A Breath of French Air

by H. E. Bates

  ‘We haven’t gone yet,’ Ma said.

  ‘I’ll call her anyway.’

  While Mr Charlton went upstairs to call Mariette, whistling all the way up, and Ma sipped at her tea and little Oscar at his mother, Pop sat thinking. The first stunning surprise of Ma’s pronouncement had passed. It now began to occur to him that the situation was not at all unlike that in which Charley, soon after his marriage, had suggested that Pop should give up the Daily Mirror as his daily newspaper and start instead to take The Times.

  At the time that too had seemed a surprising, unthinkable, revolutionary thing to do. Then Pop remembered that quite a number of other people in the village, including Miss Pilchester, the Brigadier, and Sir George Bluff-Gore, all took The Times too and if they could do so why not he? Miss Pilchester was as poor as a church mouse; the Brigadier hadn’t had a new suit for twenty years and generally wore socks that didn’t match; and Sir George Bluff-Gore was so hamstrung with taxes that he couldn’t afford to keep the ancestral Gore Court going and had had to sell it to Pop himself for demolition and then go and live in a stable. They were the aristocracy, of course, these people; they were the toffs; but if they could afford The Times so could he.

  Now he didn’t regret taking The Times at all. It gave you something, The Times did, though he wasn’t quite sure what. Ma liked it too, though she still took the Mirror herself, otherwise she would never know what was in her stars. Nevertheless she got a big thrill out of the Saturday Times advertisements for rich and exotic foods and was always sending away for lists and catalogues. Such things didn’t inspire Pop and he still thought there was nothing so good as roast beef and Yorkshire, rice pudding, lamb and mint sauce, and plenty of roast goose and apple sauce on Sundays. He supposed he might have to change some day, though he didn’t see why.

  Oscar had taken another five minutes of his mother when Ma pulled the cork of her nipple away from him with another gentle plop and turned him over to lie against her shoulder. The result of this was a series of sudden belches, each richer, louder and milkier than the first.

  Ma said that that was better and it must be the gin she’d had last night.

  Instinctively Oscar renewed his nuzzling for the breast. Ma said she might just as well turn herself into a four-ale bar and be done with it and gave a sudden deep sigh that had in it a certain note of weariness and even despair.

  Pop felt suddenly concerned at this sigh and said:

  ‘Ma, don’t you really feel well? Tell me, my old duck.’

  In reply Ma could only ask him how he would feel if someone had played football inside him for nine months, but it was a question for which Pop could think of no sensible answer and he was both glad and relieved to hear Mariette and Charley coming downstairs.

  ‘As well as turning yourself into a bar three or four times a day. Somehow I think I’m getting too old for this lark.’

  Ma, he thought, had never talked like this before. It struck him as being chronic. Too old? Damn it, she was only thirty-six.

  ‘The trouble is this one’s like you,’ Ma said. ‘Never satisfied.’

  A moment later Mariette came in, her dark hair still loose from sleep, wearing a green silk dressing-gown and crimson slippers. In a new state of excitement she ran straight to Pop, who had a mouth full of sausage, mushroom and mustard, and started kissing him with a warm fervour that reminded him of Ma when he had first met her at the age of fifteen.

  ‘Oh! wonderful, wonderful Pop. Oh! you’re always so wonderful.’

  What had he done now? Pop started to say.

  ‘France!’ she said. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to France. When do we start? Do we all go?’

  ‘Who said we were going to France?’

  ‘You did, Charley did.’ She turned excitedly to Ma, at the same time kissing Oscar on the back of his neck. ‘You want to go to France, don’t you, Ma?’

  ‘That’s what I just told Pop.’

  ‘There you are – everybody wants to go. Oh! for that sun –’ Mariette rolled her handsome body to and fro under its dressing-gown, her breasts rising in voluptuous expectation – ‘I can’t wait for that sun. It’s amazing what that sun can do for you. Oh! to feel the heat of that sun.’

  Pop listened with keen alertness. Perhaps it was, after all, the sun that she and Charley had been missing?

  ‘Ah! the heat of the sun,’ Charley said. ‘“Fear no more the heat of the sun –” ‘

  Off again, Pop thought. Keats again. Mr Charlton started laughing happily and Mariette again rolled her shoulders ecstatically in her dressing-gown, laughing with him. Oscar made succulent noises at his mother’s breast and Ma sipped with relish at her tea, so that suddenly, for some reason, Pop felt rather out in the cold about things. He couldn’t get worked up at all.

