September on the Riviera was a good month, with just enough rain to start the grass growing again; the shrivelling heat of summer gave way to a gentle warmth, and the ocean was more refreshing than ever. Our relationship with Stanley soon became more complex.
One day Graeme took her on a bus ride to the walled town of St-Paul-de-Vence, a famous tourist attraction; they came back late in the evening, when I was drinking quietly in bed, and I heard them tiptoeing up the stairs to her room. My feelings for the next half-hour were mixed. I wondered if it might not be easier if they were not quite so close by; then I decided it really made no difference. I was relieved when Graeme appeared.
‘She wants to join us for a few drinks,’ he said.
He had glasses and soda-water ready by the time Stanley came in, carrying her ukulele.
‘Could I play you something?’ she asked. ‘A little Rameau?’
I had never heard Rameau on the ukulele, but the effect was both modest and graceful. It was a country dance, its rhythms underscored by heavy bass strokes. Stanley played it with skill and feeling, leaning back in her chair, her legs crossed, her eyes fixed on the soft night sky beyond the window, humming the melody in her small voice.
‘That’s a bourrée,’ she said. ‘It’s classical, I know, but it’s jolly and the way I feel. Could I have another drink?’
It was an idyllic evening. As the level in the brandy bottle sank, the conversation became more uninhibited and Stanley’s songs more unrestrained. Our new friend’s repertoire included items we had never heard before.
The next two months passed very pleasantly. As we were not impelled by ambition, envy, avarice or pride, none of us did anything at all: we remained sunk in greed, sloth and sensuality—the three most amiable vices in the catalogue, and those which promote so much content and social ease that I could never see what they are doing in it at all, and have often thought they should be replaced by jealousy, exploitation and cruelty, which are much worse sins for everyone involved. I do not think the life we led at the Dora Melrose was in any sense wicked for all its irregularity. It did no harm to anyone—and far from misusing our time, we were really turning it to the best account for our own sakes and the world’s as well; for I am persuaded half of man’s miseries result from an insufficiency of leisure, gormandise and sexual gratification during the years from seventeen to twenty. This is what makes so many people tyrannical, bitter, foolish, grasping and ill-natured once they have come to years of discretion and understand they have wasted their irreplaceable years in the pursuit of education, security, reputation, or advancement.
I realize that such remarks do not come with much authority from one whose pursuit of pleasure has led him to a hospital bed, but on the other hand I do not think my own want of moderation, and my bad luck, should altogether vitiate these arguments in favour of a youth of wine and roses.
Towards the end of October Madame Gyp told us the Dutchman who owned our suite was coming back. After casting around for new quarters we settled on the Pension Rodolphe Plascassier only half a block away on the corner of the rue de Californie, where we took two rooms, with Graeme and Stanley sharing the larger one.
Like Dora Melrose, Rodolphe Plascassier had been dead for many years, and the pension was run by a small beady-eyed Franco-Italian called Amédéo Dongibéne. The food here was even better than at the Dora Melrose, for Dongibéne had been chef at a number of smart hotels in Paris, Rome and Berlin. He talked familiarly of Jean Negresco and Henri Ritz, with whom he claimed to have worked as a waiter in Vienna; and he had a violent dislike of the English, especially the English nobility.
‘Never trust an Englishman,’ he said, ‘and when he has a title you must be still more on your guard, for the English nobleman is the biggest thief and swindler in the world. People say that Russians of title are unreliable: I have seldom found them so. The French aristocracy are hagglers, but honest in the main; a German baron is a good fellow, and generally pays his bill. An American senator! Ah, there is the perfect gentleman, who tips well. As for an Indian prince, he is a fountain of gold unless he forgets. But most hereditary titles—no. By the way, I notice both you gentlemen are described in your passports as ‘Esquire’. Is this a Canadian title, may I ask?’
We were glad to explain this was only a piece of meaningless snobbery on the part of our Department of External Affairs.
Dongibéne had many stories to tell of the tricks by which people at his pension had tried to escape without paying the bill, and of his own astuteness in circumventing them.
