The Daffodil Sky (7 page)

Presently he was surrounded by other people coming to say good-bye; every few moments he heard somebody say what a wonderful party it was. His wife, they told him, was so good at these things. He was assailed by shrill voices ejected piercingly from the roar of a dynamo.

The girl pressed herself back against the wall, regarding the scene through eyes limpid with fascination, over the rim of her glass. He was aware of a fear that she would move away and that he did not want her to move away.

‘Don't go,' he said, and touched her hand.

Before she had time to speak he was involved in the business of saying good-bye to a Mrs Borden and a Mr Joyce. He remembered in time that Mrs Borden was really Mrs Woodley and that she had changed her name by deed-poll in order to run away with Borden, who had then rejected her in favour of Mrs Joyce. The complications of this were often beyond him, but now he remembered in time to address her and the consolatory Mr Joyce correctly.

‘Nice party, old boy,' Mrs Borden said. ‘Nice.'

He felt that Mrs Borden had a face like a bruised swede-turnip and that Joyce, red and crusted and staggering, was a little drunk.

‘I ought to go too,' the girl said. ‘I think I see them signalling me.'

He began to steer her gently through the maze of groups and factions like a man steering a boat through a series of crowded reefs and islands. As he did so he was aware of a minute exultation because, until the last, he had kept her a stranger, apart from them all.

‘Oh! Clavering, must say good-bye.'

He found himself halted by a clergyman named Chalfont-Beverley, from a parish over the hill. Chalfont-Beverley was tall and young, with a taste for flamboyance that took the form of dressing-up. He was now dressed in a hacking jacket of magnified black-and-white check, with a waistcoat of magenta and a purple tie. His chest had something of the appearance of a decorated altar above which the face was a glow of rose and blue.

‘Damn good party, Clavering,' he said. His hands were silky. Clavering remembered that he was given to Anglo-Catholicism and occasional appearances at afternoon services dressed in pink-cord riding breeches and spurs below sweeping robes of white and scarlet. ‘Damn good. Must bear away.' There was an odour of powder in the air.

By the time Clavering was free again he saw the girl being taken away, in the hall, by the Paul Vaulkhards. He reached them just in time to be able to hold her coat.

‘It isn't far,' she said. ‘I'll just slip it over my shoulders.'

She held the collar of the coat close about her neck, so that he felt the young delicacy of her face to be startlingly heightened.

‘Good-bye,' everyone said. The Paul Vaulkhards said they thought it had been enchanting. Mr Paul Vaulkhard gave a bow of courteous dignity, holding Mrs Clavering's hand. Mrs Paul Vaulkhard said that the Claverings must come to see them too, and not to leave it too long; and he saw his wife exalted.

‘Good-bye, Miss Dufresne,' he said and again, for the second time, held her hand. ‘I will see you all out. It's a little tricky. There are steps——'

The Paul Vaulkhards went ahead with Mrs Clavering, and as he followed through the outer hall he said:

‘Did you enjoy it? Would you care to come and see us again before you go away?'

‘Oh! it was a marvellous, wonderful exquisite party,' she said. ‘It was beautiful. It was vivid.'

The word lit up for him, like an unexpected flash of centralised light, all her eagerness, touching him into his own moment of reserved exultation. He walked with her for a few yards into the frosty drive, where the Paul Vaulkhards were waiting. A chain of light frozen boughs, glistening in the lamplight, seemed to obscure all the upper sky, but she lifted her face in a last gesture of excitement to say:

‘Oh! All the stars are out! Look at all the stars!'

‘Now remember,' he said. ‘Don't forget to come and see us before you go.'

‘Oh! I will, I will,' she said. She laughed with light confusion. ‘I mean I will come—I mean I won't forget. I will remember.'

He watched her run into the frosty night, down the drive.

Later, in a house deserted except for the caterers' men and shabby everywhere with dirty glasses and still burning cigarettes and a mess of half-gnawed food, his wife said:

‘Honestly,
did
you think it went well?
Did
you? You didn't think everybody was awfully stiff and bored?'

‘I don't think so,' he said.

‘Oh! Somehow I thought it never got going. It never jelled. People just stood about in groups and glared and somehow I thought it never worked up. You know how I mean.'

‘I thought it was nice,' he said.

