“Ah, yes, Jacques,” he said.
“I’d like to tell you about him,” I said. “And about my father—he was a journalist, like you….”
“Not yet, not now,” he said, and stopped my lips with a kiss.
Later, he insisted on bringing up the subject of Joséphine again. He told me all he knew of her. That she’d never been to school, had stayed at home to help in the house but that wasn’t too unusual in country districts at that era. She was hardly small enough to be classed as a midget but neither her mind nor her body had developed to “normal” size.
“But she’s been a useful member of her community,” he insisted and I wondered why he felt it so necessary to defend her case so vehemently. Especially to me. I’d shown little interest either way. I was not hostile, but I did not feel the urge to get to know these people any better. All I wanted was to be with Robert as much as possible without neglecting Tony too much.
“They say, you know,” he went on, watching me carefully, “that Mongol children and other handicapped infants can be of great value to their families—they bring out all the best qualities in others when they’re loved. Are you religious?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “I used to think I was, but it all got lost somehow. I felt bitter when my father died. I stopped going to Services then. I still go and look at interesting churches and not just for the architecture. I like the hushed atmosphere; I like watching those lucky people with unshakeable faith getting comfort from the rituals. Jacques was an atheist,” I mused. “Mabiche is a convert to the C of E because of her Fred. Beryl’s tried everything. She was very taken by Russian Orthodox at one point, but I think it was more because of the costumes than the creed. And I’ve a friend at Cambridge who’s a staunch Catholic.”
I thought of Kathryn’s grief at the funeral and wished that Robert had not brought up the subject.
“I’ll take you to some churches while we’re here,” he said, and I revelled in the cosy way he had assumed our future togetherness.
He jumped up and mixed two more Kirs.
“But we’ll go to the beach, too,” he promised. “And on a boat trip across the Morbihan Gulf—and to a country town street market—and to Quimper….”
I reminded him that we were only here for a week, Tony and I.
“But surely you can please yourself,” he said. “You’re not hard up and you’re your own boss.”
“True,” I admitted. “And I still can’t think what I’m doing here in a “family” gíte—someone must have put the idea into my head—I’m too susceptible…. Seriously though—Tony has other projects….”
I waited for him to beg me to prolong my visit—to throw in my lot with him.
“Well, we’ll see,” was all he said.
He insisted on leaving then so as not to run into Tony before I’d had a chance to talk to him. He was right I must explain how matters stood. Except that I wasn’t sure just how they did stand. Robert seemed to have become suddenly cagy. Had I been too eager? I was supposed to have planned this holiday for Tony’s sake but I’d admitted to myself even as we boarded the plane at Heathrow that I hoped to meet up with Robert Tardy. I cheered up when I recalled that Tony had given me the impression that he wished something ‘special” would come into my life. And after all, Robert had made the first advances in London.
As it happened I did not see Tony till he tapped on my door and offered me breakfast in bed.
“I didn’t wake you last night,” he said, dumping a tray of coffee, orange juice and croissants on my knees. “I wasn’t all that late, but you were sleeping so peacefully.”
I blushed as I wondered what he would make of the exercises that had guaranteed me such a deep sleep.
“How was your evening?” I asked. I was beginning to look forward to telling him about Robert—carefully, slowly, discreetly—not all about our liaison. But how good it would be to tell him that his wish for my fulfillment was on the brink of being realised.
“I found a hilarious place to eat,” he enthused. “You must come with me next time. It wasn’t in Vannes—a bit off the beaten track, actually. I’d been driving round, thinking—”
He paused, and I put down my bowl of coffee.
“How could I have let you down! I didn’t mean you to go off and brood!” I cried.
“No…no,” he assured me. “It’s a way I have of sharing new scenes, new experiences—with David. To let myself think of him from time to time is necessary, Gaby—I told you.”
“Go on,” I said. “Tell me where you ended up.”
“In an excellent restaurant—well-known, it seems, for its seafood—and run by a couple of poufs.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The most unlikely pair!” he went on. “The proprietor had just come back from fishing off the quay at Locmariaquer. I really go for the names round here, don’t you? He still had his sea boots on. Plus lipstick and eye make-up!”
