A Breath of French Air

by H. E. Bates

  Mr Charlton, who could see no point in these exercises, was glad merely to relax with Mariette in the sun, reading detective stories or occasionally turning an eye on Mariette, moving her perfect young body over to brown on the other side, like a young plump chicken on a spit. He felt mostly relaxed and contented, even when sometimes aroused by the voice of Ma:

  ‘Fetch everybody ice-cream, Charley, will you? There’s a dear. Big ones. Bring two for everybody. And some nuts.’

  One of the few things Ma was agreeably surprised about in France was the fact that they had ice-cream and nuts. She had been afraid they wouldn’t. At least that made it a bit more civilized.

  Pop too was content. He liked merely to lie in the sun and look at the sky. With his hypersensitive, keenly developed sense of smell he could lie for hours breathing the scent of sea and seaweed, sun-dried rocks and pines, tarry boats and fish being unloaded at the quay. He could translate these things into separate living scenes without opening his eyes at all, just as he could smell lily-of-the-valley in imagination and recapture Mademoiselle Dupont clear and close to him.

  Over the past day or two it had struck him that Mademoiselle Dupont had become more and more refreshingly attentive. She laughed whenever he met her on the stairs. Was the food right for Monsieur Larkin? Did Madame and the family like it? Were the children happy? Was there some special dish they would like? Pop hadn’t the heart to tell her he thought the food was mostly a terrible mistake and that what he really wanted was rice pudding, stewed plums, and roast beef and Yorkshire. He merely joked:

  ‘Ma says it suits her a treat. She’s slimming. Taken off pounds.’

  ‘If there is something special you prefer at any time please to tell me. Sans supplément, of course. Please just to say.’

  On the fifth morning she called him into the Bureau in order to give him back the passports, apologizing at the same time for keeping them so long. She also said:

  ‘I have been thinking that you might care to take an excursion on the 8th – that is, to Le Folgoët. There is a great pardon there that day It is the greatest and most beautiful pardon we have in Finistère.’

  ‘Pardon? Pop had no idea what a pardon was but he listened respectfully as Mademoiselle Dupont went on to explain its religious significance and beauty.

  ‘Not much on religion,’ he confessed. ‘Don’t care for dog-collars.’

  ‘Perhaps Madame and the children would care to go,’ she said. ‘You must please tell me if they do. I can give them all directions.’

  Up to that moment, rather absent-mindedly, Mademoiselle Dupont had kept the passports in her hands. Suddenly she remembered them and handed them back to Pop, giving a little nervous laugh at the same time.

  Pop grinned quickly as he took the passports and asked to know what had amused her.

  It was quite a little thing, Mademoiselle Dupont said, just something that had occurred to her.

  ‘What?’ Pop said.

  ‘Ce sont les passeports,’ she said, starting once again nervously thinking in French. ‘It is rather curieux. A little bit funny.’

  ‘Oh?’ Pop said. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It was when I was looking at the passports this morning,’ Mademoiselle Dupont said. ‘It was très curieux – very curieux – but it occurred to me that if you are not married you are still a single man?’

  She laughed quickly and rather self-consciously and Pop, in his customary rousing fashion, laughed too. That, he confessed, had never occurred to him either.

  ‘Single chap, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, well.’

  That afternoon, when he went back to the plage after having a short after-lunch nap with Ma on the bed, he found Mr Charlton in a state of unusual restlessness.

  Charley, who had hitherto been fairly content, had made a disturbing discovery He had rumbled what the business of the big sailing coloured balls was all about. They were all part of a design for the ensnarement, if not seduction, of Mariette.

  The young Frenchmen, he had at last discovered, had every wind direction beautifully worked out. In that way they could be sure that the balls would always float towards her, so that every five minutes or so they would find it necessary to invade the precious territory of scarlet bikini and naked flesh and, with voluble apologies, laughter, and much athletic show, recapture them.

  Mr Charlton made it clear he didn’t care for it at all.

  *

  On the morning of the 8th Pop lay alone on the plage, basking for the first time in the true heat of the sun. The sky was actually the colour Mr Charlton had so confidently predicted it would be. It hung overhead like a cornflower, brightest blue to the very distant edges of a sea that seemed to have receded across miles of new-bleached sand to the hazy rim of the world.

