
The Greengage Summer is true, or partly true: when I was fifteen, my elder sister Jon seventeen going on eighteen, two totally self-involved adolescents, our mother, Mam, driven by despair over us, made an announcement: "We are going," she said, "to the Battlefields of France" -- those words were in capitals -- "and perhaps when you see the rows and rows of crosses for those young men who gave their lives for you, it might make you stop and think of your selfishness."
Mam had never been to France or anywhere on the Continent. She spoke no French but this was a crusade; her cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes determined. "We have to change trains at Rouen and have two hours to wait so I shall take you to the market place to see where Joan of Arc was burnt" -- she had read it all up thoroughly -- "St Joan, too, might make you think. And," she added, "you are not to tell Aunt Mary. She thinks we are going to the seaside."
We did not see where Joan of Arc was burnt; all I remember of the time in Rouen were the first French strawberry tarts we ate -- Rose our youngest sister in heaven -- she and the next sister, Nancy, were with us. We spent the whole two hours in a patisserie opposite the station because Mam could go no further. She had not absolutely deceived Aunt Mary; we had been at the seaside in Varengeville in Normandy for three weeks and there Mam had been bitten on the leg by a horsefly. On the train her leg began to swell with agonizing pain. Jon and I knew enough about fevers to know she had high fever; by the time we arrived in Paris she was helpless.
I can see us now, the four of us on the platform of the Gare de l'Est, grouped around Mam who sits on our suitcases. "Children you . . . Jon . . . Rumer . . . you must . . ." is all she can say, but though Jon and I were, to our minds, quite old, not children at all, we were oddly inexperienced and tongue-tied into shyness and dismay.
Mam had asked a clergyman friend for advice and he had told her that Château Thierry, a town on the Marne, had been the American Headquarters in the war. "If you want to see the battlefields there can be no better place," he had said and recommended a small pension, the Hôtel des Violettes. As with Joan of Arc, we failed to see the battlefields but we did reach Château Thierry.
Not without a private battle. "Jon, you must get a porter and ask him," I said.
"You speak better French. You ask him."
"I don't speak better French."
"You do."
"Girls," said Mam feebly, and, "Go on," commanded Jon.
I had to beard a horrible and extortionate porter like a bear in a blue blouse and station cap; at first, he could not understand a word I said -- which was not surprising -- until at last, "Château Thierry," he shouted; it sounded as if he were swearing and we wondered what was wrong with Château Thierry. Mercifully the train left from the same Gare de l'Est. He shouldered and swung some of our suitcases, we carried the rest, another porter almost carried Mam and, after parting with far too many francs, we found ourselves in a second-class compartment, bumping slowly through a flat countryside.
It is difficult, with the novel I was to write about those two months in Château Thierry and the film that followed it, to know what I remember as happening, what is transposed in the novel, and what is overlaid by the film; each seems to shimmer through the others. I do not know if we really had to walk from the station, Jon and I one on each side of Mam holding her up, a boy pushing our luggage in a handcart, Nancy and Rose trailing behind as, "Hôtel des Violettes," we said over and over again.
"Si," said the boy, "si," and nodded ahead to where trees, iron railings, and tall scrolled iron gates showed, behind them, a big house with lights. "Hôtel des Violettes." We felt a tingle of anticipation.
In the book and film, the hotel was called the Hôtel des Oeillets-carnations, but, as I write, I smell the "Violettes" smell of warm dust and cool plaster, of jessamine and of box hedges in the sun, of dew on the long grass -- the smell fills the garden -- and, in the house, it is of Gaston the chef's cooking; of furniture polish, damp linen, and always a little of drains. There are sounds that seem to belong only to des Violettes: the patter of the poplar-tree leaves along the courtyard walk, a tap running in the kitchen with a clatter of pans and china, mixed with the sound of high French voices, especially of the chamber-maids as they call to one another out of the bedroom windows; the thump of someone washing clothes in the river sounds close and barges puff upstream; a faint noise comes from the town and near, the plop of a fish; a greengage falls.
The river was the Marne; and beyond the hotel's formal garden of gravel paths, statues, small flower beds edged with box, an orchard stretched to a wall in which a blue door opened on to the river bank. The orchard seemed to us immense; there were seven alleys of greengage trees alone; they were ripe and in the dining room, Toinette, the waitress, built them, on dessert plates, into pyramids. "Reines Claudes," she would say, to teach us their names; always afterward we called this time the greengage summer.
Madame -- I will call her Madame Chenal -- was kind; few hotel keepers would have accepted a critically ill foreign woman with four children. The doctor was there that night and she comforted and reassured us, calling in an Englishwoman, a Mrs Martin staying in the hotel who, herself, had a small girl. Mrs Martin coaxed Nancy and Rose to eat supper and put them to bed; meanwhile Jon and I were almost overcome by the hotel.
The Hôtel des Violettes had been a château; it had elegant rooms, a great hall from which a painted panelled staircase led up to a first and second floor of bedrooms -- there were attic bedrooms above with mansard windows. The salon was panelled too, with sofas and chairs in gilt and brocade; the dining room had -- what particularly impressed me -- blue satin wallpaper. Our bedrooms were large with four-poster beds -- it seemed at first that there was only a hard bolster, no pillows; we were surprised when we found them in the vast armoires. The windows had shutters too heavy for us to close; we could see lanterns lit along the drive and, even in that night of distress, we lingered, breathing the warm fragrance and, again, felt the tingle of anticipation.
Mam had septicaemia, acutely dangerous in the days before penicillin.
"Are there no relatives we could send for?" asked poor Madame Chenal and before I could open my mouth, "None," said Jon firmly.
Poor Mam! How could she have known it would all turn out the opposite of her innocent plan. To begin with, Château Thierry was in the champagne country, a luxury town to which the buyers came for the vintage. It was, too, famous for its liqueur chocolates -- Jon was to be given boxes of them. We gorged ourselves, and on the delectable food, especially the ripe fruit in the orchard. Perhaps part of the feeling of being in a dream was because we ate so much; we were, too, out of ourselves from being so suddenly immersed in France.
There was shock after shock. "Do you know," asked Nancy who managed to discover everything, "Madame Chenal has a lover. What's a lover?"
Jean Pierre, a French Canadian, was big, handsome with heavy-lidded eyes, astonishingly blue, and a mass of wiry dark hair. He smelled of sweat and drink -- he was often drunk. Years afterwards, I discovered he was a spy who was trading on Madame's bounty. He fell in love with Jon, at first furtively. He used to get a ladder and climb up to our window as we undressed for bed. The first time I froze with terror and let out a scream but Jon's hand came like a clamp on my lips.
"Be quiet!" and, "You're not to tell -- ever."
"Suppose he comes in?"
"He won't."
"Why?"
"Because he knows that I don't like him. He keeps on bothering me," said Jon, "so I asked Toinette what to say and I said it. Salaud," said Jon with relish . . .
"Weren't you afraid?"
"No. Why should I be?" She gave a shrug. "Men do what you want them to," said this new Jon. I was speechless.
It was not only Jean Pierre. There was Mr Martin, husband of the kind Englishwoman; he was English too, young, slim, with lazy good manners and perfectly dressed.
They had a four-year-old daughter, Betsy, and to our relief, took charge of Nancy and Rose. Mr Martin, Madame told us, worked in a bank in Paris; he left every morning before we were up and came back late but during weekends he was there and, in his magnificent car, drove us out into the green and gold countryside, its white roads winding between vineyards, where the grapes were heavy. He took us to a restaurant overlooking the river and let us order as we liked. "Comme il est gentil," said Madame Chenal, but I saw him looking at Jon, not as Jean Pierre looked, avidly, but with a half-unwilling tenderness and this time Jon looked back.
The weeks passed, the vintage began, and everything, the hotel, the whole town, was filled with bubbling life. I saw men and women drunk; I remember a gutter running with wine from a broken cask and children scooping it up to drink. The young men were rowdy and no longer stared at us but sometimes would not let us pass. I knew enough to know they would not have given even a wolf whistle for me -- it was Jon.
That August she was eighteen and, for her birthday, Mam let her choose herself a dress which is imprinted on my memory as are many of Jon's dresses. This was strawberry-pink French voile piped with white, and chic -- which none of our dresses had been.
The hotel guests clapped when she came in to dinner wearing it. There were murmurs of "Ravissante" . . . "Charmante" . . . "Adorable" and "Heureuse anniversaire!" -- Madame had told them it was her birthday -- "Heureuse anniversaire!" they called and raised their glasses. It was the first time I saw Jon blush.
One of the buyers, Monsieur Bosanquet, sent a bottle of champagne over to our table. Jon and I sipped it reverently. We took the bottle up to Mam who could sit up now and walk a little; as she drank her wan face took on a little colour, her eyes had an echo of her sparkle. "I had forgotten how it tasted. Nectar!" she said and looked at Jon with love and pride, but that was the last night of our dreams.
Next morning we woke to find the hotel in chaos and full of police, the gates guarded by gendarmes, even the blue door in the orchard. Mr and Mrs Martin and Betsy had gone in the night and a Paris bank had been robbed, "Of millions and millions," said Toinette. Mr Martin was a well-known international thief; Mrs Martin was not his wife but an accomplice and Betsy was not their child, she was borrowed or hired to add to the illusion of their being an ordinary English family.
We were interviewed by the police, even Rose. When Mr Martin took us out, where did we go? Did he meet anyone? Did he leave us in the car and go anywhere? Had we heard Mr and Mrs Martin talking? Jon was stiff and as non-committal as if she hated them but I felt like a heroine, shielding Mr Martin and talked willingly until, out of the corner of her mouth, Jon hissed, "Stop, stop."
"But I'm only trying to help him. Don't you mind about Mr Martin?"
"Mr Martin!" Jon made a sound like "p'fui".
It was over. Mam was soon able to travel, though painfully, and took us home.
There was an unexpected -- and touching -- sequel. One day of Mr Martin's last week at the Hôtel des Violettes, as he was leaving for work, the handle of his attaché case had come off -- it would have been called a briefcase now -- and Jon had lent him hers, a small case but made of crocodile leather from a crocodile Fa had shot. Jon treasured it but it had disappeared with Mr Martin.
He was not caught but three months later the case came back, posted to Eastbourne from the South of France -- he must have taken a considerable risk to send it. When Jon opened the wrapping and saw the case she burst into tears.
CONTENTS
ON AND off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault, and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did. Hester of course was quite unabashed; Will---though he was called Willmouse then---Willmouse and Vicky were too small to reach any but the lowest branches, but they found fruit fallen in the grass; we were all strictly forbidden to climb the trees.
The garden at Les Oeillets was divided into three: first the terrace and gravelled garden round the house; then, separated by a low box hedge, the wilderness with its statues and old paths; and, between the wilderness and the river, the orchard with its high walls. In the end wall a blue door led to the river bank.
The orchard seemed to us immense, and perhaps it was, for there were seven alleys of greengage trees alone; between them, even in that blazing summer, dew lay all day in the long grass. The trees were old, twisted, covered in lichen and moss, but I shall never forget the fruit. In the hotel dining-room Mauricette built it into marvellous pyramids on dessert plates laid with vine leaves. 'Reines Claudes,' she would say to teach us its name as she put our particular plate down, but we were too full to eat. In the orchard we had not even to pick fruit---it fell off the trees into our hands.
The greengages had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet. Coming from the streets and small front gardens of Southstone, we had not been let loose in an orchard before; it was no wonder we ate too much.
"Summer sickness," said Mademoiselle Zizi.
"Indigestion," said Madame Corbet.
I do not know which it was, but ever afterwards, in our family, we called that the greengage summer.
"You are the one who should write this," I told Joss, "it happened chiefly to you"; but Joss shut that out, as she always shuts out things, or shuts them in so that no one can guess.
