‘I’m an expert on jet-lag,’ said Simon. ‘I used to fly back and forth between London and Jedda.’
‘What should one do?’
‘Don’t drink alcohol on the plane.’
She laughed – a stage laugh. ‘Too late, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t go to sleep after lunch. Stay awake until it’s time to go to bed over here.’
Despite her stated lack of appetite, Carmen was eating the stuffed peppers. ‘Well, you’ll have to think of some way to keep me awake,’ she said, ‘because otherwise I’ll just collapse.’
‘A swim,’ said Charlie.
‘Isn’t the water kind of polluted around here?’ she asked. ‘I read an article in Time which said that the Mediterranean was just a cesspool.’
‘It’s not too bad,’ said Priss dryly, ‘especially if you drive out to Cap Ferrat or Cap d’Antibes.’
‘I’d like to see things,’ said Carmen. ‘Isn’t there that Matisse chapel somewhere around here?’
‘In Vence,’ said Charlie.
‘Can we go see that?’
‘Of course.’
‘And there’s a nice little Matisse museum up in Cimiez,’ said Priss.
‘Great,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m really hungry for the whole Côte d’Azur experience.’ She put down her knife and fork: the stuffed peppers had gone into her stomach.
Willy, who had said nothing since Carmen had arrived, now covered his face with his hands and started to make odd sounds which might have been groans or sobs or the hiccups of suppressed laughter.
‘Let’s go and have coffee in the garden,’ said Priss quickly, rising from her chair.
The others all obeyed but Willy remained seated – his face still covered by his hands.
‘Is he all right?’ asked Carmen, who seemed to sense that Willy’s behaviour was somehow directed at her.
‘Don’t pay any attention,’ said Priss. ‘He likes to disconcert people when they arrive.’
Carmen looked baffled. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said.
‘Ask Helen,’ said Charlie, coming to lead his fiancée into the garden. ‘He tried to embarrass you, didn’t he?’
‘It’s only a joke,’ said Helen in the casual tone of someone who was already an old hand at the Villa Golitsyn.
They went out into the garden. Simon waited with Willy. The sounds stopped. The hands remained over the face but a space appeared between the third and fourth fingers of the right hand, and a bloodshot eye peered out. ‘Has she gone?’ Willy whispered.
‘They’re in the garden.’
The hands came down from his face and reached for the bottle of wine. ‘Now tell me,’ said Willy in a quiet, reasonable tone of voice, ‘you who know so much about human nature. What strange, unresolved complex from his childhood compels a blonde little fairy like Charlie to fall for an old bag like that.’
‘She didn’t seem old,’ said Simon.
‘But a bag. You don’t dispute that, I hope?’
‘One shouldn’t judge by appearances.’
‘And how else should one judge? One look at me – a drunk. One look at you – a civil servant. One look at her – a bag.’
‘But a bag of what?’
‘Californian pretentiousness. Or, in her patois, a bag of bullshit.’
‘We shall see.’
‘Shall we? Must we?’
‘I think so. For Charlie. Don’t you?’
‘Make an effort?’
‘We owe it to him.’
‘Yes,’ said Willy. ‘Dear Charlie.’
Willy did make an effort that afternoon, and again that evening at supper. Carmen received many a broadside of Ludley charm, and responded by relaxing, preening and laughing ‘hilariously’ just as she must have been taught to laugh ‘hilariously’ at her acting school in Hollywood. The others watched, fascinated not – as she may have supposed – by her wit and charm, but by Willy’s controlled performance. Charlie, originally anxious, seemed relieved that some sort of rapport had been established between his host and his girlfriend, and only Helen looked irritated that the newcomer should have so much of Willy’s attention.
The evening passed without incident. Charlie and Carmen retired early on the pretext of Carmen’s exhaustion – although Charlie by this time looked more tired than she did, and Carmen, before leaving the room, gave a stagey ‘wanton’ chuckle as if to intimate that there were other reasons for wanting to go early to bed.
