by Ann Bridge
But when she had gone upstairs he went out again to the café over the river, ordered a beer, and sat looking down the perspective of lights, thinking about her. Having her on his hands like this, shopping for her and with her, and all the fest of it, was a very odd business—and it was producing a very curious effect on him. To-night, after that gentle afternoon in the country together, he could no longer escape from the realisation that he had pushed aside the evening before. He was in love with Raquel de Verdura. There was no getting away from it. But generally, when one is in love with a woman, one is as it were defended from certain things for a certain length of time; one does not ordinarily at once start travelling tête-à-tête with her, stay with her in hotels, have to see her through hysterical collapses—least of all does one usually have her completely dependent on one financially. These things come later, when one is ready for them, and wills it so—after marriage, or when a liaison has been decided on; not before. But at this point in his relation to the Condesa every stage was being telescoped together, foreshortened, run into one, by the sudden need for her escape from Spain, and by her penniless condition. It was all very peculiar.
James Milcom rubbed his big black head, as he sat before his glass of beer. He was an Irishman even more than he was a Yorkshireman, and therefore reacted to everything after the manner of his race, which is different from that of all other people. Quite apart from his almost shy personal avoidance of love, to his enormous emotional fastidiousness opportunity acted as a deterrent, not as a stimulus; called off his senses, and set his mind perversely and actively to work. In the inn garden at Arles-sur-Tech, idling away the afternoon in unexpected tranquillity, he had loved the thought of staying there with Raquel; being boxed up in a hotel with her sent him out to the café, to sit rubbing his head and thinking how odd and tiresome it was that he, of all people, should have to fall in love with a White. He thought too, more gently, that he had no idea how she felt—that probably she didn’t know herself, and no more than he, wished or was ready to be in love at this moment. Or did he wish it? Half awed by the answer which his heart gave to that question, he pushed it vigorously to one side. He was in love, anyhow; there was no escape now.
Chapter Three
This Side—St.-Jean-de-Luz
It is often quite hot in St.-Jean-de-Luz in October. Mr. Oldhead, sitting in the sun outside the Bar Basque with his wife and daughter, registered the fact gratefully. Among much which he disliked or felt bound to disapprove of, he could cordially approve of the heat—little as he admired the resultant dress worn by most of those about him. During the latter part of the Spanish civil war St.-Jean-de-Luz was crowded with journalists, upper-class Spanish refugees, and diplomats, grafted onto the normal population of French residents, British villa-owners, and the inevitable itinerant Americans—the people sitting all round Mr. Oldhead, at other little tables covered with orange and white checked Basque linen, belonged to one or other of these various categories, and were brightly and incompletely attired in various forms of beach-trousers, sweaters with short sleeves, gaudy sandals, and dark glasses with white rims. Mr. Oldhead shifted his chair a little, to get the sun more fully on his back—he was delicate and rheumatic, and the warmth soothed his painful muscles in a most agreeable way. The light was good too; it shimmered on the neat little saw-edged leaves of the bay-trees which stood in tubs down the edge of the long narrow group of tables, it glittered off the lustrous foliage of the big magnolias bordering the street. One would be able, he reflected, to do some rather interesting photography here. But he did not allow his satisfaction to become apparent; he sat sipping his orangeade with that expression of rather sulky discomfort so common in elderly Englishmen abroad until they know a place well enough to feel—and look—as if they had bought it.
Mr. Oldhead had not yet bought St.-Jean-de-Luz—he had in fact only been there a week. But his wife and daughter, less exacting and less self-conscious, had already decided that they liked it. Mrs. Oldhead was a woman of thirty-eight, and some twenty years younger than her husband; lively and still good-looking, in an unsophisticated way, with her Irish eagerness for fun and interest of any sort undimmed, she sat drinking her vermouth-and-soda and watching the people about her with considerable enjoyment. She liked having people to watch, to speculate over, and if possible to hear gossip about, and the strip of pavement outside the Bar Basque was thoroughly promising in all these respects.
