‘I’ll have a gin and tonic, thanks. Let me.…’
‘Yes, do pour it. All this bathing saps one.… Is there enough ice? Jules is inside sorting out some junk he bought in Nice this afternoon. The heat never tires Jules, but never. I guess it’s all those years in Algeria.’
A fire-fly winked round the edge of the balcony like a mislaid cigarette end. I told Jackie what I had been doing this afternoon, except for the visit to Villefranche.
She said: ‘Jules is such a magpie. Anything, but anything. Old maps, old manuscripts, old books, old pictures, old sheets of music. Not old women, thank God. He swears he’ll make a packet out of all this stuff he buys, but I say how can he when he never sells any of it? I should think Sandra should be home any time now.’
I took a gulp and let the iced drink burn its way down.
‘Is it all that transparent?’
‘Not transparent, but not that at all. Dear Morris, the disguise would be real good for most people, but for me … I guess I’ve lived fifty-three years, four months and a few odd days, and for all but a few of the early ones, I’ve moved in an atmosphere of persistent fornication. It does sharpen one’s wits.’
‘And how d’you suppose this is going to turn out?’
‘You are married, I guess? Or divorced?’
‘Not yet.’
‘But you want to be? Then why this subterfuge?’
‘There are reasons.’
She tapped ash off the end of her long-range cigarette. ‘ Well, you know, dear boy, Sandra is free and white, etc. It does put temptation in her way, all these men who make a fuss of her, but all these men. When I was her age I had six handsome Adonises wanting to marry me—swearing undyingly that they loved me for myself alone. And all but none of them sincere! … It’s different with Sandra.’
‘How different?’ I was obstinate and knotted inside.
‘Well, when I was twenty-one I inherited sixteen million dollars. It’s a handicap. You wouldn’t believe the amorous attraction of greenbacks. I was never a Venus to the detached observer, but believe me I looked one to all those young men! … It’s not so with Sandra. She hasn’t a bean, as you well know; all she’s got is a pretty face and one hell of a good body and that’s enough for enough men to give her opportunities.’
‘Is this advice you’re offering me?’
‘Not advice; I wouldn’t dare, but I wouldn’t dare. For all I know you may have staked a claim and be ready for all comers. But I like you. You’re modest and ingrown. So much to be preferred to the immodest and the overgrown. So I thought you should know of the other bees round the honey-pot.’
‘Not least Trevor Dain.’
‘By no means least! But I’ll say this for Trevor: he’s like Henry the Eighth; he does love marrying them! And then there’s an earnest young Scot, full of bra’ good health.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed grimly.
‘And there’s an American boy down here, with almost as much money as I’ve lost.…’
‘You terrify me.’
‘Ah, there you go resenting my interference—’
‘Not in the very least …’
There was a step on the terrace, and Count Jules Francois Evrard de Courcy de la Fayarde came out. He had this afternoon found six obscene drawings in the drawer of an old shop in the Riquier district of Nice. That they were obscene was beside the point—except as a reason for their being kept in a drawer. The point was that he was convinced they were early eighteenth century and by Lemoyne or possibly Boucher.…
We studied the drawings. By now it was nearly nine, so we had dinner on the terrace, Jackie flapping an idle hand at the odd mosquito. Some cloud was mottling the moon, and the night was oppressive. Getting to know these two people better, I found them oddly innocent, as I find so many sophisticates innocent, in that their very sophistication belongs to shallowness and not depth. They would talk about subjects that even today don’t get discussed with complete frankness in ordinary society, but talk of them with a surface knowledge that knew no true perception. They had no morality in the sense in which I had been brought up to understand the term; but when the smaller fences go down there are only the big jumps left, and these were not the big jumpers. To be truly bad you have to have stature, just as to be truly good. At that moment I knew myself to be capable of far more than they.
