Family and Friends (18 page)

And he loves these children, who so resemble their mother, and who, in response to their mother’s excellent nurturing instinct, grew up without problems, without those little finicky appetites which had always dogged his brother and his sisters, without faces pale and temples
hollowed by the hours of reading that he remembers as such a feature of his own youth. Frederick’s children, Erica and Thomas, have always slept through the night and have eaten everything that is given to them. They enjoy scratched legs, dirty faces, and days in the open air; they flourish on the intermittent hygiene meted out by their mother, on the inappropriate menus which come down to them from the hotel dining-room, and from the ice-creams at the café for which Frederick always slips them money. Erica and Thomas speak Italian and a sort of French, both with lingering uneducated accents; they are sharp and resourceful children, and they will never be properly educated. In many ways they resemble the children of the environs; canny and quick and very slightly underhand. They will do well, and they will never go home. Yet, with their square teeth and their Start-Rite shoes, they grin convincingly enough in the photographs which Frederick sends home to his mother to set her murmuring about resemblances and peering at the tiny faces in an effort to see reflected there the image of her beloved son.

On this sunny morning, as on so many others, Frederick walks down the Corso Italia, turning his head from side to side the better to savour the varied delights that are brought to the attention of his senses: the smell of vanilla from the café, the hose playing about the orange-tree tubs in the garden, the pleasant bustle of early morning, and the impeccable sky of uninflected blue. Despite the charms of Bordighera, Frederick is making for Nice, as is his habit. If the car is not free he will take the train, which saves him a lot of trouble at the frontier even if it does take a little longer. He is usually in Nice by midday and he takes a taxi to the old town so that he can spend an hour in the market before sitting down to a pleasant lunch in any of half a dozen favourite places behind the harbour.
Frederick will rarely buy anything in the market but the place has become essential to him as a storehouse of further sights, smells, and impressions to feed his ever greedy sensorium. From the flower market, with its tightly furled bouquets of carnations – red, pink, white, yellow, striped, and even dyed blue – Frederick will penetrate to the inner secret depths of the old town. Here, on precipitously stepped and cobbled streets, twisting blindly and abruptly around corners and slippery with fish scales, Frederick will tread carefully in his pale shoes, tipping his hat to those stall holders who recognize him from previous visits. He will appreciate, with an equal and a discerning eye, a tuft of coarse grass thrusting up through the cobbles where the alley meets the wall of the church of St Rita, the butcher’s boy emerging with uplifted hatchet from the back of the shop to check on the symmetry and the quantity of the day’s display of lamb chops in white enamelled trays, the priest with his long soutane and his furled black hat, the basket of cheap but elegant shoes in the doorway of a shop so dark that it is necessary to put most of its goods on the pavement, the sharp and almost sickening smell of the cheeses laid out on leaves of fern and palm, the sudden gleam of a coffee machine and the spurt of its steam, the blessed sight of the fresh loaves of bread, newly baked for lunchtime, being set up vertically in the window of the baker’s shop. Sometimes Frederick will imagine himself loading baskets with sticks of bread and portions of different paté – the rabbit, the goose, the hare – and bushels of mirabelle plums, and taking those baskets somewhere where he and Evie can steal away from the children and eat. But as he is on his own, Frederick puts his excellent sensual imagination to work and enjoys, vicariously, the delights which the shopkeepers and stall holders arrange for his delectation. Frederick is such a happy man, so
elegant, so smiling, as he wends his way down the slippery and sharply descending streets, that everyone gives him a greeting; it hardly matters that he never buys anything, for he has become in a sense the spirit of the place, if not its patron, and merely to see him there in his pale shoes and his immaculate shirt and his panama hat is to receive a lift to the heart, as if this market, in which humbler people ply their trades, has been granted a certificate of excellence from the most enlightened of connoisseurs. Frederick raises his hat to old ladies in black who have slipped out for a cutlet and a bottle of wine and a baguette for their lunch; he notices the sinewy cats that weave figures of eight around the old ladies’ slippered feet, and he empathetically imagines that he too is an old lady, free at last to please herself, to get fat, and let her feet go, and emerge from aromatic gloom to the dark blue sky above and the dusky smell of the cheese shop and the cool shape of the bottle in one’s hand and the prospect of a long siesta. Frederick raises his hat to the priest, and, for courtesy’s sake, enters the small hot gaudy church of St Rita and slips some money into the wooden box; sometimes he lights a tapering candle, for the sheer pleasure of seeing the flame reluctantly take hold and climb up the white unsullied wick and achieve a steady pale glow; he will sniff the incense with the same careful nose that he once laid to a cigar. Finally, he will take a small cup of black coffee standing at the counter of a dark café, a mere tunnel between two shops, glittering with the chrome of its coffee machine and alive with the cries and greeting of the midday clientele. Here, too, he is known.

‘Eh bien, M’sieu Frédéric, ça va, la santé?’

‘Très bien, Martial, je vous remercie.’

‘Qu’est-ce qu’on vous sert aujourd’hui, M’sieu Frédéric?’

‘Un express et un verre d’eau fraiche, s’il vous plaît, Martial.’

For Frederick rarely drinks, and in any case seems to
despise any additional stimulus which might heighten and ultimately falsify his own excellent imagination.

