by Alec Waugh
“That is a point, but all the same I can’t imagine you not working even if you married a millionairess or became the heir of one. That’s the way you were brought up. Work was a religion. They tried to bring me up that way, but it didn’t work: the world was a different place by my time; it may not have been to them, but it was to me. I didn’t think the structure stable. I felt it was undermined; and I was right, wasn’t I? You’ve only got to look round you. It’s happened in Russia. It’s happened in Germany: it’s half happened in Italy. It’ll be happening here quite soon; in Spain, probably, a little earlier. We shan’t be able to stop the rot in England so much longer. Another war and we’ll be finished. Why shouldn’t I live here in the sun for the short while I can?”
Guy was reminded of that last dinner in Rutland Street before Franklin left for Portugal. That was the first time that Franklin had displayed any need to justify himself: always up to then he had disarmed criticism by his self-confident unawareness of any need for criticism. But that evening at the flat he had not spoken with the angry vindictiveness that now all of a sudden came into his voice.
Guy was to remember this tone later; was to appreciate its full significance, but now he followed his own train of thought. He remembered how in the Christmas of 1916 when there had been talk of peace, one of the strongest arguments for continuing the war had been the need ‘to keep faith with the fallen’, to ensure that their children’s future should be secure. A patched-up peace, so the argument had run, would only mean another war in ten or fifteen years’ time, in which the sons and brothers of the men who died on the Somme would be involved.
So the war went on; another three million men, the flower of a generation, lost their lives: and heaven only knew how many million more died afterwards, by pestilence and hunger, by revolution and by civil war. And what was there to show for it? The Kaiser’s tyranny had been supplanted by the Nazis’; the O.G.P.U. had taken the Cheka’s place. The little finger of the new tyranny was thicker than its predecessor’s loins. The victors were exhausted and impoverished. And the generation for whom the last twenty-three months of slaughter had been sustained, faced its future with shrugged shoulders; its motto was ‘Je m’en fiche’. What else but a lack of faith in the world’s future had been responsible a few years back for the wild behaviour of London’s Bright Young People? They had lived in the present because the future had been uncertain. That had been their inheritance: a lack of faith.
Could anyone now seriously maintain that from every point of view it would not have been better to have ended the war in 1916, before the political collapse of Russia and Germany; before the slaughter of Passchendaele; before America had been brought in, to deliver the final blow and to get no thanks for it; to become an object of jealousy and suspicion on the part of her former friends and to be left resentful of ingratitude. Yet who could have foreseen in 1916 that the world would have reached this impasse by 1935? One lived from day to day; one acted in terms of the day after to-morrow; one acted for the best; and finally nine times in ten one saw one had decided wrongly.
Next day Guy moved down the coast to stay with Barbara. He could not have encountered a more different way of living. Barbara was being true to her promise of a gipsy-type existence. She and Norman were living in their seventh residence since marriage. They called it a studio flat. It was half-way between the waterfront and the lower Corniche road. A kitchenette opened off a rather large room with a very large divan. In one corner primitive washing arrangements were curtained off. It was not exactly untidy since it was clean: but a painter surrounds himself invariably with a litter of easels, canvases, palettes, oil tubes, brushes. The owners had left behind them a good deal of luggage. It was lucky that they themselves travelled light. A large table in the middle of the room, off one corner of which they ate, was covered with the tools of Norman’s trade.
“Wouldn’t Mother be horrified,” was Barbara’s introduction of it. For herself, it was exactly what she wanted. She loved cooking, she insisted, though her cooking as far as Guy could see consisted of emptying a tin into a saucepan. She also loved marketing, she said; but her shopping consisted of filling a string bag with bread, fruit, cheese, and butter.
“We live continentally, we breakfast out,” she said.
They joined Guy each morning on the hotel terrace for rolls and coffee.
“Then we have a picnic lunch,” she said.
Norman went sketching every morning. Usually she went with him. Sometimes she busied herself with what she called household chores; having her hair fixed or writing letters or sunbathing under the embankment: lunch consisted of sandwiches, a long roll sliced through to accommodate a slice of ham and lettuce; a few hard-boiled eggs and two bottles of vin du pays. “That’s the great thing about living in France. Wine’s cheap: and wine’s a food,” she said. “Dinner’s our main meal.”
Dinner was supposed to be the meal that Barbara cooked herself.
“I want you to tell Mother that I’m a cordon bleu. I’ll make you crêpes suzettes. That’s my speciality.”
It may have been, but he never sampled it. They had only one meal in the studio. Soup out of a tin, a langouste salad; brie and figs, with a bottle of champagne to make it an occasion, then they strolled down to Germaine’s for coffee and a fine.
Other times they went out to restaurants; to St. Jean Cap Ferrat, or into Nice to one of the little restaurants along the Quai des Etats-Unis.
“It seems silly when we have all this money not to spend it. One day we may not have it: then I’ll do the cooking,” Barbara said.
Under her father’s will, she had an income that was ample for the needs of their joint gipsy life. They accepted, both of them, as a matter of course the fact that he should be dependent upon her money. It took a long time for a painter to get established. Three, five, ten years. It would be Norman’s turn later on to pay the rent and buy Hispano Suizas.