Alexandra did not come in until ten-thirty, and then hastily, flushed with her haste. In the distance the Ferrari drove away. When she saw me she smiled apologetically, but addressed herself to the Fayardes, explaining that she had stayed longer than she realised with her friend and then had missed the bus. Trevor Dain had happened to see her in Villefranche and had brought her home. She refused food, saying she had had a snack about seven.
I could have struck her in the mouth: that beautiful mouth that I coveted so much and that uttered such detestable lies. It smiled, and the glint of moist white teeth showed; the blood beat in my head; I shook it trying to clear it; Jackie said what is it, a mosquito round you? I said yes, a mosquito.
We talked. The end came when the telephone rang, and a servant came out to say a Mr. David McNair was calling Miss Wilshere. Alexandra went in. I rose to go. Jackie, her bloodshot beetle eyes summing me up, said wait a while; it’s early days; Jules, make him stay. But nothing short of force would have kept me. I said thank you for a lovely dinner, thank you, darling, and kissed the powder on her cheek and left. The Count walked with me to the gate, talking of amphoras, which were fished up off the coast of Spain, and their possible value in America.
I walked back to the hotel. There was some sort of a concert in the village, and music drifted across the silent harbour. A puff of cooler air from the sea wafted in my face, and the dry palms in the hotel garden made a noise like angry rattlesnakes. The sea was not so still tonight. I went up to my bedroom and slowly undressed. I knew that if I was going to sleep I had to relax, but there was no sign of it yet. Yet I was physically tired. The humid heat and the expense of emotion had tired me like a long walk.
There was a tap on my door. The little man who acted as receptionist in the evening was there. ‘Monsieur is wanted on the telephone.’
‘Will you say—will you tell the caller that I’m out.’
The next morning the weather had cleared again, though there was more wind. I breakfasted on the terrace early, and got into my car and drove to Nice.
I was too early for Charisse, who arrived back at his house about noon. We lunched together and talked. He was adamant that a double interval in Paris would prejudice the success of the play. More and more the public expected the single break and resented two. I said I would not tolerate the sandwiching of two acts together, but might consider breaking Act Two somewhere if an appropriate place could be found. With quiet authority he suggested a place, and at once I saw that this was not only possible but might give a new and original slant to the last lines before the curtain. I agreed to consider it, and if I accepted the suggestion said I would write in a few extra lines at the beginning of the new act. It was all very civilised, and even our disagreements were cerebral and not emotional. Such a relief, even if only for an hour or so, to ignore the gnawing pain in my stomach and consider the purpose for which, I hoped, I had been born into the world. It would be lovely, I thought, if Alexandra Wilshere did not exist.…
I left about seven and crawled back through the streaming traffic to Cap-Ferrat. At the hotel there was a message. Would I ring the Villa Alberta, 79–97–73. I threw it in the waste-paper basket and took a bath and changed my clothes. Dinner somewhere in the town perhaps. I wasn’t hungry. A quick meal and early to bed. Last night I had not slept. Downstairs and over to the Renault. Just for a moment I thought there was a mistake for there was someone in the passenger’s seat. The glow of the cigarette end was the first warning. I opened the door and the interior light came on. It was Alexandra.
I said: ‘What do you want?’
She did not reply for a moment, being busy with her
cigarette. I stared at her, my heart doing somersaults. Perhaps that accounted for my roughness, I don’t know.
‘Are you going out?’ she said.
‘I was going out to dinner.’
‘D’you mind if I come?’
It was on the end of my tongue to say yes, yes, I do mind if you come, for I cannot stand lies between lovers, but I knew if I said that she would leave me and go, and that would be the end for ever. So I sat in the car beside her, but kept the door open, one foot out.
She said: ‘Would you like me to explain about last night, or am I satisfactorily condemned without a hearing?’
‘There’s no satisfaction in it, believe me.’
‘But plenty of condemnation.’
‘Good God, I’m not your judge. What I think doesn’t make anybody’s law.’
I drew in my foot and the door shut and the light went out.
Some people from the hotel went tramping past. She said: ‘ It’s a bit public here.’