  ‘Is it right they eat frogs?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ Charley said. ‘And absolutely delicious they are too.’

  ‘Good God.’

  Pop felt mildly sick.

  ‘Just the legs,’ Charley said. ‘They’re exactly like chicken.’

  Involuntarily Pop burst out laughing in his customary ringing fashion.

  ‘Hear that, Ma? Frogs! Just like chicken.’

  ‘They eat snails too,’ Ma said, ‘don’t they?’

  ‘Certainly Escargots de Bourgogne. Wonderful too they are.’

  Pop sat stunned over the breakfast table, open-mouthed at the sound of a new, strange language coming from Charley’s lips.

  ‘That was French,’ Mariette said with both excitement and pride. ‘Did you know Charley speaks French?’

  ‘French? Where’d he pick that up?’

  ‘Playing with French children,’ Charley said. ‘Every holiday.’

  Ma said she was greatly relieved.

  ‘That was the only thing that was worrying me,’ she said. ‘How we’d make ourselves understood.’

  ‘He’s going to teach me,’ Mariette said. ‘Anyway why don’t we all learn?’

  ‘Why not?’ Charley said. ‘I could teach you all a few simple phrases.’

  Pop was speechless. Charley-boy speaking French, Charley-boy quoting Keats and Shakespeare and spending holidays abroad – there was no end to the surprises of his son-in-law.

  Pensively Pop helped himself to marmalade and made a tentative suggestion that Charley-boy should give him an example of one or two of the simple phrases.

  ‘Certainly,’ Charley said. ‘Bonjour – Comment ça va, Monsieur Larkin?’

  ‘Eh?’ Pop said.

  Ma sat in silent admiration at these few but impressively fluent words, bemusedly rocking little Oscar backwards and forwards at her bosom. Marvelling too, Pop said, his mouth full of marmalade:

  ‘And what the pipe does all that mean?’

  ‘Good morning. How goes it? How are you?’

  ‘I’m damned if I know’, Pop said. ‘I’m getting a bit tangled up with this froggy lark.’

  Ma started laughing, her body shaking like a vast jelly, so that for a moment little Oscar lost his grip on her. With a deft movement she heaved him back into his place at the bosom and said she could never get her tongue round that lot.

  ‘Nor me neither,’ Pop said.

  ‘Oh! it’s simple, it’s easy,’ Charley said. ‘Just say it.’

  ‘Me?’ Pop said.

  ‘Yes. Go on. Just repeat it. Bonjour. Comment ça va? or comment allez-vous? if you like. Same thing.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ Pop said, ‘as the girl said to the soldier. Bonjour – that it?’

  ‘Splendid. Bonjour. Comment ça va?’

  ‘Bonjour. Comment ça va?’ Pop said, grinning now, his perkiness and confidence coming back. ‘Any good?’

  ‘Marvellous. You’d have a jolly fine accent in no time.’

  Pop, feeling suddenly proud, started preening himself before Ma, languidly stroking his side linnings with the back of one hand.

  ‘Having French lessons now, Ma. Eh? What price that?’

  Ma was
proud too and looked at Pop in gleaming admiration.

  ‘Oh! Pop, you’d pick it up in no time,’ Mariette said.

  ‘Always quick to learn,’ Ma said. ‘Sharp as a packet o’ needles. No flies on Pop.’

  Pop, increasingly thirsty for knowledge, preened himself again and said what about some more examples, Charley-boy?

  ‘Au revoir,’ Charley said. ‘À bientôt.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Good-bye. See you soon.’

  ‘Au revoir. À bientôt,’ Pop said swiftly. ‘Easy. Like water running off a duck’s back.’

  Charley said again how marvellous it was and how, very soon, in no time at all, Pop could acquire an accent. Mariette actually applauded, so that suddenly there was no holding Pop, who got up smartly from the breakfast table, bowed to Ma and said:

  ‘Bonjour, madame. Comment ça va? Au revoir! À bientôt!’

  ‘Jolly fine!’ Charley said and Ma started laughing so much that little Oscar lost his grip on the bosom again. Milk flowed down his pink dumpling face as Ma rocked up and down.

