by H. E. Bates
Harris, with his back to the room, could not see the comings and goings of French families. They were reflected for him in the flashing glasses, the brief arrested pauses of neat lean jaws, the way the silver lobster pincers were held, delicately or with surprise or with a certain stern reproval and expectancy, over a pile of pink-brown shell and whisker.
‘I believe they are going to put that family—no, they are not. Thank Heaven.’
‘Which family?’
‘Blanche. The big fat man in the blue-striped shirt and the white cap that he always forgets to take off in the dining-room.’
After the langoustine that day there were small filets de Sole Dieppoise and after that navarin d’agneau with tender olive peas. The sun was a blinding silver on the bay. Big blue sardine boats, with blood-bronze sails, came round the distant point of pine and rock with deceptive grace, running quickly out of sight into port. Across the bay an almost complete circle of sand, dead white, lay below blue-black pine woods like a crust of salt left by tide and baked to a dazzling fierceness by wind and sun.
By the time he reached the navarin Harris was quite sleepy. It was the same, he discovered, every day. Lunch began at twelve o’clock and every day he was determined to walk, afterwards, along the little coast road under the pines to find out for himself what lay on and about that dazzling curve of sand across the bay. Every day lunch with Jean-Pierre and Madame Dupont went on, with much laughter and sucking of grapes and coffee, until two o’clock, and after it he went to sleep in the sun.
At one-thirty Madame Dupont said, ‘It is very queer the table is not occupied. I find it very queer.’
‘Monsieur Harris is going to sleep,’ the boy said. ‘His eyes are shutting!’
‘Oh! no, no, no. Wide awake. Thinking.’
‘Too much langoustines!’
‘They have put special flowers on the table,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘Roses and things. Nice ones.’
‘Monsieur Harris is asleep! He’s not listening.’
‘I find it very queer,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘Special flowers and nobody coming.’
‘The flowers are always for Americans,’ Harris said. ‘They will have ice-water and plain salad and make a fuss.’
‘Fuss, fuss?’ the boy said. ‘What’s that? What’s fuss?’
‘It’s what you are,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘Fuss fuss!’
‘Fuss fuss!’ he said.
Madame Dupont, not speaking, began to wash a branch of blue-black grapes in her finger bowl, holding it just under her mouth, letting it swing there. Slowly, almost dreamily, she took off the wet grapes with her slender fingers, one by one, pressing them into her mouth, stones and skin and all, with neat and elegant squirts.
‘You must not look,’ she said, ‘but the new people are just coming now.’
Harris idly began to wash a bunch of grapes too. In the water the dark skins gathered crusts of little pearls. The grapes were always sweet and delicious, he found, but sometimes in the early pears and peaches there were to be found, to the boy’s amusement, trundling fat maggots, pear-cream or peach-rose according to the flesh from which they unrolled, and Madame Dupont, in horror, covered her twinkling glasses with her hands.
Today, in the boy’s slim green pear, there were no maggots, and Madame Dupont’s eyes were alert and free.
‘I thought it looked for a moment like Monsieur Bazin from St. Germain and his wife,’ she said. ‘He is a man of the same build.’
‘Not Americans?’
‘Oh! no, no. French. An elderly man and a girl.’
‘Nice?’ he said. ‘The girl.’
A grape lay for a second in the centre of Madame Dupont’s lips, delicately poised.
‘A beauty.’
As the grape slid into Madame Dupont’s mouth, to be sucked and champed and swallowed swiftly away, she said:
‘Can I describe her for you?’ and went on, not waiting for an answer: ‘Very dark. No colour. Big brown eyes. And quite a big girl—big and round, with nice arms and hands.’ She broke off another grape. ‘About twenty-two.’
‘And him?’
‘She’s wearing a white sun dress with a red coat that slips off. She’s putting a flower into his buttonhole.’
‘What is he like?’
‘A real French papa. He’s a little short-sighted I think. He seems to find it hard to read the menu.’
