Night Without Stars

  Every day I went out, keeping mostly clear of the main streets, through the quiet alleys and closes of the town. I remembered one day it snowed, and I walked down Bear Lane and Oriel Street and Merton Street to Magdalen Bridge. The water was a kind of bottle-green, moving as slow as a snake, and the Tudor towers glimmered in it. The trees were all built up into a white architecture of their own; and the snow sky had broken up and there were pools and drippings of green in it as if a thaw had come. Starlings were chattering in the snow, fighting for a crust. I remember a boy on a bicycle came wobbling across the bridge, his wheels making new and finer lines among the ruts. I walked into St. John’s Quad, where the snow was hardly disturbed and old Magdalen crouched in the quiet As I went home, through Queen’s Lane and New College Lane, the sun set and an afterglow flushed into the sky. It lit up the towers and spires. I felt as if I was seeing something for the very first time.

  During that week the tightness inside me began to slacken off at last. I began to feel the change was true, not just another promise which would go wrong like the last.

  In the new year I stayed with an aunt in Yorkshire. More walking here, though of a different kind. It seemed for a time as if that was the thing I wanted to do most; not to think much but to give one’s body something regular to do while one’s mind took a holiday.

  It was queer about France. Before the operation there’d been all that urge to go back. Lying under the bandages, I’d thought: if things come right I’ll go by the first plane. But when sight came it was different. For one thing there was the risk. This that had come back was worth so much and, by experience, was so chancy, that I was afraid of doing half the usual things, of getting overtired, of sitting in draughts, of reading too much or jumping or bending or moving suddenly. Life in a bathchair would have been worth accepting if that was the only way of staying whole. Silly, perhaps, but … try the alternative for a while.

  Then when spring came and a slow reassurance, and the sense of invalidism began to lift, another reluctance grew up. Perhaps it was going to be all right, all the things that I’d wanted so much were more or less permanently back: to be able to read and drive a car and meet people on an ordinary basis. If that was so, then I wanted just those things and no others, normalcy and nothing else. France was the unusual. France was the place where I’d been made a fool of; the very smell of the flowers and the food and the streets would bring back vividly the double frustration.

  Oh, there was the pull of Alix—it wasn’t the sort of thing one got over—there was the niggling anxiety that by not following it up at once something precious and important was being allowed to slip away, that in a sense I might be letting Alix down somehow; there was the itch to know, the old pugnacious desire not to be beaten; but just at present these feelings all together weren’t quite strong enough to shift the balance.

  Other things began to relax too. When I finally got down to reading I read a good bit; philosophy, poetry, things there’d been no time for since that year in Paris. I felt faintly ashamed, trying to work out something to fit my view of the universe now things were going well. The time for that, when the really big person would have showed himself, was last year. Instead I’d been bitter and suicidal. I’d developed a terrific inferiority complex which must have stuck out a mile. I’d been egocentric about the whole thing.

  I found I could see almost as well without glasses as with, except for long bouts of reading, but I kept them on just the same as a protection. I put in a certain amount of work, but couldn’t settle yet to regular attendance at the office. Lewis grumbled sometimes.

  In May it seemed a good idea to spend a fortnight fishing in Devonshire. That would set me up for the summer. After that maybe one would settle down to law, in September think out the French business afresh, see if one wanted to face it then.

  Going to Devon meant rather more of a pack-up than previous visits to sisters and aunts. I fished out the larger case, which was plastered with records of Continental travel.

  A queer feeling; even the smell of the inside of the case was reminiscent. It struck at me with a sensation of alarm, as if there was danger in it, or had been, and the old gods were calling. A few odds and ends hadn’t been taken out. I’m not tidy at the best of times, and blindness doesn’t help. There was the torn-off bill of my dinner on the train, a couple of programmes of concerts with the Wintertons, the pair of shoes bought from Alix wrapped up in an old paper. Those gave me a turn. I unwrapped them, looked them over; the smell of the leather seemed to bring back that day. I wondered if I’d been a fool think going back, to leave something like that unfinished, a loose end to life.

