The Daffodil Sky (10 page)

‘The season will soon be ending,' Madame Dupont said. ‘There is always a horrible rush about the fifteenth and then by the end of the month it begins to thin out a little.'

‘Do you have langoustines in England?' the boy said.

‘No: no langoustines in England.'

‘You have peaches?'

‘Yes: peaches.'

‘Yesterday I had a big fat animal in a peach. The biggest one I ever had. Pink like a
langouste
, with a black head——'

‘I shall be sick!' Madame Dupont said, and buried her face, with its flashing spectacles, in her hands.

After all the weather had not broken. The single day and night of gusting rain had been followed by skies of pure washed blue, exquisite and brilliant: by afternoons of burning indigo breeziness, bringing a saltiness that Harris could taste on the face of the girl as he touched it with his mouth. Her body had become a deep butter-golden brown in the sun.

By the second week in September he began to experience once again the excruciating fear that soon it would all be over. The blue dishes of langoustines, the shrill voice of Jean-Pierre discovering maggots in the peaches, Madame Dupont's unwearying spectacles; the hot afternoons by the estuary, the earlier darkening
evenings along the shore. Not even the week-end dole of francs, delivered with the letter after being squeezed somehow from the changeless dapper parent who came up from Paris with unfailing punctuality every Saturday, could save it much longer.

She too seemed to realise it and along the shore, on a dark humid September evening, said to him:

‘I wanted to tell you something about myself,' and went on at once: ‘It was about being married——'

Listening, not interrupting her, he watched the many navigation lights flowing emerald and white and crimson across the bay. She, too, after all, it seemed, had been one of his partisans. In four years she had helped nearly two hundred men: English mostly, but colonials too, and in the final year a few Americans.

During all the time she spoke of this there was a flatness in her voice that reminded him of the evening he had first walked with her by the sea. She had once again pulled down that opaque blind between them; as if she were keeping something back.

And then she began to talk, presently, of another man. Not an Englishman this time, but a French boy, a young man from Orleans, an eager brilliant boy who when war broke out had been studying for a degree in engineering and then, late in the war, had become a partisan too. ‘He had a wonderful face,' she kept saying. ‘Such wonderful brilliant eyes. So intelligent and beautiful.'

After she had known him a few weeks they had been given an assignment, quite a difficult one, seventy or eighty miles north of Marseilles, and suddenly, under all the impulse of war and the emotion of war, they
decided to get married before attempting it. They were married in his own village, somewhere south of Paris, and afterwards they set out on bicycles. That was their honeymoon: sleeping in barns, under haystacks, sometimes in small hotels, sometimes in the houses of other partisans. It had been very beautiful, she said, and as she spoke of it he could hear once again the restrictive quietness of unspent tears in her voice, making it flat and calm.

On the second night of the journey as she bicycled downhill in darkness, she missed the road, crashing the bicycle into a bank, buckling it beyond repair. They hid it in a barn so that he could come back for it. Then they rode on together on one bicycle, she on the crossbar. And all that night the feeling of being close to the young eager boy grew deeper, until in that excited, keyed-up, secret and almost funny situation she felt they were inseparable. Here she spoke again of his face, saying how brilliant and beautiful it was.

And then the cross-bar of the second bicycle broke; and they went on to complete the rest of the assignment on foot, quite successfully as it turned out, except that the boy, going back two days later in the hope of picking up at least one of the bicycles, had himself been picked up by waiting Gestapo.

After three months they sent him back. ‘There was not much left of his face,' she said. Her voice had a stony, barren sound. ‘I did not know him from his face. It was not there.' He died a week or two later.

Pride and anger and tenderness for her flooded up like her own unspent tears through his heart, confusing and hurting him, so that he could not speak again.

‘I did not sleep for a year,' she said. ‘I felt I could never sleep again.'

He did not answer.

‘Something was taken away and has not come back,' she said.

