by Jane Gardam
Then the door opened and the English family, very slightly flushed in the face, swept steadily in like a river and sat down at the long table without a word. The young Signora, coming through to remove the old lady’s plate and blow out her candle, stopped and gasped. It was past nine o’clock. Over two hours late. It was as clear as if the Signora had shouted it that the kitchen was empty, the cook abed, the ovens cold. She said nothing, stood still, then after a pause went away and the family sat staring straight ahead. After quite a few minutes the Signora returned and asked, with a catch in her voice, whether they would take soup.
‘Please,’ said the father, candlelight on his glasses.
In the considerable time that then passed, the father said once, ‘Is something wrong?’ and nobody answered him.
Soup came. The Signora could manage no smile. She did not even look at the child, Elizabeth. She handed the basket of bread to each of them and, turning her big body about, disappeared through the door with head high. ‘Shall we go?’ said Mick to Evelyn, who was looking all the time at the child, but Evelyn said, ‘No. No. Wait please.’
‘Oh, Evelyn.’
‘No. Just wait a bit longer. Please.’
From the shadows of the centre table somebody suddenly said very high and clear, ‘The soup is cold.’ The mother pushed hers away.
‘I think,’ said the father, ‘that it must nevertheless be drunk, don’t you?’
Two or three of the children put down their spoons. Elizabeth went on with the soup until it was finished.
‘Shall we all finish the soup?’ asked the father slowly, turning his head about. The children one by one picked up their spoons again, getting the soup down somehow with the help of the hard bread. The mother turned sideways and looked at the floor.
‘Come along now, Elizabeth, eat your bread.’
‘I have drunk the soup,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but the bread is too hard.’
‘Then we shall hope that you can eat it later, shall we not?’
Pasta came, freshly made, the Signora hot in the face. Evelyn and Mick asked for more coffee and the Signora, serving it, suddenly blazed her eyes at Evelyn and poured forth a whispered torrent of Italian with backward movements of the head at the centre table. Evelyn nodded but did not take her eyes from the child.
‘We shall not take meat or fruit,’ said the father, ‘we shall go to bed. “For what we have received—” Elizabeth?’
She did not look up.
‘You have not eaten the bread.’
‘It’s too hard. I drank the soup.’
‘Come along. Eat the bread.’
She did not move.
‘“For what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful.” Come along. We shall go. And Elizabeth shall stay here until she has eaten the bread.’
They went out, one of the older boys giving Elizabeth a push in the back with a friendly finger, but nobody else paid any attention, the mother leaving the room first without a glance. All their feet could be heard receding down the corridor, crackling like a forest fire, and doors were heard to close.
Suddenly, all the electricity in the pensione came on in a flood and the child was revealed like a prisoner under a search-light, all alone at the long table. She sat stalwartly, with small, round, folded arms, looking at her hands, her mouth dogged, the bread untouched on the tired cloth.
‘Shall we go now?’ asked Mick, loudly and cheerfully, coughing a little, squeaking back his chair.
‘No. No. Not yet. I want some more coffee.’
‘We can’t have more coffee, it’s much too late.’
The Signora came in again and stopped to see the child sitting alone in the glare. She turned astonished eyes on Evelyn and Mick and started towards the centre table, but the dark, fierce air hanging around the child made her shy.
‘You—finito? Everyone now?’
The child did not answer.
‘Could we have more coffee? I’m sorry—I know it’s terribly late,’ called Evelyn and looking back over her shoulder at the child all the way to the door, the Signora made for the kitchen again.
Mick began to hum and pace the floor a little. He looked out of the window where the colonnade of the Innocenti blazed patchily above the whirling lights of the cars. Above was the starry sky. Turning in to the room again, he said, ‘Hard old bread, isn’t it?’ and went and sat down by the child. ‘Enjoying your holiday?’ he said. ‘Expect it’s all a bit of a bore, isn’t it? Churches and stuff. I expect you’d rather be at the sea.’
