The Vansittarts live now in the Villa Teresa just off the Avenue du Sémaphore, and they do not intend to move again. Their childless marriage has drifted all over Europe, from the hotels of Florence and Berlin to those of Château d’Oex and Paris and Seville. To the Villa Teresa the people from the other villas come to play tennis twice a week. In the evening there is bridge, in one villa or another.
Riches have brought these people to Cap Ferrat, riches maintain them. They have come from almost all the European countries, from America and other continents. They have come for the sun and the bougainvillaea, purchasing villas that were created to immortalize the personalities of previous owners – or building for themselves in the same whimsical manner. The varying styles of architecture have romance and nostalgia in common: a cluster of stone animals to remind their owners of somewhere else, a cupola added because a precious visitor once suggested it. Terracotta roofs slope decoratively, the eyes of emperors are sightless in their niches. Mimosa and pale wistaria add fairy-tale colour; cypresses cool the midday sun. Against the alien outside world a mesh of steel lurks within the boundary hedges; stern warnings abound, of a Chien Méchant and the ferocious Sécurité du Cap.
In her middle age Mrs Vansittart’s life is one of swimming pools that are bluer than the blue Mediterranean, and titles which recall forever a mistress or a lover, or someone else’s road to success, or an obsession that remains mysterious: Villa Banana, Villa Magdalene, Morning Dew, Waikiki, Villa Glorietta, Villa Stephen, So What, My Way. The Daimlers and the Bentleys slide along the Boulevard Général de Gaulle, cocktails are taken on some special occasion in the green bar of the Grand-Hotel. The Blochs and the Cecils and the Borromeos, who play tennis on the court at the Villa Teresa, have never quarrelled with Mrs Vansittart, for quarrels would be a shame. Jasper is her partner: her husband plays neither tennis nor bridge. He cooks instead, and helps old Pierre in the garden. Harry is originally of Holland Falls also, the inheritor of a paper-mill.
The Villa Teresa is as the Vansittarts wish it to be now; and as the years go by nothing much will change. In the large room which they call the salon there is the timeless sculptured wall, a variety of colours and ceramic shapes. There are the great Italian urns, the flowers in their vases changed every day; the Persian rugs, the Seurat, and the paperweights which Harry has collected on his travels. Carola and Madame Spad come every morning, to dust and clean and take in groceries. The Villa Teresa, like the other villas, is its own small island.
‘Ruby, don’t you think it’s ridiculous?’ Mrs Vansittart said a month or so ago.’Don’t you, Jasper?’
Mrs Cecil inclined her head. Jasper said:
‘I think that sign they’ve put up is temporary.’
‘If they spell it incorrectly now they’ll do it again.’
Two tables of bridge were going, Mrs Cecil and Signor Borromeo with Jasper and Mrs Vansittart at one, the Blochs, Signora Borromeo and Mr Cecil at the other. In the lull halfway through the evening, during which Harry served tea and little pâtisseries which he made himself, the conversation had turned to the honouring of Somerset Maugham: an avenue was, to be named after him, a sign had gone up near the Villa Mauresque, on which, unfortunately, his surname had been incorrectly spelt.
‘Then you must tell them, my dear,’ urged Jasper, who liked to make mischief when he could. ‘You must go along and vigorously protest.’
‘Oh, I have. I’ve talked to the most awful little prat.’
‘Did he understand?’
‘The stupid creature argued. Harry, that’s a polished surface you’ve put your teapot on.’
Harry snatched up the offending teapot and at once looked apologetic, his eyes magnified behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. Harry isn’t tall but has a certain bulkiness, especially around the waist. His hands and feet are tiny, his mouse-coloured hair neither greying nor receding. He has a ready smile, is nervous perhaps, so people think, not a great talker. Everyone who comes to the villa likes him, and sympathizes because his wife humiliates him so. To strangers he seems like a servant about the place, grubbily on his knees in the garden, emerging from the kitchen regions with flour on his face. Insult is constantly added to injury, strangers notice, but the regular tennis-companions and bridge-players have long since accepted that it goes rather further, that Harry is the creature of his wife. A saint, someone once said, a Swedish lady who lived in the Villa Glorietta until her death. Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch have often said so since.
