by Alec Waugh
As he came back into the house, he met Marion in the hall. She was wearing a dark-blue coat and skirt and a wide-brimmed hat. She was carrying gloves and a small leather-bound prayer book. If last night’s scene had been staged in any other place, at any other time, he would be joining her now, to walk across the fields, to stand at her side in the small dark Norman church beneath whose rounded arches for eight centuries young couples had plighted their troths to one another.
She checked at the sight of him, but she did not flush. Her color was a little high. He fancied that she had put make-up on so that no one would notice that her cheeks were pale. She raised her hand, as he came towards her.
“No, please don’t say anything about last night. I don’t want you to feel badly. We’ve had such happy times. I’ve so much to be grateful to you for. I want you to have happy memories of me. You mustn’t feel badly because it meant more to me than … because it meant something different to me from what it did to you.”
Her voice was controlled and firm. There was a new strength, a new dignity to her this morning. Her refusal to pretend that last night had not meant something real to her was proof of it. She had become an adult person. You certainly are fine, he thought, as he watched her walk out through the front door, over the lawn, to the path across the fields. Had they met anywhere else, at any other time each might have been the answer to the other’s problems. A voice of premonition warned him that never again would he pass so close to the possibility of a lifetime’s happiness.
Sadly he crossed into the drawing room. Judy was there alone, arranging a bowl of flowers in the window. She was wearing a summer frock, one of the frocks that she had worn at Mougins. It was the first time that he had seen her in a summer frock since then.
“You wore that at Vence,” he said.
She nodded. She looked at him very steadily.
“I’m sorry that it should have turned out this way,” she said.
Into her voice had returned the glow that he had thought never to hear again, in her eyes was the fondness for which he had been so long nostalgic. The feeling of premonition that had oppressed him as he watched Marion cross the lawn, was dissolved, obliterated by this new sensation, by this rediscovery of the Judy that he had thought lost forever. She was just as she had always been. It was just as it had been at Mougins. All was not lost. Surely all was not lost then after all.
He took a quick step over to her; he caught her hand.
“Listen,” he said, and his voice was desperate. “I’m going tomorrow and it’ll be forever. I can’t ever come here again, not after last night. I can’t join you in Mougins either. But surely that needn’t mean … you remember what I said to you in that letter.”
“Darling, you said so many things.”
“I know, but the main thing I say about its being impossible if I once came down here … I said that then, but now it’s different. It needn’t be too late. We could still start a life of our own together. We could go to Spain.”
“No, no we couldn’t.”
Her voice was firm, the glow gone out of it. She pulled away her hand.
“It’s impossible. I’ve always told you that that was quite impossible.”
“Then What on earth did you think was possible?”
She shrugged. “Is there any point in our going into all that now?”
She had become once again the watchful defensive Judy that he had known over the last month. At the reappearance of that now familiar Judy, his rancor rose. He had been humbled and humiliated. He had been trapped into a false position. In this last moment he had to reassert himself.
“You kept on talking about the sweet time we could have, that we would have together. How did you think that we were going to have that time unless we ran away?”
Again she shrugged.
“Does it matter now what I thought?”
“Your eyes lit up that day when the Wessex Galleries took those pictures. You suggested I should take a studio in Chelsea. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You looked at me so strangely, challengingly, as though you were saying, ‘I told you there was a solution, didn’t I?’ What were you thinking when you looked at me that way?”
“Perhaps what you think I was.”
It was said as a challenge, or rather as the acceptance of a challenge, but it was said wearily. Her voice was haughty but in her eyes was the appeal unworded, “Why go on with this, why tear our nerves to pieces?” But the strain of the long separation, the accumulated irritations of the past four weeks, the humiliation he had had to face in front of Marion would not let him stop.
“Did you imagine that I was going to spend months down here, that I was going to join you in the South of France, that for half my life I was to be your husband’s guest, maintaining a facade behind which we, you and I, would sneak away every so often surreptitiously for a few snatched moments in a beach hotel or in a Chelsea studio? Was that your idea of a sweet time together?”
He was angry and his voice had risen, but she retained her calm.
“Anything I said now you’d just misinterpret but if you still insist on knowing just what I thought …” She checked. “No,” she went on, “I can’t explain; you wouldn’t understand, not in your present mood. But this you should know, this you must know. I couldn’t act a lie. I’m the last person in the world to act a lie. I’m a straightforward person, you should know that … that night at Villefranche. It was a mistake, I see it now. But at the time I thought, as far as I thought anything … afterwards, at least, I thought, ‘He must know now the kind of woman that I am, he knows the real me. I’ve given him all I have to give. I’ve given him a proof.’ I thought that after that proof you might find it easier to wait.”
