A Breath of French Air

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Give us a hand, Charley,’ Pop said, ‘before she goes under for the third time.’

  Pop and Charley started to pull at Ma, who began to laugh with huge jellified ripples. The man in pince-nez looked on with frigid, withdrawn, offended eyes. Pop and Charley pulled at Ma harder than ever, but with no result except to set her laughing with louder shrieks, more fatly.

  Presently Ma went strengthless. It became impossible to budge her. Above the telephone the light came on again, illuminating Ma as a collapsing balloon that would never rise.

  ‘Ma, you’re not helping,’ Pop said. He pleaded for some small cooperation. ‘If you don’t help you’ll have to go round with the damn thing stuck on your behind for the rest of your natural.’

  Ma laughed more than ever. The vast milky hillock of her bosom, deeply cleft, rose and fell in mighty breaths. Her whole body started to sink lower and lower and suddenly Pop realized that even if she survived, the chair never would.

  He started to urge Charley to pull again. In a sudden wrench the two of them pulled Ma to her feet and she stood there for some seconds with the chair attached to her great buttocks like a sort of tender.

  Suddenly, with shrieks, she sank back again. Another peal of thunder, more violent than any other, rent the air above the hotel. The man in pince-nez pleaded ‘La chaise, madame – je vous prie –la chaise!’ and for the ninth or tenth time the light went out.

  When it came on again Ma was on her feet. Behind her the chair was flatter than a door-mat and by the telephone the man in pince-nez had his head in his hands.

  ‘Madame, madame, je vous –’ he was saying. In distress the necessary language for the occasion did not come to him for some moments. When it did so his English was sadly broken up: ‘Madame, please could – Oh! madame, I ask – I please –’

  With incredible swiftness Pop came forward to defend Ma. Irately he strode over to the man in pince-nez and struck the desk a severe blow with his fist, speaking peremptorily and with voluble rapidity.

  ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’ he shouted, ‘and comment ça va and comment allez-vous and avez-vous bien dormi and qu’est-ce que vous avez à manger and à bientôt san fairy ann and all that lark!’

  The little man in pince-nez looked as if he’d been hit with a pole-axe. His mouth fell open sharply, but except for a muted gurgle he had nothing to say. A moment later Pop and Ma started to go upstairs, followed by the children, Ma still laughing, Pop glad in his heart of the excellent tuition given by Charley in various French phrases likely to be of use in emergency.

  At the foot of the stairs he paused to turn with pride and perkiness to look back.

  ‘Accent all right, Charley-boy?’

  ‘Perfick,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Absolutely perfick.’

  Pop waved a mildly deprecating hand.

  ‘Très bon, you mean, très bon,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget we’re in France now, Charley-boy. We don’t take lessons for nothing, do we? À bientôt!’

  3

  Nearly an hour later, when Ma brought the children downstairs for dinner, closely followed by Charley and Mariette, Pop was already sitting moodily in a corner of the salle à manger, a room of varnished, ginger-coloured matchboard and glass built like a greenhouse shrouded with yellowing lace curtains against the westward side of the hotel. Some squares of glass were coloured blue or ruby. A few, broken altogether, had been patched up with squares of treacle-brown paper and it seemed generally that the whole ramshackle structure, battered by the Atlantic storm, might at any moment fall down, disintegrate, and blow away.

  Driven by ravenous hunger and thirst to the bar, Pop had found it furnished with a solitary stool, a yard of dusty counter, a dozing grey cat, and a vase of last year’s heather. The stool had two legs instead of three and all about the place was that curious pungent odour that Ma had been so quick to notice earlier in the day: as if a drain has been left open or a gas-tap on.

  In the salle à manger, in contrast to the silent half-darkness of the bar, a noisy, eager battle was being waged by seven or eight French families against the howl of wind and rain, the tossing lace curtains, and more particularly against what appeared to be dishes of large unpleasant pink spiders, in reality langoustines. A mad cracking of claws filled the air and one plump Frenchman sat eating, wearing his cap, a large white one, as if for protection against something, perhaps flying claws or bread or rain.

  Three feet from Pop’s table a harassed French waitress with a marked limp and loose peroxide hair came to operate, every desperate two minutes or so, a large patent wooden-handled bread-slicer about the size of an old-fashioned sewing machine: a cross somewhere between a guillotine and a chaff-cutter.

