Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  Turbot aux herbes

  Sorbet aux fraises des bois

  Escalope de foie de canard au Calvados

  Le château de la Belle au bois dormant

  The wines were:

  Chassagne-Montrachet (I forget the year)

  Lynch-Bages 1947

  and I think the champagne was Krug.

  But it was Sleeping Beauty’s castle I dreamed about, for years afterwards, with its spindly turrets of silver and gold sugar, its gooey battlements and the creamy succulence of its inner courtyard of ice-cream soused in some divine liqueur – Grand Marnier, Jane said. No, Kirsch, Mrs Wilmot said, bet you ten dollars it’s Kirsch, and the two brindled copper heads, which might have been made of the same spun sugar as the castle, appealed to the waiter who smiled and didn’t know.

  At the end of the table sat Helen next to Jean-Claude Robinson, the number three jockey in France according to Dodo, the one who should have been riding Cornichon if he hadn’t been displaced by Hippo Rossi.

  ‘What happened, Jean-Claude?’

  ‘They want ‘Ippo to ride, ‘e ride, ‘e lose. Tant pis.’

  And he shrugged his shoulders with a smile which said I’m not telling you the half of it.

  ‘Why Robinson?’

  ‘My grandfather emigrated from Newmarket. There are plenty of us ’ere, Smith, Jones, Robinson, all French now.’

  He ate scarcely at all: a couple of crayfish tails, a mouthful of fish, and then sipped a glass of champagne.

  Together at the end of the table, he and Helen looked like a miniature king and queen whose grosser courtiers we were. Helen ate hugely, taking great mouthfuls of French fries with her duck liver.

  Farid Farhadi talked all through dinner: how he had been helicopter skiing – you mean the helicopter skis? – ‘No, no, they drop you on some isolated mountain and you schuss down through virgin powder, such bliss. Gianni Agnelli took me, the avvocato you know, he only goes on the mountain with the chopper now. And then down to the bottom of the ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, you know it? Once you have dived there, it spoils you for anywhere else, I went to Jamaica last winter, I did not put my toe in the water, I was spoiled. You must know the Reef, Professor.’

  No, I did not know the Reef, or the Mountain, or the Quartier, or the Canal, or the Faubourg, or any other of the geographical features which had graduated to this singularity. But I didn’t mind, as another turret of Sleeping Beauty’s castle melted on my tongue, and the unexpected warmth behind the tingle of the champagne tiptoed down my throat. It was as in a dream that I watched the neat figure of Jean-Claude go up to the little stage to receive a tiny gold whip for being the top jockey at the meeting despite losing the ride in the Grand Prix.

  ‘It’s his third cravache, he’s such a darling,’ Jane said.

  As he came back to the table, he waved the whip in a shy little gesture of triumph and passed it to Helen who waved it too but more as though it was a sceptre, part of her regalia in this miniature gilded kingdom.

  ‘What do you think of Bowyer?’ Dodo asked me.

  ‘Who?’ I was still looking at Helen and the jockey.

  ‘George Bowyer, the Admiral.’

  ‘Never heard of him, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Never heard of him? The guy who lost a leg on the Glorious First and was awarded the Gold Medal when Collingwood wasn’t? And Collingwood never forgave him, but then Collingwood was a mean bastard, though he didn’t do too bad at Cape St Vincent. He was in the Hector then. But Bowyer was the better sailor, he’d have taken over from Nelson at Trafalgar, not Collingwood, if he hadn’t lost that goddamn leg. You interested in naval history?’

  ‘Not really, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘And you from a seafaring nation, that’s great.’ Dodo forgave me with a big slap on the back and threw back a huge glass of wine. Even his glass seemed to be bigger than mine.

  Then the little woman in the black dress which looked so worn came on. She had to pull the microphone down to bring it level with her head (or perhaps this was a bit of business to remind us how small and frail she was) before she could begin to sing her hits, sounding throatier, more resonant still, than when she had first sung them, as though all the drink in her life and the brutal lovers and the suicides attempted (and some succeeded) had combined to add more power to her voice, so that while the rest of her body shrivelled into a rusty old concierge the voice went on growing.

  ‘Quand tu me prends dans tes bras.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Jane shrieked, as though it was the most extraordinary thing in the world for her to choose this number. Whoop went Dodo Wilmot, and Farid clapped, for the first time looking a little bored.

