Part 1 (1/2)

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.