  This instrument made crude groaning noises, like an old tram trying to start. Slices of bread, savagely chopped from yard-long loaves, flew about in all directions, dropping all over the place until harassed waiters and waitresses bore them hurriedly off to eager, waiting guests. These, Pop noticed, at once crammed them ravenously into their mouths and even gluttonously mopped their plates with them.

  Presently the rest of the family arrived: Mariette immaculate and perfumed in a beautiful sleeveless low-cut dress of emerald green that made her shoulders and upper breast glow a warm olive colour, Ma in a mauve woollen dress and a royal blue jumper on top to keep out the cold. Ma had plenty of Chanel No. 5 on, still convinced that the hotel smelled not only of mice but a lot of other things besides.

  As the family walked in all the French families suddenly stopped eating. The French, Charley had once told Pop, were the élite of Europe. Now they stopped ramming bread into their mouths like famished prisoners and gaped at the bare, astral shoulders of Mariette, Ma’s great mauve and blue balloon of a body, and the retinue of children behind it.

  Most of the older French women, Pop thought, seemed to be wearing discoloured woollen sacks. The younger ones, who were nearly all tallow-coloured, bruise-eyed and flat-chested, wore jeans. It was hard to tell any of them from boys and in consequence Pop felt more than usually proud of Mariette, who looked so fleshily, elegantly, and provocatively a girl.

  Presently the waitress with the limp brought the menu and then with not a moment to spare hopped off to work the bread machine.

  ‘Well, what’s to eat, Charley-boy?’ Pop said, rubbing his hands. ‘Somethink good I hope, old man, I’m starving.’

  Mr Charlton consulted the menu with a certain musing, studious air of English calm.

  ‘By the way, Charley,’ Pop said, ‘what’s “eat” in French? Haven’t learned any words today.’

  It was Pop’s honest resolve to learn, if possible, a few new French words every day.

  ‘Manger,’ Charley said. ‘Same word as the thing in the stable – manger.’

  Pop sat mute and astounded. Manger – a simple thing like that. Perfickly wonderful. Unbelievable. Manger. He sat back and prepared to listen to Charley reading out the menu with the awe he deserved.

  ‘Well, to begin with there are langoustines. They’re a kind of small lobster. Speciality of the Atlantic coast. Then there’s saucisson à la mode d’ici – that’s a sort of sausage they do here. Spécialité de la maison, I shouldn’t wonder. Hot, I expect. Probably awfully good. Then pigeons à la Gautier – I expect that’s pigeons in some sort of wine sauce. And afterwards fruit and cheese.’

  ‘Sounds jolly bon,’ Pop said.

  Charley said he thought it ought to satisfy and Ma at once started remonstrating with Montgomery, Primrose, Victoria, and the twins about eating so much bread. She said they’d never want their dinners if they went on stuffing bread down.

  ‘What shall we drink?’ Charley said.

  ‘Port,’ Pop said. He too was stuffing down large quantities of bread, trying to stave off increasing stabs and rumbles of hunger. Ma agreed about the port. It would warm them all up, she said.

  ‘I doubt if they’ll have port.’

  ‘Good God,’ Pop said. ‘What? I thought you said the Froggies lived on wine?�
��

  ‘Well, they do. But it’s their own. Port isn’t. I suggest we drink vin rosé. That’ll go well with the fish and the pigeon.’

  The harassed waitress with the limp, freed momentarily of bread-cutting, arrived a moment later to tell Charley in French, that there were, after all, no langoustines.

  ‘Sorry, no more langoustines,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘They’ve got friture instead.’

  ‘What’s friture?’

  ‘Fried sardines.’

  Ma choked; she felt she wanted to be suddenly and violently sick.

  ‘Oh! fresh ones of course,’ Charley said. ‘Probably caught this afternoon.’

  ‘In that lot?’ Pop said and waved a disbelieving hand in the general direction of the howling, blackening gale that threatened increasingly to blow away the salle à manger.

  A second later a vast flash of lightning seemed to sizzle down the entire length of roof glass like a celestial diamond-cutter. A Frenchwoman rose hysterically and rushed from the room. The chaff-cutter guillotine attacked yet another loaf with louder and louder groans and a long black burst of thunder struck the hotel to the depth of its foundations.