A waiter in a white-jacket, with a glossy black head, blue jaws, and an unusually self-satisfied and impertinent expression, even for a continental waiter, emerged from the restaurant with a tray of glasses, which he carried to a table; the group of men round it greeted him cheerfully, and he remained standing by them, talking and laughing, flashing his white teeth. Rosemary Oldhead gave her mother’s arm a little tweak.
“That’s Ladislas,” she said, indicating the waiter. “He’s the spy.”
Mrs. Oldhead studied the waiter with interest; Mr. Oldhead looked sceptical.
“Who does he spy for?” he asked.
“At least four different governments,” Rosemary said, with a small giggle. “It’s no good looking down your nose, Daddy—those are journalists he’s talking to now; at least one is, that lanky one with the yellow hair. He’s Hooters.”
“What’s his name, darling?” Ethel Oldhead enquired, shifting her attention from the spying waiter to Hooter’s local representative.
“Hever—Tom Hever. Oh, and look—” Rosemary lowered her voice and leant across the table towards her mother—“there’s the Duquesa de las Illas; there, in black.”
Mrs. Oldhead looked obediently at the woman who now crossed the pavement and stood, accompanied by a man in white trousers and a blue blazer, looking round for a table. She was in deep mourning; her face was made up in a peculiar tone of orange, and the front rolls of her black hair were bleached by peroxide to a sort of creamy bronze; her lips and nails were a deep carmine. Mr. Oldhead surveyed her with distaste.
“She looks no better than she should be,” he observed.
“Yes, she does look a bit tartish,” Rosemary agreed.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” her Father remonstrated.
“I thought it was what you meant,” said Rosemary equably.
“Who is she, anyhow?” Mrs. Oldhead asked, with the double motive of keeping the peace and satisfying her own curiosity.
Rosemary told the story—a common one in the Civil War, but appalling in its completeness. The Duquesa’s husband had been murdered by the Republicans more than a year before; she herself had escaped—first to Franco Spain, then to France.
In telling it, Rosemary used the expression “The Reds.” This called forth a protest from her Father.
“Why can’t you give them their proper name, and call them the Republicans?”
“Sorry—Republicans, then.”
Mr. Oldhead, like many Englishmen of his age and class, was secretly an intellectual Red; that is to say his Liberal outlook and traditions, and his hatred of any form of dictatorship or interference with freedom of thought and speech made him feel, rightly or wrongly, much more sympathy for the Barcelona government than for that of General Franco, particularly since the Italian intervention in Spain which had, in his view, aligned the latter with the dictators. Like many other people whose information was derived mainly from their favourite newspaper, he tended to assume that all light and learning in this conflict was on one side. At first he had merely been impatient with a local quarrel in the course of which a large part of the artistic heritage of mankind seemed likely to be destroyed; then, with incredulous irritation, he had seen other European countries gradually becoming involved in a conflict which lacked even the dubious sanction of national or economic interests—to a sensible man, Mr. Oldhead felt, there was something wickedly absurd about a war mainly or solely of idea. Finally, ignoring or forgetting the French and Russian aid to Barcelona, he had watched the veiled but vigorous intervention of the two states w
hose form of government seemed to him most destructive of human values; and all this had made him, in his secret heart, an active sympathiser with the Republicans.
His wife and daughter did not share these views. Ethel Oldhead was not an intellectual of any description, red or white; she was a good-hearted person, shrewd about people in a rather simple way, inexperienced but intuitive. While Rosemary told the story of the Duquesa, Mrs. Oldhead watched the woman. Her face, under the startling make-up, was a little heavy; impassive except for the fine eyes. But Mrs. Oldhead got an odd impression that the Spanish woman did not somehow match her story; she did not look like a stricken widow—she had the occupied look of a woman with a job, though she was now sitting at a little table in the sun with a flashy-looking man, drinking Cuentra. Of course she hadn’t got a job, and her appearance wasn’t in the least that of a professional woman—but still she had that busy look. Funny.
