Parlour Four

by J. I. M. Stewart

  André liked this interpretation of the statue. Indeed, secretly in the single pocket of his truncated jeans he carried a little key of his own, which when quite small and at dead of night he had contrived after some scrambling to apply notionally to this long-since vanished part of the monument. Although he would have been reluctant to confess it, he still placed some reliance on this key. On both his beaches he frequently had to deal with the undesired offerings of Tréboul’s wandering dogs. They were decent enough dogs in a normal condition – but it was a time at which la rage was said to be advancing like the first covert scouts of an invading army from Normandy. About these dogs André had another of his venturesome ideas. By the entrance to Tréboul’s public garden hung the representation of a wholly endearing dog and the injunction:

  Faites-lui faire ses besoins

  hors du JARDIN!

  Les ENFANTS y jouent!

  Why not have similar notices at both beaches – simply reading des PLAGES instead of du JARDIN? But this, too, Andre thought that it might be judged overweening to suggest prematurely to the municipal authorities. All the same, it would be quite fun.

  As the season advanced and the number of visitors to Tréboul mounted, André’s labours were inevitably more prolonged. In a limited – and sometimes disturbing – way, they became more interesting as well. The abandoned cigarette packets were not invariably quite empty; newspapers cast negligently away could be read only by persons conversant with alien tongues; occasionally bottles had been smashed in a disobliging and dangerous fashion before being cast aside, so that their late contents were to be arrived at only from embossed inscriptions or from scraps of labels blotched by spindrift or dew. But, also, here and there in the more secluded places lay flaccid testimonies of amorous enterprises achieved by night. These, to be dealt with only in the most gingerly manner, drew André’s thoughts in a natural but also a disquieting direction. He possessed an adequate theoretical knowledge of what you did to girls, but had made no start at all with its practical application. In this he would quite soon be in a humiliating minority (or so, at least, he had been persuaded) among his male contemporaries. Those happy balayeurs on the rubbish carts, with some of whom he was on chattering, joking terms: he thought of them all as sinning and confessing (if they still went in for that) and sinning again as briskly as they hurled those bins at work and swam and dived at play.

  Visualising these felicities with an envy that he knew to be entirely in order, he yet nursed an obscure feeling that there might be something lacking in them. He had no idea what. It was a guessed-at region, this, to which his only access was through the doors of the local cinema, on the flickering screen of which much ado was made of passion apparently of a soul-searching, soul-shattering, but ultimately enobling sort. Whether he could measure up to that sort of thing, he didn’t know at all.

  He took to lingering on the increasingly crowded beaches through long afternoons, carefully in a near-nakedness so as to avoid being conspicuous. The spectacle was astonishing. Prone or supine, flat on bellies or bottoms, inert, faintly twitching, restlessly wriggling, there sprawled acre upon acre of bronzed human flesh which rendered paler the pale sand beneath it. Flashes of bright colour here and there were parasols, miniature tents, towels, skimpy cache-sexe mini-garments. A ceaseless hubbub blended the shouts of children and the jabber of grown-ups with the unresting sibilation of the sea. André had no idea where all these people came from, or what was their station in life. He rather supposed that most of them were enormously rich; were in every direction as affluent as those weird Americans whose serialised fortunes you could follow on television in a café over a lingering mug of chocolate.

  But Jules laughed at this. Jules, a schoolfellow of André’s, had landed himself a job in the Grand Hotel. At the moment he was a simple plongeur pretty well round the clock, but at any time he might graduate to a white jacket and the carrying of clean plates into the restaurant and dirty ones out of it. Meanwhile, he was keeping his eyes open, and reporting his conclusions to his friend.

  ‘Grocers,’ Jules said, as the two lay side by side on the sand. ‘French, Dutch, English – but little bourgeois cattle one and all. This man is a coal-merchant, and that one – but in a small way – tins stinking meat for cats. For the whole lot, it’s their annual blow-out, their bloody spree. They rejoice for the time at having other people to run about emptying their slops.’

