perhaps owned higher endowments as well. This, she told herself, she was unfitted to judge – and still less was she competent to pronounce upon the value of this or that among Fulke’s literary remains. She had a notion that Fulke at some stage of his career had been over-ambitious, going after a kind of excellence that was beyond his reach. Having acknowledged this
to himself he had probably settled down to gratify the common reader, and his final quirky idea had been prompted by the just yet unflattering notion that his sister-in-law Penelope was exactly that. Penelope found that she didn’t care for this role at all. The situation was artificial and absurd, and she must get out of it as best she could. She liked Le Colombier, and to a rather surprising degree she liked Bernie; yet she wasn’t at all sure that at the back of her mind there didn’t lurk a strong and simple impulse just to go home. All this was behind her next remark.