Where the Clocks Chime Twice
Page 30
I need not have been. I had written telling her the number of my flight, suggesting that she should be at the terminal at Nice, but to my surprise she was there, waiting at the airport. She was not alone. There was a fifteen-year-old girl, little and slight and very pretty : just like Cécile and yet unlike her, and very obviously her daughter. There was also a man in the middle thirties, fairly tall, healthy looking, broad, with a close-clipped dark moustache, whom you might have taken for an Englishman, whom she introduced to me as mon future.
Her future, Felix, was a press photographer and he had to the full the vitality and bonhomie of the press. He was bustling, friendly, laughing half the time. He was a frequent visitor at the airport, snapping arrivals and departures. He was on the best of terms with everyone. He and Cécile had met at the Plantation, where he had gone professionally to photograph the guests. He was the only person there whom she could meet on equal terms. He was, I could tell at a glance, exactly the kind of person needed to revivify her; ‘just the job’.
It was shortly after eleven that I arrived. In my letter I had asked Cécile to lunch with me in Nice, but she had already made arrangements for us to lunch at Cimiez. A bus ran past her villa. We left my luggage at the Terminal and sauntered slowly to the Place Massena. The sky was cloudless and the sun was shining, the gardens seemed very green and cool and flowery after parched Baghdad. Everyone looked gay and carefree in their bright beach clothes; there was a sparkle and animation about Cécile that had been lacking three years before.
Her flat was high on Cimiez, beyond the ruins of the arena, on the second floor of a villa that had been divided into flats. Cimiez is quite a place. Its air is fresh, and though many of the big houses have been divided up into apartments it has still an air of spaciousness; you can understand why Queen Victoria should have felt at ease there.
Cécile’s flat consisted of two rooms divided by a kitchen which served as dining-room. It was bright and airy, with a garden view and comfortable furniture. The lunch was excellent, hors-d’oeuvres with a rich and plentiful mayonnaise, ravioli, veal and spring beans, caramel cream. A Brie was offered, but my appetite was unequal to it. There was no lack of wine.
I spent eight days in Villefranche. On my second day I was joined by my elder son, Andrew, then just seventeen. It was his first time in France, and most days we made some excursion. Cécile and Liliane came with us. For Liliane it was a flattering adventure to have as her escort a tall young Englishman two years her senior, and I do not think Andrew found the experience irksome. We went into the hills to Grasse and Mougins and La Turbie and along the coast to Menton. How surprised I should have been in 1930 had I been told that in twenty years Cécile and I would be driving in a charabanc through Monte Carlo while our almost adult children gossiped together on the seat in front. I remembered what ‘the woman who knew Frank Harris’ had said about not necessarily regretting in middle age the things one hadn’t done. I felt glad that nothing had happened in the days when we played ‘Petit Cochon’ to prevent our tendresse from ripening to this full vintage.
One evening we dined in Villefranche. Although Cécile had never lived farther than ten miles away, she had not once been back there since her marriage. I think she was touched by the welcome she received. Many of her old friends were there: Vincennes with a patch over one eye and more inarticulate than ever; Mimi who had recovered his health and spirits, who had shaken off his cafard; Germaine, once a housemaid at the Welcome, now owning her own bar on the waterfront, with a married daughter settled in America. Germaine invited us to lunch so that when I got back to New York I could ring up Poupette and assure her that her mother’s fingers had not lost their cunning. Only one of Cécile’s closer friends was not among us, and he the least expected : Artur was married now and rangé, the father of a daughter; the husband of a woman as unlike as could be to the tap-à-l’ïil ladies of his heyday, a quiet, unostentatious femme de ménage. On hearing the news I was inclined to smile. The hunter tamed. I need not have. It was, he had told Cécile, what he had always wanted, or rather what he had known that he would want when he was forty. ‘Ma vraie vie, c’est maintenant,’ he said.
Which was something that I felt on this short visit about Villefranche itself. The place had become itself again. Once again you could be quiet there. Under the protection of the Société des Beaux-Arts its amenities are being sternly guarded. The waterfront that has attracted so many painters is not to be allowed to lose its harmony. There is no longer a hard line of lights along the Corniche Road to disturb your eyes as you sit over your brandy after dinner. Nor are you distracted by the busy buses as you sit at breakfast. Flower-boxes have been arranged upon the terrace so that you are cut off from the surrounding bustle.
