by C. K. Stead
The party was in two very big rooms opening on to an enormous balcony-terrace that hung out over a rock-enclosed bay where Carlo’s yacht was anchored, decked out with coloured pennants, and with a set of pontoons running out to it from a shingle beach lit by oil-burning flambeaux.
I was dancing with Katy, saying, ‘Parlez-vous jig-jig, Madame,’ when the knocking started, a very loud and insistent banging on the burly gates that were shut on the courtyard. We were dancing to that dreamy Christophe song, ‘Estate senza te’—Summer without you. The knocking got louder, people were running this way and that, and Clifton, who had put away a lot of the party-giver’s beautiful wine, threw back his head and howled, ‘Wake drunken with thy knocking, I would thou couldst.’
‘Duncan,’ I corrected. ‘Wake Duncan …’
Fabrice was pale and trembling. ‘It’s a raid,’ he said. ‘Must be a raid.’ And he shouted down to Carlo, who was already casting off down there, to wait for him—‘Merde-shit-you-asshole-cunt, wait for me.’
But the yacht was moving. And then from the bay entrance a searchlight flicked on and swept the water. A launch was out there, waiting. No escape!
At the gate they were still hammering, shouting ‘Polizia’ and telling us to open up. It was then I remembered Ernst’s car had blocked us at the gates of the villa. I asked Fabrice was there another way out, and told him I’d parked five hundred metres along the road.
‘Mon-Dieu-Jesus-Christ-and-Santa Maria,’ he said. ‘There’s a track up from the beach.’
So we stumbled after him, Katy and Clifton and Peggy and I, down the iron spiral to the beach, over the shingle and pebbles, up the track among rocks on to the dark road, while at the villa the police were just breaking into the courtyard, and out in the bay Carlo’s yacht was being boarded …
3. French polish and the Spanish cow
JAVINE HAD A ROOM and the use of kitchen and bathroom in her uncle’s house close to the port—still a fishing port in those days, catching real fish and bringing them in direct to the market and the restaurants. When I’d got to know her well she used to leave her key on a leather thong under the stairs so I could let myself in if she wasn’t there. I used to call on my way from the market in the mornings and leave her fruit and bread; or if I had nothing to leave I made a ‘sculpture’ of what was there—fruit, bottles, books, pens, candlesticks. It was my call sign.
Her family farm was so small it was hard to see how they made a living from it. It was in the foothills behind the town. The house was below the road. A piece of land that couldn’t have been more than an acre ran down from the house to a stream, and a corresponding slope, only slightly larger, went up the other side. It was all more or less contained in a hairpin bend of the road, and the stream disappeared into a culvert underneath. But those slopes caught the sun and were protected from the worst of the wind.
It was all beautifully terraced, down to the stream and up to the road on the far side, all supported by ancient stone walls, and every inch planted in vegetables. There were olives, cherry trees, plum trees along the boundary, and against the stone walls that rose up to become the parapet at the road’s edge there were espaliered apple trees. All around the house were vines, and on the terrace directly below was the poultry shed.
They weren’t a peasant family. They had modest bourgeois pretensions. Javine’s father was a hearty, vigorous sort of man who took your hand warmly at every meeting. In the summer he rented a strip of one of the man-made swimming beaches, and hired out deckchairs, beach umbrellas and paddle boats, sold ice cream and drinks and gave swimming lessons. Madame Rive did what she called ‘supplementary laundering’ at the height of the season when the established laundries couldn’t cope. Javine’s older brother helped on the farm and also worked as a stonemason, doing a kind of mosaic work that was traditional in the villages. I once saw him at work with a team that was tiling a public section of the olive grove that was called le parc du Pian near the Scarfs’ apartment. They were wearing hats made of paper folded in triangles, as you do to make a paper boat. I don’t know what purpose they served but it seemed to be a kind of uniform. Each man (they were all men) had his paper hat, a plain baguette for lunch, and a plastic bottle of red wine.
Javine was described in the family as the clever one. She was what I thought of (perhaps unfairly—I was no expert) as a typical French young woman. She could look at you with big expressionless eyes, pools of innocence, and with a mouth almost petulantly neutral. But somewhere at the corners of the mouth, and around the eyes, were faint lines of irony which made you feel it might be a mask that could come off—and then what?