‘Oh, Harry, look, it has marked it.’
How could she tell? Mrs Cecil thought. How could it be even remotely possible to see half-way across the huge salon, to ascertain through the duskiness – beyond the pools of light demanded by the bridge tables – that the teapot had marked the top of an escritoire? Mrs Cecil was sitting closer to the escritoire than Mrs Vansittart and couldn’t see a thing.
‘I think it’s all right,’ Harry quietly said.
‘Well, thank God for that, old thing.’
‘Delicious, Harry,’ Mrs Cecil murmured quickly, commenting upon the pâtisseries.
‘Bravo! Bravo!’ added Signor Borromeo, in whom a generous nature and obesity are matched. He sampled a second cherry tart, saying he should not.
‘We were talking, Harry,’ Mrs Vansittart said, ‘of the Avenue Somerset Maugham.’
‘Ah, yes.’
He pressed the silver tray of pâtisseries on Signora Borromeo and the Blochs, a wiry couple from South Africa. ‘Al limone?’ Signora Borromeo questioned, an index finger poised. Signora Borromeo, though not as stout as her husband, is generously covered. She wears bright dresses that Mrs Vansittart regards with despair; and she has a way of becoming excited. Yes, that one was lemon, Harry said.
‘I mean,’ Mrs Vansittart went on, ‘it wouldn’t be the nicest thing in the world if someone decided to call an avenue after Harry and then got his name wrong.’
‘If somebody –’ Mr Cecil began, abruptly ceasing when his wife shook her head and frowned at him.
‘No, no one’s going to,’ Mrs Vansittart continued in a dogged way, which is a characteristic of hers when her husband features in a conversation. ‘No, no one’s going to, but naturally it could happen. Harry being a creative person too.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch swiftly and simultaneously.
‘It’s not outside the bounds of possibility,’ added Mrs Vansittart, ‘that Harry should become well known. His cycle is really most remarkable.’
‘Indeed,’ said Jasper.
No one except Mrs Vansittart had been permitted to hear the cycle. It was through her, not its author, that the people of the villas knew what they did: that, for instance, the current composition concerned a Red Indian called Foontimo.
‘No reason whatsoever,’ said Jasper, ‘to suppose that there mightn’t be an Avenue Harry Vansittart.’
He smiled encouragingly at Harry, as if urging him not to lose heart, or at least urging something. Jasper wears a bangle with his name on it, and a toupee that most remarkably matches the remainder of his cleverly dyed hair. Sharply glancing at his lip-salve, Mrs Vansittart said:
‘Don’t be snide, Jasper.’
‘Someone’s bought La Souco,’ Mrs Cecil quickly intervened. ‘Swiss, I hear.’
Harry gathered up the teacups, the bridge recommenced. While the cards at his table were being dealt, Jasper placed a hand lightly on the back of one of Mrs Vansittart’s. He had not meant to be snide, he protested, he was extremely sorry if he had sounded so. The apology was a formality; its effect that which Jasper wished for: to make a little more of the incident. ‘I wouldn’t hurt poor Harry for the world,’ he breathlessly whispered as he reached out for his cards.
It was then, as each hand of cards was being arranged and as Harry picked up his tray, that a bell sounded in the Villa Teresa. It was not the telephone; the ringing was caused by the agitating of a brass bell-pull, in the shape of a fish, by the gate of the villa.
‘Good L
ord!’ said Mrs Vansittart, for unexpected visitors are not at all the thing at any of the villas.
‘I would not answer,’ advised Signor Borromeo. ‘Un briccone!’
The others laughed, as they always do when Signor Borromeo exaggerates. But when the bell sounded again, after only a pause of seconds, Signora Borromeo became excited. ‘Un briccone!’ she cried. ‘In nome di Dio! On briccone?’
Harry stood with his laden tray. His back was to the card-players. He did not move when the bell rang a third time, even though there was no servant to answer it. Old Pierre comes to the garden of the Villa Teresa every morning and leaves at midday. Carola and Madame Spad have gone by five.
‘We’ll go with you, Harry,’ the wiry Mr Bloch suggested, already on his feet.