  ‘Can you see us, over there, Ma?’ Pop said. ‘Eating frogs’ legs and snails and me talking froggy?’

  ‘Oh! I can’t wait!’ Mariette said and again her body went through its voluptuous rolling under the dressing-gown. ‘I just can’t wait. I’ll just lie all day in the sun in a bikini.’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to take too,’ Ma said. ‘A bikini. A bit of sun would firm me up.’

  The prospect of Ma being firmed up in a bikini fired Pop so madly that he almost shouted at Charley:

  ‘All right, Charley-boy, when do we start?’

  ‘Well, the children will be on holiday in August – that’s if we’re all going.’

  ‘Of course we’re all going,’ Ma said. ‘It’ll be education for the lot of us. Like telly is.’

  ‘All right then. I suggest the third week in August. That’ll avoid the French national holiday, which is on the fifteenth.’

  Charley-boy again – knowing everything. Full marks for Charley. ‘Perfick!’ Pop said. ‘À bientôt!’

  Pop, sitting down at table again, poured himself another cup of tea while Mr Charlton marvelled once more how swiftly, fluently, and excellently Pop had acquired himself an accent.

  ‘How do we get there?’ Pop said. ‘Swim?’

  ‘I suggest we take the Rolls if it’s all right with you.’

  ‘Good God,’ Pop said. ‘Never thought of that.’

  ‘They won’t over-charge us, will they?’ Ma said, ‘if they see the Rolls?’

  ‘I’ll get the Beau Rivage to quote everything first,’ Charley said. ‘Taxes, taxe de séjour, service, everything. I think Mr Dupont will be fair – that’s if he’s still there. But in France it’s always as well to fix everything beforehand.’

  A great fixer, Charley. A marvellous fellow for figures, discounts, bills, and all that. In the last six months Pop had left him to deal with all paper work, forms, returns, and what Pop called the dodgy stuff. A great help, Charley.

  Pop in fact was more than pleased that Charley, after marrying Mariette, had had sense enough to throw up his job at the tax inspector’s office to take up more respectable, more sensible employment. It was worse than awful to think of having anybody in the family connected with the tax lark. Wouldn’t do at all. Worse than having somebody who’d been doing time.

  In recognition of Charley’s sensible behaviour Pop had given him and Mariette five hundred laying pullets. That had set them up in the egg lark. It paid pretty well on the whole, the egg lark, if you worked it right. It was another way of getting doh-ray-me out of the government before they had a chance to get it out of you. In less than a year Charley and Mariette had made enough profit to buy themselves another five hundred pullets and were doing very well for themselves, except that Charley would insist on making proper income tax returns about it all, which was a very bad habit to get into, Pop considered, whichever way you looked at it.

  As to the house he had promised to build them out of material from Sir George Bluff-Gore’s mansion at Gore Court, when he pulled it down, he’d been much too busy on a variety of other larks even to get round to the house’s demolition. It would have to wait a bit. Most of his time had been taken up with a big deal about army surplus, the surplus consisting of all sorts of unlikely things like tins of beetroot in vinegar, rat-traps, body belts, brass collar studs, gherkins in mustard, rubber shoe heels, and bottles of caper sauce: the sort of things that nobody else seemed to think that anybody wanted. Pop knew better. There was always somebody who wanted something somewhere. He had to admit the beetroot in vinegar and the gherkins in mustard were turning out a bit sticky though.

  But there was no doubt about the change from taxes to eggs suiting Charley all right. Charley had put on a bit of weight and looked brown. He always ate hearty breakfasts and had stopped worrying over his health and whether he was going to wake up every morning with appendicitis or not. He looked in every way a fit, virile young man. All the more puzzling, Pop thought, that he didn’t seem to be able to translate it all into the proper channels. He had to admit that Charley had always been a slow starter – but married nearly a year and no children, that was really a bit dodgy. He wouldn’t have thought a young healthy couple like them would have found it all that hard.

  ‘Of course,’ Charley said now, ‘there’s the trouble of passports.’

  ‘Trouble?’ Mariette said. ‘What trouble?’

  With as much tact as he could muster, Mr Charlton reminded them all of the delicate and rather difficult situation concerning Pop and Ma.

