by Simon Brett
When Twinks rang from the Hôtel de Crillon the number that Dimpsy had given her, she was unsurprised to find her call answered in French by a gruff male voice. In the light of Dimpsy’s reputation on the St Wilhelmina’s old girl grapevine, the surprise would have been if she hadn’t got a man in residence.
Watched open-mouthed by her brother, Twinks dropped instantly into perfect, accent-free French and asked the man about Dimpsy’s whereabouts. From the response it seemed her question had touched a raw nerve. The man at the other end of the line launched into a diatribe about the fickleness of the female gender and even Twinks, whose knowledge of the language was exhaustive, picked up a few new Gallic swear words.
Finally managing to stem the flow of vituperation, she elicited the information that Dimpsy was almost definitely to be found at the Bistrot Julien in Rue des Panniers on the Rive Gauche. ‘And should you find her,’ was the man’s histrionic parting shot, ‘tell her that if she ever comes back here, she will find – not the living Eugène Blocque, but the corpse of Eugène Blocque!’ His words ended in a violent burst of coughing.
‘I shall certainly pass on the message,’ said Twinks politely.
6
Le Bistrot Julien
To reach the Bistrot Julien they took a cab. ‘What’s that fumacious stench?’ asked Blotto as they entered its murky interior.
‘It’s garlic.’
‘And what’s that when it’s got its jim-jams on?’
Twinks tried to explain, but her brother couldn’t be made to understand why anyone would allow anything that smelt like that near anything they were planning to eat. He had a lot to learn about France.
The cab driver dropped them in the pitch darkness of an unlit Rue des Panniers and immediately drove off, grumbling about the large tip Twinks had given him. Enquiries as to where they’d find the Bistrot Julien had been met by his full repertoire of hand gestures and facial tics, but unfortunately no directions.
As their eyes accommodated to the darkness, Blotto, fumbling around in a doorway, encountered the firm flesh of a scantily clad young woman who seemed very anxious for him to accompany her somewhere. But he couldn’t understand what she was suggesting they should do together when they got there. (That wasn’t due to the language barrier – he wouldn’t have understood what she was suggesting they should do together when they got there if she’d been speaking English.) The young woman stormed off with a very French flounce of disgust.
‘I can see about as much as a mole in a coal-hole,’ Blotto complained.
‘Don’t don your worry-boots,’ said Twinks. ‘I’ve got something that’ll sort us out.’ She reached into her reticule and produced one of those new-fangled electric torches. Because it belonged to her, it was of course silver-plated.
Directing its beam into the dingy doorways of the Rue des Panniers, Twinks didn’t take long to find a discoloured brass plaque on which ‘Bistrot Julien’ had been etched. The frontage looked little different from the other run-down buildings in the street. On the walls plaster bulged and cracked. Through the grimy windows meagre candlelight flickered. ‘Come on, Blotters,’ said Twinks, as she pushed against the sagging wooden door.
The interior seemed only marginally less dark than the pitch-blackness outside. It hadn’t been just the filth on the windows that had diminished the candlelight. The glow they gave was extremely feeble and it was a moment or two before Blotto and Twinks could take in their surroundings.
The tables all stood in shady alcoves, but few of them seemed to be occupied. There wasn’t the excited buzz of conversation that Twinks remembered from visits to other Parisian eating places. The Bistrot Julien had all the conviviality of a morgue after a tram crash.
But before that impression had time to settle, Twinks was cheered by a voice shrieking her name and a lithe body hurtling across the room to envelop her in its arms.
‘Twinks, darling!’
‘Dimpsy, darling!’
‘It’s positively shrimpy to see you, Twinks!’
‘Shrimpy with a sloozy bodice, Dimpsy!’
‘Shrimpy with a sloozy bodice and rah-rahs, Twinks!’
At the end of this exchange, the two girls burst into high-pitched giggles. Blotto felt a bit left out. He hadn’t expected to understand anything French people said, but Dimpsy Wickett-Coote was English, for the love of strawberries! He thought he should be able to understand the odd word. But all he could extract from their conversation was his sister’s name.
