A Breath Of French Air Part 10

'Rhubarb!' Charley said loudly. 'h.e.l.l's bells. We only just got here.'

'Please excuse,' the Captain said.

'Rhubarb!' Charley said again. 'I thought the French were drinkers.'

The Captain again protested that he had to get back to his ship and Pop said very well, that was all right, and he hoped he'd see him soon. Perhaps in England?

'In England, yes,' the Captain said. 'I come soon. When teeth are ready.'

'What teeth?' Charley snapped.

Without embarra.s.sment and with a certain touch of pride the Captain slipped from his mouth what he explained to Pop and Charley were his temporary set of dentures. The new ones, he a.s.sured them, would be ready in a month or so: in England.

'National Elf lark,' Pop reminded Charley.

'My mate,' the Captain said, 'he have new wooden leg. Also it is true you can have cognac sometimes? Oui?'

'There's the National Elf lark for you. Charley old man,' Pop said. 'Free for all. Even the Froggies. Wooden legs an' all.'

'Rhubarb to the National Health lark!' said Charley aggressively, 'and double rhubarb to the Froggies!'

As if detecting in this a certain note of ill-concealed hostility Captain Brisson, whose face had now broken out in a rash of red and purple blotches, shook hands all over again with Pop and Charley, at the same time forgetting to put his teeth back. It was only when he had gone some yards along the quayside that he remembered the omission and slapped them back into his mouth with a blow so sharp that it knocked him off keel, making him stagger.

Soon after he had disappeared Pop was about to say for a second time that he and Charley ought to be going too when he saw across the street a figure waving to him with a white and chocolate scarf.

He did not need to hear the fluted call of 'Darling!' that followed it to know that this was Angela Snow. She was dressed in trim pure white shorts and a coffee-coloured linen blouse and white open sandals in which her bare painted toenails glistened like rows of cherries. With her was a girl in a pea-green cable-st.i.tch sweater and a skirt of indeterminate colour that might have once been mustard. Much washing had turned it to an unpleasant shade of mongrel ochre, rather like that of a mangel-wurzel.

'This', said Angela Snow, 'is my sister. Iris.'

Pop and Charley rose to shake hands, Charley unsteadily.

'Good. Splendid,' Charley said. 'Just in time for a snifter.'

'Darlings!' Angela Snow said. 'My tongue's hanging out.'

Iris said nothing but 'Howdedo'. She was a solid, shortish blonde of rising thirty with a skin as hard as marble and more or less the colour of an acid drop. Her eyes were almost lash-less; the complete absence of eyebrows made her face actually seem broader than it was, as well as giving it a look of completely bloodless astonishment. Her hair was cut in a roughish homemade bob and she had short white ankle socks of exactly the kind that French girls wore.

Charley demanded of the two girls what would it be and presently Angela Snow was drinking Pernod and her sister a small bottle of Perrier with ice. Charley and Pop decided at the same time that this was as good a moment as any to have a fourth Red Bull and while this was being mixed Pop reminded Angela Snow of her luncheon promise and when was she coming?

'Whenever you say, dear boy. At the given moment I shall be there.'

'Tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow, darling, as ever is. Bless you.'

'And your sister,' Pop said, giving Iris a rich perky look that would have melted Mademoiselle Dupont to tears but that had on Angela Snow's sister only the effect of heightening her appearance of bloodless surprise, 'would she care to join us too?'

'I'm sure she'd adore to.'

'Impossible,' Iris said. 'I go to Guimiliau to see the Calvary and then the ossuary at '

The word ossuary startled Pop so much that he gave a sort of frog-croak into his Red Bull, which had just arrived. He had as sharp an ear as ever for strange new words but this one had him floored.

'What', he said, 'is an ossuary? Sounds tres sn.o.b.'

'Bone-house,' Angela Snow said.

'Same to you,' Pop said.

'Scream!' she said and everyone, with the solid exception of Iris, roared with laughter.

Even before the arrival of the fourth Red Bull Charley was feeling great. The bit about the ossuary served merely to put him into a louder, cheerier, more pugnacious mood.

'Rhubarb!' he said to Iris Snow. 'Of course you can come. It's langoustine day tomorrow. Have them every Thursday. Don't you adore langoustines?'

