A Breath Of French Air Part 12

'Ah!' Pop said smartly, picking it up in a flash. 'Les apres.'

Alphonse looked witheringly about him for a second or two and then held a short conversation with Mademoiselle Dupont, who said: 'Alphonse is suggesting either crepes Suzette for dessert or bombe surprise.'

It was at this moment that Angela Snow came out of her half dream to hear Ma insisting on jelly and custard for the children and to find herself being shamelessly and mentally undressed by Alphonse's over-large handsome eyes.

'I think myself the crepes Suzette,' she said, staring straight through Alphonse. 'They'll keep him busier at the time.'

'That about settles it then,' Ma said.

'No it don't though,' Pop said. 'What about the cake? Got to have a cake. Midnight, champagne, and all that lark.'

'Oh! Pop, lovely!' Mariette said and suddenly ran round the table in one of her moments of spontaneous delight to kiss Pop with luscious grat.i.tude. 'Cake and champagne it's like being married all over again!'

'Second honeymoon, Charley, second honeymoon,' Pop said, hoping the cheerful pointed words wouldn't be lost on him. 'Second honeymoon.'

Charley, using his loaf, looked as if he understood. Then Mademoiselle Dupont said Alphonse would be most honoured to make the cake. And if there were any other things, any other thoughts suddenly a great sense of excitement ran through her, as if the party were really her own, and she ended by half-running out of the salle a manger into the Bureau in another fluff, repeating half in French, half in English, a few uncertain sentences which n.o.body could understand.

For another half hour, while Charley, Mariette, and the children went to the plage and Pop for a gentle snooze on the bed, Ma and Angela Snow sat outside on the terrace, drinking coffee. By this time the sun had appeared but the air was quite autumnal. Already at the end of the terrace a few leaves of the plane trees pollarded to give shade in hot weather were turning yellow and even falling to the ground. The bead-like strings of coloured lights, shattered by storm and still unrepaired, gave the trees an air of premature shabbiness that was like a small herald of winter. It was all too true, as Mademoiselle Dupont had remarked to Ma only that morning after breakfast, that the season was coming to its end. The guests were departing. Soon the hotel would be empty. The French had no taste for the sea when October began and in another week or two the little plage would be wrapped away for winter.

Presently Angela Snow was saying how much she was looking forward to the party and what a lot you missed by not being married: the anniversaries and that sort of thing.

'Suppose you do,' Ma said. She'd never really thought of it.

'I'll have to settle down myself I suppose one of these days,' Angela Snow said.

'Oh?' Ma said. 'Why?'

She didn't mind a sc.r.a.p everyone knowing that she and Pop weren't married most people took it for granted they were and anyway it looked the same, even if it wasn't and she remained quite unperturbed and unsurprised when Angela Snow, who liked to be frank in everything, said in an off-hand way: 'Don't you ever think of marrying Pop?'

Ma threw back her dark handsome head and roared with laughter.

'What?' she said, 'and give him a chance to leave me?'

'Scream,' Angela Snow said. 'Suppose he might at that.'

'Off like a hare.'

Angela laughed so much over her filtered half-cold coffee that she spilt most of it into the saucer. It was undrinkable anyway: as she had long since discovered, filtered coffee always was. But she nevertheless supposed the French would always cling to it, just as the Scots did to herring and oatmeal.

'Well, must go,' she said. 'Must see what the adventurous Iris has been up to. Let me know if ever he does.'

Ma laughed in her friendliest fashion.

'Who? Pop? I'll send you a wire. That'll give you a bit of a start on Mademoiselle Dupont.'

'Oh! is she in the hunt too?'

Ma said she was afraid so. She'd be in a whale of a tizzy by the time that party was over.

'And not the only one.'

Graceful and elegant, Angela Snow stooped to kiss Ma a sporting good-bye, telling her at the same time to give Pop her best love, which Ma warmly promised to do, with k.n.o.bs of bra.s.s and tinkling cymbals, as Pop himself was so fond of saying sometimes.

'G.o.d bless,' Angela said. 'Have to fix a hair-do somehow before that party. For two pins I'd have my blasted face lifted as well.'

'Where to?' Ma said, laughing again. 'You keep it as it is. Pop'd never forgive you.'