“No!” I said.
“Ur—hm! The waiter—there’s only one, it’s a small place but it was packed out—minced across the room—and he seemed to be part of the attraction of the place. The customers all seemed amused but not surprised. They were discreet enough in the way they laughed at him. Except…”
He broke off and began to spread jam on a warmed up crusty roll.
“Go on…” I urged.
“Well, there was a group of English people. The man was insufferably rude. He made sure his remarks were understood, even by the French.”
“Oh, how ghastly!” I sympathised. “Did you hide behind a potted palm and stick to French?”
“It was too late,” he sighed, looking down at his plate.
“Why?”
“I’d—spoken to a girl in the British party.”
A dreamy look had come into his eyes. He was speaking now more to himself than to me. “The most lovely creature I’ve ever seen—made me swell with pride to be English even after that brash, loud, colonel-type had lambasted everything in sight. Blonde hair—silky and smooth—lovely features, perfect skin. Her eyes….”
He was staring into space but now he was frowning slightly.
“Gaby,” he said, suddenly looking straight at me again. “The loud chap’s wife introduced herself and him as Sybil and Hugh Carter—and the girl as—Lilian Tardy.”
Chapter 18
“My sister,” said Robert, and I could see why Tony had been so struck with the girl. She had been feeding the geese that patrolled the grounds, better than watch-dogs of the canine variety. Whenever I’d approached them they had arched their necks viciously and responded aggressively. For Lilian there had been hardly a cackle and now they followed her in a stately procession as she came towards us, smiling. She walked with a natural grace that would have been the envy of the models I had known in Paris. Her perfect teeth gleamed in a smooth, peachy complexion, set off wonderfully by wavy ash-blonde hair. As she shook my hand, I looked for flaws, but could see only something a little odd about her eyes. Not wanting to stare too obviously, I could not exactly analyse what it was—it could have been the hint of a cast. She pulled down her sunglasses from the top of her head and covered her eyes. Had she noticed me peering at her so critically, I wondered.
Robert had come knocking at our door before I’d had time to fret about his connection with the girl who’d made such an impression on Tony. I had slipped on a tee shirt and jeans, wondering as I often did what Jacques would have made of the impact of le bluejean on French fashion. I was inclined to believe that he would have held out against it.
“There’s someone here I’d like you to meet,” Robert had said and I had examined his face to see if he were showing signs of inventing some tale about an old friend of the family. I was ashamed of myself when he told us just who she was. How could I have suspected him of having skeletons in his closet? He was such an honest, open person.
Tony had been delighted that Fate had brought this vision of beauty right to his door, and very
obviously relieved to discover that Major (he’d got the type right but misjudged the rank) had delivered Lilian into her brother’s care and then gone on to their time-shared chalet at Tignes.
“They live near us in St Ives,” said Robert. “Near our family home.” He had told me of his scruffy basement in Southall, describing hilariously details such as the stain on his ceiling due to some unsavoury accident in the dentist’s surgery overhead and the stain in his bath that didn’t bear thinking about. I had already planned in my mind to get Mabiche over there with a basket of cleaning products and Jane—to “thack into” the scrubbing it patently needed: they would be in their element.
“I was going to tell you about St Ives,” he apologised.
“I know St Ives,” I said. “I did a tour of Cornwall with Father….”
“No, no, I mean the St Ives near Cambridge,” he interrupted. “I was going to tell you about our house there.”
I understood now that he was apologising not so much for omitting to tell me about his other home as for not mentioning his sister before she arrived so abruptly amongst us. I wondered if the phone call I’d seen him making after our first misunderstanding had anything to do with her arrival. I began calculating the time element and then felt ashamed of again trying to catch him out.
“She’s lovely,” I whispered to him, unable to bear the look of strain on his candid face. “I know we shall be friends.” I watched happily as Tony demonstrated the gadgets in the car and Lilian listened raptly. Or was she just pretending to listen out of politeness? Was that a look of remoteness: I watched and noticed that though she nodded and glanced at everything Tony showed her, she constantly sought out her brother as though she needed to be reassured of his presence. Perhaps, like me, she suffered from shyness—yet she’d seemed confident enough when she’d been introduced.