Mr Cecil stood up also, as did Jasper. Signor Borromeo remained where he was.
Harry placed the tray on a table with a painted surface – beneath glass – of a hunting scene at the time of Louis XIV. Nervously, he shifted his spectacles on his nose. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said, accepting the offer of companionship on his way through the garden to the gate. Signora Borromeo fussily fanned her face with her splayed cards.
It was Jasper who afterwards told of what happened next. Mr Bloch took charge. He said they should not talk in the garden just in case Signor Borromeo was right when he suggested that whoever sought entry was there with nefarious purpose. He’d had experience of intruders in South Africa. Each one caught was one less hazard to the whole community: the last thing they wanted was for a criminal to be frightened away, to bide his time for another attempt. So as the bell rang again in the villa the four marched stealthily, a hand occasionally raised to smack away a mosquito.
The man who stood at the gate was swarthy and very small. In the light that went on automatically when the gate was opened he looked from one face to the next, uncertain about which to address. His glance hovered longer on Harry’s than on the others, Jasper reported afterwards, and Harry frowned, as if trying to place the man. Neither of them appeared to be in the least alarmed.
‘It is arranged,’ the man said eventually. ‘I search for Madame.’
‘Madame Spad is not here,’ Harry replied.
‘Not Madame Spad. The Madame of the villa.’
‘Look here, my old chap,’ Mr Cecil put in, ‘I doubt that Madame Vansittart is expecting you.’ Mr Cecil is not one to make concessions when the nature of an occasion bewilders him, but it was Jasper’s opinion that the swarthy visitor did not look like anyone’s old chap. He thought of saying so, sotto voce, to Mr Bloch, but changed his mind.
‘Better,’ he advised the man instead, ‘to telephone in the morning.’
‘My wife is playing bridge tonight,’ Harry explained. ‘It’s no time to come calling.’
‘It is arranged,’ the man repeated.
In a troop, as though conveying a prisoner, they made their way back through the garden. The man, although questioned further by Mr Bloch, only shrugged his shoulders. No one spoke after that, but similar thoughts gathered in each man’s mind. It was known that old Pierre would shortly be beyond it: after tennis one evening Mrs Vansittart had relayed that information to her friends, inquiring if any of them knew of a younger gardener. What would seem to have happened was that this present individual had telephoned the villa and been told by Mrs Vansittart to report for an interview, and now arrived at ten o’clock in the evening instead of the morning. When they reached the villa Mr Cecil began to voice these conclusions, but the man did not appear to understand him.
He was placed in the hall, Jasper and Mr Bloch guarding him just to be on the safe side. The others re-entered the salon and almost, immediately Mrs Vansittart emerged. As she did so, Jasper took advantage of the continuing interruption in order to go to the lavatory. Mr Bloch returned to the salon, where Harry picked up his tray of tea things and proceeded with it to the kitchen.
‘I told you not to come here,’ Mrs Vansittart furiously whispered. ‘I had no idea it could possibly be you.’
‘I tell a little lie, Madame. I say to the men there is arrangement.’
‘My God!’
‘This morning I wait, Madame, and you do not appear.’
‘Will you kindly keep your voice down.’
‘We go in your kitchen?’
‘My husband is in the kitchen. I could not come this morning because I did not wake up.’
‘I am by the lighthouse. It is time to fix the tablecloths but I stand by the lighthouse. How I know you ever come?’
‘You could have telephoned, for God’s sake,’ whispered Mrs Vansittart, more furiously than before. ‘All you had to do was to pick up the damn telephone. I was waiting in all day.’
‘Yes, I pick up the damn telephone, Madame. You husband answer, I pick it down again. All the time Monsieur Jean watch me. “It is no good this time to fix the tablecloths!” he shout when I come running from the lighthouse. My hand make sweat on the tablecloths. I am no good, he shout, lam bad waiter, no good for Grand-Hotel –’
‘I cannot talk to you here. I will meet you in the morning.’
‘This at the lighthouse, Madame?’
‘Of course at the lighthouse.’