As the weather grew colder we found life becoming rather dull. In spite of Stanley’s allowance we found all our money was going on board and lodging. We were obliged to stop drinking brandy and switch to kirsch; we could no longer go to cafés and nightclubs, where the prices had been raised for the winter season; and the totals of Dongibéne’s illegible bills seemed mysteriously to increase every week. We did our best to meet expenses. Graeme would spend two nights a week rolling dice in Christie’s Bar on the rue de France, and for a while I was taken on as a gigolo at the Savoy Grill; but his luck seemed to have left him, and I soon found that piloting old women around the dance floor was both tedious and unprofitable. Stanley alone appeared to be without a worry: when not sleeping or eating, she busied herself composing a sonata for violin, and spent each morning over sheets of music paper, stabbing at them with a pencil, strumming with her fingers and hissing through her teeth.
The winter dragged on, while the heat in our rooms steadily decreased and our spirits worsened. Things seemed to be losing their savour.
‘I feel we should get out of here,’ said Graeme to me quietly one morning. ‘We’ve had enough of the Riviera anyway. One should never spend more than three months in one place and we’ve been here six. We’re getting hopelessly behind with our bills too.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘I’m afraid there’s only one thing. We’ll have to do a bunk.’
‘It doesn’t seem quite right. Poor Dongibéne, he’s always talking of bunks.’
‘I know. But he’s been padding our bills for the last three months. I’ve gone over them carefully and we’ve been overcharged about a hundred dollars since we came. He has a system of interchangeable fives and nines, and units and sevens, a kind of complex service charge that runs from fifteen to twenty per cent, and every third or fourth week seems to have eight days.’
‘Have you any kind of plan?’
‘Of course. We stage a lover’s quarrel over Stanley. I lose, I tell Dongibéne to get your three big trunks out of the cellar, pack all our good stuff, pay my own bill right up, and leave. The same night you and she play at turtledoves, you move into the big room, fill my canvas trunk with old clothes and things for weight, and let him stow it in the cellar because you’re staying till May. Then you both pack all the rest of the stuff and slip out at three in the morning. I’ll have a taxi waiting around the corner of the Place Magnan. The Genoa-Marseilles express goes through at 3:30.’
‘What old clothes were you thinking of leaving?’
‘Our winter coats for one thing.’
‘My coon coat?’
‘It’s not worth more than ten dollars. And I’m giving up my grandfather’s trunk too.’
‘If we’ve got to have weight, what about the copy of Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans Bob gave you?’
‘Good idea. It goes in with the coats.’
‘When is the day?’
‘Why put it off? Tonight.’
Stanley was enchanted with the plan. ‘What fun,’ she said. ‘It’s sort of criminal, in a way, except that it’s really not. I mean, we’re just setting things to rights, like Robin Hood.’
But at night, after Graeme had gone with the trunks, she looked around the big room nervously. ‘I’d like to walk in the moonlight,’ she said. ‘We’ll take a romantic farewell of Nice, shall we?’
‘Too dangerous. We’d better stay right here.’
‘I suppose you’re right. But I suddenly hate this room. I feel it’s trying to enclose me, possess me. Why?’
‘We’ve already left it. It’s not a nice room anyway.’
‘Not like the lovely room you had at Madame Gyp’s. Funny the way things always seem to get worse.’ She looked at me bleakly, then suddenly began to cry. ‘No, no,’ she said, pushing me away when I tried to comfort her. ‘It’s no use ... Life is awful, awful.’
Before we left she had hysterics.
But by the time the train had reached Cannes she had recovered. Opening one of her bags she brought out three enormous ham sandwiches and a bottle of milk.
‘I bet neither of you would have thought of this,’ she said.
We all ate like wolves.
‘Well,’ said Stanley after a while, ‘here we are. En route, as they say. Where are we going? Paris?’
‘Neither Graeme nor I have ever seen Vienna,’ I said.
‘I have, and once is enough.’
‘Our tickets are only good to Marseilles,’ said Graeme.
‘I’ll buy the fares to Paris then. Oh boy, I want to see the Latin Quarter and Montmartre and the Bastille and the Sacré Coeur and everything.’
‘You forgot the Eiffel Tower,’ I said.
‘My God, yes.’ In the grey light of the rainy morning her expression suddenly grew rapt. ‘The Eiffel Tower!’