When I had known her a while she issued a kind of warning. She’d come to the door to see me off. The vines that climbed around the door and up to the balcony of her room were just breaking into bud. It was one of those velvety nights you read about in the guidebooks. Down at the port the lights were glittering on the water, the fishing boats were bobbing gently up and down at their moorings, knocking lightly against one another and apologising as people do in a crowd, while the big light flashed from the bastion. I turned to say goodnight and she held on to me, brushing the hair back from my face, hooking it behind my ears. My hair was rather long in those days. It was the fashion.
‘I want to tell you,’ she said, speaking in French, ‘I’m in love with you so you must …’ And she hesitated.
This, I felt, was a Colette moment, a Claudine moment, and I played my part. ‘So I must …?’
‘You must,’ she said in French; and then in English, ‘’old on to your ’at.’
Well I hoped so. I wanted to be ‘swept off my feet’, bouleversé, knocked flat, wrung out. I wanted the plangent note of Christophe’s ‘Summer without you’ to cut deep—to wound with sweet pain. It was happening—and yet it wasn’t. There was, I discovered, something maddeningly tenacious about my affections, and consequently about what ‘falling in love’ meant. It was a trick not easily done nor, once achieved, easily repeated or repudiated.
Are such matters different now? It may be they are, when sex is so effortlessly available and casual (I do not speak disapprovingly, but as an observer) that you can read about couples being ‘fuck buddies’—partners who are friends-who-fuck but with no significant emotional engagement or deep attachment. I think I would have liked that, but it didn’t figure when I was young; or if it did it was not publicly acknowledged—had not entered the common parlance of ‘relationships’. The truth is I had been in love with Deirdre, and she still inhabited my dreams—not my day-dreams, but my night ones, which were more potent and not under my own control. The regret I’d felt at losing her would not entirely leave me, and in weak moments I yearned for her.
So yes, I was ready to ’old on to my ’at; I can even say I was ’opeful—but I was not sure it would ’appen.
But on the other hand, would it be possible to argue that Javine and I, far from being behind the times, were ahead of them; that, without knowing it, we were ‘fuck buddies’ already?
When I give this matter further thought I have to remember there was also my more than slight obsession with Katy Scarf, who was, you might say, the wife-and-mother I’d imagined my own wife was going to be. So there was the part of me that would have liked to be Clifton, married to Katy and the father of their three lovely kids; and there was the other part that wanted to be ‘a real writer’. It had all come up while my divorce was in the air. My gay great-uncle, Desmond, who told me he would have been a writer himself ‘if things had gone differently’, was pleased I’d trained as a journalist. But he wanted more for me, and from me—‘better’ he would have said—and we talked about it during his protracted dying. He was an admirer of Somerset Maugham and even encouraged the idea of a stint for me in the South of France. It was not that Maugham had written much about the region, but he had lived there; and it was clear that Great-uncle Desmond wanted me to believe that he had himself visited the famous Villa la Mauresque, Maugham’s home for many year
s, and that the visit was a secret because of the wicked things he had got up to there. So he would hint, and then deny it in a tone that seemed to wink. He told me Maugham had called the French Riviera ‘a sunny place for shady people’—and he told me this in a way that gave the impression Maugham had said it to him in person.
He recommended Cyril Connolly’s book—not the novel, The Rock Pool, which he said should have been called The Rock Bottom, because that was where its narrator ended up, but one called Enemies of Promise about the things that can stand in the way of genius producing the great works of art it is capable of; and one such sombre obstacle was what Connolly called ‘the pram in the hall’. Marriage and small children stood between the writer (thought of as male) and his work. In my uncle’s naïve but touching equation, you must understand, I was the one whose ‘work of genius’ might be obstructed by the pram.
So Great-uncle Desmond, though he didn’t encourage our divorce, didn’t stand in its way either; and even provided in his will for me to have the means by which it might be seen as a release and an opportunity.
