A Breath Of French Air Part 2

'Bless my soul, Larkin, you're in a hurry, aren't you?' the Brigadier said. 'What's all this?'

'Started to learn froggy,' Pop said. 'All going to France. For a holiday. Place in Brittany.'

'Entire brood?' the Brigadier said.

'The whole shoot,' Pop said. 'Baby an' all.'

'Cost you a pretty penny, won't it?'

'Who cares?' Pop thundered. 'Ma wants to go. Mariette wants to go. Charley wants to go. Everybody wants to go. What about you? Why don't you come too? More the merrier, general!'

The Brigadier, who found it hard on his meagre pension to afford a day in London every six weeks or so and who couldn't remember the last time he had had a holiday at all, much less one in France, merely stood bemusedly in the rain, involuntarily shaking his head and having no word of any kind to say until Pop, with a burst of expansive exuberance, invited him to hop in.

'No. No thanks. I like the walk. Part of my const.i.tutional.'

'Still raining. Glad to drop you.'

The Brigadier bemusedly thanked him again and said he really rather preferred Shanks if Larkin didn't mind.

'Just what you like best, general,' Pop said breezily. 'How about France though? Do you a power o' good, general. Get some sun on that back of yours.' The general, he thought, didn't look half well as he stood there in the rain. No doubt about it, the mackintosh and the rain made him look, if anything, more drawn than ever. 'Find room for a little 'un like you in the Rolls. Return trip won't cost you a penny.'

In a low circ.u.mspect voice the Brigadier inquired if Pop really meant he was contemplating taking the Rolls?

'Course,' Pop said. 'Going to fly the d.a.m.n thing over. New idea. Over there in two ticks of a donkey's tail.'

'Good G.o.d,' the Brigadier said. His white moustaches seemed to bristle and the stiff prawns of his eyebrows leapt upward sharply. 'Bless my soul.'

'Got to get out and see life, general!' Pop said suddenly, in a burst of enthusiastic admonishment. 'See how the other half lives. See the world. What about it?'

The Brigadier, who had spent the better part of forty years in places like Delhi, Singapore, Hyderabad, and Hong Kong, had seen all of the world he wanted to see and could only thank Pop a third time in polite, irresolute tones, adding at the same time that he thought the thing was hardly in his line.

'Well, plenty o' time to change your mind, general old boy,' Pop said. 'Get me on the blower if you do. Not going to hop in after all?'

'Thanks all the same, I won't. Only going as far as the shop to get a little mouse-trap.'

Pop said he was sorry to hear that the Brigadier was troubled with mice. Ma hated them.

'Meant the cheese,' the Brigadier explained. He would dearly have loved a cheese of a better, more imaginative kind than mouse-trap, but the budget wouldn't run to it. 'You'll have beautiful cheeses in Brittany. Delectable.'

Pop had never heard of the word delectable. He marvelled silently and then started to push in the car gears.

'Ah! well, can't stop. Must push on. Au revoir, general! See you bientot!'

Pop raised his hand in breezy, friendly farewell and the Rolls drove opulently away. The Brigadier, cadaverous, upright, and still both bemused and startled, stood for some time under the umbrella in the lessening rain, forgetting even to say 'Adieu!' and merely thinking of the delicious, delectable cheeses one could eat in Brittany and listening to the sound of the Rolls hooter, melodious and triumphant as a hunting horn, cutting through the dripping quietness of the meadows, the oak-woods, and the steaming country lanes.

How should he have the mouse-trap? On toast or au naturel? Still shaken by the opulence of Pop's entrance, news, and exit, he decided to have it on toast. In that way he could fool himself, perhaps, that it was really camembert.

2.

When Pop drew up the Rolls outside the Hotel Beau Rivage at half past six in the evening of the last day of August a gale was raging in from the Atlantic that made even the st.u.r.dy blue fishing boats in the most sheltered corners of the little port look like a battered wreckage of half-drowned match-stalks.

Dancing arches of white spray ran up and down the grey quay walls like raging dinosaurs forty feet high. Rain and spray beat at the windows of the little hotel, crashing pebbles on the shutter-boards. A wind as cold as winter ran ceaselessly round the harbour with unbroken shriekings and occasional whistles like those of Mr Charlton's much-loved, long-distant little train.

'For crying out gently, Charley,' Pop said. 'Where's this? Where the pipe have we come to? Lapland?'

