by Michael Bond
There was a moment’s silence while the Director digested the remark, ‘An interesting thought, Aristide.’ His voice sounded milder, almost affectionate. ‘Not one that appeals to me, I must admit, Sooner you than me. Apart from anything else, who knows what hidden passions you might release. Passions kept in check over the years by constant scanning of P39s.’
‘One moment, Monsieur.’ From outside, beyond the trees, came the sound of a helicopter approaching fast. Fast and low. The noise made it difficult to hear what the Director was saying.
Monsieur Pamplemousse crossed to the window, cupping the telephone receiver under his chin as he did so. The two National Guardsmen were in a state of alert, their machine-guns at the ready as they watched the sky in an area beyond the pool where the tops of the trees were already waving in the down-draught from the plane. The waiters had all stopped work and were watching too. The two coloured boys from Reception hurried past pulling a trolley on which reposed a large roll of carpet. Monsieur Pamplemousse slid the window shut. The director was still talking.
‘I cannot persuade you to change your mind?’
‘No, Monsieur.’
‘I sometimes wish I had your sense of right and wrong, Pamplemousse. It is an enviable trait.’
‘Comme ci, comme ça, Monsieur. Sometimes it is a blessing, at other times it is a curse.’
‘Pamplemousse …’
‘Oui, Monsieur?’
‘I do not know what you have in mind, and perhaps it is better that I do not ask. Also, I should not be telling you this – it is supposed to be secret – but the “shopping expedition” of a “certain person” has been brought forward for security reasons. He is due to arrive at Les Cinq Parfaits today.’
‘I think, Monsieur, he is arriving at this very moment.’
‘Alors!’ The Director sounded depressed. ‘In that case, Aristide, I can only wish you bonne chance.’
‘Merci, Monsieur.’
As he hung up, Monsieur Pamplemousse glanced at his watch. It was just after twelve thirty. If he was to be on time for his meeting with Fräulein Brünnhilde he would need to leave at once.
He crossed to the fridge and opened the door. The room maid had obviously completed her rounds, for the rack of apéritifs and mineral waters had been restocked, but the bottle of champagne he’d ordered was nowhere to be seen. Worse still, the second bottle of Château d’Yquem seemed to have vanished.
‘Merde!’ He was about to close the door again in disgust when he paused and looked in the freezer compartment. A bottle bearing the Gosset label lay on top of the ice-tray awaiting his pleasure, but there was still no sign of the d’Yquem. It must have been put somewhere for safekeeping – such riches demanded special treatment. Lifting the champagne carefully out of the compartment he examined the bottle. He could hardly grumble, since he’d asked for it to be as cold as possible, but it was now so cold that the outside was white with ice. He glanced at the freezer control – it had been turned to maximum. He would need to treat the champagne with respect; in its present state it could be lethal.
Closing the door of the fridge, he took the cardboard tube out of its carrier-bag and slid the bottle gently inside it. It fitted as snugly as if it had been made to measure.
Seeing his master reach for the other carrier-bag, Pommes Frites leapt to his feet. Pommes Frites liked picnics and one way and another he had a lot of eating to catch up on. That apart, Monsieur Pamplemousse’s mood communicated itself to him in no uncertain manner. Second only to food, Pommes Frites enjoyed nothing better than a spot of action. He licked his lips. All his senses told him that with a little bit of luck he could be enjoying both before he was very much older.
7
THE PICNIC
The journey to Les Beaux Arbres took Monsieur Pamplemousse even longer than it had on the first occasion, mostly because of the state of his car. With its 150,000-kilometre service long overdue and the pads on the cable-operated front-wheel brakes now even more badly in need of replacement following the sabotage of the main system, he had no wish to stop on a steep part of the hill. If they once started rolling backwards there was no knowing where they would end up. He could hardly hope for another convenient road sign to get in their way, and the bottom of the valley looked too far away for comfort.
