‘Roger! Roger Baines! Is it? No. Yes it is, by Jove.’
The sudden shout arrested him half way along the harbour wall. The August afternoon was too rough for sailing. A hot scudding wind, almost a gale, was blowing in from the land, setting a whole crowd of moored craft jollying up and down like so many busybody ducks. Along the French coast, for miles, a great span of sand-dunes was smoking, every dune a cauldron of swift white fire.
‘First I thought it was you and then I wasn’t sure. I waved but you didn’t see me. Then I felt an awful damn fool—and then—know how I finally recognised you?’
‘Haven’t a clue, Maxie, old boy. Maxie—it can’t be you!—’
‘The missing two fingers. There’s only one curly-headed flying type I know that’s got two fingers missing from the left hand, says I to myself, and I know where they were shot off, says I.’
‘Maxie! Marvellous to see you. Terrific. How’s the score?’
‘Oh! living a life of tolerable ease and comfort, thanks. And you?’
Roger Baines lifted his left hand. The first and fourth fingers, with the stumps of the two missing fingers low between them, made a sort of victory sign.
‘Thanks to the two fingers, not bad. Put the old gratuity and the pension together and got into plastics on the ground floor. And what does Maxie do?’
‘Awfully little, old boy.’ Maxie laughed, mouth and teeth handsome, the chestnut-grey remnants of an Air Force moustache spruce and smart above them. ‘It’s my new working philosophy.’
‘Married?’
Roger Baines, Maxie thought, was getting rather fat. He supposed it was the good living. He was heavy and pink in the jowls. His hair was thinning too.
‘My eye,’ he said. ‘I’m here with Mother. You?’
‘Was, but not any more. She told me I was wedded to the business and really I suppose I was. Couldn’t deny it. So we called it a day and I got myself a boat instead. But it’s damn well too rough for sailing today.’
‘You don’t mean to tell me you’ve got it over here?’
‘It’s the pale green one over there. I was just going to give her the once over.’
Maxie whistled with surprise, saying that plastics were indeed a man’s best friend. It clearly wasn’t like the old days, when they were with the squadron and life was just a bowl of pea-nut butter. An inevitable moment of reminiscence followed in which Roger Baines was asked with a touch of dark jocularity if he remembered Auxi le Château? Maxie, with much nostalgia, had been thinking of it only yesterday.
‘Auxi le Château?’
‘Old boy, you can’t have forgotten. You simply can’t have. We were on half rations at the time at Abbeville. In that first phoney autumn. It was awfully rough, if you remember. I can still hear a type complaining bitterly in the Mess when champagne went up to three bob a bottle.’
‘It’s a long time ago. You might as well ask me to remember the Wars of the Roses.’
‘Nothing so dim, old boy. And it isn’t so long ago. After all we called on her more recently than that.’
‘Her?’
‘Madame la Comtesse. We saw her again in that blissful summer of invasion.’
With a bright burst of nostalgic laughter Roger Baines suddenly remembered too. He actually struck Maxie with comradely ardour on the back. He was with him now. What on earth had caused him to forget that generous creature?
‘Too much grindstone, old boy. That’s what. Too much plastics. You work too hard—bad thing, work. I think of her all too often. She haunts me. I swim with her in that lake. I eat with her in that château. I get considerably worked up, I tell you, when I think of her—’
‘There used to be the most wonderful peaches on the garden wall. And huge melons in great big glasshouses. And butter. Big blocks of butter.’
Maxie seemed suddenly about to double up with laughter. He remembered a terrific day, he said, when six or seven of them were there.
‘We were most of us gloriously pickled,’ he said. ‘But you were the most gloriously glorious of the lot. Just to impress her you stood to attention on a third floor window sill and drank a quart of cider. Remember? You said it was like something in Tolstoy—War and Peace or something. We held a couple of potato sacks underneath in case you fell.’
‘And did I fall?’
‘Two chaps had you firmly by the braces all the time.’
By Jove, they found themselves saying, almost together, those were the days. It certainly took you back, Roger Baines said and he seemed to see once again, as through a tender glass, the large grey château, the colour of an old elephant crouched on a hillock above a wooded valley where, on a thick-reeded lake, flocks of wild duck flew.
‘It can’t be all that far from here,’ Maxie said.
‘What can’t?’
‘Auxi. The château.’
In a half dream Roger Baines now found himself remembering not only the château but the Countess. She was rather tall, he recalled, for a French girl, but that particular feature about her never appeared to be dominant because she was plump and generous in the body too. She had altogether an air of great healthiness. She was fresh-complexioned and fair, in the Norman fashion, and much given to ringing, brilliant laughter.