With a sudden feeling of low, cold dismay Mr Charlton stared silently at the Beau Rivage. The hotel seemed altogether so much smaller, so much shabbier, so much more dilapidated and inexclusive than he remembered it being in the last summer before the war. It seemed to have shrunk somehow. He had fondly pictured it as large and gay. Now it looked dismal, dark, and pokey. Its style of creosoted Tudor looked incredibly flimsy and insecure and now and then the blistered brown shutters sprang violently on their hooks and seemed, like the rest of the hotel, ready to collapse, disintegrate, and wash away. On the little outside terrace rows of coloured fairy lights, strung necklace fashion between half a dozen plane trees pollarded to the appearance of yellowish skinning skeletons, were swinging wildly about in the wind, one or two of them occasionally crashing on to the concrete below. There was very little Beau about it, Mr Charlton thought, and not much Rivage.

'Well, I suppose we ought to go in,' he said at last and suddenly led the way with an appearance of remarkably enthusiastic alacrity into the hotel, hastily followed by Ma carrying little Oscar, then Primrose and Montgomery submerged under one raincoat, the twins, Victoria and Mariette under one umbrella, and finally Pop carrying two suitcases and a zip canvas bag.

Pop was wearing thin blue linen trousers, a yellow sleeveless shirt, yellow canvas shoes, and his yachting cap in antic.i.p.ation of a long spell of French hot weather. In the short pa.s.sage from the car to the hotel he half-rowed, half-paddled through rising lakes of Atlantic rain and spray. Several times he was convinced he was going under. Once he slipped down and one of the suitcases was blown out of his hands and began to wash away along the quayside. He grabbed it, battled on, and a few moments later found himself shipwrecked inside the vestibule of the hotel, where he was at once a.s.sailed by a powerful smell of linseed oil, drainpipes, French cigarettes, and leaking gas. One single electric bulb burned above the reception desk in the gloom of early evening and this was flickering madly up and down.

When Pop was able to get to his feet again he was more than glad to observe that Charley was already in charge of things at the reception desk. Charley, even if he didn't feel it, looked calm, self-possessed, even authoritative. He was speaking in French. Pop liked it when Charley spoke in French. It seemed to ease and resolve the most anxious of situations.

'Et les pa.s.seports, M'sieur?'

Behind the reception desk a small, bald, paste-coloured man in pince-nez, with grey, hungry cheeks and brown mole-like eyes, spoke to Mr Charlton in a voice of school-masterly irritation, as if hoping to catch him out. But in a split second Mr Charlton had everything weighed up. Swiftly the pa.s.sports were on the desk: Mr and Mrs Charlton's, Pop's with the six children included on it and Ma's in her maiden name of Flo Parker.

'Et qu'est-ce que vous avez comme bagage?'

With a commanding, irritated palm the man in pince-nez struck a large desk bell such a resonant blow that little Oscar, startled, began loudly weeping.

Ma, sitting reposedly in one of several decrepit basket chairs, at once decided that the best way of meeting the situation was to give him a little refreshment.

A few moments later an astonished elderly concierge in gumboots, sou'wester, and plastic mackintosh arrived from dark regions somewhere behind the reception desk in time to see little Oscar bury his face in the contented continent of Ma. The hungry-faced man in pince-nez looked astonished too.

Pop then remembered that there was a good deal of baggage in the car, Ma and Mariette having brought three suitcases each, mostly full of beachwear, swimwear, and summer dresses, and he followed the concierge into the driving, howling August rain.

Coming back, both shoes full of water, he saw Charley in process of being lectured, as it seemed, by the man in pince-nez. He looked extremely annoyed and seemed to be accusing Charley of some act of irresponsibility.

'What's up?' Pop called.

'He says he wasn't aware that one of the children was so small.'

'Tell him we've only just had him,' Ma said and moved herself as if to expose her bosom to larger, fuller, and more public gaze. 'I'm trying to fatten him up as fast as I can.'

Earnestly, in French, Mr Charlton spent some moments explaining to the cold eyes behind the pince-nez the reasons for little Oscar's immaturity. The man in pince-nez seemed not only unimpressed by this but more irritated than ever and began to s.n.a.t.c.h various huge bra.s.s lobed keys from their hooks.

'And tell him we want a cup o' tea,' Ma said and moved with squeaks of wicker irritation in her chair. 'I'm dying for one.'

With mounting impatience the man in pince-nez crashed the keys back on their hooks.

'He says '

'Don't he speak English?' Ma said. 'I'll bet he does or else he wouldn't have understood what I said just now. You speak English, don't you?'

'Oui, madame. Yes.'

'All right then, why don't you speak it? Instead of standing there talking a foreign language?'