  When her act was over and she had slipped away behind the curtain, I could not help thinking of the rest of her evening, the scrawny thug in the belted mac who was waiting to beat her up and demand money from the management, the bottle of scotch on the dressing-table amid the swabs of cotton wool smeared with make-up, and that image, too, part of the enchantment, even if her publicists had touched it up a bit, so that she seemed to be fleeing a tough reality into the gala’s golden light, backing on to the stage and reminding the lucky ones what they had all got away from, for the time being anyway.

  ‘Let’s go to the Boudin.’

  ‘Oh Dodo –’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll go to the Boudin.’

  Swept along in the umbrous comfort of the Wilmots’ limo, I scarcely noticed where we were heading except that even the limo’s springs could not conceal the fact that we were bumping over some roughish cobbles. Wilmot started talking about Nelson’s admirals again. He seemed to have a real grudge against Admiral Collingwood. I imagined that the Boudin would be as grand as the Casino, perhaps lined with pictures of elegant nineteenth-century ladies sitting on the beach turning their parasols. But when we got out, we were on the quayside of the shabby little port across the river from the Ville standing outside a dull café front which scarcely seemed to have any lights on, though the door opened to us instantly. Rain was falling, softly, and I could smell the pines above the port.

  Inside was a long narrow room with dirty brown walls hung with pictures and photographs of people making and eating black pudding, white pudding and other offal products. There were pictures of girls with garlands of black pudding round their necks and beaming chefs holding silver cups and wearing silver chains with their prizewinning boudin displayed in front of them. And here and there, as though to show fair play to the provider of all this, there were coloured engravings of pigs: pigs in sties, pigs rootling in the forest, pigs with bows and rosettes tied to them at agricultural shows, pigs of enormous size filling the entire picture frame. It was a sort of shrine.

  ‘Isn’t it great, the Boudin?’

  We sat on banquettes facing each other at opposite sides of the room. The gangway between the two lines of tables was narrow and made narrower by a giant black and pink porcelain pig snuffling in a lead trough which stood on a metal stand surrounded by brass vases of flowers, blotting out the Farhadis and the Wilmots, at least until Dodo’s huge babyface rose above the flowers like some pasty sun.

  ‘Hey you guys, lighten up over there, we’re having ourselves a party, not a wake.’

  Something came through the air and caught me a light stinging blow on the cheek. I picked it up. It was a bread roll. Soon a couple more followed and now the Farhadis rose into view above the hydrangeas and started throwing as well. At the end of our table Boy Kingsmill got up and with a seraphic smile on his face began throwing the bread rolls back. A nervous little waiter pushed a huge basket of rolls down the table and then ran for cover.

  ‘Hey, you a Member of Parliament?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Boy raising his arm to launch another brioche. ‘Leicester Central, Conservative.’

  ‘Great. You must be used to this kind of thing.’ Wilmot raised his balloon glass to his mouth while flinging a roll with his other arm. He had a graceful baseball arm, which sent the missiles skimmi
ng at head height. Mrs Farhadi threw with a jerk of her elbow which made it look as though she was hitching up her dress. I threw a roll back. At my side Helen sat pale and silent, not even bothering to dodge as the bread rolls mostly passed over her head.

  ‘Time for the heavy artillery.’

  Dodo drained his brandy glass and threw it high in the air down to the far end of the room where it smashed into a picture of pigs playing musical instruments. Another glass followed, and another, and the room was filled with the sound of broken glass and the pictures were taking heavy casualties.

  ‘Farfar, you just gave me an idea back there in the casino. The ladies need some flowers, flowers for the ladies.’ And Dodo started picking armfuls of flowers out of the vase and throwing them around with a great sweep of his arm.

  ‘We need some more glasses.’ He was up on the table, quite nimble for his size, and began waddling down the line of tables picking up glasses and throwing them as he went with Farhadi aping him a couple of yards behind.

  ‘Now jump, baby, jump,’ and they leapt across the narrow path down the middle of the room which turned out to be not narrow enough for Wilmot, so that he crashed to the ground with his head almost severed from his shoulders by the edge of the opposing table. Unmoved by this setback, he scooped up three or four glasses from the table and began throwing them back at the side he had come from.

