A Breath of French Air

by H. E. Bates

  Pop, masticating hard at bits of dog, supposed it was. Très snob – rather good expression, he thought. He must tell Ma.

  ‘How about some cheese? Or fruit perhaps?’

  Pop, who was feeling a little less light, but not much, said he fancied both.

  For the next half hour it was delicious to sit in the open air, on the edge of the pines, and eat cheese; peel big yellow peaches, and suck grapes; and also, Pop thought, to watch newly arrived customers struggling with their rectangles of charred dog.

  Now and then Pierre, ruder and louder as he warmed up to his work, poured brandy over the cháteaubriants and set them alight. Dramatic flames shot into the air, making the customers look keener than ever in anticipation. Pop enjoyed watching this and made Angela Snow laugh ringingly by saying that he supposed this was the way you made hot dog.

  ‘And coffee. What will you have with your coffee?’

  Pop said he fancied a Rolls-Royce.

  ‘One of your blinders?’

  Pop said it was; though Red Bull was stronger.

  ‘You think Pierre can mix it?’

  ‘Easy’ Pop said. ‘Half vermouth, quarter whisky, quarter gin, dash of orange bitters.’

  ‘That’ll suit me too,’ she said.

  ‘Better make ‘em doubles,’ Pop said. ‘Easier somehow’

  Pierre seemed unexpectedly impressed by the privilege of mixing strange and special drinks and momentarily dropped all rudeness to become softly, almost obsequiously polite: probably, Pop thought, because it was another case of très snob.

  Out in the bay the copper sails of departing fishing boats lit up the blue cornflower of sky with such intensity in the sunlight that they too were triangles of fire. All illumination too, Angela Snow’s hair seemed to shine more beautifully when broken pine shadow crossed it and left it free again as the sun moved over the sand.

  Soon the double Rolls-Royces had made Pop feel more like himself and he responded with an involuntary belch and a robust ‘Perfick!’ when Angela Snow suggested a short siesta in the dunes.

  ‘I’ll get the bill,’ he said.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘My party.’

  ‘Not on your nelly’ Pop said.

  ‘Darling, that’s not nice. I asked you.’

  ‘I’m paying,’ Pop said with all his charm. ‘You think I don’t know my technique? Rhubarb.’

  When the bill came Pop looked at it and suddenly felt cold. There were so many items and figures that he could neither disentangle them nor add them up. His eye merely grasped at a few painful essentials and blinked the rest.

  The portions of charred dog had each cost 1,200 francs; the monies marinières 700 francs; the cheese 500 francs; the double Rolls-Royces each 1,400 francs, making a final total, with tax on top of service and supplement on top of tax, of 11,650 francs.

  As he fumbled to pay this, a last alarming item caught his eye.

  ‘What’s couvert?’ he said. ‘What the blazes is couvert? We never had couvert.’

  Angela Snow laughed in her most celestial fashion.

  ‘That’, she explained to him, ‘was just the breathing charge.’

  Pop, who was never one to be unduly miserable over the cost of pleasure, thought this was very funny and was still laughing loudly about it when they reached the dunes. He must tell Ma that one: the très snob lark and the breathing charge. Jolly good, both of them.

  He was still more delighted when Angela Snow’s first act on reaching the sand-dunes was to cast off her shirt and drop her apricot slacks and stand before him in a yellow bikini so sparsely cut that nothing really separated her from pure golden nakedness.

  ‘My God, this is good,’ she said and lay flat on her back in a nest of sand. This is good. Where are you?’

  Pop didn’t know quite where he was. He felt more than slightly lost and dazzled.

  ‘Come and lie down with me, chéri. Come on.’

  This invitation was delivered with such bewitching languor that Pop was at her side, half in a dream, before he really knew it. Almost at once she closed her eyes. The deep olive lids, shutting out the large pellucid eyes that were always so warm and embracing, seemed now to offer him the further invitation to take in the whole pattern of her long slender body: the slim beautiful legs and arms, the sloping shoulders and the tiny perfectly scooped salt-cellars below the neck, the small but upright breasts, and the navel reposing centrally below them like, Pop thought, a perfick little winkle shell.

