Monsieur Pamplemousse Aloft (7 page)

‘I’m sorry. I do not understand. There
is
a show tonight?’

There was moment’s hesitation. ‘You mean you haven’t heard about the accident?
Morbleu
!’

Monsieur Pamplemousse felt an icy hand clutching at the pit of his stomach. He knew the answer before he even posed the question.

‘It was the trapeze artiste? The girl Yasmin?’

Madame Caoutchouc nodded. ‘It was terrible. I was there when it happened. I saw it all. There was nothing anyone could do. She missed the bar after a triple somersault. It was a difficult trick, but she had done it many times before. She landed in the net – that too, has happened many times – but this time …’ She suddenly had difficulty in finding the right words.

‘We did everything we could. Everything. I went with her in the ambulance …’

Monsieur Pamplemousse asked the question uppermost in his mind.

‘No, she isn’t dead, but she is in a coma. If you had seen her lying there …’

To his dismay Madame Caoutchouc suddenly burst into a flood of tears. It was as though a dam had broken. For a moment or two it was so uncontrollable he felt at a loss to know what to do or say. It was always the same when he was confronted by a woman crying; a mixture of tenderness and helplessness, which occasionally gave way to irrational anger, not with the person concerned, but with his own inability to supply the right words.

‘I am sorry.’ He reached out and touched her. ‘If there is anything I can do’ For a moment he was tempted to tell Madame Caoutchouc about his meeting with the girl, then he decided against it. There seemed little point.

‘
Merci, Monsieur
.’ With a struggle she pulled herself together. ‘I’m sorry. I am a little overwrought. The police have been here asking questions. What do they know about the circus?

‘There will be a show tonight – we cannot afford not to have one, but it will be without Yasmin. And without Yasmin, I think there will be no problem about tickets.’

‘Merci, Madame.’
He held her hand briefly, then turned to go. ‘I am sorry to have troubled you. I did not realise what had happened.’

Madame Caoutchouc followed him to the door. Halfway down the steps Monsieur Pamplemousse paused and looked
back at her.

‘You say you went with your daughter to the hospital? Did she – did she say anything while you were there? Anything at all?’

‘A few words in the ambulance, that is all. And they were a struggle. Nothing that made sense. I think she must have been delirious by then.’

‘Do you remember what she said?’

He immediately regretted asking the question. For a moment or two it looked as though Madame Caoutchouc was about to burst into tears again, then she recovered herself.

‘It was just the one word. It sounded like
pamplemousse.
Pamplemousse, pamplemousse, pamplemousse,
she kept repeating it over and over again. Who knows what she was trying to say?’

‘Who knows?’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Who indeed knows?’

Leaving his car parked outside the telephone
cabines
,
Monsieur Pamplemousse walked slowly back along the beach towards the harbour. The wind had started to freshen, but he hardly noticed it. He was sunk in gloom. He could still hardly believe the news about the girl’s accident. There was probably nothing at all that he could have done to help her, and yet somehow he couldn’t rid himself of a feeling of being in some way partly responsible. If only he had gone to see her the night before, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened. Perhaps she’d had her mind on some problem and that in turn had caused a momentary loss of concentration. He was glad he hadn’t seen her fall. That would have been too awful in the circumstances. Sensing his mood, Pommes Frites presented him with a stick he’d found. It was a specially large one with some seaweed attached.

When they reached the port Monsieur Pamplemousse bought a postcard for Doucette in a shop which sold everything from fishing nets to wooden
sabots,
via Breton lace, hand-painted china, and oilskins – a reminder that Brittany had ‘weather’ – even in summer. The card showed a man paddling a flat-bottomed boat through the local marshes; it was a choice between that, views of the harbour, the salt pans, or close-up pictures of lobsters awaiting the pot.

Coming out of the shop the first thing he saw was a picture of the girl. Her face looked out at him from the front page of a local
journal.
They must have worked quickly. He bought a copy and led the way to a café a little way along the front.

Suddenly realising how hungry he was, he ordered a
crêpe
au sucre
as well as a plate of
croissants,
a large cup of
chocolat,
and a bowl of water for Pommes Frites. Then, to the sound of halyards slapping against steel masts in the freshening wind, he settled down to read the
journal.

In the end it didn’t tell him much more than he already knew, or could have guessed. Le Cirque Bretagno was a small family-owned concern of Italian origin that had been going the rounds since before the turn of the century, handed down from father to son and currently being run by the mother. The father had died several years ago. It travelled all over Europe, seldom staying more than a night or two in any one place, and only intended being in Port St. Augustin for three nights before heading further south towards Bordeaux.

The accident had happened when Yasmin was performing a change-over on the high trapeze. It was a difficult manoeuvre – the high-spot of the act – but one which she had performed many times. No one knew quite what went wrong; a momentary loss of concentration, a split-second error of judgement; her hands had touched the other bar, but too late to tighten her grip. With such a trick there was no second chance. It underlined the ever present danger of circus life, and the fact that even with a safety net disasters could happen. Tragedy was never far away, lurking round the next corner waiting for a chance to strike. But nowadays people were so blasé; they had seen such tricks many times before on television.