Then he put out his hand and let it stay for a moment above the child’s head. He let it drop and began slowly to stroke her hair. She flung up her chin and pulled away as though she had been stung and simultaneously the door to the corridor opened and the father stood in the dining room. He said, ‘What is this?’
‘I was talking to your daughter.’
‘I’m afraid my daughter is not allowed to talk to strangers.’
‘Isn’t it rather unwise then to let her sit alone, long after her bedtime, in a room with only strangers in it?’
‘She knows how to behave. She knows that she has to stay there until she has eaten the bread.’
‘That’s your affair—’
‘It is.’
‘It’s your affair, but suppose that the strangers had not been us? To leave a small child alone. Late at night. In a foreign restaurant.’
‘Hardly a restaurant I think.’
‘You treated it as a restaurant tonight. Over two hours late for dinner. Never a word of apology. The one and only waitress tired out. Pregnant. Behaving like lord and peasant—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but my wife and I have been horrified. Disgusted. Disgusted with you. Never seen such idiocy. Quaint. Victorian play-acting. You need a psychiatrist—not fit to have children.’
‘Are you an authority on children?’
‘I—yes. I am a doctor. I know a lot about children.’
‘And how many have you?’
‘That’s not the point. I see a child being studiously, insanely—’
‘Shall we continue this outside?’
‘By all means. If you will send this child at once to bed.’
‘I shall consider it when we have talked. Outside this room if you please. I don’t believe in discussions of this sort in front of children.’
‘Very well.’
As the father swung out of the room and Mick swung after him, Evelyn saw in her husband’s eyes the remote, terrible band of dismay she thought she had dreamt before. He was blind to her. She put her head in her hands and thought, ‘I never knew how much he wanted children. In all the years, I never asked. I never thought of him.’
Lifting her face, she found that the little girl was looking at her with interest. The bread uneaten on the cloth. Her face was serious. She said to Evelyn, ‘Don’t cry. It doesn’t matter.’
‘I’m not. I wasn’t—’
‘It was a puncture. We got late. He’s terribly ashamed. It’s all right.’
‘I—I just didn’t—’
Tramping feet, loud voices were to be heard returning and the child, looking kindly at Evelyn, sighed and picked up the bread in both fists.
‘Oh no—oh no! Please don’t,’ cried Evelyn. ‘Please let me have it—please. I’ll hide it in my bag.’ She held out her arms. ‘Throw it me. Throw it me.’
But Elizabeth, shocked, turned away. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, and began to munch.
The two men as they returned, saw first this loyal munching and then Evelyn in her corner, weeping at last.
SHOWING THE FLAG
The boy with big ears, whose father was dead, kissed his mother with a sliding away of the eyes, heaved up his two immense suitcases and loped up the gang-plank. At the top he dropped the cases briefly to give a quick sideways wave, keeping his face forward.
He jerked the cases up again, grimaced, tramped on and his mother far below, weeping but laughing, said, ‘Oh, Pym! It’s the size of the cases. They’re nearly as big as he is. Oh, I can’t bear it.’
‘He is going for a sensible time,’ said her elderly woman friend. ‘Three months is a good long time. The cases must necessarily be heavy.’
‘I can’t bear it,’ wept the other, dabbing her streaming cheeks, laughing at her weakness.
‘Of course you can. You must. It’s not as if he’s never been away before.’
‘Since six. He’s been away since he was six. Oh, boarding-schools. Oh, children—why does one have them? Children—it’s all renunciation. Having them is just learning to give them up.’
‘It is the custom of the country,’ said the elderly friend—unmarried. She was a Miss Pym. ‘It is in the culture of the English middle class. We teach our children how to endure.’
‘He has endured. He has learned.’
‘Oh, he scarcely knew his father, Gwen. Don’t be silly. His father was hardly ever at home.’
‘‘He missed him. Not of course as I—’
‘You scarcely saw him either,’ said sane Miss Pym. She was a plain-spoken woman.
