by Alec Waugh
Her voice was deep, reaching beyond those tones that had come into it at that first lunch when she had talked of -Lillian Russell. And as she talked, as he lay there listening, as he drew the smoke into his lungs watching the red tip of her cigarette glow and darken, he began to relax, feeling his tautness loosen; forgetting his shame and terror, as her voice flowed on.
“I wanted you whenever you thought of Juan to remember that you had driven past it with me,” she said. “Whenever you thought of Cannes I wanted you to remember having drunk a vermouth cassis with me at a café there.”
As she spoke, memory carried him back to that first drive; he remembered things that she had said, things that he had noticed for the first time because she had shown them to him; he saw her again, bending over her glass. He was back into the past, back where he had been at ease; sure of himself and confident. He was no longer the abject creature whose fingers had trembled at his belt.
“That’s why I kept you back when lunch was over. So that I could show you my house. I wanted to be remembered by you against the background of my house. I wasn’t sure that I should ever see you after that one day.” She laughed, a gay and merry laugh. “I was in a funny mood that day, not knowing if it was the last. I was happy-sad. Sad because it might be the last time, happy because I was with you. Then when you told me that there wasn’t anyone in Villefranche or even in New York, oh, darling, what a reprieve that was.” She laughed again, a laugh that seemed to spring from a deep well of happiness, a laugh that transported him to the enchantment of that first afternoon.
“I knew then, darling, that everything was going to turn out all right. As it has,” she said.
She raised herself upon her elbow. As she leaned across him to stub out her cigarette, he was conscious, through the thin silk, of her breasts’ rounded firmness. His arms went round her. “And to think,” he said, “that it’s taken all this time for me to discover that I was in love with you.”
The use of the word “love” with all its memoried associations, its freight of boyhood’s dreams, served as a charm, an amulet against his fears. The mood, the temper that quarter of an hour earlier he had sought unavailingly to evoke, was on him now, unbidden. His hands slid along her shoulders, pulling the thin silk from under her. She raised herself upon her elbows. “Oh my dear,” she said, “my darling.”
It was a peace beyond anything that he had dreamed; a smoothing away of every doubt, a wrapping about of every cherished dream; the release of every hesitation. It was a peace, a canceling, a homecoming, a fulfilment; it was a sense, far more than it was passion, of being at last where he belonged.
“I never knew it could be like this,” he said.
Once again she laughed; a laugh into which seemed to be gathered every mood of happiness that her life had known, that her dreams had cherished.
“Darling, I seem to be ahead of you in everything.”
In silence they lay side by side; moonlight was streaming now across the bed, onto the dressing gown tangled with the rumpled counterpane beside her feet. Every few seconds the beam of the Nice lighthouse swept the far corner of the room. In the bar below a gramophone was playing. On the quay a group of half-drunken sailors were chanting out of tune with it, “Valencia, Valencia.” He watched, as he had watched earlier, the tip of her cigarette grow red and darken. The little fingers of their hands were interlocked. For several minutes now she had not spoken. He had never known her to be quiet for so long. He was grateful to her for her silence. He was grateful to her for her tact, her patience, for her appreciation of his mood, grateful with a gratitude that crossed the borders of adoration. Peace was upon him, peace and pride. He felt fulfilled and justified, with every nerve cell soothed.
He lifted himself upon his elbow. She was lying in the classic pose with one knee raised. Her beauty was beyond anything that he had dreamed. Slowly, in a long caress, he passed his hand over the long curving line between her knee and shoulder, slowly, possessively, as though inch by inch he would imprint upon his finger tips that line of beauty.
“How little I guessed when I saw you in that first bathing dress that you could look like this,” he said.
She chuckled. “But you did half-guess, didn’t you? Didn’t you say something about your being able to see the point in those Victorian bathing dresses?”
“So you remember my saying that.”
“Do you remember what I said in answer?”
“That it was nice to know that I was human.”
“I was beginning to feel quite hopeful then.”
They laughed together. It was lovely that they could laugh about it all, that they had not to be intense and solemn.
“But that first afternoon when we bathed up at your cistern.”
“Darling, do you think I didn’t notice?”
“I could hardly take my eyes off you.”
“I began to feel rather more than hopeful then.”
“But even then I had no idea that anyone could be so beautiful.”
Once again in a long intimate caress his hand passed over her, slowly, lingering as it passed.
“I had no idea you could be so beautiful. I had no idea that there could be such beauty in the world.”
“Is that all your Guggenheim fellowship has done for you? Didn’t you see any statues in all those galleries?”
“I didn’t think they were real; that they were portraits of real women I mean to say; I thought of them as composite creations. One feature borrowed here, another there. I never believed that any one single person, I never believed that there could be a you.”
He could manage to keep light still the actual words he used, but he could not control the tremor in his voice. In his finger tips as they fluttered over her, there was a new fierce urgency.
“Do you need to smoke that cigarette right to the very end?” he asked.
She did not answer, or at least not in words. She lifted her arms, clasping her hands behind her neck. He took the cigarette from between her lips and stubbed it out. He pulled the pillow from beneath her head. She half closed her eyes. “Tell me,” she whispered, “tell me.”