'Oui, madame.'

'We all want a nice cup of tea. Quick. And if you can't make it I soon will.'

'But in twenty minutes you may have dinner, madame.'

'I daresay I may, but that's not tea, is it?'

The man in pince-nez s.n.a.t.c.hed at a telephone, as if about to pour rasping orders into it, and then stopped.

'Combien de how many teas, madame?'

'Everybody,' Ma said. 'All ten of us.'

With piercing but sightless frigidity the man in pince-nez stared at the sight of little Oscar busily engaged in taking refreshment.

'Even the baby, madame?'

'Oh! he'll have gin,' Ma said. 'He likes it better.'

With cold and extravagant restraint the man in pince-nez put the telephone back in its place and walked out, at the same time calling to the concierge. 'Dix-sept, dix-neuf, vingt-quatre, vingt-huit,' as if these were orders for prisoners going to an execution.

Pop stood looking at his new canvas shoes. They were full of water. It was running out of them in a stream. Water was coursing down his backbone, through his trousers, and out of his shirt and socks.

There was a sudden smell of fried fish in the air and Ma, catching it, said: 'Smells like fish-and-chips for dinner, Pop. Why don't we cancel the tea and have it later? Go down well with the fish.'

An old, pre-marital nervousness seized Mr Charlton.

'I doubt very much if we ought to countermand the order now '

'Oh! no, don't let's,' Mariette said. 'I'm dying for a cup.'

'Me too,' Ma said. 'All right.'

'Like a nice gla.s.s of hot port,' Pop said. 'I know that. With cloves and cinnamon. Like I rigged up last Christmas.'

'Or else a Guinness,' Ma said.

A fusillade of pebbles, sharp as shrapnel, hit the half-closed shutters. A cold blast chiselled at the door-cracks and the smell of fried fish grew stronger. The smell reminded Ma that she was hungry. She said so in a loud voice and Mr Charlton thought it a good moment to draw her attention to various framed certificates, diplomas, and ill.u.s.trated addresses hanging about the walls, so much evidence of the excellent, even high-cla.s.s cuisine of the Beau Rivage.

'Diplome d'Honneur Strasbourg 1907. Lyon 1912 and 1924. Ma.r.s.eille 1910, '27, and '29. Paris, six times. Dijon, 1932. Chevalier de Taste Vin Foire Gastronomique 1929 '

'See, Ma?' Pop said. 'Cooking prizes.'

'Anything for this year?' Ma said.

Mr Charlton was saved the necessity of finding an answer to this pertinent question by the arrival of the tea.

The tea was in a huge white metal coffee pot, with thick white coffee cups to drink it from, and the bill was on the tray While Mariette sugared and milked the cups, Pop, moving like a deep-sea diver who has only just surfaced, dripping water from every thread, picked up the bill and gazed at it.

'How much is two thousand three hundred and fifty francs, Charley-boy?'

At this moment Victoria started crying.

'You take her, Mariette,' Ma said. 'You know how she is.'

Whispering consolatory noises, Mariette took Victoria out, and Mr Charlton, trying in the circ.u.mstances to be both discreet and casual, said: 'Oh! about two pounds. Just over.'

'For tea?' Ma yelled.

For one moment her bosom seemed to rise into air like an outraged, affronted puff-ball.

'I thought you said it was cheap?' Pop said.

'Well, of course, you've got to remember in France '

'Here,' Ma said. 'Hold Oscar.'

Mr Charlton found himself suddenly holding Oscar. Oscar, like Pop, was wet. Ma hastily covered up her bosom and bore down on tea and teacups, stunned to impotent silence while Mr Charlton said: 'After all, tea in France is probably a pound a pound. Perhaps twenty-five shillings. I was reading in The Times only the other day '

'And hot milk!' Ma said. 'Feel this! They brought hot milk.'

No one had any time to comment on this outrage before Mariette and Victoria came back, Mariette tightly holding her sister's hand.

'Hot milk, Mariette!' Ma said. 'Two pounds and over for a cuppa tea and they bring hot milk. Hullo, what's the matter with you?'

'Nothing.'

Mariette looked white and shaken.

'Look as if you'd seen a ghost or something. Look as if you'd had the bill and not Pop.'

Mariette's lip was trembling. She was taking long, hard breaths.

'Whatever's the matter?' Ma said.

'I'd rather not talk about it. Just something out there.'

'You can't sit down!' Victoria said. 'You have to stand up!'

'Good G.o.d,' Ma said. 'Think of me.'