"You are the one who likes words," said Joss. "Besides . . ." and she paused. "It happened as much to you."
I did not answer that. I am grown up now---or almost grown up---"and we still can't get over it!" said Joss.
"Most people don't have . . . that . . . in thirty or forty years," I said in defence.
"Most people don't have it at all," said Joss.
If I stop what I am doing for a moment, or in any time when I am quiet, in those cracks in the night that have been with me ever since when I cannot sleep and thoughts seep in, I am back; I can smell the Les Oeillets smells of hot dust and cool plaster walls, of jessamine and box leaves in the sun, of dew in the long grass; the smell that filled house and garden of Monsieur Armand's cooking and the house's own smell of damp linen, or furniture polish, and always, a little, of drains. I can hear the sounds that seem to belong only to Les Oeillets: the patter of the poplar trees along the courtyard wall, of a tap running in the kitchen mixed with the sound of high French voices, of the thump of Rex's tail and another thump of someone washing clothes on the river bank; of barges puffing upstream and Mauricette's toneless singing---she always sang through her nose; of Toinette and Nicole's quick loud French as they talked to one another out of the upstairs windows; of the faint noise of the town and, near, the plop of a fish or of a greengage falling.
"But you were glad enough to come back," said Uncle William.
"We never came back," said Joss.
The odd thing was, when that time was over, we, Joss and I, were still sixteen and thirteen, the ages we had been when we arrived on that stifling hot evening at the beginning of August. We were Mother, Joss, I---Cecil---Hester and the Littles, Willmouse and Vicky. It must have been nine o'clock.
"Why were you so late?" asked Mademoiselle Zizi. "There are plenty of trains in the day."
"We were waiting in the Gare de l'Est for Mother to get better."
"And she didn't get better," said Willmouse.
"And we had nothing to eat all day," said Vicky, "but some horrid sausage and bread."
"And the oranges we had with us," said Hester, who was always accurate, "twelve oranges. We ate them in the train."
Mademoiselle Zizi shuddered, and I burned to think that now she must know we were the kind of family that ate oranges in trains.
There had been no taxis at the station, but after a stress that I do not like to remember---the whole day had been like a bad dream---we found a porter who would take our suitcases on a handcart.
It was beginning to be dusk when our little procession left the station; men were coming back from fishing, women were talking in doorways and in their stiff gardens where gladioli and zinnias seemed to float, oddly coloured in the twilight, behind iron railings. 'French people don't have gardens,' Uncle William was to say, 'they grow flowers.' Children were playing in the streets; Willmouse and Vicky stared at them; I think they had thought they were the only children in the world kept up to this late hour.
All round us was the confusion of the strange town, strange houses, strange streets. The people stared at us too, but we did not feel it. We did not feel anything; our bodies seemed not to belong to us but to be walking apart while we floated, as the flowers did, in the dusk. Perhaps we were too tired to feel.
The handcart bumped over cobbles that, even though we had not walked on cobbles before, we knew were unmistakably French. Mother gave a small moan each time the porter turned into another street. It seemed a long way, and by the time we came to the hotel gates lamplight was showing in the houses and most of the doors were shut. At Les Oeillets every night after dark the dogs were let loose and the outer gates closed, leaving only a wicket-gate unlocked; the handcart would not go through that and we had to wait---still apart from ourselves---while the porter rang the bell.
It clanged. There was a deep barking. We did not know Rex and Rita then but could tell it was a big dog's bark; two voices commanded it to stop, a woman's, shrill, and a man's---or a boy's talking like a man; that was a good guess, for it was a large boy who appeared. He had on a white apron; we saw it glimmering towards us. His apron flapped, his shoes flapped too, and a lock of hair fell into his eyes as he bent forward to pull the bolt; he held the gate open to let us pass, and we smelled his smell of sweat and cigarettes and . . . "Is it onions?" I whispered.
"Not onion, garlic," Hester whispered back. "Don't you remember the sausage in the Gare de l'Est?" He was dirty and untidy and he did not smile.
Then we went into the hotel and---"Good God! An orphanage!" said Eliot.
Afterwards he apologised for that. "But you were all wearing grey flannel," he said, and he asked, "Why were you wearing grey flannel?"
Hester looked at him. "Perhaps you haven't been in England for a long time," she said gently. "Those were our school clothes."
In England we---except Joss---had been proud of them. There are two sorts of families; for one a school uniform is a step down, the feeling of being like everybody else; for the other that feeling is an achievement, the uniform a better, more complete set of clothes than any worn before. We belonged to the second category, and Willmouse's grey shorts and jacket, our St Helena's coats and skirts and hats, were our best clothes, the only ones suitable for travelling.
'Other girls have other clothes,' Joss said often.
'Not when an Uncle William pays for them,' said Mother.
Now Joss's eyes threw darts of hate at Eliot though he could not have been expected to know who she was. Our school hats were soup-plate shaped; Vicky in hers looked like a mushroom on two legs, but Joss's was small on her mass of dark hair and showed her forehead. She looked almost ugly in that hat, and the pleated skirt of her suit was too short.
Of course a great many things happened before Eliot said that about the orphanage; he did not even come in until later; but it was Eliot whom we remember of that first evening. He was its ace.
"When he came there was no more dreadfulness," said Hester, but I had to add, "Except the dreadfulness."
"WHAT! ONLY two passports?" said Mademoiselle Zizi when I took ours to the office next morning.
"Joss, my sister, has hers; the rest of us are on my mother's." I hated to have to say that. The hotel boy who had let us in was listening---his name, we knew now, was Paul; he was scornfully polishing the brass grille and could squint down at the passports. His look said plainly that he would not go about with a mother.
I had fought about that passport. "Why should Joss have one and not I?"
"She is sixteen," said Mother, and added, "You forget how young you are."
Three years separated each of us children---Father's expeditions usually lasted three years---but Joss and I had always been the Big Ones, as Willmouse and Vicky were the Littles, with Hester in a no-man's-land between. Joss and Cecil, it had been one word though it had meant I had sometimes to be older than I conveniently could; now I was relegated to a no-man's-land myself. I could see it was inevitable---thirteen is not child, not woman, not . . . declared, I thought, as Joss was now---but it hurt. The separate passport was a public confirmation of the status Joss had taken for herself; she had moved into it quite naturally, leaving me behind as she had moved from the bedroom we had always shared into one of her own. "There are things," said Mother, purposely vague though she knew I knew perfectly well what those things were, and she had let Joss change with Willmouse, moving him in to me.
Hester would have been a more natural companion, but she could not be separated from Vicky. "I have to sleep with my foot in her bed, you see," said Hester.
"Your foot out, in her bed?" I asked.
"Yes, or she won't go to sleep."
"But isn't it cold?"
"Sometimes." Hester added I was not to tell Mother. A great deal of the peace in our house was kept by Hester, but I was shocked. I spoke to Vicky. "But that is how I know she is there," said Vicky as if that justified it.
"But it's naughty."
"I don't mind being naughty," said Vicky.
A line might have been run through our family dividing it, with Hester, Vicky and me on one side. Joss and Willmouse on the other. Our surname was Grey; I wished it had been Shelmerdine or de Courcy, ffrench with two small 'ff's, or double-barrelled like Stuyvesant-Knox, but it was, simply, Grey. "Better than Bullock," said Joss. We had not quite escaped that; Uncle William was a Bullock, William John Bullock, and Vicky, Hester and I were as unmistakably Bullock as he, short, bluff, pink-faced, with eyes as blue as larkspurs.
It was not as bad for Hester and Vicky, because the Bullocks made pretty children; Vicky, fair-haired, with pearly flesh, was enchanting, and Hester, with her ringlets and rosiness, had kept her appeal; but in me, as in Uncle William, the plumpness had become a solid shortness, the fair hair was mouse, the rosy cheeks a fresh pinkness. No one ever looked as normal as Uncle William, and I wanted to look startling. Why could I not have been born to look like Joss, to be Joss? Joss and Willmouse were dark and slim, with such an ivory skin that their lashes and hair looked darker. "Like Snow White," said Hester with the only trace of envy I ever heard in her. They were, too, delicately unusual; Willmouse had the peaked look of an elf while Joss's eyes had the almond shape that had given her her nickname. "Because Chinese people have slant eyes," said Joss.
"Are supposed to have them," Father had corrected her on one of his times at home. "Most of them have eyes as straight as anyone."
"They have them in paintings," said Joss, who knew all about painting. She and Willmouse were equally vain---and clever; Joss was a serious painter and Willmouse had what we called his 'dressage'. It was years before we found out that that had to do with horses not clothes. Willmouse's scrapbooks and workbox and the dolls that so distressed Uncle William---'Dolls! Gordon's ghost!'---were part of it; the books held a collection of fashion prints, designs, and patterns of stuffs; Willmouse needed his scissors and pins for draping his designs---'I don't sew,' he said; 'that will be done in my workrooms'---while the dolls, his models, Miss Dawn and Dolores, were not dolls but artist's lay figures carved in wood with articulated joints. They had been given to Joss by Uncle William to help her in her painting, but to Mother's bewilderment she would not touch them, while Willmouse had annexed them. Mother could deal with us little Bullocks. Though we were often rude or obstinate, 'That is normal,' said Mother, but with Joss and Willmouse it was as if, in our quiet farmyard, she had hatched two cygnets and, 'Everything I do is wrong,' said poor Mother.
It seemed to be; for instance, when Joss complained that the art mistress at St. Helena's was no use Mother enrolled Joss in a London correspondence art course, but that had led to difficulties. 'Dear Mr A . . .' Joss wrote in the second lesson to her far-off master, 'I send you the design you asked for using a flower, St John's Wort, and the drawing of the woman---my mother---I am sorry I cannot find a naked man anywhere.'
With Joss and Willmouse even the Grey in their names took on an elegance; Joanna Grey, William Grey, had a good sound while Cecil or Victoria Grey were nothing, though Hester Grey suited Hester.
It had never been fair, but now, I thought, it was growing more unfair, for Joss had blossomed; that was what people said of young girls and I saw it was the right word; she was like a tree or a branch where every bud was breaking into flower.
She would not undress with me any more, and I was glad because my pinkness was still distressingly straight up and down while she had a waist now, slim and so supple I could not help watching it, and curves that tapered to long slim legs, while her breasts had swelled. I knew how soft these were and that they were tender, for once, out of curiosity, I touched them and she had jumped and sworn at me. As Joss grew, she grew more irritable, with flashes of temper that were sometimes cruel; she was restless too, as if she were always excited, which was odd because her face was serene and withdrawn, almost secret, I thought, with only the palest pink flush on her cheeks to tell of the excitement inside. "Is Joss beautiful?" I asked with a pang.
"Just now," said Mother, "just now."
I tried desperately to keep up with Joss. Cecil de Courcy, de Haviland, Cecil du Guesclin, Winnington-Withers . . . Winter. That was a beautiful name, and I thought, I shall use it when I am a writer, or a nun; Cecil Winter, Sister Cecilia Winter; but I was not yet a writer, or a nun, nor did I know that I should ever be either. At the moment I was more like a chameleon, coloured by other people's business, and now I burned as I had burned about us eating oranges in the train when I saw Mademoiselle Zizi's lips twitch as she read out our names from Mother's passport. There was barely room for us all in the space.
"You went chasing across France with that gaggle of children?" Uncle William said afterwards.
"We didn't chase," said Mother, "we went quite slowly by train." Sometimes Mother was no older than Hester and that passport with its single stamp, in spite of all the names, looked like a child's.
"Et votre père?" asked Madame Corbet.
"Yes. Where is your father?" asked Mademoiselle Zizi.
"In Tibet," said Hester.