Tony banged down the bonnet. He beamed at us.
“How about a picnic on the nearest beach?” he suggested. “It’s too hot to do anything but sunbathe and swim.”
We found a little beach at Larmor-Baden which was already crowded when we arrived at eleven. Lilian was a good swimmer: I was not. Robert offered to teach me, but I couldn’t face the humiliation of demonstrating my awkwardness and fear of the water amongst all the young children striking out expertly. I didn’t mind cooling my ankles in the shallows, thankful that my well-cut one-piece swimsuit in a lovely apricot shade, that had always been the theme of Jacques’ collections, made the most of my willowy figure. Tony and Lilian were in the water most of the time and it filled me with joy to see him so relaxed. Robert declared that he was after all happier lying in the shade of the low wall where we had installed ourselves. He confessed to being a “hothouse flower.”
“I detest being cold,” he laughed. “I can’t live anywhere with poor central heating.”
He looked slyly at me and I wondered if this was to be a preliminary to attacking the subject of our future. Instead he set out to keep me amused by making up stories about the other people on the beach. he managed to make me forget that I’d been hoping for a more personal discussion—his imagination was so lively, his observation so accurate.
“Look at their beach bags,” he said, gesturing at our immediate neighbours. “There you get your first clue to their personalities….”
As he turned his inventiveness on each group, the germ of a story was sewn in my mind and I knew unashamedly that I would “transfuse” his ideas later into my notebook. In bed, tonight, perhaps—unless I were lucky enough to arrange matters so that I was otherwise engaged.
Beach Bags
by Gabrielle Parker
Monsieur LeBréus took his petit déjeuner on the terrace, overlooking the Golfe de Morbihan. He thanked his housekeeper in a stiffly formal way for the croissants and coffee and announced that he would be driving back to Paris that morning. She expressed regret that he must once again cut short his holiday. He muttered something about pressing business matters and she withdrew. He stared across the small garden, ablaze with geraniums and Arum lilies and bordered by a strip of private beach. The water looked coolly inviting on this August day, already promising to be a scorcher. He felt a momentary pang of regret at having to quit, after a brief weekend, his attractively-situated maison de campagne for his apartment at La Défense, with its claustrophobic view of neighbouring tower blocks. Looking at the place laid for his son he felt guilty, too, at having spent so little time with Thibaut in this past year. After all, he had invested in this property in the vague hope of trying to make up to the boy for recent family upsets.
Monsieur LeBréus shied away from other definitions: he would not allow himself to brood on what had happened. He had been as hurt as anyone and he had more to lose if he let himself go under. Thibaut had youth and health on his side. There was plenty to occupy a young man right here. He could swim and idle about at the bottom of his own garden or he could explore this richly-endowed part of Brittany in his Renault 5 Turbo, a gift for his eighteenth birthday last summer. His physical needs would be well looked after by Madame Derrien who did not live in but came daily to tend house and garden. It had been made clear that Thibaut could invite anyone he liked and Monsieur LeBréus had visualised a crowd of boisterous young men filling up the rooms: he felt a trifle uneasy that no-one had materialised and that Thibaut had brought no young friends to the city apartment. But now he looked at his watch with some impatience and glanced at the shuttered windows of his son’s room. Shrugging, he gathered up briefcase and weekend bag and tossed them into the back seat of the Mercedes.
Thibaut watched from the bathroom window as the large black car swung out of the gate into the narrow, dusty lane and wound its way between the fields of ripening corn. He made his way to the terrace where Madame Derrien was already clearing away his father’s bowl and plate. She offered him fresh coffee and he asked for a packed lunch. His manners were as cool and impeccable as his father’s. He did not smile. While the housekeeper carried out his orders, he hoisted his Planche à Voile onto the roof of the neat little car and in a very short while, the Renault was brushing past the green-sheathed cobs lining the lane to Plougoumelon.
