As winter approached he moved on south—“I’m like the swallow,” he wrote to Ursula—until he was stopped by the sea and rented a room above a café in a little fishing village, unspoilt, as yet, by visitors. Every day he sat at a table in the one and only café, a jacket and a scarf all he needed to defend himself against the Riviera winter, and smoked Gitanes and drank espresso from thick little white cups, his notebook on the table in front of him. By lunchtime he had moved on to wine, with bread and fish straight from the sea and grilled over wood, and by the time the sleepy afternoons had taken hold he was ready for an aperitif. He was living a life of the senses, he told himself, but deep down he suspected he was shirking his life and felt accordingly guilty. (He was English, after all.)
“L’Ecrivain Anglais,” the villagers called him, rather fondly as he was the first poet to visit them, although artists were ten a penny in that part of the world. They were impressed by his colloquial French and his dedication to his notebook. He was glad that they couldn’t read his paltry offerings. They might have lost some of their admiration for him.
He decided to be more methodical in his approach to Art (Sylvie’s capital letter). Poems were constructs, not simply words that flowed willy-nilly from the brain. “Observations” he had written as a heading at the beginning of the notebook, and the pages were filled with pedestrian images—“The sea is particularly blue today—Sapphire? Azure? Ultramarine?” And “The sun glints off the sea like a thousand diamonds” or “The coastline seems composed of solid blocks of colour and hot slices of sunshine.” (He was rather pleased with that.) And “Madame la propriétaire is wearing her funny little green jacket today.” Was there a poem to be had from Madame la propriétaire, he wondered? He thought of the fields of lavender and sunflowers he had seen on his sojourn, all harvested now, and sought out images—the “imperial spikes” and “golden discs of Helios turning to worship their god.” If only he was an artist—paint seemed less demanding than words. He felt sure that Van Gogh’s sunflowers hadn’t given him as much trouble.
“Gulls wheeling and screeching overhead, excited by the fishing boats returning home,” he wrote carefully, before lighting up another Gitane. The sun was below the yardarm (almost) as his father would have said if he were here (how could he not like France?) and it was time for a pastis. He began to think of himself as a loafer, a lotus eater. He had enough money saved to winter on the C?te d’Azur and then perhaps head north and see Paris. “One can’t die without seeing Paris,” Izzie said. Although he did.
Shortly before Christmas a telegram arrived. His mother was in hospital. “Pneumonia, rather poorly, best come home,” his father had written sparely. “Her mother’s lungs,” Hugh said on Teddy’s return. Teddy had never known this grandmother and the legendary lungs that, according to Sylvie, had killed her. Sylvie recovered surprisingly quickly and was home before the year was out. She had not been so very ill, Teddy wasn’t sure it had merited a telegram and for a while suspected some kind of family conspiracy, but “She kept asking for you,” Hugh said, rather apologetically. “The prodigal son,” his father said fondly when he picked him up from the station.
To tell the truth, Teddy was rather relieved to give up the pretence of poetry and after the familiarity of Christmas at Fox Corner it seemed faintly absurd to journey all the way back to France. (And for what? To be a loafer?) So instead, when his father found him a position in his bank he took it. The first day, as he entered the hushed halls of polished mahogany panelling he felt like a prisoner embarking on a life sentence. A bird with its wings clipped, earthbound for ever. Was this it? His life over?
“There, Ted,” Hugh said, “I knew you’d settle to something eventually.”
The war, when it came, was an immense relief for Teddy.
Penny for them?” Nancy said, taking a tape measure from her knitting basket and placing it against his shoulder.
“Not worth it,” he said. Back to the wretched snowdrop.
“The ‘drop’ in snowdrop does not, as many think, refer to a snowflake but to an earring, and one can picture this delicate flower trembling in the ear of some Elizabethan beauty.”
“Strictly speaking, can an earring tremble in an ear?” Nancy said, laying down her needles in her lap and frowning at her knitting. She pulled on her own delicate earlobe to demonstrate the fixity of the small grey pearl therein. “If it were dangling it could tremble.”
She was forensic. She would make a fine High Court judge. She could deliver an opinion that bore no weight of emotion and in the most pleasant fashion. “How cruel you are to me,” she said, laughing. She had hinted before at what she considered the rather “flat” quality of these pieces. It was journalism, Teddy thought defensively, an inert form of writing. Nancy always wanted everyone to find the best in everything.