"Ti-bet?"
I should have done better without Hester, who could never learn to temper anything. It was odd---and annoying---that I always wanted us not to be ordinary, but when we were a little extraordinary I blushed.
"Juste ciel! What is he doing in Tibet?" asked Mademoiselle Zizi.
"Picking flowers," said Hester.
"Picking flowers!" Mademoiselle Zizi repeated it in French, and Paul gave a short guffaw which made me rap out what was almost a French sentence: "Il est botaniste." I added, in English, that he was on an expedition. "He usually is," said Hester.
Mademoiselle Zizi and Madame Corbet looked at one another. "Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Eh quoi?" said Madame Corbet. "Il n'y a personne pour s'occuper de tout ce monde-là?"
They began to talk about us in French as if we were not there. "They have not been in France before," said Mademoiselle Zizi, looking at the passports.
"They have not been anywhere," said Madame Corbet.
"We have," I began hotly. "My sister Joss was born in India. Mother's old passport expired, that's all . . ."but they did not listen.
"And they don't speak French."
That was wounding, because up to that moment I had believed that Joss and I, particularly I, spoke French very well. "You ought to," said Joss, "you learned enough." That was not kind, for learning French poetry was a punishment at St Helena's.
"Never mind," whispered Hester. "Look how it has helped you, being bad." Certainly it was the only thing at which I ever beat Joss and the hours I had spent over 'Le temps a laissé son manteau, De vent, de froideur et de pluie,' 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose' and the Verlaines I had grown to love, and stood me in good stead; I had been able to understand, all that nightmare day, what people had said, and really it was I, more than Joss, who had piloted us all here. I did speak French, but, as if he knew what I was thinking, Paul sniffed and drew his finger across his nose and wiped it on the back of his trousers, which looked rude.
"We cannot be expected to look after them," Madame Corbet was saying.
"We can look after ourselves," I said with dignity. "We are not little children."
Mademoiselle Zizi picked up Joss's passport and then threw it down on the desk. "Sixteen," she said, "a child," and asked me in English, "Have you no relative, no one at all who could come?"
Before I could stop her Hester had answered. "Uncle William,"
Uncle William was Mother's brother, ten years older than she . . . "though it might have been a hundred," said Joss. Most grown people are like icebergs, three-tenths showing, seven-tenths submerged---that is why a collision with one of them is unexpectedly hurtful---but Mother was like a child transparently above board and open, "To any scallywag," said Uncle William.
I sometimes wondered if he ranked Father as a scallywag, but he did not say it and Uncle William said most things. "If you had listened to me," was his favourite. I do not think Mother had listened to him when she married, but, all the same, when she brought Joss back from India---babies cannot go on expeditions---he had met them and brought them to Southstone, "And Belmont Road," said Joss bitterly.
"How did we know enough to hate it?" she asked afterwards, "when it was all we could remember?" We disliked and were ashamed of the ugly cheap little house with its pebbledash, its imitation Tudor gables and leaded windows. "Silly to cut glass up into all those bits," said Willmouse, but it was one of Uncle William's houses---he owned several in Southstone---and he kindly let us live in it. "He is so kind!" Mother said and sighed.
Uncle William spent money and time and effort on us children, "and words," said Hester, "heaps and heaps of words," while Father came only at long intervals and, when he did come, hardly lifted his eyes from his collections of ferns or orchids to look at his wife and children. I think he could scarcely tell the Littles apart, yet we loved him and longed for him to come home; we ran our legs off on his errands and were proud of belonging to him. "Oh well," said Hester, "I will look after Uncle William when he is old."
Did we need Uncle William? I could never make up my mind, just as I could never make out if Mother were very silly or very wise. Take her dealings with Willmouse. "He says he won't wear it," she had said, handing back his new school cap at his school.
"Then he must leave," said the headmaster.
Mother consulted with Willmouse and, "He would rather leave," said Mother, and Willmouse left, until Uncle William heard.
"Why can't I go to a girls' school?" asked Willmouse. "They don't have caps and perhaps I could wear my muff."
"Gordon's ghost!" said Uncle William.
The muff was white fur lined with satin; Willmouse had bought it with the money Uncle William gave him for his fifth birthday.
"What did you buy, boy? A cricket bat? A train?"
"A muff," said Willmouse.
"Gordon's ghost!" said Uncle William. We never discovered who the ghost was, but Willmouse often made Uncle William say things like 'Gordon's ghost!' and 'The only boy amongst them and he isn't a boy!'
Willmouse was little then, but I think we, ourselves, sometimes wished we had a proper boy. "He is Willmouse," said Mother. That was what she understood about him, about us all, even Joss, in our different ways. Perhaps if she had been left to deal with us alone there would not have been the discontent and rudeness.
I think now that the discontent was because we were never quite comfortable in Southstone and the rudeness came from the discontent; it was as if a pattern-mould were being pressed down on us into which we could not fit. For one thing we were much poorer than the people we knew, poor to be Uncle William's sister, nieces and nephew; and we had this curiously absent father while other girls' fathers went to offices and caught trains and belonged to the Sussex Club. Mother too was not like other mothers, nor like a grown-up at all; she patently preferred being with Vicky or Willmouse or any of us than playing bridge, or organising bazaars, or having coffee or luncheon or tea with the select Southstone ladies. When any of us---except Hester, who was at home anywhere---went out to tea in one of the big red-brick houses, with lawns and laurel bushes and meticulously gravelled driveways, we felt interlopers. We were odd, belonging and not belonging, and odd is an uncomfortable thing to be; we did not want to belong but were humiliated that we did not. I know now it was not good for us to live in Southstone. We should not have been as odd somewhere bigger, in London perhaps.
"In London," said Joss dreamily, "you can be anyone. You never know whom you are sitting next to. He might be a beggar or a duke."
"Or a thief," said Uncle William, who had decided views on London.
"Southstone . . ." I began.
"Is where you live," said Uncle William.
"It's all middle, middle, middle," I said. It was. No beggars and no dukes. "Just middle."
"My dear child, that is the world."
"The world is not all middle," said Joss.
"Most of it is. Why should you be different?"
We could not think of any reason, yet we knew we were; every heart-beat told us that. "How shall we ever get out of Southstone?" I asked Joss in despair.
Then we were rude to Mother again and she took us to Vieux-Moutiers---Vieux-Moutiers and Les Oeillets.
I do not know what it was that drove her to it. Probably Joss and I had been more than usually difficult and unkind, for I had followed Joss in this new bullying of Mother, of being horrid to Hester and snapping at the Littles, of criticising; I joined in from habit and from principle.
"Oh, Mother! You are so slow!"
"Do we have to have that disgusting old tea cosy?"
"Must you wear that hat?"
I think at that time, she was only happy when she was with Willmouse and Vicky; she and Hester were too alike to know if they were happy together or not; it would have been like trying to know if one were happy in one's own skin.
"Why do you have to have a shopping bag?" Joss would say.
"To put the shopping in," said Mother, astonished.
"Why must Hester wear plimsolls in the street?"
"She is going on the beach."
It was on the beach that it happened.
We did not go away for the summer holidays---"Or any holidays," said Joss discontentedly---but spent long days on the beach, picnicking. "Must we?" asked Joss.
"I thought you liked it," said Mother, but Joss shuddered.
Our picnics were even more family ones than most; we had baskets and bags bulging with bathing towels and Thermos flasks, and a dreadful aluminium food container, brought home by Father from India, that was always coming apart in the street. We had buckets and spades and shrimping-nets, jerseys and paper bags. "Like a bank holiday," said Joss; "and must Hester talk to everyone? She's such a blatant child."
We had to wear what we called our scarecrows, old faded-out patched cottons. "I can't help it," said Mother. "I can't let your good clothes get covered with salt and oil."
"We haven't any good clothes," said Joss.
Mother was gentle, but that day we went too far. I do not remember what we did, but she lost her temper. "You are abominably selfish," she said.
When she was angry she did not go white as Joss did---she went pink. "You never think of anyone but yourselves."
We stared. Whom else should we think of?
"Everyone tells me you are badly brought up and it's true."
"You brought us up," said Joss.
"It's true," repeated Mother.
"What are you going to do about it?" I asked as insolently as I could, and Hester stole a hand into hers.
"I shall do something."
"What?"
Mother took a deep breath. "I shall take you to the battlefields of France."
"The battlefields of France!"
We were still speaking rudely, but it was feeble, the last intermittent gunfire before surrender. "Why?"
"So that you can see what other people have given," said Mother, "given for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice. Perhaps that will make you ashamed and make you think. And Saint Joan," said Mother, "Saint Joan at the stake. We shall stop at wherever it was and see where she was burned."
"Oh, Mother! Not in the middle of the summer holidays!"
"Holidays or not," said Mother, and shut her lips.
"Pooh! You haven't enough money," said Joss, but she sounded a little frightened.
"I shall use the legacy."
"The legacy is for college," said Joss.
"This is college," said Mother. "It is education. You need to learn . . . what I cannot teach you," said Mother, her voice quivering.
She did not ask Uncle William's advice. She went to Mr Stillbotham.
Mr Stillbotham was an elderly Theosophist, who lived in Belmont Road and was the only person in it, as far as we knew, who travelled. Father, of course, could not be said to live in Belmont Road. Mr Stillbotham spent his winters in the South of France; we admired him for that and thought him distinguished with his silver hair, pince-nez, blue-and-white-striped shirts and bow-ties. We also liked his manner to us which was full of courtesy and admiration---particularly for Joss.
"Standing with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,"
Mr Stillbotham would say when he saw her. Altogether he seemed a suitable person to advise us, and we approved.
"You wish to visit your dead?" he asked when Mother told him about the battlefields. "They are not dead but liv . . ." but for the purposes of our visit Mother needed them dead and she cut him short. "Can you tell us of an hotel, not too expensive, and near the cemeteries?" she said.
"Les Oeillets at Vieux-Moutiers." That was the first time we heard its name. "You will find plenty of motors at the station."
Saint Joan had been burned, it seemed, at Rouen. "But you can break your journey there if you go by Newhaven-Dieppe, which will be cheaper," said Mr Stillbotham; "or if you preferred it you could spend the afternoon in Paris."
Spend the afternoon in Paris! Saint Joan had not the slightest chance after that. "I shall see the Louvre," said Joss. "Mona Lisa. The Winged Victory."
"I shall see the shops," said Willmouse and, as always when he was stirred, his face went white.
"Do you remember those strawberry tarts, little strawberries in syrup, that Father once brought back?" asked Vicky. "They came from Paris," she said reverently.
Hester and I, as usual, were far more ordinary; she would be happy buying postcards and taking snapshots with her Brownie camera, while I, the chameleon, would be with them all in turns. "Well, you enjoy it more in that way," said Mother. We were all equally excited.
"If you listen to me . . ." said Uncle William, but nobody listened.
"Very well," said Uncle William. "When you get into trouble don't ask me for help."
"We shall not need help," said Mother, dignified; but the day before we left she was bitten on the leg by a horsefly. "A little fly," said Hester, "to do all that!"
When Mother took down her stocking in the train from Dieppe, the leg was swollen and the skin looked purple, green and blue. "Like a bruise," said Hester. "Did you bruise it? All over?" she finished uncertainly.
Mother shook her head. She fumbled with her handbag as if she could not control her hands and she shivered although she was hot.
"You are ill," said Joss accusingly, and Mother could not deny it.
It was altogether a disappointing as well as a dismaying day. From the train France did not look very different from England; it had the Constable, Peter Rabbit colours we had grown up with, and in Paris we did not see the Louvre, nor the shops, nor eat strawberry tarts. We did not buy a single postcard, nor take a photograph; we waited in the waiting-room for Mother to get well. The attendant in a dark-blue overall with a black crochet shawl came and looked at us, but we were too shy to speak to her. "Why didn't you go to Cook's? Lunn's? The American Express? Any of them would have helped you." Uncle William has asked us that often, but Joss and I had then only one idea: to get Mother, the Littles, Hester, ourselves and our suitcases to Vieux-Moutiers and Les Oeillets.