Angela Snow went back into the hotel on the pretext of telephoning a hairdresser but in reality on the off-chance of running into Pop as he came downstairs. But the lounge, the reception desk, and the stairs were all deserted and she suddenly realized with unpleasantness that she might run into Alphonse instead. She didn't care for Alphonse. The process of being mentally undressed by strange men had never amused her. Nor, for some reason, did she like men who parted their hair down the middle. But now and then she couldn't help wondering what the virginal Iris would make of those too large, too handsome eyes.

'Did Mademoiselle wish for something please?'

It was Mademoiselle Dupont who came at length to the door of the Bureau and called the words. In reply Angela Snow said she was wondering about a hairdresser and was there one she could go to in the town?

'There is nothing exciting here. Nothing soigne. One must go to Morlaix or Brest.'

'Oh? Then I might go to Brest.'

'Philippe: that is the name.'

'Philippe,' Angela Snow said. 'Do you go there?'

'I regret not often. I can't afford it.'

'No? Not even for the party?'

Mademoiselle Dupont, who had been torn all day by the question of whether to have a hair-do or a new corset for the party and had almost decided on the corset, could only gaze in silence at Angela Snow's exquisitely smooth aristocratic yellow hair and wish that her own were like it, so that such difficult dilemmas and choices never arose.

'Got to make the party a success you know,' Angela Snow said.

'I think that Milord Larkin', Mademoiselle Dupont said rather loftily, 'will see to that. He has the flair.'

Drawn up sharply by the second mention of the word milord that day, Angela Snow had no time to make any sort of comment before Mademoiselle Dupont fluffed again and said: 'I am right in thinking that? Yes? He is a milord?'

'Down to the ankles,' Angela Snow said. And like every Englishman he's sure his home is his castle.'

At the mention of the word castle Mademoiselle Dupont was unable to speak. A castle a chateau. There was something overpowering, tres formidable, about the word castle.

'You must ask him to tell you about it,' Angela Snow said.

'I will ask that,' Mademoiselle Dupont said quietly.

After Angela Snow had departed Mademoiselle Dupont went upstairs. In her room she took off her dress, as she did every afternoon, and lay down on the bed. Like Angela Snow she had hoped for the chance of running into Pop on the stairs but nothing had happened and she lay for an hour alone and in silence, thinking largely of milord Larkin, the castle, and how altogether surprising the English were, but also of the entrancements of marriage and a lot of other things. She remembered the occasion when Pop had caressed her, brief and idle though it had been, with a warm swift hand, and how he would for ever remember her bedroom when he caught the scent of les muguets.

At the end of it she decided there was nothing for it but to have her hair dressed at Philippe's and buy the new corset too. After all, she thought in typical French fashion, the bill for the party would be a big one and she would be able to afford it out of that.

She would have her hair done in that Empire style that was now so fashionable and that she knew would give her the illusion of height she needed so much. The corset must be a black one, trimmed with lace in parma violet at top and bottom, and every time she thought of it she started trembling.

8.

The evening of the party was warm and sultry, only the softest westerly wind ruffling the sea into small white pleats on the sand along the plage.

Dinner, Mademoiselle Dupont had suggested, should be at eight-thirty. This would give the only two French families remaining in the hotel time to finish their food in comfort before retiring to the lounge. She had herself superintended the laying of the one long table, decorating it with bright orange dahlias, dark red rose petals strewn about the cloth, and sprays of asparagus fern.

Pop, who entranced everybody by appearing in a biscuit-coloured light-weight suit and a yellow silk bow tie with large cranberry spots on it and a handkerchief to match, spent most of the time between six and seven mixing punch in the bar, tasting it frequently to see if it was any good at all. He finally decided it was a bit of a snorter.

He had seen the recipe for punch in some magazine Ma had bought. It was known as Colonel Bramley's Punch and you could have it either hot or cold, Pop deciding that since the evening was so sultry he would make it cold. Plenty of ice was the form.