This time it was very different. His words not hers had played the prelude. Where before he had been guided, now he led. Before it had been the entering of a long-searched-for garden, the turning of a key, the opening of a door, the sudden bewildered flooding of eyes and nostrils with new scents and colors; the excitement of arrival blending with the relief at a long journey’s end, the need to relax, to rest, to be restored.
That was how it had been then. Now it was very different. Now it was a tireless search, a cataloguing of every path and plant, an enchanted recognition of each new scent and color, a turning from one flower bed to another in the resolve to leave no taste unsavored; it was a discovery of new, a return to old delights; it was a drowning, a saturating of every sense in the ruthless refusal to forget any former delight in the discovery of any new one; in the insatiable attempt to encompass in one blended, culminating instant every enchantment of light and shade, of taste and smell and color that the garden offered. It was breathless, wild, tempestuous, yet beneath its surface fury was the profound tranquility of a deep swift river.
It was different, altogether different. And the silence that followed after it was different too. Where before he had been apart from her, grateful, fond, adoring, now he was in harmony, at one, utterly at one, with her.
“It’s strange,” she said at length, “but every hour for the last three weeks I’ve been thinking of this hour; I’ve been terrified lest it would never come; at the end of every day I’ve thought, That’s a day nearer to the eighth. I don’t suppose that a single whole minute’s passed in which I haven’t thought of you, but now that it’s actually come, I don’t know that I should really mind if I were to be told that I wasn’t ever to see you again after tonight.”
“What a thing to say!”
“Is it? I don’t know. Th’s is so perfect. We’re so very close. We may
not ever be so close again. If we could live in this memory of each other.”
“But we are going to see each other again.”
“Silly, of course we are. We’re lunching at the Cap tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. I don’t want to think about tomorrow.”
“Let’s not then, let’s think of all the yesterdays that brought us here.”
It was quiet now below the window. The gramophone in the bar was silent. The last sailor had been escorted either to his ship or to a refuge in the upper town. The patch of moonlight lay diagonally across the bed, a clean-cut line from hip to shoulder leaving Judy’s face in shadow. The room was twilit. but her voice came out of darkness.
“When did you first begin to think about me in this way?” she asked.
“Not till three hours ago. I adored you, but as one might a goddess!”
She chuckled softly. “And to think that I’ve been in love with you all this time. I feel rather cheated. Tell me truthfully what did you really feel that first time we met?”
They talked in whispers; the silence on the waterfront below seemed to enjoinder whispers as day by day they lived over the last three weeks, comparing notes, evoking confidences. “But surely you must have known when I said that.” “What were you really thinking then?” “But surely you must remember …” Never in his life had he felt so utterly at one with anyone, so surrendered and yet so masterful. And all the time as he talked his hands were moving over her slowly, fondly, so that gradually, softly the tide of his adoration swelled so that once again vibrant and purposeful his need for her was risen. Once again he was stubbing out her cigarette.
And this time, too, it was completely different. It was not the peace, the relief, the release, the fulfilment of that first entering of the garden; it was not that wild plundering of every fruit and flower that the garden cherished; it was a carefree temporary sojourning in one chosen part, chosen casually in the full knowledge that there were a hundred other spots, already visited, and to be revisited. It was light and gay; almost frivolous. “Darling,” she laughed, “what dark lines I shall have under my eyes tomorrow.”
And this time afterwards they were in no mood for cigarettes or whispers; close locked in each other’s arms sleep came to them unbidden, while the patch of moonlight moved slowly across the bed on to the floor. On the table beside his bed was a luminous-handed traveling clock. The hour hand was near the four when she awoke suddenly with a cry, her arm asleep. “Darling, look at the time. I must go really, right away.” But he could not let her go, not yet, while the day was still an hour distant. Eager, refreshed by sleep, he caught her in his arms. “Not till you can see the villas on Cap Ferrat.” She struggled to get away, but his hands were round her, firm, insistent.
Her teeth closed upon her lower lip. She sighed. She flung out her arms sideways on the bed, beating her fists like a drumbeat, shaking her head from side to side, then suddenly closing her arms about his neck, her nails pressed into it. It was a thing of seconds, followed by a long shuddering moan.
The sky was lightening above Cap Ferrat when at last she lifted herself upon her elbow. Tenderly she stroked his cheek.
“It may take you twenty years to realize quite what this night’s meant,” she said.
Chapter Five
Francis woke with the sunlight streaming across his face. He sat up, blinking. The hour hand of his clock was pointing between nine and ten. He had never slept so late before; his eyes ached and his throat was dry. He looked round him, puzzled, trying to collect his thoughts. In the ashtray on his bedside table was a pile of cigarette stubs, two-thirds of them pink-tipped. A tumbler half full of water was rimmed with lipstick. His foulard dressing gown was tumbled on the floor. He drew his hand across his eyes. On its palm was the scent of tuberoses. Yes, he remembered now. It all came back. On his chest of drawers was the picture on which he had been at work the previous morning, the picture that Judy had looked at when they had come upstairs. It was the last thing that she had done before she had asked him to turn out the light. That picture was the last thing that he had seen before he turned the switch. When he had last seen that picture none of it had happened. When he had last seen that picture he had had no conception that any of it would happen, that any of it could happen.