The others followed soon after. Willy had drunk less than usual and climbed the stairs without assistance. Simon and Helen both went to their rooms at the same time as the Ludleys – Simon with the particular anguish felt by a man who sees the woman he loves retire to bed with her husband.
The weather the next morning was so fine that Simon, when he came down, took his coffee and croissant out into the garden. Being the first he had claimed the copy of Nice-Matin and saw with some satisfaction that it was cold and wet in the rest of Europe.
Priss was the next to appear. She blushed when she saw Simon, and he too looked confused. She was not yet dressed, but wore a white silk dressing-gown over her nightdress, and the very intimacy and informality of these clothes only reminded Simon of what was not his. Ever since Priss had so blithely suggested that Willy should father a child by Helen, Simon had felt obliged to abandon his hypothesis that Willy was impotent, and he imagined now that she had made love with Willy the night before, or even that morning – perhaps only minutes before.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Priss asked solicitously with just that admixture of intimacy and embarrassment shown by a woman to a man who is and yet is not her lover.
‘Yes,’ he said curtly – as if it was none of her business. ‘What about you?’
She blushed again. ‘Well enough,’ she said – and then, as if in reply to the question he had not put to her, she added: ‘Willy always goes out like a light and sleeps like a log.’ As she spoke she sat down on a chair beside his. ‘We’re being very lucky with the weather,’ she went on. ‘I thought it might be an idea to go out on the boat today.’
Simon said nothing.
‘Would you like that?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Why not?’
‘Some people hate sailing, and I don’t want to force you out on expeditions if you’d rather stay here and read …’
‘No. I should like to go on the boat.’
‘Then I’d better go and wake the others,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to leave too late.’
Willy was captain of the Clöe, Simon, Helen and Carmen were the passengers, and Charlie and Priss were the crew. As they unpacked the sails and prepared the boat for sea, Willy became agitated: he pranced around the boat, shouting at Priss to do this and Charlie to do that; but while the crew appeared to obey his orders, it soon became apparent to Simon that they had a will of their own – they cast off, started the engine and raised the sails only after muttered discussions among themselves, not in obedience to the captain’s orders.
Willy either did not notice this insubordination or did not care. He was, it seemed, playing out his role as ‘Ludley man of action’, his profile proffered to his guests like that of an actor posing for the camera. Thus with Priss at the tiller and Charlie raising the sails, they passed out of the harbour and turned to the West across the bay. The sea was quite calm but there was a slight breeze from the south: they set course for the Iles de Lerins.
It was not easy to talk against the crackle of the canvas and the slapping sound of the prow hitting the water. They therefore remained silent, content with the spectacle before them – the blue sky, the mountains and behind them the whole length of the city of Nice lit by the silvery sunlight. Willy and Helen sat forward, leaning against one another and trying to spot the Villa Golitsyn through a pair of binoculars. Every now and then a Boeing or an Airbus would fly over them as it made its approach to the airport. They passed close to where these landed – to the spit of silt formed by the Var where now huge lorries were emptying earth into t
he sea – extending the land on which the runways had been built to make room for a new port for the Côte d’Azur. They then altered course towards the Napoleonic fortress at Antibes, rounded the Cap d’Antibes, and came in sight of the Iles de Lerins.
They docked the boat at the first – the Ile Sainte Marguerite – and ate lunch at a restaurant near the jetty. Ferries from Cannes came and went with their sparse cargoes of late-season tourists. The sun shone. They drank wine as they waited for the food, and then more wine as the food was served.
‘This is great,’ said Carmen with a guttural sigh. ‘It’s really beautiful here. I mean, I can see why all those rich guys come out here. There are other nice places, I guess, but this scenery and this weather in October …’
‘I’m so glad you like it,’ said Willy. ‘I thought you might be homesick for Malibu beach.’
‘My God, why should I homesick for Malibu beach?’
‘Or Venice,’ said Willy. ‘Isn’t there a charming little port, rather like Villefranche, near Los Angeles called Venice? With lots of handsome homosexuals dressed in leather …’
‘Have you been to Venice?’ asked Carmen.
