Parlour Four Read online

  The girl had smiled at him, although with an unlingering glance. Then she closed her book, slipped from the wall, and walked back to the Grand Hôtel. Yet certainly her father could not be one of those who tinned bad meat for cats. Perhaps she was really a princess, just as Iseult had been.

  On the following morning she made no appearance. André, now deeply in love’s toils without quite knowing it, waited and watched much as the young Troilus must have waited and watched for Cressida as dawn paled the camp-fires of the Achaeans. There was only the detestable M. Hochedur effecting his humiliating travesty (as it might be felt to be) of the unassuming but necessary and sensible labour upon which André himself was engaged. M. Hochedur was moreover in a bad temper. He twice slapped the face of the miserable little Alexandre in a merely wanton way, and whereas he had never admitted any awareness of André’s presence before, he now treated him to an ugly scowl whenever their paths crossed. Conceivably he was feeling that this particular El Dorado had exhausted itself and that he ought by this time to have moved on to another beach.

  It was then that the odd thing happened.

  André was fully clad again – in a T-shirt much admired by his mother, which bore on its breast the injunction En avant Citroën! Some consciousness newly born in him made the boy aware of a demeaning slant to this – for why should he thus advertise a chunk of hardware he was unlikely ever to possess? So perhaps he wasn’t himself in a very good temper either. With unwonted clumsiness he sometimes fumbled in his picking up of the previous day’s squalid litter, and it was because of this that at one point his fingers went quite deep into the sand and came upon some small, hard object buried there. He brought it to the light. It was a woman’s ring, and he gazed at it for a moment unbelievingly. As he had told Jules, he had never come on anything valuable throughout his now considerable professional experience. Set in a band of white metal, slender but curiously heavy, was a single large and brilliant gem.

  ‘Ten francs.’

  André became aware that M. Hochedur had halted beside him, that the man’s eyes were fixed on the ring, and that he had uttered these words with an objectionable lack of ceremony.

  ‘Pardon?’ André said.

  ‘The thing’s a mere trinket. But I’ll give you ten francs for it.’ M. Hochedur held out an imperious hand. ‘Show it to me.’

  This command André, no doubt foolishly, obeyed. So M. Hochedur took the ring, and at once afforded evidence of a disposition to appropriate it. But now, as it happened, two citizens of respectable standing, who for reasons of health were taking an early-morning stroll on the beach, had paused to observe the small incident. M. Hochedur, thinking better of thus forcing the issue, handed the ring back to André.

  ‘Almost worthless,’ he said. ‘Still, twenty francs.’

  This abrupt doubling of what in André’s regard was already a substantial sum of money was a mistake. It alarmed him a little, and at the same time it seriously offended him. Quite unaccountably as yet, the ring had become something not to chaffer over.

  ‘But I think not,’ he said decisively, and turned and walked away. Then he dropped the ring into his pocket – thus lodging it beside the key that would have touched Saint Tugen’s key had Saint Tugen’s key survived to be touched.

  So did the ring bring André luck? It is a question hard to answer – as are all questions to the resolving of which some definition of happiness is essential. Certainly the girl almost at once began to appear again. Perhaps, after thought, she had judged it pleasurable to include in her holiday routine a glance at – even a brief word with – the boy who cleaned up the beach. But she didn’t make anything of the kind emphatic. It couldn’t have been said that she was approachable in any improper way. Sometimes her thoughts seemed far off, and she would stroll past André on the still almost empty beach disregardingly. At other times she would ravishingly say ‘Hallo’, and her eyes would take in not merely his shy smile but his whole body. This turned him giddy. It perplexed him that he didn’t start imagining things – evolving fantasies in which unbelievable intimacies took place. But nothing of the sort happened to trouble the long enchanted moment in which he lived. And some things that had formerly amused him now seemed impossibly crude.