Finally, as the crowd drifts away from the café, Frederick takes his leave of the owner, settles his hat once more on his head, and goes out in search of lunch. He prefers to leave it late, for then he can enjoy the spectacle of the Vieux Port slumbering in the early afternoon heat as he sips his coffee and lights his cigar on the terrace of whatever restaurant he has chosen for that day. Frederick is abstemious, and although no longer mindful of his thickening waistline, prefers to eat a modest meal, perhaps merely a grilled sole or an escalope of veal and a little
salade cuite
, before settling down to his half-hour of contemplation with his coffee and his cigar. Now the sky is powdery white with heat and he can no longer make out the horizon; cars dazzle him with the reflection of the sun on their chrome, and in the longer and longer intervals of quiet, he can hear the creaking of the masts of the little boats in the harbour. Draining his coffee-cup, Frederick asks for the bill, enquires after the health of the lady at the cash desk who nods to him and mimics a reply, and glances to left and right before deciding which route to take to his afternoon place of entertainment. He will either walk along the front, made giddy by the brilliant light and the swoop of traffic, or, more usually, thread his way through the back streets, where trees and rough pavements soon give way to commercial arcades selling the sort of odourless and manufactured produce for which Frederick has no use: magazines, sun glasses, picture postcards, stamps. Once past the Place Masséna, the town is of no further interest to him. He hardly notices it.

At the Ruhl they know him, of course. They are assured that he will spend no more than an hour at the tables, that he will bet modestly, and neither win nor lose a great deal, and that he will be on respectful and easy terms with
the ladies who come there, carefully coiffed and made-up, every afternoon, ostensibly to take tea, in fact to attach to themselves a dancing partner, even if they have to pay for one. Frederick is at ease here, and the management are always pleased to see him; his good nature and his good manners ensure that no lady will remain too pathetically and too obviously on her own for more than five or ten minutes. Compliments have always come easily to Frederick; therefore he considers it quite natural to steer these ladies round the tables and to offer them tea. Sometimes the ladies order something stronger and suggest that he stay on for dinner, but Frederick has never cared for that sort of behaviour. In Frederick’s universe, the man offers and the woman gratifies. It would seem a reversal of the natural order to proceed in any other way, and indeed he has never needed to do so. Therefore, after a cup of lemon tea and a little expert and desultory conversation, so that the lady should not feel herself to have been offended, he looks around for his panama hat, stands up, and, kissing the lady’s hand, takes his leave.

He never stays later than four o’clock. By this time he is feeling a little tired, a little less than the immaculate self which he presented to the world that morning, in the shining air of Bordighera. On the train he pats down a yawn and applies himself to the evening paper which he has bought at the station, noticing with a slight exclamation of distaste that the print has soiled his hands. No matter; at the Hotel Windsor he will ask the upstairs chambermaid Maria to draw his bath as soon as he gets back, and he will recline in the coolish water, scented with New Mown Hay, until he feels his energies return. Then he will dress in his hotelier’s evening wear: an immaculate pale cotton suit with matching tie, a fresh shirt, a clean linen handkerchief. He will smooth his sleek greying hair down with his father’s silver brushes, which
came to him as a matter of course, and, no longer noticing his pear-shaped figure or his dark brown face, he will go downstairs, and, with a discreet but none the less heartfelt kiss, will imply to Evie that she is now free until dinner.

These early evening hours are when Frederick both lays himself out to please and excels himself. Not a guest enters the lobby of the Hotel Windsor after a weary day on the beach or sight-seeing further down the coast but does not feel a lightening of the spirit on encountering Frederick in his pale blue or his pale grey suit, always ready to order a late cup of tea for them and to hear about their day’s adventures. Frederick’s sybaritic leanings incline him towards indulgence and he has a special smile with which he listens to feminine chatter; it is with a lighter step that so many women guests go up to take their baths and to decide what to wear for the evening. Dinner is a fairly formal affair: Evie and Frederick dine together at a small table slightly out of earshot of the other guests; the children having eaten earlier, either in their suite, if the maids are not too busy, or, more probably, in the kitchen, where they can more easily satisfy their robust appetites. Evie and Frederick have coffee served for all in the salon rather than at the tables, an English habit which makes a favourable impression on the guests, many of whom have returned to the hotel two or three times. When they have enquired after the health of the one or two carefully selected retired couples who intend to spend the winter there, Evie and Frederick tend to say good-night to everyone and to slip out, knowing that they have stimulated the sort of remarks which will be made about them in their absence. ‘A quite devoted couple, it seems.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it charming? And they always take this evening walk together before they retire for the night. I find it quite touching.’ ‘So delightful. It makes for such a pleasant atmosphere.’

In the scented night Evie and Frederick take their late walk, arm in arm, sometimes hand in hand. The sky is now an impenetrable indigo, yet along the horizon there is still a faint smudge of salmon-coloured brilliance. The wind rustles the leathery palm leaves and the oranges and lemons glow on the trees as if lit from within. Amber light gushes from the café, where the coffee machine gleams and the scent of vanilla is now mingled with the aroma of cigarettes. Evie and Frederick walk up the steep Corso Italia, away from the sea, away from the station, to the higher ground above the little town. Here, like an elderly couple, they sit on a municipal seat, and here Frederick smokes his second and last cigar of the day. They sit in wordless companionship, looking down on the dark vulture-like shapes of the palm trees, hearing nothing but the whine of a passing moped. Strange, how peaceable Evie has become, she who used to be so noisy and so disruptive. Strange, how excellent this marriage has proved to be, the man offering, the woman gratifying. Strange, how fearless and how original they are away from the constrictions of home and family. Strange, how rooted they appear to be in this frivolous place, divorced from serious need or concern. Soon they will rise to their feet, take each other’s hand, and slowly wander back to the Hotel Windsor. They will appreciate the new keenness of the air as a little wind blows up and the houses darken. In their room they will find the bed turned down on both sides, and the shutters closed. Evie will light an incense stick to keep mosquitoes at bay. In no more than a few minutes they will have undressed, kissed, and fallen asleep, safe and calm in the conviction of another beautiful day tomorrow, under the same unalterable sky.

No wonder Frederick never seriously considers going home again.