‘But I know that he minds about you. That’s why, when Charlie said that he’d met you in London, I hoped he’d be able to get you to come out here. You see, really … the doctors in Switzerland said that Willy would kill himself if he didn’t stop drinking.’
‘Shouldn’t he see a psychiatrist?’ Simon asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Of course, but he never would, and I’m not sure that it would be right to make him. He’s always had a strong idea of what is noble and what is base. He would think it ignoble to hand himself over to an analyst.’
‘Why?’
‘Too passive. Feminine. Abdication of Free Will. So if I forced him to go to an analyst he would lose his self-respect. You see, I did once get him into a clinic – the one in Switzerland – and he looked quite defeated. Dead. Then he escaped. He climbed down from a balcony on the sixth floor and for two months after that he was wonderful. Really his old self. He drank a bit, but never before lunch. He was happy, cheerful, funny. Full of ideas. His escape was like a shot of some wonder drug. It made him feel fine, but it wore off. He went back to his old ways.’
‘I was thinking about him after lunch,’ said Simon, ‘trying to decide in my own mind why he might drink so much. It isn’t in his family, is it?’
‘No. Not particularly.’ She spoke carefully. ‘His father drank, but no more than anyone else.’
‘He wasn’t an alcoholic?’
‘No.’
‘And his mother?’
Priss shook her head. ‘She died when Willy was still at school, but not of drink.’
‘Did you know them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were they like?’
She turned away from him so that he could not see the expression on her face. Then she looked at him again. ‘Would you know what I meant if I said that someone had died inside – had deliberately killed their own capacity to love and be loved because they had suffered so much?’
‘I can imagine it.’
‘Willy’s mother was like that. Cold. Withdrawn. Even when he was a child. People thought that she was a snob because she did everything by form; but it wasn’t snobbery. It was just the only structure she had left.’
‘And why did she suffer so much?’
‘From him.’
‘Willy’s father?’
She nodded.’
‘I’ve heard he wasn’t very nice.’
She laughed – a cruel little laugh. ‘I know one’s not supposed to speak ill of the dead,’ she said, ‘but I can’t say anything about him without speaking ill …’ She spoke with a dainty vehemence.
‘Was he such a monster?’
‘He was charming to his friends. People loved to come and stay at Hensfield. Didn’t you read the obituaries?’ She laughed again. ‘“Ne’ere shall the like be seen again.” You had to be an intimate of the family to know what he was really like.’
‘You make him sound fascinating.’
‘He was, in a way. He was very clever, and he used his intellect to humiliate people who were less clever – particularly Willy’s mother, until she was past caring. He was very rich and assumed that everything could be bought – especially women. He was proud of his virility. His motto was: “If it moves, fuck it.”’ Priss glanced at Simon as if to see whether he was shocked by what she had said. ‘When Willy was twelve he taught him how to masturbate. He used droit de seigneur on all the servants, and he particularly enjoyed seducing other people’s wives – the younger, the better – not because he wanted to please the wives but simply to humiliate their husbands. He didn’t really belong to the twentieth century at all; certainly not to the England of the Welfare State. He was more like something out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.’
‘You seem to have known him quite well.’
‘I did.’
‘So you knew Willy as a child?’
‘Yes.’ She turned away from him again and looked out to sea. ‘I was, as it were, the girl next door.’
Helen came back from her swim and sat on her towel a few feet away from her older friends.
‘Did you marry before Willy went abroad?’ Simon asked Priss.
‘No. After.’
‘While he was with the Foreign Office?’
‘No. Just after he resigned.’
‘In Singapore?’
‘Yes.’ She looked surprised that he should know. ‘We had our honeymoon in the Raffles Hotel.’
‘Did he drink then?’ asked Simon.
‘No, no.’ She smiled to herself as if remembering those early days of her marriage. ‘A bit, of course, but not compulsively.’
‘When did he start?’