He wanted in that moment to ask her if there was, perhaps, something of himself that could replace the things, the feelings, the inexplicable something she had lost, but he could not express himself in words. A light run of breeze brought a few sharper, more crested waves across the bay. He heard her say how beautiful the evening was, how you could still imagine it was full summer. For some moments longer he listened to a sardine boat chuffing and coughing away to sea and then to her voice reminding him, at last, still with its dry stony pain, that in a week he would be listening to it all no longer.

‘Did you mind that I told you all that?' she said.

‘No: I'm glad you told me.'

‘Sometimes you make me think of him. The same feeling comes. I'm happy again.'

His own happiness and anguish for her kept him quiet again and after she had said, in a sentence he did not understand and did not ask to have explained, ‘There are things that can kill you like that, unless you find someone in their place,' they walked back arm in arm to the hotel.

‘One has to live,' she said.

The following day, at lunch, there were langoustines and Madame Dupont, cracking away with neat relish above a pile of pink-brown shells, stared through her spectacles to where, at the table by the window, the
girl was threading the customary flower into the dapper buttonhole.

‘It was only today I discovered from Madame Prideaux who he is.'

Before Harris could answer her the
patron
came to the table to say: ‘I know you do not like the liver, Monsieur Harris—so if you prefer it we have today for you a piece of meat. A bifteck. If you find it all right?'

‘Excellent,' Harris said. ‘Thank you.' The
patron
smiled and patted Jean-Pierre on the head and walked away. Madame Dupont stared critically, with a kind of dry prudery, through her spectacles. Jean-Pierre said he would be glad when the peaches came and Madame Dupont, holding the lobster-pincers poised under her chin, said:

‘He was at La Baule the summer before the war. With another girl.'

‘Another daughter?'

‘I remembered him very well the moment Madame Prideaux reminded me.'

The noon wind was springing up, deepening the sea to flashing brilliant indigo, across the bay.

‘Daughter?' Madame Dupont said. ‘She is somebody's daughter, yes. They are all somebody's daughter.'

In the dining-room there was a swift breath of fish hot in butter, and richly, thickly, with nausea, it clotted Harris's throat.

‘It's a fine game,' she said. ‘I suppose you find it in England too? I suppose one finds it everywhere.'

He sent the fish away.

‘Nor me!' the boy said. ‘Nor me. I hate it!'

‘You must eat fish,' Madame Dupont said. ‘It gives brains.'

‘No!'

‘It gives brains, doesn't it, Monsieur Harris? He must eat it.'

‘Monsieur Harris doesn't eat it.'

‘Monsieur Harris is old enough to please himself what he has and what he doesn't have. Aren't you, Monsieur Harris?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘You must eat and grow big and get lots of brains,' she said, ‘so that you can please yourself what you do.'

Across the bay the rising breeze from open sea carried deeper sparkling furrows broadside along the shore. A blue sardine boat, like an ark, shone with its climbing crimson sail tightening against the long promontory of blue-black pines.

‘After all she has to live,' Madame Dupont said. She smiled with dry tolerance, her mouth twisted, her eyes narrowed like the eyes of the old watchful matriarchs behind her spectacles. ‘They all have to live.'

Harris, eating his beefsteak, stared blindly across the bay.

‘She knows how to make a fuss of an old man like that. And after all the old man wants to live——'

‘Fuss, fuss!' the boy said.

‘Quiet!' Madame Dupont said. ‘Take what fruit you want, Jean-Pierre, and eat it.'

Harris, staring across the sea, thought of the boy who had died, the something that had been taken away from the girl and that he hoped, in a sense, he might have given back. Suddenly it seemed that the other shore of
the bay was very far away. It quivered and receded in the bristling air of noon.

And staring at it he realised that he had never, all this time, been across the bay. He had never been across to the other side. It was too late now and as he sat thinking of the girl's dark hair blowing across her face, the rain beating on the windows and the suit of cream alpaca, pressed and neat, hanging in the bedroom, he remembered the stony barren pain of her face and the things that would kill.

‘I have a big one!' the boy said. ‘Look! Look! Look at that!'

Harris looked away from the sea to where Jean-Pierre, splitting a gold-pink peach in halves, was prodding with the point of his fruit knife a trundling fat maggot that had fattened on the blood-brown shining heart of flesh.