  As if knowing quite well that he was taking his fill of these things, and with some pleasure, she let her eyes remain closed for fully two minutes before opening them again.

  Then she smiled: still a languid smile but also rather fixed.

  ‘Suppose you know I’m madly in love with you?’

  Pop confessed he didn’t know. It was news.

  ‘Outrageously All-consuming,’ she said. ‘Night and day.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ Pop said. ‘Perfick.’

  ‘Not on your nelly,’ she said. ‘It’s hell.’

  A recurrent lick or two of fire from the Rolls-Royce raced about Pop’s veins and caused him to say that this was crazy.

  ‘Right first time,’ she said. ‘Crazy. Mad. Mad as those hares.’

  For crying out gently, Pop thought. That was bad. By the way, had she ever seen those hares?

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  Watching those pellucid olive eyes that now seemed to have added a look of mystery to their largeness, Pop told her about the hares: the strange wild gambollings that you would see in March, the leaping, dancing business of spring courtship.

  ‘Fascinating,’ she said. ‘That would be a thrill.’

  ‘Bit mysterious,’ Pop said. ‘All that tearing about and dancing.’

  ‘Not more than us,’ she said. ‘What do we dance for? I mean all that stuff in Freud.’

  What, she asked, did he feel about Freud?

  ‘Never touch it,’ Pop said.

  ‘Scream,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

  She laughed so much at this that it was fully a minute before she was calm again and said:

  ‘Here’s me madly in love with you ever since that virgin-firework lark and you’ve never even kissed me.’

  This was a state of affairs, Pop said, that could be remedied with no delay at all.

  A second later he was lying at her side, kissing her for the first time. He had always been a great believer in first times, his theory being that there might never be another, especially where women were concerned, and now, with velvet artistry, one hand softly under her small left breast, he made the kiss last for ten minutes or more.

  This experience left even Angela Snow slightly light-headed. She seemed to come round, already slightly tipsy after the wine, as if after a deep, passionate faint. Her large eyes blinked slowly, in a dream, and there might even have been a tear of emotion in them as she smiled.

  He must save one of those for Iris sometime, she said in a languid attempt at light-heartedness, and what a lucky creature his wife was.

  It was essential to keep all those things, Pop thought, on a light-hearted level. Else it wouldn’t be fair to Ma. This now seemed the critical moment with Angela Snow and he laughed resoundingly.

  ‘What’s funny?’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ Pop said, ‘if everybody had their right I haven’t got a wife.’

  ‘Joke.’

  It certainly was a bit of a lark, Pop said, when you thought of it. Him and Ma not married. And Ma on a separate passport an’ all. Did Angela mean she’d never heard?

  ‘Not a peep,’ she said. She’d concluded from the offspring alone that all was well.

  ‘Must get it done some day,’ Pop said. ‘No good. You know we’ve had another since I saw you?’

  Unsurprised, Angela Snow held him in a gaze fully recovered from its first emotional storm and said with languor:

  ‘Good show. Means you’re still agile, virile, and fertile.’

  Pop said he
hoped so and was so amused and even slightly flattered that he granted her the indulgence of a second kiss, holding her right breast this time, again with prolonged tenderness.

  Passion and fervour left their mark on Angela Snow even more deeply than before and as she came round a second time she again felt it necessary to check emotion with yet another touch of flippancy.

  ‘Don’t know which I liked best. The one from the married man I had first, or the single one I had second.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Dupont knows I’m not married too. Rumbled it from the passports.’

  ‘Oh! she does, does she?’

  And once again she gave him a smile of luscious, penetrative simplicity.

  They lay on the dunes, watching the sun across the bay and occasional triangles of sail-fire cut across the blue horizon, for the rest of the afternoon. As time went on her almost naked body grew warmer and warmer in the sun. The sand of the dunes became quite hot to the touch as the sun swung westwards and most of the time Pop couldn’t help thinking what a beautiful place it would be for Mariette and Charley to try out sometime. It might encourage them a bit.

  At last, when it was time to go, Angela Snow said:

  ‘See you soon, poppet. Don’t let it be long. The nerves won’t stand it.’

  ‘Come and have lunch at the hotel one day,’ Pop said. ‘Ma’d love to see you.’

