A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘What I’d like you to do,’ she said firmly, ‘is to sift through all those papers a bit ahead of me, and simply show me anything that you judge to be of consequence. I think that will be enough to fulfil any obligation I may be said to have been put under in accepting this house – and a sort of endowment, I gather, going along with it. It’s the common sense of the thing, Bernie, and I don’t feel that common sense often leads one far astray.’

  ‘Then I’ll start in this afternoon.’ Bernie may have been amused, but his immediate attitude was cheerful and without fuss. Was he, perhaps, too ready to acquiesce in any course of life that came his way? Wouldn’t he be more worthily employed if, instead of accepting a good deal of money to mess around with Fulke’s papers, he had called it a day so far as secretarial labour was concerned, and set himself up in some garret of a studio to wrestle with his own proper art? It was in Penelope’s nature to take satisfaction in the spectacle of people seriously employed to the limit of their capacities. So she felt that possibly she even had a duty to encourage Bernie to see things that way. He was still very young, certainly much younger than herself, and this made the dash of frivolity one could distinguish in him harmless and rather fun. Her own association with him was going to be quite transient. Perhaps she could give him a bit of a lead, all the same.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go briskly to work, and get it all out of the way. I’m sure there are other things you want to get back to, Bernie.’

  ‘Ring down the curtain, you mean, on this small comedy. Life is real! Life is earnest! Longfellow.’

  So Bernie, who was quick to detect a train of thought, was laughing it her with a frankness that was part of his appeal. And Penelope – at least for the time – didn’t mind this a bit.

  Nor did she mind his again preparing a meal that evening, although the fact of its being a second occasion of the sort carried with it an odd suggestion of domesticity. The very easiness of Bernie’s address enhanced this; they might have been a couple long habituated to just such a routine. But at least Bernie’s talk didn’t incline to the over-intimate. What he had to say referred mostly to his investigations of the afternoon.

  ‘There’s quite a lot of what they call juvenilia for a start,’ he said. One piece is amusing – or at least it’s an amusing idea. Shelley and Jane Austen. They’re having an Imaginary Conversation.’

  ‘Like in Landor?’

  ‘Yes. There was a vogue for such things on the radio, it seems, a good long time ago. Shelley and Miss Austen are alone in the inside of a stage coach. Shelley’s still at Eton, and he’s hugging what Miss Austen takes to be a tuck-box. But it’s really an infernal machine, which Shelley is preparing to loose off against the tyrants of the earth. It’s rather a nice situation or confrontation. Only Fulke seems to have been unable to think of anything for them to say to one another. It’s one of his earliest false starts. He may have written it while he was still at school himself.’ Bernie got to his feet in order to pour Penelope a glass of his late employer’s claret. ‘Then there’s an affair, almost equally abortive, which I’d date during his undergraduate days. It gets a little further, but I don’t know that you’d care for it. Two tarts – one a high-class courtesan and the other a drab – find themselves most improbably stranded together in the waiting-room of some deserted railway station here in France. They square up to one another a little, and then – more improbably still – a young Englishman strays in on them. Again there’s no development. But the piece is interesting, I suppose, as illustrating what was often going to be Fulke’s way of setting up a situation and just trusting that something would come of it.’

  ‘I’d imagine writers quite often go to work in that way.’ As she said this, Penelope seemed to recall having herself as a small girl embarked on the composition of fairy stories much after the same fashion.

  ‘Probably they do – and Fulke made quite a technique of it. It seems wasteful to me, just like embarking on a painting without having formed an overall design. If I was going to write a novel or a play, I wouldn’t put a word on paper until I’d thought of some single and completed action which was to be the substance of the thing.’

  Bernie Huffer wasn’t only clever; judging by this Aristotelian pronouncement one had to credit him with being well-read too. Penelope felt that it would be a mistake to begin admiring Bernie. But he was at least a good deal more lively and attractive than, say, the majority of her father’s parishioners.

  On the day following his return to the villa Bernie embarked upon a routine which might have been based on a tactful feeling that he ought not to impose too much of his society upon his new employer. Every morning, and while Penelope was for the most part exploring the region in which she had now become almost a landed proprietor, he worked alone in Fulke’s big library-room upstairs, sifting through a substantial batch of papers and singling out whatever he judged Penelope might like to see. The result was commonly of no great bulk, and he handed it over to her at lunch-time so that she might occupy herself with it for as much as she cared of the afternoon. Having thus, as it were, decently earned his keep, he retreated to his dovecot until the evening, and there presumably pursued his own proper artistic activities. Penelope approved of this programme. Whether or not the young man was going to turn out to be any sort of considerable painter she was without the competence to determine. But it was right that he should stick to the attempt. Being an artist must be vastly more rewarding than burrowing however effectively in a deceased author’s scrap-books.

