Unclouded Summer

Author:Alec Waugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

It was a poem that Francis had heard his father read many times. His reading of it tonight, should have made him feel really home. It didn’t though. It made him ill at ease. He sat down quietly waiting for his father to finish reading.

Some humble door among thy many mansions

Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease

And flows forever through Heaven’s green expansions

The River of thy Peace…

The voice stopped reading. There was a pause. It was for Francis, and he knew it, to say something that would set the right atmosphere for the evening; something friendly and easy; something affectionate and fond, that would warm his parents’ hearts; but he could not find the words.

“I saw Julia today,” he said.

It was so much the opposite of what he should have said, of what he had meant to say, of what he had planned to say on his first night home, that his parents made no reply. As he had walked round the picture galleries of Europe, as he had begun his final journey up the coast, from Genoa to Marseilles, he had pictured himself on his return, talking far into the night about all he had seen and done. I’ll probably bore them blue, he’d thought, but they’ll just have to lump it. Yet here he was talking about Julia. If only he could feel more natural. He would have given a lot for a strong rye highball, but even before Prohibition his father had only served highballs on occasions. He would have no truck with bootleggers

There was a pause; to cover the embarrassment of the pause Francis hurried on.

“It was a great piece of luck. I’d gone round to see Van Ruyt. I had an hour or two to spare. I rang her up on the off chance. To my surprise she was in. She’d come up for the afternoon. We lunched together.”

“And what about Robin?” his mother asked. Robin was Julia’s son.

“As far as I know, we didn’t mention Robin.”

“He must be all right then. He had a cold last week.”

Mrs. Oliver rose to her feet.

“I’ll go and see how my dinner’s getting on.”

“Call out when it’s nearly ready, Mother, so that I can bring out the bottle.”

It was a bottle of champagne that his father had cooling in the frigidaire. One of the last that he had laid down before Prohibition.

“Though this can hardly be a treat to you after all the champagne that you must have been drinking over there,” he said.

Francis laughed. “Even in France it costs three dollars. That’s more than a struggling painter can afford too often.”

“But I imagine some of your friends there could. What about those Marriotts you wrote about?”

“Oh, they were rich enough.”

A month ago – was that really all it was – in the first excitement of meeting Judy he had imagined the descriptions that he would give on his return of the villas he had visited, the parties he had attended, the socialites that he had met.

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