A Breath of French Air

by H. E. Bates

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said. Somebody had turned the record over or put on another one and now the gramophone was playing a tune he didn’t know at all, but which Primrose did – a heart-twister of yearning southern sorrow called Anima Core. ‘You’re grown up. You’ve forgotten about things –’

  Pop started to assure her that there were some things he hadn’t forgotten about yet, but she said peremptorily:

  ‘You’d like to part us, I expect.’

  ‘Well, I –’

  ‘Don’t you ever hear that bit Charley’s always quoting?’ she said. ‘It’s his favourite bit. “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,” – we have it at school too sometimes.’

  Pop was silent. That feller Keats again. Charley-boy all over. He had to hand it to Charley. Terrific influence on the family that chap had been. No doubt about it.

  Gloom hung over him like a cloud and he was profoundly wishing he knew a bit more about psychology, if not Keats, when a cheerful languid voice hailed him and said:

  ‘Why the dark deep furrowed brow, dear boy? The crêpes Suzette not settling or what? or shouldn’t a girl ask? Cheer up, chum.’

  It was Angela Snow, dancing past him with Montgomery, and Pop, suddenly restored to his perky, normal self again, laughed back in typical rousing fashion.

  ‘Only Juliet here,’ he said, stroking Primrose’s soft dark hair – dammit, he wasn’t sure he wasn’t very nearly quoting Keats or Shakespeare or somebody himself now – ‘wants to stay in France with her Romeo.’

  ‘And rightly so,’ Angela Snow said. ‘Got the right idea. You’re going to let her, of course, aren’t you? I’ll kick you if you don’t.’

  ‘Course,’ Pop said. ‘Course. Got to start sometime.’

  ‘Sensible man,’ she said. Anyway I’ll be here for a while yet. I’ll do a chaperone.’

  Unstartled by a word only vaguely familiar to him, Pop watched the turquoise, willowy vision float away and then found himself, a moment later, looking down at a pair of dark eyes brimming over, as he had feared they would be, with tears – except that they were now clear, bright tears of joy.

  ‘Oh! Pop,’ was all Primrose could say. ‘Oh! Pop. Marc-Antoine will be thrilled.’

  French blood in the family now, Pop thought. Blimey, what next?

  ‘It’s just like The Sugar Plum Fairy,’ Primrose said softly, her olive lids quite closed. ‘I never imagined –’

  ‘Like who?’ Pop said.

  ‘Tchaikowsky.’

  She was light-headed, Pop thought. Must be. It did that to you when you were young. You went off your grub and got to thinking you were floating about, empty.

  He now hadn’t the vaguest idea what his daughter, with eyes still lusciously closed, was talking about and he decided it could only be another of them larks they learnt you nowadays at school. And again, as if sensing his thoughts, she said:

  ‘It’s about the little girl who goes to bed after a Christmas party and can’t sleep and then comes downstairs and watches The Sugar Plum Fairy dance and all that. Just like this. Haven’t you ever heard of it?’

  Pop had to confess he hadn’t. Bit out of his range, like that feller Keats and the rest of ‘em. Nevertheless he was fascinated, as always, by the hint of an excursion into new upper worlds and asked her what else they learnt them nowadays at school? You never knew.

  ‘Oh! biology,’ she said. ‘Sex and all that.’

  For crying out gently, he thought. No wonder Ma had said she was developing early. It didn’t surprise him, considering the help they got. Again, for the second or third time, he didn’t know what to say and was saved the necessity of attempting any comment by another airy remark from Primrose, delivered this time with dark eyes fully open, roundly staring up at him, beautifully glistening.

  ‘They don’t teach them sex in French schools though,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ Pop said, ‘don’t they? Well, well. Too bad,’ He laughed in his customary rousing fashion. He’d had an idea for a long time the Froggies were a backward lot. Even in sex. How did she know they didn’t teach it?

  ‘Because I asked Marc-Antoine,’ she said. ‘He was awfully surprised we had it.’

  Didn’t wonder at it, Pop thought. Didn’t wonder at all.

  ‘Anyway he was very interested and that’s how we started to get to know each other better.’