  Alarmed too, the children ate more bread. Pop ate more bread and was in fact still eating bread when the friture arrived.

  ‘They’re only tiddlers!’ the twins said. ‘They’re only tiddlers!’

  ‘Sardines never grow any bigger,’ Charley said, ‘otherwise they wouldn’t be sardines.’

  ‘About time they did then,’ Ma said, peering dubiously at piled scraps of fish, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘Bon appétit!’ Mr Charlton said, and proceeded enthusiastically to attack the friture.

  Pop, turning to the attack too, found himself facing a large plateful of shrivelled dark brown objects which immediately fell to pieces at the touch of a fork. Scorched fragments of fish flew flakily about in all directions. The few crumbs that he was able to capture, impale on his fork and at last transfer to his mouth tasted, he thought, exactly like the unwanted scraps left over at the bottom of a bag of fish-and-chips.

  ‘Shan’t get very fat on these,’ Ma said.

  In a low depressed voice Pop agreed. Ma’s great bulk, which filled half the side of one length of the table, now and then quivered in irritation and presently she was eating the friture with her fingers, urging the children to do likewise.

  The children, in silent despair, ate more bread. Savagely the guillotine bread-cutter worked overtime, drowning conversation. And presently the limping waitress brought the vin rosé, which Charley tasted.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said with mounting enthusiasm. ‘Quite delicious.’

  Ma drank too and suddenly felt a quick sharp stream of ice descend to her bowels, cold as charity.

  At last the multitudinous remains of the friture were taken away, plates piled high with brown wreckage, and Ma said it looked like the feeding of the five thousand. Pop drank deep of vin rosé, raised his glass to everybody, and unable to think of very much to say remarked mournfully:

  ‘Well, cheers, everybody. Well, here we are.’

  ‘We certainly are,’ Ma said. ‘You never spoke a truer word.’

  After a short interval the saucisson à la mode d’ici arrived. This consisted of a strange object looking like a large pregnant sausage-roll, rather scorched on top. Slight puffs of steam seemed to be issuing from the exhausts at either end.

  Ma remarked that at least it was hot and Pop, appetite now whetted to the full by another sharp draught or two of vin rosé, prepared to attack the object on his plate by cutting it directly through the middle.

  To his complete dismay the force of the cut, meeting hard resistance from the surface of scorched crust, sent the two pieces hurtling in the air. Both fell with a low thud to the floor.

  ‘Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!’ Ma said. ‘Mice everywhere.’

  ‘I’ll order another,’ Charley said. ‘Ma’moiselle!’

  In silent patience Pop waited, but by the time a waitress could be spared from the bondage of bread-cutting the rest of the family had finished the battle with the saucisson à la mode d’ici.

  With gloom, drinking more vin rosé to fortify himself, Pop waited while Charley explained to the waitress the situation about the unfortunate disappearance of his second course.

  The waitress seemed dubious, even unimpressed. She simply stared coldly at Pop’s empty plate as if knowing perfectly well he had eaten what had been on there and crushingly uttered the single word ‘Supplément’.

  ‘She says if you have another you’ll have to pay extra,’ Charley said.

  ‘Better order another bottle of vin rosy instead, Charley’ Pop said.

  Weakly he started to eat more bread. He had, he thought, never eaten so much bread in his life. He no longer wondered why the guillotine worked overtime.

  Suddenly thunder roared again, faintly echoed by the rumblings of his own belly, and presently the little man in pince-nez appeared, making his furtive mole-like way from table to table. When he saw the Larkins, however, he stood some distance off, in partly obsequious retreat, an uneasy grimace on his face, his hands held together.

  Once he bowed. Mr Charlton bowed too and Ma grinned faintly in reply.

  ‘Nice to see that,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Typical French. He’s come to see if everything’s all right.’

  ‘Why don’t we tell him?’ Ma said.

  ‘What do we have next?’ the twins said. ‘What do we have next?’

  ‘Pigeons,’ Pop said. The thought of stewed pigeons made his mouth water. In wine sauce too. ‘Pigeons.’

  ‘We want baked beans on toast!’ the twins said. ‘And cocoa.’

  ‘Quiet!’ Pop thundered. ‘I’ll have order.’

