A Breath Of French Air Part 8

Pop, who was feeling a little less light, but not much, said he fancied both.

For the next half hour it was delicious to sit in the open air, on the edge of the pines, and eat cheese; peel big yellow peaches, and suck grapes; and also, Pop thought, to watch newly arrived customers struggling with their rectangles of charred dog.

Now and then Pierre, ruder and louder as he warmed up to his work, poured brandy over the chateaubriants and set them alight. Dramatic flames shot into the air, making the customers look keener than ever in antic.i.p.ation. Pop enjoyed watching this and made Angela Snow laugh ringingly by saying that he supposed this was the way you made hot dog.

'And coffee. What will you have with your coffee?'

Pop said he fancied a Rolls-Royce.

'One of your blinders?'

Pop said it was; though Red Bull was stronger.

'You think Pierre can mix it?'

'Easy' Pop said. 'Half vermouth, quarter whisky, quarter gin, dash of orange bitters.'

'That'll suit me too,' she said.

'Better make 'em doubles,' Pop said. 'Easier somehow'

Pierre seemed unexpectedly impressed by the privilege of mixing strange and special drinks and momentarily dropped all rudeness to become softly, almost obsequiously polite: probably, Pop thought, because it was another case of tres sn.o.b.

Out in the bay the copper sails of departing fishing boats lit up the blue cornflower of sky with such intensity in the sunlight that they too were triangles of fire. All illumination too, Angela Snow's hair seemed to shine more beautifully when broken pine shadow crossed it and left it free again as the sun moved over the sand.

Soon the double Rolls-Royces had made Pop feel more like himself and he responded with an involuntary belch and a robust 'Perfick!' when Angela Snow suggested a short siesta in the dunes.

'I'll get the bill,' he said.

'No, no,' she said. 'My party.'

'Not on your nelly' Pop said.

'Darling, that's not nice. I asked you.'

'I'm paying,' Pop said with all his charm. 'You think I don't know my technique? Rhubarb.'

When the bill came Pop looked at it and suddenly felt cold. There were so many items and figures that he could neither disentangle them nor add them up. His eye merely grasped at a few painful essentials and blinked the rest.

The portions of charred dog had each cost 1,200 francs; the monies marinieres 700 francs; the cheese 500 francs; the double Rolls-Royces each 1,400 francs, making a final total, with tax on top of service and supplement on top of tax, of 11,650 francs.

As he fumbled to pay this, a last alarming item caught his eye.

'What's couvert?' he said. 'What the blazes is couvert? We never had couvert.'

Angela Snow laughed in her most celestial fashion.

'That', she explained to him, 'was just the breathing charge.'

Pop, who was never one to be unduly miserable over the cost of pleasure, thought this was very funny and was still laughing loudly about it when they reached the dunes. He must tell Ma that one: the tres sn.o.b lark and the breathing charge. Jolly good, both of them.

He was still more delighted when Angela Snow's first act on reaching the sand-dunes was to cast off her shirt and drop her apricot slacks and stand before him in a yellow bikini so spa.r.s.ely cut that nothing really separated her from pure golden nakedness.

'My G.o.d, this is good,' she said and lay flat on her back in a nest of sand. This is good. Where are you?'

Pop didn't know quite where he was. He felt more than slightly lost and dazzled.

'Come and lie down with me, cheri. Come on.'

This invitation was delivered with such bewitching languor that Pop was at her side, half in a dream, before he really knew it. Almost at once she closed her eyes. The deep olive lids, shutting out the large pellucid eyes that were always so warm and embracing, seemed now to offer him the further invitation to take in the whole pattern of her long slender body: the slim beautiful legs and arms, the sloping shoulders and the tiny perfectly scooped salt-cellars below the neck, the small but upright b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the navel reposing centrally below them like, Pop thought, a perfick little winkle sh.e.l.l.

As if knowing quite well that he was taking his fill of these things, and with some pleasure, she let her eyes remain closed for fully two minutes before opening them again.

Then she smiled: still a languid smile but also rather fixed.

'Suppose you know I'm madly in love with you?'

Pop confessed he didn't know. It was news.

'Outrageously All-consuming,' she said. 'Night and day.'

'Jolly good,' Pop said. 'Perfick.'

'Not on your nelly,' she said. 'It's h.e.l.l.'

A recurrent lick or two of fire from the Rolls-Royce raced about Pop's veins and caused him to say that this was crazy.

'Right first time,' she said. 'Crazy. Mad. Mad as those hares.'

For crying out gently, Pop thought. That was bad. By the way, had she ever seen those hares?

'No,' she said. 'Tell me.'

Watching those pellucid olive eyes that now seemed to have added a look of mystery to their largeness, Pop told her about the hares: the strange wild gambollings that you would see in March, the leaping, dancing business of spring courtship.

'Fascinating,' she said. 'That would be a thrill.'

'Bit mysterious,' Pop said. 'All that tearing about and dancing.'

'Not more than us,' she said. 'What do we dance for? I mean all that stuff in Freud.'

What, she asked, did he feel about Freud?

'Never touch it,' Pop said.

'Scream,' she said. 'I love you.'

She laughed so much at this that it was fully a minute before she was calm again and said: 'Here's me madly in love with you ever since that virgin-firework lark and you've never even kissed me.'

This was a state of affairs, Pop said, that could be remedied with no delay at all.

A second later he was lying at her side, kissing her for the first time. He had always been a great believer in first times, his theory being that there might never be another, especially where women were concerned, and now, with velvet artistry, one hand softly under her small left breast, he made the kiss last for ten minutes or more.