‘What about the wine? I knew as soon as we started it was a mistake. People didn't know what to make of it, did they? It was too cold. Didn't you feel they didn't know what to make of it—it's funny how a little thing like that can go through a party.'

Disconsolately, agitatedly picking up glasses and putting them down again, she wandered about the empty rooms. The caterers' men, in their shirt-sleeves, were packing up. In the hall a spray of lilac had become dislodged from its green guard of pittosporum leaves and as Clavering passed through the hall he picked it up and put it back again.

‘What do you suppose the Paul Vaulkhards made of it?' his wife called. ‘Didn't you have an awful feeling they felt they were a bit above it? Not quite their class?'

Opening the front door, he was too far away to answer. He walked for a few paces down the still-lighted drive, looking up at the stars. The night in its
rimy frostiness was without wind. With a tenderness he did not want to pursue into anything deeper he remembered how much the girl had liked all things that were white. He remembered how she had thought everything was beautiful.

From the frozen meadows behind the house there was a call of owls and from farther away, from dark coverts, a barking of foxes.

‘How many langoustines today, Monsieur Harris?' the boy said.

Almost every day that summer there were big blue dishes of cream pink langoustine, a sort of small spidery lobster, for lunch, and all through the sunny dining-room of the hotel there was a hungry cracking of claws. A fine bristling Atlantic air blew in hot from the bay.

The small boy Jean-Pierre had eyes like glistening blobs of bright brown sea-weed. ‘English! English!—in English, please!'

‘Nine.'

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—noine!'

‘Nine:

‘Noine.'

‘Nine:

‘Please say nine!' Madame Dupont said. ‘Nine, Jean-Pierre—now! No more of that noine!'

‘Noine.'

‘Ten now,' Harris said and even Madame Dupont,
the governess, who with small beady dark eyes and neat pink jaws delicately champing had something of the look of a refined langoustine herself, laughed gaily.

‘I have to laugh,' Madame Dupont said. ‘It's very wrong, but I can't help it. The boy is very happy.'

Harris had begun to share a table under the window with Madame Dupont and the boy because now, in July, towards the height of the season, the hotel was quickly filling up. There were no longer any single tables for single men. Every day new French mammas and papas arrived with shrieking families and dour matriarchal grandmothers and small yapping dogs, and every day Madame Dupont, who had chosen the table in the corner because it was secluded and strategic, squinted finely through small gold spectacles so that she could see them better.

‘That's a family named Le Brun who were here last year. They are from Lyons. He is in the Sûrete.'

‘How many langoustines now, Monsieur Harris?'

‘One dozen.'

‘Dozen, dozen, dozen? How many is that?'

‘Douzaine,' Harris said. ‘Dozen, douzaine. Douze, douze.'

‘It is the same,' Madame Dupont said. ‘Isn't that so often the case? They are so alike, French and English. Sometimes there is hardly any difference at all, really.'

‘French is more beautiful——'

‘Oh! no. English is very beautiful too.' Sea-light from the wide hot bay sparkled on Madame Dupont's spectacles as she lifted her face. ‘The family Bayard has gone, I see. They have rearranged the tables.'

Harris, with his back to the room, could not see the
comings and goings of French families. They were reflected for him in the flashing glasses, the brief arrested pauses of neat lean jaws, the way the silver lobster pincers were held, delicately or with surprise or with a certain stern reproval and expectancy, over a pile of pink-brown shell and whisker.

‘I believe they are going to put that family—no, they are not. Thank Heaven.'

‘Which family?'

‘Blanche. The big fat man in the blue-striped shirt and the white cap that he always forgets to take off in the dining-room.'

After the langoustine that day there were small
filets de Sole Dieppoise
and after that
navarin d'agneau
with tender olive peas. The sun was a blinding silver on the bay. Big blue sardine boats, with blood-bronze sails, came round the distant point of pine and rock with deceptive grace, running quickly out of sight into port. Across the bay an almost complete circle of sand, dead white, lay below blue-black pine woods like a crust of salt left by tide and baked to a dazzling fierceness by wind and sun.

