A Breath Of French Air Part 1

A Breath of French Air.

H. E. Bates.

1.

Little Oscar, Ma Larkin's seventh, to whom she hoped in due course to give a real proper ribbon of names, probably calling him after some famous explorer, admiral, or Roman Emperor, or even the whole lot, lay in his lavish silvery pram in the kitchen, looking remarkably like a very soft, very large apple dumpling that has been slightly over-boiled.

Continual small bubbles of spittle oozed softly like pink juice from his lips and Pop, coming in to breakfast after giving morning swill to the pigs, paused affectionately to wipe them off with a feeder worked all over in royal blue daisies and a bright scarlet picture of Miss m.u.f.fet, the big spider, and the curds-and-whey. Ma, who looked if anything six inches wider since having the baby than she had done even while carrying it, had worked the feeder herself. She hadn't all that much time to spare with seven on her hands but she was surprisingly clever with her plump olive fingers that were almost hidden in pearl and turquoise rings.

'Soon be as fat as a Christmas gander,' Pop said, at the same time pausing to give his son-in-law, Mr Charlton, his customary open-handed clout of greeting in the middle of the back. Mr Charlton, who sat patiently looking through his spectacles at The Times while waiting for his breakfast, took the salutation without flinching. Nearly a year in the Larkin household had hardened him a lot.

Ma, in bright purple blouse and pink ap.r.o.n and with her dark rich hair still in curling pins, had three pounds of sausages in one frying-pan, several rounds of fried bread and seven or eight rashers of bacon in another and a basket of fresh pink field mushrooms waiting for a saucepan. Just before Pop bent to kiss her full on her handsome mouth and wish her good morning, she dropped half the mushrooms into the saucepan, where they at once started hissing at an intruding lump of b.u.t.ter as big as a tennis ball, cooking fragrantly.

'Mariette not down?' Pop said. 'Kids off to school? Going to be a beautiful day. Perfick. Mushrooms smell good.'

Outside it was raining in drilling summer torrents. Nothing could be seen of the far side of the junk-yard, the woods, and the surrounding meadows in the cloudy, steamy air. Nearer to the house the only visible moving things were a few hens shaking damp brown feathers under a straw hovel, a line of six or seven Chinese geese wandering dopily in and out of a wet jungle of rusty iron and nettles, and a small flock of sparrows bathing with sprinkling wings in muddy pools of water.

This was July, Ma thought, and it was enough to give you the w.i.l.l.i.e.s. It was a real thick 'un, or what she sometimes called bad courting weather. Not that she had any intention of going courting, but it reminded her of times when she had. Wet summer days and evenings frustrated you that bad you felt all bottled up. You couldn't let yourself go at all. The fact that she had let herself go with splendidly fruitful effect over the years didn't occur to her at all. It was just that she hated rain in July.

Pop, irrepressibly optimistic that the day was going to be a beautiful one, inquired again about his eldest daughter, Mariette. She was nearly always up with the lark, out riding or something, and he missed her when she didn't come down. It wasn't like her.

'Not feeling all that good,' Ma said. 'Bit peaky.' Pop p.r.i.c.ked up his ears sharply. Not good? He wondered what it could be? Morning sickness perhaps. He hoped so.

'Oh?' he said. 'Thought she looked a little bit below par yesterday. Anythink I ought to know about?'

Pop gave a sharp, inquiring look at Ma and then a still sharper, even more searching look at Mr Charlton. But neither Ma nor Charley seemed to think it was anything he ought to know about and Ma went on moodily prodding at sizzling mushrooms and Mr Charlton with The Times.

'She needs a change,' Ma said. 'Ought to have a holiday. Weather's getting her down.'

'Soon clear up,' Pop said. 'You'll see. Be perfick by midday Beautiful.'

'Don't you believe it,' Ma said. 'It's one of them Julys. I've seen 'em before. They never get right. By the time you get into August it's like they have in India. What are they called, Charley, them things?'

'Monsoons,' Mr Charlton said.