“I feel so happy being able to do something for Norman,” Barbara said. “He needs sunlight; he needs to travel; I can give him that. It must be awful for a wife when she’s forced to feel that she’s a hindrance to a husband, that he has to give up things for her. When his success comes, I’ll know I’ve shared in it. Don’t you think his work’s improving fast?”
“As far as I can judge.”
It was a truthful answer. Though Guy went to most modern exhibitions, though he read critiques of modern painting and could hold his own in a discussion, he did not trust his judgment. He preferred Norman’s more recent pictures, but in the main that was because he preferred the subjects. Living under the grey skies of England, he liked sunny canvases; harbours with boats awash against their moorings; café tables in the shade of a bright awning; red geraniums in contrast to a dusty street; tanned figures stretched upon the sand; a bowl of figs and peaches on a cotton tablecloth. Guy preferred them to blue smoke-filled vistas of a London street and to leafless boughs against a winter sky: but he did not know if they were better paintings.
He had asked Roger what he thought of Norman’s work. He trusted Roger’s judgment. Roger shrugged. “He’s promising: but so are so many others. Do you remember that passage of Matthew Arnold’s, about so many promising to run well, so many seeming to run well. I think it depends on the way their lives go, on the amount of character they have, on the extent to which they stand or fall by their success as painters; there’s no reason why he shouldn’t get there. It depends upon himself.”
Certainly at the moment it looked as though the dice were loaded in his favour. He was getting the material that his talent needed. There were two types of Englishmen, Guy reflected; there was the type like himself who had a deep feeling of belonging to the locality of birth, who felt himself and was proud to feel himself cut off by water from the cosmopolitan of the Continent: there was the other type who was fretted by the confines of an island life, who needed a larger scope. The latter type had built the Empire; the former type had maintained the base from which those scatt
ered outposts had been organized, directed, and administered.
There was the same distinction among English artists; there were those like Constable and Girtin, like Morland, Tennyson, and Dickens, who drew their strength from their insularity, the seeing of one thing steadily and whole; there were the others, Turner, Byron, Landor, Browning who could not endure a cabined atmosphere, whose natures needed Greece and Rome, their landscape and their climate; who starved if they were not relinked with the long stream of culture that had fed England in the past. Norman was one of the latter. He was himself here; there was a lightness, a happiness about his painting that had before been absent. No doubt because Norman was himself so happy. He had heard it often argued that art was produced to compensate for personal frustration. Could it not also be an expression of delight, of the sense of wonder which had transfigured life and landscape for the early Italian masters?
“I think you’ve put a lot into his work, or rather there’s a lot more in his work now because of you,” Guy said to Barbara.
“Is there? Have I? I should like to think there was. He’s given me so much. I didn’t know it was possible to be so happy: to have someone of one’s very own; someone who belongs to you, to whom you belong. It’s what I’ve wanted all the time, without quite knowing it. How could I? You can’t know until you’ve had it, can you?”
He nodded. He supposed you couldn’t. It was something he couldn’t tell, something he had never known; to belong to someone who belonged to him.
“Where were you thinking of having your baby?”
It was not till the fifth day that he asked her that. He felt guilty, impinging upon their paradise.
“October is a long time off,” she said.
“It can be a trying month here: November can be most unpleasant.”
“We may not be here. We don’t know where we’ll be. That’s the whole point of our scheme of living.”
“There’s a lot to be said for having it in England.”
“Is there? What?”
“For one thing, Mother. She’s alone. It’s only a very little while ago that she became a widow. She needs something to fuss over. She’s bound to worry about you being all this way away. She doesn’t trust French medicine.”
Barbara pouted. “How very old-fashioned of her. There are perfectly good doctors here.”
“I know, but moving around the way you do, you can’t be sure of finding the really good ones.”
“A great many English people live abroad. They could advise us.”
“But don’t you think you’d be a great deal more comfortable in Highgate? Apart from that it might be a good thing for Norman to show the dealers what he’s done. You’ve been away eighteen months. It doesn’t do to get out of touch. You have to go back every now and again. This seems as good a time as ary. The last month anyhow you’ll have to stay fairly quiet. Norman wouldn’t be able to get much work done. It might make it easier for him. Anyhow, think it over.”
He did not stress the point. He did not want to appear to interfere. But since he had seen the way in which Barbara and Norman lived, he felt that there was quite a lot, very nearly everything in fact to be said for their going home. Probably they would realize it themselves when the time grew nearer.
On his return he would tell his mother that he believed he had convinced them; he would set her mind at rest, adjuring her not to mention in her letters that there was a possibility of their coming back; then a little nearer the time he would drop a note, recapitulate his arguments. He had planted the seed now.
He had been happy at Mougins with Franklin. He was even happier in Villefranche with Barbara: so happy that he decided to stay on a few more days.
“But you mustn’t think you’ve got to look after me,” he said. “In fact it’s high time I did a little browsing on my own. Tomorrow I’m going in to Nice. I’m not sure if I shall be back for dinner. I’ll leave you to yourselves.”