Iris, who thought eating the other deadly sins and consequently existed mostly on dry toast, cheese biscuits, and anchovy paste, had no word of answer.

'You see she visits somewhere different every day' Angela Snow said in explanation. 'Ah! the calvaries and the crosses, the dolmens and the menhirs, the allees convenes and the tumuli Iris has to see them all.'

Pop sat open-mouthed before what he thought was the oddest female he had ever seen in his life but was saved from pondering over her too long by a sudden, almost pugnacious question from Charley.

'And how', he demanded of Iris, 'do you travel, Miss Snow? By car or what?'

Iris permitted herself the astonishing luxury of uttering fifty-six words all at once, speaking with measured solemnity.

'I think walking is the only true and right way of seeing these things. Walking leads to contemplation, contemplation to mood, and mood to meditation, so that when you get there you are one with the place you're visiting. So I walk to all the nearest ones and go to all the distant ones by train.'

'By train?' Charley said. 'What train? Not by any chance that little train?'

'Of course. What else? Whenever and as often as it's '

'My G.o.d!' Charley gave a positive shout of delighted triumph and gazed at Iris Snow with alcoholic rapture, as to a kindred spirit. 'She knows my little train! Hear that, Pop? She knows my little train!'

Pop, who thought something must have got into Charley he'd start spouting Shakespeare or that feller Keats any moment now, he thought could only stare at Angela Snow, who gave him a split-second sporting wink, without the trace of a smile, in reply. He was too astonished even to wink back again.

'That train,' Charley kept saying. 'That little train. You remember, Pop, how that was the first thing that brought it all back again?'

Brought all what back again? Pop wanted to know.

'Me. This. Everything. All that time. All those years. The whole ruddy shooting match.'

No doubt about it, Pop thought, Charley was as drunk as a newt. Pickled. Something had got into him. It reminded him of the time he had first met him and how Mariette had had to lend him pyjamas and put him to bed. There was the same raving, rhapsodic light in his eyes.

'Chuffing away over the heather!' Charley said. He had started to wave his arms about in ecstatic recollection. 'Chuffing away for miles. I remember once where was it? St Pol de Leon no, not there. Somewhere else. No. Has St Pol de Leon two cathedrals?'

Without knowing it, and for no sane reason at all, Charley had begun to sharpen his pencil again.

'You might almost say it has,' Iris Snow said. 'There's the cathedral itself, and then of course there's the Chapelle du Creizker. Much, much more magnificent.'

'It was there!' Charley said with a rhapsodic jolt in his voice. 'It was there!'

What was? Pop wanted to know.

'Charley's got a spider on the end of his nose,' said Angela Snow, who loved practical jokes and who was dying to get the subject changed, since relics, saints, and pardons were her sister's food and drink, day and night. 'I can see it dangling.'

Charley did nothing about the supposed teasing spider except to s.n.a.t.c.h vaguely at the air immediately in front of him and then start stirring his Red Bull madly with his pencil, as if it were a cup of tea.

'First time I ever really saw the world,' he said. 'Consciously I mean. Consciously. From that tower you can see '

'Seventy other towers,' Iris said. Of course on a clear day.'

'Never forget,' Charley said. 'G.o.d, you talk about "a wild surmise silent upon a peak in Darien" '

'Charley's off,' Pop said. 'More Shakespeare.'

'Keats!' Charley shouted. 'Keats!'

'Same thing,' Pop said.

'Whenever I go there again,' Iris Snow said, 'I shall think of you.'

'Do,' Charley said, 'do,' and started to sharpen his pencil madly again. 'Think of me!'

Suddenly he was on top of the tower again, on top of the world. Everything was splendidly revelatory and wonderful. His insides felt rich with Red Bull. His veins were a jumble of wires that sang like harp-strings. He heard himself order a fifth Red Bull in a voice that echoed inside his head as a cry might have done through one of the sepulchral allees convenes that Iris found so fascinating.

Drinking it, he was aware that his intestines were on fire and he suddenly gave a belch of rude immoderation.

Magnifique, he kept telling Iris Snow. Magnifique. Rhubarb! And he didn't care a d.a.m.n for any of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Did she?

Whether it had anything to do with this robustly repeated inquiry he never knew but suddenly he came to a vague realization that neither Angela Snow nor her sister were there any longer.