  ‘Even the hotel,’ she said. ‘Anywhere. But don’t let it be long.’

  Finally, with a long quiet sigh, she drew on her slacks and Pop said good-bye to what he thought, with pleasure but detachment, was the nicest body he had ever seen since he first met Ma.

  That night, as he sat in bed reading The Times and smoking his late cigar, he broke off several times from reading to tell Ma about Angela Snow, the terrible lunch, the bill, the très snob lark, and the breathing charge.

  Ma said she was very pleased about Angela Snow; it had made his afternoon.

  ‘Get round to kissing her?’

  Pop confessed that he had but Ma, huge and restful in transparent nightgown after a day that had been a strange mixture of religion and fair, French fish-and-chips and saints, remained quietly unperturbed.

  ‘Says she’s in love with me.’

  ‘That pleased you, I’ll bet. Nice girl. I like her. Bit of a card.’

  For the third or fourth time that evening Pop remarked that he was thirsty. He expected it was the mussels. All shell-fish made him thirsty.

  ‘Well, go down and get a drink,’ Ma said. ‘Bring me one too.’

  Pop said this was a good idea and got out of bed to put on a silk dressing-gown vividly embroidered in green and purple with vast Asiatic dragons, a last-minute holiday present from Ma, remembering something else as he did so:

  ‘Ma, you remember that lot of pickled cucumbers, gherkins or whatever they were I had left over from that army surplus deal? The one I made nearly six thousand out of?’

  ‘The ones you got stored in the top barn?’ Ma said. ‘I know.’

  Pop chuckled ripely.

  ‘Hocked ‘em all to one of the fishing boat skippers this afternoon after Angela had gone,’ he said. ‘Seems they’re just what they want to pep up their diet with. Terrible monotonous diet they have, these Froggy fishermen. Potatoes and fish all boiled up together. Saw ‘em doing it. And gallons of wine.’

  ‘Hope you’ll get paid.’

  ‘Coming over to pick ‘em up himself and pay me,’ Pop said. ‘Puts in to Shoreham sometimes. What do you want – champagne?’

  ‘Just what I could do with,’ Ma said.

  Pop, going downstairs, found Mademoiselle Dupont going over her books in the Bureau. She got up to greet him in her customary nervous fashion, fearing another complaint, but Pop at once put her at rest by explaining about the champagne.

  ‘And what mark of champagne do you prefer, Monsieur Larkin?’

  The best champagne Pop could ever recall drinking was something called Bollinger ‘29 at a big Hunt Ball at home, just before the war.

  He mentioned this but Mademoiselle Dupont shook her head. ‘In all France I do not think you could now find one bottle of Bollinger ‘29. All is past of that year.’

  ‘Pity,’ Pop said.

  ‘But I have Bollinger ‘34. That too is good.’

  That, Pop said, would do him all right.

  Later he insisted on carrying it upstairs himself: ice-bucket and bottle and glasses on a tray. As he did so Mademoiselle Dupont stood in her habitual position at the foot of the stairs and watched him in soft admiration, dreamily thinking.

  Day by day it was becoming increasingly clear to her that Monsieur Larkin was a milord. Only a milord could smoke such expensive cigars in bed at night and ask for Bollinger ‘29. Only a milord could walk the quayside with such an elegant lady as she had seen him pass the hotel with that afternoon: so golden and aristocratic in her elegant apricot slacks.

  At the turn of the stairs Pop turned, cocked his head to one side, and looked back.

  ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle, dormez bien,’ he said nippily. ‘Sleep well.’

  ‘Bonsoir,’ she said. ‘Sleep well, milord.’

  Pop thought that this milord lark just about took the biscuit and he told Ma all about it as he uncorked the champagne in the bedroom.

  ‘Called me my lord, Ma,’ he said. ‘What price that?’

  Ma, who sat up in bed popping Chanel No. 5 down her bosom, thought it was a scream.

  ‘Lord Larkin,’ she said. ‘Sounds all right, though. Not half bad. I think it sounds perfick, don’t you?’

  Pop said he certainly did and, laughing softly, poured out the champagne. In fact it was more than perfick.

  ‘I think it’s jolly très snob, Ma,’ he said, ‘don’t you? Very très snob.’

