Free Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw Page A

let Gail McKinnon walk in front of him and followed her, protecting her. In her sandals she drifted noiselessly over the scoured stones. Her long hair blew cleanly in the sea wind. Suddenly he remembered what had troubled him when he first saw her in the Murphy’s patio standing in sunlight with the sea behind her. She had reminded him of his wife Penelope on a June day on the Long Island shore, girlish and rosy, poised on a dune, outlined against the incoming tide.
    The Danish mother was propped up against the rocks beside the pool reading, her child sitting with her blonde head on her mother’s shoulder.
    A dangerous coast.
    Take an old man’s advice. Try.
    Walking to the car, Gail McKinnon put on the ridiculous dark glasses again.

W HEN he drove the car out of the gate of the hotel grounds, he turned, out of an old memory, in the wrong direction, toward Antibes, instead of toward Juanles-Pins and Cannes. The year after his marriage he had rented a villa for a summer on the coast between the Cap and Antibes, and the habit of turning toward it, he realized a little ruefully, had remained with him all this time.
    “I hope you’re not in a hurry,” he said to the girl beside him. “I’m going the long way round.”
    “I have nothing better to do today,” Gail McKinnon said, “than to go the long way round with Jesse Craig.”
    “I used to live down this road,” he said. “It was nicer then.”
    “It’s nice now.”
    “I suppose so. There’re just more houses.” He drove slowly. The road wound along the sea. A regatta of small sails glittered far out on the blue water. An old man in a striped shirt was fishing off the rocks. Above them a Caravelle was losing altitude, coming in to land at Nice.
    “When were you here before?” Gail McKinnon asked.
    “Quite a few times,” he said. “In 1944, for the first time, when the war was still on …”
    “What were you doing then?” She sounded surprised.
    “You said you did your homework,” he teased her. “I thought my past was an open book to you.”
    “Not that open.”
    “I was in a jeep,” he said, “in an army camera unit. The Seventh Army had landed in the South of France, and we were sent down from Paris to make some film of the action down here. Our line was based near Menton, just a few miles from here. You could hear the artillery on the other side of Nice …”
    Old soldier’s maundering, he thought, and stopped. Ancient history. Caesar ordered the camp to be set up on the hills overlooking the river. The Helvetii were in line of battle on the other bank of the river. For the girl beside him Caesar’s line and the line of young Americans before Menton were equally lost in the gulf of time. Did they even teach Latin anymore?
    He looked sidelong at her. The glasses, which protected her and revealed him, annoyed him. Her youth annoyed him. Her ignorance, which was the innocent function of her youth, annoyed him. There were too many advantages on her side. “Why do you wear those damn things?” he asked.
    “You mean my shades?”
    “The glasses. Yes.”
    “You don’t like them?”
    “No.”
    With a single gesture she took them off and tossed them out of the car. She smiled at him. “That better?”
    “Much.”
    They both laughed. He was no longer sorry Sonia Murphy had forced him into taking the girl along with him to Cannes.
    “And what about that ghastly sweat shirt yesterday?” he asked.
    “I experiment with different personalities,” she said.
    “What was today’s personality?” He was amused now.
    “Nice, scrubbed, virginally coquettish, in an up-to-date Women’s Lib kind of way,” she said. “For Mr. Murphy and his wife.” She raised her arms as though to embrace the sea, the rocks, the pines shadowing the road, the entire Mediterranean afternoon. “I’ve never been here before, but I feel I’ve known this coast since I was a little girl.” She pulled her legs up and turned in her seat to face him. “I’m going