'Where have the Snows gone?' he said. 'Melted?' Jolly good joke, he thought. Magnifique. 'Snows all melted?'

Some time later he was dimly aware of walking back to the plage with Pop, still madly sharpening his pencil and still saying he didn't care a d.a.m.n for the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, whoever they were.

'All Froggies are alike,' he was saying as they reached the plage. 'Eh, Pop? No guts. No Red Bull. No red blood. Eh? Can't take it, eh?'

Without waiting for an answer he made a sudden spasmodic leap on to the sand, landing midway between Ma, who was giving further refreshment to Oscar, and Mariette who, sumptuous in fiery cinnamon in the noon sun, was flirting madly with a muscular Frenchman bronzed as evenly all over as if every inch of colour had been painted on.

Charley at once uttered a queer cry, half in warning, half in anger, and rushed across the sand, seawards, as if about to drown himself. The plage, it seemed to him, was full of b.a.l.l.s. They were floating everywhere, maddening him as they had never done before.

Suddenly he started charging hither and thither with the violence of a demented buffalo. He was attacking b.a.l.l.s everywhere as if they were monsters, stabbing at them with his open pen-knife, making them burst.

One of several loud reports startled a Frenchwoman into a scream and another startled Ma in the act of giving Oscar the other side. One ball as vivid a shade of mustard as Iris Snow's skirt had once been was floating in the water. Charley charged it with a dive, leaving it swimming on the surface of the waves like a deflated and forgotten tooth-bag.

Pop, who didn't know what to make of it all, stared blankly at Charley giving the death blow to a big pink and purple ball that went up with a crack like a Roman Candle, merely thinking that perhaps they'd better lay off Red Bulls for a bit, in case Charley got violent sometime. They didn't suit everybody, especially on an empty stomach.

Less than a minute later he was shaken out of this complacency by the sight of Charley rushing back with puffing frenzy across the sand, every ball now triumphantly punctured, to where Mariette, luxuriously lying on her back under the gaze of an admiring Frenchman who stood with hands on his knees, was testing the truth of Ma's shrewd observations on variety.

In full flight, Charley kicked the startled Frenchman twice up the backside. He was, however, less startled than Pop, who suddenly heard Charley, as he lugged an astonished Mariette to her feet, ripping out the challenging words: 'And tomorrow you'll come on the little train! Hear that? You'll come with me on the little train!'

In bed that night, in the quiet of darkness, Pop was still trying to work out this violent episode for himself.

'So that', he said, 'was what all the hoo-ha was about. That little train. Don't get it, Ma. Do you?'

Ma said of course she got it. It was as plain as a pike-staff.

'How? Don't get it,' he said.

'Charley wanted to go on the little train and Mariette didn't. That's all.'

Lot of fuss for nothing, Pop thought. All over a little thing like that. All over a train.

'Not at all,' Ma said. 'It's always the little things. That train means a lot to Charley.'

Pop said he thought it seemed like it too.

'It's connected with something in him,' Ma said. 'In his childhood.'

'Never!' Pop said. 'Really?' For crying out gently.

'It stands for something he's lost. Or else something he's never had. Not sure which.'

Pop said he shouldn't think so either. Charley would have to take more water with it, that was all.

'It's psychology' Ma said. 'You hear a lot about it on telly'

Wonderful thing, Pop remarked, telly. He missed it on holiday. It learnt you something all the time. Every day. Ma said she agreed. She missed the Mirror too. Without it she never knew what her stars foretold and that made it awkward somehow.

At last, lying under the lee of Ma's huge mountain of a body, Pop found himself going back over the day and in the course of doing so remembered something else he thought remarkable.

'Heard a word today, though, Ma,' he said, 'I've never even heard on telly yet. And I'll bet you never have either.'

Oh, and what word was that? Ma wanted to know.

'Ossuary.'

And whatever in the world did that mean?

'Bone-house to you,' Pop told her.

'Do you mind?' Ma said and kicked him hard under the bedclothes. 'Whatever next? You'll have the twins picking it up in no time.'

'Sorry, Ma,' Pop said. 'Dormez bien. Sleep well.'

'Sleep well, my foot,' Ma said and gave her handsome head a swift twist on the pillow, so that she was lying full face to him. 'What makes you think I'm all that tired?'

Pop said he couldn't think and immediately set to work to demonstrate that he wasn't all that tired either.