'That's it.' Ma, with a gesture of unaccustomed impatience, threw four more links of sausage into the frying-pan. 'I don't know as I shan't be screeching for a holiday myself if this lot goes on.'

The sausages. .h.i.t the frying-pan with the sound of red-hot irons plunging into freezing water and immediately little Oscar began to cry.

Pop rushed at once to pick him up but Ma said breakfast was ready and began to serve the first of the bacon, the sausages, the fried bread, and the mushrooms to Mr Charlton, who was still deep in The Times.

'I know what he wants,' Pop said. 'He wants his morning Guinness.'

'Well, he'll have to wait for his Guinness, that's all,' Ma said. 'Like other folks do.'

Oscar cried out plaintively again and Pop asked with some concern if he shouldn't give him a piece of fried bread to be going on with? Ma said 'Not on your nelly' in a voice very near to severity. It wouldn't hurt him to cry for a bit and in any case he'd have to learn to be patient. You had to learn to be patient in this world. Anyway, sometimes.

'He wants his drop o' Guinness,' Pop said. 'I know.'

Mr Charlton, who had heard nothing of this conversation, folded The Times into quarter-page size, then suddenly pointed to a picture in it and said that that was a most extraordinary thing.

'What is?' Pop said, 'wanting a drop o' Ma's Guinness?'

Pop laughed uproariously, as if in fact it was.

'How many sausages, Pop?' Ma said. 'Four? Shall I do you a couple of eggs before I sit down?'

Pop said five sausages and he would manage with two eggs.

'What's extraordinary?' Ma said.

'This picture,' Mr Charlton said. 'It's a picture of a little place called St Pierre le Port. I used to go and spend every summer holiday there when I was a boy. My aunt and uncle used to take me.'

'Let's have a look,' Ma said.

'This is the actual view I used to see from my bedroom window. The actual view here along the quay.'

'Seaside?'

'On the Atlantic. The sea goes out for miles at low tide and you can paddle on lovely warm sand and there's a funny little train comes from somewhere inland and goes trundling from place to place along the coast.' Mr Charlton had forgotten sausages, bacon, fried bread, and mushrooms, and even the cries of Oscar in a delicious ecstasy of recollection. 'Oh! I hope they haven't done away with that train. I loved that little train. That train is France for me.'

Pop, open-mouthed, stopped biting sausage and looked completely startled at the word France, as if it were something he had never heard of before.

'France? You went abroad?' he said. 'For your holidays? Didn't your Pop and Ma want you?'

'I lost them both when I was six,' Mr Charlton said. 'I think I told you.'

At this moment Oscar started to cry again and Ma said she would switch on the radio to soothe him down. She turned the switch and The Blue Danube bellowed out at full blast.

'Uncle Arthur and Aunt Edna adored France,' Mr Charlton said. 'I think they loved it even more than England. They went so often in the end you'd have taken them for French. Especially Uncle Arthur.'

In a low voice Pop asked Mr Charlton to pa.s.s him the mustard. He could think of nothing else to say.

'It brings it all back,' Mr Charlton said, 'that picture in The Times.'

Pop, still submerged in disbelief at the astonis.h.i.+ng course of the conversation, now became aware of another remarkable thing. Ma was not eating breakfast.

'Ma, you're not having anythink,' he said. 'What's up?'

Ma got up from the breakfast table. Oscar was crying more loudly than ever, undrowned by The Blue Danube.

'Not very peckish,' Ma said. 'I think I'll give Oscar his first. Perhaps I'll feel better after that.'

'Hope so. Terrible. What's up with everybody? Everybody looks pale round the gills.'

Without speaking Ma, who did indeed feel pale round the gills, went over to the pram and picked up little Oscar, who belched sharply and stopped crying immediately. Then she kissed him softly in the nape of his neck and sat down again at the table, at the same time undoing her blouse.

All this time Pop had been silently dipping sausage into mustard, staring at his plate, unable to think of a word to say, but now he looked up in time to see Ma extract from her blouse a large expanse of olive bosom twice as large as a full-ripe melon. Into this ma.s.s of tender flesh Oscar buried his face and settled down.

