A Breath Of French Air Part 3

There was nothing for it but to give Mariette the strongest cup of tea she could pour out. This was several shades paler than straw and looked and tasted like discoloured water flavoured ever so faintly with boiled onions.

After that Ma swished the teapot powerfully round and round in an effort to bring strength where it was most needed, saying at the same time: 'It'll be mice next. I know. I smelt 'em when we came in.'

As if in answer to an outrageous signal the man in pince-nez appeared out of a door marked 'Bureau' with the habit of a hungry burrowing mole. He busied himself for some moments behind the desk, sniffing and rattling keys, and then asked Mr Charlton if he had yet filled up the forms.

Mr Charlton had not filled up forms. There were ten of them. He now gave Oscar to Montgomery, took out his fountain pen, and sat down in one of the many decrepit, disintegrating wicker chairs. His hands were damp from Oscar.

As he started on the forms Ma called: 'I bet they haven't got television. Ask him, Charley. Ask him if they got telly.'

Mr Charlton looked up and asked the man in pince-nez, in French, if they'd got television.

'Pas de television.'

'No telly, Ma, I'm afraid.'

Pop was stunned. For crying out gently.

'Terrible. You'd never believe it,' he said. 'Never believe it, Ma, would you?'

'Well, good thing Montgomery brought the radio,' Ma said. 'Turn it on somebody. Let's have a tune. Should have brought the new Hi-Fi.'

Primrose switched on the portable radio at full blast and dance music roared forth, momentarily louder than the wind, now punctuated by occasional thunder, that ripped like a half hurricane across the port.

Involuntarily startled, the man in pince-nez rang the desk bell, setting Oscar crying again.

'Ask him if there's a bar,' Pop said.

Mr Charlton, who in the confusion was having difficulty in remembering the date of his own birthday, looked up to ask the man in pince-nez if there was a bar.

'Oui, m'sieur. Par ici.'

With one thin finger he indicated that the bar lay somewhere in regions beyond the Bureau, in the direction where Mariette and Victoria had found life so inconvenient for their s.e.x.

'Yes: it seems there's a bar.'

'Good egg,' Pop said. 'That's something.' With relief he abandoned the tepid, onioned tea. 'I think I'll buzz round and have a snifter.'

'Not on your nelly!' Ma said. 'Take hold of Oscar. I expect he wants changing. That's why he's roaring again.'

The concierge came back. Pop took over Oscar. It was now so dark that Mr Charlton could hardly see to write the forms. A tremendous crash of thunder broke immediately above the hotel, setting the shutters rattling, the radio crackling, and the single dim light beside the telephone quaking even more like a candle in a wind.

The man in pince-nez spoke suddenly in French, with a slight sense of outrage, as if still offended by Ma's charge about speaking in a foreign language. Mr Charlton translated: 'He says you can go up to your rooms now if you want to.'

'Well, what the merry Ellen does he think we're sitting here waiting for?' Ma said. 'Christmas?'

Oscar had stopped crying. The concierge picked up the remainder of the baggage and the children their things. Mr Charlton said he'd come up soon, since the forms would take him at least another twenty minutes to finish, not that he'd even finish them then, in view of remembering all the birthdays.

'My belly's rattling,' Petunia said. Zinnia said hers was too and they couldn't stand it much longer.

'We won't bother to unpack,' Ma said. She knew Pop was starved. She was getting pretty well starved herself. 'I'll just change Oscar and wash and then we'll all come down.'

Everybody was ready to go upstairs except Ma and Mr Charlton when a fresh and more stupendous crash of thunder occurred. The light above the telephone went completely out, came on, went out, came on, and repeated the process six more times before going out altogether.

In the comparative silence after the thunder a strange new sound crept into the air. It was that of one of the wicker chairs squeaking, like a horde of mice, in protest.

It was the chair containing Ma.

'Here, hold Oscar, somebody,' Pop said. 'Ma's stuck.'

Mariette took Oscar. Pop went over to Ma, solicitous but unsurprised; it had happened before. Ma had always had difficulty in getting her two-yard bulk into the confines of strange furniture and still more difficulty in getting it out again.

'Give us a hand, Charley,' Pop said, 'before she goes under for the third time.'

Pop and Charley started to pull at Ma, who began to laugh with huge jellified ripples. The man in pince-nez looked on with frigid, withdrawn, offended eyes. Pop and Charley pulled at Ma harder than ever, but with no result except to set her laughing with louder shrieks, more fatly.

Presently Ma went strengthless. It became impossible to budge her. Above the telephone the light came on again, illuminating Ma as a collapsing balloon that would never rise.

'Ma, you're not helping,' Pop said. He pleaded for some small cooperation. 'If you don't help you'll have to go round with the d.a.m.n thing stuck on your behind for the rest of your natural.'

Ma laughed more than ever. The vast milky hillock of her bosom, deeply cleft, rose and fell in mighty breaths. Her whole body started to sink lower and lower and suddenly Pop realized that even if she survived, the chair never would.

