Watching them a little uncertainly he drew out from the cupboard three dirty glasses and a half-empty bottle of brandy.
“‘Sfine,” he muttered. “Cognac! Triste arles. Biste.”
“Mon Dieu!” said Greenbloom. “He’s drunk.”
“What’s he saying?” asked John.
“Oh—‘Fine’, the French for a shot of brandy. The man is so far gone that it’s a little difficult to follow him.”
He accepted a tot of the brandy touched glasses with him and drained it at a gulp. “Try and get hold of the bottle,” he went on. “Once they’re retired these maquignons drink like fish.”
John slid the bottle behind him on the table and Greenbloom directed the concierge’s attention to the map once more.
“Nous sommes descendus par avion. C’est necessaire que nous gagnons Paris sur-le-champ. Combien de kilomètres á la Capitale?”
“Capital?” repeated the man. “Out.” He looked round for the bottle.
“Non,” shouted Greenbloom pointing at the man. “Pas encore! Paris, mon vieux; ou est Paris?”
The effect of Greenbloom’s sandpaper shout was instant; the little man froze to attention as Greenbloom got up and stood over him.
“Ah donne nord nutte’n’at arle bût Paris,” he said rapidly, “andide nutte ave’t faire ‘tesse idee ou yeux te boeuf inde donne yeux route.”
Greenbloom’s finger wavered over the map. “Repetezcèla, lentement!”
But the concierge ignored him and continued to stand before him looking apologetically first at John and then at the map.
“What did he say?” asked John nervously. Greenbloom was beginning to bristle with anger. “I am not sure!” He spoke slowly and ruminatively. “Had I been sure I would not have asked the fool to repeat it. I am convinced that he is talking some kind of a patois or dialect which is new to me—he must be a Basque.”
He turned on the man.
“Basque?” he fired at him. “Arcachon? Les Landes? Hendaye? Pau?”
“Pôt?” the man repeated solemnly.
“Oui-oui,” said Greenbloom. He pronounced it ‘wayoo-way’ and the man looked bewildered for a moment and then he moved helpfully to the door.
“Lourdaud! Imbécile! Butor! Vous n’avez rien compris à ce que je voulais dire—Il y a combien de kilomètres d’ici à Paris?”
“Saint—Jesu!” said the man and stopped.
With exasperation Greenbloom seized the bottle of brandy and poured what was left of it into two glasses. “Saint,” he said to John. “You heard him, the idiot can’t even say ‘cent’ correctly; it’s the hideous adenoidal drawl of the Pays Basque. I can only suppose that he’s trying to tell me that it is cent kilometres to Paris.” He drank his brandy wiped his lips carefully and then with a patent effort at politeness handed the other glass to the concierge who cheered up at once.
“Eiffel yeux d’enscrive pour moi,” he said hesitantly. “Ah’d mai bedouhin mise bist endevoir feu te decouver quoi’te contre yeux fromme, eh tiens—”
“Stop!” said Greenbloom.
“‘Sieur!”
“Un moment! Taisez vous.” He turned to John. “It is hopeless. We will have to find someone else. I’m beginning to think this fellow may not be French at all. He must be a foreigner of some sort. Go and get Rachel and tell her we’re going to find a telephone and get hold of a taxi.”
The concierge jumped forward eagerly.
“Taxi!” he said loudly and distinctly.
“Oui.” Greenbloom’s smile returned. “Taxi, toute de suite!”
The man nodded vigorously. “Oui,” he said, drawing out a chair and pointing to it. “Oui, yeux b’aisseyez—ici”
“Tres bien—ici, taxi ici.” Greenbloom turned to John. “In the most atrocious accent he’s telling us that he wants us to sit down in his absence. One presumes that he either owns or knows of a local taxi.”
They sat down obediently, waited while the caretaker locked the brandy in the cupboard, smoothed his hair in front of a section of mirror, and finally hurried off down the road in the direction of the cottage whose smoke they had seen.