‘No, alas. I’ve been to the other Venice, but only I assure you because it was nearer. Given the chance, I’d much rather have one of those beefy buggers in your Venice than a weedy gondolier from ours.’
Carmen looked a little confused. She glanced at Charlie but Charlie only smiled. She then looked at Priss, but Priss was paying no attention to their conversation. She therefore leaned across the table and said quietly to Willy: ‘You’re not, er, gay, are you?’
‘Bisexual, dear girl, bisexual. Everyone’s both these days.’
‘Well, great, that’s great,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m certainly glad you’re not, well … I was afraid you might be a little uptight about that sort of thing.’
‘And a friend of Charlie’s? Not at all. We’re upper-class, you see, and the British upper classes have always been awfully broad-minded. We leave morality to the bourgeoisie, don’t we Priss dear? They’re the ones who disapprove.’
Priss still paid no attention.
‘Well, that’s great,’ said Carmen, ‘just great.’
After lunch they went back to the boat and sailed to the other side of the island. There they dropped anchor and – taking turns to change in the cabin – dived into the sea and swam ashore. Willy led the way. He swam in an eccentric style, somewhat like a frog, with his neck craning out of the water, and when he reached the shore lay down on his back on the sand with his eyes closed in ironic appreciation of the sun. Priss, who came after him, placed her long, elegant body next to his – its health and colour a marked contrast to the pallor of Willy’s limbs and torso, and the way the skin hung loosely over his ribs.
After Priss came Helen, who set herself down at Willy’s other side, giggling at his parody of a sunbathing man. Then came Simon, Charlie and last of all Carmen, who reached the shore and pulled herself out of the water just as Willy opened his eyes.
He screamed. Priss and Simon who had been lying on their stomachs both spun round to see what was wrong and were confronted as Willy had been with Carmen’s two enormous naked breasts.
‘Am I the only one topless?’ she asked with disingenuous cheerfulness. ‘I thought everyone went topless in the South of France.’
‘Yes, well, a lot of people do,’ said Priss, rearranging herself on the sand.
Willy had closed his eyes again: indeed he clenched them shut.
‘Well,’ said Carmen, lying down quite close to her host, ‘I just hate constrictions of any kind.’
Willy groaned.
‘Why don’t you go topless?’ Carmen asked Priss.
‘Oh, I’m too old.’
‘You should,’ Carmen said to Helen.
‘No, I … er … I just couldn’t.’
Willy opened one eye. Carmen was lying on her back, her head propped up against the rubber flippers she had worn to swim from the boat. Her breasts, which while she was standing had hung like overripe fruit from a tree, now in obedience to gravity retreated like well-set blancmange. Only the pigmented flesh around the nipples, and the nipples themselves, protruded from the fluid mass of white flesh as if ginger biscuits surmounted by glacé cherries had been placed on top of the puddings.
‘It appears,’ said Willy, comparing the whiteness of her breasts with the brown colour of her stomach, ‘that you don’t indulge this freedom in California.’
She laughed. ‘Sure I don’t. You’d be arrested if you went topless on Malibu.’
‘So the Land of the Free is not as free as all that?’
‘I guess not.’
‘And all the women in California have brown bodies with white tits?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I wonder if it will pass into their genes,’ Willy asked rhetorically, ‘producing a race of skewbald women.’
‘And boys with white asses,’ said Carmen with a laugh.
‘Yes. Quite right.’ Willy turned to Charlie. ‘Charlie-boy, you’d better bare your buttocks.’
‘After you, Willy.’
‘It doesn’t matter about me. I’m not likely to father any children. And anyway, my balls are brown already.’
‘Shut up, Will,’ said Priss. ‘You’re going too far.’
‘But Carmen doesn’t mind that sort of talk, do you Carmen?’
‘I don’t mind anything.’
‘Then think of Helen,’ said Priss.
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Helen quickly.
‘Then think of me,’ said Priss.
‘But Priss, my dear,’ said Willy, ‘we can’t keep our conversation clean just for a prude like you. I mean to say, what was the point of all that rebellion in the sixties if we can’t say fuck and shit and balls and cunt and that sort of thing.’