The main ingredients were rum, white wine, Curacao, lemon, and sugar, but after the first mixing Pop decided that the flavour of rum was, if anything, rather too prominent. Not everybody liked rum. He added brandy. This brought out a certain heaviness in the mixture. It needed sharpening up a bit. He tried a tumbler of Kirsch for this and decided that it was exactly the right thing for giving the punch a subtler but at the same time more brittle tone. When the ice was added just before seven o'clock, when everybody was expected to arrive, he casually decided that another bottle of white wine and a second dash of brandy wouldn't do anybody any harm at all and these were added together with large slices of fresh orange and a scattering of c.o.c.ktail cherries, which had the effect of making the whole thing look pretty, amusing, partyish, and at the same time quite innocuous.

Although Ma, Mariette, Charley, and the children came downstairs after seven o'clock and gathered in the bar, from which Mademoiselle Dupont had actually removed last year's heather and replaced it by bowls of dark purple asters, there was no sign of Angela Snow and her sister until a quarter to eight or of Mademoiselle Dupont until nearly forty minutes later.

Meanwhile the children drank Coca-cola and orange juice and the four grown-ups sampled the punch. Sometimes Ma allowed the children to sample the punch too and also sneak a slice of orange or a cherry out of it with their fingers so that they could have an extra suck.

'Good pick-me-up on a wash-day this, Pop,' she said. Just what she wanted. 'Wondered why you'd been so quiet since six o'clock.'

Ma was wearing a low-cut dress in deep purple, much the colour of the asters, with a narrow mink stole. She was drenched in a new perfume called 'Kick' and was wearing a pearl and diamante comb in one side of her hair and three handsome rows of pearls round her neck. Mariette was wearing a dress of stunning low-cut simplicity in burgundy velvet, effective in its sheer richness but also because there was so little of it, and a necklace of garnet and diamond that Pop had bought her in Brest for the anniversary.

Now and then Pop decided that the punch was going down rather too fast and added another harmless dash of rum, a little Kirsch, or a gla.s.s of brandy.

By a quarter to eight, when Angela and Iris Snow arrived, the character of the mixture had changed completely, though Pop, by adding orange and cherries again, kept it looking much the same. Ma thought that, if anything, it was much nicer now.

'Very more-ish,' she said and settled down to a fifth gla.s.s of it. And so cool.'

As soon as Angela Snow and her sister arrived Pop remarked how warm the evening was and was quick to press them to a cooling gla.s.s.

'Ingredients?' Angela Snow said as she tasted it. 'I think it's another of your blinders.'

Cheers, she went on to say, if it was. If not there was plenty of time.

'Women's magazine recipe. Practically teetotal,' Pop explained. 'It's actually the coolth that makes it what it is.'

Iris Snow, who liked Pop's word coolth, sipped happily.

Their lateness in arrival was, she explained, entirely due to her. She had been to see a calvary at St Thegonnec and had missed the train. She smiled with unusual readiness and apologized. Her hair looked less home-cut than usual, Pop thought, and the dark coffee-brown frock she was wearing, apart from the fact that in the haste of dressing she had evidently had some difficulty in balancing the two protuberances underneath it, so that one was much lower than the other, suited her quite well and was modestly attractive.

But it was Angela Snow's dress that had everyone wide-eyed in admiration. Pop thought it a corker. If she had a st.i.tch on underneath it he would be more than surprised. The embroidered purity of its line, somehow accentuated by her long drop ear-rings, was even more fetching than its colour, a pale turquoise, and the fact that it fitted like a skin.

About eight o'clock M. Mollet crept in, mole-like as ever, as if out of hiding. He had been sent to say that Mademoiselle Dupont wouldn't be long; she had been delayed by complications of the kitchen.

She had in fact been delayed by complications of the new corset. It was rather tight and the zip was awkward. Twice she had rung down for one of the chambermaids to come and help zip her up but they were all giving a hand in the kitchen and it was M. Mollet who at last came up to her room, to face the unparalleled embarra.s.sment of finding Mademoiselle Dupont less than half-dressed, with a figure white as marble under a shining sheath of pure black and purple frills.

The experience left him not knowing whether he was going this way or that. It was then crowned by the sudden vision of the tall English girl in long ear-rings and pure turquoise and the disturbing fact that though she was fully dressed she actually seemed to have far fewer clothes on than Mademoiselle Dupont had in her bedroom. A cosmic explosion could hardly have shaken him more. A kind of low sea-sickness rocked through him and Pop gave him a gla.s.s of punch, which he accepted in a nervous daze, confident only, as Mademoiselle Dupont already was, that things in the hotel had never been quite like this before and never would be again.

n.o.body took much notice of the self-effacing little figure in black coat and pin-stripe trousers and presently he crept out again, head held timidly down, so that he accidentally knocked against Pop, who was ladling out a third gla.s.s of punch for Charley.