As soon as he was out of sight they went out in search of Rachel and found her waiting disconsolately by the plane.
“Wherever have you been?” she asked. “I thought you must have gone off to get a taxi.”
“Indirectly that is exactly what we did,” said Greenbloom. “Within five or ten minutes it should be here.”
“Why were you so long?”
“We met a drunken Frenchman,” said John, “and Greenbloom—”
“They will have to be careful,” Greenbloom interrupted, “a peasant drinking spirits at this hour! There will be a war or revolution or both. Germany will go through the Maginot like a bayonet through Gruyêre.”
Rachel looked at him sympathetically. “Poor Horab, didn’t he give you a drink?”
“Yes Rachel.” He stepped forward quickly and catching her hand bent it backwards so that she leaned agonisingly away from him laughing and crying up into his face. “He did, ma petite! He did give Horab a drink; but that is not the point. Greenbloom is not a peasant—is he?”
“No,” she said and he at once relaxed his grip. She sprang away from him and spat precisely on to his left foot.
“Pig! Cochon! Salaud!” She quivered with fury.
Greenbloom produced his silk handkerchief and wiped his shoe; he smiled at John. “Pretty when she spits, isn’t she,” he said. “Would you like her?”
“Er—”
“She is very clever; she has a superior intelligence; she is intuitive and always just one leap ahead of a blundering male.”
“I think Rachel is very beautiful,” said John. “Particularly in the evening.”
Greenbloom grated a harsh call like a corncrake’s. “Take her!” he said. “She will do you good and together you may laugh at me; this is France!”
He sprang at her as she stood there small and graceful as some exotic little animal sprung from the grass in the night; he kissed her as carelessly and easily as he would have fondled such a domestic pet, picking her up tightly in his two hands, dropping her back on to the grass; then he walked away in the direction of the road.
Rachel opened her handbag and gazed into the mirror; she looked pale and withdrawn for a moment.
“Horrible man!” she said. “He treats me like an hors d’oeuvre or an oyster.”
John laughed. “You like it really, don’t you?”
She stamped her foot. “No I don’t. I want permanence. I am a Jewess and I am tired of the desert.” He watched her as she stood there ruffled and self-absorbed fluffing at her hair with a jewelled hand. Suddenly she looked up.
“Come here, John.”
He moved over to her and she looked round quickly after Greenbloom.
“Yes, what is it?”
“You know where we are?” she whispered.
“No, not exactly; Greenbloom said somewhere near a place called Chantilly.”
Rachel tittered behind the small expert painting of the lipstick she was applying. “You mean to tell me that you have not discovered?”
“Discovered what?”
She put away her lipstick and powder, “Why! That we are perhaps a thousand miles from Paris.”
“A thousand miles?”
“Perhaps a little less; but certainly seven hundred.”
“I don’t understand.” He felt his mouth beginning to hang open. “What do you mean? Where are we?”
“In Ireland,” she said.
“But—”
“We are in Ireland,” she repeated. “I found a Ladies in the back of the grandstand and there was a large notice giving the rules of the course—dozens of notices. This is the Curragh racecourse and we are in County Kildare.”
“But that little man, the concierge—the flag,” he paused and pointed up at it as it fluttered above the grandstand.
“Irish both of them,” she said. “Green, white and orange, the n
ational flag of the Irish Free State, and as for your little man he may have been drunk but that means nothing. The Irish drink even more than the French.”
“But he spoke French,” said John.
“Are you sure? Horab did not seem to have understood it. Are you quite certain that he was not just muttering with an Irish accent? and trying to put a few French words in here and there because he thought you were French? Did you, for instance, hear any actual French words?”
“Yes I did: words like nord and devoir and arles—I remember that distinctly because it made me think of Van Gogh.”
