A Breath Of French Air Part 6

'The beds,' Pop said. And that room. We'll have to change that room, Ma and me, if we're going to stay here.'

For the third or fourth time Pop transfixed her with a smile that was at once perky, soft, and full of disquieting penetration, so that Mademoiselle Dupont found herself torn between the question of the unsatisfactory room and its bed and that brief, tormenting sc.r.a.p of reminiscence about Pop and Ma eloping and how Ma and she had the same creamy skin and the same dark soft hair.

This flash of romantic reminiscence confused her all over again, so that she pressed the key harder than ever into the palm of her hand and said: 'It is tres, tres difficile. I have no more rooms, Monsieur Larkin. Not one more.'

'Couldn't spend another night in that 'orrible room,' Pop said. He thought of his battle with the elements. He hadn't been dry all night. 'And Ma won't, what's more.'

Mademoiselle Dupont, without knowing why, felt suddenly ashamed. She felt inexplicably sorry that there had ever been any thought of ejecting Monsieur Larkin and his family.

'Nothing for it but the beach, I suppose,' Pop said. 'Bit difficult with Oscar, though.'

Mademoiselle Dupont inquired if Pop meant sleeping on the beach and who was Oscar?

'The baby,' Pop said and added that he thought Oscar was a bit young to start night-work.

Mademoiselle Dupont said, in French, how much she agreed. For some inexplicable reason she felt like weeping. She pressed the key harder and harder into the palm of her hand and listened confusedly while Pop inquired if there were other hotels.

'Mais oui, certainement,' she said, starting to think in French again, 'mais ils sont tous pleins all full. I know. All are full.'

'Like the sky,' Pop said and with a slow wearying hand directed Mademoiselle Dupont's glance through the window, beyond which the relentless Atlantic was stretching with still greyer thickness its imprisoning curtain over port, quayside, and plage. 'Fancy sleeping out in that lot. Eh?'

Mademoiselle Dupont found herself confronted by an emotional and physical dilemma: she was overcome by a violent desire to sneeze and at the same time wanted to weep again. She compromised by blowing her nose extremely hard on a very small lace handkerchief, almost masculine fashion, with a note like that from a trombone.

This stentorian call startled Pop into saying: 'Sound as if you've caught your death. Well, this rain'll give the car a wash anyway.'

Outside, in the hotel yard, the Rolls stood with expansive professorial dignity among a shabby crowd of down-at-heel pupils, the muddy family Citroens, the Peugeots, the Simcas, the Renaults of the hotel's French guests.

'That is your car? The large one?'

Pop confessed that the Rolls-Royce was his and with a wave of modest pride drew Mademoiselle Dupont's attention to the gilt monograms on the doors. These, he a.s.sured her, gave the car both cla.s.s and tone.

'Some duke or other,' he said. 'Some lord. Feller I bought it from wasn't sure.'

At the word lord Mademoiselle Dupont found herself flushing: not from embarra.s.sment or shyness, but from sheer excitement. It was on the tip of her tongue to inquire if Pop was actually an English milord or not but she checked herself in time, content merely to stare down at the monogrammed aristocracy of the Rolls, so distinctive and splendid among the muddy plebeian crowd of family four-seaters parked about it.

Nevertheless she found it impossible to stop herself from supposing that Pop was, perhaps, a milord. She had once before had an English milord, a real aristocrat, to stay in the hotel. All day and even for dinner he had worn mud-coloured corduroy trousers, much patched, a French railway porter's blue blouse, a vivid b.u.t.tercup yellow neckerchief, and open green sandals. He had a large golden ambrosial moustache and thick, chestnut hair that was obviously not cut very often and curled in his neck like fine wood shavings. Mostly he smoked French workmen's cigarettes and sometimes a short English clay. He also took snuff and invariably blew his nose on a large red handkerchief.

From this Mademoiselle Dupont had come to the conclusion that the English were to some extent eccentric. All the lower cla.s.ses tried to behave like aristocracy; all the aristocracy tried to behave like workmen. The higher you got in the social scale the worse people dressed. The men, like the milord, dressed in corduroys and baggy jackets and workmen's blouses and had patched elbows and knees and took snuff. The women dressed in thick imperishable sacks called tweeds, flat boat-like shoes, and putty-coloured felt hats; or, if the weather became hot, in drooping canopies of cream shantung that looked like tattered sails on the gaunt masts of ships becalmed.

The English were also very unemotional. They were immensely restrained. They never gave way. The women said 'My deah!' and the men 'Good G.o.d' and 'Bad show' and sometimes even 'Damme'. They were bluff, unbelievably reticent, and very stiff. They were not only stiff with strangers but, much worse, they were stiff with each other and this, perhaps, Mademoiselle Dupont thought, explained a lot of things.