  The extra-sensory impressions that were so lively in him that morning told him that this was perfick. It couldn’t possibly be more perfick anywhere, even to go off to a pardon, however beautiful, as Ma and all the rest had done. Only Mariette, it seemed, had shown any reluctance to go to the great pardon of Le Folgoët, largely on the ground that it would interfere with her scheme for browning her body all over, but Charley had rumbled that. He had shown swift and admirable marital firmness and had, to Pop’s great satisfaction, insisted she should go.

  So by ten o’clock the Rolls was away, Mariette driving, the boot packed with a large picnic lunch of Mademoiselle Dupont’s preparing, together with several bottles of vin rosé and bags of peaches, sweet white grapes and pears. The children now liked vin rosé as much as ice-cream and much more than orange juice and Ma was very glad. She thought it was very good for them.

  As the Rolls drove away she was already busy giving little Oscar a drop of refreshment and with a free hand waving ‘Have a good time’ to Pop, who called back that he had The Times of the day before yesterday and that it wouldn’t be long before he went down to read it over a snifter and watch the Breton women dozing in their stiff white hats and the sardine boats bringing in their catches to the quay.

  ‘Perfick,’ he kept saying to himself in the sun. ‘Perfick. Absolutely perfick.’ He could actually feel the early September heat, bristling with its heavy Atlantic salt, burning his chest and thighs and shoulders. ‘Perfick. Good as champagne.’

  Twenty minutes later he was asleep on his face and woke only just before midday – a time when the plage always emptied itself so suddenly and completely of people that it was as if a plague had struck it – to hear an elegant voice saying:

  ‘Hullo, there. Comment ςα va, mon chérit? How’s the beauty sleep, darling? It’s me.’

  Pop turned and looked up. Above him a hatless vision in shirt and slacks of a warm pale shade of apricot, was sitting on the sea-wall above the plage. Down over the sand dangled the long, languid legs of Angela Snow, his kindred spirit of the summer party of a year before.

  Pop was instantly glad of Charley’s brief tuition in French and promptly leapt to his feet and said:

  ‘Très bien, mercil Et vous aussi, my old firework?’

  ‘Scream,’ she said. ‘You speak the language!’

  ‘Just enough,’ Pop said. ‘Count up to ten and ask for vin rosy’

  ‘Been dying to see someone who’s fun and here you are.’

  Angela Snow gave a serpentine twist of her body and leapt down to the sand. Her hair had a glorious gold-white sheen on it and she gave the impression of having chosen the slacks and shirt not to match it but to heighten it and make it shine more brilliantly. Her pretty feet were bare except for flat yellow sandals that simply slipped on, Chinese fashion, without a tie.

  When she sat down her long legs curled themselves loosely underneath her. Her clear olive eyes seemed even larger than Pop remembered them and she seemed to embrace him with them as she asked him all about himself, how he came to be there, in this hole, and all that.

  ‘Holiday’ Pop said.

  ‘Not alone?’ Her usually languid voice was quick, even eager.

  Pop at once explained a
bout the family and how everyone else had gone to the great pardon at Le Folgoët.

  ‘Iris too,’ she said. ‘My sister. Terribly religious, Iris. Got the most God-awful relidge, Iris has.’

  Smiling to the uttermost edges of her large pellucid olive eyes she asked Pop, in turn, if he was very relidge.

  Pop said he wasn’t, very.

  ‘No particular brand, you mean?’

  Pop confessed he had no particular brand. He supposed if it came to a definition he would say that being alive was his relidge – that and earth and woods and flowers and nightingales and all that sort of lark and enjoying it and not preventing other people doing so.

  ‘Wouldn’t do for Iris,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Couldn’t have that, darling. Couldn’t sell her that. She’s an Ill-fare Stater. The iller you fare the gooder you are.’

  Pop shook his head. Family throw-back? he suggested.

  ‘Got to lacerate yourself, according to Iris. Beds of nails. Fakir stuff.’

  ‘Sack-cloth and ashes?’ Pop suggested.

  ‘Dish-cloth and wet-breeches,’ Angela Snow said, ‘that’s Iris. A positive wetter. Even says damp prayers. Sobs away half the time.’