‘I loved him,’ said Gwen, impressive in her heavy hanging musquash coat and flat velvet bandeau (it was the nineteen-twenties). ‘And now I have lost Philip. Oh, can we find tea?’ She held her tightly-squeezed handkerchief in her fist, out in front of her like a blind woman, and her friend led her away through the crowds, among the crates and high-piled luggage and the other fluttering handkerchiefs. Arm in arm the two women disappeared, slowly, floppily in their expensive boat-shaped shoes, and Philip who had found a good position for the suitcases beside a long slatted seat, hung over the rail and waved to them in vain.
When the last flicker of them had gone he blew through his teeth a bit until a whistle came and swung his feet at the bottom rail along the deck, scuffing his shoes like a two-year-old, though he was nearly thirteen. As the ship got away towards France he hung further over the rail and called down at the seagulls who were wheeling and screeching round the open port-hole of the galley. A bucket of scraps was flung out. The seagulls screamed at it and caught most of it before it hit the foam. They plunged. ‘Hungry,’ thought Philip. ‘I’m hungry. I hope the food’s going to be good. Messy French stuff. They all say it’s going to be good, but it’ll be no better than school. It’s just disguised school.’
‘The seagulls eat like school.’ He watched enviously the birds tearing horrors from each other’s beaks, flying free. Were they French or English seagulls? Where did they nest? They spoke a universal language, seagulls. And all birds. All animals. Presumably. Didn’t need to learn French. ‘They’re ahead of people,’ thought Philip, covering his great red ears.
It was bitterly cold. Maybe it would be warmer in Paris.
He was to get to Paris on the boat-train by himself and would there be met by a Major Foster. They would know one another by a small paper Union Jack pinned to a lapel on each of them. Philip was keeping his Union Jack in his coat pocket at present, in a small brass tin. Every few minutes he felt the tin to make sure that it was still there.
He left the rail and sat on the long seat beside the suitcases. He could not remember actually having seen the flag in the tin, only hearing about it there. He had seen it when it was part of a small packet of Union Jacks, tied in a bundle. He had heard nothing else but Union Jacks it seemed for weeks: his mother’s search for just the right one, the dispatch of the Major’s identical one to Paris with the instructions to him about the lapel. The (rather long) wait for the letter of confirmation from the Major that the Union Jack had been safely received. Then a further letter about the positioning of the Union Jack on the right lapel, in the centre and with a gold safety-pin.
Philip however could not remember the act of placing the Union Jack inside the tin. After all, she might just have forgotten. Not that it was the sort of thing she ever did do—forget. But during the last few months—after the funeral which he hadn’t gone to, and which she hadn’t gone to, being too ill in bed and her friend Miss Pym paddling about nursing her and bossing her in a darkened room—after the funeral there had been some sort of break. Only a short break of course. His mother wasn’t one to break. She was terrific, his mother. Everyone knew she was terrific. She kept everything right. Never made a mistake. Ace organiser. He’d heard them saying in the kitchen that it was her being so perfect had killed his father, though goodness knows, thought Philip, what that meant.
Oh, his mother was a whizz. Organising, packing, making decisions. ‘These are your gifts. These are your life-blood,’ had said Miss Pym. ‘You are by nature an administrator—quite wasted now as a mere mother.’ His school matron always sighed over his trunk at the end of term. ‘However did your mother get so much in?’ she said. There was not a shoe not filled with socks, not a sock that did not hide a card of special darning-wool or extra buttons. Bundles of Cash’s name-tapes would be folded into a face flannel. Soap in a little soap-shaped celluloid box would rest inside a cocoa mug, and the cocoa mug would rest inside a cricket cap and the cricket cap would be slid into a Wellington boot.
No. She’d never have forgotten the Union Jack.
‘I think it’s rather a lot to expect of a Frenchman,’ had said Miss Pym. ‘To wear the English flag.’
‘The Fosters are French-Canadian,’ had said his mother. ‘They’re very English. Very patriotic, although they live in the Avenue Longchamps.’