‘Perhaps he is long-sighted instead,’ Harris said and Madame Dupont, looking hastily down under her glasses, washing grape-stained hands in the finger bowl, seemed for the first time a little confused.
‘I have a feeling I have seen him somewhere before,’ she said. ‘Jean-Pierre, you must wash your hands. Quickly. Wash them. We must go.’
‘Fuss fuss!’ he said.
‘Thanks to you he is learning English too quickly,’ she said. ‘Are you coming too?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am going to walk across the bay.’
‘On your stomach? or swimming?’ she said and once again the three of them, the boy with imp-bright eyes, Madame Dupont no longer severe or confused, laughed gaily together.
‘He’s asleep!’ the boy said. ‘His eyes are shut! He’s asleep already.’
‘Quiet!’ she said. ‘Walk nicely from the dining-room.’
‘Tell me about the war,’ the boy said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing to tell. I must walk across the bay.’
All afternoon he slept, as usual, in the sun.
When he woke, about five o’clock, the wind had turned a little northward, breaking straight through the small gap from the open sea. It stirred even the sheltered bay into a surface of jagged glass, a dark and wonderful indigo, with flouncing edges of salt-white foam. The air was so much cooler that he woke with a sudden start, the wind quite cold across his shoulders, where his wound scar, almost invisible now on dark sea-browned flesh, felt tight and dead.
He dressed and began to walk, as he had always promised himself, up the road that went along the bay. For about half a mile there were little hotels, each with its own small red-tented plage, a few villas with shutters pulled down on geranium-filled verandahs against the sun, and then four or five pensions, shuttered too and noiseless behind walls of sea-bent cypresses. Between them a few boats lay beached, half-buried in thick white sand; and then the shore, at last, was clear, all pine and slate-blue rock and dune-grass, with the road winding thinner and thinner up the bay.
Here and there a cove of rock, a miniature bay, pushed the road further inland, so that the sea was suddenly not visible over humps of bracken and pine. He began to see that the fine long curve of road was a deception. It would take hours, half a day, perhaps more, to walk the long circle to the point. Sand blew in sharp tedious whirls under the pines and a sound of shaken boughs, somewhere between a moan and a whine, not summery at all, was almost ugly in the cooling afternoon.
He was glad to be on clear treeless road again, where he could feel sun. And then, abruptly, on a rise of rock, the road ended altogether. It shot upwards over the little rise, ending in barricades of wire and petrol cans and old sea-worn notices that had once spelled ‘Danger: Pont coupé’ in brighter red.
Beyond, a narrow estuary, tidal, filling now with the scum of incoming sea, cut him off from the higher coast, and he stood looking down at what remained of the bridge, two lines of old black tooth-stumps, crusted by weed and mussels in the sand. The estuary gave on to a little bay, sheltered from the west by a point of rock, with scattered pools: and then beyond again the repeated dazzling dunes of sand.
He sat down, lazy in the strong sea-air, glad to be cheated of the walk along the coast. He had not come to France for walking; he was happy to absorb sea and sun and sand, eat a thousand langoustes, a thousand langoustines, and sleep, with no one to worry him, every day. He had been shot down over Lorient a day or two before invasion began. He had been wounded in the left shoulder; and now it produced a curious deflective sort of action in his arm, so that he travelled crab-wise
when swimming. Partisans had taken care of him for a week or two, grim, high-spirited and very kind, and his first thought, after the war, had been to come back to them. He had wandered, later, all through the coast country about here, trying to find his unit in a countryside littered with abrupt, tired, severe notices saying ‘No: we do not know where your unit is.’ All of it now seemed a million years away.
He would not have known the girl coming up the road, five minutes later, if it had not been for Madame Dupont’s description of her: a white sun-dress with a red coat that could be slipped off. She had taken off the coat and was carrying it in her hand.
She too stood looking down at the little estuary, the bay, and the remains of the bridge; the wind filling and beating the skirt of her dress, so that she held it down with her free hand.