  ‘They don’t belong, then, to the fashionable world?’

  ‘Of course not, dunderhead. Your fashionable world wouldn’t give a fart for the lot of them. Except for having a sou or two more in their pockets, they’re just like you and me. But we give a bow and a bob, we open a door, we say “Good morning, ladies” as if we loved the bitches, and perhaps a few centimes come our way. It’s life.’

  André found this information disillusioning.

  ‘So it’s like that?’ he said. ‘They’re all of a piece?’

  ‘As like as a turd’s like a turd.’

  ‘But they’re not, Jules.’ André’s own professional knowledge came into play here. ‘There are turds and turds.’

  ‘Understood! And – just sometimes – there is here also the exceptional thing. I mean at our hotel. It is, one has to grant, as tolerable a hotel as this wretched flea-bitten corner of France can show. And, just occasionally, the people of a superior sort will come. Not many. And always couples.’

  ‘Couples?’

  ‘Fornication in a corner, my good André. Rich, and even perhaps of good family, well brought up. They come because nobody of their own acquaintance will be here too, to spot them in a compromising situation.’ Jules paused for a moment. ‘The English,’ he then went on, ‘speak of “a dirty week-end”. But we French exhaust ourselves less easily. In and out, in and out for a fortnight – and then look around elsewhere. That’s us.’

  André ceased to listen, since Jules’s chatter was drifting into routine. Instead, he gazed with unaccustomed reflectiveness at the scene before him. The further shore of the Bay of Douarnenez had disappeared within a haze of heat, so that the horizon was a great arc of blue against which, so distant as to seem immobile, a single cruising yacht could be seen. But near at hand was a maze of rapid movement as the innumerable planches à voile of the younger holiday-makers composed beneath their multicoloured sails a kaleidoscopic harlequinade of zigzag or arrow-like motions. They tussled with what appeared to be an unnatural battle of the winds – these intrepid wind-surfers – and appeared able to move simultaneously in parallel but diametrically opposed directions, like jousting knights charging one another at the tilt. Abruptly dismounted ever and again as their sails flopped over and lay awash on the surface of the sea, the riders were for all the world like warriors unhorsed by the enemy, yet practised in heaving their steeds upright again and renewing the fray.

  This martial reverie drew André’s thoughts to ancient things imperfectly understood in lessons at school. Many were of dire conflicts and grim revenges. For example, centred on that now peaceful if tourist-crammed island just concealed on his right hand beyond the Môle du Biron, there had been the evil La Fontenelle, the devastator of all Brittany, who had ended his days as a huddle of broken and bloodied bones on King Henri’s wheel.

  That lesson had been disagreeable, and André glanced at Jules in order to converse about something more cheerful. But Jules had fallen asleep, which is a proper enough thing to do on a vacant summer afternoon. So André resumed his study of the scene. There was a second arc, this time a concave one and demarcated by little scarlet buoys, on the barely ruffled sea. The wind-surfers had to keep outside this arc, since these nearer waters were reserved for the swimmers, the young men and older children diving from the tall plongeoir, the paddling infants and their anxious mamas. All these people still made a great deal of noise – noise against which the little rippling waves directed their lulling murmur in vain.

  On the beach, however, there were plenty of sleepers besides Jules. It was as if th
e sun, hammering down on their near-nakedness, had knocked them out. Those that weren’t asleep read livres de poche, tickled each other’s spines with feathers or caressed each other’s behinds, munched petits pains au chocolat. Although the Mayor of Douarnenez owned impressive convictions about public decency, and itemised them in the lengthy arrêts placarded here and there along the seaboard, he had failed to convince many of the sun-bathing ladies that more than a few centimetres of their mystery need be concealed from the general view. But although André’s eyes duly lingered on the naked breasts of these alien creatures, he was not confident that they excited him quite as much as they should. He would have preferred, he saw, to this abundant and gratuitous but disregarding display a more restricted, a more gradual and reciprocal intimacy achieved by some manly persistence of his own. He wondered whether it might be possible to discuss this with Jules on a serious rather than a prescriptively ribald note. But Jules continued to slumber, and presently André went home.