  Of this there was one striking instance. André’s way home from his labour was up that steep rue des Professeurs Curie, where it was necessary to get off his bike and trudge. It had become his habit to pause halfway at a spot where a small expanse of tussocky grass occasionally afforded an odd diversion. For here some of the rowdier young people of the neighbourhood would often be at horseplay of a peculiar sort. In particular, three lads of his own age or a little older, together with a hoyden of a girl, had evolved a burlesque kind of fighting with, seemingly, no holds barred. One saw such antics at circuses or on TV, and this quartet had worked quite hard on them, so that what was on view was a very fair imitation of Kung Fu or some such outlandish thing – with various indecencies thrown in for luck. Motionlessly challenging at one moment, the four would be all whirling activity, savage intent, the next. What they had chiefly mastered was a trick of turning full circle on the heel with incredible rapidity – lashing out, feinting, ducking, jabbing the while. The chief victim was the girl. One lout would trip her, pitch her to the ground; another would grab a leg and with a series of mere flicks transform her into a species of garden roller. But in a moment she would be on her feet – laughing wildly, kicking out at her aggressors with a seemingly murderous force finely calculated to fall just short of the groin. And the louts too would be laughing loudly, since part of the fun was to create a tremendous row. André had been finding all this – not least its crass sexuality – highly entertaining, and even stimulating in an agreeable way. Now he judged it horrid, and austerely passed it by. The eternal womanly was leading him higher.

  But he had moments of disillusion, or at least lucidity, and in these it would occur to him that the girl’s holiday must end and she must simply go away. Cautiously by way of Jules (who was amused) he instigated mundane inquiries about her. Had she parents, brothers, sisters? Were they rich – the kind of people who would have yachts, many large cars, beautiful clothes, costly jewels?

  ‘By no means.’ Jules from amid his pots and pans had been developing – or so he believed – a flair for refined social discriminations. ‘Of substance, yes; and of good family, it may be, in their country’s fashion. But rich, not. More manners at the table than money in the bank.’ Jules paused to admire his own power of epigram. ‘And they leave – papa, mama, a younger brother – at the end of the week.’

  André was dismayed, but at least he was learning something. ‘Supposing,’ he asked, ‘one of them lost some costly thing: a fine camera, a necklace, a gold watch. What would they do?’

  ‘Fuss about it, of course. Enquiries would be made, a notice would be put up, the patron would begin suspecting one or another of us, and questioning the rest.’

  ‘But there has been nothing of the sort?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  André was reassured. It was not the girl herself who had lost the ring. Had it been so, merely to restore it to her would have been a joy. But he now nursed – no doubt culpably – a far more splendid design. He would make a present of the ring, an offering tendered with deep respect! But there was ground he still had to make certain of.

  ‘Those others you spoke about,’ he said. ‘The hugely rich. Are there at present any of them in the hotel?’

  ‘Lately, yes. But they are now gone away. People of the jet-set sort.’ Jules was coming to command a good deal of franglais of this order. ‘Their morals were bad. Here on these very beaches they would, some of them, misconduct themselves in the night.’

  ‘Jules, supposing such people, so engaged, lost such a thing as we have spoken of – a watch, or it might be a ring – would they, as you say those English would, create a fuss about it?’

  ‘But no. It would mean nothing to them: the object and such value as it had.
They would be discreet, and keep mum.’

  So that was it; that was the explanation of the ring. André’s path was clear, and there was no time to lose. He acted next day.

  Soon after his arrival on the beach the girl was there, carrying her book in a rather perfunctory fashion – much as a priest might carry his breviary on holiday. And again she smiled and nodded. With his heart in his mouth, André walked straight up to her.

  ‘Good morning, Mademoiselle. You leave us soon?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, I’m afraid.’ The girl was surprised: amused, perhaps, but not startled. They were, after all, acquaintances already, after a fashion.

  ‘May I, then, offer you a small present?’ And André, resolutely if in a shaking hand, held out the ring.

  ‘Oh, but really . . .’ She was now frankly confused, and had momentarily lapsed from her schoolgirl’s French into English. ‘But it is too kind of you and I don’t a bit deserve it. So, please, no!’

  But something in André sensed that this was not a true negative. Her eyes were signalling that her heart was touched.

  She liked him as a girl should like a boy, and he asked for nothing more. For a moment, at least, his bliss was entire.