  I put the shoes away and tipped out the other things: bathing trunks, a pair of shorts, a beach towel, threw them on the bed; and began to pack the things needed this time. Alix’s shoes might as well go after all, as they wouldn’t look out of place in Devonshire. I was going to wrap them in the same newspaper, but having taken it up I stood beside the bed reading it, as I often did now, for the sheer pleasure of being able to read.

  It was a copy of the Nice paper I’d taken regularly. In a bottom corner of the back page was a paragraph headed: “Motoring Tragedy.” The notice began: “ The victim of the car accident reported in our edition of yesterday has been identified as …” I’d passed the name and was going on before it came back at me like a blow in the chest.

  “… has been identified as Pierre Francois Grognard, the well-known Nice restaurateur. His body was recovered late yesterday afternoon.…” I glanced up quickly at the date. The day before I left Nice. Of course, I’d wrapped the shoes up to pack them. By then I’d given up bothering Old Larosse to read anything.

  “… His body was recovered late yesterday afternoon by gendarmerie and ambulance staff from Grenoble. The car was badly smashed, having fallen nearly one hundred and fifty metres, and it has not been decided whether any efforts will will be made to move it from where it has fallen at the foot of the Gorge du Cheval. The road on which the accident took place is notoriously dangerous, but no fatal accident has occurred there since 1929, when a van fell over barely half a kilometre from the scene of the present tragedy. M. Grognard appears to have been motoring to Grenoble at the time and the wheels of his car skidded on the loose surface.

  “A native of Normandy, the deceased man settled in Nice some twelve years ago and opened the first of his luxury restaurants in 1937. During the war he rendered valuable service to the F. F.I. by supplying them with intelligence gained from his waiters who served the German officers in his restaurants. M. Grognard, who was thirty-five, leaves a widow but no children.”

  Chapter 6

  I went to Devon after all, but didn’t catch much in the way of fish. When I arrived back I pottered about for a day or two, and then on impulse rang Rachel.

  She sounded surprised. “Yes, Giles, I’d love you to come down. Michael’s away unfortunately. What train can you come by?”

  I told her, and when I got there in the afternoon she was waiting at the station to meet me. She was as lovely as I remembered her, though perhaps a bit fuller in the face. She linked my arm and led me down the platform.

  I said: “ Who’s been telling tales?”

  “What about?”

  “You know what.”

  She frowned. “With not hearing anything of you I got anxious and phoned your office. Perhaps it wasn’t my concern any longer, but I felt that way. They told me you’d been away six or seven months in France. Eventually I got on to your cousin and he—told me things weren’t coming up to scratch.”

  “You haven’t phoned recently?”

  “No—I had Susan, and …”

  “What, another?”

  “Only number two. She’s three months old. Also I didn’t phone again because I didn’t know if it was bad taste on my part, seeing what had happened. I thought perhaps your cousin thought so.”

  “No, that’s just his normal voice.”

  We passed the ticket barrier. “Darling
, tell me about yourself,” she said. “Is it—very bad again?”

  I said: “ You see that clock over there?”

  “… No, afraid I don’t.… Which? You don’t mean the one in the tower?”

  “The one with the grey seagull sitting on top. It’s twenty minutes past three by it. And on the second ledge—”

  “Giles, how did you— Your eyesight’s as good as mine”

  “Not quite.”

  She got the car going and we drove off.

  She said: “Why ever did your cousin tell me …”

  I explained. We reached the house and went in. I admired Jeremy and Susan, and after a bit we had tea. When we were alone again she said:

  “What does it feel like, being able to see again after—that?”

  “Just what you’d expect, only more so. And not without a tag of responsibility somewhere. Every now and then I feel I ought to build a church or endow hospital beds or give all my money to the poor. Then I do nothing about it and feel very ashamed.”