‘Right,’ said Carmen.
‘You agree with me, don’t you?’ said Willy, turning to Carmen as if for support.
‘Sure I do,’ said Carmen.
‘Isn’t that what 1968 was all about – smoking what you liked, sniffing what you like, bare breasts, bare bums, fucking here, there and everywhere?’
‘It was,’ said Carmen.
‘Fucking men, women, girls, boys …’
‘Anything.’
‘Straights, gays, animals, vegetables …’
‘Wow.’
‘Wouldn’t you agree,’ said Willy to Carmen in a tone of great sincerity, ‘that if you – tonight – were to go to bed with a cucumber, and I with a goat, we would be affirming the values of the age in which we live?’
‘Sure,’ said Carmen, ‘only …’
‘Only what?’
‘Well, I’d prefer Charlie to a cucumber.’
‘Oh quite,’ said Willy, ‘and I’d prefer Charlie to a goat.’
He laughed, lay back and closed his eyes again. The others said nothing. Only Carmen, either because she came from another country or because she knew him less well, had failed to catch the exasperated irony in Willy’s tone of voice. Charlie, who must have realized what was going on, lay with an impassive expression on his face, as if indifferent to the fate of his fiancée at the hands of his friend.
‘Do you know what would be nice?’ said Carmen suddenly.
‘Tell us,’ said Willy. ‘What would be nice?’
‘France without the French.’
‘France without the French,’ Willy repeated after her. ‘I had never thought of that. How would you like to see it. Depopulated altogether? Or colonized by Americans?’
‘And the British too.’
‘We’re doing our best down here,’ said Willy, ‘but you I take it would like to see hot dog stands and pubs instead of restaurants and cafés all over the country?’
‘Well …’
‘And cups of tea and iced water replacing claret and Burgundy?’
‘No, well, I guess I’d like to keep their wine and food, but not the people. I mean, they’re so rude …’
r /> ‘They may be a little touchy,’ said Willy, ‘but that’s because they feel themselves to be a beleagured nation – a chosen people, their civilization the Ark of the Covenant – surrounded by hordes of Slav and Anglo-Saxon Philistines. And can you blame them?’
‘You can blame them,’ said Simon, ‘for not accepting that their civilization, like ours, has had its day.’
‘What? Like the old Venice and the new one? Europe has had its day?’
‘Hasn’t it?’ asked Simon. ‘Hasn’t the torch been passed to Russia and America?’
‘Not at all,’ said Willy. ‘They have more powerful armies, that’s all.’
‘What is a nation, anyway?’ said Charlie. ‘Just a group of people living on the same piece of land.’
‘No,’ said Willy, ‘it’s more. Much more. That’s the mistake made by Marx. Because he was a Jew, and the Jews were scattered all over the world, he underestimated men’s natural ties to their tribes and nations.’
‘But look at you,’ said Simon. ‘Do you think of yourself as English any more?’
‘More than ever.’
‘But you’ve lived abroad for seventeen years. You have more in common now with other expatriates in the South of France than you do with the kind of people who inhabit the British Isles.’
‘No,’ said Willy forcefully. ‘It’s only when you do live abroad that you realize how much you belong to your native land.’
‘But the English you used to know – the sort who played cricket on the village green – don’t exist any more.’
‘You’re much the same as you used to be.’
‘I’m an anachronism.’
‘Someone must still live there,’ said Priss.
‘Oh yes,’ said Simon. ‘There are fifty million or so, but you wouldn’t recognize them and they wouldn’t recognize you. They wear anoraks and donkey-jackets, and their heads are full of half-digested Marx and Freud.’
‘I don’t mind what they think or what they wear,’ said Willy. ‘I still feel I’m English, that England is my home, that I belong there in a way I have never belonged anywhere else.’
‘Then why don’t you live there?’ asked Carmen.
Willy turned and glared at her. ‘Because the girls don’t bare their breasts,’ he said. ‘I’m hooked on tits, and this is the only place were I can get a regular fix.’