  ‘As a souvenir of Tréboul,’ he said. ‘It is nothing in itself. A trinket merely.’ He had remembered M. Hochedur’s depreciating word.

  ‘Then, thank you very much. I shall remember Tréboul – and, of course, yourself as well.’ She had taken the ring. Conscious, perhaps, of the need to be gracious, she gave it an admiring glance, but refrained from attempting to slip it on a finger. And suddenly André knew there was something more that had to pass his lips.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, and without a moment’s pause turned and walked away. He didn’t look back. It was over. He knew that he would never see his princess, the English girl, again. Already, had he known it, she was looking at the ring once more, and now a little strangely. Her people weren’t rich, but her mother’s small jewel-case, at least, was familiar to her. Was it possible?

  The girl quickened her pace back to the Grand Hôtel. Her first thought was to consult her father, tell him of this almost alarming sequel to a very simple sort of love-liking, fleeting love-liking, for a handsome peasant boy. But as she studied the ring once more, the full awkwardness of the thing dawned on her. The ring wasn’t a trinket by a very long way, and her father wouldn’t be the prudent lawyer he was if he didn’t find it wise to investigate what had occurred. He would say no word to suggest that the boy must be a thief. But that would be his thought. And he wouldn’t countenance for a moment inaction before a situation whereby his daughter, after however bizarre a fashion, had conceivably become the recipient of stolen goods. Through one agency or another, unbearable inquiries would be made.

  She stopped in her tracks. She wasn’t frightened. She knew very well that there was little danger of her being hauled before some magistrate and interrogated. But it wasn’t so with the boy. They would be after him like a shot. As she realised this, her embarrassment, her mere distress, turned into a kind of horror in face of life’s treacheries. Perhaps the boy had stolen the ring – the boy who had spoken those words to her and at once turned away. She knew nothing about him – or only that he was plainly a penniless lad, hired for some pittance to collect rubbish from a beach. But he had said that. And he had meant it.

  Suddenly the girl walked on, and at a quicker pace, now making not for the hotel but for the rocky promontory at the far end of the beach: the spot where the Germans had built their gun-emplacements. These had been levelled to the ground, but at one point a long concrete platform still jutted out sheer above the sea. To this the girl walked more slowly – her mind being made up and now curiously at ease. Reaching the verge, she paused for a moment, and then gently cast the ring into the secure oblivion of Douarnenez Bay.

  André was disconsolate for weeks. The season was drawing to its close, and with it his job. He would be among Brittany’s thousands of unemployed. Perhaps he would chum up with the louts and their trollop on that tussocky grass, and learn Kung Fu.

  The sky grew full of cloud, and the breakers full of sand. At the poste de secours a brown pennant had replaced a green: Baignade dangereuse. Even experienced wind-surfers were in trouble: the speed-boats guarding them busy giving one or another a humiliating tow to land. The children’s trampolines had been folded away; the École de Natation, the Piscina Nausicaa, the Club Micky Éducation Physique had all gone out of business. Autumn was over everything, and one knew that the Atlantic raved outside the western straits of France.

  What had André achieved? Nothing at all. Even the Mayor of Douarnenez had got ahead of him in one important regard. Instead of the small joke he had himself thought up there had belatedly appeared a large placard announcing:

  Plage interdite aux chiens

  And a day came when there were no human beings on the beach at all. There were only half a dozen dogs.

  PIPKIN GROVE

  It was a very ordinary evening at the Thimbles. Young Harold Thimble had taken himself off on his motor-bike to Youth Redeployment, as he regularly did on Mondays and Thursdays. Harold was on the dole, and Youth Redeployment was providing the gen. that might get him into some vaguely adumbrated venture in electronics. Or so Harold said. His mum believed him and would remark – quite truly – that Harold had always been having ideas, and that Youth Redeployment was one of them. His dad, who disliked ideas but felt he knew the world, said Youth Redeployment was probably the pub, or perhaps it was riding round up to no special good with a bunch of hippies. Harold’s sister, Samantha, never said anything much. Samantha had managed to train as a hair-stylist, and now worked in a unisex place called Follicles. After her day’s artistic striving she was sitting by the fire with a nice book: the previous week’s issue of Modern Brides, which she had brought home from the saloon. Albert Thimble, the master of the house, was also reading, and had got to page 3 of The Sun. Chummy, the Thimbles’ cat, snoozing on the hearthrug, gently wagged the very tip of her tail. It was all entirely normal and innocent – or at least it seemed to be. From scenes like these spring an ordered society and the repose of governments.