Yasmin was twenty-eight. She was still in a coma, but the local hospital hoped to issue a statement after she had undergone further examination. Her temporary loss was a great blow to the circus, but they would do their best to carry on.

Monsieur Pamplemousse folded the paper carefully, broke the remaining
croissant
in two and gave one piece to Pommes Frites, then he signalled for the bill. The clock on the church
tower said ten-forty. It was time they were on their way.

Back in the car, he unlocked his issue case and removed the Leica camera and the Trinovid binoculars. The flight would give him a good opportunity to take some aerial photographs; something he had never done before. He hovered over the compartments of the felt-lined tray for a moment or two, unable to make up his mind which lenses to take, but eventually settled on the standard 50mm and the 28mm wide-angle. He had no idea how high they might be flying and he wished now he’d given the matter more thought; there might be a problem with the light. He always kept ultra-violet filters on the lenses anyway; they provided extra protection against scratches, but he slipped a couple of yellow filters into his jacket pocket to be on the safe side.

On the spur of the moment and acting on an impulse that had paid off many times in his days with the Force, he attached an auto-wind to the camera, slipped a zoom lens into place, and on the pretext of checking it, pointed the camera in the direction of the circus and shot off the rest of the reel of film. As far as he could tell, no one had seen him do it. A few moments later, the camera re-loaded, they set off.

The airship was tethered to a mooring-mast attached to the back of a large lorry. From a distance it looked like a giant wind-sock floating to and fro, the double wheels below the gondola describing a large arc as the wind blew the envelope first one way and then the other. There were more people standing around waiting for his arrival than he expected. No doubt they all had a function to perform, but it reminded him of a film set, with everyone poised for action. On the other hand, security struck him as being remarkably lax; apart from two gendarmes and a man in civilian clothes occupying a hut at the entrance to the field, no one asked to see his credentials and he was allowed to drive right up to the concrete square which served as a landing and take-off area. If the dark grey pill-boxes near the cliffs were anything to go by it was probably a relic of the war years. The Germans had built to last.
The small office and reception room near by looked freshly painted and from two white poles alongside it the flags of France and the United Kingdom were already flying.

Monsieur Pamplemousse wasn’t sure whether the airship looked bigger or smaller than he’d expected. Both in a way. Close to and seen from below, the balloon itself looked vast – vast and slightly out of control; the gondola, with its large windows and helicopter-like Perspex dome surrounding the flight deck, like a pimple which had been added as an afterthought.

Two men in dark blue uniform came out of the office to greet him.

‘Monsieur Pamplemousse?’ The first one, grey-haired, with a weather-beaten face and an air of quiet authority, held out his hand to introduce himself. ‘Commander Winters.’ He turned and nodded to the second man. ‘My colleague – Capitaine Leflaix of the French navy. I’m afraid,’ he looked down at Pommes Frites, ‘your dog will have to stay behind.’

‘Stay behind?’ repeated Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Pommes Frites? But he always comes with me. Wherever we go.’

‘Company orders, I’m afraid.
Chiens
are strictly
interdits.
’ Clearly there was no point in arguing.

‘
Là, là.
’ Monsieur Pamplemousse bent down to give his friend and confidant a consoling pat. It struck him as he did so that Pommes Frites was taking the news of his deprivation remarkably well.

Looking round, he saw why. Some dozen or so of the waiting group had detached themselves from the main body and were clutching the gondola in an attempt to keep it steady ready for boarding. They weren’t achieving one-hundred-per-cent success. The remaining men were clutching two bow lines like tug-of-war teams awaiting the signal for the off.

Commander Winters looked up at the sky. ‘Right!’ He clapped his hands briskly. ‘We’ll get you weighed first and then we’d better get cracking.’ He led the way into the reception room and pointed to some scales. ‘
Parlez-vous
anglais
?’

‘
Un petit peu
,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse non-committally as he watched the needle shoot round. ‘A little.’

Commander Winters looked at the scales. ‘Aah!’ He made the word sound like a black mark. Monsieur Pamplemousse wasn’t sure if it referred to his lack of English or the figure on the dial; probably both. He followed the others back outside.

‘You need always to face the airship,’ said Capitaine Leflaix as he helped Monsieur Pamplemousse up a small flight of steps. ‘Both getting in and getting out. Otherwise, it can take you by surprise.’

As Monsieur Pamplemousse missed the first step he saw what the other, meant. Conscious of raised eyebrows and pained expressions on the faces of those trying to hold the gondola steady, he had another go, then paused momentarily in the doorway to wave
au revoir
to Pommes Frites. Pommes Frites wore his gloomy expression, as though ‘goodbye – it’s been nice knowing you’ would have been more appropriate to the occasion. There was a clatter of feet from the other two as they followed him up the steps.