Even Blotto, however, couldn’t help noticing that the girl hugging Twinks was a splendid piece of womanflesh. She was tall and her black hair was cut into a short page-boy bob. Under long lashes lurked black eyes like concupiscent sloes. And even the shapelessness of the man’s jacket and trousers she wore could not disguise the generosity of her contours.
As Twinks’s giggles subsided, she remembered her brother. ‘Now did you ever meet Blotto, Dimpsy?’
‘No-oh.’ The girl elongated the vowel almost to breaking point before asking, ‘Where have you been hiding this haunch of venison? It’s just like when we were at St Wilhelmina’s. You always did manage to get the tastiest tips of asparagus, Twinks.’
‘Dimpsy, Blotto is not an amorous swain, you clip-clop. He’s my bro.’
‘Is he?’ More elongated vowels. Dimpsy Wickett-Coote was extremely interested in what she saw in front of her. With his thatch of blond hair and dazzling blue eyes, Blotto did look, as ever, impossibly handsome. Dimpsy moved towards him, almost physically licking her lips.
But her progress was interrupted by a torrent of French (incomprehensible to Blotto) and the interposition of a small man in filthy overalls and a beret between the girl and her prey. Undisturbed by the cataract of vituperation that spilled through them, from his lips dangled a grubby cigarette from which emanated the aroma of burning tyres.
The sputum of unfamiliar words directed at Blotto resolved itself into the repetition of one. The man spat up into his face what sounded like ‘Sallow! Sallow! Sallow!’
Now, though he’d been the despair of his French teacher (and all his other teachers) at Eton, at that moment Blotto had what he thought of as a linguistic brainwave. Perhaps the frog-muncher’s language wasn’t so difficult after all … Perhaps the poor thimbles used English words and just added an ‘s’ to the beginning of them!
So Blotto responded, ‘And hello to you too.’
‘You are English?’ said the man, switching languages. ‘That makes things even worse! That the faithless Dimpsy should choose a porridge-eater for a lover!’
‘As it happens,’ Blotto thought he ought to point out, ‘I don’t actually like porridge.’
‘That is of no importance. You are still attempting to steal my woman, you … salaud!’
‘Hello,’ Blotto again responded.
The man coughed.
‘I think,’ said Twinks judiciously, ‘that we are at cross purposes.’ Then in fluent French she told the angry little man that Dimpsy and Blotto had never met before and that there was no emotional relationship between them. He was to some extent mollified by this, though suspicion still gleamed in his eye. And Dimpsy looked downright disappointed.
The four of them were soon seated round a battered table with a zinc top. The Frenchman ensured that Dimpsy was not allowed to sit next to Blotto. After his show of aggression, he now took over the duties of a host, though with very bad grace and a lot of elaborate working of his lower lip. He didn’t ask the newcomers what they wanted to drink, but waved the empty bottle on the table to a slatternly waitress, who brought a replacement, along with two more grubby glasses.
Twinks and Dimpsy were immediately into a catch-up session on their last few years, an overlapping duologue interrupted by many shrieks and outbursts of hysterical laughter.
Blotto smiled at his host. Since the facial response he received looked more like a sneer than anything else, he decided he should perhaps lighten the mood with a little conversation. ‘What is it we’re d
rinking, me old pineapple?’ he asked.
‘It is absinthe.’
‘Oh.’ Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t heard of it.
‘The foolish gouvernement have tried to ban absinthe – les salauds!’
‘Hello,’ said Blotto, who thought he was now getting the hang of this French conversation business.
‘But here in Bistrot Julien they always keep a secret store of absinthe – pour moi. Absinthe is the lifeblood of art!’ Blotto took a cautious sip of the murky fluid, as the man went on, ‘Absinthe takes your breath away.’
When Blotto had once more achieved normal respiration, he was forced to admit that the man was right.
‘The gouvernement has no understanding of the artistic temperament. The banning of absinthe is just another example of the petit bourgeois minds that control our lives. An artist like Tacquelle should not be constrained by the regulations of tiny minds.’