  ‘Perhaps it would have been better if you’d got married after all,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I suppose we still could,’ Pop said, but not with apparent enthusiasm. ‘But it’s a bit of a palaver.’

  ‘I’m willing,’ Ma said blandly. ‘Always was.’

  Mr Charlton pondered briefly on this and finally said he supposed the solution was that all the children could go on Pop’s passport, leaving Ma to take hers out in her maiden name, though he was still not quite sure what that was.

  Placidly Ma fondled the head of her seventh child against her large cheek, not unduly concerned.

  ‘Well, I suppose if everybody had their rights,’ she said, ‘I’m still Flo Parker.’

  Pop looked painfully startled, almost embarrassed, more at the word rights than anything else, but also as if he were actually being introduced to Ma by name for the first time. It was a bit unnerving, hearing Ma called Flo Parker.

  ‘Oh! well,’ Ma said, ‘I expect it’ll sort itself out in the wash.’

  The Froggies are broadminded,’ Pop said and laughed uproariously, ‘if all I hear is true. Paris and all that lark, eh?’

  ‘Leave it to Charley,’ Mariette said. ‘He’ll arrange everything. Not the clothes though. Ma, I’ll need masses. I’ll need a million new frocks.’

  Ma had now finished giving little Oscar his breakfast. The huge melons of her bosom were back in the folds of her purple blouse.

  ‘Talking about clothes, Pop,’ she said. ‘I think it would be nice if you took your yachting cap. The one you bought once for that fancy-dress ball.’

  That was a jolly good idea, Pop said. Perfick. Just the thing for the froggy seaside.

  A moment later Ma was putting little Oscar back into the luscious folds of his pram and Pop was at the door, suddenly remembering there was work to do.

  ‘Must go. Got to see Joe Rawlings about the straw deal at half past nine.’ He stood erect and perky, holding the door knob, and then permitted himself the luxury of a bow.

  ‘Au revoir! see you bientôt!’

  ‘Au revoir,’ Mr Charlton and Mariette said together, laughing. ‘Àbientôt! Adieu!’

  At the same time little Oscar made a series of noises compounded of wind, slobber, and his mother’s milk, so that Ma said if they weren’t all careful they’d have him at it too.

  Outside the rain had slackened; a
lmost ceased. Pop drove the Rolls from a junk-yard deep in puddles to a road overhung by oak shadow from which dripped great drops of humid July rain.

  Half a mile down the road a figure was walking under an umbrella, wearing a military raincoat of the kind once known as a gorblimey and carrying a grey string bag in his hands. It was Pop’s old friend the retired Brigadier.

  Like Ma, Pop always felt uncommonly sorry for the Brigadier: always so erect and yet so down at heel, with odd socks, patched elbows, darned shirt collars, and that half-lost, under-nourished leathery look about him, But today, under the umbrella, in the tattered raincoat, and carrying the empty string shopping bag, he looked, if anything, more like a walking skeleton than ever.

  Reaching him, Pop drew up the Rolls, leaned out of the window and said:

  ‘Bonjour, general. Comment ça va?’

  The Brigadier stopped sharply and looked immensely startled.

  ‘Très bien, merci, Larkin,’ he said. ‘Et vous aussi j’espère?’

  At this Pop looked even more startled than the Brigadier and could think of nothing to say at all except:

  ‘Au revoir! À bientôt!’

  ‘Bless my soul, Larkin, you’re in a hurry, aren’t you?’ the Brigadier said. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Started to learn froggy,’ Pop said. ‘All going to France. For a holiday. Place in Brittany.’

  ‘Entire brood?’ the Brigadier said.

  ‘The whole shoot,’ Pop said. ‘Baby an’ all.’

  ‘Cost you a pretty penny, won’t it?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Pop thundered. ‘Ma wants to go. Mariette wants to go. Charley wants to go. Everybody wants to go. What about you? Why don’t you come too? More the merrier, general!’

  The Brigadier, who found it hard on his meagre pension to afford a day in London every six weeks or so and who couldn’t remember the last time he had had a holiday at all, much less one in France, merely stood bemusedly in the rain, involuntarily shaking his head and having no word of any kind to say until Pop, with a burst of expansive exuberance, invited him to hop in.

  ‘No. No thanks. I like the walk. Part of my constitutional.’

  ‘Still raining. Glad to drop you.’