‘The bridge is cut,’ he said. He spoke in French and for a moment she did not reply.
Then she said, with a curious repetitive flatness that he could not explain as either ironical or bored:
‘Yes: the bridge is cut.’
She stared across the bay, lips full, thrust outward, almost pouting. It was true, as Madame Dupont said, that she was a big girl, big and round, with sallow skin and fine full arms; but her eyes, like her voice, were flat and unresponsive. Sea-light seemed to have pulled over the deep brown pupils a thin opaque blind.
He stood for a second or two not knowing what to say and then he remarked that, below, the little bay was very beautiful.
Yes, it was very beautiful, she said: flatly again, as if, perhaps, it were a stretch of corrugated iron.
There was probably a road round the estuary, he said, if she thought of walking on; and she said:
Yes, there was probably a road round the estuary: as if neither she nor anyone could possibly care.
Quite suddenly she turned and began to walk back down the road to the hotel. He watched her for some minutes and then began to walk back too. Half-way there the wind blew cool again, whining and moaning under the pines, and the girl put on the little scarlet coat as she walked along.
That evening the patron came to the table, as he always did, and said, ‘Tonight, sir, Mister Harris m’sieu, we have on the menu to eat a nice potage, a broth, and then some local fish cooked en fenouille, and afterwards a piece of meat, bifteck, cooked in butter. It is all right? You find it?’
He would find it excellent, Harris answered, and at the bifteck Madame Dupont said:
‘The girl is all alone. She is wearing quite a nice dress, dark blue and white. It goes well with that dark hair of hers.’
‘You have butter on your chin, Monsieur Harris,’ Jean-Pierre said, and Harris licked the running butter away with his tongue.
‘Their name is Michel. I found it from Madame. He is something in automobiles in Paris. Quite well off, I think, too.’
‘Are they married?’
‘They are father and daughter.’
‘Then why do you suppose the father isn’t there?’
‘Because he has gone to Paris,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘He is like so many other gentlemen. He has affaires in Paris and he will come here, no doubt, for the wickend.’
‘Have you seen him before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘I am not sure. Somehow there is a little feeling I have seen him somewhere.’
In the evenings there was nothing to do but sit on the terrace and, in the darkness, almost always warm but hardly ever without a stir of wind, watch the awakening of lights across the bay. The long sea-strong days made him very sleepy and by ten o’clock, most evenings, he was too tired to keep awake and fell asleep at once, on the top floor, in his small attic bed. In the hotel salon games of bridge between staid French pairs, at tables of green baize, went on until midnight; and in the bar below plaintive French songs, on records, with dancing, beat into the wave-lapped night air for an hour or two longer.
That night he did not fall asleep. With sunset the bristling wind across the bay had died. In the still air the gramophone from below thumped like the heavy throbbing of a sardine boat setting out to open sea.
It seemed as if, for an hour, the same tune was played over and over again. He got up and looked at his watch. He shook it several times to make sure that half past nine, and not, as he thought, half past ten, was the time it showed. Across the bay, at the headland, a navigation light flashed green and red, and below, on the terrace, there was still a noise of spoons in coffee saucers.
It suddenly came to him that, in a moment of sleepiness, he had made a mistake of an hour in the time. He dressed and went downstairs. There was much knitting by French mesdames in the lounge, and outside, under arbours of plane-leaves, a few people were still drinking, served by a waiter who in moments of idleness stared out at a dreamy milk-calm sea. In the bar a few others were dancing, the windows open for air, the gramophone filling the room with the beat of the same hot sweet tune he had heard upstairs.
In the bar he found the girl: but not dancing.
She was sitting alone on a high stool at the bar, playing with a few dark-golden grains of sugar in a coffee spoon.
‘Would you dance?’ he said.