  He must tell Ma all this. Ma would certainly have to hear all about this lark, Pop was thinking. At the same time he was wondering if another glass of champagne wouldn’t do him all the good in the world, when suddenly the music stopped.

  In the short ensuing silence he saw Ma talking to one of the French chambermaids. He guessed little Oscar was awake and was quite certain of it a moment later when he heard Ma say she’d be up in a minute to soothe him down and that if punch, white wine, red wine, champagne, and crêpes Suzette wouldn’t do the trick nothing would.

  With an involuntary rush of paternal affection he turned to pat Primrose on her head and was astonished to find that he stood with empty arms. A voice low with emotion thanked him with a few happy whispered syllables for the dance and everything. He stood without a coherent thought he could offer in answer, trying hazily to disentangle all that stuff about Sugar Plum Fairies, Tchaikowsky, sex, biology, and what they learnt you nowadays in school, so bemused that he probably wouldn’t have heard the next record, which was that old favourite Night and Day, if it hadn’t been that a curious thing occurred.

  As Iris Snow heard the opening bars of the music something suspiciously like a sob sprang from her throat. A moment later she hastily pressed a tiny lace square of handkerchief to her mouth and started rushing from the room.

  *

  By one o’clock Pop had danced once each with Mariette, Ma, and Angela Snow and was now having a waltz with Mademoiselle Dupont. Ma warned him several times of the virtues of equal shares.

  ‘Got to treat all of us the same,’ she said. ‘It’s Iris Snow after Mademoiselle Dupont. No favouritism. Don’t forget.’

  Pop, who was ready to distribute favours everywhere, remarked that Iris Snow had disappeared somewhere and laughingly supposed she might have gone off to catch the flea.

  ‘What flea?’ Ma said.

  Pop explained how Angela Snow, who was increasingly irritated by her sister, had jocularly told him about the twitch.

  ‘Not a very nice thing to say’ Ma said. ‘Still, don’t you catch it though.’

  He left her to find Mademoiselle Dupont, who was in excited mood. While she danced she kept breathing harder and harder and as the dance went on she threw back her head, laughing freely, and said she felt like singing.

  Rather to Pop’s surprise she actually burst into a few bars of song. Her voice came out as a rather pleasant not uncultured contralto and not a bit as if she had adenoids, as French singers often do. Pop then said jovially that he felt like having a bit of a warble himself and on the spur of the moment suggested she should join him in It Had To Be You – but she didn’t know that masterpiece, a favourite of Pop’s youth, and they sang C’est si bon instead, she singing the French and he, in a light falsetto, what he could remember of the English words. Soon everyone else was singing too and the bright noise was punctuated by the cracking volley of champagne corks.

  Iris Snow could hear them as she stood on the terrace outside, talking to Alphonse, in French, under the plane trees. Every moment she felt more than ever like a wild canary. She had never had so much to drink in her life and in rapid sentences she was telling Alphonse how much she adored his country. France was her Mecca. Everything about France was so cultured. There was nowhere in the world like France. She adored it, its people, its art, its manners, its wine, and its food.

  From a woman who fed largely on soft-boiled eggs, dry toast, and anchovy paste on biscuits this was said with a remarkable degree of passion, and in the lights of the hotel windows Alphonse kept her held with remorseless charm in the overlarge handsome eyes that were n
ow so like big, shining prunes.

  Soon she was aware again of a transcendent rushing thrill, that strange, unsteady thumping in the bosom and the panting desire for air. She longed to rush down to the beach, she said. A few moments later Alphonse guided her unsteadily to the plage, where she found it much easier to sit down than stand up and where she suddenly found herself remarking recklessly, for no reason at all, in a voice that seemed not to belong to her, that the night was just like Grecian honey. It was all like new warm honey from the south, she said, and she longed to rush to the sea. A moment later she started to take off her shoes and stockings, going about it so ineptly that Alphonse, without asking, started to give help with the suspenders.