  Penelope could see, however, that the scrap-books and fugitive papers were not without interest at times. Fulke appeared to have done his thinking on a typewriter, and to have let his mind wander from one project to another with scarcely a pause in the clicking of the keys. Then periodically he would disengage the various fragments of something judged promising from their random context, and build up a more substantial synopsis of a play or novel with the help of scissors and paste. But since Penelope’s knowledge of his achieved works was so culpably non-existent she had no idea whatever of what, amid all this disorder, might be leading where. Fulke could not, of course, have foreseen this total incapacity on his sister-in-law’s part. As things were, she was without the means of determining the relative interest or importance of one fragment or another – although Bernie, presumably, would be able to do so. Those red-headed men in the Sherlock Holmes story who were set the task of copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica were not more uselessly employed than was Penelope in thumbing through Fulke Ferneydale’s notes and jottings. It was possible, no doubt, that some completed or nearly-completed works might turn up later – in which case she could stand in as the Common Reader he had appeared to envisage. Penelope had a mounting sense, however, that she was involved in an absurdity.

  So, not unnaturally, her attention frequently strayed away from the typescript before her. She told herself how much more sensibly Bernie Huffer was employed in his dovecot, pencil in hand and paper before him – and perhaps before him, also, one (or conceivably two) of those giggling peasant girls. The image thus formed in Penelope’s mind gave her no pleasure; was, in fact, disturbing as well as indelicate. But it continued at times to come between her and the typescript page.

  Then an afternoon turned up on which she frankly declared to herself that she was not a bond-slave to Fulke and his remains. If she preferred to all these disjecta membra another stroll under a marvellous June sky she was perfectly free to put in time that way. So she pushed aside her papers, and within a few minutes was wandering through the woods. By this time she had discovered how to preserve a general sense of her direction as she walked. Every now and then there was a glade, and in any of these she had only to pause and look overhead. For there would be the black kites, sweeping in their effortless arcs in what she knew to be the southern quarter of the sky. But in addition to this there were now individual trees that were familiar to her, just as there were in the spinneys and copses for several miles round M
allows vicarage. It thus came about that when she eventually made a certain change of direction it was with the full knowledge that she was now – as once before – approaching Le Colombier du cote de chez Huffer. Within minutes the colombier would be squarely before her. She was at least too honest with herself to treat this as a surprise. Indeed, she told herself that she was being idly overcome by feminine curiosity. Yet, after all, why not pay Bernie an afternoon call? It could be regarded as a sign that she was prompted to take a friendly interest in his more serious activities.

  With this in her head, and while approaching the dovecot from the rear, she became aware of something that might well have made her hesitate. There was here a window on the ground floor, too high for any observation from without, but now standing open to the afternoon sun. And through it there came sounds not readily to be identified with any serious artistic pursuit: sounds of panting, slapping, and low sharp laughter, which were at least sufficiently explicable to tell Penelope that were she to persist in her notion of an afternoon call a considerable degree of embarrassment might ensue. But when she had half-achieved this change of plan, and the door of the dovecot was in consequence in view, it burst open and André tumbled through. Flushed and laughing, he took in Penelope at a glance, and then bolted round the building like a rabbit making for its burrow. He was buttoning up what clothing he wore as he ran.

  Penelope, if surprised, felt relieved as well. She had to acknowledge to herself how much she had disliked the idea of Bernie at work upon those young women. But this afternoon, at least, he had opted for a male model, and André had been conveniently to hand. She had herself arrived when the session had ended in some piece of skvlarking of a decidedly juvenile sort. She would tease Bernie about this at dinner that evening.

  But in fact she did not. What made her refrain she didn’t clearly know. She was aware only of a new and disturbing image of Bernie Huffer somewhere upon the borders of her mind.

  Part Five

  XIV

  ‘We have had a letter from Penelope.’

  Mrs Rich gave this information to Charles Gaston upon his arrival at the vicarage on what had turned into a routine weekly call on its incumbent. Mr Rich was rapidly becoming a valetudinarian, accumulating small anxieties at a rate requiring regular reassurance that all was fundamentally as it should be in a man of advancing years.

  ‘A most amusing letter,’ Mrs Rich went on. ‘As you know, Penelope went off a fortnight ago to inspect her surprising French inheritance. She finds Le Colombier to be quite enchanting.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ Gaston, who had long suspected Mrs Rich of having divined his feelings about her stepdaughter, was careful to give no particular emphasis to this reply.

  ‘But there is something a little out of the way, as well. Entering what she believed to be an untenanted house, she found herself in the presence of a young Englishman, engaged upon some sort of abstract painting. It was, Penelope says, like a small coup de théâtre. There is something slightly odd in the mere phrase.’

  ‘Fulke was a man of the theatre. Penelope may have been thinking of that.’

  ‘Very true. Well, the young man turned out to have been Fulke’s secretary, and to be named Bernie Huffer. He made a little joke to the effect that he “went with the house”. Fulke, it seems, had arranged that this Mr Huffer should remain at the villa for a time, to help Penelope with sorting through his papers. It seems to me—’ Mrs Rich paused for a moment, and in a manner somehow reminding Gaston that here was Mrs Martin still—’just a little bit strange.’

  ‘Do you mean not quite proper?’