He kicked back the sheet, swung himself out of bed: slipped his feet into his canvas sandals, shuffled across the floor towards the balcony. Heat and glare struck up at him from the cobblestones below. The iron railing was hot under his hands. There was not a breath of wind. There was an oily shimmer on the water. It was going to be a scorching day. He had had a bare four hours’ sleep, and at half-past twelve he was to join the Marriotts at a lunch party at the Cap. Judy had brought him the invitation the day before. She would not be able to call for him herself, she had explained. She had to meet guests who were arriving by train from London. He was to go out by bus. There was an evening party later. It had been arranged that she should drive him back to Mougins, to siesta there, till it was time to start for it.
Yes, but that was what they had arranged in the afternoon. Everything was different now. everything was changed. Last night she might have said “I’ll be seeing you at lunch tomorrow.” But that was last night; what would she be feeling now. waking as he was waking after a few hours’ sleep with eyelids heavy, her throat dry, her temples throbbing. It was one thing to talk about “tomorrow” in the moonlight; tomorrow was quite another commodity under the hard morning light. He’d better call it off: or rather he’d better give her a chance to call it off: he could put it to her in such a way that it would be easier rather than harder for her to say. “Well, on the whole perhaps that would be better. I’ll drive down tomorrow in the morning and see how things are.” Tomorrow they would both be calmer, rested and refreshed.
He pulled on the foulard dressing gown and hurried down the stairs. The patronne greeted him with a smile.
“You are very late this morning, Monsieur Oliver. I hope this means that you enjoyed your party.”
The telephone stood on the bureau desk. The bureau was situated in the hall that divided the drawing room from the dining room, in the most public part of the hotel. Private conversation was impossible. But there would be no need for prolonged conversation. He would know from the tone of her voice what he should do. “Mougins 53-53” he called.
There was a pause, the inevitable, the invariable long pause during which he seemed to be listening in to every call that was being put through along the coast. “ ‘Allo Cannes” “ ‘Allo Nice” “J’écoute” “Lui-même” “ ‘Allo Cannes.” When finally a voice did answer him, it was a masculine and foreign voice; wrong number, he thought, of course. “No, no,” he repeated testily. “Mougins 53-53.”
But it was not a wrong number. It was the butler speaking. “Her Ladyship has just gone out. She has driven down to the station to meet Sir Henry.”
Pensively he hung the receiver back. Pensively he climbed back up the stairs. If Judy had just left, it would be an hour, at least, before she returned. She might not bother to come back at all. She might go straight on from the station to the party. But then she had other guests to meet. She would have, wouldn’t she, to take back Sir Henry first? There wouldn’t be room in the car for their luggage and Sir Henry’s. If she took back Sir Henry first, she would only have time to stay for a moment or two at the villa. If he were to ring up in an hour or so that was to say, most likely he would be answered by Sir Henry. There would be no point in that. He shook his head. He tried to work it out, but he got confused. There were so many alternative possibilities. I suppose I’ve got to go, he thought. It would look odd, explanations would be required if he didn’t. That was the one thing that would be fatal.
In the doorway of his room, he paused, noting again in the clear morning light the ashtray with its pile of pink-tipped cigarette stubs, the tumbler with its rim of lipstick, the picture standing on the chest of drawers. He walked over to the bed, lifted the pillow, held it a
gainst his cheek; it was scented with tuberoses. He had the sensation of something under his heart going round and over. It had been such a dream; he had never guessed that anything could be such a dream. He felt pride and exultation; exultation that anything so lovely could have happened to him, pride that it was through Judy that that loveliness had come to him, that Judy could have felt about him in that way. Mingled though with his pride was a sense of shame, of guilt. Judy was Sir Henry’s wife, the man who had honored and befriended him, who had trusted him: there was a sense of foreboding, too, mingled with his exultation. What was going to happen next?
He began to shave. His hand was shaking and he cut himself, an awkward nick under his chin, the kind of cut that would take a long time to heal. As he lathered himself a second time, he watched the blood ooze through the soap, the red stain spreading. It was still oozing as he dried his face. He examined himself with a cool detachment. What on earth had Judy seen in him? He had no illusions about his looks; his features were ordinary and conventional; he had never felt the least impulse to self-portraiture. If only, he had sometimes thought, he had an interesting ugliness. What had Judy seen in him? She had said that one never knew oneself what one really looked like. She had said that she had had this feeling about him from the very start. It was something he could not understand. He was not bad-looking, he knew that. Julia had told him that. He could imagine that a girl who had known him for some time, whose trust and confidence he had earned, might come to care for him, to love him. But how anyone could fall in love with him at sight, as Judy had said she had … no, he could not understand it. Was it just one of those caprices to which judging from recent English novels like Antic Hay and The Green Hat, fashionable Englishwomen were extremely subject? It could not be that. He could not believe that it was that. He could not bear to believe that it was that. But if it wasn’t that, what was it? Doubt and foreboding were mingled with his exultation. What was to happen now?