A Breath Of French Air Part 9

Pop thought that this milord lark just about took the biscuit and he told Ma all about it as he uncorked the champagne in the bedroom.

'Called me my lord, Ma,' he said. 'What price that?'

Ma, who sat up in bed popping Chanel No. 5 down her bosom, thought it was a scream.

'Lord Larkin,' she said. 'Sounds all right, though. Not half bad. I think it sounds perfick, don't you?'

Pop said he certainly did and, laughing softly, poured out the champagne. In fact it was more than perfick.

'I think it's jolly tres sn.o.b, Ma,' he said, 'don't you? Very tres sn.o.b.'

6.

Pop began to watch events on the plage with growing uneasiness, if not dismay. Things were not going well at all. It was clear as daylight that Mariette and Charley were right off hooks.

Periodically he talked to Ma about it, but Ma seemed quite indifferent, beautifully unperturbed. With great placidity she sat all day watching the sea, the French mammas, the leaping young G.o.ds, the tatty little French girls, and the fishing boats putting out to sea. She knitted, read magazines, sunbathed, and gave little Oscar the refreshment he needed, serenely unconcerned.

'What's Mariette sulking for?' Pop wanted to know. 'Dammit, she hardly speaks to Charley nowadays.'

Ma made the astonishing suggestion that it was probably lack of variety.

'Variety?' Pop said. This was beyond him. 'Variety in what?'

'Before she was married she never had less than two or three running after her,' Ma said. 'Now she's only got Charley.'

Pop, who had never looked at it in this way, had nothing to say and Ma went on: 'What do you think I let you run around with Angela Snow and old Edith Pilchester for?'

Pop said blandly he hadn't the foggiest.

'Variety,' Ma said serenely. 'Variety.'

Pop still couldn't understand why Mariette should always seem to be sulking. At this rate he and Ma would be fifty before they had any grand-children: a terrible thing. Why were them two always off hooks? Did Ma think that it was possibly some defect in Charley's technique? And if so should he have a quiet word with Charley on the matter?

'Don't you do no such thing,' Ma said. 'I've had a word already.'

'With Charley?'

'No: with Mariette.'

Setting aside the notion that perhaps the whole matter was bound up in some curious feminine secret, Pop said: 'Give her any ideas?'

'Yes,' Ma said. 'I did. I told her to start flirting.'

Pop whistled. Even he was stunned with surprise.

Ma said she didn't see that there was anything to be surprised about. Even the twins and Primrose flirted. Even Victoria had started. Didn't Pop use his optics nowadays? Hadn't he seen Zinnia and Petunia making eyes at those two little black-eyed French boys who wore such funny little pinafores? They were at it all day. They had them in a tizzy.

'Flirting's good for people,' Ma said. 'It's like a tonic. You ought to know.'

Pop laughed and asked Ma if she'd thought of going in for a little herself.

'I might,' she said. 'Only it's a bit difficult with Oscar.'

Pop was pleased at this and asked Ma if she thought a little drop of flirting now and then would do Charley any harm?

'Flirting with who?' Ma, who was sitting placidly on the sand, huge pale legs outstretched, indicated with a contemptuous wave of her heavily ringed fingers the pallid creatures who populated the plage on every side. 'With this tatty lot? I pity him.'

Pop said he was thinking more of somebody like Angela Snow. She could teach him a thing or two.

'You should know,' she said. 'He's not her type, though. Not like you are.'

'She's got a sister,' Pop said. 'Very religious.'

'Give the poor chap a chance,' she said. 'I'm trying to make it easy for him. Not '

She broke off and looked at her wrist-watch. It was ten o'clock: time to give Oscar a drop of refreshment. With a slight sigh she picked him up from where he had been lying with some of her own reposeful placidity on a large clean napkin and then dropped one side of her magenta bikini top and produced a handsome expanse of bosom like a full-blown milky balloon. Into this Oscar buried himself with eager rapidity while Ma went on: 'Oh, talking about flirting and all that, I think we're going to have trouble with our Primrose.'