For Rosemary, the change from a damp and chilly English autumn, in the damp and chilly class-rooms of her rather dull country school, to hot sunshine and sandal-wearing exciting foreigners of all sorts was one of the purest satisfactions that life had so far brought her. She was nearly seventeen, and her parents had decided that her education would on the whole benefit by a few months spent abroad, improving her already good French, and learning Spanish. Rosemary’s education was not a thing on which her family built very high hopes, in any case; she could learn languages, it seemed, but she never got anywhere in examinations because she could not do algebra, and anyhow would never work at anything which did not interest her. She was the complete product of the modern English system of upbringing, in which the parents count for little and the school, the film and fiction for much; she already knew more about such things as perversion, the liaisons of film-stars, the white slave traffic and drugs than her mother did, and talked more openly about them than her mother would ever live to do; but fundamentally she had the curious emotional innocence of this peculiar generation, and stood possessed of certain secret, strong, individual and on the whole very just ideas of right and wrong. Nothing surprised her, little shocked; everything amused and interested her. She was already taller than her mother, and not bad-looking; there was an engaging contrast between the exaggerated if becoming fashionableness of her hair-dressing, rolled immensely high above the forehead, with foolish curls over the ears, and the eager amusing face—the long thin nose with a tilt at the tip, the liquid brown eyes and sharply defined eyebrows, the brownish, very clear skin, so clear that the very brownness was almost a beauty. So far she used no rouge or lip-stick—her mother was firm about this; she had to confine herself to creams and powder, and the enormous elaboration of her pretty hair, in her attempts at personal adornment. Mrs. Oldhead was amused and resigned at thefuss Rosemary made about her hair; Mr. Old head, on the other hand, was disgusted and sarcastic. Beauty to him was in architecture and in Nature, which he photographed with a complicated camera, a telephoto lens, and infra-red screens to bring out distant detail. While Mrs. Oldhead was still studying the unstricken appearance of the Duquesa, and Mr. Oldhead was deciding silently that he would profit by the beautiful light and go out photographing that afternoon, a stout grey-haired man in a grey flannel suit appeared among the tables accompanied by a very smart woman with platinum blonde hair. Rosemary tweaked her mother again.
“Look—there’s Mr. Crumpaun. He’s Universal Press.”
“How on earth do you know who all these people are?” her father asked, amused.
“Well, he’s in our hotel.” Catching Mr. Crumpaun’s eye, as he stood looking for a place, she nodded to him.
“Good-morning.” The stout grey-haired man moved over towards them. “Pretty crowded here to-day—that’s the sun.”
“Why don’t you sit here?” Rosemary said, to her father’s dismay and to Mrs. Oldhead’s secret satisfaction. “My Father, my Mother—Mr. Crumpaun.”
“That’s very nice—we’d like to.” He brought over the platinum lady and introduced her—“Mrs. Jones—Mrs. Walter B. Jones. Her husband’s the American consul in Rivas Nuevas; but he pushed her out. Things are pretty hot down there.” They sat down; Mr. Crumpaun beckoned to Ladislas, the spy; drinks were brought. Mr. Crumpaun, who had a rather undefined Canadian accent, put through a few genial enquiries as to why the Oldhead family were in St.-Jean, but he did it very nicely—he was a comfortable sort of man. Having satisfied himself that it was for reasons of health, he next enquired if Mr. Oldhead was comfortable at the Grande Bretagne—“it’s the best food here, if the pub itself is a bit mothy.” And then, as usual, he began to discuss the war in Spain. Both he and the blonde were rather pro-Franco, it appeared; she used the expression “those Reds” more than once. Mr. Oldhead began to get restive, and at last asked her why she thought the Republicans were worse than the Franquistas.
“But they’re Red!” she protested, opening immense pale eyes, under plucked and darkened eye-brows.
Mr. Oldhead gave a helpless shrug.
“All Spaniards are a lot of killers, anyway,” Mr. Crumpaun observed easily—“but I think maybe the Barcelona lot got in a bit ahead of the others and did a bit more. There were some terrible things done. There’s a woman in this town who had her husband and son killed before her eyes in a way I couldn’t describe to you.”