  Not much of a chum on holiday, Pop suggested. Why did she come?

  ‘My idea,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Thought I might find some arresting Breton fisherman to bed her down with. Sort of cure. Don’t know of an arresting somebody, chéri, do you?’

  Pop said he didn’t and laughed. He much enjoyed being called darling and chéri by Angela Snow.

  ‘And how’, she said, ‘are the virgins?’

  Throwing back her head Angela Snow laughed with all the rippling limpidity of a carillon about the virgins. She’d never forgotten the virgins. Seven of them and so foolish, riding on the donkeys at Pop’s Derby in the summer gymkhana a year before. Almost needed changing still, she confessed, every time she thought of them. Dear virgins.

  ‘Iris is one,’ she said. ‘The dears do make such hard work of it.’

  ‘This place is full of ‘em,’ Pop said.

  ‘You don’t say?’

  Pop referred her to the boyish female skinnies, largely unwashed, who disported themselves listlessly about the plage. Ma and he had discussed them thoroughly. Terrible little show-offs, they thought, with nothing to show. And French girls supposed to be so chick an’ all. And fast. Even young Montgomery was bored.

  ‘Terribly strict country still,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Big mother is watching you and all that.’

  ‘Nothing for the Froggy boys to do but make eyes at Mariette.’

  ‘Can’t blame ‘em,’ she said. ‘She’s inherited all her father’s virtues.’

  Virtues? Pop laughed and said he didn’t think he’d got very many of them.

  ‘No?’ Angela Snow said and gave him a smile of luscious simplicity.

  Free to look about him again, Pop saw that the plage had miraculously emptied itself, as always, at the stroke of noon. In five minutes every salle à manger in the place would be full of ravenous masticators. The potage cultivateur would be on, stemming the first pangs of the pensionnaires. Everywhere the bread-slicers would be working overtime.

  Suddenly overcome by a sharp recollection that if you weren’t there on time you fell behind in the noon race for nourishment and never really caught up again, Pop half got to his feet and said:

  ‘Suppose I ought to get back to the Beau Rivage. Before the troughs are empty.’

  Any good?’ she asked, ‘the Beau Rivage?’

  Pop was obliged to confess he thought it terrible.

  ‘Bad grub?’

  That was the worst part of it, Pop said. He yearned for a good drop of –

  ‘Complain, sweetie, complain.’

  Pop confessed that he hadn’t the heart to complain to Mademoiselle Dupont. She probably did her best.

  ‘You must, darling. It’s the only way. I’m the great complainer of all time. The great table-banger. And who’s this Dupont?’

  Pop explained about Mademoiselle Dupont while Angela Snow listened with detachment, unsympathetically.

  ‘All too obviously another one,’ she said. ‘Like Iris. Plain as a pike-staff, sweetie.’

  Pop’s insides were light with hunger. Sleep and the bristling air of morning had made him feel empty and fragile as a husk.

  ‘Invite me to lunch one day,’ she said, ‘and I’ll give a demonstration of the arch-complainer.’

  What about lunch today? Pop said. He couldn’t go on much longer.

  ‘Only place in this hole is Pierre’s,’ Angela Snow said. Out there, towards the forest. About ten minutes, if you don’t mind walking.’

  Pop said he hoped his legs would carry him. Angela Snow laughed in reply, again in her high, infectious rippling fashion, and actually took Pop’s arm in her soft, slender fingers.

  ‘I’ll see you don’t fall by the wayside, chum. Lean on me, chéri.’

  Thus fortified, Pop bore up remarkably well until they reached Pierre’s, which stood in a clearing where forest and sand joined at the deep central cup of the bay. All his hypersensitive impressions, heightened still further by the growing heat of sun, baking sand, seaweed, and pines, were now fused together in wild galloping pangs of hunger.

  Pierre’s appeared to be a shack built of bits of bamboo, pine boughs, and old orange boxes. It looked, Pop thought, remarkably like an abandoned coal-shed.

  Outside it a few tables without cloths, apparently knocked up out of driftwood, were sheltered by the same number of blue and white umbrellas. Charcoal was smoking away slowly under an iron grid built above bricks. A sign stuck on a pole said Toilette and pointed to a flimsy arrangement of almost transparent sacks slung up behind a tree.