There was a train at seven. I remember I went to a food wagon and bought rolls and sausage. I did not know what else to buy and Joss would not go. "But you are the eldest," I said.
"You are the best at French," said Joss cruelly.
Like a herd we drew together and sniffed the sausage; we had not smelled garlic before and we gave it to the attendant; we ate the rolls.
I remember when Vicky touched Mother's leg, Mother gave a little scream and quickly bit her lips. "Don't worry," she said in a moment, "one is not sent anything one can't bear," but she had to bite her lips again. I remember, too, that Willmouse disappeared. "Il est parti voir les locos," said the attendant, but there was a new Vogue on a kiosk and he had gone to look at that.
I do not remember the train, only that Mr Stillbotham had been wrong and there were no taxis at the station. "Mais c'est pas bien loin," said the porter, and we took the handcart.
"But Mother can't walk," said Hester.
"She must." A terrible hardness had come upon us. We took her by her arms. She moaned and stumbled, and Hester wept. At last we came to the gates.
As we waited after the porter rang the bell I moved away from the others. I had had the sudden sense of a garden, sharp because it cut me from them. Through the gates I could see a courtyard with gravel round a square of grass in front of the house. To the side, paths led away into the trees; the light was almost gone now and trees showed dimly, grey-green along the wall, while the garden was black in the depth of the shadows. There was a steady light pattering sound---I did not know then that French sound of poplar leaves. A bird gave a sleepy call; an owl answered it, that strange night noise that I recognised though I had not heard it before.
I could smell a summer smell of cut grass and, near me, some flower scent that was heady and sweet; a white flower, I thought, jessamine or syringa. After the city and train my skin was cinder-dry and the air was gratefully cool against my face. I was filled with a sense of peace; all the fears and ignorance of the day seemed to drop away. This was the Hotel des Oeillets, real, not the mirage we had held in front of us through the travelling; we had arrived.
"L'hôtel n'acccepte pas les malades," said Madame Corbet.
"Does that mean she won't take sick people?" I asked Joss.
"I think it does."
The office at Les Oeillets was off the stairs, it was not big enough to be called a room; steps led up from the hall to an entresol with a landing and doors; the office was an annexe to this landing, separated from it by a counter and brass grille. There was just room behind the counter for a safe, a keyboard with pigeon-holes for letters, and Madame Corbet's desk with its telephone and account books. Now we, Joss, Hester, Willmouse, Vicky and I, stood in front of the grille; Willmouse's eyes were just level with the counter; only the top of Vicky's hat showed.
The staircase was panelled in pale green, riddled with curious holes, but the holes did not take away from its elegance. The hall was elegant too. It was odd that we, who had never seen elegance before---though it was our favourite word---immediately recognised it---except Hester. "It isn't like the Metropole or Cavendish," she said regretfully. They were the big hotels on Southstone's grand parade, but instinctively I liked this better. The staircase made a graceful shape as it led up to the floor above. The banister-rail was dark polished wood, the banisters thin and white; halfway up was a round window that showed a glimpse of trees, and in the wall were crystal wall lamps that matched the chandelier in the hall. We looked at that, amazed, for we had never seen a chandelier in a house. The hall had a squared marble floor; its chairs were gilt with faded brocade cushions; four small tables stood against the walls. "But they are only halves," said Willmouse in surprise. We had never seen console tables either.
In that hall our fibre suitcases looked cheap. We had other luggage even more vulgar; a basket, the bag that had held the oranges, a brown-paper parcel of the Littles' Wellington boots, an untidy heap of raincoats with their belts hanging; and we all carried treasures. Joss's, of course, were neat, a drawing-board strapped to her wooden paintbox. Hester had her camera, Willmouse his scrapbooks and workbox packed up with Miss Dawn and Dolores, while Vicky had Nebuchadnezzar in a basket. Nebuchadnezzar was a pig made out of a potato, with matchstick eyes and legs; she had made him at school and carried him about ever since, though he was beginning to shrivel a little. "When he is quite shrivelled I shall eat him," said Vicky. Mother sitting on a chair had her hat on one side and the coat of her good suit wrongly buttoned: she leaned her head against the chair back and shut her eyes, and her face seemed as mottled now as her leg. As for us, we were crumpled, untidy, and dirty, Hester's and Vicky's faces were streaked with dirt and tears, their socks had come down, and all our shoes were dusty. I could see that we were not at all the kind of family that would be an ornament to any hotel.
"I expect a doctor will come and take our mother to hospital," Joss said in English.
"L'hôtel n'accepte pas les enfants seuls."
"She won't take children by themselves."
"But if we are by ourselves?" said Hester.
Madame Corbet sat behind the grille with the hotel books spread out round her. On this hot evening she was wearing a black high-necked blouse; a black crochet shawl with bobbles was crossed on her shoulders. She wore a finger-guard of stained celluloid and her face looked stained too with sallow marks; her hair was in two black snakes coiled in a knot on the top of her head and she had a moustache of heavy black down on which Willmouse, straining to look over the counter, had instantly fixed his eyes. All the time we were talking I saw him examining it.
Joss was desperate. I knew that by her white face and the bigness of her eyes. She had taken over Mother's capacious old handbag, which looked oddly big on her. "S'il vous plaît, aidez-nous," she said. I knew how difficult it was for her to humble herself, but Madame Corbet only shrugged so that the topknot and the bobbles of her shawl danced. "Et qu'est-ce que je peux y faire, moi? Je ne suis pas la patronne. Je suis Madame Corbet, c'est tout." She said that as if to be Madame Corbet was something derogatory.
"If it is not your hotel, where is . . ." Joss consulted the paper Mr Stillbotham had given us. "Where is Mademoiselle de Presle?"
"Mademoiselle Zizi? Elle va dîner au château de Méry."
Joss and I looked at one another. Did she say going out to dinner. In Southstone we had supper at seven o'clock; now it was nearly ten.
"Au château de Méry," repeated Madame Corbet impressively.
The maid who had helped with our luggage and who was now waiting on the stairs rolled up her eyes and crossed herself; she was pert and Madame Corbet spoke sharply.
"Y sont des amis . . ." "Amis means friends," I told Hester. "Mademoiselle de Presle is going to a big house, a château, that might mean a castle, to friends."
"Des amis à Monsieur Eliot . . ." said the maid. Why did she say "Mr Eliot's friends" so meaningly?
Madame Corbet ignored her. To us she said, "They say the President of the Board of Trade is to be there," and I thought, So, she can speak English.
"Then we can't see Mademoiselle de Presle?" asked Joss.
"Naturally not."
"But what can we do?"
Madame Corbet shrugged. "Vous feriez bien d'aller au commissariat. Oui, allez au commissariat."
"Commissariat?" What was that? We looked at one another mystified. "Police," said the hotel boy Paul from his place on the landing. "Go police."
Joss's face flamed as though Madame Corbet had slapped it. "Come," she said to us.
We left the counter and followed Joss across the hall, walking round the two big Alsatian dogs who lifted their dark-furred faces. One wagged its tail; it was the first sign of friendliness Les Oeillets had given us. Perhaps it was that that made Madame Corbet feel ashamed.
"Vous pouvez laisser les bagages," she said.
"No thank you," said Joss.
This was proud but not very practical. The porter had gone and I do not know how we should have managed with Mother and the Littles, but at that moment the dogs stood up, wagging their tails more violently and looking towards a white door on the entresol landing. It opened and Mademoiselle Zizi and Eliot came out.
It was the first time we had seen anyone in 'tails'. Uncle William had a dinner-jacket, of course, but our vision had gone no further than that. I say 'tails' because it was at Eliot we looked. It seems strange now that, seeing a man and a woman both in full evening dress, we looked at the man first, but there was no question about it. Hester gave a little gasp.
"Were you ever a sailor?" Joss asked Eliot afterwards. I knew what she meant; he was tall and brown and lean, as were sailors in magazine pictures. His eyes even had lines at the sides as if he had wrinkled them looking at the sun. "Were you a sailor?"
"Probably," said Eliot.
"Don't you know?" asked Hester incredulous.
"I know I was a soldier," said Eliot. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman . . ." but Hester interrupted him.
"You can't have been everything," she said.
"I pretty well was," said Eliot.
We took it for granted that his eyes were blue. His hair was brown, a little grizzled. His face had curious high cheekbones. "From my Chinese grandmother," he told us solemnly. We believed him, and it still seems to me now that his hands and feet were so small as to be oriental. "I am descended from Genghis Khan," he was to tell us, and Hester asked, "Who was Genghis Khan?"
"A fearful Tartar," said Eliot, smoothing her hair.
His clothes were so impeccable---that was a word I liked and had taught to Willmouse---that they looked as if he had just bought them.
"Well, he had." Hester said that later. "Poor Eliot. He could never keep his clothes long."
"What do you mean?"
"He said so. He said, 'Pity, I like this coat. I hate to leave it.' That was his checked one; of course, he was thinking aloud. He did not know I was there. Toinette is always saying that his shirts and pyjamas are new."
That night he wore medals. "His?" Uncle Willaim always said he doubted it but "Of course they were his," we said indignantly.
He had a carnation in his buttonhole, a dark-red one, and it seemed to symbolise Eliot for us. Why are flowers bought by men so much more notable than those bought by women? I do not know, but they are. Father brought flowers into the house but they were dried, pressed brown, the life gone out of them; with Eliot the flower was alive.
Behind him came Mademoiselle Zizi. When we looked at her we were struck dumb with shyness because Mademoiselle Zizi was . . . "Bare," whispered Hester. Arms, neck and shoulders, "and back and front," said Hester reluctantly. We did not know what little puritans we were until we saw Mademoiselle Zizi.
Privately I thought her very beautiful, with her heavy dark-red hair and eyes that seemed almost too enormous---like a sunflower's. They were blued . . . "on the lids," said Hester, surprised, and her mouth was very, very red. What there was of her dress was gauze, black.
I saw Willmouse looking at the dress critically at first, then satisfied. "That is a real dress," whispered Willmouse, "and what a smell!"
"Is the smell the lady?" asked Vicky. It had filled the hall as Mademoiselle Zizi came in.
They came down the steps from the landing, stopped at the sight of us, and it was then that Eliot said, "Good God! An orphanage!"
Joss was too angry to notice that he spoke in English.
"Don't worry," she said bitingly, "we are not staying." To us she said sharply, "Come on. We will take the luggage first and come back for Mother."
She walked past Eliot to the door, her painting things under her arm; she had picked up two suitcases; Vicky, carrying Nebuchadnezzar's basket, was holding to one of them. The rest of us followed, loyally staggering too. Paul went to open the door, but Eliot stepped forward.
"Where are you going this time of night?"
"To the police." Joss's nostrils were pinched with temper.
"The police? Why?"
"Because of you French," said Joss furiously.
"I'm not French, I'm English," said Eliot.
Mother must have heard that. She gave a moan and said, "Please." Eliot looked past us to her, and his face changed. "Zizi," he said, "she's ill."
He went quickly to Mother, bent down and took her hand, feeling it as he questioned her, but after that 'Please' Mother did not speak again, and her head rolled against the chair.
"She's very ill, Zizi," he said. "We must help."
"But . . . our dinner." Her English was pretty and clipped.
"All the same."
"But we shall be late!"
"All the same." It sounded like a command. "Irène," he called to Madame Corbet, "ring Doctor Giroux"; and to Mauricette, "Open the rooms."