  A moment later a waitress, arriving with a fourth plate of bread, proceeded to announce to Mr Charlton a fresh and disturbing piece of news. There were, after all, no pigeons.

  Pop felt too weak to utter any kind of exclamation about this second, deeper disappointment.

  ‘There’s rabbit’, Charley told him, ‘instead.’

  Instantly Pop recoiled in pale, fastidious horror.

  ‘Not after myxo!’ he said. ‘No! Charley, I couldn’t. I can’t touch ‘em after myxo!’

  Myxomatosis, the scourge of the rabbit tribe, had affected Pop very deeply No one else in the family had been so moved by the plague and its results. But to Pop the thought of eating rabbits was now as great a nausea as the thought of eating nightingales.

  ‘It started here in France too,’ he said. ‘The Froggies were the ones who first started it.’

  ‘Have an omelette,’ Charley said cheerfully.

  ‘They don’t suit him,’ Ma said. ‘They always give him heartburn.’

  Pop could only murmur in a low, dispassionate voice that he had to have something, somehow, soon. Heartburn or no heartburn. Even an omelette.

  ‘A steak then,’ Charley said. ‘With chips.’

  At this Pop cheered up a little, saying that a steak would suit him.

  ‘Alors, un filet bifteck pour monsieur,’ Charley said, ‘avec pommes frites.’

  ‘Biff-teck! Biff-teck!’ the twins started shouting, punching each other, laughing loudly. ‘Biff-teck! Biff-you! Biff-you! Biff-teck!’

  Pop was too weak to cry ‘Quiet!’ this time and from a distance the man in pince-nez stared in disapproval at the scene, so that Ma said:

  ‘Sssh! Mr Dupont’s looking.’

  ‘That isn’t Mr Dupont,’ Charley said. ‘He’s only the manager. Mr Dupont’s dead.’

  ‘Die of over-eating?’ Ma said.

  Pop laughed faintly.

  ‘The hotel is run by a Miss Dupont – Mademoiselle Dupont,’ Charley explained. ‘But it seems she’s away in Brest for the day.’

  ‘When the cat’s away,’ Ma said.

  ‘Well,’ Charley said, ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that didn’t explain a slight lack of liaison.’

  Pop, too low in spirits even to admire Charle
y’s turn of phrase, drank deeply of vin rosé.

  ‘Better order some more of the juice, Charley old man,’ he said. ‘Got to keep going somehow.’

  ‘Biff-teck! Biff-teck! Biff-you! Biff-teck!’

  ‘Quiet!’ Pop said sharply and from across the salle à manger several French mammas looked quickly round at him with full sudden glances, clearly electrified.

  Half an hour later he had masticated his way through a bloody piece of beef roughly the shape of a boot’s sole, the same thickness, and about as interesting. He ate the chips that accompanied it down to the last frizzled crumb and even dipped his bread in the half-cold blood.

  Ma said she hoped he felt better for it but Pop could hardly do more than nod, drinking again of vin rosé.

  ‘Don’t even have ketchup,’ he said, as if this serious gastronomic omission were the final straw.

  Soon the twins, Primrose, Victoria, and Montgomery, tired out from the journey, went up to bed and presently Pop began to throw out broad hints that Mariette and Charley ought to be doing likewise.

  ‘It’s only nine o’clock,’ Mariette said.

  ‘I used to be in bed at nine o’clock at your age,’ Pop said.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Ma said.

  ‘We thought there might be dancing’, Charley said, ‘somewhere.’

  ‘There’s sure to be a night-spot in the town,’ Mariette said. ‘Something gay.’

  With a queer low laugh and a wave of the hand Pop invited the two young people to look and listen at the signs and echoes of the little port’s mad, night-time gaiety: the howl of Atlantic wind and rain on the glass roof of the salle à manger, the whirling curtains, the crash of spewed foam on the quayside, and the intermittent lightning and cracks of thunder that threatened every few moments to put the lights out.

  ‘Gorblimey, hark at it,’ Pop said and once again urged on Charley and Mariette the fact that they would be much better off, in all respects, in bed.

  Mr Charlton evidently didn’t think so.

  ‘I’d rather like some coffee,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ Mariette said.

  Pop agreed that perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea at that. At least it would save him from going to bed on a completely empty stomach.