Primrose was eleven: even Pop, very faintly surprised, thought that was a bit dodgy.

'Trouble? How?'

'In love. Bad.'

Pop said he'd go to Jericho. In love? How was that?

'How?' Ma said. 'What do you mean, how? Naturally, that's how. Developing early, that's how. Like I did.'

Ah! well, Pop said, that was different. That was the right spirit. Nothing like starting young. Who was it? Not some French boy?

'Two,' Ma said.

Pop, laughing good-naturedly, remarked that he supposed there was safety in numbers, to which Ma firmly shook her head.

'That's just it. Can't sleep at night. She's trying to give one of 'em up and can't decide which one it's got to be.'

'Thought you said it was a good thing?' Pop said.

'Said what was a good thing?'

Pop, feeling himself to be rather sharp, laughed again.

'Variety.'

Instead of laughing in reply Ma regarded him with something like severity over the top of little Oscar's bald dumpling of a head.

'Sometimes I'm surprised at you, Sid Larkin,' she said. It was always a bit of a bad sign when she called him Sid Larkin. 'It's a very tricky age. You'll have to be careful what you say to her.'

'Me?' Pop said. 'Haven't said a word.'

Ma, deftly shifting little Oscar from one side of her bosom to the other, looked at him for some seconds before answering, this time with a glance more mysterious than severe, so that he was almost afraid she was going to call him Sid Larkin again. That would have been a bit much. She only did it once or twice a year so's he'd know it really meant something when she did.

'No,' she said darkly, 'you haven't. But you will.'

'Oh?' he said. 'When?'

'When the time comes,' Ma said blandly, 'when the time comes.'

Ma had him properly guessing now. He couldn't rumble her at all. There was something behind that Sid Larkin touch, he thought, and he was still trying to fathom what it was when Ma, in her habitually unruffled way, abruptly changed the subject by saying: 'Going back to Charley. I think a walk would do him more good. He sits on this beach too long. He's moping. Take him down to the harbour and have a drink with one of your fishermen friends. Didn't you say you had another deal cooking?'

That was right, Pop said. He had. He'd got the Froggy skipper interested in a hundred cases of that tinned gherkins in vinegar that he hadn't been able to hock to anybody else up to now. It would show about three hundred per cent if it came off. Nothing very big: but it would help to keep the pot boiling.

'Good idea,' he said.

He put one finger into his mouth and with a sudden piercing whistle, shrill as diamond on gla.s.s, startled the entire plage into thinking a train was coming. Mr Charlton, who was idly picking up sh.e.l.ls and trying not to notice the antics of the G.o.d-like young Frenchmen prancing all about him, recognized the sign at once and came strolling over.

'Put your top hat on, Charley old man,' Pop said. 'I'm taking you down to the harbour for a wet. Fit?'

Charley said he was fit and called a few words of explanation to Mariette, who had discarded her bikini for a remarkable strapless sun suit in brilliant cinnamon with a boned front that uplifted and enlarged her bust to a sumptuous and thrilling degree.

The b.a.l.l.s would be floating over any moment now, Charley thought, and he wondered suddenly if he had the courage to leave her there. She looked maddeningly beautiful, as she always did when sulky. Today she was all steamy voluptuousness, lying there languidly pouting in the warm morning sun, and he actually called: 'You're really absolutely sure you don't mind if I go?'

Mariette made no sign. It was Ma who shook her head. Pop was, after all, right about Charley's technique. There really were some serious gaps in it. He really ought to use his loaf sometimes.

'Darling!' he called.

'Yes?' Mariette said.

'You honestly don't mind?'

'Have a good time. Don't get drunk,' she said.

Probably not a bad idea, Pop mused, as he and Charley walked along the harbour walls, watching the Breton fishing crews brewing buckets of fish and potatoes into one big steaming stew and loading red wine on to the decks by the dozen crates. It gave Pop great pleasure to watch all this and to gaze at the many furled copper umbrellas bright in the mid-morning sun above the crowded blue hulls.

'Don't see old Brisson about,' he said. 'Anyway we'll have a snifter at the Chat Noir. He'll be along.'