‘And sorry, who is this Tacquelle boddo we’re talking about?’
The Frenchman drew himself up in his chair to his full height. It wasn’t very high. ‘I am Tacquelle. Gaston Tacquelle. Are you telling me you are another of the paysans who have not heard of my work?’
‘Just remind me what your work is, me old thimble?’
‘I am a Trianguliste.’
‘Ah, that would explain it. I’m a bit of an empty revolver when it comes to musicians.’
‘I am not a musicien!’ cried the deeply affronted Gaston Tacquelle. ‘Je suis Trianguliste! Triangulisme is the latest vague in the world of arts. We the Triangulistes will sweep out the dusty corridors of Impressionisme! We will sweep away the memory of such crowd-pleasing hypocrites as Picasso! We will—’ But the impassioned painter was then interrupted by a ferocious bout of coughing.
‘Nasty tickle you’ve got there, me old greengage,’ said Blotto. ‘Need some cough drops. Presumably a boddo can buy cough drops in France?’
‘It is not … a “tickle” … I am suffering from. It is—’ Tacquelle managed to gasp this out before his words were swallowed in another tide of phlegm.
Dimpsy interrupted her shrieking reminiscences with Twinks to explain, with an awestruck note of admiration in her voice, ‘Gaston is suffering from the phtisie.’
‘Is he?’ asked Blotto with an equally awestruck note of incomprehension in his voice.
‘She means “consumption”,’ added Twinks helpfully.
‘Ah, eating too much. Funny, he does look as though he stuffs the old tongue-trap with—’
‘No,’ Twinks explained patiently. ‘Dimpsy is talking about tuberculosis.’ Another bewildered look from Blotto. ‘TB. An infection of the lungs.’
‘Ah, yes. Read your semaphore – on the same page now. That’s the one where the poor old greengages keep spitting out blood?’
‘You’re bong on the nose there, Blotto.’
‘Oh. Haven’t noticed you spitting blood, Mr Tacquelle.’
‘Often I do, often I do,’ asserted the Trianguliste, aggrieved at having his illness downplayed. ‘Every morning my pillow looks like the field of Magenta.’
‘Red pillow you’ve got, is it, me old cucumber?’
‘Magenta was a battlefield,’ Twinks explained patiently.
‘But it is true,’ Gaston Tacquelle insisted. ‘Every morning my pillow is like this battlefield, stained with my lifeblood.’
‘Some mornings,’ said Dimpsy Wickett-Coote.
Blotto was unaware of the newly aggrieved look that the painter focused on her for again diminishing his medical condition. He was too preoccupied by the shocking implication in Dimpsy’s words – that she might actually see Gaston Tacquelle in the mornings. He’d heard rumours of that kind of thing happening between young men and women who weren’t married, but he’d always dismissed the notion as fanciful, something dreamed up by novelists, poets and similar bad tomatoes. Toad-in-the-hole, he thought with a mental whistle of amazement, Twinks does have some modern friends.
Sensitive to the reproof she had received from Gaston Tacquelle, Dimpsy over-compensated by building up the serious state of his health. ‘Both lungs are infected,’ she proudly asserted. ‘Gaston is on borrowed time. He could die any day. It’s very romantic.’
‘You poor old thimble,’ said Blotto to the spluttering painter, with appropriate compassion. But not too much. A charmless Frenchman remained a charmless Frenchman; the fact that he was dying did not make a great deal of difference.
‘Tragically,’ Dimpsy went on, ‘Gaston may actually die before he’s completed his chef d’oeuvre.’
‘Well, I’ll be snickered …’ murmured Blotto. ‘I didn’t know he was a cook as well.’
Dimpsy Wickett-Coote was about to reply to this, but a slight shake of the head from her schoolfriend stopped her. ‘So,’ asked Twinks, ‘what is his chef d’oeuvre?’
‘It is in the Trianguliste style …’
‘Of course.’
‘And it is a nude …’
‘Of course.’
‘And the subject of the work …’ Dimpsy Wickett-Coote’s face became wreathed in the dimples from which she had perhaps acquired her nickname, ‘is little moi.’