Fräulein Brünnhilde was waiting for them behind some bushes. She was dressed in a brightly coloured, transparently thin cotton skirt, topped rather disappointingly by a tee-shirt bearing a map of North America. Her blonde hair was tightly coiffeured into a neat but forbidding bun. Paradoxically, she was carrying what appeared to be a groundsheet under her arm.
‘It is for the picnic,’ she announced as she climbed into the passenger seat.
Monsieur Pamplemousse eyed it uneasily as he helped her on with the seat-belt, adjusting it from N.P.F. (Normale Pommes Frites) to a more suitable size – somewhere at the higher end of the scale.
Apart from any untoward implications which might or might not go with the sharing of a groundsheet, he would have much preferred making use of the folding table and chairs which he kept permanently in the boot. In his experience even the lushest of pastureland grew inordinately hard in a matter of moments. That apart, the more inviting it looked the higher the animal population; he’d once seen some incredible figure quoted for just one square metre of earth.
Pommes Frites had even stronger views on the subject of picnics and he gazed disapprovingly at the offending object as it landed on the seat beside him. It was bad enough being relegated to the back of the car without having half of it taken up by what he considered to be highly unnecessary luggage, and he registered his disapproval in no uncertain fashion by breathing heavily down the back of his master’s neck. In a matter of moments there was a satisfactory wet patch on the shirt collar.
They had only gone a little way when Fräulein Brünnhilde gave a sudden wriggle. ‘I will take shelter while we pass the school gates,’ she announced, disappearing below the level of the dashboard with a total disregard as to whether or not her skirt would follow suit. Monsieur Pamplemousse felt a dryness in his throat as he glanced down. Patently it had decided against the idea of accompanying its owner.
Viewed from close quarters, Fräulein Brünnhilde seemed to have grown in stature; the word Amazonian would not be amiss in describing her. The material of her tee-shirt was strained far beyond the limits which might reasonably have been specified by even the most generous of garment manufacturers. From his vantage point in the back seat Pommes Frites followed the direction of his master’s gaze and he, too, eyed their passenger with interest. Interest which was tinged, despite his feelings about the ground-sheet, with a certain amount of awe.
Thanking his lucky stars that he’d thought to open the roof of the car before they left – it would have been unbearably warm otherwise – Monsieur Pamplemousse glanced up the driveway as they passed the entrance to the school. There was nothing to be seen. The gates were shut.
‘You are safe now.’
Fräulein Brünnhilde wriggled herself back up into a sitting position and readjusted the belt, removing a few loose dog hairs as she did so. ‘I see you read the English journaux,’ she said, catching sight of the newspaper lying on the shelf above the dashboard.
Monsieur Pamplemousse felt a quickening of interest as he considered the remark, weighed it, analysed it, and began to wonder if perhaps his original theory had been right after all.
‘You are interested in printing?’
‘No. What is interesting about printing?’ He received an odd look in reply.
‘I only wondered, that is all.’
‘It is a very strange question. Why do you ask if I am interested in printing?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse began to wish he hadn’t. Fräulein Brünnhilde clearly had a very literal turn of mind, the workings of which were not enhanced by her phrase-book style of conversation. He decided he must be patient. In fairness, his own knowledge of German was minimal.
‘Your spelling is not good, perhaps?’ he asked hopefully.
‘My spelling is very good. Why do you say my spelling is not good?’
‘Because you would not improve it by reading that particular journal,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse with authority.
‘Why do you say that? What is wrong with it! It is a very good journal.’
‘There are many mistakes. Some letters are not where they should be. Sometimes there are whole lines that are not where they should be.’ It was catching. Any moment now he would find himself drawing on an old English/French phrase-book he kept handy in case of an emergency. ‘You have taken the wrong tooth out!’ was one of his favourites. It was almost worth a visit to the dentist to try it out and see what happened.
‘I wish to improve my vocabulary. All the girls speak English. It is hard to talk to them. They say things I do not understand, so all the time I am doing the crossword.’
‘Ah, the crossword!’ Busy with his thoughts, Monsieur Pamplemousse felt the warmth of a body against him as he negotiated a bend too fast. ‘A bad-tempered worker gains in the beginning and gets something to eat. Nine letters.’