She frowned. ‘It all happened gradually. We went from Singapore to Argentina – we had a ranch there and Willy decided to try and run it by himself. He saw himself as a gaucho because of that book by W. H. Hudson. There he drank quite a lot of pisco …’ She shook her head and said again: ‘It happened gradually. I remember, once, in Mendoza when he had his first real fit. We were on holiday.’ She stopped and looked miserable.
Simon waited for a moment and then asked: ‘Do you know why he left the Foreign Office?’
‘I think he was bored.’
‘And why did you never go back to England?’
She turned sharply and looked at him straight in the eyes – a hard, almost wanton look. ‘Why? What is there to go back to?’
‘Family and friends.’
‘We haven’t any family or friends.’
‘Are your parents dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘No brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’
‘And no friends.’
‘None that I’d ever want to see again.’
‘Then why did you leave Argentina?’
She sighed. ‘We didn’t miss England but we missed Europe. Argentina is very far from anywhere else. You feel terribly cut off, and get tired of all that steak and pisco. Have you ever been there?’
Simon shook his head. ‘No.’
‘One begins to long for some architecture – proper houses and old churches and ruined castles …’
‘I can imagine.’
‘And then Willy was hopeless on a horse. As soon as we arrived the ranch started to lose money, and as soon as we left it made a profit again.’ She laughed and stood up. ‘I’m going for a swim before it gets cold.’
She ran to the sea and threw herself into the water. She swam like an eel, her head down, her legs straight and thrashing. For fear that she might think him a sissy, Simon followed.
TEN
They got back to the Villa Golitsyn to find that a telegram had been delivered for Charlie to say that Carmen Baker, his American girlfriend, was arriving in three days’ time.
Willy, who sat in the garden drinking tea from the silver teapot, seemed in a state of great excitement. ‘Do you realize, Priss,’ he said, ‘that tomorrow we are to entertain a film-star in this humble little house of ours?’
‘She’s not a star,’ said Charlie looking confused. ‘She’s an actress, or rather, she’d like to be an actress. She’s been in one or two things …’
‘He’s being modest,’ said Willy. ‘She’s obviously a Jane Fonda – long legs, golden hair …’
‘She’s got black hair,’ said Charlie.
‘A raven-haired beauty. I can’t wait.’ He turned to Priss. ‘We must lay on something special for lunch tomorrow. No ravioli-eater, this one. Caviare, larks’ tongues …’ He flourished his hands like an operative tenor.
‘She’s really quite ordinary,’ said Charlie.
‘How can she be so ordinary, Carlo mio, when she has freed you from the bonds of faggery and converted you to the one true heterosexual faith?’
Charlie blushed. ‘In LA,’ he said, ‘one isn’t necessarily one or the other.’
‘California. The land of the Free. Priss, my dear, why didn’t we go and live in California?’
Priss shrugged her shoulders. ‘You sai
d you hated Americans.’
‘Did I? Well, perhaps I do, but Carmen is going to change all that. She’ll convert me too – not to heterosexuality, of course, because I’m already a believer, but to love of the USA.’
‘Why don’t you like Americans?’ Simon asked.
‘If they were all like Carmen,’ said Willy, ‘I would adore them.’
‘You haven’t met her yet,’ said Charlie.
‘But she won’t be dressed in baggy trousers and drip-dry shirts, will she? She won’t complain all the time that the Mexicans are poor and beg in the streets?’ He turned to Priss again. ‘Do you remember, dearest? In Querétaro?’
‘Yes, but you can’t judge all Americans by a busload of tourists in Querétaro.’
‘And Vietnam? Can you judge them by that?’ He took a sip of tea from the porcelain cup. ‘Of course you’re too young to remember,’ he said to Helen, ‘and you, Simon, you’re too much of a civil servant to let emotions affect your judgement, but I remember when they were bombing and burning and counting the bodies …’
‘But that’s finished,’ said Charlie. ‘They left.’
‘They did indeed. And now, aren’t we meant to admire them for going? And to pity them for the trauma of Vietnam? How it brutalized their innocent, sensitive soul? How it damaged their confidence in themselves – the poor little things?’