I put in the key but didn’t start the engine. Her cigarette smouldered between her fingers.
She said: ‘ I went to Villefranche to see Kathleen at two. We talked for a bit, but she had to catch the six forty-five plane; I didn’t know that. She left at five and I was going to catch the bus back. Trevor Dain saw me and offered me a lift. There wasn’t any rendezvous about it, it just happened. After I’d got in the car he said he had to go up to Eze first. I’d plenty of time and it didn’t matter. When we got up there we walked through the old town; I hadn’t been before. It took longer than I expected: then he had to see this man, Tony Waterhouse, who’s a sort of eccentric architect; Trevor’s bought a piece of land here and wants Tony to design the villa. Tony asked us to dinner. I said I couldn’t but they persuaded me. It would have been a bit hard to make a scene about it. As it was, it was a struggle to get Trevor away when I did … Then when I came in last night you were there and looking like thunder, so I told the first lie that entered my head. That’s all.’
I was blocking the car behind me, and the man put his head in the window and asked me to move. I drove off. We dined at Cappa’s in the village, off melon au Porto, fried chicken and some sort of a pleasant local cheese.
It was curious to observe oneself and to watch how long the accumulated anger and jealousy and resentment took to drain away. Probably five minutes before the last was gone.
Then one stands aghast that it ever existed.
I told her as much. She smiled. ‘Love is possessive, isn’t it?’
‘Possessiveness can’t work only one way. That’s what I’m trying to make it do.’
‘Temporarily perhaps.’
I put my hand over hers. ‘Forgive me.’
‘Try to understand, Morris. I’m fond of David McNair—we have something of the same background, many of the same tastes; we get on well together; I like him. But Trevor Dain means nothing to me. He’s—agreeable. But I don’t care anything for him. Try to understand.’
I said: ‘I’m not playing fair with you, Alexandra. I’ve got to from now on. I promise you I’ll tell Harriet … give me—how long? This is August. Give me till the end of September. I’ll undertake to tell her before the thirtieth of September. That’s an absolute promise.’
‘All right …’
‘To think I’ve only four days here and poisoned one of them with a misunderstanding.’
‘It’s the way things happen.’
‘But they shouldn’t, they shouldn’t … I’ve always seen myself as a reasonable man.’
She put her other hand on top of mine. ‘Now yours.’
I stared at her, only half comprehending, then put my left hand on her right. She drew her other hand from under my right hand and put it on top of the others. Catching the mood, I did the same with my right hand, and in a moment we were playing the childish game and dissolving into laughter. It was perhaps the surest and wisest solvent for the tension there had been.
After dinner we got in the Renault and drove out of the town. At the first opportunity I stopped in a dark alcove and took her in my arms. But cars kept passing and their headlights would flicker along the side.
I said: ‘Let’s go up in the mountains.’
I drove through Beaulieu and up one of the long hair-pin climbs to the Moyenne Corniche. This was busy and I went up again to the Grande Corniche, the original Route Napoleon, and drew in on to the Place de la Justice, a big plateau surrounded by heaths and fragrant bushes. Here there was no one. We left the car and walked off through the heather. Far below was the coastline, a nouveau riche woman glittering with too many jewels.
Presently we lay down and made love. It was a necessity born of a month’s separation, but compared to Paris it was hideously unsatisfactory: a passionate unsophisticated fumbling in the dark, in a temperature twenty degrees less than that of the coast a thousand feet below, among the heather and the bickering cicadas.
We sat up eventually, and I said sorry, sorry, it shouldn’t have happened like that; oh, darling, forgive me, I wanted you so much. She put a hand over my hair, pushing it away from my face, and said let’s go; I don’t like it up here; let’s go.
So in a rather dismal silence we drove back, unpicking the great head of the Préalpes, hairpin by hairpin, down towards the noise and the lights; and the warmer air met us with each hundred feet we dropped.
We stopped in a café in Beaulieu and had coffee and brandy; then I drove her home.
