Unclouded Summer (4 page)

In the harbor at the foot of the hill, a small but smart, freshly painted liner was moored against the quay. She slowed down as she drove past.

“Whenever I see a boat about to sail I want to get on it.”

“Where's that one going?”

“Corsica.”

“Have you never been there?”

She shook her head.

“I can't think why. I'm always meaning to. It's just one of the things I've never got around to.”

“I'd thought of going there myself, but then I thought I'd get more out of St. Tropez and the places beyond Toulon.”

“But I thought you were sailing for America early in October.”

“I am. I've only just time to see them all.”

“Then that means you'll be leaving Villefranche fairly soon.”

“At the end of the week.”

“I see.”

She drove on in silence for a moment, but only for a moment; they turned into the quai Etats Unis and once again she was chattering gaily while they drove past the picturesque succession of bungalow-fronted restaurants. She pointed out one of them to Francis, La Maison Rouge.

“Henry says that they make better ravioli than anyone in Italy. He often gives parties there. And unless I watch him carefully he always misdirects our guests by telling them to meet him at the quai du Midi. He can never remember that
half the streets in Nice have been rechristened. He still talks about the Avenue de la Gare.” She chuckled merrily. “Poor Henry. He does hate the way the Riviera's changing. Every time I come back he asks me the same question. “What new horrors have gone up since yesterday?' “

She slowed down again as they turned into the long curve of the Promenade des Anglais. The narrow strip of sand past the Casino was a bright patchwork of beach colors.

“When we came here first seven years ago,” she said, “you'd only have seen a few French nurses picnicking; it's all happened in the last two years.”

West of the Negresco a large new building was in construction. She looked at it pensively. “Heaven knows what this place will be like in a few years' time. When you think of what Juan was six years ago, just sand and pines, running to the sea.”

As they skirted Juan, she looked back over her shoulder at the Cap. “There's something pretty terrible going up there, too, as far as I can see.”

Along the edge of the gulf was the same patchwork effect of beach umbrellas. “If Napoleon could have foreseen this,” she said.

“But that was March, when he landed. I mean to say there may have been a winter season.”

“I'd doubt it. Cannes was a village when Lord Brougham came here.”

“It's hard to believe that now.”

She nodded. They had turned the tip of the Croisette. Everything looked very solid and established, the proud curving esplanade, the palm trees and the shops and the hotels, the sleek, low, shining cars and the statue of Edward VII in his yachting cap, the bright colors on the beach, the bathing dresses and the umbrellas, the trim half-naked figures and the bronzed young men tossing medicine balls to one another, and the sun refracted from the tall white buildings. It all looked so very permanent, so in tune with itself.

“It's only the ports that stay the same, Villefranche, and the old part of Nice and this.”

She was driving past the Casino into the square beyond as she said that and indeed they seemed here to have come suddenly into another world, an older world, with yachts moored against a quay, and tables set in front of cafés under plane trees; with kiosks and horsedrawn cabs, with sailors in white caps loitering on the quayside, and on the far side the
silhouette of the old town climbing to the peak of its squat stone tower.

“Let's have a drink,” she said.

“What about your dress?”

“Oh, that can wait.”

In the shade of the Taverne des Allées were a number of vacant tables. In spite of the noise along the waterfront, the honking of horns, the shouting of fishermen and sailors, it all seemed very secluded here, beside the flower market beneath the plane trees. “Yes,” she said, “a vermouth cassis, and a cigarette.”

She held the cigarette between her two first fingers, right against her knuckles, closing her fist on it, when she was not smoking. He had never seen a woman smoke that way. But it suited her. It was compact and practical.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “I don't know anything about you except your painting.”

He told her about his home; an old colonial house in the Connecticut valley. It had been his grandfather's. His father had been a professor at Columbia. He had retired now but he did a certain amount of lecturing still and editorial work for a firm of publishers.

“Do you live with your parents then?”

“To a certain extent. But I've a studio in New York.”

“You sound quite rich.”