I heard Madame Corbet pick up the telephone, the maid shrugged and went to the keyboard. Paul took the suitcases from Joss, but Mademoiselle Zizi stayed where she had been, at the foot of the steps, her beautiful dress held up.
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DINNER WAS not comfortable that night. If anyone French came to the hotel, Eliot dined alone, not at the table by the screen, and tonight, all through dinner, his eyes kept coming to Joss, still with that amazed look, and from her table Mademoiselle Zizi's eyes followed his. At last she got up and left the dining-room. I do not think he noticed her going.
We, at our table, had long waits because Paul did not come to us at all. He had on the white coat he wore when help was needed in the dining-room, but he only brought dishes to the service door for Mauricette and took the dirty plates from her. I heard her order him, in angry whispers, to come in and help her, but he would not. Joss, of course, did not know it was different; she sat innocently well mannered and patient, but Vicky began to nod with sleep and Willmouse yawned and even fidgeted. It was absurdly late for them, but for a long time now their bedtime had been forgotten. I had given up worrying about it after that first day and Joss must have been bemused, because she did not say anything. "I never went to bed before eleven, not once," Vicky told Uncle William afterwards.
Hester beckoned to Paul to bring us the dish he was holding in the doorway, but he scowled and turned his back. There was celery soup, stuffed tomatoes, veal with potatoes, flageolet beans served separately as they did here, cheese and fruit. We had only reached the veal when Mademoiselle Zizi called Eliot from the office. He threw his napkin down impatiently and went out. Soon the visitors finished and left too, but Mauricette still walked past us, putting things away instead of bringing our fruit. We, who were familiar, began to be annoyed, but Joss said, "Naturally they have to attend to the more important visitors first."
She seemed not to know that Mauricette was taking it out on us, that Paul was shunning us. How could she? When Mauricette at last planked down our plate of greengages, the cut-glass bowl of water for our fingers and the clean plates, Joss said, "Merci," as if Mauricette had been normally polite. "Mademoiselle Zizi vous attend dans le bureau," said Mauricette, "si des fois vous auriez fini," she added sarcastically.
Joss looked enquiringly at me; she was not used to Mauricette's quick talking. "Mademoiselle Zizi wants us in the office," I said. "Oh, Joss!"
She was a little startled, and we others looked at one another. The table, with us round it, seemed suddenly small and the dining-room big and foreign.
"Who gave you permission to change your time for dinner?" asked Mademoiselle Zizi.
Joss looked at me in surprise. "We have been having it when Monsieur Armand and the others have theirs," I explained to her.
"What others?"
"Mauricette, Paul, Toinette, Nicole." I was beginning to regret this childish helter-skelter week; it was partly regret that it was over, our happy obscurity was lost; Joss was dragging us into the limelight.
"Who said you could change?"
Joss turned her eyes on Mademoiselle Zizi. Her voice was still gentle as she asked, "You want us to eat with your servants?"
Mademoiselle Zizi's neck went red. "Mauricette cannot manage with so many in the dining-room."
I should have accepted that, but Joss answered, "But Cecil says you often have sixty people for luncheon. Tonight we were only fifteen."
"I do not wish"---Mademoiselle Zizi floundered a little---"to have children with adults."
Joss's soft answer came relentlessly. "But Monsieur le Colonel and Madame . . . I don't know their name . . . had their little girl with them tonight."
"Do not argue with Mademoiselle Zizi," said Madame Corbet to Joss with such venom that Joss was surprised again.
"I---I'm sorry," said Joss, "but our mother would not like it."
"Your mother left you in my charge," said Mademoiselle Zizi.
Joss could have taken refuge in being small, a child, but, "Could I?" asked Joss afterwards. "I am as big as I am." I suppose she had to be, but I see now that what she said was like a stone thrown into a pool; it spread ripples.
"Your mother left you in my charge," Mademoiselle Zizi said.
"She left us in Mr. Eliot's," said Joss. "Shall we ask him what he thinks?"
I thought Mademoiselle Zizi was going to slap Joss, but she controlled herself and, after a moment, "You may have your dinner with the guests," she said, "but I forbid you, absolutely forbid you, to trouble Monsieur Eliot."
After a while Hester and I went to the back steps. We did not want Paul to think we had deserted him, but, though he saw us and knew that we knew that he saw us, he did not come. He worked ostentatiously in the kitchen, and each time Monsieur Armand passed him he said, "Bougre de gâte-sauce! Marmiton miteux! Expèce de mitron de merde! Va donc, eh! Ordure!" I knew they were swear words, but what they meant I fortunately did not know; and I did not know, either, why he should be out of temper with Monsieur Armand.
"What is the matter with Paul?" asked Hester.
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"IF THIS is how grown people feel," said Joss, "they are even worse pigs than I thought."
I said, perhaps tactlessly, "They know when to stop."
"Do they!" said Joss. "Look at Mademoiselle Zizi." But I had to be fair.
"Of all the grown-ups she is the only one who doesn't seem to know," and I sighed. "I suppose one has to learn even to drink."
I did not remember getting into bed, but I had woken to find myself under the clothes though dressed. "Dressed in bed!" said Willmouse. "Cecil, what have you been doing?" It was not often Willmouse asked questions, and when he had seen how unwell I was he had slipped on his vest and shorts, brushed his hair and gone out. I think he kept Hester and Vicky away.
When I had gone in to Joss she too was in bed, the covers tucked carefully round her, her sandals placed neatly side by side on the rug, but she also was dressed. I felt so miserable that I woke her and she was cross. Then, sitting up, she had taken in where she was, her crumpled dress, the smell on her hair and she gave a sound like a moan and shut her eyes.
We felt our bones were stained now indeed and, too shamed to go down to breakfast, we stayed in Joss's room. "But it wasn't our fault," I argued and used a phrase I had read in Monsieur Armand's newspapers, "They drove us to it," but Joss was more truthful than I.
"It was our fault," she said wearily, "and we shall have to learn."
"Learn what?"
"To manage."
"Manage what?"
"Manage what happens to us better than this. I smell," said Joss.
"I smell too," I said.
"Not as badly as I do," and once more she covered her eyes with her hand. It was only to shut out the light, but it looked tragic and I felt torn.
When something is badly needed it is amazing how an answer will come. I was moved to tell Joss about Monsieur Joubert. She was quiet as she listened, then she took her hand down. "You mean he said, 'Put it on my bill', just like that?" she asked.
"Just like that."
"He wasn't angry?"
"Not with us."
"And I was drunk."
"Very."
"Like those men by the canal."
"Yes. He carried you up to bed."
"Not . . . Eliot?"
"Eliot wanted to but Monsieur Joubert would not let him."
Joss thought for a moment, then got out of bed, went to the washstand, poured water into the basin and began to splash her face. She did not speak while she dried her face and hands, then stripped off her crumpled dress; I knew she was thinking very deeply or she would have told me to go away. At last, as she was putting on a clean dress I asked, "What are you going to do?"
"Give Monsieur Joubert one of my paintings," she said.
"But, Joss! He is famous. He gets hundreds of pounds for a portrait. He has paintings in big galleries like the Salon and the Academy."
"Not the Academy. The Uffizi in Florence. They have just bought some of his," said Joss calmly, putting on her shoes.
"He is to have an exhibition in London this year," I argued; "Madame Corbet said so. He . . . he won't be bothered with a girl, Joss. He is Marc Joubert. Madame Corbert says he is one of the best painters in the world."
"Then he will know when a painting is good," said Joss.
She was, of course, right. Monsieur Joubert did not send her away; he held the little painting at arm's length, looked at it again, put it up on a chair and went away from it. Nor was he play-acting---I do not think Monsieur Joubert ever acted. We all stood round in a chorus while a familiar catechism began. "You did this yourself?"
"Yes," said Joss, and we nodded.
"No one helped you?"
"No," and we shook our heads.
"Then what are you doing mixing yourself up with other things?" asked Monsieur Joubert.
Joss said uncertainly, "There are other things."
The answer came back, "Not for you."
"I am going to an art school soon," said Joss.
"When?"
"Perhaps when the holidays are over."
"Painters don't have holidays," said Monsieur Joubert. "They don't know how. Why an art school?"
"I need to learn to draw," said Joss meekly.
I thought he would say 'Nonsense' but he nodded. "That won't spoil you. When Madame your mother is better I will speak with her," and he said to me, "Does she talk?"
"Mother?" I asked, startled.
"Mademoiselle." He pointed at Joss.
"Oh! She! Sometimes."
He pounced. "Not all times?"
"Oh no! That's Hester."
"Then," said Monsieur Joubert, "Mademoiselle Joss can come and paint with me. Not near but near enough, but no other child must come," and he said fiercely to the rest of us, "Keep away!"
We nodded again, our eyes wide with respect. This, we knew, was something different from Eliot.
Eliot made one approach to Joss. Before dinner she stayed out on the terrace so that she need not meet him in the bar. Mademoiselle Zizi was talking to some American arrivals and he went out.
"Joss."
"Yes."
"I'm sorry. Joss, I had to do that."
Joss said nothing.
"You won't talk to me?" asked Eliot.
"No," said Joss.
"Tomorrow I'm not going to Paris and . . ."
"I will be busy tomorrow," and it was true, not an excuse.
From that day we were split as we had been . . . before Eliot, I thought. Vicky went back to Monsieur Armand, Willmouse stayed in his cherry bank atelier, Hester and I rambled alone. Joss got up in the mornings now as early as Monsieur Joubert; almost before it was light she was out on the bank---she too was painting two pictures---and she went early to bed. "There is no light then. I might as well go to bed," she said. The other people in the house hardly saw her at all.
As Hester and I dawdled at the cove we would watch her. She had none of the trappings Monsieur Joubert had, not even a camp stool; she sat on an upturned wooden box and held her board on her knee. She had not any proper canvas, only a piece of linen stretched on the board, but Monsieur Joubert showed her a way of washing it over with two or three coats of white---"not paint, tempera," said Joss---to make it smooth. He had given her a flat tin box filled with jars of tempera and, "One day, he will help me with oils," she said. Worst of all she had no umbrella and she had to sit out in the heat with only her old straw hat to shade her and that had been bent when it was packed so that the straw had split; I could not imagine Joss consenting under any other circumstances to wear it. Every now and then she climbed down the bank and wetted her handkerchief to spread on the crown; even so, she was sickly pale at the end of the day.
"Monsieur Joubert ought to send you in."
"He doesn't notice me," said Joss with pride. She knew how to please him and she only interrupted her work to join us when we went to pay our evening visit to Mother. We were allowed to go and see Mother every day now and, "I'm painting," Joss told her and Mother looked relieved.
"And what are you doing, Cecil?"
"Nothing."
"But you are looking after the Littles?"
"Yes," I said grudgingly. I had to. Joss was as good an elder sister as any, but, when she was painting, Vicky or Willmouse could have fallen into the Marne and she would not have known.
"Only they wouldn't," said Hester.
"No, but Willmouse goes off every evening alone and he shouldn't."
Every evening when he had finished his work Willmouse put his things away: his box of scraps, his sewing-box, Miss Dawn and Dolores, and their new confections; then he tidied himself, which was only a form because he was always tidy---even his scarecrows managed to be neat; he would wash his face and hands, sleek down his hair with his private bottle of eau-de-Cologne and, like any old gentleman, go for a little walk. A new barge, the Marie France 47, had anchored above the cove; he liked to walk up and look at that.
"Why don't you go when we go?"
"I like to go by myself."
"You can't always do what you like."
"I can," said Willmouse.
I let him. It was too hot, everything was too strained, to bother.