‘Is that why you left the Foreign Office?’ Simon asked. ‘Because of Vietnam?’
Willy turned and looked at him with a slightly more serious expression on his face. ‘It might have made it difficult to stay,’ he said, ‘because one couldn’t hate the Americans for what they were doing without despising our government – our Labour government – for supporting them. Back there in Whitehall it may have made sense: verbal support costs us nothing. But out there in Asia, where the generalissimos and profiteers drove past the hungry children in their Mercedes Benzes, it was difficult to keep a professional detachment if you didn’t have …’
Simon finished the sentence for him. ‘A heart as cold as mine?’
Willy smiled with slight embarrassment. ‘Yes, Simon old fellow, but many’s the time when I wished I had a cold heart, because with a cold heart you get things done. Emotional people like Charlie and me …’ – he put his arm around Charlie’s shoulder – ‘we may feel more than you do; we may suffer and exult; but at the end of the day it’s all vanity and egoism. I love. I suffer. Whereas you, with your phlegmatic common sense, you analyse, act and put things right.’
Simon leaned forward to pour himself some tea. ‘But no analysis is exact if it doesn’t take account of emotion, and if you cannot feel emotion, then you cannot place it in the equation.’ He filled his cup with tea.
‘I’m afraid it’s cold,’ said Willy.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Simon.
‘Do you take milk?’
Simon shook his head.
‘If the Americans had been more cold-blooded,’ said Priss ‘they would never have got involved in Vietnam.’
‘Our policy,’ said Willy, looking at Simon with an expression of amused mockery, ‘the kind of policy made by clear-headed, cold-hearted people like you, Simon, was always to win if we could, and if we couldn’t, to abandon our principles and betray our friends. Perfide Albion.’
As he prepared his reply, Simon sipped his tea. He choked. It was cold cognac.
‘Look at Malaya,’ Willy went on, grinning at Simon’s confusion. ‘We fought and won. But in Kenya, Cyprus, India, Burma – everywhere else …’
Priss glanced suspiciously at Simon. He put down his cup. Willy leaned forward to interpose his body between Simon and Priss. ‘We left without a fight. Cunning to the last. Men like you in charge, Simon.’ He smiled. ‘Tea too cold? Shall I make a fresh pot? Easily done with teabags.’
‘No thank you,’ said Simon. ‘This is fine.’
When the sun set the air suddenly became colder. They went into the house to change into warmer and smarter clothes. Priss liked her guests to change for dinner. They came down again to find Willy in his old linen suit and a silk shirt – both faded and bought when he was plumper, but elegant all the same. He hovered around the drink; made a gin fizz; filled their glasses; filled his own; refilled his own. He went on and on about Carmen: he seemed more excited about her coming than Charlie was. Simon glanced at Priss to see if this annoyed her but she only looked bored. It was Helen who seemed slightly sulky at all this advance publicity for the American girl. She had looked happier at lunch when Willy was clasping her knees crying: ‘Natalie, Natalie, stay with me. Don’t leave the children.’
Priss had decided that they would go to a restaurant that night rather than eat at home. ‘Luckily there are quite a few,’ Charlie whispered to Simon, ‘because once our Willy’s been to one, he tends not to be welcome again.’
They got into the Jaguar and drove along the Promenade to the port. There they ate bouillabaisse at a restaurant on the quai. Helen cheered up, laughing at the puffy faces of the fish, drinking as much wine as the rest of them and, while they drank coffee, eating vanilla ice-cream with hot chocolate sauce. Willy ordered marc for everyone. Simon was about to object, in loco parentis, at a glass of such strong spirits for Helen when Priss turned to her and said: ‘You don’t really want marc, do you?’
‘Not really, no.’
Willy ordered her a crême de menthe instead, and as she was drinking it Helen suddenly started laughing. ‘If only the girls at school could see me now,’ she said. ‘Then they’d all run away.’
‘To runaways,’ shouted Willy, raising his glass in a toast. ‘We’re all runaways here.’ He emptied it and ordered another.