All this Jasper heard through the slightly open lavatory door. It was not, he recognized at once, a conversation that might normally occur between Mrs Vansittart and a prospective gardener. As he passed through the hall again his hostess was saying in a clenched voice that of course she would wake up. She would be at the lighthouse at half past six.
‘He’s a waiter from the Grand-Hotel,’ Jasper reported softly in the salon, but not so softly that the information failed to reach anyone present. ‘They’re carrying on in the mornings at the lighthouse.’
Signor Borromeo won that night, and so did Mrs Cecil. At a quarter to twelve Harry carried in a tray with glasses on it, and another containing decanters of cognac and whisky, and bottles of Cointreau, cherry brandy and yellow Chartreuse. He drank some Cointreau himself, talking to Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch about azaleas.
‘Harry dear, you’ve dribbled that stuff all over your jacket!’ Mrs Vansittart cried. ‘Oh, Harry, really!’
He went to the kitchen to wipe at the stain with a damp cloth. ‘Hot water, Harry,’ his wife called after him. ‘Make sure it’s really hot. And just a trace of soap.’
He’d had a bad day, she reported when he was out of earshot. In his Red Indian song Foontimo’s child-wife – the wife who was not real but who appeared to Foontimo in dreams – continued to be elusive. Harry couldn’t get her name right. He had written down upwards of four hundred names, but not one of them registered properly. For weeks poor Harry had been depressed over that.
While they listened they all of them in their different ways disliked Mrs Vansittart more than ever they had before. Even Jasper, who had so enjoyed eavesdropping at the lavatory door, considered it extravagantly awful that Mrs Vansittart’s seedy love life should have been displayed in front of everyone, while Harry washed up the dishes. Mrs Bloch several times tightened her lips during Mrs Vansittart’s speech about the difficulties Harry was having with his creation of an Indian child-wife; her husband frowned and looked peppery. It was really too much, Mrs Cecil said to herself, and resolved that on the way home she’d suggest dropping the Vansittarts. There were all kinds of people in this world, Signor Borromeo said to himself, but found that this reflection caused him to like Mrs Vansittart no more. A cornuto was one thing., but a man humiliated in pubblico was an unforgivable shame. Harry was buono, Signora Borromeo said to herself, Harry was like a bambino sometimes. Mr Cecil did not say anything to himself, being confused.
At midnight the gathering broke up. The visitors remarked that the evening had been delightful. They smiled and thanked Mrs Vansittart.
‘She has destroyed that man,’ Mrs Cecil said with feeling as she and her husband entered their villa, the Villa Japhico.
Signora Borromeo wept in the Villa Good-Fun, and her husband, sustaining hi
mself with a late-night sandwich and a glass of beer, sadly shook his head.
‘She has destroyed that man,’ Jasper said to his friend in El Dorado, using the words precisely a minute after Mrs Cecil had used them in the Villa Japhico. In the Villa Hadrian the Blochs undressed in silence.
Mrs Vansittart lit a cigarette. She sat down at her dressing-table and removed her make-up, occasionally pausing to draw on her cigarette. Her mind contained few thoughts.
Her mind was tired, afflicted with the same fatigue that deadened, just a little, the eyes that people are rude about.
Harry sat at the piano in the snug little room he called his den. It was full of things he liked, ornaments and pictures he’d picked up in Europe, bric-a-brac that was priceless or had a sentimental value only. The main lights of the room were not switched on; an ornate lamp lit his piano and the sheets of music paper on the small table beside him. He wore a cotton dressing-gown that was mainly orange, a Javanese pattern.
The child-wife who visited the dreams of Foontimo said her name was Soaring Cloud. She prepared a heaven for Foontimo. She would never leave him, nor would she ever grow old.
Harry smiled over that, his even white teeth moist with excitement. He had known she could not elude him for ever.
The following morning Jasper watched from the rocks near the lighthouse. He carried with him a small pair of binoculars, necessary because the lie of the land would prevent him from getting close enough to observe his quarry profitably. He had to wait for some minutes before Mrs Vansittart appeared. She looked around her before descending a path that led to a gap among the rocks from which, later in the day, people bathed. She sat down and lit a cigarette. A moment later the swarthy waiter from the Grand-Hotel hurried to where she was.
The Collected Stories Page 96