Before Eliot. We were back to that time, yet we were not back. It was the same, and it was not the same. A curious tenseness was in the house. Eliot when he came from Paris looked bone tired and haggard, and he was so curt with Mademoiselle Zizi that her eyes looked bigger than ever with perpetual tears. She was very silly. She kept searching his face, beseeching him with those big eyes instead of leaving him alone; we scurried out of his way as soon as we saw that tiredness in his face.
For three days he did not come at all. Mademoiselle Zizi went to the telephone four or five times. We heard her ask for the same Paris number, then wait, listening, while that far-off bell rang and rang. There was never any answer. If the office telephone went she would leap out of her chair; then she would sink back again as she heard Madame Corbet's, "Hôtel des Oeillets. Oui, madame. Oui. Certainement."
Then there was Paul. I could bear his having tried to make Joss come to him, that was to be expected of Paul; if he had hit me that night, as I think he meant to with the bottle, I could have expected that too; but he had sneaked out and left me. In our code that was mean.
"Mauricette says you were drunk," said Hester.
"So that was what was the matter with you," said Willmouse.
"She says you shouldn't be with Paul." Hester was troubled.
"He is a horrid boy," said Vicky. "He gave me a bit of frog to eat and said it was chicken."
"Did you eat it?"
"You can eat them," said Vicky, as if that settled it.
Neither of the Littles liked Paul. Hester, of course, took a more lenient view. "But you were not there," I said. "You don't know how awful he was," I said.
"More awful than you and Joss?"
"Yes," and then, thinking of what Paul had been through, the camps and the Hôtel-Dieu, the half-negro sister, I had to say, "I don't know."
I did not want to see all these things in Paul, but since coming to Les Oeillets I seemed to see a long way into people, even when I did not wish it. "You think of no one but yourselves," Mother had said on that long-ago day on the beach, and how much more comfortable that had been. I seemed to see into everyone and, "There isn't anybody good," I said in misery.
"Yes, there is," said Hester; "Monsieur Joubert."
Perhaps even he was not completely good but he was . . . kept good, I thought; we could see him now, with Joss faithfully behind him, both of them busy. "I wish I had painting or dressage or something," I said, and asked, "How can you be good if you are just lying about?"
"Mother says not everyone can have things."
"Then they can't be good," I said firmly.
Hester was looking at the river, at the water eddying down. There was a long silence, then, "Cecil, is Eliot good?" she asked.
The question seemed to fall with a plop into the peaceful water.
"We love him," I said uncertainly. Can one love someone who is not good? That was as much a reversal of our ideas as that the Black Virgin was beautiful.
Is Eliot good? It was a question I would rather not have answered and I was glad when the water-whirls took it away.
IT WAS the third week of August, and the same high summer weather; even in the cove it was hot; hardly a breeze disturbed the willows so that they hung dustily green, not showing their silver; the grass was dusty and untidy, filled with the litter left by Sunday walkers and picnickers; the bulrushes were untidy too; they were ripe and powdering, and if we accidentally brushed a spear-rod a stain of brown was left on our skin and clothes. In the orchard the greengages were almost over and at dinner small white grapes appeared on the table. "Are they champagne grapes?" we asked---we had become most conscious of champagne---but Mauricette shook her head. "These are from the Midi. Ours are not ripe till the end of September," and she said, "But you will be here for the vintage, of course."
We did not dispute that. It seemed to us we were here for ever. Mother was better but still not out of bed, not even sitting up. Next month the holidays would be over, but there were still three and a half weeks to go and at Les Oeillets each day was like a year. Twenty-three days; twenty-three years. Who bothers what will happen in twenty-three years?
I remember thinking that as I was lying on my stomach in the sun at the edge of the cove, looking down into the water where hundreds of tiny fish were nibbling at nothing that I could see. If I threw in a crumb they would all dart round it, taking bites, as something sensational would divert us. I supposed a fish's only sensation was food . . . food and death, I thought, watching a big fish hovering over them. Sometimes someone from the town or the hotel would bring a fine net and scoop these little fish up, a hundred or so of them, to fry crisp and season with salt and lemon, and eat with slices of brown bread and butter. I had eaten dozens; now I, part of their fate, hung over them and they did not even see me. Ugh! I thought.
My back seemed to be melting with heat, but suddenly I felt cold as if my blood had chilled. There was nothing one could do; at any moment the big fish, the net, might come to any of us, to me. I looked at the nibbling shoal again. If there were a crumb they darted, but even if the shadow of a very big fish went over them they did not move from the crumb. They were too busy living.
Well then, I thought; and slowly the cold ebbed away and again I could feel the heat beating through my dress on to my skin, but I could not forget that cold. "Funny, I was never afraid of death before," I told Hester.
"You never thought about it," said Hester and she comforted me. "It was only the fish." I had put death firmly out of my mind when she said thoughtfully, "I don't know why but I don't like these days."
I did not like them either, but there seemed nothing wrong; in fact there was a new friendliness in the house. We had put Paul out of bounds so that we heard no scandal; Mademoiselle Zizi and Joss kept truce under Monsieur Joubert; Madame Corbet, perhaps because she wished she had not slapped me, was less sharp; and for us it was as if we had taken a step or two backwards; we were children again, and that was a relief.
Joss finished her first painting and took it to Mother. Vicky had her fifth birthday; Monsieur Armand made her a cake and we had a French birthday party. We were to remember it always. "Because it was from then," said Hester afterwards. "That was the day," she said, "when Eliot began to be where he wasn't."
"And wasn't where he was."
It was a queer birthday party. A table was carried out in the garden, Mauricette covered it with a white cloth and decorated it with vine leaves from the arbour. In the middle was the cake, covered with cream icing and nuts, and round it Mauricette put a ring of wine-glasses filled with grenadine. "No tea?" asked Vicky puzzled, but there was no tea. Mademoiselle Zizi came and Madame Corbet, Mauricette, Monsieur Armand, Toinette and Nicole, Robert the gardener and his wife and baby; Monsieur Joubert and Joss left their painting, Willmouse his sewing. Paul curtly refused to come out of the kitchen, and Eliot, though he had known about the party, had gone to Paris. That made it more amiable but less exciting.
It did not last long; there were no presents, Mother could not be reminded and we could not buy them without any money, but Vicky, with so few birthdays behind her, was not in the habit of presents and did not know what she was missing. We drank her health, cut the cake, and after eating and drinking, broke up. Joss, Hester and I went to the hospital, Willmouse took his walk, and Vicky had more cake in the kitchen.
When Willmouse came in he said, "Who told you Eliot was in Paris?"
"He is."
"He isn't. He's here."
"How do you know?"
"I saw him," but Willmouse seemed perplexed.
"What's the matter?" I asked him.
"It was Eliot, not in Eliot's clothes."
"You must have made a mistake."
"I don't make mistakes about clothes," said Willmouse.
He had been walking home along the bank---"You know the bit along the path where the cove is hidden in the bulrushes?"---when Eliot had appeared, walking in front of him. "And he was wearing blue, like the overalls here but trousers and one of those striped jersey shirts."
"Eliot doesn't wear those sort of clothes," said Hester.
"I know," said Willmouse exasperated. "That's why."
"Why?"
"Why it seems funny when he does."
"Are you sure?" asked Hester.
"Don't I know about clothes?" said Willmouse in a terrible voice, and Hester subsided.
"He went off the path just above the bulrushes where it has a side path into the wood." Willmouse wrinkled his forehead again. "Do you know, it looked---I thought---but he couldn't have . . ."
"Couldn't have what?"
"Come off the new barge." Willmouse sounded oddly positive, but what would Eliot have been doing on the Marie France?
We liked barges with their black hulls and clean scrubbed decks, and had all been up to look at this one. We often looked into barge cabins to see their shining brass, their curtains and pots of flowers; often there was a cat or a bird in a cage, a mother and lots of children, but the Marie France did not seem to have a woman aboard. Her brass was not polished, there were no curtains or flowers. She was a dingy barge and we saw only two men, in the cotton trousers Willmouse had described, but they did not wear jerseys, even cotton ones; they were naked above the waist, with black sailor caps.
"It wasn't Eliot," I said, and that seemed positive when Eliot came back at nine o'clock that night.
"Did you have a good day?" Mademoiselle Zizi asked anxiously.
"Damnably hot," said Eliot. He looked exhausted.
He had brought Vicky a box of chocolates such as we had never seen or imagined; it was a pink satin box painted with roses and tied with wide velvet ribbon, and inside, where most boxes have paper-lace edgings, it had real lace. It was marked Dorat. "One of the most expensive chocolate shops in Paris," exclaimed Madame Corbet.
"You see he was in Paris," I told Willmouse.
"Yes," said Willmouse, but he did not sound convinced.
Eliot stayed at Les Oeillets next day, but he did not sit, as he usually did, reading in the garden. First he took the Littles to see Mother; when he came back he asked Hester and me if we would like to go with him into the town. We passed Joss on the river bank, but she did not turn her head, nor did Eliot say anything. In the town he bought postcards, giving them to us, and then some grapes for Mother, which we took to the hospital, calling on Monsieur le Directeur, who called out, "Á ce soir," when we left.
"Why à ce soir?" I asked.
"He is coming tonight. There's a big dinner," said Eliot. "Didn't you know?"
"We are not told things," I said.
As soon as we got in Eliot coaxed Mademoiselle Zizi out to the Giraffe. "That's three times," said Hester.
"That Eliot has gone into the town?"
"Yes. Isn't he fidgety?" said Hester.
He could not have had very much lunch, for just after twelve he came to the cove where Hester and I had taken our picnics and turned us out. "Keep away," he said. "I want to sleep."
"But we haven't eaten our picnics."
"Well, go and eat them somewhere else."
There was no one about. Monsieur Joubert had gone in, he lunched at twelve. Joss could not accompany him; she ate her picnic humbly in the orchard; after that they both went to their rooms to sleep. Willmouse too, after his picnic, would take a nap under his cherry tree; like the little old gentleman he was he would cover his face with his handkerchief. Vicky was still at the age when she was put to rest and was collected by Joss on her own way up. Monsieur Armand, when the luncheons were over, would read the newspaper on the kitchen table, Mauricette lazed in the kitchen or garden, Mademoiselle Zizi lay in a long chair on the terrace, and I think even Madame Corbet nodded in the office. Hester and I had meant to bathe, immersing ourselves, coming out now and again in the sun, going back; the water would have been cool, but now we could not bathe.
Eliot must have divined this, for he asked, "Did you want to bathe?" and he suggested, "Go to the Plage for once."
"We should have to pay," said Hester.
Eliot laughed. "You little skinflints."
That hurt us. "Ever since we have been here," I said in a muffled voice, "we haven't had any money."
"Why not?" asked Eliot.
"Nobody has given us any." Hester's voice was muffled too. It was from the remembrance of the times we had looked over at the Plage, read the list of ices, gazed in at the sweetshops in the town, at those wonderfully coloured sucettes and, in l'Eglantine, at the gladioli we had wanted for Mother; it was the remembrance of Vicky not having any birthday presents, of wanting to buy 'Moi et Toi' and something for Uncle William that made us sound choked.
"Usually we have pocket money every week," I explained.
"Good Lord! I'm sorry," said Eliot. "Why didn't you ask? Look. Have three weeks, now," and he took out his wallet, fat with French notes, and peeled off seven. "One for Hester, one between Vicky and Willmouse, two for Cecil and three for Joss."
We looked at them stunned and neither of us moved. "Take them," said Eliot; he sounded impatient, but we shook our heads. "What's the matter now?"
"It's too much," said Hester, and I added, "More than a pound each."
"If I say you can have it."
"We can't," said Hester, shocked. "You see, Vicky has sixpence, Willmouse has ninepence, I have a shilling, Cecil has two, and Joss has another arrangement." I would not have told all this, but Hester never minded exposing the family. "She has ten shillings, but she has to pay her bus fares and buy her own stamps and soap and toothpaste and handkerchiefs and stockings."