‘I hope their French is not patriotic. If so there’s very little point in Philip going.’
‘They are patriotic to France as well.’
‘How odd,’ said Pym. ‘That is unusual.’
Philip took the tin out of his pocket and shook it and there seemed to be no rattle from inside. But then when he opened the lid, there lay the little paper flag quite safe beside its pin and the wind at once scooped it up and blew it away among the seagulls.
Philip ran to the rail and watched it plucked outwards and upwards, up and up, then round and down. Down it went, a little bright speck until it became invisible in the churning sea.
‘Calais,’ said the fat French lady along the seat beside him. ‘You see? Here is France.’ Philip immediately got up and walked away. He looked at the scummy waves slopping at the green jetty, the tall leaning houses. There was a different smell. This was abroad. Foreign soil. In a moment he was going to set foot upon it.
And he was lost and would never be found.
‘Le petit,’ said the French lady coming up alongside him at the rail and stroking his hair. He wagged his head furiously and moved further away. ‘Tout seul,’ and she burst into a spate of French at her husband. Philip knew that the French meant that the barbaric English had abandoned this child. Not able to consider this concept he shouldered the suitcases and made for the quay, and there was approached by a ruffian who tried to take them both from him. He hung on to them tight, even when the man began to scream and shout. He aimed a kick at the man and tramped away, the cases grazing the ground. Not one person on the crowded quay paid attention to the attempted theft.
Philip showed his passport and was swirled into the crowd. ‘Paris,’ cried the fat lady, swinging into view, ‘Paris—ah, le petit!’ and she held her rounded arm out boldly but shelteringly in his direction, leaning towards him. Her husband who had a sharp nose and black beret and teeth began to talk fast and furiously into the nearest of Philip’s vulnerable ears.
But Philip behaved as though he were quite alone. He climbed into the train, found his seat, took off his gaberdine raincoat, folded it onto a little rack and looked at the huge suitcases and the higher luggage-rack with nonchalance. The rest of the carriage regarded them with amazement and several people passionately urged that the racks were unequal to the challenge ahead of them. Another ruffian came in and seemed to want to remove t
he cases altogether but Philip with a vehemence that astonished him and the ruffian and the whole carriage and a stretch of the corridor, flung himself in the man’s path and across his property. He turned bright red and his ears redder and cried out, ‘No, no, no.’
This caused more discussion and the ruffian, lifting his gaze to the ceiling and his hands near it, went shouting away. The suitcases were then successfully stowed on the racks, two of the Frenchmen shook hands with Philip and an old woman wearing a long black dress and a lace headdress like some sort of queen, offered him a sweet which he refused. Huddled in his corner seat he looked out of the window and wondered what to do.
Rattling tracks, bleak cement, scruffy houses all tipping about and needing a coat of paint. Shutters. Railway lines insolently slung across streets, all in among fruit-stalls, all muddly. Rain. No Union Jack.
Rain. Fields. Grey. Everything measured out by rulers. Small towns, now villages. Gardens. Allotments. No Union Jack.
Men in blue overalls. More berets. Black suits. Stout women with fierce brows. Men standing looking at their allotments, very still and concentrated like saying their prayers. Vegetables in very straight rows. Men carefully bending down and plucking out minute, invisible weeds. Mix-up of muddle and order. Like Mother. No Union Jack.
What should he do? Major Foster would be wearing his Union Jack and Philip would go up to him and say— But in all the hundreds of people getting off the train at Paris there might be a dozen boys of twelve. Perhaps a hundred. The Major would go sweeping by. ‘Oh no. I’m sorry. They were very particular. The boy I am to meet will be wearing—’
And he’d be speaking in French of course. Probably French-Canadians spoke no English. It hadn’t been clear. Miss Pym had written all the letters to the Foster family because she could write French, and the replies had been in French. Miss Pym had taken them away to translate with the dictionary under her arm. No Union Jack.