  ‘Waldo please.’

  ‘Isn’t that great when she says Waldo please? I like a woman who pleads. You look dry my friend, I don’t like to see a dry politician.’ He took the brass vase, empty now, and raised it high above Boy’s head, then with a solicitous, almost baptismal motion poured it over the sleek tarmac of Boy’s hair. His victim stood unflinching with eyes closed and the seraph’s smile on his lips. Then with the same solicitous reverence, Boy himself took the next brass vase and poured it over Wilmot’s bristles. The two stood dripping face to face delighted with themselves and then bowed to one another and to the rest of us before Dodo rampaged on down the middle of the room chucking everything that was left at the walls, glasses, plates, knives, forks, before collapsing in a heap on the bench at the end.

  ‘I’m going home now,’ Helen said.

  She got up and picked her way through the broken glass round the giant pig which had lost one of its ears in the mêlée.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear, he does this every year,’ Mrs Wilmot said. ‘He always pays afterward, you know.’

  Helen said nothing and marched out of the door.

  ‘You better go with her, it’s not a very nice area.’

  As I came out into the drizzling night, the café owner was sobbing in the street, with his few strands of hair flopping down his cheek.

  ‘I can get home by myself, thank you,’ Helen said.

  ‘Mrs Wilmot said I should come.’

  ‘You don’t always have to do what other people say, you know. You didn’t have to throw those rolls. It encouraged them.’

  ‘I didn’t know they were going to go on like that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to do it.’

  ‘At least he’ll pay for the damage, his wife says.’

  ‘Pay. Can you imagine how long it took to collect all those pig things?’

  I fell silent. She walked fast and angry and I had to hustle to keep up with her, but felt I ought to go on talking, silence seeming to confirm my complicity.

  ‘I was surprised at Farid,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought –’

  ‘Surprised? Why? That’s just the sort of person he is.’

  ‘Have you still got that flower?’

  She unpinned the orchid from her dress and held it up. In the bleaching light of the street lamp, it looked like a surgical specimen.

  She threw it into the water, where it floated, still and evil-looking with the lamplight winking on the rubber bulb.

  ‘He is a disgusting person, my employer. Do you know what he said to me?’

  ‘The darling of all our hearts, yes I was there.’

  ‘No, not that. Just afterwards, when we were coming into the dining place. He whispered into my ear, would you like to suck my cock?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Charming. They’re all charming.’

  ‘So, what did you say?’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘I expect that was the right thing to say.’

  She snorted a kind of laugh and told me she was going home tomorrow because she wasn’t going to stand for that sort of thing and anyway she had already done her month but I could come and see her in London if I liked and I said I would.

  It wasn’t the same after she had left. Although we had only just met, she had already become the focus of the whole show. Her neat still little person caught my eye even in the gilded halls of the casino where there were so many other sights for gawping at. And when she spoke in that quiet spelled-out voice, she instilled silence around her. I noticed that even Dodo Wilmot, or perhaps particularly Dodo, paused a fraction before taking up something she had said. Somewhere within his elephant body there was some high-frequency receiver not installed in other people who looked more sensitive, and he had to let her vibrations die down before he began transmitting.

  The morning after the Boudin, he came down early, looking babyfresh as though he had never touched anything stronger than milk and a good deal of that.

  ‘Not on your trapeze today, Brainerd?’

  ‘There’s no Monsieur on Mondays.’

  ‘Where’s your collection? I don’t see anything out there . . .’

  Brainerd glared. He resented all enquiries on the subject. ‘I only put it out after lunch,’ he said. An obvious lie. Most days you could hear the clank of the Coke tins and the grating of the Orangina bottles on the cement balustrade first thing after breakfast.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t know about the gallery’s opening hours. Well, we had ourselves a ball last night, didn’t we, I’ve just been along to give M. Pingeot a couple of tickets for Chantilly, turns out he’s a racing man.’

  ‘Waldo, a couple of tickets – I mean, do you think that’s quite –’

  ‘Jane baby, what do you think I did with my winnings? Believe me, the old Boudin’s going to be so refurbished you wouldn’t know it. Yes, that was quite a party.’ He relapsed into beatific contemplation, before turning to me: ‘I was wrong. It was the Excellent Collingwood had command of when he engaged the Santissima Trinidad at Cape St Vincent, not the Hector, he was transferred to the Hector the year before, when Bowyer left the Honfleur.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘I checked it out when I got home. She got away.’