Fräulein Brünnhilde righted herself. ‘What are you saying? I do not understand.’
‘It is a clue from an English crossword,’ he explained.
‘Ah!’ Fräulein Brünnhilde nodded. ‘And what is the answer?’
‘Croissant.’
‘Croissant? I do not understand.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse changed down as they approached an even sharper bend. Ahead of them the Cornettes de Bises loomed large, marking the border between France and Switzerland. ‘It has to do with a bad-tempered ant – a worker – and the cross which has an “i” in it.’ He heard his voice trail away. He hadn’t totally understood the answer himself and it sounded even less probable now.
‘Why does the cross have an eye in it?’ demanded Fräulein Brünnhilde. ‘And why is the ant in a bad mood?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse felt tempted to suggest that perhaps it had been trying to explain crosswords to an idiot foreign ant, but he refrained.
‘On Saturdays,’ said Fräulein Brünnhilde unexpectedly, ‘they have a prize draw. There is a token for the first one they open. With the token you can buy a book. They have never opened one of mine. I have never won a prize.’
‘You like reading?’
‘No. I do not like reading.’
‘In that case,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘it is good that you have never won.’ Having delivered this remark he fell silent. The prospect of a picnic with Fräulein Brünnhilde was rapidly losing its attraction. He glanced across at her. She seemed to be breathing heavily, wriggling uncomfortably from side to side as though she was having complications beneath her tee-shirt. As she leaned forward to carry out some unspecified rearrangements and adjustments behind her back he couldn’t help but notice the coastal mountains of California and the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern America resting impressively against the dashboard. Although they were jiggling up and down in time with the motion of the car they had none of the gay abandon one might have expected. Clearly they were being held in place by a superior form of restraint.
Averting his gaze and fixing it firmly on the road ahead, he reached out with his free hand for the safety-belt. ‘May I help?’
His offer was rejected in no uncertain fashion.
‘Please do not do that!’ Fräulein Brünnhilde looked at him severely. ‘I have met your sort before.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered where. He felt aggrieved, both by the refusal of what had been intended as a genuine offer of help and by the sweeping generalisation that went with it.
‘You are not to touch my top storey. It is verboten. You may touch my knees. You may touch my ankles. You may touch my bottom storey. Anything else. But not my top storey.’
Undecided as to whether he had received an invitation, a reproof, or the laying down of a set of architectural guidelines for future reference, Monsieur Pamplemousse lapsed again into silence.
Fräulein Brünnhilde spoke first. ‘Are we going much higher?’ she enquired. ‘Heights give me problems. So do depths. I am best at sea-level.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse found the remark too cryptic even to think about. Holmes might have pondered over it, or perhaps Mr. Pickering. It sounded like one of his crossword clues.
‘We are nearly there. I am taking you to a little place I know.’
‘Is it where you take all your girls?’
‘I have never taken a girl there before in the whole of my life.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse was able to speak with conviction. The only other time he’d been there was with Madame Pamplemousse when they had been exploring the area a few years before, and that was hardly in the same category. He still remembered it; most of all he remembered the profusion of wild flowers. Lower down the valley and on the hillsides fruit was still on the trees waiting to be picked, the grapes were yet to be harvested, but here, high up in the mountains, there would be wild geraniums, harebells, daisies and late crocus amongst the clover.
He turned in past a notice which estimated in hours the time it would take a walker to reach the next vantage point. Breaking off from the narrow track, he drove down a short dip and then up a grassy slope until he reached the top of a ridge where, if his memory served him aright, he knew there would be a view through a gap in the hills to Lac Léman, and beyond that again to mountain-tops eternally covered in ice and snow. He wasn’t disappointed. The weather was on his side and the view was breathtaking.
Swinging the car round in a broad circle, he brought it to rest on top of the ridge facing the way they had come, its bonnet pointing back down the hill. Noting a strong smell of burning from the overworked brake-linings, he left it in gear and climbed out, followed by Pommes Frites.