  Perhaps a shade reluctantly, Albert Thimble turned on from page 3 to page 4. He frowned slightly, as if he had come on something that perplexed him. Glancing up from his paper, he saw that his wife, who had been pouring out cups of tea, was for some reason rejecting one cup and taking another from the shelf. He looked at his daughter and the cat, his frown deepening. Samantha and Chummy were yawning simultaneously, so that it would have been impossible to tell which of them had caught the impulse from the other. Mr Thimble put down his paper.

  ‘And now,’ he said abruptly, ‘there’s going to be a terrible crash.’

  Mrs Thimble placed the teapot back on the kitchen table.

  Samantha glanced incuriously at her father and returned to her book, from which she had just gathered that an average wedding costs £1,500, not counting the never-never. Then, minutes later and without warning – only it was precisely not without warning – there was the sudden roar of a tremendous explosion. The whole house shook. Tea spurted from the spout of the teapot. Dust which oughtn’t to have been there, but which perhaps lurked on valences and the tops and backs of picture-frames, rose and eddied round the light-bulbs. Chummy had arched herself and bristled like a cat in a strip cartoon.

  A hundred years earlier, or thereabout, people like the Thimbles might have thought of anarchists, prowling London in inky cloaks and big black hats, bearing before them bombs like footballs emitting a tiny curl of smoke to show they were in business. Mrs Thimble remembered the blitz, and now she thought of it. Samantha, more up to date, saw that they hadn’t, all three plus Chummy, been reduced to dirty marks on a wall, so at least they hadn’t been nuked by the Russians. Then Mrs Thimble exclaimed, ‘the I.R.A!’ and felt she had found the answer. Of course, the I.R.A. went, on the whole, for prestige localities in the West End, not for unpretentious
South London suburbs like Plumstead. But they were said to have inconspicuous houses all over the place, and to use them for manufacturing everything from block-busters to what the police liked to call incendiary devices. Sometimes they had an accident, and one of these houses went up with a bang. Mrs Thimble said that for some time she’d had an eye on comings and goings at Number 34 in their own street. So that must be it. The explosion must have been at Number 34. They were lucky it hadn’t been nearer their own Number 14.

  ‘Terrorists,’ Mrs Thimble said, not uncomfortably. ‘As bad as that Goering and his Luftwaffy, they’re coming to be. But you knew about him. That it was what-for for all of us, I mean, if our boys didn’t stop him. But who knows anything about these Irish and what they’re after? I don’t. Let them alone, I say, and they mayn’t come worrying quiet folk in Plumstead. Who lives in 34, I ask you? Not Mrs Thatcher.’

  These political reflections didn’t interest Samantha, who had simply returned to Modern Brides. But her father, although accepting his wife’s theories that it had been Number 34 and no business of theirs, was plainly perturbed. It didn’t seem to occur to him to go out into the street and investigate – not even when an urgent wailing of sirens and clangour of bells told that police cars and fire engines and ambulances were arriving in Pipkin Grove. And when at length he had something to say, it was haltingly and to an odd effect.

  ‘I’ve known it before,’ Albert Thimble said.

  ‘Of course you have, Albert.’ Mrs Thimble was impatient. ‘That Goering—’

  ‘Nothing to do with Goering, you old cow.’ Mr Thimble made use of this endearment only when something more than commonly vexatious had occurred. ‘Thinking a string of things have all happened before. Turning over from a bit of cheesecake and finding something about Albion Rovers. And then your fiddling with those cups. And Samantha and the cat both yawning after that. And then—’