'Was it healthy?' Pop said.

'France you mean?' Mr Charlton said. 'Oh, very. The air's wonderful there in Brittany. All hot and sultry. It was awfully cheap too. And marvellous food. Wonderful food.'

'Did you say hot?' Ma said.

'Some summers we'd never see a drop of rain. And the sea I always remember how blue the sea was. Vivid. Just the colour you see on travel posters.'

'I should like to feel it hot again,' Ma said. 'Like last year. I haven't felt the sun hot on my chest since that day you and Mariette were married in September.'

'Always hot in Brittany,' Mr Charlton said. 'That's my recollection. You can bet on that.'

Oscar pulled at his mother's breast with steadfast sucks of contentment and an occasional rich, startling plop! like that of a cork coming out of a bottle. In silence Pop dipped pieces of sausage into mustard and found himself brooding over a remembrance of the day Mariette and Charley had been married.

A very lovely day that had been, as Ma had said: all light and hot suns.h.i.+ne, with a big marquee in the garden and plenty of iced port, cold salmon, and champagne. He would remember for ever Mariette's striking and unconventional dress of yellow silk, so suited to her dark hair, and her bouquet of stephanotis and cherry-red nerines that appeared to have gold-dust sprinkled all over their petals. Everybody was there that day and Mariette's sisters, Zinnia, Petunia, Victoria, and Primrose, were bridesmaids, each in deep cream, with head-dresses of small golden roses and posies of lily-of-the-valley. Ma, like Miss Pilchester and several of their friends, wept openly at the sight of these touching things and even Pop had a tear in his eye.

It was less than a week after Mariette and Charley were back from honeymoon when Pop began to inquire of Ma if anything was happening yet?

Ma said she should think not everybody wasn't like him.

'You've only got to start eyeing me across a forty-acre field,' she said, 'and I start wondering whether I'm going to have twins or triplets.'

You'd got to give them a chance, she went on, and Pop could only reply that he thought a fortnight was plenty of chance. He murmured something about the question of Charley's technique, of which in view of his great shyness before marriage Ma had entertained considerable doubts, but Ma replied blandly that she thought that if there was anything Charley didn't know by this time Mariette would soon teach him. Pop said he should hope so.

Ever since that time there hadn't been a day when Pop had not been increasingly fired with the hope that Ma would soon have some interesting news to tell him. But nothing ever happened and now at last Pop had begun to have considerable doubts about Charley's desire, or even ability, to make him a grandfather. He thought the whole situation was getting everybody down. Ma seemed mopey and was always complaining of the summer rain. Mariette looked decidedly pale too and even seemed, he thought, a shade thinner and lacked that plum-like bloom that even at seventeen had given her such a dark and luscious maturity.

'Got your watch on you, Chatley?' Ma said. 'How long's he had on this side?'

Mr Charlton looked briefly up from reading The Times to glance at his wrist-watch. With unconcern he gave another glance at Oscar, nestling into Ma's bosom like a piglet into the side of a vast pink sow, and said he thought it was about ten minutes.

Deftly Ma released Oscar from her bosom. There was another rich, milky plop! as Oscar let go the cork of her nipple and then a sudden complaining wail of hunger as she slipped her breast back into her blouse.

'Let me get the door open for goodness sake, child,' Ma said.

'Never known anybody like him for his Guinness,' Pop said.

'Oh!' Ma said, 'haven't you?'

A moment later Oscar was buried again in rosy flesh, all contentment, while Ma held him close to her with one hand, trying at the same time to pour herself a cup of tea with the other.

Mr Charlton was quick to see her difficulties and got up at once to pour it for her himself. That was one of the things Ma liked about Charley: these little touches of nice manners. They did you so much good.

After Charley had poured the tea she took two or three sips slowly, as if in contentment or deep thought or both, and then made a sudden p.r.o.nouncement that set Pop choking.

'I should like to go to France,' she said.

'G.o.d Almighty,' Pop said. 'What for?'

Hot mustard stabbed at the back of his throat and set him coughing.