"Don't. You make me giddy," said Eliot. "Well, have this for now." But we still shook our heads.
"Must you be so appallingly honest?" He said it so harshly that we stared.
"I suppose," said Hester, wavering, "that Mother would pay for us to bathe."
"Look," said Eliot, "I'm tired." He did not seem tired but . . . was it excited? Why? I wondered. Why should he be excited on this hot sleepy afternoon? "Take this." He gave us a note. "Go and bathe and we will settle the rest this evening." We still hesitated and he shouted, "Go! If anyone comes near me before five o'clock I shall skin them alive."
In fairness we ought to have gone and fetched the others when we had finished our picnics, but, "They are probably asleep," said Hester. "They can go afterwards. There's heaps of money." And so we went to the Plage we had looked at and yearned after so often. We walked over the white bridge, past the railing with the life-belt, in at the gate, and took our tickets from the sleepy caretaker; we rented one of the red-and-white cabins and used all three pools and the low-, the middle-, but not the high-diving boards. I could dive, though sometimes I hit the water with a slap; Hester simply jumped off, holding her nose. It was blissfully cool and for an hour or two we were like a pair of porpoises playing. At last we came out, and after we had dressed we bought strawberry ices from the kiosk and ate them at one of the white tables. "Eliot is good!" said Hester reverently as she licked her cardboard spoon.
The ices were spun out as long as we could. "We had better not have another one, had we?" asked Hester, but in the end we had another between us. We spun that one out as well. Four o'clock struck, but, "I don't want any goûter," she said; nor did I.
We left the Plage and walked back along the bank; it was then that Hester said, "Let's creep up on Eliot."
"For what?"
"Just to love him," said Hester. Another Eastern idea of which Father had told us was the taking of 'darshan', that even to look on anyone good or great would feed the soul.
"He told us not to."
"How will be know?" asked Hester.
Les Oeillets had taught us to be as adept as Red Indians in stealing up on what we wanted to see and we came up to the cove without a sound. Eliot was lying, as he always lay, face downwards on the sand, his length pressed into it, his head pillowed on his arms, the old cap tilted over his eyes. Behind the bulrushes we crept up on him. He was lying with his head towards us. "Fast asleep," breathed Hester.
That must have made a sound, for he stirred, stirred and lifted his head and . . . it was not Eliot.
In Eliot's clothes, under Eliot's cap, we were looking into the face of a dark unknown man. I do not know why it was so frightening, but, for the long moment he looked, we froze as rabbits do and the river seemed to be running in my ears. When his head went down again we retreated backwards through the bulrushes so fast that we were covered in bulrush dust. Then we ran. We reached Joss's box and I sank down on it while Hester fell on the grass. My neck and the backs of my knees were clammy and cold; her chin was shaking.
We sat there a long while without speaking and the sun did not make us any warmer.
At last, "Do you think it could be us . . . after the ices?" asked Hester.
"No."
"It was another m . . ."
"Yes."
"Then . . . ?" The question seemed to go on and on.
It was some time later that Hester said, "Hullo! Monsieur Joubert's things have gone." There was no umbrella, no easle or stool, and Joss's box, alone on the river bank, looked small and lonely.
The light grew deeper, swallows were beginning to skim the river as they did when the insects flew down; five o'clock struck from the Hôtel de Ville and we got up to go in. As we reached the blue door it opened and Mademoiselle Zizi came out.
She was in white and carried a deep mauve sunshade, the colour of heliotrope. She was freshly powdered and made up and her scent came to us in waves. "Are you going out?" we asked stupidly.
"Only to the cove, to meet Eliot."
We looked at one another, opened our lips, and shut them.
"Why didn't you tell her?" said Hester after she had gone.
"Why didn't you?"
We did not go in but stayed in the orchard. We talked to Willmouse, admired Miss Dawn's new hat, and played with the dogs. We did not say it to one another but we were waiting to see, and after what seemed a long while the blue door opened again. Mademoiselle Zizi came through, and behind her was Eliot.
AS SOON as we came into the house we knew that Madame Corbet had sent Mademoiselle Zizi to meet Eliot because she wanted her out of the way.
Madame Corbet was efficient; when anything had to be arranged at Les Oeillets, a dinner, two or three chars-à-bancs of tourists for luncheon or an early breakfast, it was made ready quietly and swiftly. "But not if Mademoiselle Zizi is there," said Hester. Mademoiselle Zizi gave contradictory orders to Mauricette, upset Monsieur Armand by suggesting last-minute changes in the food, took Paul away from his work, and quarrelled with Madame Corbet. It was wiser to send Mademoiselle Zizi away and now the house was being quickly transformed; we could see it was for a much bigger occasion than any since we had come.
"Is it a banquet?" asked Willmouse.
The tables in the dining-room had been moved to make one large T, the whole covered with white cloths and laid with silver and glass. "Ninety-four places," whispered Hester when she had finished counting. The flowers were not being done as usual by Mauricette; Madame from l'Eglantine and her two Mademoiselles in green overalls were arranging them---carnations, asparagus ferns and white flowers like small lilies on one stem; they had a strong, sweet smell. "Mauricette says they are tuber roses," I said.
"I have heard of them," said Willmouse gravely.
In the bar a platform had been made; we knew it was only of boxes, but, laid with a carpet and palms, it looked impressive. There were more flowers in the hall and bar, and a carpet had been put down from the front door to the foot of the stairs, "Because the Sous-Préfet and Monsieur le Maire are coming," said Vicky, who had joined us from the kitchen.
We had seen the Mayor of Southstone at the Armistice parade; he had worn a red-caped cloak, a cocked hat and a great chain. "But I did not know one had mayors to dinner," I said in awe.
"It is a banquet," said Willmouse certainly.
"It's the Brass Instruments Ball," said Vicky, who had been in the kitchen most of the day and knew everything.
Not quite everything. It was the Brass Instrument Factory's centenary dinner, but it remained for ever in our minds as the Brass Instruments Ball.
We had often passed the factory when we were exploring across the river and spelled out the lettering on the long notice-board along its wall. 'Emile Perrichaut, fabricant d'instruments de fanfare. Trompettes. Clairons. Médaille de l'Exposition de 1895. Fournisseur de l'Armée.' Now all the thirty workers, with their wives---and husbands, for some of the workers were women---their grown-up sons and daughters were coming and, as well as the Sous-Préfet and the Mayor, the Town Clerk, the Commissaire of Police, the Lieutenant of Gendarmerie, the Chief of the Municipal Band, "Et le Capitaine des Pompiers," said Mauricette, which meant the head of the Fire Brigade. Mauricette said that the doctor, Monsieur le Directeur, was coming because he was the brother-in-law of Monsieur Perrichaut, and that Eliot and Mademoiselle Zizi were invited. There would be no room at Les Oeillets for any visitors that night---the whole hotel was taken up with the Brass Instruments.
"What will they do?" asked Vicky, and I saw she was trying to think of the most exciting things she had heard of people doing. "Drink cider and play cards?" she asked.
"They will eat a lot, drink quite a lot, and make long speeches," said Eliot, who had come up behind us. Hester and I shrank a little from him, but he did not notice. "And then perhaps they will dance."
"To the Brass Instruments Band?" asked Hester.
The Brass Instruments had their own band. We had heard it on Sundays and feast days in the town and guessed that the platform was for them.
"Look what they are to eat!" said Vicky.
She had brought us the menu:
Hors-d'œuvre variés
Homard à la mayonnaise
"That's lobster," I told Vicky.
"I know, I ate some," she said.
Poulet Chasseur
Filet de boeuf rôti jardinière
Salade de saison
Fromages variés
Pièce Montée
Fruits
"And the pièce has a whole band on top of it," said Vicky. "Monsieur Armand has been four days making it. He said I wasn't to tell you."
She took us to look at it. It was on a silver slab, a great cake with trellises and scrolls of icing and, on top, a sugar band, the bandsmen made of meringue and coloured, the tiny brass instruments of yellow sugar. We could not believe it had been made here in the kitchen. "I am Marc Joubert of the icing sugar," said Monsieur Armand. He seemed radiantly pleased as he chivvied us out of the kitchen, but I had caught sight of Paul, his back turned to us, at the sink with a huge pile of saucepans. When he reached for a cloth the lock of hair fell back and we saw his face looking thinner than ever and as dirtily white as his apron. How I wish now I had gone and spoken to him, but I was afraid he would only have sworn at me.
No one told us what was to happen to us, and we stayed watching in the dining-room while Madame Eglantine and her Mademoiselles put the last flower in the last vase, then we went upstairs and dressed. We put on our best frocks, that we had not worn yet; they were not very grand, crinkled white seersuckers with small rose spots. Mother had made them out of a length she had bought at the sales; Joss had grown out of hers, and they had been handed down so that I wore Joss's, Hester wore mine and Vicky Hester's; with two more to come down, it seemed Vicky would have to wear rose-spotted seersucker for years. Willmouse put on a clean shirt, his silk tie, clean shorts. "What will Joss wear?" asked Hester.
"She will see when she comes in."
"Isn't she in?" asked Hester, but there was no sound from her room.
We cleaned our nails and brushed our hair; Vicky and Hester put on clean white socks---Joss had arranged for our washing to be done, and at last we had clean clothes---I unrolled my one pair of thin stockings and we cleaned our sandals. When we were finished there still had not been a rustle from Joss's room. "If she had been to see Mother she would have been back long ago. Perhaps she went out with Monsieur Joubert," said Hester.
"Someone would have told us."
I knocked. No answer. I went in and Joss was there, lying face downwards on her bed.
"Joss! Are you having an attack?"
No answer.
I went timidly closer. Hester and the Littles stayed at the door.
"Joss. It's Cecil. Speak to me, Joss."
She raised her head but she did not speak to me. "I hate her. I hate her," she said. It sounded as if she were speaking to the whole world.
"Hate whom?" but I knew and, "What happened?" I asked apprehensively.
"She has ended the painting," said Joss.
"Ended the . . ."
"Yes." Joss sat up and beat the pillow with her fist. "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
"But . . . how?"
"He asked me to have lunch with him."
I hesitated. We knew who 'she' was but 'he' might have been . . . "Eliot?" I hazarded.
"Idiot! Monsieur Joubert. It was so hot outside---I think he did it because of that---and I said Yes. There was no one in the dining-room but us and . . . them."
"Mademoiselle Zizi and Eliot?"
"Yes. Madame Corbet was too busy to come in to lunch. Perhaps we---Monsieur Joubert and I---laughed too much." She lifted her chin. "I wanted to laugh . . . Eliot . . ." She broke off.
I had to prompt her. "Eliot?"
"Kept looking," said Joss. "Then, when he had gone---he went quite soon as if he didn't like it---Mademoiselle Zizi came to our table and said . . ." She stopped again.
"Said?"
"It was in French but I understood. I wish I hadn't," said Joss. She looked round and saw the others. "Shut the door, Cecil."
I slowly crossed the little room and shut the door. Whether because of the long bathing that afternoon or the shock in the cove, I seemed to be filled with pains, in my legs and back and head, pains that hurt, and I did not want to hear any more . . . ugliness, I thought---I could sense this was something ugly---and I wished I were with Hester and the Littles on the other side of the door.
I came back to the bed and Joss whispered, "She told him she could not have it in her hotel, an old man and a young girl. That I had . . ."
"Had?"
"Bothered Eliot," said Joss in a whisper. Two tears fell on the pillow, only two; it was as if she were bleeding, not crying.
"What happened then?"
"Monsieur Joubert got up and bowed, not to her but to me.
"Bowed to you?"