'Quel twirp,' Pop said and there was laughter from everybody except Angela Snow, who suddenly realized that, for some unaccountable reason, she felt intensely sorry for the little reception clerk, who spent all his days burrowing between desk and bureau, for ever like a mole.

It was twenty-five minutes past eight before Mademoiselle Dupont entered the bar. This was a strange experience in itself, since she could recall no one having had a drink there since Liberation Day. In traditional French fashion she was wearing all black, with long pearl-drop ear-rings to give the illusion of that extra height she needed. Tonight she looked positively chic and was enveloped in a strong sensational cloud of lily-of-the-valley.

Pop, whose progress in French had been quite marked always so quick to pick everything up, as Ma said went straight over to her, clasped her by both hands and said: 'Mademoiselle! Enchantay!' as if he had been doing it all his life.

'Delayed in the kitchen, my foot,' Angela Snow thought and realized suddenly that she was madly, unreasonably jealous. It was quite unlike her.

'Fascinating tie,' she said and went over to finger Pop's large yellow and cranberry b.u.t.terfly that made him look so dashing. 'French?'

'English,' Pop said.

'Has that air,' she said. 'The Froggies simply couldn't do it, dear boy.'

The word 'Froggies' made Mademoiselle Dupont bristle. She had begun the evening with nervous apprehension anyway, the complications of the kitchen being so great and those of the corset hardly less so. She felt all too conscious of the corset. She was sure it would make her itch before the night was gone.

'Drink up,' Pop said. 'Everybody have one more for the wagon train.'

Mademoiselle Dupont, sipping punch, deliberately turned her back on Angela Snow and asked to be told what this cool, charming liquid was.

'In anglais, punch,' Pop said.

'Ah! le punch.'

'Specialite de la maison Larkin,' Pop said. 'Larkin Special. Goes down well, eh? Tres bon, n'est-ce pas?'

'Extraordinaire. Excellent,' Mademoiselle Dupont said and then remembered how, in books about England, one always read of gentlemen drinking le punch. It was like tea and fog: it was part of the true English scene. Everyone knew, of course, that England was perpetually shrouded in fog, that the sun hardly ever shone there and that no one ever, or hardly ever, drank anything but tea. But now she had recalled le punch. Undoubtedly it was an aristocratic thing.

She now suggested that they might, at any time, go in to dinner. Pop, ladling out the last gla.s.ses of punch and sending a final tumblerful to Alphonse in the kitchen, cordially agreed.

'Feeling quite peckish,' he said and hoped everyone else was.

The evening had begun well, he thought, and most people were laughing as they left the bar and went into the salle a manger. Everyone seemed properly warmed up, companionable, and happy.

Even Iris Snow, who had eaten nothing but two cream crackers since twelve o'clock midday, felt like a canary.

After the cooling punch the softer, warmer touch of melon au porto was like a velvety caress. Everyone agreed that that had been very well-chosen. Full marks. Absolutely. Even the twins mopped it up in no time, asking what it was called.

'There it is on the menu,' Charley said. 'You can read it. Melon au porto. Melon with port wine.'

The menu cards had been specially printed in gold and Mademoiselle herself had also ordered little decorations of gold doves to be added at each corner. She had searched for a long time for some suitable symbol of marital love and had finally decided that doves were it.

'Porto! Porto! old mother Shorto! Diddlum dorto!' the twins started shouting, and a smiling Pop, for once, had no word of reprimand.

A light white wine of the Loire, a little dry, accompanied the sole. It was colder, if anything, than the punch had been. Charley said he thought they married very well together and Pop said Charley should know. Ma remarked that she thought the sole was the best bit of fish she'd had in France and Mademoiselle Dupont beamed. Pop was sorry about the chips, though, and was on the verge of saying so when he changed his mind and said: 'In front of snails, anyway. Anybody want to change and have snails? Don't all speak at once. Twins? Snails?