A Breath of French Air

by H. E. Bates

  ‘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 glass, startled the entire plage into thinking a train was coming. Mr Charlton, who was idly picking up shells and trying not to notice the antics of the god-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 balls 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 café 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-class idea, Pop,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Absolutely first class.’

  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 gods, those stupid great balls, 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 ‘Garçon!’ 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 cocktail 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 cocktail.

  ‘Propel the whole ruddy boat,’ he said. ‘Nothing like it. Absolute blinder. Santé.’

  ‘Santé,’ Captain Brisson said.

  ‘Cheers,’ Pop said. ‘Santé.’

  ‘Cheers,’ the Captain said.

  ‘Santé,’ 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 quantity. 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 nobody and nothing at all, were added to Mr Charlton’s document, 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 memor
y of the young French gods and their stupid idiotic balls 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.

  ‘Rhubarb!’ Charley said loudly. ‘Hell’s bells. We only just got here.’

  ‘Please excuse,’ the Captain said.

  ‘Rhubarb!’ Charley said again. ‘I thought the French were drinkers.’

  The Captain again protested that he had to get back to his ship and Pop said very well, that was all right, and he hoped he’d see him soon. Perhaps in England?

  ‘In England, yes,’ the Captain said. ‘I come soon. When teeth are ready.’

  ‘What teeth?’ Charley snapped.

  Without embarrassment and with a certain touch of pride the Captain slipped from his mouth what he explained to Pop and Charley were his temporary set of dentures. The new ones, he assured them, would be ready in a month or so: in England.

  ‘National Elf lark,’ Pop reminded Charley.

  ‘My mate,’ the Captain said, ‘he have new wooden leg. Also it is true you can have cognac sometimes? Oui?’

  ‘There’s the National Elf lark for you. Charley old man,’ Pop said. ‘Free for all. Even the Froggies. Wooden legs an’ all.’

  ‘Rhubarb to the National Health lark!’ said Charley aggressively, ‘and double rhubarb to the Froggies!’

  As if detecting in this a certain note of ill-concealed hostility Captain Brisson, whose face had now broken out in a rash of red and purple blotches, shook hands all over again with Pop and Charley, at the same time forgetting to put his teeth back. It was only when he had gone some yards along the quayside that he remembered the omission and slapped them back into his mouth with a blow so sharp that it knocked him off keel, making him stagger.

  Soon after he had disappeared Pop was about to say for a second time that he and Charley ought to be going too when he saw across the street a figure waving to him with a white and chocolate scarf.

  He did not need to hear the fluted call of ‘Darling!’ that followed it to know that this was Angela Snow. She was dressed in trim pure white shorts and a coffee-coloured linen blouse and white open sandals in which her bare painted toenails glistened like rows of cherries. With her was a girl in a pea-green cable-stitch sweater and a skirt of indeterminate colour that might have once been mustard. Much washing had turned it to an unpleasant shade of mongrel ochre, rather like that of a mangel-wurzel.

  ‘This’, said Angela Snow, ‘is my sister. Iris.’

  Pop and Charley rose to shake hands, Charley unsteadily.

  ‘Good. Splendid,’ Charley said. ‘Just in time for a snifter.’

  ‘Darlings!’ Angela Snow said. ‘My tongue’s hanging out.’

  Iris said nothing but ‘Howdedo’. She was a solid, shortish blonde of rising thirty with a skin as hard as marble and more or less the colour of an acid drop. Her eyes were almost lash-less; the complete absence of eyebrows made her face actually seem broader than it was, as well as giving it a look of completely bloodless astonishment. Her hair was cut in a roughish homemade bob and she had short white ankle socks of exactly the kind that French girls wore.

  Charley demanded of the two girls what would it be and presently Angela Snow was drinking Pernod and her sister a small bottle of Perrier with ice. Charley and Pop decided at the same time that this was as good a moment as any to have a fourth Red Bull and while this was being mixed Pop reminded Angela Snow of her luncheon promise and when was she coming?

  ‘Whenever you say, dear boy. At the given moment I shall be there.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow, darling, as ever is. Bless you.’

  ‘And your sister,’ Pop said, giving Iris a rich perky look that would have melted Mademoiselle Dupont to tears but that had on Angela Snow’s sister only the effect of heightening her appearance of bloodless surprise, ‘would she care to join us too?’

  ‘I’m sure she’d adore to.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Iris said. ‘I go to Guimiliau to see the Calvary and then the ossuary at –’

  The word ossuary startled Pop so much that he gave a sort of frog-croak into his Red Bull, which had just arrived. He had as sharp an ear as ever for strange new words but this one had him floored.

  ‘What’, he said, ‘is an ossuary? Sounds très snob.’

  ‘Bone-house,’ Angela Snow said.

  ‘Same to you,’ Pop said.

  ‘Scream!’ she said and everyone, with the solid exception of Iris, roared with laughter.

  Even before the arrival of the fourth Red Bull Charley was feeling great. The bit about the ossuary served merely to put him into a louder, cheerier, more pugnacious mood.