  She got up and brushed together the crumbs Jeremy had dropped. After a minute she said: “ I’ve never got over feeling a bitch about the way everything happened. Is there any worse time or way of telling a person than the way I did it?”

  “There wasn’t any right time or way of telling me that. You performed the rites as decently as they could be done.”

  “No.… I don’t know. You see, I had to then; I couldn’t go on pretending. I’m not a bitch by nature; at least I don’t think so.…”

  “Nor do I. So you couldn’t have been fairer than that.”

  “All the same I’ve never felt square with myself. And after hearing from your cousin …”

  “Oh, that. That only obscured the issue. In more ways than one.”

  She didn’t speak for a minute. “ Why’ve you come down suddenly now, after all this time? Any particular reason?”

  “I took it into my head. I thought: I’ll go and see Rachel, stir up all the old memories. Feeling that way, I suppose.”

  She shook her head doubtfully. “Are you thinking of getting married?”

  “What an extraordinary idea.”

  She laughed. “ Just now when you were looking at me I wondered if perhaps you’d—fallen for someone else and felt you had to come and take a look at me to reassure yourself that you’d really got over our affair.”

  “Ingenious brain.”

  “Yes. Perhaps I’m conceited. Perhaps you got over it long ago.”

  “You talk as if it was distemper or the measles. Tell me about yourself. Are you happy?”

  “Very. But doesn’t that turn the point of the question?”

  After a minute I said: “Anyway, I don’t think your question’s quite a nice one to put to me in the circumstances. Whether I’ve ‘got over’ our—”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the question at all!”

  I thought, oh, yes, it was, darling Rachel. But it was self-esteem and not love of me that prompted it. Good for Michael.

  I said: “ I’m going back to France pretty soon.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Neither really. I just feel I want to go.”

  “For long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She said: “ What is it, Giles? What’s been happening to you there?”

  “Why?”

  “You sound different. Tougher, somehow.”

  “Tougher?”

  “Not physically. But you were always so easy-going. Light-hearted. It’s as if the roundness has gone.”

  I said: “ Your memories of me sound pre-war.”

  She got up. “ Well I suppose they are, aren’t they? As good as. I haven’t seen much of you since you were wounded.”

  “And precious little before that.” I stared with pleasure at her tall figure by the window. “The dark satanic side didn’t have a chance when you were around.”

  “Ha!” she said.

  “And anyway these last three years haven’t been exactly a joy-ride.”

  “I know that darling,” she said quickly. “ No one can complain if the—roundness has gone. Anyway, I like you just as well. Only I shouldn’t think you’re nearly so easy to manage.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “D’you find loving someone—as you do—a good way to be?”

  She looked at me. After a bit deciding I was serious, she said: “Yes, Giles; once you’ve had it, it seems almost the only way to be.”

  “I wonder how it works when there’s one-way traffic only, I mean when the other person doesn’t seem to put a lot of store by you.”

  She flushed. “Are you talking about me or some female you’ve met in France?”

  The trouble with Rachel was she was so darned quick. I said: “Matter of principle. Hypothetical case only.”

  “Then I should think it was pretty unsatisfactory. But there have been cases.”

  “D’you think I’m a likely subject?”

  She looked at me again. “No,” she said.

  “No. I don’t feel it myself.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off me for a long minute.

  “You are in love with somebody else, aren’t you?”

  I stared back at her.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen her.”

  There was no sense in seeking a job for what might possibly be quite a short stay; yet the thirty-five pounds’ tourist allowance wouldn’t go anywhere. So that meant an application to the Treasury after all. Halliday turned up trumps, and after about three weeks, impatiently borne, permission to draw on sterling up to a limit of £440 over a period of six months was granted me.

  When I left England it was almost a year since coming home.