  6

  Pop began to watch events on the plage with growing uneasiness, if not dismay. Things were not going well at all. It was clear as daylight that Mariette and Charley were right off hooks.

  Periodically he talked to Ma about it, but Ma seemed quite indifferent, beautifully unperturbed. With great placidity she sat all day watching the sea, the French mammas, the leaping young gods, the tatty little French girls, and the fishing boats putting out to sea. She knitted, read magazines, sunbathed, and gave little Oscar the refreshment he needed, serenely unconcerned.

  ‘What’s Mariette sulking for?’ Pop wanted to know. ‘Dammit, she hardly speaks to Charley nowadays.’

  Ma made the astonishing suggestion that it was probably lack of variety.

  ‘Variety?’ Pop said. This was beyond him. ‘Variety in what?’

  ‘Before she was married she never had less than two or three running after her,’ Ma said. ‘Now she’s only got Charley.’

  Pop, who had never looked at it in this way, had nothing to say and Ma went on:

  ‘What do you think I let you run around with Angela Snow and old Edith Pilchester for?’

  Pop said blandly he hadn’t the foggiest.

  ‘Variety,’ Ma said serenely. ‘Variety.’

  Pop still couldn’t understand why Mariette should always seem to be sulking. At this rate he and Ma would be fifty before they had any grand-children: a terrible thing. Why were them two always off hooks? Did Ma think that it was possibly some defect in Charley’s technique? And if so should he have a quiet word with Charley on the matter?

  ‘Don’t you do no such thing,’ Ma said. ‘I’ve had a word already.’

  ‘With Charley?’

  ‘No: with Mariette.’

  Setting aside the notion that perhaps the whole matter was bound up in some curious feminine secret, Pop said:

  ‘Give her any ideas?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ma said. ‘I did. I told her to start flirting.’

  Pop whistled. Even he was stunned with surprise.

  Ma said she didn’t see that there was anything to be surprised about. Even the twins and Primrose flirted. Even Victoria had started. Didn’t Pop use his optics nowadays? Hadn’t he seen Zinnia and Petunia m
aking eyes at those two little black-eyed French boys who wore such funny little pinafores? They were at it all day. They had them in a tizzy.

  ‘Flirting’s good for people,’ Ma said. ‘It’s like a tonic. You ought to know.’

  Pop laughed and asked Ma if she’d thought of going in for a little herself.

  ‘I might,’ she said. ‘Only it’s a bit difficult with Oscar.’

  Pop was pleased at this and asked Ma if she thought a little drop of flirting now and then would do Charley any harm?

  ‘Flirting with who?’ Ma, who was sitting placidly on the sand, huge pale legs outstretched, indicated with a contemptuous wave of her heavily ringed fingers the pallid creatures who populated the plage on every side. ‘With this tatty lot? I pity him.’

  Pop said he was thinking more of somebody like Angela Snow. She could teach him a thing or two.

  ‘You should know,’ she said. ‘He’s not her type, though. Not like you are.’

  ‘She’s got a sister,’ Pop said. ‘Very religious.’

  ‘Give the poor chap a chance,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to make it easy for him. Not –’

  She broke off and looked at her wrist-watch. It was ten o’clock: time to give Oscar a drop of refreshment. With a slight sigh she picked him up from where he had been lying with some of her own reposeful placidity on a large clean napkin and then dropped one side of her magenta bikini top and produced a handsome expanse of bosom like a full-blown milky balloon. Into this Oscar buried himself with eager rapidity while Ma went on:

  ‘Oh, talking about flirting and all that, I think we’re going to have trouble with our Primrose.’

  Primrose was eleven: even Pop, very faintly surprised, thought that was a bit dodgy.

  ‘Trouble? How?’

  ‘In love. Bad.’

  Pop said he’d go to Jericho. In love? How was that?

  ‘How?’ Ma said. ‘What do you mean, how? Naturally, that’s how. Developing early, that’s how. Like I did.’

  Ah! well, Pop said, that was different. That was the right spirit. Nothing like starting young. Who was it? Not some French boy?

  ‘Two,’ Ma said.

  Pop, laughing good-naturedly, remarked that he supposed there was safety in numbers, to which Ma firmly shook her head.