‘Did you mean by that,’ he said, ‘that you thought as officers and gentlemen we ought to call and leave our cards?’
‘It’s a thought. Why not?’
‘It’s a very pleasant thought.’
‘Very pleasant. Do you think she’d welcome us?’
‘She always did.’
They laughed, again simultaneously, but it was Roger Baines who said:
‘Suppose she didn’t? After all, she must be a woman of nearly fifty now. The fires may have got a bit damped down.’
‘Can’t believe it, old boy. After all, we’re all that much older. Are your fires damped down?’
Suddenly Roger Baines felt himself becoming peculiarly excited. It wasn’t at all unlike that particular exhilaration he had so often felt in the old days, when about to fly. You didn’t know quite what was going to happen to you—disaster or glory—but you knew it was going to be hellishly good while it lasted. It was worth a bang.
‘All right,’ Maxie said. ‘Let’s have a bash. We might take a little present too. Say some perfume?’
‘Fair enough. We’ll go in my car. You can read the map. Unless you can remember the road?’
Maxie laughed again, teeth and mouth more handsome than ever under the pressure of his own excitement, his fingers brushing his moustache with the lightest gesture of self-approval.
‘We’ll get there by instinct,’ he said. ‘Like two old dogs following the scent home.’
‘I’ve got an idea this is going to be awful fun,’ Maxie said.
After all it was Roger Baines who remembered the road. A bridge over a river, blown up before invasion, had been rebuilt and now shone in startling new white stone, clean as a starched collar across the valley. A vivid memory of the days when the bridge was cut and you had to ferry across on six planks and a couple of petrol drums made him say:
‘That’s the road. Whipping straight up the hill there. I’m sure there’s a church over the other side. What did you say about fun?’
‘This jaunt. I think it might be fun. I mean I don’t somehow feel she’ll have changed.’
‘Well, it might be and it might not. Supposing the Count should be there? We never saw the Count, did we?’
‘No. The first time he was away in Paris. Wasn’t he a deputy or something? The second time the Huns had yanked the poor chap away.’
‘Which made it better.’
They laughed again; the car seemed positively to spring across the bridge, and Maxie said:
‘When you come to think of it you and I were damn lucky.’
‘How? Lucky?’
‘First we were in the same squadron. Then we pulled out with Fighter Command before Dunkirk. Then we had a good old cufuffle with the Hun and came through that. Then we got parted up and eventually posted to the same squadron again. Only casualty—those two fingers you lost over Dover.’
‘Bloody careless that was, too. Still I always say I’d rather have the pension than the fingers.’
‘Yes, you might say it’s gone pretty well on the whole.’
It had indeed, Roger Baines thought. Damn well. The fingers had been a bit of a bind at the time of course, but looking back you could say that on the whole the war had been fun. Especially the château bit. That had brightened the tedium an awful lot.
Beyond the crest of the hill, where thick woods of oak and hazel and hornbeam were being beaten into deep dancing waves by the summer gale, there was the church he remembered and then, rather sooner than he expected, the château, crouching exactly as he recalled it, grey and elephantine, its thick lawns spreading before it between battalions of silver poplars.
‘Think there’s anybody at home?’ Maxie said. ‘Looks a bit dead to me.’
‘It’s the way all French châteaux look. I never quite know what it is about them. They always look a bit like memorials to me.’
‘Mausoleum-like.’
‘Exactly.’
A fairly long gravel drive, beyond rusting iron gates of an over-elaborate spidery pattern, swept round the lower circumference of the hillside and then climbed up through the poplars. Every leaf was whipping wildly in the gale, the sound like that of a great crowd of whistling, hissing people.
‘Certainly looks empty.’ The jalousies of all the front windows, steely grey in colour, were tightly closed, striking Maxie into sudden depression. ‘Still, we can look round I suppose.’
‘I seem to remember they used the back of the house more.’
Immediately beyond the poplars the high stone walls of the garden began. It was here that peaches had grown in such luxuriance in far distant summers and where on very hot days you could smell the scent of melons on the air.
‘Better leave the car here,’ Roger Baines said, ‘and walk the rest.’
He was glad, a few moments later, to be on the other side of the wall, out of reach of the hissing wind and the sound of wildly prancing leaves. Something almost like a vacuum shrouded both garden and house in comparatively silent seclusion, uncannily.