As he and Charley chose a pavement table at the cafe on the harbour's edge, Pop got the sudden idea that the occasion was one when they might try something a little special. It was too early for wine. It made him sleep. And he was fed up with the eternal Dubonnet, Pernod and Cinzano. What did Charley think about a real drink? Red Bull or something of that sort?

'First-cla.s.s idea, Pop,' Mr Charlton said. 'Absolutely first cla.s.s.'

Pop, slightly astonished at the strenuous vehemence of Charley's tone, gave him a sharp glance of inquiry which he didn't bother to answer. Charley was feeling a private need for a strong pick-me-up. It depressed him increasingly each time he thought of the young French G.o.ds, those stupid great b.a.l.l.s, and Mariette sunning herself in her sumptuous cinnamon.

'Rattling good idea,' he said. 'I've been waiting for somebody to ask me that one.'

As Pop was about to call 'Garcon!' and begin an explanation as to how to mix the Red Bulls he saw Captain Brisson arrive. Pop always called him Captain. Huge, florid, and purple, he looked very much like a large bulldog with heart disease.

Charley, having been introduced, suddenly took off his spectacles and started polishing them madly. Pop, unaware of what made him do this, called to the waiter and at the same time started to explain to the Captain about the Red Bulls and did he want one?

'Plizz, what name? Red Bull, you say?'

'Red Bull. It's a self-propeller!' Mr Charlton said. 'A blinder!'

'Plizz?'

The Captain, like Pop, looked positively startled at the sudden vehemence of the small Englishman who, momentarily without his spectacles, looked so harmless, odd, and short-sighted.

'My son-in-law,' Pop said, as if this explained everything.

Mr Charlton rammed his spectacles back on his nose and in rapid French explained the composition of the c.o.c.ktail that, only a year before, had knocked him flat. He was stronger now. He could take a dozen.

'Good,' Captain Brisson said, presently tasting the Red Bull, which Charley had had the forethought to order double. 'Good. I like. Good at sea.'

Searching stabs of raw alcohol inspired Charley to fresh, almost rapturous enthusiasm for the virtues of the c.o.c.ktail.

'Propel the whole ruddy boat,' he said. 'Nothing like it. Absolute blinder. Sante.'

'Sante,' Captain Brisson said.

'Cheers,' Pop said. 'Sante.'

'Cheers,' the Captain said.

'Sante,' Charley said. 'Down the hatch.'

He already thought, as Pop and Captain Brisson sat discussing the question of sliced gherkins in vinegar, that he felt a great deal better. Pop was feeling pleased with himself too. The Captain had made a very reasonable offer for the hundred cases and the deal was now completed except for the formality of a little paper.

Since Pop was incapable of writing his name and the Captain incapable of writing English it devolved on Mr Charlton to draw up a sort of invoice, agreeing price and quant.i.ty. For some reason he chose to do this in pencil. He couldn't think why, since he had a perfectly good pen in his pocket, except perhaps that the pencil needed sharpening and that the short rapid strokes of his penknife gave him the same nervous outlet for his emotions as the mad polishing of his spectacles.

'I am content,' the Captain said. His signature and Pop's cross, binding n.o.body and nothing at all, were added to Mr Charlton's doc.u.ment, which the Frenchman kept. Pop never kept records. It was all in his head. 'I sank you.'

After this the Captain and Pop shook hands. Then Pop knocked his Red Bull straight back, declaring that the proceedings called for another drink to which Charley added a kind of vehement amen.

'You bet!' he said.

'Plizz,' the Captain said. 'I like to pay.'

'Rhubarb!' Charley said. 'This one's on me!'

After the second Red Bull he began to feel that the contemptuous memory of the young French G.o.ds and their stupid idiotic b.a.l.l.s and still stupider prancings no longer disturbed him quite so much. He started to see the harbour through a viscous, rosy cloud.

Now and then he sharpened the pencil madly again and then, after a third Red Bull, actually started to sharpen it at the other end. About this time Captain Brisson said he ought to be going back to his boat and Pop said they ought to be going too.