“Do you mean the Duquesa?” Rosemary enquired.
“Yeah—know her?”
“No—do you?”
“No to mention. I know a bit about her, though. I hear she’s shifting to our hotel—food’s too bad at the Moderne.”
“Have all these people got money?—in spite of the Revolution and all that?” asked Mrs. Oldhead, whose first week’s bill at the Grande Bretagne had slightly alarmed her.
Mr. Crumpaun cocked a shrewd eye at her.
“You’ve hit on one of the Great Spanish Mysteries, Mrs. Oldhead—how the refugees live! Her husband was one of the very rich men in Spain, but I guess they’ve lost pretty well everything; all their property was over that side. I hear she’s going to take some sort of job, though—going back to run the female Falange, or something.”
“She must spend a good bit on her face alone,” Rosemary said, glancing again towards the woman in black. Mr. Crumpaun laughed.
Mrs. Jones leant over the table, and lowered her voice confidentially.
“They say she’s a spy, and one of the best they’ve got,” she murmured.
“Well, spies get good pay,” observed Crumpaun.
“But what does Franco want with spies out here?” Mr. Oldhead asked, a little incredulously.
“Don’t know what he gets, but it’s quite a racket, by all accounts,” said Mr. Crumpaun. “They’re supposed to have a big organisation this side of the frontier, and I was told the other day that the head of it stays quite close by here—Guéthary or Biarritz.”
“Who is the head?” Mrs. Oldhead asked innocently.
“Now you’re asking, Mrs. Oldhead! If I knew that, I’d know a lot.”
“I wonder if there’s any news of the Condesa,” Mrs. Jones observed to Mr. Crumpaun. “That’s the Duquesa’s sister,” she explained to the Oldheads—“the Condesa de Verdura. She’s the famous beauty, you know; they say she’s the most beautiful woman in Europe.”
“So far as I know there’s been nothing heard of her for months,” said Mr. Crumpaun. “She and the child were supposed to have been in Madrid—I’ve not met anyone who knows whether she’s alive or dead.” He turned to Mr. Oldhead. “That’s one of the real horrors of war, this time,” he said. “Half these people have no idea whether their nearest and dearest are dead or alive. Of course there are always rumours, but they’re worse than nothing.”
“The Conde de Verdura is alive—he’s in prison on the Barcelona side, somewhere,” Mrs. Jones volunteered.
“Yes, that’s so. Shouldn’t think that would break the Condesa’s heart, if she’s still got a heart to break,” said the journalist, lighting a cheroot.
“Why not?�
� Rosemary asked, her brown eyes immense with interest.
“Well—” Mr. Crumpaun hesitated, and glanced sideways at Rosemary’s parents. “He’s a bit of a tough guy, the Conde, and runs around rather a lot,” he finally said, inconclusively. Mrs. Jones had no such scruples, however.
“Rich as he is, they say he’d pretty well ruined himself over his ladies,” she said airily. “Why, he gave that dancer a pearl necklace that they say was worth a hundred thousand pounds.”
“It was his wife’s, anyway, so that won’t have broken him. But we needn’t go into all that, Madeleine,” said Mr. Crumpaun, with a significant glance at Rosemary. “The best of that family,” he went on, briskly changing the subject, “was the Duquesa’s brother, Juanito. He was one of the straight Spaniards—went in for politics, and really tried to pull things round. And when the war began they say he made a magnificent soldier.”
“You say was—is he dead?” Mr. Oldhead asked.
“Supposed to be—very stickily finished off by the Reds, when they caught him.”
“But do they kill prisoners of war?” Mrs. Oldhead looked appalled.
“Some of them, in this war; lots of them, I should say. If they’re dangerous people. He was dangerous, because of his politics—and his cleverness.”
“Anyway they said he was a spy as well—” Mrs. Jones as usual added her quota.
“I’m surprised that there should be so much spying when there’s so little actual fighting, relatively,” Mr. Oldhead remarked, addressing himself to Crumpaun. “Do you really believe that there is anything in all these stories?”