Part 8 (1/2)

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 chateaubriants and set them alight. Dramatic flames shot into the air, making the customers look keener than ever in antic.i.p.ation. 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 tres sn.o.b.

Out in the bay the copper sails of departing fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 marinieres 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 fas.h.i.+on.

'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 tres sn.o.b 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 s.h.i.+rt and drop her apricot slacks and stand before him in a yellow bikini so spa.r.s.ely cut that nothing really separated her from pure golden nakedness.

'My G.o.d, 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, cheri. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the navel reposing centrally below them like, Pop thought, a perfick little winkle sh.e.l.l.

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 h.e.l.l.'

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 courts.h.i.+p.

'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.