She held up her arms, not speaking, without a smile. The sleeves of her dress, dark blue, were long, ending in cuffs that clipped together with small white shells. The stuff of the dress was some light crêpe-like material through which, as they danced, he could feel her skin, smooth and blood-warm and unencumbered. She danced mechanically, smoothly, staring over his shoulder: either as if she were deep in thought or not thinking at all. He asked her once if she knew the name of the French tune that now, as before, the gramophone kept playing over and over again, but she shrugged her shoulders, whether because she did not understand or because she did not know he never discovered.
After the third or fourth dance he experienced a curious feeling. A latent boredom, a kind of soft fungus of drowsiness rising from the same dance, the same tune, the same mechanical rhythm of her body—as if she had done all this and done it as silently, as beautifully and as efficiently with a hundred men like him before—began to creep up through his mind. He felt it over-hot in the little bar. He began to dislike the haunting repetitive little tune. A smell of sea-air, fresh and salt, came in lightly through the open window, and suddenly he felt he wanted to be outside, watching the bay and its lights, walking by the sea.
‘Shall we walk?’ he said.
Her response to the idea of walking was exactly as it had been to the idea of dancing. Not speaking, again without a smile, she walked in her anonymous way into the darkness ahead of him. He followed her and, side by side, they began to walk along the little curving esplanade. For a time street lights at regular intervals lit up bright purple and scarlet beds of verbena and geraniums, rows of striped bathing huts, blue and brown boats upturned on white sand.
And then, soon, the last of the light had gone. The dark sea, a white fringe of miniature summer waves, a few dark rocks in white sand: it was all wonderfully quiet after the bright noises of the bar.
Half a mile farther on they stopped by the sea-wall and looked out to where, over the bay, it was possible now to see the lights of the lower port, the green and scarlet flashes of navigation points, the trail of a sardine fleet making for open water. He watched for a few moments and then, casually, he turned to kiss her. He thought for a moment he had made a hasty and blundering attempt at it because, as he came close to her, she turned her face away. And then suddenly he knew that she was simply offering her cheek, lightly and formally, in the conventional French way.
‘Not that way,’ he said and began to turn her towards him, kissing her full on the mouth. He felt a great start of quickened response flare up through her body that, from her breast downward, seemed to have nothing covering it but the flimsy crêpe-like stuff of the dress.
Like one of the navigation lights pricking the darkness, the start of her body flared up and went out again. She seemed to kill it and then hold herself away.
> He stood for some moments tracing with one finger, slightly puzzled, the line of her long arm and the bare curve of one shoulder. She had taken up a half-crouching attitude, leaning forward on the wall, looking at the sea.
‘How long do you stay here?’ he said.
‘Until the hot weather is finished. It is very hot in Paris now.’
‘Do you live in Paris?’
‘I live in Paris.’
‘Do you like it here?’ he said. ‘Do you swim?’
‘Yes: I swim,’ she said.
There was something increasingly curious, he thought, about that repeated formality, the flashing start of feeling, the sudden ending of it, the holding away. He felt that behind it, behind all the soft correctness of tone, a disturbed moment of high feeling, of anguish in heat or even anger, might suddenly flare out if he touched her again.
‘Perhaps you would like to swim to-morrow?’ he said. ‘With me.’
‘I would like it. Thank you.’
‘What time? At half past ten? Before lunch?’ he said.
‘Before lunch: yes.’
He began to explain to her about the sand in front of the hotel. The wash of tide covered it with unpleasant contours of sea-weed and a species of ugly splintered grey shell. By noon crowds of feet had turned it into a mess. It was better to bathe some distance up the shore and now he suddenly remembered the smaller bay, at the estuary, where the bridge was broken, that he had seen that afternoon.
‘Would you come there?’ he said. ‘It’s better.’
‘Yes: I will come there,’ she said.
For more than half the way back to the hotel she had nothing else to say. He did not kiss her again. At a turn in the esplanade a brief curl of wind, like some afterthought from the breezy afternoon, caught her long hair and blew it, intensely black and beautiful, across her face. She stopped to pin it back; and standing there, in the half-light of the first esplanade lamp forty yards away, she addressed him for the first time with a question of her own.
‘How long do you stay here?’
He laughed.