Suddenly Maxie said he remembered a courtyard—didn’t they used to sit out there on big benches and drink cider in the evenings?—and a few moments later they were standing inside it. Huge smooth flags of stone, across which dust and torn green leaves danced in squirming spirals, paved every yard as far as the big back door of the house, where a huge iron bell-pull hung like a rusty mace.
‘Well, we can but ring,’ Maxie said. It didn’t seem much like the old days, he thought; you could hardly call it gay. ‘How’s your French?’
‘Pretty ropey, old boy. How’s yours?’
‘I can but have a bash.’
Maxie tugged the bell-pull. The only answering sound to come from it was its own rusty squeak. Maxie, depressed again, inclined his ear to the door, at the same time looking at his watch. It was four o’clock and he said that perhaps la Comtesse was resting.
‘Ring again.’
Maxie rang the bell again. Then, while waiting and in order to break if only briefly the spell of depression, he raised his eyes to look at the third floor windows. It was there, he reminded Roger Baines, that the incident of the cider had taken place. It made him laugh even now—more especially the bit about the potato sacks. Damn funny.
Roger Baines looked up. He could remember nothing whatever about that incident. He merely felt slightly dizzy.
‘I think we’re out of luck,’ Maxie said.
A moment later he thought he could hear footsteps behind him. He turned simultaneously with Roger Baines and there, across the courtyard, saw a girl coming to meet them.
She was very dark, about eighteen he thought, with large sullen brown eyes, a sallow skin and rather flattish figure. She was wearing a loose black sweater and black jeans and her hair hung loose too. The jeans were not very clean and her naked feet, pushing from under the straps of a pair of once white sandals, looked unwashed and dusty.
‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle,’ Maxie said. ‘Madame est là? La Comtesse?
‘My mother is in Paris,’ the girl said in English. ‘She will not be back for some days.’
Her voice was full of a curious indifference; her lips, naturally colourless and without lip-stick, tightened up immediately she had spoken.
‘Good Heavens,’ Maxie said, ‘how on earth did you know we were English?’
Without speaking, she gave him a look that would have been contemptuous if there had been the slightest life in it. Its very deadness withered him even more than contempt would have done and Roger Baines said quickly:
‘I ought to explain that we are old friends of your mother’s. We knew her during the war.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh! here. She was most hospitable to us. Most kind.’
‘We were Air Force officers,’ Maxie said with an enthusiasm that he thought would impress her. It failed completely and he said: ‘We were here at the beginning of the war and then towards the end. Of course you weren’t here then, so you wouldn’t remember.’
She greeted this piece of unusual insight with a stare. It too had no life in it and Maxie looked awkwardly away. The rough hot wind had made him very thirsty but for some reason he was fearful of asking for a drink of water.
‘I’m sorry we shan’t see your mother,’ Roger Baines said. ‘Perhaps you will tell her we called?’
‘She knew many Air Force officers. Which are you?’
‘Oh! I’m sorry. Tell her that Mr. Shaw and Mr. Baines called.’
There was no hint of promise in the way she stared back. Feeling thirstier every moment, Maxie said:
‘You speak excellent English. Like your mother. I suppose you learned it at school?’
‘I learned it in England.’
‘Ah! you’ve been to England,’ Maxie said, again with enthusiasm. ‘You liked it?’
‘No.’
Neither Maxie nor Roger Baines found themselves with anything to say. Fully half a minute went by in silence. A pile of leaves, screwed by a burst of wind into a cowering, hissing heap, whisked across the courtyard and died uncannily, without movement or sound, in a corner.
It was time to go, Roger Baines started thinking, but something made him say:
‘I suppose you wouldn’t mind if we looked at the garden? There used to be such marvellous peaches there, I remember.’
She gave him another spiritless stare and Maxie said:
‘Yes, you see we had such splendid times here. It was wonderful. Your mother was so gay.’ It seemed for some reason a good time to recount the episode of the third-floor window. He looked up, pointing. ‘We had terrific times. One evening Mr. Baines stood on the window sill up there—that middle one on the third floor and drank a whole quart of cider.’ Maxie burst into spontaneous laughter. ‘I have to laugh about it even now.’
Roger Baines laughed too but the girl simply stared.
‘We held potato sacks down here,’ Maxie said, ‘in case he fell. You know, to catch him.’
The glint of a strange smile opened in her face like a bloodless cut and then closed again.
‘Potato sacks! I ask you. Potato sacks! It’s the potato sacks that make it so funny.’
‘Well, it certainly helped to push the war along,’ Roger Baines said.