‘It is very beautiful here. It is a good choice.’ Fräulein Brünnhilde appeared at his side carrying the groundsheet. She breathed in deeply, winced visibly, then touched his elbow with her hand. ‘It is very romantic. The lake and the mountains.’
‘It has always attracted poets and writers,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Especially the English ones. English poets are fond of lakes.’ He drew on memories of past conversations with Mr. Pickering. ‘It was outside the Hotel d’Angleterre at Sécheron that Byron first met Shelley. Another writer, Gibbon, finished a book called Decline and Fall at Lausanne.’ He pointed towards the gap in the hills. ‘Near there, where the lake is at its deepest, Shelley and Byron almost died in a sudden storm.’
Taking the groundsheet he shook it open and began laying it out behind the car. Along its sides there was a series of brass eyelets to which lengths of cord had been attached. He took the ones nearest to the rear bumper and began tying them securely in place, lifting up the edge of the sheet as he did so in order to make a barrier against the light south-westerly breeze.
‘It is hard to think of storms on such a day as this. Storms are for bad days.’ Fräulein Brünnhilde removed some pins from behind her ears, shaking her head as she did so. Her long, blonde hair glinted in the sunshine as it cascaded down her back. The effect was startling, like the sudden release of a waterfall, the transformation scene in a play.
Monsieur Pamplemousse cleared his throat, aware that Pommes Frites was watching too. He busied himself with a knot. ‘Perhaps it was the fault of Shelley himself. Water always had a fascination for him. In the end he died in a boat which had been christened Don Juan by Byron.’
Fräulein Brünnhilde looked at him curiously. ‘You know a lot about some things.’
‘No.’ Monsieur Pamplemousse went round to the side of the car and removed the carrier-bags. ‘I know a little about many things. That is not the same. It has always been one of my problems. I am a picker-up of unconsidered trifles.’
Before closing the door he signalled to Pommes Frites to get back in. There were times when Pommes Frites got in the way if he felt so inclined. Or, not to mince words, if he got an
attack of the jealousies. He looked as if he might have a bad one coming on. Pommes Frites obeyed the order with a marked lack of enthusiasm. He climbed into the car wearing his ‘hard done by’ expression.
Avoiding the unwinking gaze through the back window, Monsieur Pamplemousse began unloading the picnic, crouching as low as possible so as to avoid rubbing too much salt into Pommes Frites’ wounds. He stood the bottles of Mondeuse and Evian and the cardboard tube containing the champagne in a neat row in front of the bumper, then reached into the second bag. ‘Take this gâteau de foies blonds de volaille, par exemple. Some people might say that it does not matter how or where it came from; the fact that it is created from a poulet de Bresse means nothing to them. But to me, the knowledge that by law for the whole of its life, it will never have had less than ten square metres of land to itself, to run about on and to feed naturally, will also mean that its flesh will be juicy, and that will sharpen my appetite and thus increase my enjoyment.’
He took out two more packages and held them up. ‘Knowing that this ham was smoked over pinewood and juniper berries high up in the mountains where the air is crisp, will add romance to the flavour. And when we follow it with this’ – he unwrapped the Reblochon – ‘the knowledge that the word reblocher means the last and richest dregs of milk from the cow’s udder will not make it any more digestible, but it will warm my heart.’
‘You are interested in food?’ The thought was evidently a new one.
‘If I am fortunate enough to live to be ninety,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘and if I am equally lucky and continue to eat three meals a day it will amount to a grand lifetime’s total of over one hundred thousand meals. It would be foolish not to be interested in something which has occupied so great a part of one’s life and is in part responsible for its continuation. It would be even worse than economising on the bed in which one spends perhaps a third of one’s existence.’
Fräulein Brünnhilde lowered herself carefully on to the groundsheet and lay back staring up at the sky. She appeared to be encountering a certain amount of difficulty in carrying out the manoeuvre, rather as if some hidden and opposing forces were at work, but at least she made herself comfortable.