“Easier to wait?”
“Aleck Moore waited twenty years for Lillian Russell.”
At that he lost his temper. It was, he felt, the most outrageous suggestion that had ever been made to any human being. Wait twenty years! What did she think he was: a lap dog? Was that what she thought American men were like? Had she fallen for that European twaddle about the enslaved American male? A torrent of angry words poured out; words that once spoken cannot be forgotten, for which the question of forgiveness cannot, exist, since they have poisoned at the root each flower of friendship. Wait for twenty through the succession of heavyyears! What did she think he was, that she should arrogate to herself the right to place a man’s life in chancery, denying him his inalienable right to freedom, to the pursuit of such a life and such a happiness as Marion or an equivalent of Marion could have given him. The conceit, the arrogance of such a proposition. The rancor of weeks poured out in a flood of tempestuous abuse. “To keep me dangling from your finger tips, to keep me your slave for twenty years, for twenty years!”
He repeated the words on a crescendo of mounting indignation, as though the very remoteness, the inaccessibility of that date stressed and explained the enormity of her offense. “For twenty years,” he said.
She raised her hand, checking him. “Sh,” she whispered. “There are people coming.”
He paused, listening. There were voices in the passage, voices that were moving towards the door. Another moment and they would be in the room.
He gasped, the full implications of the moment startlingly apparent. This was the last time he would be alone with her, these were the last words that he would ever speak to her. From now on until the Monday morning she would be a hostess, apart, avoiding him. The enormity, the finality of what he had done, appalled him. He should have known, he should have understood. His knowledge should have made him patient. Hadn’t he realized all those months ago in Villefranche that there was a part of her that never had grown up, and wasn’t her charm in large part due to that part that had remained a child, her vitality, her generosity, her perpetual effort to do things for her friends … was not the one the complement of the other? He should have known that, he should have been patient, should
have made allowances. He had failed her completely, hopelessly; and this was the end, inexorably, inevitably the end.
Lunch that day was for Francis the most grim experience in a month that had been well-stocked with grimness. It was a large and noisy lunch party. Richard Marriott who had appeared late with the announcement that he was suffering from an all-time high in hang-overs, had compromised with his hang-over to the extent of three Martinis and was now in the highest spirits. From her place at the foot of the table Judy matched him with badinage and repartee. Her eyes were sparkling. Her laughter rang out, clear and frequent. She did not seen to have a trouble in the world. No one could have believed that ninety minutes earlier she had been involved in a nerve-shattering scene. Had she forgotten it already; did she possess also a child’s capacity to dry its tears, to lose itself in, to adapt itself to the minute, or was she as she had called herself at Villefranche, a better actress than she knew? “I was so miserable under the surface,” she had said. Was she that now?
With an aching heart he looked at her. She looked so exactly as she had at Mougins, when she had dazzled him in those early days, with her charm, her vitality, her background of wealth and prominence, sweeping him off his feet with her generosity, her interest in him, her capacity to set him at his ease, to draw him out. He had been so proud then of her friendship. To think that the climax to all of that should have been that wretched squabble in the drawing room.
Opposite him two places away across the table as silent as himself sat Marion. Their eyes had not met since they had spoken in the hall. But they were acutely conscious of one another. From time to time he glanced at her. Never had she seemed to him more fine. With a heavy heart he remembered that first look that they had exchanged across the lunch table, remembered the sense of confederacy that had grown up between them on the golf course, the eagerness with which she had taken him into her confidence, her courage when he had told her the truth about her pictures. He recalled the easy carefree comradeship that had ripened day after day, growing deeper, tenderer, ripening till it had blossomed into the kiss that should have set the seal on it. The physical memory of that kiss was an acute ache along his senses; but even more acutely bittersweet was the appreciation, only now fully grasped, of the complete unqualified trust in him that had been implicit there. She had gone into his arms, courageously, with open eyes, with open heart, without reserve, believing herself to be at last where she belonged. To think that he should have betrayed that trust.
Slowly with its chatter and its laughter the meal dragged its way through the succession of heavy courses – the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the apple tart, the port and Stilton – that characterize an English Sunday lunch. It was close on three before they left the table. Never again, he told himself; never, never again. For no inducement that earth had for making would he sit through another meal like that. He was desperate, in a mood for which there was one cure only – alcohol in masculine society. In his room he had a full fifth of Scotch. It was Parker’s evening off. They would settle down over that flask after tea and make a night of it. He wouldn’t come down for dinner. He’d send down a note that he had a headache. He was looking round for the butler to send a message to Parker that he needed him, when a hand fell upon his elbow; he turned and there was Judy there.
