"You'd best get back in practise on that stuff," John said. "There's work in Dublin from this August."
Hogan leaped to his feet again, over the moon with happiness. "For me?" he asked in anxious disbelief.
John looked apologetic. "Unless you can persuade someone else," he said reluctantly, "I'm afraid it'll have to be you."
Hogan roared with laughter and uncorked the whiskey with his teeth. No pain showed. He took a sip as a drowning man might gasp at air.
"I'll send Monsieur Duquesne back to the market then," John said and turned to go.
"Ah, for God's sake," Hogan said. "Tell him he may go back to Yvetot and keep out o' my sight for a week. Tell us about Dublin."
"I'll give you the details when I come back this way tomorrow. It's the Great Southern and Western from Dublin to Cork and a branch to Carlow. There's four years' exile if you can stand it. Until tomorrow, then."
John turned and helped Nora back to the platform leaving Hogan stupefied with joy. He found his tongue when they were almost there. "If Jack Duquesne has a twin," he shouted, "ye may put him on too!"
"Was it wise," Nora asked when they were on the train to Havre, "telling him that news and leaving him a whole bottle of his mother's milk?"
"And saying I'd be back tomorrow," John answered, surprised she had not grasped his purpose. "It's a test of the man. I hope he understood that."
Chapter 13
The ferry sailed from the north jetty, on the farthermost side of the harbour from the station, so their fly had to traverse the whole maze of basins on its way between the two.
"That's where we docked after the crossing from Devon." John pointed to a quay. "There's the only bit of French soil I've actually gone down on my two knees and kissed!"
He took a keen note of the harbour works in progress.
"Anything for us, d'you think?" Nora asked.
He shook his head. "Not a sniff. The locals have it neatly divided; I'd have to shine too many palms to show any profit. Anyway, they're ahead of us in marine work, the French. Always have been. When they say 'canal' they mean an inland way for ships—not little puddles you can just about drown a small dog in."
Nora waved her hand contemptuously at a gang of men doing some bottom work behind a cofferdam. "What can they teach us?" she asked.
John looked at the working. "Thank you," he said suddenly and made the driver stop. "I'd not have noticed. That's clever." He got out and walked to the edge of the quay.
The cofferdam was circular, about twenty-four feet in diameter, close to the quay wall. At its foot was an iron structure made up of a central ring from which ran eight radiating girders to an outer ring that fitted the dam with only inches to spare. The central ring formed a hole about six feet across. The radiating segments were floored with hinged iron flaps that could be swung open to reveal the harbour bottom below. One segment was at present open in this way, and men were digging out the bottom and piling the spoil on the closed iron flaps of the neighbouring segment of flooring.
"See what they do?" John said. "They work right round like that, digging out each segment and piling it on the floor of the segment next door. Then the bucket fits down into that hole in the centre and they just scrape it into the middle and haul away. They're elegant, the French. That's what I call elegant. It takes a man with a quite uncommon hatred of hard labour to think up that."
"What would we do?" Nora asked.
"We'd have men at the circumference digging and throwing in to the centre, and men at the centre shovelling the spoil up over their shoulders into a six-foot bucket. They've got eight men there, we'd have twelve or fourteen."
Nora thought briefly. "Difference in wages would never make up the cost and daily expense of that great lump of iron. I'll wager there's some local French Brunel saying 'Hang the cost, I've got this grand idea.'"
He chuckled and squeezed her arm, guiding her back to the fly. "Probably," he said. "But it gives me an idea. And one that will pay a bit more than that." He craned forward to look into her face as if he expected a negative response.
"I'm in favour of that," she said. "Never be first. Let others run on the rocks. It makes the safe course easier to chart."
They climbed back into the fly. "We need them though," he said seriously, "the folk who want to be first."
"Who would you rather be," she asked, "Admiral Lord Franklin in his tomb of ice or plain Mr. Can't-quite-remember-his-name who brought the first paying cargo through the Northwest Passage that Franklin will die in seeking?"
"Who says he's going to die?"
"Suppose."
The question troubled John. He pulled his moustache. He took off his gloves and scratched his knuckles. "I don't know," he said at last.
"What I really want to do is find the Northwest Passage and bring a paying cargo through, at one and the same time."
The wind was westerly and the tide was flowing against the river, so after a short reach to starboard, they almost ran before the wind all the way across the estuary to Honfleur. The sun was well down in the sky when they nosed into the slack waters between the sandbars of the harbour mouth. A team of ducks flew overhead and settled noisily in the reeds to the west of the port.
"I saw some spoonbills there in April," John said.
A chill was forming on the air.
"I could just fancy a nice fire, a cup of tea, and a plate of muffins," Nora said.