He started to urge Charley to pull again. In a sudden wrench the two of them pulled Ma to her feet and she stood there for some seconds with the chair attached to her great b.u.t.tocks like a sort of tender.

Suddenly, with shrieks, she sank back again. Another peal of thunder, more violent than any other, rent the air above the hotel. The man in pince-nez pleaded 'La chaise, madame je vous prie la chaise!' and for the ninth or tenth time the light went out.

When it came on again Ma was on her feet. Behind her the chair was flatter than a door-mat and by the telephone the man in pince-nez had his head in his hands.

'Madame, madame, je vous ' he was saying. In distress the necessary language for the occasion did not come to him for some moments. When it did so his English was sadly broken up: 'Madame, please could Oh! madame, I ask I please '

With incredible swiftness Pop came forward to defend Ma. Irately he strode over to the man in pince-nez and struck the desk a severe blow with his fist, speaking peremptorily and with voluble rapidity.

'Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?' he shouted, 'and comment ca va and comment allez-vous and avez-vous bien dormi and qu'est-ce que vous avez a manger and a bientot san fairy ann and all that lark!'

The little man in pince-nez looked as if he'd been hit with a pole-axe. His mouth fell open sharply, but except for a muted gurgle he had nothing to say. A moment later Pop and Ma started to go upstairs, followed by the children, Ma still laughing, Pop glad in his heart of the excellent tuition given by Charley in various French phrases likely to be of use in emergency.

At the foot of the stairs he paused to turn with pride and perkiness to look back.

'Accent all right, Charley-boy?'

'Perfick,' Mr Charlton said. 'Absolutely perfick.'

Pop waved a mildly deprecating hand.

'Tres bon, you mean, tres bon,' he said. 'Don't forget we're in France now, Charley-boy. We don't take lessons for nothing, do we? a bientot!'

3.

Nearly an hour later, when Ma brought the children downstairs for dinner, closely followed by Charley and Mariette, Pop was already sitting moodily in a corner of the salle a manger, a room of varnished, ginger-coloured matchboard and gla.s.s built like a greenhouse shrouded with yellowing lace curtains against the westward side of the hotel. Some squares of gla.s.s were coloured blue or ruby. A few, broken altogether, had been patched up with squares of treacle-brown paper and it seemed generally that the whole ramshackle structure, battered by the Atlantic storm, might at any moment fall down, disintegrate, and blow away.

Driven by ravenous hunger and thirst to the bar, Pop had found it furnished with a solitary stool, a yard of dusty counter, a dozing grey cat, and a vase of last year's heather. The stool had two legs instead of three and all about the place was that curious pungent odour that Ma had been so quick to notice earlier in the day: as if a drain has been left open or a gas-tap on.

In the salle a manger, in contrast to the silent half-darkness of the bar, a noisy, eager battle was being waged by seven or eight French families against the howl of wind and rain, the tossing lace curtains, and more particularly against what appeared to be dishes of large unpleasant pink spiders, in reality langoustines. A mad cracking of claws filled the air and one plump Frenchman sat eating, wearing his cap, a large white one, as if for protection against something, perhaps flying claws or bread or rain.

Three feet from Pop's table a hara.s.sed French waitress with a marked limp and loose peroxide hair came to operate, every desperate two minutes or so, a large patent wooden-handled bread-slicer about the size of an old-fashioned sewing machine: a cross somewhere between a guillotine and a chaff-cutter.

This instrument made crude groaning noises, like an old tram trying to start. Slices of bread, savagely chopped from yard-long loaves, flew about in all directions, dropping all over the place until hara.s.sed waiters and waitresses bore them hurriedly off to eager, waiting guests. These, Pop noticed, at once crammed them ravenously into their mouths and even gluttonously mopped their plates with them.

Presently the rest of the family arrived: Mariette immaculate and perfumed in a beautiful sleeveless low-cut dress of emerald green that made her shoulders and upper breast glow a warm olive colour, Ma in a mauve woollen dress and a royal blue jumper on top to keep out the cold. Ma had plenty of Chanel No. 5 on, still convinced that the hotel smelled not only of mice but a lot of other things besides.

As the family walked in all the French families suddenly stopped eating. The French, Charley had once told Pop, were the elite of Europe. Now they stopped ramming bread into their mouths like famished prisoners and gaped at the bare, astral shoulders of Mariette, Ma's great mauve and blue balloon of a body, and the retinue of children behind it.

Most of the older French women, Pop thought, seemed to be wearing discoloured woollen sacks. The younger ones, who were nearly all tallow-coloured, bruise-eyed and flat-chested, wore jeans. It was hard to tell any of them from boys and in consequence Pop felt more than usually proud of Mariette, who looked so fleshily, elegantly, and provocatively a girl.

Presently the waitress with the limp brought the menu and then with not a moment to spare hopped off to work the bread machine.