I had a strange dream that night. I dreamt that I was lying beside my mother in the heather near the Place de la Justice. The sun was out, and she lay with one arm hiding her eyes from the sun. I got hold of her skirts to pull them down, and as I did so saw that the folds were seething with black ants. I tugged at the skirt and began to brush off the ants, but as fast as I shook them away more poured out from under her blouse. I took hold of her arm and shook it to wake her; she groaned and half turned; and as she did so there was some communication in my mind between the conscious and the subconscious, telling me that my mother was really dead and had been dead for eight years.
Now she was sitting up, but still with her arm before her face. The ants were running all over her arm, were pouring out of her mouth. She moved her arm from her face.
I jerked up in bed with a loud gasp, hitting my arm on the table, rocking the bedside light, clutching with mental fingers at the reality around me for reassurance, for comfort, for grace. I knew it wasn’t like that, I knew it hadn’t ever happened, I knew it was a dream. Yet I was profoundly, spiritually relieved that the face she had uncovered had been unspotted by corruption.…
I stayed sitting up in bed for a few moments and then exhaustedly let my head go back. Immediately I was in another world again, of half dream, half recollection. Old trailing recollections of early youth clung to my mind, as if reluctant to be jettisoned, memories almost forgotten, put away in some store cupboard of the brain; now the shock of the dream had left the doors swinging.
Illness in front of a fire. I was on someone’s knee. She was singing a song: ‘ ‘‘All the little waves. In all the little caves, Looked as if they would hot hurt a fly.’’ ’ Eyes pricking with sleep; sleep and sickness interwoven, so that one became the other and back again; and all the little waves in all the little caves …
… The first girl brought home, when I was fifteen. Long fair hair; the most beautiful creature, a goddess, a princess; everything she said pearly wisdom, everything she did a thing of joy. To tea and then to supper. When she had gone my mother let fall certain criticisms. She didn’t think it a good thing for a girl of her age to have permanently waved hair; she thought her voice rather shrill and her laugh tiring; and what unsuitable shoes. The scales fell. Worshipping a false goddess. I never saw the girl again.
And that maid who had stolen things. I hadn’t believed it until my mother said it, then one accepted without question. She had stolen the sea-gull feathers I had picked up on the beach on that holiday at Lulworth. And the Florentine mirror
was broken.
A warm soft hand holding mine. Red sky at night. ‘That’s Southampton,’ my father said. ‘Incendiaries, the same as Coventry. In a few hours we’ll be getting the first casualties brought in.’
The month when my father had the operation on his eyes. All the little waves in all the little caves looked as if they would not hurt a fly.
The light was quickening over the harbour before I fell asleep.
Chapter Eight
Although there had been moments in my stay in the South of France, I could not claim to have enjoyed it all, set about as it was by jealousy, anxiety and frustration. But in retrospect it seemed bright in comparison with humdrum life in a wet and steamy London.
Harriet was no better for her treatment, and while she had been willing enough to see me go abroad alone she seemed now to resent my tan and my good health. In the club one day I tackled Cecil Mallory but he was non-committal. ‘Early days yet, Morris. There are half a dozen other things we can try. But it may be a long job finding the right one.’
‘And if there isn’t a right one?’
He shrugged. ‘Why look on the black side? Medical science is changing every day; there are always new things coming up. The great thing is to continue the hospital treatment and not worry. Worry has killed more people than arthritis.’
‘It’s not death one fears in arthritis.’
‘Too true. I know how you must feel, and I know how devoted you are to Harriet. But don’t let’s be in too much of a hurry to get results. There’s plenty of time.’
Plenty of time, I thought, there’s about six weeks before my pledge to Alexandra runs out.
I went into hibernation to work. The first act rewritten, began to breathe and answer for itself; the second would not progress. Ralph Diary rang to say that the Dunnet management, who had originally taken up Rhesus Boy and then dropped it, were, as he had supposed they would be, willing to re-present it this autumn, probably in November, in London and without a preliminary tour. The terms were satisfactory.
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