It might explain, perhaps, why some of them never got married. It might be that the milords, the true aristocrats, were a law unto themselves. As with the corduroys and clay pipes and snuff, they could set aside the mere conventions of wedlock lightly.

Suddenly she was quite sure in her own mind that Monsieur Larkin was one of these: a milord whose only outward symbol of aristocracy was the Rolls and its flourishing gilded monograms. In no other way could she explain the charm, the ease of manner, the captivating, even impetuous inconsistencies.

'I have been thinking,' she said. There is perhaps just one room that possibly you and madame could have.'

'I hope it's got something for emergency,' Pop said, thinking again of his elemental battle the night before.

'Please to come with me.'

With a final sidelong glance at the Rolls every time she looked at it now it shone like a princess, she thought, among a shabby crowd of kitchen workers she led Pop out of the Bureau and upstairs.

Once or twice on the way to the second floor Ma and Pop and the children were all high up on the fourth she apologized for the lack of an ascenseur. She supposed they really ought to have an ascenseur one day. On the other hand it was surprising how people got used to being without it and even, in time, learned to run upstairs.

'I haven't caught Ma at it yet,' Pop said.

Following Mademoiselle Dupont upstairs, Pop was pleased to make two interesting discoveries: one that her legs, though her black dress was rather long, were very shapely. They were, he thought, not at all a bad-looking pair. From his lower angle on the stairs he discovered also that he could see the hem of her underslip, It was a black lace one.

This, he decided, was a bit of all right. It was perfick. It interested him greatly, his private theory being that all girls who wore black underwear were, in secret, highly pa.s.sionate.

He set aside these interesting theoretical musings in order to hold open a bedroom door which Mademoiselle Dupont had now unlocked with one of her large bunch of keys.

'Please enter, Monsieur Larkin. Please to come in.'

The room, though not so large as the one he and Ma were occupying two floors above, was prettily furnished and a good deal lighter. It had one large mahogany bed, a huge Breton linen chest, several chairs covered in rose-patterned cretonne, and curtains to match. It also had a basin with running water. It lacked, Pop noticed, that odour of linseed oil, drainpipes, French cigarettes, and leaking gas that penetrated every other part of the hotel. It seemed instead to be bathed in a strong but delicate air of lily-of-the-valley.

'The room is not large,' Mademoiselle Dupont said. She patted the bed with one hand. 'But the bed is full size.'

That, Pop said, was the spirit, and almost winked again.

'And you see the view is also good.'

She stood at the window, still pressing a single key into the palm of her hand. Pop stood close beside her and looked out on a view of plage, sea, sand-dunes, and distant pines. As he did so he couldn't help noticing that Mademoiselle Dupont herself also smelled deeply of lily-of-the-valley.

'Very nice,' Pop said. Tm sure Ma would like this room.'

'I hope so,' she said. 'It is my room.'

Pop at once protested that this was far too good of her and under several of his rapid disquieting smiles of thanks Mademoiselle Dupont felt herself flushing again. There was no need to protest, she said, only to accept. The pleasure was entirely hers: and a great pleasure indeed it was. She merely wanted him to be happy, to be comfortable there.

'And you see there is even a little annexe for the baby in here,' she said, and showed Pop into a sort of box-room, just large enough for little Oscar to sleep in.

Laughing richly, Pop said he was absolutely sure they would be very comfortable in that pleasant room, with that nice bed, with that nice smell of lily-of-the-valley.

'C'est curieux, c'est extraordinaire,' she said, starting to think in French again. 'How did you know this?'

Pop drew a deep breath and told her, in a swift flick of description, almost ecstatic, how he had a kind of sixth sense about flowers and their perfumes.

'Acts like a key,' he said. 'Marigolds I smell marigolds and in a jiff I'm back in Ma's front garden where I first met her. Bluebells straightaway up in our wood at home. Cinnamon and it's Christmas. Violets only got to smell 'em and I'm back in the woods as a kid. The same', he concluded, 'with your lily-of-the-valley. Never be able to smell it again without thinking of this room.'

Averting her face, watching the distant pines that she had already a.s.sured Pop several times were so exquisite in the strong Atlantic sunsets, Mademoiselle Dupont diffidently confessed that they were her favourite flowers, le muguet, they were all of springtime to her, as roses were of summer.

'They suit you,' Pop said and without waiting for comment or answer thanked her again for all her kindness about the room.

It was perfick, he said, he was tremendously grateful, and suddenly, feeling that mere words were not enough, he gave Mademoiselle Dupont an affectionate playful touch, half pinch, half pat, somewhere between the waist and the upper thigh.

