Unclouded Summer by Alec Waugh Read Free Book Online

langouste with white wine standing in beaded ice buckets along the table; a light and simple meal. But the soup had a flavor of sherry in it, and the salad – jellied eggs on a bed of asparagus tips and tomatoes – was cool without being iced, and, the wine though it was presented casually in carafes, was dry and rich upon the tongue. The linen napkins were monogrammed and the silver crested; the wine glasses were paper-thin, and down the length of the starched damask tablecloth, was a design of small leaves and flowers, simple hedge flowers for the most part, with just so many tuberoses as might scent, without overpowering the air. An aged and silent butler in a white high-buttoned jacket moved behind the chairs. There was an air, not of opulence, but of ease and elegance.
    Sir Henry sat in the center of the table, a vantage point from Which he could control the conversation better. Francis sat between Allan and Madame Renan. The moment they sat down, Allan turned to him.
    â€œI am most happy to have an opportunity of meeting you,” he began. “I want to ask your advice. I have just built myself a house, in Hollywood. I need six pictures for my dining room. They must be the right pictures. You know what reporters are. They are so anxious to make fun of film stars, particularly of our homes. I am resolved that they shall not make fun of mine. Whenever I meet anyone Whose opinion I can trust, I ask him to give me a list of the six best modern painters, the painters who would be as you might say, the opposite numbers to John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Constance Talmadge, myself, Alice Terry. Then when I havesay twenty lists, I will see which names appear most often and I will buy a picture by each one of them.”
    â€œBut the pictures might be of such different styles that they would clash.”
    Allan shook his head.
    â€œThat would not matter. It is the names that count. I am thinking of the gossip writers. I want to have them say ‘The most artistic dining room in Hollywood is, of course, Rex Allan’s. On his walls you will see …’ And then will follow a list of the six best modern painters. If you will give me your list of the six best modern painters, I will add it to the fifteen other lists that I already have. Now who would you put on your list?”
    â€œThe artists must be living now?”
    â€œOf course yes, as I said, the opposite numbers of myself and Gilbert.”
    â€œWell, I’d have John and Picasso and Dufy and Matisse…”
    Before he could complete his list, however, a general discussion at the table had begun to make conversation à deux difficult.
    When Francis and Judy had arrived, the party had been discussing the general strike which had threatened earlier in the year to overthrow constitutional government in England. They returned to the subject now. The whole thing had been settled, Ambrose was explaining, at a lunch party that Lord Wimborne gave.
    â€œIt was really very cleverly arranged,” he said. “The negotiators on both sides had to be got together. They had to meet on a neutral ground. Ivor was probably the one person who could have organized it and he chose exactly the right people. He made it an informal party. He asked people like Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell who could make good neutral conversation to begin with, and set the right friendly atmosphere. I saw Jimmy Thomas the next day. He told me the lunch party didn’t break up till six o’clock and by then the strike was settled.”
    It was talk of a quite new kind for Francis. At his father’s table he had heard the politics of the day discussed, but he had heard them discussed as history was; as something that happened somewhere else. He had never before mixed with people to whom politics and the general ordering of the world were a part of their own lives, were the stage on which their own lives were acted, for whom the protagonists in