He shook his head. “I've enough to keep myself from starving, but I shan't have much of a life unless I make a success of painting.”

“That's fine; that sounds exciting, that's something I've never known, the start of a career, the first successes. I'm Henry's second wife you know. He's a lot older than me. He was an ambassador when I met him.” She paused. “That's something that I've always missed being young with someone, working up with someone, being a part of their success.”

She spoke slowly, almost wistfully, but she was still wearing her sunglasses. He could not read the expression in her eyes. “Tell me more about yourself. Tell me about your friends. Tell me about your studio,” she said.

He told her about his studio; it was in Washington Square, high up in the attic of a Georgian house. “I'll like picturing you working there,” she said.

She asked him about his friends. But it is hard to talk about your friends to someone who is not familiar with the world you move in. He changed the subject.

“How much of the year do you spend down here?” he asked.

“As much as we can manage.”

“How much does that amount to ? “

“Two months, three months, it depends on how busy Henry is.”

“He's not retired then?”

She shook her head. “He's not an ambassador any longer. But the Foreign Officer is always calling him in for consultations. He's always presiding over committees or sitting on commissions.”

“I've never met an ambassador before. Is he very formidable?”

She smiled at that. “He's an impressive person, and he can be fierce. But it's a diplomat's job to put people at their ease. No, he isn't terrifying.”

“Is it a party that you're taking me to or just ourselves?”

“An informal party.”

There would be Rex Allan, she told him, and Lord and Lady Ambrose, who had a villa across the valley, and Jules Renan, the French dramatist and perhaps his wife. “But they quarrel so much that one never knows whether they will come together. And maybe there will be someone else. We're nearly always more than we lay places for. I'm a casual hostess. I keep inviting people and then losing count.”

As she went through the list, he raised his eyebrows. He would be able to make an impressive story out of this party when he got back home.

“You won't be shy will you, meeting all those strangers?”

He shook his head.

“I shall be far too interested to feel shy.”

“Will you? Yes. I think you will. Somehow I can't quite imagine you being shy.”

She looked at him thoughtfully as she said that. It pleased him that she should have said it. To so many people he did seem shy. But she right away had realized that he wasn't. It gave him a renewed feeling of being understood.

Behind him in the town a clock began to strike the hour.

“That's noon,” he said, “oughtn't we to be looking for your dress?”

“Never mind about the dress, but we should be going.”

They drove over the railway bridge, and then branched left. “There it is,” she said, “on that second hill.”

A tiled roof backed by cypresses was showing red across
the valley. The car swung out of the main road and turned into a narrow lane that mounted in a succession of zig-zag curves through fields flanked with vines and through terraced olive groves. He could see what she had meant by saying that it was very simple. There was no formal entrance, no elaborate sun porch; you just turned out of a lane and you were faced with it, a low rambling two-storied cottage on to which a wing had been added in an L, so that the verandah between late morning and early afternoon was in the shade. There was nothing “Hollywood” about it; but as it had stood there mellow in the sunlight, with the red and white of the hibiscus and the mauve and red-brown of the bougainvillea trailing over its walls and doorways, with the cypresses standing like sentinels, black against the Mediterranean azure, and the garden running back into the hills in a series of low stone terraces, it had a warm and lived-in air. It had intimacy. It was a home. The half-dozen people who were sitting out on the verandah, on wicker chairs, with glasses at their sides, looked very much at ease, very much in tune with the languor and beauty of the day.

As the car drove up, a tall thin man, clean-shaven, with graying and thinning hair, rose from his chair and came towards them. He was sunburned and his wrinkles where he had smiled were marked in white. He was wearing a silk, short-sleeved shirt; a crocodile skin belt, with a gold buckle, fastened above dark-blue trousers; his feet were bare under his sandals; his handshake was firm and friendly.

“This is a great pleasure, a great great pleasure. I was so delighted when Judy told me about your meeting. Now don't you think,” at that point he turned round towards the others – “don't you think,” he said, “that the best way for me to introduce Mr. Francis Oliver would be to ask him to show us his pictures right away?”