‘Larksissimo!’
‘I’ve been sitting for months.’
‘Oh, it’s not that long,’ said Blotto. ‘I mean, I know the service is a bit slow, no sign of anyone bringing menus or that kind of rombooley, but—’
‘Dimpsy means,’ Twinks interceded, ‘that she’s been sitting as an artist’s model for months.’
‘Ah. On the right hymn sheet, Twinks me old cigar-cutter.’ Blotto turned to Dimpsy. ‘So where do you sit? On a chair?’
‘I lie on a chaise longue.’
‘Oh, very French.’
‘I have been sitting for Gaston every morning for the past three months. Every day his cough gets worse. Every day he is closer to his death. Every day the likelihood of his finishing his chef d’oeuvre diminishes.’
‘If there’s such a time pressure,’ said Blotto, his face suffusing with the rare pinkish glow that appeared when he had an idea, ‘why don’t you sit for him in the afternoons as well?’
‘Because in the afternoons,’ Dimpsy replied dramatically, ‘I sit for Eugène Blocque.’
Hearing the name, Gaston Tacquelle spat out the single word, ‘Salaud!’
‘Hello,’ said Blotto, who had fully caught on now.
‘But why do you do that, Dimpsy,’ asked Twinks, ‘if time is so short for Gaston?’
‘Because,’ her friend replied operatically, ‘Eugène is also dying of the phtisie.’
‘So you have two amorous swains trying to finish painting you before they topple off with the TB?’
‘That’s it, Twinks my shrimparoo!’ Dimpsy Wickett-Coote glowed with the excitement of the moment. ‘Isn’t it the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard?’
‘Well—’
‘Because Eugène Blocque and Gaston Tacquelle are the premier artists of the Trianguliste Movement! And I am muse to both of them! In future the curves of my body – or rather the triangles of my body – will be known to art lovers all around the world. I, Dimpsy Wickett-Coote, will be hailed as one of the most beautiful women in history!’
‘Do not be so sure!’ Tacquelle’s coughing fit had subsided sufficiently for him to speak again. ‘Perhaps the painting will never be finished.’
‘Oh, stuff a pillow in it, Gaston! Of course you will live long enough to finish the painting, I know you will!’ exhorted Dimpsy, rather in the way she spoke to her partners when playing tennis. ‘I will be recorded for posterity as one of the most beautiful women in history.’
‘You misunderstand me, ma cocotte. I did not mean that I would not finish the painting because I would die.’
‘Then what did you mean?’
‘I meant that, as an artist – as a Trianguliste – my muse has to be the most beautiful woman in the world!’
‘Yes, I know that,’ said Dimpsy. ‘And you told me that I was the most beautiful
woman in the world.’
‘“Was” – that is the important word – “was”. Dimpsy mon petit choufleur, when I described you as the most beautiful woman – la plus belle du monde, I was drawing my conclusion from insufficient data.’
‘What in the name of Robinson Crusoe do you mean?’
‘I mean that I thought you, Dimpsy, were the most beautiful woman in the world … until this evening … when I saw Twinks.’
Oh, broken biscuits, thought Blotto, not again. This kind of thing was always happening with his sister and experience had told him that it could end up in quite a major gluepot. Awful when you’ve got two best friends from school being set against each other by some thimble-jiggler of a man. They were both breathsappers, for the love of strawberries! Who cared whether one had just a fairy thimblesworth of beauty more than the other? But experience had also told Blotto that it was just that kind of tiny detail that women did care about.
Not Twinks, of course. His sister was always a Grade A foundation stone. She didn’t let thoughts of beauty go to her head. She didn’t worry about whether she was the biggest eye-wobbler in the room (but then of course she always was the biggest eye-wobbler in the room, so she didn’t need to worry about it).
But the expression on the face of Dimpsy Wickett-Coote showed that she didn’t take such considerations so lightly. Having first focused on Gaston Tacquelle a look of contempt that would have frozen the pipes in one of those new-fangled central heating systems, she turned her withering eye on what clearly ‘used to be’ her best friend.