‘Of course,’ she said and the bitterness of the two words was caustic.
There was no hint of the mother in her at all, Roger Baines thought. She simply wasn’t the same flesh and blood. Perhaps she was like the father? he thought, and suddenly said:
‘I suppose the Count isn’t here either? We should have liked the pleasure of meeting him.’
‘The Count is dead. The Germans shot him.’
Maxie licked his dry lips and then impulsively decided that this was the best of all possible moments to beg a glass of water.
‘Water?’ she said. ‘I will bring it to the garden.’
While the girl went into the house Roger Baines followed Maxie across the courtyard and into the garden. Peaches, as before, hung ripe on sunny walls, netted with white muslin against wasps and birds. He then remembered how once, as a special gesture of celebration, the Countess had opened champagne, adding cold peach juice to it and rings of pink-hearted peach flesh, to make the most celestial of all the drinks he had ever tasted. Great stuff. He could taste its ambrosial coldness now.
‘Do you suppose la Comtesse has married again?’ Maxie said.
‘Most likely. Anyway the Count couldn’t be the girl’s father.’
Involuntarily they looked sharply at each other and then as quickly looked away again, Roger Baines staring at the peaches imprisoned in their muslin shrouds.
‘By the way, haven’t we forgotten something?’ Maxie said.
‘What?’
‘The present we brought for Madame.’
‘Ah! the perfume. You’ve got it, haven’t you? The Mitsouko. Or did you leave it in the car?’
‘We left it in the car,’ Maxie said. ‘I’ll go and get it.’
‘I remember she always put it on the back of her legs, just behind the knees. She was the first woman I ever knew who did that. God, it was exciting. Everybody else put it on behind their ears—’
‘I’m off. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Maxie had been gone about three minutes in the direction of the hissing chorus of wind-blown poplars when the girl came back, carrying a green wine bottle of water and two glasses. Her flat, wholly unresponsive face seemed more lifeless than ever.
She gave him a glass and poured water into it. As he took the glass she noticed the stumps of his two shot-off fingers. Her colourless lips seemed to curl and he said.
‘Thank you. It’s very kind of you.’
‘Kind?’
It might have been a word of contempt. Unaccompanied as it was by any expression at all, but merely by the same extraordinary neutral flatness as before, it sounded like a sneer.
‘Your mother was always awfully kind to us.’
‘I can imagine so.’
‘I remember once,’ he said, trying to restore some normality to the conversation by echoing Maxie’s enthusiasm, ‘when she wanted to celebrate the Liberation. She made us the most marvellous peach-and-champagne cup. Ice cold.’
‘Liberation?’
Again the word was like a sneer.
‘Yes. You know, 1944, the Liberation.’
‘What liberation? Liberation from what?’
‘From war,’ he said, ‘and so on—’
‘We’re still at war, aren’t we? We’ve never been anything else. Wars have to be helped along. You said so.’
He didn’t say anything. He supposed they were still at war. There was an awful lot of war about, if you came to think of it. But not wars you could work up much enthusiasm about, as it were. Not like the old days.
Presently Maxie came back, smiling, rubbing the backs of his fingers across his moustache in that self-approving way of his, bringing with him a large bottle of Mitsouko, handsomely wrapped in blue paper and tied with shining pink ribbon.
‘Ah! the water. Thank you very much, Mademoiselle. Merci. I’m dying for that.’
Eagerly seizing a glass, Maxie drank deep, not merely once but a second and a third time.
The girl watched impassively. Her large inhospitable brown eyes neither changed their expression nor flickered for a second.
‘Nectar,’ Maxie said. His wind-parched mouth felt eased at last. ‘Absolute nectar. Champagne couldn’t have gone down better.’
‘Not even the peach-and-champagne cup?’ Roger Baines said.
‘Not even that.’
‘Can’t agree. There was never any nectar quite like that.’
Fired once again by the memory of that far-off nectar, Roger Baines stood idly wondering how many times he had, in those two summers, made love to la Comtesse. Impossible to remember. At the same time he seemed to recall that one chap, Forster he thought his name was, had rather foolishly put it all down in a diary. For his part he thought it was all a bit much in black and white. There were limits. Better to remember it as a chain of dreams.
‘I suppose your mother has married again?’ Maxie said.
‘No.’
For an embarrassed second or two he felt bound to look at Roger Baines again but he thought better of it and merely glanced at the girl. It was all very awkward. Her face, at the same time, had taken on a curious brooding frown, darkly melancholy. She was silently staring into far distances, as if probing for something: it might have been for the truth about something that had long been withheld from her.