When they left the restaurant they walked along the quai to take a closer look at Clöe, the Ludleys’ boat. Helen skipped ahead. Willy followed, arm-in-arm with Priss. One might have said that he was propped against her except that she too leaned against him, her head resting on his shoulder. The image of the two of them, against the floodlit castle, the lights of the cafés on the far side of the port, and the black glistening water, was somehow moving – even to Simon, who Willy said had no emotions.
‘They do seem happy together,’ Simon said to Charlie.
‘I think they live for one another,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen such a close couple.’
‘Not even in California?’
He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t expect it there. That’s why I’m glad Carmen is coming. She thinks that all love starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. But with Willy and Priss you sometimes feel that it’s like a fantastic wine or an incredible lawn – that it’s only got as good as that after years and years of care and a kind of maturing.’
Simon looked sideways to catch the expression on Charlie’s face. It was bright – bright with admiration and a kind of hope. It struck him that Charlie still loved Willy – not with a homosexual desire but with an almost filial love for one whose strong personality had shaped his weaker one.
Simon had not realized until just now how weak Charlie was. It was evident in his face and in his movements that he had no real convictions of his own: the sky-blue suit and the open-necked shirt, being gay or straight or both, being Left or Right, in films or advertising, married or unmarried, were all matters of fashion – all things he did because other people thought they were the things to do. At the Villa Golitsyn he always had an opinion ready for a book or a play or a person, but if Willy or Priss or Simon took a contrary view, he would quickly agree with just the opposite of what he had been saying a moment before. Simon thought it quite likely that the only thing he would defend to the death was Willy – Willy who was largely indefensible.
As his children had noticed in Norfolk, Simon knew nothing about boats. Clöe seemed to him to be rather more than a dinghy and less than a yacht. They climbed on board and Willy showed him a dark hole which he said was a cabin which would ‘sleep three’. At the entrance to this cabin there was a galley and a lavatory – designed, said Willy, so that ‘a
constipated sailor can cook and crap at the same time’.
The boat was not in good condition. The paint was peeling off the side and the metal fittings had a greenish veneer. A tarpaulin which had once covered the entrance to the cabin had partly blown away, and before they left Willy and Priss tried to tie it back in place. Willy was too drunk and Priss too weak, so Simon and Charlie did it for them. They then helped Willy off the boat, afraid that he might totter into the harbour.
‘We must take her out,’ said Willy, looking at Clöe with pride. ‘We’ll spin off to the Iles de Lerins.’
‘Not at this time of year,’ said Priss. ‘I don’t want to get caught in a storm.’
‘Clöe can ride out a storm,’ said Willy.
‘Clöe can but we can’t.’
‘Are you suggesting,’ asked Willy, ‘that I’m an incompetent sailor?’ It was difficult for the others to tell whether he was offended or only pretending to be.
‘Oh no,’ said Priss sarcastically. ‘Only a skilled navigator could beach his boat on the plage concédée in front of the Negresco and have to be towed off by the pompiers.’
‘There you are,’ said Willy, turning to Simon and Charlie. ‘She undermines me. It was the same in Argentina when I got on a horse.’
‘Only because you looked like Don Quixote.’
‘We are what we see reflected in the eyes of others,’ said Willy acidly. ‘You always wanted to be a boy, that’s all.’ He turned to Simon and Charlie. ‘You admired me at school, didn’t you? So I believe in myself. But from Priss – perpetual derision. So what have I become?’ He shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘I believed in you long before they did. It’s just that I don’t see you as a man of action.’
‘But great Heavens, wasn’t I captain of the First Fifteen?’ He snatched Priss’s handbag and set off down the quai towards the car. Charlie ran after him shouting: ‘Pass, Ludley, pass.’ Willy turned and threw the bag at Charlie with the same graceful twist of his body that Simon remembered from the playing fields at school. It flew through the air but opened before Charlie caught it, scattering coins, credit cards, bank notes and make up all over the cobbles.