'For a holiday of course,' Ma said. 'I think it would do us all good to get some sun.'

Pop could think of nothing to say. He sat in meditative, flabbergasted silence while Mr Charlton let out a positive crow of delight and approval at what Ma had said.

'Heavens, that would be marvellous,' he said. 'That would be great. 'That little train again, that beach, that warm sea. Those little sweet grapes and the peaches. That food '

He was suddenly overcome with an emotional desire to strike Pop in the back and actually did so. It was a thing he had never felt urged to do before, but its effect on Pop was only to stun him into a deeper, more confused silence than ever.

' "Come unto these yellow sands and then take hands," 'Charley started quoting, at the same time getting up from the breakfast table. 'I've simply got to tell Mariette.'

Charley was off, Pop thought. That feller Keats again.

'We haven't gone yet,' Ma said.

'I'll call her anyway.'

While Mr Charlton went upstairs to call Mariette, whistling all the way up, and Ma sipped at her tea and little Oscar at his mother, Pop sat thinking. The first stunning surprise of Ma's p.r.o.nouncement had pa.s.sed. It now began to occur to him that the situation was not at all unlike that in which Charley, soon after his marriage, had suggested that Pop should give up the Daily Mirror as his daily newspaper and start instead to take The Times.

At the time that too had seemed a surprising, unthinkable, revolutionary thing to do. Then Pop remembered that quite a number of other people in the village, including Miss Pilchester, the Brigadier, and Sir George Bluff-Gore, all took The Times too and if they could do so why not he? Miss Pilchester was as poor as a church mouse; the Brigadier hadn't had a new suit for twenty years and generally wore socks that didn't match; and Sir George Bluff-Gore was so hamstrung with taxes that he couldn't afford to keep the ancestral Gore Court going and had had to sell it to Pop himself for demolition and then go and live in a stable. They were the aristocracy, of course, these people; they were the toffs; but if they could afford The Times so could he.

Now he didn't regret taking The Times at all. It gave you something, The Times did, though he wasn't quite sure what. Ma liked it too, though she still took the Mirror herself, otherwise she would never know what was in her stars. Nevertheless she got a big thrill out of the Sat.u.r.day Times advertis.e.m.e.nts for rich and exotic foods and was always sending away for lists and catalogues. Such things didn't inspire Pop and he still thought there was nothing so good as roast beef and Yorks.h.i.+re, rice pudding, lamb and mint sauce, and plenty of roast goose and apple sauce on Sundays. He supposed he might have to change some day, though he didn't see why.

Oscar had taken another five minutes of his mother when Ma pulled the cork of her nipple away from him with another gentle plop and turned him over to lie against her shoulder. The result of this was a series of sudden belches, each richer, louder and milkier than the first.

Ma said that that was better and it must be the gin she'd had last night.

Instinctively Oscar renewed his nuzzling for the breast. Ma said she might just as well turn herself into a four-ale bar and be done with it and gave a sudden deep sigh that had in it a certain note of weariness and even despair.

Pop felt suddenly concerned at this sigh and said: 'Ma, don't you really feel well? Tell me, my old duck.'

In reply Ma could only ask him how he would feel if someone had played football inside him for nine months, but it was a question for which Pop could think of no sensible answer and he was both glad and relieved to hear Mariette and Charley coming downstairs.

'As well as turning yourself into a bar three or four times a day. Somehow I think I'm getting too old for this lark.'

Ma, he thought, had never talked like this before. It struck him as being chronic. Too old? d.a.m.n it, she was only thirty-six.

'The trouble is this one's like you,' Ma said. 'Never satisfied.'

A moment later Mariette came in, her dark hair still loose from sleep, wearing a green silk dressing-gown and crimson slippers. In a new state of excitement she ran straight to Pop, who had a mouth full of sausage, mushroom and mustard, and started kissing him with a warm fervour that reminded him of Ma when he had first met her at the age of fifteen.

'Oh! wonderful, wonderful Pop. Oh! you're always so wonderful.'

What had he done now? Pop started to say.