The Welcome is a very much better hotel than it was in 1930. The original rather dreary dining-room has been reconstructed, and a balcony, on which you can lunch on sunny days and dine in summer, has been built above the bar. The food is better. The rise in cost is in proportion to the general rise throughout the world. The whole atmosphere of the port is cleaner, brighter, gayer; no longer malodorous and unscoured. A motor road has been built along the harbour; cars can drive up and park under the railway station. The waterfront has ceased to be a promenade for the young people—they have moved into the upper town—but even so it all looks very picturesque with its line of restaurants and tables set out under the stars. I have no right to be nostalgic, to recall the days when the Welcome was a club for painters and for writers, for typewriters and canvases; when lobsters were kept in a cistern under the Reserve; when no cars disturbed the nets along the cobbles, and in the evening the dark-haired girls sauntered in couples arm in arm while the young sailors eyed them. Painters discover a place, paint it, popularise it; then the tourists come and the painters move. In a way that has happened in Villefranche, but only in a way. The Welcome is a club no longer. But neither the Welcome nor Villefranche has been spoilt. I hope to spend many weeks there in the next few years.
Cécile has always typified Villefranche for me. She was in the first place the magnet that drew me there. In her youth she typified the quietness, the isolation, the self-completeness of the little port. After the war, in 1947, her apathy symbolised the eclipse of the personal and private happiness which existed in Villefranche in a way that I have found it in few other places. Now in 1952 in her reconstructed life, with its present contentment and in its promise, there is a symbol of Villefranche’s return to its charm and its apartness, the being different that had endeared it to me first. Cécile has known adversity, has suffered casualty, just as Villefranche has; but she has recovered, she is reforming her life in terms of what she was at twenty on a solid basis.
I had got this same impression in those other familiar places that I had revisited—Beyrouth, Baghdad, Damascus. It would have been easy on my return to write an article under some such heading as ‘We’ve got our Second Wind’.
But against that appearance of recovery and rejuvenation had to be set the headlines of the Korean War and the conjecturing of scientists as to what percentage of humanity would survive the explosion of the latest bomb. As I drove out to the airport I remembered the last time I had flown north from Nice, in July 1939. Then as now I had an October booking to New York. But when October came in 1939 I was in Dorchester, in uniform, instructing recruits in the intricacies of the Bren gun carrier. Where might I not, I wondered, find myself in three months’ time? For six months I had been living in the sun, in lazy countries where the clocks strike twice; I was headed for the cold climates where the clock strikes once and finally.
The aircraft lifted from the ground, flying south and circling over Beaulieu before heading north. There it lay below me, the long stretch of bays and promontories and mountains, with its hotels and villas, its yachts and its casinos, its garden walls bright with bougainvillaea and geranium. It all looked so exactly as it had on that July day in 1939 when I had last said good-bye to it from the air.
Perh
aps, I told myself, there lay the answer to my question. For over twenty centuries, from Alexandria to Marseilles, conquest after conquest had swept the Mediterranean seaboard, yet there it lay, in its unmatched beauty, enriched by each successive tide of culture that had washed its shores.
The plane swung north. A few minutes and we were over the Alpes Maritimes; we were in a kind of mist and it was hard to recognise the familiar landmarks, Cagnes and Grasse and Mougins. The mist thickened and became a cloud. The aircraft gathered height. Another minute and we were above the clouds, in sunlight; but below us the trees threw no shadows.
A steward brought me a copy of the London Times. The rainiest August England had known for fifty years was being followed by a sunless autumn. I smiled to myself. No doubt I could have made that lugubrious paragraph symbolic of my return to many problems, personal and professional, and to all the issues political and international that confuse and frustrate to-day the life of the individual. There was little that might not happen. But I had, as an amulet against apprehension, the knowledge that half an hour away, behind me, that lovely coast lay in the sunlight, a constant reassurance and reminder that whatever may happen to our individual lives, the things that we have lived for will survive.
1 To-day Seychelles is not even listed in the U.S. Consular Directory.
1 I have heard that Maurice Michaud has sold Northolme as a private residence and bought a hotel in town, The Empire.
1 Now Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke.
He played for Winchester at cricket and was engaged to Tallulah Bankhead.
Among other books by ALEC WAUGH
Novels
THE LOOM OF YOUTH
KEPT
NOR MANY WATERS
SO LOVERS DREAM
NO QUARTER
THE BALLIOLS
JILL SOMERSET
NO TRUCE WITH TIME
UNCLOUDED SUMMER
Travel
HOT COUNTRIES
“MOST WOMEN...”
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN
Biography
THE LIPTON STORY
This electronic edition published in July 1952 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 1952
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