“Could I have just a word with you,” she said, “and Marion?”
She took them upstairs to the room on the first floor that she called “her room”: the room of which she had written to him in her letters. It was the first time that he had been inside it. He looked quickly round him. It was a small room, overfull of furniture. He noted a small Sheraton desk, the desk at which she had written him those many letters, an enlarged framed photograph of a young woman with dark hair parted in the center, a white, green and purple ribbon, the suffragette colors, was draped about it. Sylvia Pankhurst, he supposed. Along one wall, pictures were crowded frame to frame. Between a Cézanne and a Duncan Grant was his own Villefranche canvas. The whole of another wall was lined with bookshelves. It looked a heterogeneous collection, all types and sizes, the cross shelves sagging beneath their weight. On the mantelpiece between two Staffordshire figures was a small silver ship.
She pointed towards two chairs. “Won’t you sit there, so that I can see both of you while I’m talking?”
There was a puzzled expression on Marion’s face as she took her seat, but also there was a “defensive one, an expression that he had not seen there previously, whose presence there accentuated his sense of guilt. Marion had no longer that same bright faith in things and people which had enabled her to meet each new eventuality with candor. Today she was on her guard; her eyes watching Judy carefully as she began to speak.
“I’ve asked you here,” Judy said, “because I owe you both an apology for the way I behaved last night. And I owe you, Marion, an explanation; an explanation that I want you, Francis, to listen to. I want to explain why things happened the way they did, why I behaved in the way I did. For what you don’t know, Marion, is this; last summer in the South of France there was between Francis and myself, I won’t call it a flirtation but a tendresse; it was the kind of thing that can happen very easily in a place like that. It is very easy to say foolish things on a warm terrace in the moonlight, and it is very nice to have foolish things said to you, particularly if you are an elderly and married woman and they are said by a young and an attractive man. It is very easy for two people to misunderstand each other in that atmosphere and it is particularly easy for English and Americans to misunderstand each other; certain words have not the same connotations, the same undermeanings for them both. I’ve an idea that Francis went back to America feeling he was under some kind of obligation to me. Possibly I encouraged him to have that feeling, because as I said it is very easy and very agreeable to talk and listen to nonsense in the moonlight, and because I knew that it would be six months before we met again and because I remembered that most things cancel themselves out in that time.
“Apparently on my side, though, six months was not as efficacious a medicine as I had expected, so that when Francis came here and I saw that he preferred, very naturally and properly, the company of a young and an attractive girl, I found myself to my annoyance and surprise becoming jealous. I told myself that for a woman of my age that was most absurd. I tried to pretend to myself I didn’t feel that way. I did my best to throw you into each other’s company, but I’m afraid the cure didn’t work. I behaved caddishly. I allowed Francis to remember that at one time he had thought himself under an obligation to me: so that last night when he should have spoken, he stood tongue-tied. I behaved caddishly to you both and I apologize to you both; and I wanted you to hear, Francis, the explanation that I made to Marion.”
She paused. If the confession had cost her anything, she did not show it. She was friendly and composed. She smiled good-naturedly.
“That’s all,” she said, “except just one thing more. That scene last night must have been a shock, a painful shock to you. It was to me. Francis tells me that he’s leaving here tomorrow. That’s a good thing, I think. But before he goes, I want you to promise me one thing. I’m not a matchmaker. I don’t know how you two feel about each other. You’ve all of your lives ahead of you. But I don’t want you two young things out of hurt feelings or false pride to slip out of each other’s lives without a reason. You’ve never been alone down here. You’ve been in crowds, with elderly people round you. I want you to promise me just this, that one day this week you’ll lunch together, just the two of you in London; then if you have anything to say to one another you can say it.”
In the half-dusk of the passageway outside, they paused, Marion and Francis, looking interrogatively at one another. There was one thing that it would be fatal to do now – he knew it well – to make any reference to what Judy had just said.
“It’s early. It’s a fine day. Why don’t we shoot some golf?” he said.
“I think that would be a good idea.”
“That’s the best by two whole strokes that I’ve ever done,” she said.
Her cheeks were aglow with exercise and health and pleasure in her performance. They were happily in tune as they drove back to Charlton. It was easy for him to say now, as the car swung down the drive. “Is there any day next week when it would be possible for you to lunch with me in London?”; easy for her to answer, “I think I could manage Thursday if that suits you.”
That evening for the first time since he had come to Charlton, Judy made it easy for him to talk to her. When the men joined the women in the drawing room, she rose from the group about the fireplace and crossing to the window seat, patted the cushion at her side. It was impossible to believe that ten hours earlier within ten yards of that window seat they should have fought so fiercely.
“That was pretty decent of you,” he said.