  To someone conditioned to older ways of travel the flight from London to Nice is unnatural and a bit uncanny. You think of the train journey as indispensable, leaving Victoria, crossing the Channel, the customs and the porters, the nightlong journey on the other side with the sleeper and the whistling train, the lonely clanking stations in the dark hours, dinner and breakfast in the rocking dining-car, the terrific ride in brilliant sunshine along the coast from Marseilles. An exciting day in anyone’s life. But instead I got in the plane at Heathrow at ten-thirty, and by half-past three in the afternoon we were circling casually round the municipal airport, with the coast stretching beneath us from Rapallo to the Estérels. It wasn’t real. It was something out of the latest travel film.

  As we got down you could see a bus crawling like a bug along the Middle Corniche, and the toy harbour of Nice, the deep blue, land-locked bay of Villefranche—yes, Villefranche—and then the gracious curve of the Promenade des Anglais, the edge of the beach and the sea freckled with black dots, the crowded shopping streets, the white villas on the wooded slopes, then we were past and dipping towards the mouth of the Var.

  I’d written the Wintertons about events this year, but hadn’t told them I was coming out again and had booked at a hotel; one where the view was unfashionable and the food good. I chucked my bag down, saw the advance luggage had come, then went out. I never do feel like unpacking the first day anywhere. Much less so this time.

  I walked all over the place, wandering about in a rather aimless mood, absolutely refusing to believe that at nine o’clock this morning I’d been in Regent Street.

  The bougainvillea was out. That was the first thing that struck me. The royal purple mass of it hung down over every other villa wall. It seemed to override all the other colour, even the blue and mauve and green of the sea. The roses were still out, and the agaves and some of the fruit trees. The sun was hot but the air fresh and invigorating in a way it wouldn’t be in another month or so.

  Human nature’s a queer thing, and instead of getting a sense of the unhappiness of last year, instead of being beset by all sorts of uncomfortable memories, as expected, I just felt glad to be here. Perhaps it was the air, perhaps my spirits were ripe for the change. After I’d been out for about half an hour I felt ready to go anywhere a
nd do anything. I couldn’t understand what had kept me away so long.

  It wasn’t so much design as chance that took me towards the old town. One had to walk some way. But once there it was only three minutes to Alix’s old flat. Rushing one’s fences of course.

  Strange to go up the cobbled street, see the kids playing about, the women sitting in the doorways, knowing I’d been up this street before and yet not recognising it. The sun made knife-edged shadows. I wasn’t sure of the doorway.

  Luckily the postman was there and a woman was taking in letters.

  “Yes, m’sieu?”

  “Are you Mme. Colloni?”

  “I am.”

  “Does Mme. Delaisse still live here?”

  “Oh, it is the blind man, isn’t it? You were here last year in the spring.”

  It came as quite a surprise to be recognised. Was I the blind man?

  “Mme. Delaisse? No, m’sieu. She never came back. She sent for her things about a week after you called, but that was all.”

  “Who came for them?”

  “For her things? Oh, she wrote—and then a van came. The furniture was nearly all mine.”

  “Do you know her new address? Where are her letters forwarded?”

  “She never left an address, m’sieu. I don’t know where she is living now.”

  I walked back down the street. The sun beat on the uneven pavement and reflected up. Some washing hung from a first-floor balcony; there was a chair in the street; the people in the doorways watched me with frank, easy curiosity. Alix might have been murdered, too, for all that woman cared. Did one imagine the hint of reticence, the suggestion that further questions would be choked off? The shrugged shoulders and the slanting eyes seemed to throw out responsibility, to want to turn away before the topic was properly done with.

  Back slowly to the Avenue de la Victoire. Crowds of holiday-makers with their sun-glasses and beach-wear and gay trousers; cyclists, trams, taxis in a mêlée; the plane trees weren’t rustling to-day. A shoe-shop on the right going up. Dark after the brilliant sun. Over there was where I’d come a crash. No sign of Alix. An assistant moved across.