Rachel laughed, “Oh well, perhaps he was in France during the Great War. He might even have been a Frenchman; I believe the Irish sell many of their best horses to French owners. That is just the sort of thing that happens to Horab, or rather Horab is the sort of person who happens to such things: he attracts events because he is a prophet.”
“But then there was London,” said John, “and the Thames and the Channel, I saw them all from the plane.”
“Bristol, the Severn Valley, and the Irish Sea; I worked it out from the English map while I was waiting for you. Even if we had crossed the Welsh Mountains in Pembrokeshire we would not have seen them because there was too much cloud. When I realised how many terribly narrow escapes we must have had I was terrified. Some of those great clouds we saw towering above us like white mountains might easily have been white mountains.”
John shuddered.
“We should have known,” she went on, “or I should; all the time the sun was behind us, we were flying West instead of East. The wind was behind us too and increased our range and our airspeed.” She sighed. “Poor Horab! no wonder he is so cross.”
“But he doesn’t know.”
“Of course he knows! At first I was not sure; but when he hurt me like that, when he talked about my intuition as though he would have liked to s-strangle me, then I was quite certain.”
“Were you?”
“But yess! Horab is very male and he hates his women to be right. But quite apart from that this is not the first time such a thing has happened; once we went to Holland by mistake, another time to Guernsey instead of the Scilly Islands; and as you have seen he is very good at making forced landings.”
“I’m glad he is!”
“Perhaps I should have warned you before we started; but I felt so sorry for you, you looked so s-sad, Johnny; so sad!”
He said nothing; he was trying to account for it all, to shape some coherent design into which everything would fit: the Prophet, the departed sense of exhilaration, Wittgenstein, the journey to the East which had taken them West. She stroked his hand again; by this small gesture she re-entered the dizzy world of his speculation. Like everything that had happened she was difficult to know; he scarcely believed in her, she was as unreal as France and Greenbloom’s stars.
“But it’s been fun John, has-sn’t it? You don’t really regret it, do you?”
“No,” he said. How soft was her hand; as soft as Victoria’s had been before it crumbled to earth in the earth.
“Do you?” she repeated.
Perhaps her hand would not yet be earth; it took a long time. Saints were supposed not to rot and Victoria had been a Saint: more innocent than a bird that flies, a flower that blows; and yet more than all the flowers and birds that ever fluttered through the bright air.
“Oh you are worried! You are pale and ill with worry. You poor boy, you ate no breakfast and since then Horab has fed you on a diet of s-surprises. Sit down for a minute—the grass is quite dry, sit down.”
He obeyed her and she sat down beside him.
“Now,” she said, “I’ll tell you what you must do. You live in Anglesey, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you still have Horab’s money?”
“Yes.”
She opened her handbag. “Give it to me—quickly.”
He handed the Francs and the Reichsmarks to her. She counted them, reckoning on the scarlet abacus of her lacquered nails, and then gave him ten pound notes in exchange. “That is a little more than they are worth; but never mind, with all that money you will be able to find your way to Dublin as soon as we reach a town. If necessary you could spend the night in a good hotel and be, for a time a real man of the world,” she smiled at him understandingly, “and then in the morning you will be able to catch a boat from where-ever-it-is to that place in Anglesey, I forget its name.”
“Holyhead?”
“Yes, that is quite near where you live, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is.” He brightened a little. “That’s a wonderful idea! I can just say that I ran away from Beowulf’s—I’ve always wanted to run away from somewhere and I’m sure they’ll understand.”
“Of course they will. Even if they didn’t understand, this would make them; and it will please Horab.” She clapped her hands. “Yes, he will be very pleased and it will be useful to me when the time comes.”
“And to begin with I needn’t say anything about Ireland or France or Greenbloom?”
She shrugged, “Not if you don’t want to.”