  ‘There is an old woman who comes in to wash up and tidy round, and there is a boy who cuts the grass.’ Mrs Rich paused again on this oblique reply. ‘And Mr Huffer is quartered not in the house itself, but in the dovecot, where he has established a studio.’

  ‘You feel that to be reassuring?’

  ‘I hope I feel no need to be reassured, or not in the obvious sense. Penelope is not a child.’

  ‘That’s certainly true.’ Gaston reflected on the years he had let pass without venturing on a second proposal to Penelope in her widowed state. ‘And she doesn’t, I take it, describe this Bernie as being as enchanting as the villa?’

  ‘She appears to find him very entertaining. It is something we haven’t much gone in for at the vicarage.’

  ‘Will she be entertained by Fulke’s literary remains? I suppose that’s what is meant by his papers.’

  ‘I gather that there was a letter from Fulke awaiting her at Le Colombier. If it expressed some sort of wish that she should concern herself with the matter, she might feel that the task, like Mr Huffer, went with the house.’

  ‘It seems an odd idea to me.’ Gaston sounded really puzzled. ‘Penelope is fond of poetry, but has no consuming interest in present-day literature as a whole.’

  ‘I agree with you. But Penelope is bound to be conscious that Fulke has treated her, as Caspar’s widow, handsomely enough. Nevertheless there is certainly something unseemly, or at least unfortunately contrived, in her being put into double harness with a strange young man. I admit to hoping that she will herself see it as that, and lose not too much time in sending Mr Huffer about his business.’

  ‘I must go about mine.’ Gaston made a gesture in the direction of Mr Rich’s study. ‘What does her father think of it all?’

  ‘He has expressed no more than his belief that there is a respectable family of Huffers in Northumberland, although they are of German origin and keep an extra “e” in the name – like that writer, I suppose, who ended up as Ford Madox Ford. But my husband may have more disturbing thoughts as well. I have tried not to arouse alarm, and am sure you will do so, too.’

  Dr Gaston found little to say in a professional way to his patient, or at least little that was new. But he felt that, as a friend of the family, he was bound to make some reference to the news that had come from France. So on this topic he embarked, although keeping Mrs Rich’s admonition well in mind.

  ‘I’m delighted,’ he said, ‘to learn that you have heard from Penelope, and that she seems to find her new possession very much to her taste.’

  ‘And her new companion, too. I can scarcely be said to understand the situation at all. Fulke Ferneydale acted very properly in doing something substantial for his brother’s widow – and the more so because poor Caspar seems never to have been able to put together sixpence of his own. But so to arrange matters as to provide her, into the bargain, with a young male associate in what appears to be a singularly isolated dwelling strikes me as being, to put it mildly, misconceived.’

  ‘But – as your wife has just been saying to me – Penelope is not an inexperienced girl. I don’t think you need have any cause for alarm.’ As he said this, Gaston realised that he mustn’t continue fibbing – and indeed that the vicar was already, so to speak, too surprisingly on the ball to make fibbing feasible. ‘Or for any immediate cause for alarm,’ he emended. ‘Penelope has behind her a sound education and a strong family tradition of right conduct in serious affairs. If this young man offends her sense of what is proper, she is likely to give him his marching orders at once. If I understand the thing aright, she is virtually his employer. It lies within her power to sack him on the spot.’

  ‘There is truth in what you say, Gaston. But you might well add to your sketch of my daughter that, through one reason and another, she has moved into her thirties a little short of experience in the broader sense of the term. Caspar, although I had a high respect for him, seems unlikely to have been a very exciting man to marry. It is a point we do well to bear in mind. To be quite frank with you, her continued widowhood over a substantial stretch of time has been something of a disappointment to me.’

  Not unnaturally, these cogent remarks from one who was commonly no more than a fretful old man held Gaston for some moments dumb, so that it was the vicar who continued the conversation still.

  ‘We rightly acknowledge to our Creat
or that a thousand ages in his sight are like an evening gone. But profane literature has its lessons to. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni. I am frequently conscious that my own life reflects something of what Horace intends.’

  ‘We have all in our time let opportunities slip, no doubt.’ Gaston paused for a moment before adding anything to this commonplace (but, as it happened, deeply felt) remark. Henry Rich presumably had behind him – if very far behind him – an acquaintance not only with Horace but with Catullus and Martial too. Or he must at least possess a bookish knowledge of some of the vagaries of sex. ‘But there is another point, if not a very pleasant one, which we have to bear in mind. This Bernie Huffer appears to have been the latest of Fulke Ferneydale’s secretaries. And I happen to have assured knowledge that they were all very good-looking young men.’

  ‘And catamites to boot, no doubt.’ The Reverend Mr Rich came out with this quite astoundingly in his stride. ‘But that may not greatly mend matters. On the contrary, Gaston. There are homosexual men who derive satisfaction from having women fall in love with them. There are also men who are attracted by one sex or the other according to what turns up. I imagine that to have been true of Fulke Ferneydale himself. Was it not so?’