The carriage waiting for them had a platform at the back, like an ancient britzka. A coachman, a groom, and a stable lad from La Gracieuse leaned against it, waiting. The coachman recognized John first and nudged the others into life. The lad sprang onto a horse and cantered off on the Trouville road to warn the house of John and Nora's arrival. Moments later, with their trunk more or less secure upon the platform, they set off westward into the sunset. They rode through a world of deepening shadows, where tree-shaded blackness gave way to sudden grand vistas of the sea, luminous in the twilight. It was dark by the time they arrived at the gates of La Gracieuse. A faint band of deep purple light settled upon the horizon, and a crescent moon, only two hours off its own time of setting, hung in a haze, lighting the waves that distance moved as slowly as the clouds. Their breaking on the shore, somewhere below the cliff on which La Gracieuse stood, was a mere whisper.
"Oh, it is beautiful," Nora said, as if that were a concession.
La Gracieuse had been recently built, though it sought to appear quite venerable, part red-brick château, part baroque palace—all on a domestic scale. Its public face looked northward to the sea and was built around three sides of a square cobbled yard. The fourth side consisted of two small, identical gatehouse cottages with blind dormer windows let into the roof above the ground-floor windows. The wrought-iron gates were in a modern baroque from the Rodet factories, uncomfortable and mannered. The left-hand post had settled a few inches, so the gate was usually left open until dark, when the mismatch was not noticeable.
On the wall of the house immediately facing, across the yard from the gate, was a shallow, projecting bay with a two-arched entrance and three sets of twinarched windows rising above, being finished at the top with baroque achievements, almost Dutch in flavour. Thus the first impression was that the house rose four storeys. But away to the left was a further bay, with a mere three storeys of windows; only from the inside was it clear that the "four storeys" of the entrance bay were really lights for the stairwell. To the right of the yard was a circular stucco turret with a steep conical roof. The main roof of the house was steep too, soaring above the building, as high above the gutter as the gutter was above the ground. The two northward wings, completely overshadowed by trees on both sides of the house, were for the servants, of whom the Rodets seemed to have a great number. In her many weeks in the house Nora never felt confident she had seen them all. The young girls, especially, changed very often; in fact, she heard that the diligence conductor used to advise any new girl coming to take a position there to leave her bags down i
n Trouville and save carrying them the double journey to La Gracieuse and back.
The southern face of the house, away from the road, had less pomp and more charm. Three large semicircular bays projected onto, and framed, a broad flagstone terrace. On two floors the bays were linked with wrought iron balconies, so that even when it was too breezy to sit on the terrace you could find a sunny, sheltered spot against the house.
As the carriage lumbered through the gate, Nora had the impression of a vast edifice, much larger than the Adelaide hotel, with floors of lighted windows rearing above her and the huge dark expanse of roof above that. The slates glistened royal blue in the moonlight. Monsieur and Madame Rodet stood ready to welcome them, one in each archway. They looked so like the man and woman in a weather house that Nora found herself watching them and wondering which would step forward first.
It was Madame. Now did that mean rain or shine? In fact, it meant a torrent of welcome, with "my dear, my dear, my dear" and "so 'appy" as its constant theme. Nora said "bon…" five times before she completed "Bonsoir, Madame" and "Je suis très heureuse." It stopped Madame in mid-flow. Then she clapped her hands and said "Merveilleux! Now we speak only French. You see."
She barely left Nora time to greet Monsieur Rodet before she swept her indoors and up the grand staircase, and up and up, giving brief thumbnail sketches of the characters in the portraits on the walls—all spoken, of course, in English. "Alain Rodet. Not good. His wife. Poor woman, so sad. Oh and this one, Hercule. Rodet's uncle. Very old now, of course. But a mind like a—razor, razeur? Yes? You understand anyway. You will meet. He will come. Very good. Gustave, I mean. Did I say Hercule? This is Hercule. A fool. Pay no attention. You like this candlestick? It's of Sèvres where our Paris house is. Oh I have much things— many things?—from there. You will see. Sèvres, it's so beautiful, you will think. And your wedge foot too." (Nora had no idea what that meant.)
The litany went on until they were halfway up the last flight of stairs, the dark and dusty flight that led only to the top windows and the roof space. "Too far," Madame said, her bewildered eyes scanning the walls empty of portraits. "Oh!' She struck her brow with the back of a crooked hand, laughed, and grasped Nora's arm with that familiar intense clutch.
She took Nora all the way down again to the top of the first flight of stairs and then led her along a passage to the right of the stairwell. The first door was, she said, M'sieu Jean's dressing room; the second, which she also passed unopened, was their bedroom. "Oh, your baggage is arrived," she said. "Safe and well." The third door she opened and, with mock-courtliness, ushered Nora through. "The boudoir for Milady."
"Not 'Milady'!" Nora laughed. "The Three Musketeers. You know? I have just read it. I didn't like Milady."
"Oh! I have it. You had not needed to buy it. Tskoh!" She shrugged. "Eh bien, Madame. You like your boudoir?"
It was exquisite. The walls were lined with moiré silk, printed with little posies of pastel-coloured flowers. The wainscot was of ivory-painted wood with gilded rococo panels that were repeated on the doors and the furniture. A fire burned in a delicate marble fireplace, carved without a single straight line, except for the intersection of mantelpiece and wall—and even that line was broken by a gold clock under a dome of glass, flanked by a smiling nymph and a brooding faun in porcelain.