I’VE DESCRIBED MY first view of the Baie de Garavan from above the town cemetery. I have two recollections of that scene, each probably made up of a number of different occasions but quite distinct. Both are fine-weather recollections, but one is winter, the other summer. In the winter view the sky is cloudless, the sea is blue and calm, the horizon is a clear line. The colours of the rocks rising up from the frontier posts are clear and sharp. Everything has a hard edge. And straight down there, directly below where I’m standing, the two man-made beaches that run for almost a kilometre from the old port to the port of Garavan stand out empty and bright, their stone breakwaters forming a yellow-brown T-shape against the blue sea.
In the summer recollection the sun no longer picks out colours and sharpens edges. Distinctions are blurred by its force. Every line is hazy. Colours and forms seem to melt and run into one another. Where sea stops and sky begins is uncertain. The sky is neither quite clear nor cloudy; it’s a burning haze. And down there the beaches are a mass of colour and movement, with rank on rank of brilliant parasols in matching groups, like football teams, and under and among them so many human bodies the sand colour is almost extinguished. The sea is disturbed and discoloured with human bodies too, and it only begins to clear and look blue beyond the breakwater.
It was up there before the storm that I had my first conversation with Fabrice, when he invited me to join him at the Casino. I’d stopped the Fiat and was admiring the view when he pulled up behind me. ‘So you bought the old guy’s car,’ he called. He got out and came over. ‘Looks good,’ he said, though the tone did not suggest very good. He was fluent in English, which he spoke like an American, as if he’d learned it partly by watching movies. ‘Yeah, that’s a real nice automobile.’
We shook hands and stood looking down at those empty beaches in the winter sun. I noticed the bullet holes in the walls directly below us—great gashes ripped through the outer plaster, narrowing to neat black holes. I pointed them out to my companion. ‘You had your share of the war here,’ I said.
He pulled one of those pouting French faces. ‘That was our Fascisti friends from along the coast. They waited, of course, until France had fallen to the Germans, then they came to claim the town.’
We were side by side now, our hands on the railing. ‘This is a good view,’ he said. ‘I bring visitors here when I want to impress them. But you can have too much of a good thing. We must not let you get bored.’
‘I’m not bored,’ I said. I was wondering how to deal with the fact that his left hand was moving over my right. But he just squeezed my fingers lightly and moved away.
We walked back to the parked cars. His was a heavy black official-looking Mercedes. ‘Can you remember a date,’ he said—and gave the invitation to meet him at the Monte Carlo tables and to come afterwards to a party.
He got into his car. The window was still down and he stared out at me, standing there looking uncertain, wondering had he really squeezed my hand and what I should make of it. He shook his head slightly and laughed. ‘Does life trouble you so much, mon ami? Here …’
He pushed a couple of big printed tickets into my hand. ‘Take that nice girl to the Nice Opera House,’ he said. The tickets were to an event celebrating the eightieth birthday of the composer Darius Milhaud, who would be present to see some of his own works performed.
‘That nice girl?’ As he drove away I was left wondering how much he knew already about my new life—and more to the point, how he knew it.
AFTER THE STORM spring arrived. It didn’t march in obviously as it does in the north, a big festival of green. There had been green all winter, and colour too, but now there was more of both. Snow vanished from the mountain peaks you could see from the town. Buds appeared on grape vines and opened into small pale-green leaves and grew into larger darker-green leaves—so fast around Javine’s balcony you could almost watch it happen. And the flowers that had bloomed through the winter were replaced by others. My landlady’s last supplies of mimosa had blown away in the storm. All along the coast spring was like a changing of the toy-soldier palace guard at Monte Carlo. One set of flowers marched off and another, even prettier, took their place.
But up in the mountains it was more like spring in the north. Driving up into the villages, and beyond towards the receding snow, you noticed blossoms on the fruit trees, primroses, daffodils and violets in the woods, oaks and beeches bursting with new leaf, and on the higher slopes that had been dull green or bronze all winter, brilliant splotches of alpine flowers.
I think it was only at this time I began to notice the frogs in the Scarfs’ garden. Maybe they’d been there all winter. But with the longer days and milder nights Katy began to leave the windows open on to the balcony, and after the sun was down you heard the frogs, first one, then three, and soon there was a chorus. And at the same time, over the heads of the date and canary palms, among the cacti, in the spaces between the olives and especially around the huge cigar-shaped silhouettes of cypresses, bats would be soundlessly flickering like big frantic butterflies against the fading light.