Thibaut hurtled through the sleepy little village, hardly slowing down to circle the War Memorial in the centre of the inevitable Market Square. He headed south, recalling the raised eyebrows of the housekeeper who obviously thought it odd to drive off with his new expensive toy when he need only have carried it the few metres to his own strip of sand. His handsome face wore a sulky expression—he looked the spoiled rich boy Corinne had labelled him. But his eyes were haunted by a deeper emotion: the loss of Corinne was just part of a long series of what he had come to consider his own hopeless failures.
It had begun with his adolescent and illogical sense of guilt when his mother, a poetess of some renown, had run off with a fellow-writer. He had longed to alleviate his father’s grief but the strictly-formal, old-fashioned business man had remained unreachable in his self-built shell. The boy had failed to communicate his own need for companionship: an unstinted flow of expensive gifts was no substitute for the closeness he craved from his remaining parent. Maddened by the old man’s continued urgings to find himself some young companions, Thibaut had thrown himself into a relationship with a girl he knew in his heart to be hardly better than a street-walker.
He had planned to invite her here, to jolt his father into some kind of reaction—she had entered into the spirit of the game, half-hoping to captivate older as well as younger man. But a more immediate offer had turned up and she spared Thibaut nothing in describing the superiority of her new lover. The prospect of a month on the Côte d’Azur in the hands of an accomplished love-maker was much more alluring, she assured him, than the thought of having to endure the clumsy fumblings of an inexperienced youth. He had had little success, too, in his studies: his teachers’ reports, discouraging further studies in his chosen field, had yet to be shown to his father. And now, his poems, tortuous records of his bruised soul, had
been rejected, insultingly coldly, by a publisher friend of his mother’s. Thibaut had set his hopes on being able to present her with his slim volume, fait accompli, on his long put-off but now imminent visit to her and her new partner in Rome.
He brushed his hand across his eyes, and as his vision cleared, he noticed the signpost for Vannes. He turned off abruptly onto a B road, then took the first turn that seemed to head back to the northeast shore of the gulf. He shot past cyclists with rolled towels on their backs, children dragging spades and buckets—and eventually arrived at a small bay already crowded with sunbathers, their beach-umbrellas and baggage strewn around them, staking the claim of each group to their few metres of sand. There was a car park but it was more than full, late-comers having dumped their vehicles, French fashion, on all the odd corners and triangles, verges and courtesy exits. Thibaut backed his small car up the lane and through a gap in the hedge he had noticed on the way down. He had also noticed a small Gendarmerie post so he made sure the Renault was well hidden from the road before he unstrapped his board and strolled down to the slipway. He flung down his red holdall, discreetly stencilled Cardin, just below the concrete, kicked off his beach shoes and gave his full attention to the launching. Unaware of the interest his effortless skill and balance on the narrow board were causing amongst the somewhat overheated occupants of the little cove, he wet the sail, re-mounted, counter-weighted, raised the orange canvas and, after the minimum of tentative zig-zagging, advanced sea-wards before the captured breeze….
Jean-François, riffling through his scuffed plastic shoulder bag for a much-needed cigarette, looked with envy at the smart red leather holdall that had landed at his feet. He had spent much of the morning gathering together carelessly-flung carrier bags, satchels, shoes, tee shirts and copies of Podium belonging to his charges from the Colonie de Vacances. Too bad if this little pile of luxurious belongings got mixed in—he couldn’t be responsible for everybody in the world. It was already enough to be the surveillant of twenty mixed youngsters, ranging from an ash-blond Norman with a punk cocks-comb to a lithe blue-black negress with her hundred minute plaits. The harassed moniteur watched as they hurled themselves noisily in and out of the water or lay, alarmingly-close in pairs under rocks or leaned indolently against beached boats, smoking. He wondered what on earth had induced him to take on this holiday job—apart from the money, of course! But if only he had economised last term at the Sorbonne—then he could have enjoyed a languorous summer—maybe even have hired a planche like that lucky devil swooping out into the gulf. Judging by the quality of his possessions and his careless attitude, money was no object…it was such a temptation having that leather bag so close. Sighing, he conquered his moment of weakness and took a little comfort from staring at the topless sun worshippers on his left….
With Men For Pieces [A Fab Fifties Fling In Paris] Page 8