"Forgive this." Madame Rodet pointed to a group of Empire-style chairs and a chaise longue, all liberally endowed with sphinxes' heads. Every sphinx had that chubby, worried-about-my-liver look which is a sure mark of authenticity in any French carving. "One day I change these."
The tall French window was open a crack and near it Nora caught that same fragrance which had eluded her on the diligence near Abbeville.
"What is that, Madame?" she asked. "That…perfume."
Madame Rodet sniffed. "Ah! It is—I do not know—le chêne. A tree."
Above the fireplace hung a sketch by Watteau for his Embarkation for Cythera.
"It's beautiful, Madame Rodet," Nora said, awed by so much magnificence and aware suddenly of the poverty of her vocabulary. "Exquisite."
"Yes, it is," Madame said, as if she had waited for Nora's confirmation of her opinion. "And the paintings. Not like those—meubles, how d'you say— furnitures—on the stairs." She began a slow tour of the room. "Watteau, of course. And Fragonard."
The Fragonard was a little still life of wallflowers, violets, and wild roses. Then there were two by Corot, a view of Dijon, and an unidentified landscape. In this room and this company their colour seemed dull and heavy.
Madame pointed to a tree in one of them. "Le chêne," she said.
"Ah, oak," Nora said and looked toward the window. "Of course. It's the smell of oak."
"The smell of Normandy in spring."
Finally there was a Millet. "He is very good," Madame Rodet said. "A friend from Rodet, only it's not right, 'ere. Not this room." It was a study of a peasant girl. "Une rose de Picardie. Oh, and one more!" Laughing, she pulled Nora two paces sideways until they stood before an oval rococo mirror, wide enough for each woman to see herself and the other reflected. "It's the most nicest," she said. "It's called Les deux roses. You understand?"
Nora laughed.
"La rose de Normandie, et, alors, la rose de Yakshire."
"Yorkshire," Nora said.
"Oh! English! It's impossible. Yokeshire!"
They both laughed.
"Eh bien," she challenged. "La rose de Normandie." She waited for Nora's repetition.
Nora almost managed to get her tongue around the sounds, it was halfway between Miss Woods and perfection. Madame Rodet, not realizing what progress that marked, laughed again and waved a hand as if Nora's failure proved some point. "We manage," she said. "You will see."
An hour or so later, while Honorine, the maid, was helping her to dress after her bath, she heard John taking his bath in the dressing room. Shortly after, when she was almost ready, he joined her.
"Did they tip your bathwater out the window too?" she asked.
"Aye," he said. "There's a little, lead-roofed awning runs along under the balcony. It makes a sort of gutter. I've been talking with Rodet, who's very worried about our mutual friend Sir G.B. It seems he's been over here on a visit and is showing an unnatural interest in properties in Normandy."
Nora said at once, "Before or after we gave him ten per cent of the company stock?"
"Oh, before."
She smiled then. "Still," she said, "he did begin to twitch. So he has some instinct for self-preservation. I wouldn't call his interest in property here at all unnatural."
Chapter 14
Impressions of those first weeks in Normandy soon merged in Nora's mind, making it impossible later to separate one day from the next.
Standing on the balcony one morning, she discovered that not only the bathwater was emptied into the gutter formed by the awning and the southern wall of the house, the water closet on the floor above discharged there too. And the force of its water did not always carry the solids as far as the downpipe; they lay stranded on the lead roof, seething with blue-black flies, and making it difficult to enjoy standing on the balcony—or to sit at total ease on the terrace below. Later, when Madame Rodet came into her boudoir, Nora walked casually out onto the balcony and pretended to discover in passing the imperfections below their feet, while ostensibly admiring the garden. Madame smiled proudly. "We have the English water civilisation now," she said. "Even when I was young… oh! Terrible. But in my grandmother's time. We must have many houses. To move, you understand?" She drew horizontal circular itineraries in the air. "Affreux! And now—la civilisation." She gestured at the drainage and the gardens with a grandiloquent sweep of her arm, as if both were part of the same great plan.
The gardens, which sloped away from the terrace, were laid out in absolute symmetry. The gardeners, Nora thought, must spend most of the winter indoors playing with rulers, compasses, and squared paper. The effect was incomplete though, because no one had f
irst tried to level or to balance out the wrinkles of the natural landscape. A formal bed on a small eminence was thus "balanced" by another in a hollow, which then meandered on, more or less diagonally, across a large octagonal lawn. It did not even look like an idea half-achieved, Nora thought—more like one three-quarters obliterated.
Sam wrote to say that he would, at Nora's suggestion, take the diligence from Abbeville all the way to Lisieux and that he would ride up in the banquette "like most solitary Englishmen." He would then take a fly up the valley of the Tocques to Trouville, arriving at about half past five on the afternoon of Thursday 29 May, almost exactly halfway through Nora's visit.
John wrote from Rouen to say that Hogan had not passed his test and that Flynn, the man who had creatively ruined six hydraulic presses at Penmanshiel, would go to Dublin instead for the GS&W contract.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 15