I remember Clifton taking little Hermi out one evening to listen to the first frog. Hermi was almost three and just beginning to notice that some words she knew were French and some English. Maybe she was confused too by Clifton’s habit of referring to the French as ‘Frogs’. She wanted him to speak to the frog that was croaking from the garden.
‘Erk, erk,’ Clifton said.
The frog replied.
‘Erk, erk,’ Clifton repeated.
A few seconds’ silence, and then the frog again.
‘What does he say?’ Hermi asked.
‘He says it’s time small girls were in bed,’ Clifton said.
Hermi frowned. She pushed her face between the balusters and shouted, ‘Erk, erk.’
‘What did you say?’ Clifton asked.
She looked pleased with herself. ‘I telled him froggy shut up.’
WITH SPRING EVERYTHING SEEMED to change. Javine for example. I can place exactly the moment I began to feel I was getting out of my depth and that, even though it was what I thought I wanted, it might not turn out to be a happy experience. I arranged to meet her one afternoon and at the appointed time she wasn’t there. I walked down to Judlin’s photography shop and exchanged a word with the beautiful blonde assistant and then back to the corner where we were to meet but still she wasn’t there. I strolled along to the paper shop where there was another beautiful blonde. I bought a paper and asked her why the town was full of beautiful blondes. Weren’t fair heads supposed to be rare in this region? ‘Ah oui, Monsieur, bien sûr,’ she agreed—very rare. All of those others came out of a bottle.
I went back to my corner to wait. Another twenty minutes passed. And then I saw her outside a café. The tables had been put out of doors in the sun and she was sitting with a young man. I’d met him before. His name was Raoul and he was a student
. So had she forgotten our arrangement to meet—or was it just that Raoul’s good looks took precedence? I didn’t plan to ask.
I went over and joined them at their table. I shook Raoul’s hand and kissed Javine’s cheeks—the regulation mwa-mwa and back again for the southern third. I knew my feelings shouldn’t be obvious and hid them behind the English newspaper I’d bought.
Javine responded with a shrug and went back into a rapid exchange with Raoul. Hiding behind my paper I wasn’t able to follow more than a little of it, and that made me angry as I suppose it was meant to. A feeling of rebellion against the language rose in me. Like little Hermi I wanted to tell them, ‘Froggy, shut up!’
Late that evening, when Raoul was gone and the tensions had been resolved in the usual way, I explained all this.
‘Oh, mon pauvre bébé,’ she said, stroking my brow (I was lying with my head in her lap and my feet on her balustrade among the unfolding vine leaves), ‘but you speak our language so beautifully.’ And then, perhaps because this was such an exaggeration: ‘You make it sound so exotique.’
‘I speak it,’ I said, using a phrase the French use of one who can’t manage their wretched tongue, ‘comme une vache Espagnole’—like a Spanish cow.
‘I wish I could speak English like that Spanish cow,’ she said.
It was a good example of what I was coming to think of as ‘French polish’. No reply was possible.
I HAD BEEN READING Jung since I arrived in the town, and because of that was recording my dreams in a notebook kept at my bedside. The idea was, I suppose, that this would help me as ‘a writer’ and possibly provide me with ideas. I was finding that the more I recorded them the more spectacular they became, as if the dreaming function was pleased to be taken seriously, and responded with gratitude. I flick through the notes I kept, which I still have, and wonder whether I elaborated, or even fabricated, in writing them down. Sometimes they were of the architect Hirondelle, whom in the notes I called (keeping up the joke shared with Katy) ‘Mr Martin’. I dreamed of him following the Italian soldier he’d shot, down into that little valley. Or, still in the uniform of an infantry officer, he would step into the lift that should have been included in his design of L’Atrium. The lift was the shrine in which the soldier had died—and then (according to the notes) up it went against a cobalt sea and opal sky, and when it stopped it was the Virgin who stepped out to be welcomed by Giselle among the flowers and bees thirty floors above the streets of Monte Carlo.