‘Kill it! Kill it!' Madame Dupont said. ‘Put it away! Take it out of my sight. I can't bear it! For God's sake put it out of my sight!'

All across the bay the sea flashed with its deep noon beauty and in the dining-room Madame Dupont, quite pale behind her golden spectacles, buried her face in her hands.

‘I suppose the fact is men are more sentimental about them,' she said. ‘Wouldn't you think that was it?'

‘No,' he said.

Her face, underneath a little hat of striped brown and white fur, was like that of a pretty tigress that did not smile.

‘But don't they have them at Oxford?' she said. ‘Isn't it one of those things there?'

‘How can having them at Oxford possibly have anything to do with it?' he said.

‘I don't know. I just thought,' she said.

As the train rushed forward into spring twilight I could see, everywhere on the rainy green cuttings, pale eyes of primroses winking up from among parallel reflections of carriage lights. Above and beyond the cuttings many apple orchards were in thick wide pink bloom.

‘Then what is it you don't like about them?' she said.

‘In the first place they're messy. They're not like pansies,' he said. ‘They don't have the flower on a stem. That's what repulses me. They're messy.'

‘Repulses,' she said. ‘What a word.'

His hair, a weak brandy brown, was shredded like tobacco into short separated curls that hung untidily down over the fiery flesh of his neck. His lips were full and pettish. When motionless they were like a thick slit in a red indiarubber ball. In the soft fat face the eyes were like blue glass marbles that did not quite fit into their sandy lidded slots and I sometimes got the impression that they would suddenly drop out as he gazed at her.

At this moment she hid behind her newspaper and in the darkening glass of the train windows, across the carriage, we exchanged reflections. I half expected her to smile. Instead I saw the last of the paling primrose reflections sow themselves lightly across a pair of dark still eyes that were almost expressionless.

‘Another thing is that the smell absolutely nauseates me.'

‘Why?' she said. ‘It's so delicious.'

‘Not to me.'

‘Oh! that's fantastic,' she said. ‘That heavenly scent. Everybody thinks so.'

‘I don't happen to be everybody,' he said.

She had lowered her newspaper as she spoke. Now, sharply, she raised it up again. As she did so she pulled up, very slightly, the skirt of her dress, so that I could see for a moment or two her small pretty knees.

‘Who was it who made that remark about pansies being one side of Leicester Square and wallflowers on the other?' she said.

‘That was Elaine.'

‘I knew it was somebody.'

‘Thank you,' he said.

This time I knew she would smile at me and I got ready to smile back at her dark steady reflection in the glass. But to my surprise she did not smile. She sat transfixed, staring at me as if I were transparent and she could see through and beyond me into the mass of fading apple orchards sailing past in the brilliant blue evening above the cuttings.

‘What sort of day did you have?' she said. ‘What did you do?'

‘I had a very bad, tiring day,' he said.

‘All bad days are tiring,' she said. ‘That's why they're bad.'

‘Don't be trite,' he said.

He began to fuss with a brief-case, taking out first papers, then books, sorting them over and putting them back again. Between his knees he held a walking-stick of thick brown cane, the colour something more than a shade or two paler than the hairs that crawled down the flanks of his face. In the confusion he let the walking-stick slip and it fell with a clatter on the carriage floor and as he leaned forward to pick it up I saw his hands. They were pink and puffy, as if the flesh had been lightly boiled.

‘Why don't you put it on the rack?' she said.

‘Because I prefer it here.'

‘You didn't ask me what I did today,' she said.

‘If it had been interesting you'd have told me all about it,' he said.

After that the girl and I stared at each other for a long time from behind the evening papers, first directly and then, when I could not bear the steady smileless
dark eyes looking straight at me any longer, obliquely through the darkening glass. Now and then she moved her body slightly and I could see once again the rounded pretty knees. Then when she saw me looking at the knees she would cover them up again, not quickly, but dreamily, slowly, almost absent-mindedly, fixing me always with the steady eyes from under the tigress hat.