They would be glad probably of a day together. As he took his place in the blue bus that swept every half-hour into the Place du Marche, he had no sense of premonition; nothing warned him that he was on his way to meet the second crisis of his life.
It was a coolish sunny day and he took things quietly. As he was sauntering from the Place Massena, northwards up the Avenue de la Victoire, thinking that it was almost time for lunch, his attention was caught by a crowd gathering noisily in a side street. Crossing to investigate he saw standing by a taxicab, a suitcase in each hand, a tall and youngish girl who did not look French, and was clearly the centre of attraction.
He pushed his way through the crowd.
“Now what’s all this about?”
He set the question in English first and then in French. But before the girl could speak, the taxi driver and three friends of the taxi driver, had embarked on a simultaneous and corroborative explanation. They had been cheated, grossly cheated. They had brought the young lady all the way from Monte Carlo. They had brought her to the address that she had given. Now she refused to pay. They could not think why she should refuse to pay. She seemed an affluent young lady. She had tried to explain, but they could not understand her French. Young ladies who could not speak French should not engage taxicabs. They were suggesting that in payment of the fare they should take one of her suitcases or perhaps the wrist-watch, which might or might not be made of gold. They spoke as Mediterranean taxi drivers do on such occasions with a mixture of moral indignation and crafty avarice. He turned towards the girl.
“It’s quite ridiculous,” she said.
She spoke with an American accent. At close quarters she looked even younger than she had from across the street. She could not be much more than twenty. She was slim and fair-haired and tall, with a fresh complexion. Her cheeks were a little flushed. She was possibly a little angry. But there was no sign of alarm upon her face.
“It’s quite ridiculous,” she repeated. “I was in Monte Carlo. Last night I lost all the money I had with me, at the tables. I’d only enough for my hotel. But I had authority to cash cheques at this bank in Nice. I thought the best thing was to hire a taxi and drive over. When I got here I found the bank was closed.”
“You would. It’s a public holiday.”
“Oh.”
“So I think I’d better settle up this taxi now, then we can decide what’s best to do.”
Ninety francs were marked upon the meter. He gave the driver a hundred and picked up the suitcases. They bore the name Eileen Burrows.
“After all that, we’d better have a drink,” he said.
“That’s how I feel.”
They chose a café in the Place Massena.
“Do you know anybody here?” he asked.
She shook her head over her vermouth cassis. “There must be someone. But who or where I’ve no idea.”
“Then as there’s no chance of your being able to get any money until to-morrow, I suggest that you regard yourself as my guest till then.”
“That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it?”
“Have you booked a room?”
“Not yet. I thought I’d look around till I saw some place I liked.”
“I’m at Villefranche. At the Hotel Welcome. You might as well come there.”
“It looked delightful from the train.” She spoke cheerfully but calmly, accepting the unusual situation with an engaging equanimity.
“To an Englishman like myself, it seems very strange to see a young girl travelling all over Europe by herself,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Whatever harm could come to me in Europe?”
“You’d got yourself into a bit of a mess this morning.”
“Being rescued is rather fun,” she said.
He had planned originally to lunch at one of the Alsatian restaurants, off Sauerkraut and pickles and cold ham. But a hot Brasserie in the centre of the town was no place for a companion such as this. He directed the fiacre to the left, to one of the small low-roofed restaur
ants on the front along the Quai des Etats-Unis.
“It’s Italian. But Nice was Italian once,” he said.
He ordered her salade Nicoise, a loup and zabaglioni. A small boy with a guitar perched himself on the sea wall in front of them and played extracts from Italian opera. She chattered away easily and friendlily, telling him about herself. She had been born, she told him, in New York “which very few New Yorkers are”, her parents had an apartment in the East Nineties between Madison and Park and a small farm in New Jersey where they went each summer. “Nothing elaborate, just a picnic place; no servants or anything.” She herself, she told him, had just left Vassar. She was going to start working soon, but an aunt had left her a legacy of two thousand dollars which wasn’t enough to invest, “so I decided to spend it on a trip.”
She had crossed tourist on the Ile de France. She had come down the Rhine. She had ‘done’ Austria and Italy and Switzerland. She was going to stay a fortnight in the South of France, then a week in Paris, spending what little money she had left on clothes; then she was catching the Lafayette from Havre.
“You aren’t coming to England then?”
She shook her head.
“Everyone tells me the same thing about it, that it’s no good going unless you’ve got friends to show you around.”
“You’ve me.”
“Your wife might not like me.”
“I haven’t got a wife.”
“What, not married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“Not even that. A bachelor from the start.”
“Why, are you very poor?”
He laughed. “Do you imagine that the only reason for not marrying is that one can’t afford it?”
She joined him in his laughter; a fresh and jolly laugh. “I’m sorry, but it surprised me rather. I won’t say that you look married, but you don’t look the kind of man who wouldn’t marry.”
It seemed to him that there was a new interest for him in her eyes and when he told her that he was a wine merchant, she began to question him with curiosity.