  With a protesting shriek of joy she suddenly dashed across the beach to the sea. The little pleated phosphorescent waves were just like milk, she thought, and over in the western sky a great star – Oh! no, a planet, she supposed – was hanging like burnt gold above the sea – oh! so like a wonderful great big gingerbread, she called out crazily, with all the gilt still on!

  Alphonse, who hadn’t the vaguest idea what she was talking about, pursued her to the edge of the water. By the time he reached it she was already paddling ecstatically westwards, up to her knees. With the water rising up her legs she suddenly decided to tuck her frock in her knickers, which were the same shade of dull coffee brown as the dress. Seeing this, Alphonse started to take off his shoes and stockings too and roll up the legs of his blue-and-white-striped chef’s trousers, which Iris adored.

  At this point the sea, as Charley had once explained, was shallow for half a mile from the shore and Iris was still only up to her knees, thirty yards out, when Alphonse caught up with her. He at once embraced her passionately round the lower middle and started kissing her madly on one ear.

  In the middle of this she felt her knees buckle underneath her. In a moment she was up to her armpits, kneeling on sand. Alphonse went under too and in this uncomfortable position, still crying out that the night was like honey and the stars like gilded gingerbread, Iris Snow surrendered gladly to whatever was coming, with low sobs of joy.

  *

  Back in the hotel, while Alphonse was also making the interesting discovery that the English could be surprisingly unrestrained, Mademoiselle Dupont was taking advantage of Ma’s absence upstairs to invite Pop into the Bureau. There was something of importance she wished to say.

  With shining eyes she asked him to accept a small green leather box from her.

  ‘A small thing. A little parting gift for you.’

  Opening the box, Pop found inside it a pair of silver cuff-links reposing on a bed of emerald velvet.

  ‘Please to look. There is something –’

  Pop took the cuff-links out and, looking more closely, found that Mademoiselle Dupont had had his initials engraved on the faces of the links in the form of a monogram.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said. Absolutely perfick –’

  ‘It is just a small thing. Just –’

  ‘Wonderful. Very chic,’ he went on and said he didn’t know how to thank her. ‘Très snob.’

  Mademoiselle Dupont, without saying so, very much hoped he would thank her by kissing her and in fact he did. The kiss was of a kind she had never experienced before and presently knew that she probably never would do again. Under the long extremely well-directed pressure she several times thought the new corset would give way.

  When it was all over she stood looking up at him with unsteady luminous eyes, holding his face in her hands.

  Tomorrow you will be back in England,’ she said. Tell me about your house in England. Your château.’

  Oh! it was perfick, Pop said. A paradise. You wouldn’t find anything more perfick in the world nowhere, he told her, and then in that glowing hyper-sensory way of his warmed up to the business of describing how the junk-yard was in spring, with cuckoos calling, nightingales going glorious hell for leather night and day in the bluebell wood, water lilies gold and white in the stream, fields glowing with strawberries, meadows rich with buttercups and grasses, and all the rest of the marvellous, mad, midsummer lark in England.

  For some time she listened to all this as she might have listened to some sort of celestial revelation and then decided to ask a question. It was perhaps a rather indelicate question, but she knew that if she didn’t ask it now she never would.

  ‘And will you perhaps marry one day?’

  Pop patted her playfully on the roundest part of the corset with an especially warm affectionate hand, and laughed loudly. Mademoiselle Dupont had never known hands so warm.

  ‘Shall if somebody asks me.’

  ‘Someone will,’ she told him with transfixed, shining eyes. ‘I’m sure that someone will.’

  Better give her the other half, Pop thought, and set the seal on the evening, the gift and her complete and luminous joy by repeating the kiss at even greater length, under even greater pressure.

  ‘I have decided to reconstruct the hotel,’ she said. ‘To have an ascenseur and water hot and cold in all the bedrooms. It was you who gave me such ideas.’

  That was the spirit, Pop said. Très snob. Pull ‘em down. Start afresh. He wouldn’t mind putting a bit of money into it himself if it could be wangled.

  ‘We could be partners?’ she said.

  ‘Could be,’ Pop said. ‘Could be.’