“Oh I do want to, and one day I will.” He was afraid he might have hurt her; he must try and remember that she was real and could be hurt. Now that it was all over, now that he was already walking down the drive beside the golden wallflowers to the cottage in Anglesey it was difficult to hold on to her existence as a person; she would keep fading. “It’s only that I know they’re worried about Mick; he doesn’t seem to be passing many exams; and then David—”
“Your eldest brother? Oh yes, I have heard that he was difficult, but then they should know that all the cleverest men are difficult. That is what universities are for, so that young man may be difficult and come to no harm.”
“Oxford’s very expensive,” he said, “and they’re not so well-off as they once were.”
Her little chin stuck out and her lips mouthed a pout of disdain. For the smallest part of a moment he saw her as being Jewish: a tiny wrinkled woman in a shop, bargaining. “If they have not the money they should not incur the expense or the ris-sk; a potter does not fire flawed china.”
“No,” he said.
“Horab, too, is difficult; but he is gifted and after this he is going to be terrible. If I am to manage him at all I shall need to be alone with him.”
“Because of his mistake?”
“Yes. We shall have to keep up the pretence that this is France all the time until we leave. Horab will drink non-stop until we are out of Ireland; he hates it, he calls it the Island of Taints! It upsets his whole philosophy and he won’t be able to write about or even to quote Wittgenstein until we are safely out of it. I am quite sure that at this very moment he will be drinking poteen or something with that little Irish jockey. That is what is delaying him.”
“How on earth will you manage?”
“Oh, I will let him drink just enough to keep him confused, and all the time until we leave I will pretend to act as his interpreter, talking to such people as we meet in patois. He will know that I’m not really; but it will save his face,” she paused, “not exactly that, you know; Horab is not afraid of being thought foolish; it iss simply that he has to be protected, like all great thinkers, from the unrealities of life; what Wittgenstein calls—”
John got up. “Do tell me,” he said, “who is Wittgenstein?”
From her place on the grass she blinked up at him a little abstractedly.
“Wittgenstein is a comparatively young philosopher who was born in Vy’enna, educated there and at Charlottenburg and Cambridge. It was money well-spent; he published his first work in 1921, and though it owes something to your Bertrand Russ-ell—a ssilly materialist whom Horab despises—it attracted great attention from the logical positivists.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of them. Couldn’t you just tell me what Wittgenstein really believes?”
“Oh!” She stood up stiffly swaying a little as she found her
balance. “I don’t think anybody really knows that; and Wittgenstein would not want them to! You see, he is a mystic who believes that mystics can express nothing that can ever really be understood by anybody. He says that his book was intended to draw a limit to the expression of thought; and at the end of it he says ‘that whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent’. This excites Horab very much; it implies that by Mathematics and Logic the true meaning of the whole of the New Testament is beyond Man’s power either to express-ss or to understand.”
“Really?”
“But yes.”
“Do you mean that it isn’t true?”
“Not at all. It is neither true nor false, it is simply a mistake, something that could never convince because it concerns things outside the limits of the thoughts which can be expressed.”
“And is that very important?”
“To Horab it is very important, and to millions of others too; because, if Wittgenstein is right, then they are not waiting for something that has already happened. Horab does not like waiting even for things that are going to happen; it makes him very angry.”
“Then why does he hate Bertrand Russell if he is a backer of this Wittgenstein man?”
Rachel frowned, the contraction of her eyebrows was as quick as the shuffle a bird gives its wings when it is cold. “Oh John, there is no time. Tell me, are you feeling better now?”
“Yes thank you.” He was for a moment a little nervous of her. “I’m sorry to go on about it all, but somehow all this France and Ireland business seems to be connected with Wittgenstein. Everything has happened so strangely since yesterday afternoon. Later on I’ll have to try and sort it out and then it may not be possible to ask questions because I suppose I may never see either of you again?”
She turned her back on him and began to walk over to the road. When she spoke it was as though she were speaking to herself. “Horab, you may see; I know you will hear of him! but I’m afraid it is true that we may never meet again.”
He stayed where he was and called out to her. “You sound very sure!”
In the Time of Greenbloom Page 30