  ‘What – who did?’

  ‘The Santissima. She was to windward.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Outgunned him anyway. Those Spanish four-deckers were really something.’

  ‘They must have been.’ I began to feel as if I too was rolling about in a high sea, nausea, headache and a curious sensation of evisceration combining to decrease my interest in naval history, never a major subject as I had already conceded.

  He looked at me with tender concern, blinking a bit behind his glasses.

  ‘I diagnose a touch of gala flu, my friend. You stay here in this darkened room and let Miz Stilwell take care of you.’

  ‘Oh Dodo,’ Jane said, ‘leave the boy alone,’ but she put her hand upon my throbbing forehead. Her fingers felt cool and separated, like so many little cold compresses.

  ‘How about Massa Stilwell, OK is he? Sorry about the flying glass.’

  ‘John has gone to the doctor.’

  ‘Well, tell him Hi from me and tell him too to duck next time.’

  ‘Dodo, I’m afraid he expects an apology.’

  ‘Well, you just apologise for me, you’re hells good at that kind of thing. Tell him I wouldn’t want to hurt a little bitty hair on his head, specially since there’s so few of them these days – no, no don’t tell him that. I better run along before I cause any more ructions.’

  And he
waddled out with a debonair wave of his great paw.

  Silence fell in the sitting-room. How stale and dusky was the light coming through the stained-glass window in the corner turret (the one just below the window I watched the beach from). It might have been half-past seven in the evening, not just before midday. Outside, now that the coast was clear, I could hear the scrape of Brainerd’s tins on the balustrade.

  Jane was sitting next to me at the table, slowly writing a shopping-list. She was wearing a pale blue beach shift over her dark-blue swimming costume – the straps were just visible through the thin material. She put down her pen and looked at me.

  ‘You mustn’t think we’re all like that. Dodo just gets a little – uncivilised when he’s got a load on.’

  ‘No, I enjoyed it really,’ I said – which I had in retrospect, though this was not to be admitted widely, certainly not to Helen, but Jane was all right, I could admit things to her. Why was this? She was much older and my employer. I just could.

  She put her hand in mine. ‘How white your teeth are.’

  ‘No they aren’t,’ I said.

  ‘Yes they are.’ She stroked my forearm very slowly, so that the hairs stood up. No, I thought, no, not –

  She half-rose from the chair and turned towards me, expectant, her face extraordinarily pale. In appalling slow motion, as in a film where the projector had broken down and you became aware how primitive is the artifice of frame succeeding frame, if anything getting slower still, her lips parted, not smiling, and approached mine until there she was. It was a moment, not of truth, although that too no doubt, but of intense excitement and cold detachment, as cold as though I was watching her, watching myself from the other side of the universe. Even as I too came forward, flushed with the undreamed-of thrill of it, my mind was galloping with a giddy regress of thoughts: I’ve chosen to do this haven’t I, this and not that – that being to pull back and upset my coffee-cup on purpose and the whole thing to be forgotten in a fluster of getting a cloth to mop up – and this is an extraordinary thing to do, to be a nanny (male) and get off with your (female) employer, or perhaps it isn’t extraordinary at all, perhaps everyone in my position does it. It’s a sort of Cherubino story, perhaps Cherubino was really a sort of nanny-tutor. But wasn’t it a much odder thing, definitely much odder, to be thinking in such a detached way when this amazing thing was happening, not to mention the other obvious thought to be thought, that all this would land me in hellish trouble, if found out which it almost certainly would be. If Mr Stilwell had been so indignant about a little bit of flying glass, how would he react to this? But meanwhile there was this to be got on with, and it was wonderful too, the speed of her unzipping me, her nimble fingers with the pale long nails so cool against my skin. No, she said, as I tried to do the same for her, you can’t do this, Brainerd will come in, but the sly fingering and the surprising pathways were ecstasy enough for the time being. The slither of damp lycra under my hand and the smell of the cooling coffee on the table and my head still hammering in the dark room and outside the sound of Brainerd moving his Coke tins up and down the balustrade. It’s so dark in here, she said, I like that.