By the time he reached the
navarin
Harris was quite sleepy. It was the same, he discovered, every day. Lunch began at twelve o'clock and every day he was determined to walk, afterwards, along the little coast road under the pines to find out for himself what lay on and about that dazzling curve of sand across the bay. Every day lunch with Jean-Pierre and Madame Dupont went on, with much laughter and sucking of grapes and coffee, until two o'clock, and after it he went to sleep in the sun.

At one-thirty Madame Dupont said, ‘It is very queer the table is not occupied. I find it very queer.'

‘Monsieur Harris is going to sleep,' the boy said. ‘His eyes are shutting!'

‘Oh! no, no, no. Wide awake. Thinking.'

‘Too much langoustines!'

‘They have put special flowers on the table,' Madame Dupont said. ‘Roses and things. Nice ones.'

‘Monsieur Harris is asleep! He's not listening.'

‘I find it very queer,' Madame Dupont said. ‘Special flowers and nobody coming.'

‘The flowers are always for Americans,' Harris said. ‘They will have ice-water and plain salad and make a fuss.'

‘Fuss, fuss?' the boy said. ‘What's that? What's fuss?'

‘It's what you are,' Madame Dupont said. ‘Fuss fuss!'

‘Fuss fuss!' he said.

Madame Dupont, not speaking, began to wash a branch of blue-black grapes in her finger bowl, holding it just under her mouth, letting it swing there. Slowly, almost dreamily, she took off the wet grapes with her slender fingers, one by one, pressing them into her mouth, stones and skin and all, with neat and elegant squirts.

‘You must not look,' she said, ‘but the new people are just coming now.'

Harris idly began to wash a bunch of grapes too. In the water the dark skins gathered crusts of little pearls. The grapes were always sweet and delicious, he found, but sometimes in the early pears and peaches there were to be found, to the boy's amusement, trundling fat maggots, pear-cream or peach-rose according to the
flesh from which they unrolled, and Madame Dupont, in horror, covered her twinkling glasses with her hands.

Today, in the boy's slim green pear, there were no maggots, and Madame Dupont's eyes were alert and free.

‘I thought it looked for a moment like Monsieur Bazin from St. Germain and his wife,' she said. ‘He is a man of the same build.'

‘Not Americans?'

‘Oh! no, no. French. An elderly man and a girl.'

‘Nice?' he said. ‘The girl.'

A grape lay for a second in the centre of Madame Dupont's lips, delicately poised.

‘A beauty.'

As the grape slid into Madame Dupont's mouth, to be sucked and champed and swallowed swiftly away, she said:

‘Can I describe her for you?' and went on, not waiting for an answer: ‘Very dark. No colour. Big brown eyes. And quite a big girl—big and round, with nice arms and hands.' She broke off another grape. ‘About twenty-two.'

‘And him?'

‘She's wearing a white sun dress with a red coat that slips off. She's putting a flower into his buttonhole.'

‘What is he like?'

‘A real French papa. He's a little short-sighted I think. He seems to find it hard to read the menu.'

‘Perhaps he is long-sighted instead,' Harris said and Madame Dupont, looking hastily down under her glasses, washing grape-stained hands in the finger bowl, seemed for the first time a little confused.

‘I have a feeling I have seen him somewhere before,' she said. ‘Jean-Pierre, you must wash your hands. Quickly. Wash them. We must go.'

‘Fuss fuss!' he said.

‘Thanks to you he is learning English too quickly,' she said. ‘Are you coming too?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I am going to walk across the bay.'

‘On your stomach? or swimming?' she said and once again the three of them, the boy with imp-bright eyes, Madame Dupont no longer severe or confused, laughed gaily together.

‘He's asleep!' the boy said. ‘His eyes are shut! He's asleep already.'

‘Quiet!' she said. ‘Walk nicely from the dining-room.'

‘Tell me about the war,' the boy said.

‘No,' he said. ‘Nothing to tell. I must walk across the bay.'

All afternoon he slept, as usual, in the sun.

When he woke, about five o'clock, the wind had turned a little northward, breaking straight through the small gap from the open sea. It stirred even the sheltered bay into a surface of jagged glass, a dark and wonderful indigo, with flouncing edges of salt-white foam. The air was so much cooler that he woke with a sudden start, the wind quite cold across his shoulders, where his wound scar, almost invisible now on dark sea-browned flesh, felt tight and dead.