  It was midway through the holiday period that Monsieur Hochedur appeared. He didn’t introduce himself and he didn’t shake hands. André learnt his name only from one of the men at the poste desecours: unfortunate fellows who, it was said, promptly lost their job if a kid got drowned within the baignade surveillée in the vast bay. A small boy who invariably accompanied Monsieur Hochedur, presumably his son, was called Alexandre.

  The point about M. Hochedur – and it would surely have made at least a nodding acquaintance the proper thing – was that there he was every morning, moving slowly up and down the beach and doing almost exactly what André did. The difference between them was that M. Hochedur operated a metal-detector. It took André a little time to understand the functioning of this instrument. You might have called it a saucer at the end of a stick, and up from it there ran a short flex that ended in a little plug in Monsieur Hochedur’s left ear. M. Hochedur – much as if he were an Indian holy man concerned to sweep beetles and the like aside and into safety as he walked – swayed the saucer gently to and fro before his path and just above the level of the sand. Every now and then he would come to a halt and point at a spot immediately in front of him. Whereupon the stupid little Alexandre (for André felt him to be that) would stoop, scrabble, and unearth some minute object which he then transferred to a pouch hanging at his father’s side.

  It was, of course, Jules who explained this novel form of beachcombing.

  ‘Mostly,’ Jules said, ‘it is small change tumbled from the pocket – a thing likely to happen during the embrace. It may be a bunch of keys – surely a find of little account – or even the strip one rips away from the top of a bottle of Coke – which is of less account still. But there will be chains, bracelets, small articles of jewellery from time to time. Or in his folly the man may think to discover treasure buried by pirates, or by guerillas devastating the country during the troubles of the League.’ Jules, like André, still commanded scraps of the learning imparted to him at school.

  ‘And what one finds, one keeps?’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘But, Jules, I have myself never found anything like that – except the little seals off the Cokes.’

  ‘It may be because yours are superficial labours, my brave fellow. The electric eye goes deeper. It is the reason of its being, that.’

  ‘On the same beach day after day!’ André was suddenly scornful. ‘It makes no sense at all.’

  ‘Nearly everyone is wealthier than we are, André. But not all have even our modest sagacity.’

  André, who had no talent for philosophical remarks, said nothing more. But he decided to dislike M. Hochedur. After a fashion, surely, the man was queering his pitch.

  The girl’s arrival – or André’s first awareness of her – happened on the following day. Nothing spectacular was to come of it: certainly not drama of the heart-searing sort so freely available in the cinema. The setting, however, was worthy of the high canons of romance. The dawn had come up like the first bars of a symphony barely breaking in upon the long silence of the night, and André had been at work before any further orchestration began. Only because it was faintly moving could the blue-grey sea be distinguished from the sky – and the movement itself was so gentle, so reluctant-seeming, that the wide stretch of water spread before Tréboul seemed not yet to have shed the lassitude of the dark. The low waves stole upon the beach in fine, dark lines without a hint of foam, but in a curve of the bay lying beneath the direct rays of the risen sun, the barely luminous surface of the sea turned to a brilliant and glittering ellipse as of liquid gems. On the nearer sand, humped and pitted like a bleak mountainous region viewed from high in air, André’s shadow was still twelve metres long.

  There was scarcely a living creature around. The gulls, whose multitudinous imprints had almost obliterated naked or plimsoll-shod footsteps on the sand, had departed out to sea, or were comfortably perched on the high plongeoir within the bathing area. M. Hochedur and Alexandre had not yet arrived; only from the small van of La Surf School Bihan two men and a girl were unloading boards and sails in preparation for the first breeze of the day. It was like an empty stage in a theatre where a scattered audience was nevertheless already assembled, since from among the dark trees of the Bois d’Isis, on the hilly ground here above the bay, the windows in the steeply-pitched, grey-slated roofs of a score of white-walled villas gazed down, Argus-eyed, upon the scene. And every now and then as André turned to retraverse his uneventful round he would see in the Grand Hôtel a blind going up, shutters thrown back. So there in a sense was a gathering audience too.

