Part 7 (1/2)

'Ce sont les pa.s.seports,' she said, starting once again nervously thinking in French. 'It is rather curieux. A little bit funny.'

'Oh?' Pop said. 'How's that?'

'It was when I was looking at the pa.s.sports this morning,' Mademoiselle Dupont said. 'It was tres curieux very curieux but it occurred to me that if you are not married you are still a single man?'

She laughed quickly and rather self-consciously and Pop, in his customary rousing fas.h.i.+on, laughed too. That, he confessed, had never occurred to him either.

'Single chap, eh?' he said. 'Well, well.'

That afternoon, when he went back to the plage after having a short after-lunch nap with Ma on the bed, he found Mr Charlton in a state of unusual restlessness.

Charley, who had hitherto been fairly content, had made a disturbing discovery He had rumbled what the business of the big sailing coloured b.a.l.l.s was all about. They were all part of a design for the ensnarement, if not seduction, of Mariette.

The young Frenchmen, he had at last discovered, had every wind direction beautifully worked out. In that way they could be sure that the b.a.l.l.s would always float towards her, so that every five minutes or so they would find it necessary to invade the precious territory of scarlet bikini and naked flesh and, with voluble apologies, laughter, and much athletic show, recapture them.

Mr Charlton made it clear he didn't care for it at all.

On the morning of the 8th Pop lay alone on the plage, basking for the first time in the true heat of the sun. The sky was actually the colour Mr Charlton had so confidently predicted it would be. It hung overhead like a cornflower, brightest blue to the very distant edges of a sea that seemed to have receded across miles of new-bleached sand to the hazy rim of the world.

The extra-sensory impressions that were so lively in him that morning told him that this was perfick. It couldn't possibly be more perfick anywhere, even to go off to a pardon, however beautiful, as Ma and all the rest had done. Only Mariette, it seemed, had shown any reluctance to go to the great pardon of Le Folgoet, largely on the ground that it would interfere with her scheme for browning her body all over, but Charley had rumbled that. He had shown swift and admirable marital firmness and had, to Pop's great satisfaction, insisted she should go.

So by ten o'clock the Rolls was away, Mariette driving, the boot packed with a large picnic lunch of Mademoiselle Dupont's preparing, together with several bottles of vin rose and bags of peaches, sweet white grapes and pears. The children now liked vin rose as much as ice-cream and much more than orange juice and Ma was very glad. She thought it was very good for them.

As the Rolls drove away she was already busy giving little Oscar a drop of refreshment and with a free hand waving 'Have a good time' to Pop, who called back that he had The Times of the day before yesterday and that it wouldn't be long before he went down to read it over a snifter and watch the Breton women dozing in their stiff white hats and the sardine boats bringing in their catches to the quay.

'Perfick,' he kept saying to himself in the sun. 'Perfick. Absolutely perfick.' He could actually feel the early September heat, bristling with its heavy Atlantic salt, burning his chest and thighs and shoulders. 'Perfick. Good as champagne.'

Twenty minutes later he was asleep on his face and woke only just before midday a time when the plage always emptied itself so suddenly and completely of people that it was as if a plague had struck it to hear an elegant voice saying: 'Hullo, there. Comment va, mon cherit? How's the beauty sleep, darling? It's me.'

Pop turned and looked up. Above him a hatless vision in s.h.i.+rt and slacks of a warm pale shade of apricot, was sitting on the sea-wall above the plage. Down over the sand dangled the long, languid legs of Angela Snow, his kindred spirit of the summer party of a year before.

Pop was instantly glad of Charley's brief tuition in French and promptly leapt to his feet and said: 'Tres bien, mercil Et vous aussi, my old firework?'

'Scream,' she said. 'You speak the language!'

'Just enough,' Pop said. 'Count up to ten and ask for vin rosy'

'Been dying to see someone who's fun and here you are.'

Angela Snow gave a serpentine twist of her body and leapt down to the sand. Her hair had a glorious gold-white sheen on it and she gave the impression of having chosen the slacks and s.h.i.+rt not to match it but to heighten it and make it s.h.i.+ne more brilliantly. Her pretty feet were bare except for flat yellow sandals that simply slipped on, Chinese fas.h.i.+on, without a tie.

When she sat down her long legs curled themselves loosely underneath her. Her clear olive eyes seemed even larger than Pop remembered them and she seemed to embrace him with them as she asked him all about himself, how he came to be there, in this hole, and all that.

'Holiday' Pop said.

'Not alone?' Her usually languid voice was quick, even eager.

Pop at once explained about the family and how everyone else had gone to the great pardon at Le Folgoet.

'Iris too,' she said. 'My sister. Terribly religious, Iris. Got the most G.o.d-awful relidge, Iris has.'

Smiling to the uttermost edges of her large pellucid olive eyes she asked Pop, in turn, if he was very relidge.

Pop said he wasn't, very.

'No particular brand, you mean?'

Pop confessed he had no particular brand. He supposed if it came to a definition he would say that being alive was his relidge that and earth and woods and flowers and nightingales and all that sort of lark and enjoying it and not preventing other people doing so.

'Wouldn't do for Iris,' Angela Snow said. 'Couldn't have that, darling. Couldn't sell her that. She's an Ill-fare Stater. The iller you fare the gooder you are.'

Pop shook his head. Family throw-back? he suggested.

'Got to lacerate yourself, according to Iris. Beds of nails. Fakir stuff.'

'Sack-cloth and ashes?' Pop suggested.

'Dish-cloth and wet-breeches,' Angela Snow said, 'that's Iris. A positive wetter. Even says damp prayers. Sobs away half the time.'

Not much of a chum on holiday, Pop suggested. Why did she come?

'My idea,' Angela Snow said. 'Thought I might find some arresting Breton fisherman to bed her down with. Sort of cure. Don't know of an arresting somebody, cheri, do you?'

Pop said he didn't and laughed. He much enjoyed being called darling and cheri by Angela Snow.

'And how', she said, 'are the virgins?'

Throwing back her head Angela Snow laughed with all the rippling limpidity of a carillon about the virgins. She'd never forgotten the virgins. Seven of them and so foolish, riding on the donkeys at Pop's Derby in the summer gymkhana a year before. Almost needed changing still, she confessed, every time she thought of them. Dear virgins.

'Iris is one,' she said. 'The dears do make such hard work of it.'

'This place is full of 'em,' Pop said.

'You don't say?'

Pop referred her to the boyish female skinnies, largely unwashed, who disported themselves listlessly about the plage. Ma and he had discussed them thoroughly. Terrible little show-offs, they thought, with nothing to show. And French girls supposed to be so chick an' all. And fast. Even young Montgomery was bored.

'Terribly strict country still,' Angela Snow said. 'Big mother is watching you and all that.'

'Nothing for the Froggy boys to do but make eyes at Mariette.'

'Can't blame 'em,' she said. 'She's inherited all her father's virtues.'

Virtues? Pop laughed and said he didn't think he'd got very many of them.

'No?' Angela Snow said and gave him a smile of luscious simplicity.

Free to look about him again, Pop saw that the plage had miraculously emptied itself, as always, at the stroke of noon. In five minutes every salle a manger in the place would be full of ravenous masticators. The potage cultivateur would be on, stemming the first pangs of the pensionnaires. Everywhere the bread-slicers would be working overtime.