It was the kind of introduction that handled with anything but tact would have been precipitate. But Sir Henry's diplomatic touch had found the best way of placing a stranger and a foreigner without embarrassment in the center of the stage.

“Let's arrange them along that divan,” he suggested. “We can all see them there. Move it back a little so that the sun falls on them.”

There was a moment of silence as Francis stood back from before his pictures, and the other members of the party rose from their chairs to look at them. At the exact moment when
the silence was about to become embarrassing, but before it had, Sir Henry crossed to Judy and placed his arm about her shoulders, squeezing them affectionately.

“It's an extraordinary thing about you, midget, you don't know basically one thing about a picture, but you're never wrong about the work of a modern painter.” He then turned to his other guests. “I think that those pictures make the introduction of our new friend very easy. I've no doubt whatever that fifteen years from now we shall all be very proud to remember that we met Mr. Francis Oliver at the start of his career.”

It was a formal speech, but formality of a kind was appropriate to Sir Henry's height and age. He spoke, moreover, with a complete lack of effort, there was no trace of stiffness in his manner, he looked very relaxed in his sandals and short-sleeved shirt.

Francis smiled gratefully at him. He had not felt shy, no, but at the last moment, as the car had swung out of the main road, he had felt apprehensive. He was not a good conversationalist. The other guests would probably be older than himself. They were Europeans. They would look on Americans, particularly young Americans as gauche and awkward. They would expect him to be gauche and awkward. And because they would expect him to be that, probably they would think him that. He did not mind that on his own account, but it was up to him, as an American, to maintain national prestige in a foreign land. Thanks to Sir Henry he was established right away as a person of promise if not of consequence. Sir Henry in his own way had been as forth-coming as Judy had.

And now Sir Henry was introducing his other guests to him. “Lady Ambrose, Madame Renan, Lord Ambrose, Monsieur Jules Renan, Mr. Rex Allan and Mr. Muspratt.”

As he had arranged the pictures Francis had taken stock of the general company. Rex Allan he had naturally recognized at once. He had seen Allan in a dozen films, but it was strange to see the hero of so many desperate fights and impassioned wooings, whom he had always seen in some kind of fancy dress, quietly sitting on a wicker chair in flannels.

He spotted Allan and he could spot the Renans; they were obviously Latin. Renan tall and corpulent and middle-aged with a large hooked nose, sprucely dressed in a light-gray suit, was the only one of the party in a coat. He also wore a semi-stiff white collar and a loosely knotted Liberty silk tie in whose center was a large red-brown cameo pin. In spite
of his inappropriate attire he looked, however, the coolest member of the party. His skin was colorless, its texture gave it the appearance of soft leather.

His wife was also dressed as though she were to attend a Paris lunch party, in a tight black dress, swathed over the hips, cut square at the throat with the sleeves falling straight and loose to flounces that spread down to her knuckles from a ribbon that buttoned tightly at her wrist. She was very slim, and the dress was tubular. She wore a large square-cut sapphire ring and a diamond arrow with a sapphire head pierced the circle of black felt that fitted brimless like an inverted basin low upon her forehead. She looked about twenty-five. She was heavily powdered, and her mouth was painted with a purplish lipstick in an exaggerated cupid's bow. Her eyes were dark, long-lashed, and luminous. She did not understand English easily and as each person spoke she would turn towards them, following the movements of their lips with a bright intentness. She was inappropriate but picturesque.

The other woman of the party, Lady Ambrose, could not have presented a greater contrast. She was tall and slim, her hair that was of a lightish brown was cut short like a boy's and parted at the side. She was wearing canvas sandals and dark red wide-ended slacks; a short-sleeved blue cotton shirt was open at the throat. She could not have been more than twenty-three. She was sunburned and wore no make-up. When Francis had arrived, she was lying back among the cushions of a long chair, her hands clasped behind her head, one leg drawn up, the foot on a level with her knee. It was a young man's pose. In spite of her attitude and attire, she presented, however, an extremely feminine appearance.