  The girl was certainly a guest from the hotel, early abroad through some stir of impatience or curiosity at which it was impossible to guess. Perched on a sea-wall in the first warmth of the sun, she glanced without curiosity at M. Hochedur when he did turn up to start his absurd electronic fossicking. But as André himself drew a little nearer (yet no closer than he felt propriety permitted) she quickly lowered her head, produced a book, turned a page. The effect of this on André was strange. He found himself astounded. The girl was aware of him! It couldn’t be put other than like that.

  So in the middle of his dull scavenging André was thrown into confusion. He wished he was in his Sunday clothes. Then instantly, and more sensibly, he wished he was in almost no clothes at all. He was a boy proud, whether justly or not, of his ability at certain games. He believed that his virility would prove to be something beyond the average when at length the specific challenge to it turned up. But he had given only cursory thought as to whether his whole person was agreeable to the eye. The tall looking-glass in his mother’s room, before which he had on several occasions posed his nude body when she was safely out of the house, had assured him that it was probably so. Yet this, which seemed to lie in the field of mere aesthetics, he had seldom troubled himself with again. Now, and in an instant, the question had presented itself anew. It was as if, entirely to his surprise, Great Creating Nature herself had taken him by the scruff of the neck and given him his orders. How otherwise was it that he found himself suddenly behind a convenient bathing box, stripping off the single garment that left him naked to the hips and from the thighs?

  There was, of course, nothing to occasion alarm in this action. The morning was already turning warm, and within a few hours those human pelts coloured like the darkest honey would again be almost obscuring the beach. Nevertheless, circumspection now became André’s main concern. As he resumed his labours, he allowed himself not a glance at the girl, who as a consequence grew enchantingly beautiful in his imagination as mere minutes went by. And he kept his distance, even traversing the same path several times and to no further effective scavenging at all in order that this might be so. But his motions became considered in a new way. He had discovered long ago that as he perpetually stooped and stooped to gather his scraps of rubbish it made for ease from time to time a little to elevate behind him one leg or the other. Almost unconsciously, he was now importing a certain grace into this manoeuv
re. Like the Egyptian ladies in Shakespeare’s play, André made his bends adornings.

  He had nearly cleared the larger beach, and the girl was still there: perched on the low wall, now turning again the pages of her book, and now gazing out over the bay, on which the first scudding planches à voile were beginning to appear. M. Hochedur was still at work too – quite close by, so that his criss-crossings with André were like a slow-motion parody of the swiftly converging and parting wind-surfers themselves. There was something ridiculous in this, and André suspected that the girl found it to be so. Stealing a glance at her, he once or twice thought to catch a corresponding glance directed upon him.

  Boldness, just a little boldness, was surely admissible in such a situation.

  He applied himself with a quickened pace to the strip of sand between them, so that soon it became a matter of metres only. He was abreast of her, and for the first time looked at her other than covertly. It was to find that she was doing the same by him. He heard himself saying, ‘Bonjour, Madame’. ‘Madame’ was perhaps a little silly, but he judged it to be more courteous than ‘Mademoiselle’.

  ‘Oh, good morning – bonjour.’ The girl – and she was amazingly beautiful – had been taken by surprise. But she didn’t seem displeased. She was, of course, a foreigner. André had known she must be that. Had it not been from Ireland that King Mark’s destined bride, Iseult, was companioned by Tristan, and on the voyage to Brittany that the two had drunk the fatal potion? Had not this very shore been part of Mark’s kingdom of Cornouaille? André, whose schooling had been coincident with a burgeoning of Breton nationalist sentiment, knew all about that. And the strangely heady memory of the lovers’ story came back to him now.