  Angela Snow and Pop sat down at a table and Angela Snow said this was the greatest place for food you ever came across. The only problem was whether Pierre would like you. If he didn’t he wouldn’t serve you. He liked to pick his customers.

  ‘Mad on me,’ she said.

  ‘Hullo, lousy,’ Pierre said. ‘Why bloddy hell you turn up?’ and then stood over the table to slop into thick glasses two large camparis which nobody had ordered.

  Angela Snow shook back her sumptuous golden hair and with her slow drawling voice and luscious smile gave back as good as she got.

  ‘How now, brown sow?’ she said. This is my friend Mr Larkin. Mr Larkin – Pierre. Mr Larkin keeps pigs – he’ll understand you.’

  Pop actually half rose to shake hands but relapsed at once when Pierre said:

  ‘Hope you enjoy yourself. What you want to eat? I know. Don’t say. Rossbiff, eh?’

  This was exactly what Pop did want and his juices at once started flowing madly in anticipation.

  ‘Well, you won’t get, see? Today you get monies, châteaubriant, and the best brie your English bloddy nose ever stank of and like it.’

  ‘Scream,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Killing.’

  She laughed again in her high ringing fashion and Pierre gave a grin part sugary, part lascivious, his thick lips opening to reveal a row of blackened teeth punctuated in the centre by a positive door-knob of gold. The rest of his sun-burnt body, which Pop thought was almost as wide as Ma’s, suffered from these same unclean extravagances. His blue-striped sweat-shirt seemed to have been dipped in candle-grease. His uncut black hair could have been knotted in his neck. Glimpses of a belly both hairy and sweaty appeared from time to time between the bottom edge of his shirt and the tops of his trousers, which were held up by some sort of bell-rope, bright scarlet and hung with gilded tassels.

  ‘And what wine you want?’

  ‘Vin rosy,’ Pop said.

  ‘Rosy, rosy, rosy,’ Pierre said. ‘Well, we don’t have rosy, rosy, rosy Here you bloddy well have what you get and like it.’

  ‘Mad,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Killing me.’

  Pop thought it would kill him too and was openly relieved when Pierre went away, dragging one foot, like a pot-bellied crab crawling across the sand.


  ‘Going to bring Iris here one day’ Angela Snow said. ‘Pierre’s the type for her. Half an hour with him and she’d never be the same again.’

  Pop was positive she wouldn’t be.

  ‘Fun, isn’t it?’ Angela Snow said. ‘Don’t you think so? Awful fun. And the food celestial.’

  Pop was busy drinking campari for the first time and decided he didn’t like it.

  ‘These are the only places,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Real France. All the atmosphere. Piquant somehow – delish.’

  Scooping up his mussels and thinking, like Ma, that he wasn’t going to get very fat on this lark, Pop watched Pierre grilling the châteaubriant over a glowing bed of charcoal. Now and then Pierre scratched his long black hair or the hairs on his chest and sometimes he spat over the grill into the sand.

  Watching him, Pop was reminded of Charley’s opinion that the French were the élite of Europe. France was the place. Everything so cultured.

  ‘Two bloddy steaks for two bloddy English. Bon appétit.’

  A certain belching contempt filled the glowing autumn air. This, however, was merely yet another signal for Angela Snow to break into fresh peals of laughter and say what awful fun it was.

  ‘A change from the deadly Dupont and all that anyway, darling,’ she said.

  It certainly was, Pop said, and then turned with intense relish to tackle the châteaubriant and its accompanying pommes frites. After a struggle of five minutes or so it struck him that the meat was, perhaps, a piece of dog. The charred rectangle, when cut, was icy blue inside and exuded large quantities of blood. This, like the pommes frites, was stone cold. The inner sinews of the meat itself, so tenaciously bound to each other that nothing could separate them, were stone cold too.

  ‘Terribly naughty of me,’ Angela Snow said. ‘You’d have liked mustard, wouldn’t you?’

  Pop, still struggling, said it didn’t matter. Nevertheless Angela Snow said she’d ask for it, and it turned out to be English when it came.

  ‘Suppose it’s très snob, wouldn’t you think perhaps?’ she said. ‘English mustard?’