This experience left even Angela Snow slightly light-headed. She seemed to come round, already slightly tipsy after the wine, as if after a deep, pa.s.sionate faint. Her large eyes blinked slowly, in a dream, and there might even have been a tear of emotion in them as she smiled.

He must save one of those for Iris sometime, she said in a languid attempt at light-heartedness, and what a lucky creature his wife was.

It was essential to keep all those things, Pop thought, on a light-hearted level. Else it wouldn't be fair to Ma. This now seemed the critical moment with Angela Snow and he laughed resoundingly.

'What's funny?' she said.

'Well,' Pop said, 'if everybody had their right I haven't got a wife.'

'Joke.'

It certainly was a bit of a lark, Pop said, when you thought of it. Him and Ma not married. And Ma on a separate pa.s.sport an' all. Did Angela mean she'd never heard?

'Not a peep,' she said. She'd concluded from the offspring alone that all was well.

'Must get it done some day,' Pop said. 'No good. You know we've had another since I saw you?'

Unsurprised, Angela Snow held him in a gaze fully recovered from its first emotional storm and said with languor: 'Good show. Means you're still agile, virile, and fertile.'

Pop said he hoped so and was so amused and even slightly flattered that he granted her the indulgence of a second kiss, holding her right breast this time, again with prolonged tenderness.

Pa.s.sion and fervour left their mark on Angela Snow even more deeply than before and as she came round a second time she again felt it necessary to check emotion with yet another touch of flippancy.

'Don't know which I liked best. The one from the married man I had first, or the single one I had second.'

'Mademoiselle Dupont knows I'm not married too. Rumbled it from the pa.s.sports.'

'Oh! she does, does she?'

And once again she gave him a smile of luscious, penetrative simplicity.

They lay on the dunes, watching the sun across the bay and occasional triangles of sail-fire cut across the blue horizon, for the rest of the afternoon. As time went on her almost naked body grew warmer and warmer in the sun. The sand of the dunes became quite hot to the touch as the sun swung westwards and most of the time Pop couldn't help thinking what a beautiful place it would be for Mariette and Charley to try out sometime. It might encourage them a bit.

At last, when it was time to go, Angela Snow said: 'See you soon, poppet. Don't let it be long. The nerves won't stand it.'

'Come and have lunch at the hotel one day,' Pop said. 'Ma'd love to see you.'

'Even the hotel,' she said. 'Anywhere. But don't let it be long.'

Finally, with a long quiet sigh, she drew on her slacks and Pop said good-bye to what he thought, with pleasure but detachment, was the nicest body he had ever seen since he first met Ma.

That night, as he sat in bed reading The Times and smoking his late cigar, he broke off several times from reading to tell Ma about Angela Snow, the terrible lunch, the bill, the tres sn.o.b lark, and the breathing charge.

Ma said she was very pleased about Angela Snow; it had made his afternoon.

'Get round to kissing her?'

Pop confessed that he had but Ma, huge and restful in transparent nightgown after a day that had been a strange mixture of religion and fair, French fish-and-chips and saints, remained quietly unperturbed.

'Says she's in love with me.'

'That pleased you, I'll bet. Nice girl. I like her. Bit of a card.'

For the third or fourth time that evening Pop remarked that he was thirsty. He expected it was the mussels. All sh.e.l.l-fish made him thirsty.

'Well, go down and get a drink,' Ma said. 'Bring me one too.'

Pop said this was a good idea and got out of bed to put on a silk dressing-gown vividly embroidered in green and purple with vast Asiatic dragons, a last-minute holiday present from Ma, remembering something else as he did so: 'Ma, you remember that lot of pickled cuc.u.mbers, gherkins or whatever they were I had left over from that army surplus deal? The one I made nearly six thousand out of?'

'The ones you got stored in the top barn?' Ma said. 'I know.'

Pop chuckled ripely.

'Hocked 'em all to one of the fishing boat skippers this afternoon after Angela had gone,' he said. 'Seems they're just what they want to pep up their diet with. Terrible monotonous diet they have, these Froggy fishermen. Potatoes and fish all boiled up together. Saw 'em doing it. And gallons of wine.'

'Hope you'll get paid.'

'Coming over to pick 'em up himself and pay me,' Pop said. 'Puts in to Sh.o.r.eham sometimes. What do you want champagne?'

'Just what I could do with,' Ma said.

Pop, going downstairs, found Mademoiselle Dupont going over her books in the Bureau. She got up to greet him in her customary nervous fashion, fearing another complaint, but Pop at once put her at rest by explaining about the champagne.

'And what mark of champagne do you prefer, Monsieur Larkin?'

The best champagne Pop could ever recall drinking was something called Bollinger '29 at a big Hunt Ball at home, just before the war.

He mentioned this but Mademoiselle Dupont shook her head. 'In all France I do not think you could now find one bottle of Bollinger '29. All is past of that year.'

'Pity,' Pop said.

'But I have Bollinger '34. That too is good.'

That, Pop said, would do him all right.

Later he insisted on carrying it upstairs himself: ice-bucket and bottle and gla.s.ses on a tray. As he did so Mademoiselle Dupont stood in her habitual position at the foot of the stairs and watched him in soft admiration, dreamily thinking.

Day by day it was becoming increasingly clear to her that Monsieur Larkin was a milord. Only a milord could smoke such expensive cigars in bed at night and ask for Bollinger '29. Only a milord could walk the quayside with such an elegant lady as she had seen him pa.s.s the hotel with that afternoon: so golden and aristocratic in her elegant apricot slacks.

At the turn of the stairs Pop turned, c.o.c.ked his head to one side, and looked back.

'Bonsoir, Mademoiselle, dormez bien,' he said nippily. 'Sleep well.'

'Bonsoir,' she said. 'Sleep well, milord.'