Mademoiselle Dupont's reaction to this was to experience a small but exquisite palpitation in the region of her navel. She could find no coherent word either of English or French to say and she confusedly apologized once again about the stairs: 'I am sorry it was so hard for madame the stairs. But it is old, the hotel. So much needs doing and one does not know what to do.'

Pop, resisting an impulse to pinch Mademoiselle a second time and with more purpose, merely gazed at the rain-sodden landscape and said: 'I know what I'd do.'

'Yes?' Mademoiselle Dupont said. 'What?'

'Pull it down,' Pop said. 'Pull the whole flipping lot down.'

Mademoiselle Dupont, too shocked to speak, turned on him a face in which the mouth had fallen wide open. A moment later she was biting her tongue.

'But it belonged to my father and my grandfather. My family have always owned it.'

'They're dead. It's dead,' Pop said airily. 'No use being sentimental. Comes a time '

'I know we need an ascenseur. We need so much. But the money here in France everything is so expensive. C'est formidable.'

'Always raise the money,' Pop said. Only want the ideas.'

Mademoiselle Dupont laughed Pop thought rather ironically.

'That may be for English milords and people who have Rolls-Royces.'

'When you want anythink bad enough,' Pop said blandly, 'you'll always get it.'

This casual statement of philosophy plunged Mademoiselle Dupont into a fresh silence of embarra.s.sment, in which she played again with the key.

'Well, 'I'll go and tell Ma,' Pop said, 'she'll be tickled to death, I know.'

His final disquieting perky smile caught Mademoiselle Dupont in a state of unreadiness again, so much so that she actually made several quick brushes at her greasy hair with the tips of her fingers, as if to show how calm and indifferent she was. Her ears, Pop saw, were pale and pretty and faintly flushed at the edges.

'I will see that your things are moved. Please tell madame not to bother. And if there is something '

'Only the wevver,' Pop said. 'The sun. That's all we want. Sol '

'Soleil.'

'Soleil,' Pop said. 'Masculine or feminine?'

'Feminine no, no, masculine of course. Masculine. How stupid of me.'

'Should have been feminine,' Pop said and gave her a last, brief, quick-knitted smile.

Long after he had gone downstairs Mademoiselle Dupont still stood at the window watching the unrelenting rain, trying with difficulty to re-shape her thoughts on English milords, the strange, unaccountable, eccentric habits of the English, the Rolls-Royce and its monograms, and the way Monsieur Larkin, who seemed so unlike the English of tradition, possessed the secret of a key through the scents of flowers to events and places long-distant, forgotten, and even lost, as for example with lilies-of-the-valley les muguets, her favourite flowers.

5.

After three days the sun began to shine, though not very much, mostly in fitful bursts, still whitish and watered down. A steady temperate wind blew in from the Atlantic, generally raising clouds of sand and at times bristling saltily. The evenings were like December.

From time to time it was just warm enough for Mariette and Ma to shed wraps and sweaters and lie in bikinis on the little smooth-sanded plage. Mariette's figure, in spite of what Pop thought about its slight narrowing down since marriage, was well suited to the bikini. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were round but firm, girlishly fresh but quite mature. Her waist was delicate and narrow, with hips of pear-shaped line. From behind she appeared to have a beautiful little saddle, to which the lower of the bikini's three scarlet triangles was tied with the slenderest of strings.

Ma was not so lucky. She hadn't been able to get a bikini quite large enough to fit her. They didn't go quite as high as Ma in size. But there was, as she remarked, nothing much to them and she had consequently run up two for herself: one in bright petunia purple, her favourite colour, and the other in brilliant salmon rose.

Primrose, Petunia, Zinnia, and Victoria all wore bikinis too, in shades of royal blue, green, pink, yellow, and pure white which they changed from day to day. Ma wasn't having her children outdone by any Froggy kids, some of whom she noticed had their hair dyed, generally red, blonde, or black, sometimes to match their mother's.

On the whole Ma wasn't much impressed by Froggy women, young or old. The young girls who lay or pranced about the plage all looked what Pop called pale about the gills; they were very pasty, like Mademoiselle Dupont, and looked decidedly unwell about the eyes; they either wore no lipstick at all or far too much of it in the palest of puce and parma violet shades.

Their necks always looked surprisingly yellow too, Ma thought, a funny suet sort of colour, and she was certain sure they all slept in their make-up. Their hair looked uncombed and tatty and they seemed generally to wear it long, either untied or in horse tails, but occasionally they wore it crimped up, in curious frontal rolls that achieved the effect of making their foreheads recede or disappear.