  ‘It is always you,’ she said, ‘who has such wonderful ideas. Before you came to stay here I had no courage for such changes –’

  ‘Courage my foot,’ Pop said and gave the corset a final, semi-stroking amorous pat in the roundest part. ‘Natural. If you want an apple off the tree go and get the damn thing.’

  Still pondering on this remark as if it were some mysterious, mystical text for living, Mademoiselle Dupont went back with Pop to the salle à manger, where everyone except Angela Snow and M. Mollet was still dancing.

  In an astonished spasm of jealousy Angela Snow watched her come into the room, holding Pop in a kind of aerial embrace of wonder. For a few electrified seconds she experienced an amazing impulse to rush over and smack Mademoiselle Dupont’s face as hard as she could.

  While she was still trying to resist it something surprising occurred. She suddenly found herself being asked to dance by M. Mollet.

  M. Mollet had wanted to ask her to dance all evening but had lacked the courage. Now, shy and flushed, pince-nez sparkling, he began dancing with her in a way she hadn’t experienced before. He held her consistently at arm’s length, as if afraid of letting the front of his body touch the long sheath-like curves of hers. He was several inches shorter than she was, which meant that he was constantly forced to gaze up at her. In this way she found herself concentrating on his eyes. Behind the glasses the pupils were a peculiar mid-shade of brown, like partly roasted coffee beans. They were sad, mute, appealingly funny little eyes and suddenly she liked them.

  After a speechless five minutes she suddenly felt a dreamy and extraordinary impulse to kiss M. Mollet bang in the centre of the forehead. Fortunately the music stopped a moment later, waking her.

  ‘And a damn good thing too,’ she thought. ‘If you’d have kissed him the poor dear would have dropped down dead. Don’t be so lethal.’

  In a second all her flippancy was back. The jealous creature who had wanted to slap Mademoiselle Dupont’s face had disappeared.

  Meanwhile, on the far side of the room, in the electric light, the delicate little prisms of Ma’s diamanté comb flashed with many colours as Pop paused to joke with her.

  ‘It’s time you had another dance with Angela,’ she told him. ‘Fair’s fair.’

  It was nearly four o’clock, Pop reminded her. He wanted to sit down with a quiet glass of champagne somewhere. Even he was getting tired.

  ‘Do as I say,’ Ma said. ‘Have one more dance with her and then get into bed.’

  Pop threw back his head and laughed uproariously.

  ‘Ma,’ he said, ‘I think you’d better say that sentence in some
other way, hadn’t you?’

  Ma shrieked, digging him joyfully in the ribs, realizing what she had said.

  A moment later Pop found himself dancing with the same languid, casual, flippant vision who had long since endeared herself to him as a sporting, kindred spirit.

  She, as if unable to recover from M. Mollet’s technique of dancing at arm’s length, let Pop hold her in that way too, looking straight into his happy, perky eyes and giving him a sporting wink or two.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well?’ Pop said.

  ‘Whale of a party.’

  Pop said he thought so too and she said:

  ‘One thing missing, though,’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘That proposal,’

  ‘From me?’

  ‘From you,’ she said. ‘Very nearly too late now. I’ve practically given myself to M. Mollet.’

  ‘Have a heart,’ Pop said. ‘For crying out gently.’

  ‘Love him. Adore him,’ she said. ‘He’s sweet. Surprised?’

  Pop admitted he was very surprised but remarked that there was no accounting for tastes.

  ‘But I do, dear boy,’ she said. ‘He’s so small. And moley. And brown and all that. One wants to hug the wretched man. Don’t you fathom?’

  Pop said he didn’t fathom and told her, much to her surprise, that he thought it was a clear case of psychology. It was something she’d missed somewhere at some time or never had. See?

  For answer she drew him nearer and laid her lovely head on his shoulder.

  ‘This I wouldn’t have missed for all the world,’ she said, ‘for all the world, my sweet. For all the world I wouldn’t have missed it. It’s been absolutely perfick. But then with you it always would be.’

  Impulsively she kissed him as she had wanted to kiss M. Mollet, in the centre of the forehead, and an astonished Pop almost recoiled from a display of a technique with which he had been totally unacquainted before.