He had invited a fifth guest to the concert — David Ogdoad, his part-time gardener, aged about nineteen, a student of music and an early drifter. His working agreement with Mr. Chadwick allowed him to use the piano, providing Mr. Chadwick was not at the same moment trying to write a novel upstairs. The piano was an ancient Pleyel that had belonged to Mr. Chadwick’s mother; it was kept in a room called the winter salon, which jutted like a promontory from the rest of the house, with shuttered windows along two sides and a pair of French doors that were always locked. No one knew, and perhaps Mr. Chadwick had forgotten, if he kept the shutters closed because his mother had liked to play the piano in the dark or if he did not want sunlight further to fade and mar the old sofas and rugs. Here, from time to time, when Mr. Chadwick was out to lunch or dinner, or, for the time being, did not know what to do next with “Guy” and “Roderick” and “Marie-Louise,” David would sit among a small woodland of deprived rubber plants and labor at getting the notes right. He was surprisingly painstaking for someone said to have a restless nature but badly in need of a teacher and a better instrument: the Pleyel had not been tuned since before the war.
Now, of course Mr. Chadwick could have managed all this differently. He could have made David an allowance instead of paying token wages; introduced David to his friends as an equal; found him a teacher, had the piano restored, or bought a new one; built a music studio in the garden. Why not? Male couples abounded on this part of the coast. There were distinguished precedents, who let themselves be photographed and interviewed. Mr. Maugham lived not far away. But Mr. Chadwick was smaller literary stuff, and he didn’t want the gossip. The concert outing was a social trial balloon. Any of Mr. Chadwick’s friends, seeing the six of us, were supposed to say, “Watt has invited a party of young people,” and not the fatal, the final, “Watt has started going out with his gardener.”
Mr. Chadwick had not been able to book six seats together, which was all to the good: it meant there was no chance of my having to sit next to Lapwing. He was opposed on principle to the performance of music and liked to say so while it was going on, and his habit of punching one in the arm to underscore his opinions always made me feel angry and helpless. I sat with Lily in the second row, with the Lapwings and Mr. Chadwick and his gardener just behind. The front row was kept for honored guests. Mr. Chadwick pointed them out to Edie: the local mayor, and Jean Cocteau, and some elderly Bavarian princesses.
People applauded as Cocteau was shown to his seat. He was all in white, with bright quick eyes. The Bavarians were stout and dignified, in blue or pink satin, with white fur stoles.
“How do you get to be a Bavarian princess?” I heard Edie say.
“You could be born one,” said Mr. Chadwick. He kept his voice low, like a radio announcer describing an opera. “Or you could marry a Bavarian prince.”
“What about the fantastic-looking Italians?” said Edie. “At the end of the row. The earrings! Those diamonds are diamonds.”
Mr. Chadwick was willing to give the wearer of the earrings a niche in Italian nobility.
“Big money from Milan,” said Lapwing, as if he knew all about both. “Cheese exporters.” His tone became suspicious, accusing almost: “Do you actually know Cocteau?”
“I have met M. Cocteau,” said Mr. Chadwick. “I make a distinction between meeting and knowing, particularly with someone so celebrated.”
“That applause for him just now — was it ironic?”
I could imagine Lapwing holding his glasses on his blob of a nose, pressing his knuckle between his eyes. I felt responsible, the way you always do when a compatriot is making a fool of himself.
Of course not, Mr. Chadwick replied. Cocteau was adored in Rivebelle, where he had decorated an abandoned chapel, now used for weddings. It made everyone happy to know he was here, the guest of the town, and that the violinist Christian Ferras would soon emerge from the church, and that the weather could be trusted — no mistral, no tramontane to carry the notes away, no threat of rain.
I think he said some of this for David, so that David would be appreciative even if he could not be content, showing David he had reason upon reason for staying with Mr. Chadwick; for at any moment David might say he had had enough and was going home. Not home to Mr. Chadwick’s villa, where he was said to occupy a wretched room — a nineteenth-century servant’s room — but home to England. And here was the start of Mr. Chadwick’s dilemma — his riddle that went round and round and came back to the same point: What if David stopped playing gardener and was moved into the best spare bedroom — the room with Monet-like water lilies on three walls? What would be his claim on the room? What could he be called? Mr. Chadwick’s adopted nephew? His gifted young friend? And how to explain the shift from watering the agapanthus to spending the morning at the piano and the afternoon on the beach?
“Do you know who the three most attractive men in the world are?” said Edie all of a sudden. “I’ll tell you. Cary Grant, Ali Khan, and Prince Philip.”
None of the three looked even remotely like Lapwing. I glanced at Lily, expecting a flash of complicity.
Instead she said softly, “Pablo Picasso, Isaac Stern, Juan Fangio.”
“What about them?”
“The most attractive.”
“Who’s Fangio? You mean the racing driver? Have you ever seen him?”
“Just his pictures.”
“I can’t see what they’ve got in common.”
“Great, dark eyes,” said Lily.
I suppressed the mention that I did not have great, dark eyes, and decided that what she really must have meant was nerve and genius. I knew by now that nerve comes and goes, with no relation to circumstance; as for genius, I had never been near it. Probably genius grew stately and fat or gaunt and haunted, lost its hair, married the wrong person, died in its sleep. David Ogdoad, of whom I was still barely aware except as a problem belonging to Mr. Chadwick, had been described — by Mr. Chadwick, of course — as a potential genius. (I never heard his name again after that year.) He had small, gray eyes, and with his mouth shut looked like a whippet — something about the way he stretched his neck.
A string orchestra filed onstage, to grateful applause (the musicians were half an hour late), and an eerie hush settled over the square. For the next hour or so, both Lapwings held still.
At intermission Mr. Chadwick tried to persuade us to remain in our seats; he seemed afraid of losing us — or perhaps just of losing David — in the shuffling crowd. Some people were making for a bar across the square, others struggled in the opposite direction, toward the church. I imagined Christian Ferras and the other musicians at bay in the vestry, their hands cramped from signing programs. David was already in the aisle, next to Lily.
“The intermission lasts a whole hour,” said Lapwing, lifting his glasses and bringing the program close to his face. “Why don’t we just say we’ll meet at the bar?”
“And I’ll look after Mr. Chadwick,” said Edie, taking him by the arm. But it was not Edie he wanted.
Lily turned to David, smiling. She loved being carried along by this crowd of players from old black-and-white movies, hearing the different languages mingling and overlapping.