  ‘Rhubarb!’ he said to Iris Snow. ‘Of course you can come. It’s langoustine day tomorrow. Have them every Thursday. Don’t you adore langoustines?’

  Iris, who thought eating the other deadly sins and consequently existed mostly on dry toast, cheese biscuits, and anchovy paste, had no word of answer.

  ‘You see she visits somewhere different every day’ Angela Snow said in explanation. ‘Ah! the calvaries and the crosses, the dolmens and the menhirs, the allées convenes and the tumuli – Iris has to see them all.’

  Pop sat open-mouthed before what he thought was the oddest female he had ever seen in his life but was saved from pondering over her too long by a sudden, almost pugnacious question from Charley.

  ‘And how’, he demanded of Iris, ‘do you travel, Miss Snow? By car or what?’

  Iris permitted herself the astonishing luxury of uttering fifty-six words all at once, speaking with measured solemnity.

  ‘I think walking is the only true and right way of seeing these things. Walking leads to contemplation, contemplation to mood, and mood to meditation, so that when you get there you are one with the place you’re visiting. So I walk to all the nearest ones and go to all the distant ones by train.’

  ‘By train?’ Charley said. ‘What train? Not by any chance that little train?’

  ‘Of course. What else? Whenever and as often as it’s –’

  ‘My God!’ Charley gave a positive shout of delighted triumph and gazed at Iris Snow with alcoholic rapture, as to a kindred spirit. ‘She knows my little train! Hear that, Pop? She knows my little train!’

  Pop, who thought something must have got into Charley – he’d start spouting Shakespeare or that feller Keats any moment now, he thought – could only stare at Angela Snow, who gave him a split-second sporting wink, without the trace of a smile, in reply. He was too astonished even to wink back again.

  ‘That train,’ Charley kept saying. ‘That little train. You remember, Pop, how that was the first thing that brought it all back again?’

  Brought all what back again? Pop wanted to know.

  ‘Me. This. Everything. All that time. All those years. The whole ruddy shooting match.’

  No doubt about it, Pop thought, Charley was as drunk as a newt. Pickled. Something had got into him. It reminded him of the time he had first met him and how Mariette had had to lend him pyjamas and put him to bed. There was the same raving, rhapsodic light in his eyes.

  ‘Chuffing away over the heather!’ Charley said. He had started to wave his arms about in ecstatic recollection. ‘Chuffing away for miles. I remember once – where was it? St Pol de Léon – no, not there. Somewhere else. No. Has St Pol de Léon two cathedrals?’

  Without knowing it, and for no sane reason at all, Charley had begun to sharpen his pencil again.

  ‘You might almost say it has,’ Iris Snow said. ‘There’s the cathedral itself, and then of course there’s the Chapelle du Creizker. Much, much more magnificent.’

  ‘It was there!’ Charley said with a rhapsodic jolt in his voice. ‘It was there!’
>
  What was? Pop wanted to know.

  ‘Charley’s got a spider on the end of his nose,’ said Angela Snow, who loved practical jokes and who was dying to get the subject changed, since relics, saints, and pardons were her sister’s food and drink, day and night. ‘I can see it dangling.’

  Charley did nothing about the supposed teasing spider except to snatch vaguely at the air immediately in front of him and then start stirring his Red Bull madly with his pencil, as if it were a cup of tea.

  ‘First time I ever really saw the world,’ he said. ‘Consciously I mean. Consciously. From that tower you can see –’

  ‘Seventy other towers,’ Iris said. Of course on a clear day.’

  ‘Never forget,’ Charley said. ‘God, you talk about “a wild surmise – silent upon a peak in Darien” –’

  ‘Charley’s off,’ Pop said. ‘More Shakespeare.’

  ‘Keats!’ Charley shouted. ‘Keats!’

  ‘Same thing,’ Pop said.

  ‘Whenever I go there again,’ Iris Snow said, ‘I shall think of you.’

  ‘Do,’ Charley said, ‘do,’ and started to sharpen his pencil madly again. ‘Think of me!’

  Suddenly he was on top of the tower again, on top of the world. Everything was splendidly revelatory and wonderful. His insides felt rich with Red Bull. His veins were a jumble of wires that sang like harp-strings. He heard himself order a fifth Red Bull in a voice that echoed inside his head as a cry might have done through one of the sepulchral allées convenes that Iris found so fascinating.

  Drinking it, he was aware that his intestines were on fire and he suddenly gave a belch of rude immoderation.

  Magnifique, he kept telling Iris Snow. Magnifique. Rhubarb! And he didn’t care a damn for any of the bastards. Did she?

  Whether it had anything to do with this robustly repeated inquiry he never knew but suddenly he came to a vague realization that neither Angela Snow nor her sister were there any longer.

  ‘Where have the Snows gone?’ he said. ‘Melted?’ Jolly good joke, he thought. Magnifique. ‘Snows all melted?’

  Some time later he was dimly aware of walking back to the plage with Pop, still madly sharpening his pencil and still saying he didn’t care a damn for the bastards, whoever they were.