Mike was older than Barbara, although not by a great deal. He had come to France because the words “art” and “Paris” were unbreakably joined in his family’s imagination, the legend of Trilby’s Bohemia persisting long after the truth of it had died. When his high school art teacher, a young woman whose mobiles had been praised, pronounced that his was a talent not to be buried under the study of medicine or law, his family had decided that a year in Paris would show whether or not his natural bent was toward painting. It was rather like exposing someone to a case of measles and watching for spots to break out.
In Paris, Mike had spent the first three weeks standing in the wrong queue at the Beaux-Arts, and when no one seemed able to direct him to the right one, he had given up the Beaux-Arts entirely and joined a class instructed by an English painter called Chitterley, whose poster advertisement he had seen in a café. It was Mr. Chitterley’s custom to turn his young charges loose on the city and then, once a week or so, comment on their work in a borrowed studio on the quai d’Anjou. Mike painted with sober patience the bridges of the Seine, the rain-soaked lawns of the Tuileries, and a head-on view of Notre Dame. His paintings were large (Mr. Chitterley was nearsighted), askew (as he had been taught in the public schools of New York), and empty of people (he had never been taught to draw, and it was not his nature to take chances).
“Very interesting,” said Mr. Chitterley of Mike’s work. Squinting a little, he would add, “Ah! I see what you were trying to do here!”
“You do?” Mike wished he would be more specific, for he sometimes recognized that his pictures were flat, empty, and the color of cement. At first, he had blamed the season, for the Paris winter had been sunless; later on, he saw that its gray contained every shade in a beam of light, but this effect he was unable to reproduce. Unnerved by the pressure of time, he watched his work all winter, searching for the clue that would set him on a course. Prodded in the direction of art, he now believed in it, enjoying, above all, the solitude, the sense of separateness, the assembling of parts into something reasonable. He might have been equally happy at a quiet table, gathering into something ticking and ordered the scattered wheels of a watch, but this had not been suggested, and he had most certainly never given it a thought. At last, when the season had rained itself to an end (and his family innocently were prepared to have him exhibit his winter’s harvest in some garret of the Left Bank and send home the critics’ clippings), he approached Mr. Chitterley and asked what he ought to do next.
“Why, go to the country,” said Mr. Chitterley, who was packing for a holiday with the owner of the quai d’Anjou studio. “Go south. Don’t stop in a hotel but live on the land, in a tent, and paint, paint, paint, paint, paint!”
“I can’t afford it,” Mike said. “I mean I can’t afford to buy the tent and stuff. But I can stay over here until August, if you think there’s any point. I mean is it wasting time for me to paint, paint, paint?”
Mr. Chitterley shot him an offended look and then a scornful one, which said, How like an American! The only measuring rods, time and money. Aloud, he suggested Menton. He had stayed there as a child, and he remembered it as a paradise of lemon ice and sunshine. Mike, for want of a better thought, or even a contrastive one, took the train there a day later.
Menton was considerably less than paradise. Shelled, battered, and shabby, it was a town gone to seed, in which old English ladies, propelling themselves with difficulty along the Promenade George V, nodded warmly to each other (they had become comrades during the hard years of war, when they were interned together in the best hotels, farther up the coast) and ignored the new influx of their countrymen — embarrassed members of the lower middle classes, who refused to undress in the face of heat and nakedness and who huddled miserably on the beach in hot city clothing, knotted handkerchiefs on their heads to shield them from the sun.
“Not the sort of English one likes,” Barbara’s aunt had said sadly to Mike, who was painting beside her on the beach. “If you had seen Menton before the war! I had a little villa, up behind that hotel. It was shelled by the Americans. Not that it wasn’t necessary,” she added, recalling her origins. “Still — And they built a fortification not far away. I went up to look at it. It was full of rusted wire, and nothing in it but a dead cat.”
“The French built it,” Barbara said. “The pension man told me.”
“It doesn’t matter, dear,” her aunt said. “Before the war, and even when it started, there was nothing there at all. It was so different.” She dropped her knitting and looked about, as if just the three of them were fit to remember what Menton had been. It was the young people’s first bond of sympathy, and Barbara tried not to giggle; before the war was a time she didn’t remember at all. “In those days, you knew where you were at,” her aunt said, summing up the thirties. She picked up her knitting, and Mike went on with his painting of sea, sky, and tilted sailboat. Away from Mr. Chitterley and the teacher who had excelled in mobiles, he found that he worked with the speed and method of Barbara’s aunt producing a pair of Argyle socks. Menton, for all its drawbacks, was considerably easier to paint than Paris, and he rendered with fidelity the blue of the sea, the pink and white of the crumbling villas, and the red of the geraniums. One of his recent pictures, flushed and accurate as a Technicolor still, he had given to Barbara, who had written a touched and eager letter of thanks, and then had torn the letter up.
Mike had brought his painting things along on the picnic, for, as Barbara’s aunt had observed with approbation, he didn’t waste an hour of his day. Barbara carried the picnic basket, which had been packed by the cook at Pension Bit o’ Heather and contained twice as much bread as one would want. Around her shoulders was an unnecessary sweater that she had snatched up in a moment of compulsive modesty just before leaving her room. She carried her camera, slung on a strap, and she felt that she and Mike formed, together, a picture of art, pleasure, and industry which, unhappily, there was no one to remark but a fat man taking his dog for a run; the man gave them scarcely a glance.
Rounding a bend between dwarfed ornamental orange trees, they saw the big hotel Barbara’s aunt had told them about. From its open windows came the hum of vacuum cleaners and the sound of a hiccuping tango streaked with static. The gardens spread out before them, with marked and orderly paths and beds of brilliant flowers. Barbara’s aunt had assured them that this place was ideal for a picnic lunch, and that no one would disturb them. There was, on Cap Martin, a public picnic ground, which Barbara was not permitted to visit. “You wouldn’t like it,” her aunt had explained. “It is nothing but tents, and diapers, and hairy people in shorts. Whenever possible in France, one prefers private property.” Still, the two were unconvinced, and after staring at the gardens and then at each other they turned and walked in the other direction, to a clearing around a small monument overlooking the bay.
They sat down on the grass in the shade and Mike unpacked his paints. Barbara watched him, working over in her mind phrases that, properly used, would give them a subject in common; none came, and she pulled grass and played with her wristwatch. “We’re leaving tomorrow,” she said at last.