To Maxie it seemed obvious that she was merely sulking. With penetrative insight he told himself that that was her way of attracting extra attention. She had an enormous chip on her shoulder—mere youth, perhaps? Or possibly something else?—he put the thought aside. Anyway, that’s how the young were these days—they dressed in black, the girls wore trousers and no lip-stick, they didn’t wash and didn’t comb their hair. It was all a way of attracting greater attention.
So awkward was the silence becoming by this time that he was greatly relieved to hear Roger Baines say:
‘I must just walk round the garden before we go. I should just love to smell those melons again.’
He walked away across the garden, down a long paved path that led, eventually, to an orchard of old apples and pears. There the wind was blowing with scorching roughness. Under every fruit tree a gold and green clutch of fallen fruit lay scattered. He stood for a few moments and stared, picking out from the wind-shaken scene a single particularly pleasant memory. He had made love to la Comtesse for the last time on a dark August evening there, under one of the many old, big apple trees. She had been exceptionally free with him on that occasion: perhaps because an enormous apple had suddenly fallen and struck him full in the middle of the back, making her laugh with near-hysteria. Love and laughter went very well together, he remembered her saying. They did indeed.
Slowly he walked back, to be met half way along the garden path by Maxie, who said:
‘I’ve been wondering. I feel a bit sorry for the kid, somehow. Shall we give her the Mitsouko?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Parting gesture and all that. Might brighten her up a bit. Fair enough?’
‘Fair enough.’
They turned and started to walk back to where the girl, still with the empty bottle and the two glasses in her hand, was waiting by the wall of peaches.
‘Oh! by the way, I asked her why she disliked England and she said for the same reason she disliked France. What do you make of that?’
‘Search me.’
‘She’s obviously got the most enormous chip on her shoulder.’
‘Oh! enormous.’
‘Hates war like poison and all that. Probably one of those ban-the-nuclear-stuff fanatics.’
‘Shouldn’t wonder. I suppose they get over it in time.’
When they got back to the girl she was still staring with that melancholy probing frown into the far distance. She had almost to be woken up to hear Maxie say that he was afraid they would have to go now and would she perhaps accept, as a little parting gift, the Mitsouko.’
‘You know Mitsouko, I’m sure. The perfume.’
‘I never use perfume.’
The rejection of the perfume was arid, toneless but not quite impersonal. It rejected them too.
‘Oh! please take it,’ Maxie said. ‘Do.’
‘Yes, do,’ Roger Baines said. ‘It would give us a lot of pleasure.’
She abruptly switched her stare from the distance to the two men and now her eyes looked not merely sullen and melancholy but old and bruised.
‘You brought it for my mother, didn’t you?’
Without waiting for an answer she turned sharply and started to walk back to the château. She had gone only six or seven yards before she suddenly stopped, turned and stared emptily back at them.
‘I’ll tell my mother you called,’ she said.
She turned again and this time went straight on, the uncombed strands of her rag-tailed hair blowing octopus-like in the wind, until she disappeared.
For a few minutes Maxie stared at the gay ribbon and paper that encased the Mitsouko and then said:
‘This is obviously where we came in.’
‘It is indeed.’
They walked out of the shelter of the big garden wall and back to the car. The hissing lamentations of the whipped poplar leaves seemed louder than ever on the hillside. They got into the car and Maxie laid the Mitsouko on the back seat.
‘I’ll give it to my mother,’ he said. ‘Unless you want it?’
‘Oh! no, you have it.’
‘No, you. I couldn’t care less.’
They drove down the hill and across the valley.
‘And what,’ Roger Baines said, ‘do you suppose we’d done to deserve all that?’
‘God knows,’ Maxie said. ‘Search me.’
‘Strange kid.’
Maxie pondered, thinking slowly to a bright conclusion, his fingers lightly brushing across his grey-brown moustache.
‘We should never have tried to give her the Mitsouko,’ he said. ‘I see that now. The Mitsouko was the big mistake. Still, it’s an ill wind—my mother will be pleased.’
To Roger Baines the Mitsouko didn’t seem important. As he drove on it seemed more pleasant to think of walls of peaches, the smell of melons and an apple falling in the darkness.
‘Pity not to have seen la Comtesse,’ he said. ‘Sad not to have seen la Comtesse. Very, very sad.’
In the distance a bend of a river sparkled in the sun. Everywhere trees, driven by the summer gale, were in torment. Continuous flocks of dark cloud shadow scurried across the land like scattered helpless sheep.