And their figures were nothing, Ma thought, absolutely nothing. 'Compared with our Mariette's,' Ma reckoned, you'd think they were boys with a few pimples here and there. I thought French girls were supposed to be so chick and all that. Blow me, some of 'em don't even shave where they ought to.'

She felt quite sorry for Pop in this respect. There was hardly anything for him to look at on the plage. Even Edith Pilchester had more to call her own, Ma thought, than some of these. Even Mademoiselle Dupont had a certain firmness of chest and lower line. She did at least look neat and tidy, whereas most of the mammas who sat about in beach chairs or even in the shelter of red-and-white-striped tents, intensely gossiping and knitting, either looked hopelessly overdressed, with two extra cardigans to keep out the temperate westerly wind, or like moulting hawks restlessly awaiting a false move by younger prey.

The young men, on the other hand, were magnificent. Ma had never seen anything like it. All of them seemed to be tall, athletic, bronzed, and lissom. Innumerable protruding knots of muscle stuck brownly out from all over them, accentuating arms, shoulders, chest, and b.u.t.tocks. Their hair was always perfectly crimped and waved and round their middles they wore nothing but skin-tight pudding bags tied with string.

The young men occupied the beach all day, tirelessly exercising themselves. They leapt in perpendicular fashion in the air, scissoring brown legs. They stood on their heads, did statuesque hand-stands, or pranced about like restless straining race-horses. They played leap-frog or ran about square-chested, like Grecian runners, hair slightly flowing, breasting the wind. They climbed invisible ropes with arms plaited with brown muscle or did long, silent, earnest, dedicatory breathing exercises for the abdomen and chest.

But mostly they played with b.a.l.l.s: large, highly coloured b.a.l.l.s, two or three feet in diameter, in segments of scarlet and green, or yellow and violet, so inflated and so light that the Atlantic wind, when it caught them, rolled them swiftly away across acres of bare beach into distances of sea and dune and pine. When this happened they showed new high prowess as athletes, running after the b.a.l.l.s in fleeting file or in handsome echelon, Greek-like again, hair flowing, racing the wind.

Mr Charlton, who could see no point in these exercises, was glad merely to relax with Mariette in the sun, reading detective stories or occasionally turning an eye on Mariette, moving her perfect young body over to brown on the other side, like a young plump chicken on a spit. He felt mostly relaxed and contented, even when sometimes aroused by the voice of Ma: 'Fetch everybody ice-cream, Charley, will you? There's a dear. Big ones. Bring two for everybody. And some nuts.'

One of the few things Ma was agreeably surprised about in France was the fact that they had ice-cream and nuts. She had been afraid they wouldn't. At least that made it a bit more civilized.

Pop too was content. He liked merely to lie in the sun and look at the sky. With his hypersensitive, keenly developed sense of smell he could lie for hours breathing the scent of sea and seaweed, sun-dried rocks and pines, tarry boats and fish being unloaded at the quay. He could translate these things into separate living scenes without opening his eyes at all, just as he could smell lily-of-the-valley in imagination and recapture Mademoiselle Dupont clear and close to him.

Over the past day or two it had struck him that Mademoiselle Dupont had become more and more refreshingly attentive. She laughed whenever he met her on the stairs. Was the food right for Monsieur Larkin? Did Madame and the family like it? Were the children happy? Was there some special dish they would like? Pop hadn't the heart to tell her he thought the food was mostly a terrible mistake and that what he really wanted was rice pudding, stewed plums, and roast beef and Yorkshire. He merely joked: 'Ma says it suits her a treat. She's slimming. Taken off pounds.'

'If there is something special you prefer at any time please to tell me. Sans supplement, of course. Please just to say.'

On the fifth morning she called him into the Bureau in order to give him back the pa.s.sports, apologizing at the same time for keeping them so long. She also said: 'I have been thinking that you might care to take an excursion on the 8th that is, to Le Folgoet. There is a great pardon there that day It is the greatest and most beautiful pardon we have in Finistere.'

'Pardon? Pop had no idea what a pardon was but he listened respectfully as Mademoiselle Dupont went on to explain its religious significance and beauty.

'Not much on religion,' he confessed. 'Don't care for dog-collars.'

'Perhaps Madame and the children would care to go,' she said. 'You must please tell me if they do. I can give them all directions.'

Up to that moment, rather absent-mindedly, Mademoiselle Dupont had kept the pa.s.sports in her hands. Suddenly she remembered them and handed them back to Pop, giving a little nervous laugh at the same time.

Pop grinned quickly as he took the pa.s.sports and asked to know what had amused her.

It was quite a little thing, Mademoiselle Dupont said, just something that had occurred to her.

'What?' Pop said.