Monsieur Pamplemousse exchanged greetings with a girl in uniform as she moved forward to close the cabin door, then took stock of his surroundings. No expense had been spared for the forthcoming event. Everything smelled new. The floor was luxuriously carpeted in deep blue. There were eight spotlessly clean wine-red armchair-type seats, two at the far end of the cabin and four grouped around a small rosewood table aft of the open flight deck. Suddenly the scale of reference had changed again. Now that he could no longer see the balloon, the gondola felt unexpectedly spacious, like the sitting-room of a small flat – except, as far as he could see, there was no galley and no room to put one, only a door marked
TOILETTES
and what could have been a small cocktail cabinet; someone must have got their finger out already. All the same, he could see problems ahead. In the end prepared trays might be necessary – small ones at that! The Director would not be pleased.

Leflaix emerged from the flight deck carrying a small pair of portable steps. He mounted them, opened a domed porthole in the roof, and stretched up to peer through the gap.

Wondering irreverently if he was looking to see if they were still attached to the balloon or whether it had floated off without them, Monsieur Pamplemousse settled himself in one of the chairs by the table so that he would have somewhere to work and make notes.

Leflaix closed the hatch. ‘I was checking the ballonet bags to make sure we are stabilised.’ His expression was wry. ‘You need to be a sailor as well as an airman to fly an airship.’ He took his place on the flight deck.

The girl appeared and handed him a brochure. ‘
Monsieur
must be very important for the airship to fly on a day like today.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a non-committal shrug. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help feeling flattered.

He flipped through the pages. It was full of technical details: gross volume – 6,666 cubic metres, length – 59 metres, maximum speed – 60 knots, endurance – 24 hours, engines – two turbo-charged Porsche …

He had hardly finished reading the last few words when a seat belt warning light above the flight-deck bulkhead came on and there was a roar from somewhere behind him as first one and then the other of the two engines were started up. He looked through the window. The two large fans mounted towards the rear of the gondola had begun to turn.

As the crew completed their cockpit check, the men outside who had been holding the gondola steady began removing bags of ballast, while those holding the lines got ready to take the strain. He felt the pilot take control as the nose of the airship was detached from its mooring and the fans were rotated until they were at an angle of 45 degrees facing the ground.

Hand signals were exchanged and the airship began moving forward, slowly at first, then faster, until suddenly the ground started to slip away from them as the craft rose, nose
down, into the air. He had a momentary feeling of guilt as he caught a glimpse of Pommes Frites. His mouth was open as though he was howling and his plaster was hanging loose. Then they turned to port and the concrete area disappeared from view.

Almost immediately they were over the cliffs, with the sea breaking angrily in clouds of white foam on the granite rocks below. It looked as though they were in for a spell of bad weather. The wind must be coming up from the Bay of Biscay.

He tried to break the ice with the stewardess. ‘I think,
Mademoiselle,
we are better off up here,
n’est-ce pas
?’

She looked at him in surprise, as though the very idea was extraordinary, then disappeared behind some curtains at the rear of the compartment. Clearly she was in no mood for making polite conversation.

Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a shrug as the airship executed a wide turn to port, skirted along past St. Marc, where Monsieur Hulot spent his famous holiday, and headed for the Côte d’Amour around La Baule. He reached for his camera as he looked out of the window and saw people on the beach stand up to wave as they flew over. This was the life. There was no doubt about it – the Director was right – the dirigible was an elegant solution to the problem of manned flight. He ought to consider himself lucky to enjoy such a unique experience.

A moment later they had crossed the narrow strip of town and were over the Grande Brière, the vast area of swamp and marshland behind La Baule, home of peat-diggers and rush gatherers. Its streams were full of eels, pike, roach and wildfowl, their banks yellow with iris in spring and early summer.

Monsieur Pamplemousse began to wish he’d brought more film; his automatic winder had been working overtime. By the time they headed west towards the sea he could hardly have documented the area more fully had he been commissioned to make an aerial survey.

To his left he could see a group of islands; ahead of them
was the long arm of the Quiberon peninsula. The few people out and about hardly bothered to look up as they passed over. Most of them seemed too busy packing up their belongings. A
vedette
scuttled across the bay, heading towards the harbour.

Monsieur Pamplemousse was so busy with his camera he was scarcely aware of the motion, which was not unpleasant at first – a little like drifting at sea in a small boat, rising and falling with the waves. If every so often the Captain pushed the nose down in order to pin-point a landmark, so much the better; it gave him a better angle, as did the rolling gently first to one side and then the other. He managed to get a particularly good shot of the oyster-beds in Locmariaquer from a near vertical position. And when the nose went in the opposite direction – towards the sky – it gave him a chance to reload. He wished now he had brought his entire range of lenses and filters. Some of the cloud effects could have been quite spectacular through a dark filter; one moment black and angry-looking, the next moment like an etching as the sun broke through a gap and make a bright rim round their edge.