'Well, what's to eat, Charley-boy?' Pop said, rubbing his hands. 'Somethink good I hope, old man, I'm starving.'

Mr Charlton consulted the menu with a certain musing, studious air of English calm.

'By the way, Charley,' Pop said, 'what's "eat" in French? Haven't learned any words today.'

It was Pop's honest resolve to learn, if possible, a few new French words every day.

'Manger,' Charley said. 'Same word as the thing in the stable manger.'

Pop sat mute and astounded. Manger a simple thing like that. Perfickly wonderful. Unbelievable. Manger. He sat back and prepared to listen to Charley reading out the menu with the awe he deserved.

'Well, to begin with there are langoustines. They're a kind of small lobster. Speciality of the Atlantic coast. Then there's saucisson a la mode d'ici that's a sort of sausage they do here. Specialite de la maison, I shouldn't wonder. Hot, I expect. Probably awfully good. Then pigeons a la Gautier I expect that's pigeons in some sort of wine sauce. And afterwards fruit and cheese.'

'Sounds jolly bon,' Pop said.

Charley said he thought it ought to satisfy and Ma at once started remonstrating with Montgomery, Primrose, Victoria, and the twins about eating so much bread. She said they'd never want their dinners if they went on stuffing bread down.

'What shall we drink?' Charley said.

'Port,' Pop said. He too was stuffing down large quant.i.ties of bread, trying to stave off increasing stabs and rumbles of hunger. Ma agreed about the port. It would warm them all up, she said.

'I doubt if they'll have port.'

'Good G.o.d,' Pop said. 'What? I thought you said the Froggies lived on wine?'

'Well, they do. But it's their own. Port isn't. I suggest we drink vin rose. That'll go well with the fish and the pigeon.'

The hara.s.sed waitress with the limp, freed momentarily of bread-cutting, arrived a moment later to tell Charley in French, that there were, after all, no langoustines.

'Sorry, no more langoustines,' Mr Charlton said. 'They've got friture instead.'

'What's friture?'

'Fried sardines.'

Ma choked; she felt she wanted to be suddenly and violently sick.

'Oh! fresh ones of course,' Charley said. 'Probably caught this afternoon.'

'In that lot?' Pop said and waved a disbelieving hand in the general direction of the howling, blackening gale that threatened increasingly to blow away the salle a manger.

A second later a vast flash of lightning seemed to sizzle down the entire length of roof gla.s.s like a celestial diamond-cutter. A Frenchwoman rose hysterically and rushed from the room. The chaff-cutter guillotine attacked yet another loaf with louder and louder groans and a long black burst of thunder struck the hotel to the depth of its foundations.

Alarmed too, the children ate more bread. Pop ate more bread and was in fact still eating bread when the friture arrived.

'They're only tiddlers!' the twins said. 'They're only tiddlers!'

'Sardines never grow any bigger,' Charley said, 'otherwise they wouldn't be sardines.'

'About time they did then,' Ma said, peering dubiously at piled sc.r.a.ps of fish, 'that's all.'

'Bon appet.i.t!' Mr Charlton said, and proceeded enthusiastically to attack the friture.

Pop, turning to the attack too, found himself facing a large plateful of shrivelled dark brown objects which immediately fell to pieces at the touch of a fork. Scorched fragments of fish flew flakily about in all directions. The few crumbs that he was able to capture, impale on his fork and at last transfer to his mouth tasted, he thought, exactly like the unwanted sc.r.a.ps left over at the bottom of a bag of fish-and-chips.

'Shan't get very fat on these,' Ma said.

In a low depressed voice Pop agreed. Ma's great bulk, which filled half the side of one length of the table, now and then quivered in irritation and presently she was eating the friture with her fingers, urging the children to do likewise.

The children, in silent despair, ate more bread. Savagely the guillotine bread-cutter worked overtime, drowning conversation. And presently the limping waitress brought the vin rose, which Charley tasted.

'Delicious,' he said with mounting enthusiasm. 'Quite delicious.'

Ma drank too and suddenly felt a quick sharp stream of ice descend to her bowels, cold as charity.

At last the mult.i.tudinous remains of the friture were taken away, plates piled high with brown wreckage, and Ma said it looked like the feeding of the five thousand. Pop drank deep of vin rose, raised his gla.s.s to everybody, and unable to think of very much to say remarked mournfully: 'Well, cheers, everybody. Well, here we are.'

'We certainly are,' Ma said. 'You never spoke a truer word.'

After a short interval the saucisson a la mode d'ici arrived. This consisted of a strange object looking like a large pregnant sausage-roll, rather scorched on top. Slight puffs of steam seemed to be issuing from the exhausts at either end.

Ma remarked that at least it was hot and Pop, appet.i.te now whetted to the full by another sharp draught or two of vin rose, prepared to attack the object on his plate by cutting it directly through the middle.

To his complete dismay the force of the cut, meeting hard resistance from the surface of scorched crust, sent the two pieces hurtling in the air. Both fell with a low thud to the floor.