"Yes," said Joss impatiently. "He said, 'When you are a little older and in another place, and your mother is with you, we shall meet again. I shall write to her,' and he left . . ."
"For good?"
"Yes. I saw Paul carry out his luggage and painting things and a taxi came. I don't think Mademoiselle Zizi meant Monsieur Joubert to do that---I heard Madame Corbet being cross---but when she sees me Mademoiselle Zizi can't help what she does. She won't let me have anything. Not anything."
"Why does she hate Joss so terribly?" I asked Hester afterwards. "It seems more than because Eliot likes her."
"It isn't Eliot," said Hester, "not only Eliot," and she added, "You know how, when you have been awful to anyone, you can't bear them."
Now I felt miserably tired, too tired to cope with this hotbed of feelings; it seemed to me the house was filled with them, with hate and love, and the love seemed as bad as the hate. Something bad will happen, I thought, and again those prickles of fear ran over me.
"Joss . . ."
I meant to tell her about the man in the cove but she was not listening---at least she was listening to something else. She asked, "What is happening downstairs?"
I told her about the Brass Instruments Ball; the glory had gone out of it for me, but she got up from the bed. She looked so determined that I asked, "What are you going to do?"
"Go to the party," said Joss.
"But we haven't been asked."
She did not answer that. She looked over my head and said, "I tried to be nice. I found my own thing and kept out of the way. Now I won't."
"Suppose they don't ask you?"
"I shall make them. I can make people do what I like." By 'people' I knew she meant men.
"But, Joss"---I produced this hesitantly---"if you make them won't it seem that you might . . . might be what Mademoiselle Zizi says you are?"
Joss's chin went even higher. "She thinks I am what she is," she said with disdain. "All right. I shall be, only worse." Perhaps she saw the doubt on my face, for she asked, "What else am I to do?"
That sounded like Joss, not Joss cased in this proud hardness, and I said, "Go on painting."
"Without Monsieur Joubert?"
"That's what he would have done."
I thought I had won, but when I looked at her I saw it was no use saying anything more. She had on that look again, her mask look, her eyes almost like slits as if she were calculating, her nostrils pinched and her lips set. "I shall go to this party," said Joss, "and I shall wear Sin."
It was called Sin because she had had no right to buy it. A year before Uncle William had given Joss money to buy a new raincoat; her old one was up to her knees and showed inches of wrist, but she had gone into a dress shop and bought a dress. That was in the sales too, "and it had been marked down from ten guineas," said Joss.
"Ten guineas for a dress!" That seemed fabulous to us---except Willmouse.
"A dress can cost a hundred pounds," said Willmouse.
"But . . . when will you wear it?" Mother had asked, bewildered.
"Perhaps never," said Joss, "but I had to have it." It was ivory silk, stamped with roses. "Not many roses," Hester had said critically, "and not much silk." There did not seem much of anything to cost all that money; it left Joss's neck and arms bare and the skirt was narrow. "It's the cut," Willmouse had explained and examined it carefully. "It is influenced by the Chinese," he pronounced, "which is why it suits her."
For a year it had hung in Joss's cupboard. Now, after she had washed her face and brushed her hair, she took it out of the wardrobe. I had opened the door into my room to let the others come and we watched while she put it on.
Beside Sin our seersuckers looked very ordinary and homemade, and, in spite of the Black Virgin, the old envy came back. "It's too tight," I said spitefully. "You show."
Joss looked at herself in the looking-glass and smiled. "All the better." she said and laughed at my scandalised face. I had noticed while she washed that the dark tufts of hair under her arms were gone. "I have a little razor," said Joss. She had a lipstick and powder too. When she had bought these things I did not know, but watched, divided between marvelling and fright while she made up her face. "Don't put on too much," said Willmouse.
"I'm not Mademoiselle Zizi," said Joss witheringly.
When she was ready her glance fell again on me. "What's the matter with you, Cecil?" she asked.
"I have pains."
"Where?"
"In my arms and legs---everywhere."
"Growing pains," said Joss.
I suppose now it was only an ordinary bourgeois party such as would be held anywhere in the provinces of France, but to us it seemed resplendent and exciting, though we had to admit the guests were not as elegant as the flowers and food. "I think I shall go for my evening walk," said Willmouse after we had seen the first few people arrive. I could tell he was disappointed. We had not taken it into account that they were working people not quite at home in their Sunday best. The men were in dark suits, too heavy for the hot evening, and they wore thick-soled shoes; they all seemed to show a great deal of gold watch-chain and cufflinks. Their wives had meticulously clean blouses, coats and skirts, and wore high-heeled shoes instead of their usual slippers.
We watched from the stairs, not daring to risk going down until there were so many people that Mademoiselle Zizi or Madame Corbet would not notice us.
"Is that Monsieur le Maire?" asked Hester. Everyone bowed politely as they greeted him, but though his beard was imposing he was wearing a plain black suit and had only a little ribbon in his buttonhole to show he was important, no scarlet cloak, cocked hat or chain. The Sous-Préfet, more important than he, had not even a ribbon, but Monsieur Perrichaut was impressive; we knew it must be Monsieur Perrichaut because he was receiving with his wife. He was taller than anyone else---"Except Eliot," said Hester---white-haired, with an important-looking paunch. "Let me look at him," said Joss and gazed as if she were spying out the land. Monsieur Perrichaut seemed fitted to be the owner of the Brass Instruments Factory; his voice was like a saxophone, and when he blew his nose the noise was like a trumpet. He had a young man at his elbow who made introductions in a reedy voice. "Like a piccolo," I whispered, but Joss did not laugh. She was very grave. "Tell me when the doctor comes," she said.
"Monsieur le Directeur?"
"Yes."
"He is here," said Vicky presently.
"Go down," Joss told us. "Go one by one, slip in among them and start shaking hands with everyone. Then they can't send you away. And don't tag on to me," she said severely.
Hester and Vicky disappeared, but I hung back. Joss hummed a little tune---which told me she was nervous---twitched the skirt of her dress straight, frowned at it, shook her hair more loosely on her shoulders, and went down. I watched her as she went straight to the doctor, holding out her hand; then I followed, keeping behind the crowd.
The doctor kept Joss's hand. "Mais . . . c'est la petite Anglaise!" he said. I edged round to see her better.
She was making a comical face---a moue, I thought wisely. "Not so little," she said, and appealed to Monsieur Perrichaut. "I am not very little, pas si petite, am I, monsieur?" Hester had crept up beside me. "She sounds silly . . . like a lady," said Hester disapprovingly.
Silly or no, Monsieur Perrichaut seemed to like it. Soon he was asking her, "Vous dînez avec nous, Mademoiselle?" "He is asking her to dinner," I told Hester.
"I---I have not been invited," said Joss. She sounded as if she were pretending to be shy and Hester and I both frowned.
"Je vous invite," and the piccolo was sent to tell Madame Corbet to set another place. "A côté de moi," said the doctor gallantly.
"Monsieur le Directeur s'y connaît," said Monsieur Perrichaut. The most important people were standing round him and now Joss was in the centre of them. Everyone was whispering about her. Mademoiselle Zizi had seen her, but she could not very well send her out.
"Permettez-moi de vous faire mes compliments, Mademoiselle." That was the Sous-Préfet.
"Ah! La jeunesse! La jeunesse!" said Monsieur Perrichaut and they gazed at Joss.
"Absolument ravissante," said Monsieur le Maire. He was standing just in front of me and began to discuss Joss's looks with the man beside him; I could not catch it all but I heard, "Ce teint lumineux!"
"What are they saying?" hissed Hester.
"Compliments," I hissed back.
Eliot was by the bar talking to the young Town Clerk whom Mauricette pointed out to me because she admired him. The Town Clerk was dark and good-looking, but Eliot could look over his head and the heads of most of the others. Joss must have seen him at once, but she appeared not to see him nor did he look at her. I did not like this any more than I liked her pretending to be shy. Things had gone . . . out of truthfulness, I thought. Before we had been unhappy but it was truthful, now we seemed to be playing a game, and I walked away from them all out on to the terrace, where it was cool and quiet. Presently it would be moonlight, a scented, moonlit, summer night, but that seemed to me to make this playing worse, expose it more. I put my elbows on the warm iron rail and leaned my head on my hands, hiding my eyes as if I did not want to see, to look or think, but I was not left in peace for long. Fairy lights had been strung between the trees, and now they came on, red and blue and yellow. "Ah! C'est joli!" cried a woman, and people came out on to the terrace to see. Eliot was with them, and it was then that the next odd thing happened.
I heard my name called; Willmouse was running across the garden. He did not usually run, but now gravel spurted up behind him, his socks were falling down---Willmouse's socks. I ran down the steps to meet him. "Cecil, a most e'straordinary thing."
As soon as he reached me he began to tell it though he was half out of breath. "I was having my walk along the river when I saw a man . . ."
I stiffened. "A . . . dark man?"
"Like Madame Corbet," said Willmouse and I knew he meant swarthily dark . . . as ours had been, I thought. "He came out of the bushes," said Willmouse, "and he had a motor-bike; it was a big new red one---at least it looked new. He wheeled it along the bank and then on to the plank bridge to the barge. . . ."
His voice, shrill with wonder and speaking English, must have carried to the terrace. I saw Eliot come to the rail and look down.
"On to the Marie France?" I asked Willmouse.
"Yes. The man looked up and down the river as if he wanted to see if anyone was there. He couldn't see me . . ."
"Why not?"
"Because the bulrushes are so tall. Then do you know what he did?" Willmouse paused. He was always dramatic. "He-wheeled-the-bike-across-the-deck-and-dropped-it-over-the-other-side," said Willmouse.
"Into the river?"
"Yes."
"Don't be silly."
"He did. Cecil, it was a new . . ."
"And what are you doing out so late?"
Eliot's voice cut across me, and it was the voice he had used that first morning when he came out of Mademoiselle Zizi's room; I had heard it again in the courtyard at Dormans. He had left the terrace and come down the steps. "Where have you been?" he said to Willmouse.
"F-for my walk." Willmouse was so startled that the words would hardly come.
"Willmouse always goes for a walk," I said defensively.
"You be quiet," said Eliot, and to Willmouse, "You know quite well you are not allowed out so late." Willmouse opened his lips again, but, "Not a word," said Eliot. "I will not have disobedience. You can go to bed at once," and he wheeled Willmouse round, a hand on his shoulder.
"But Eliot! You never . . ." I think I wailed it. It was terrible to see Eliot taking Willmouse up the steps and marching him away like a prisoner. As for Willmouse, he looked grey with shock.
"Mais, Monsieur Eliot"---that was one of a group of men---"vous êtes trop dur."
"In England we discipline boys," said Eliot crisply; to Willmouse he said loudly, "How often have I told you . . ." and at once I knew that Eliot was acting.
Acting on Willmouse! I pushed my way after them to the foot of the stairs. "You have never told him," I cried passionately.
"Cecil, stay where you are," said Eliot. His face made me quail, but I only stayed there until he came down, then, challenging him with a look that I hoped was hate, I walked straight up, but the door of our room was locked. I went into Joss's room and tried the door there; it was locked as well. I rattled the handle. "Willmouse, it's Cecil. It's Cecil." There was no answer. I was not surprised. Willmouse was always still and silent if he were offended.
I went back to the landing, where I had another pain, and with it such a sense of desolation that I could hardly bear it. If this were growing---Joss had said that was what the pains were---I did not like it. Down below the party must have been going in to dinner; I heard chairs scraped back, more bursts of laughter, voices. I wondered if Joss were sitting next to the doctor, if Hester and Vicky were there.
There is nothing more melancholy than listening to a party from which one is shut out. I could hear the noise of knives and forks now with the talk and laughter, while on the landing it was growing dark; the stairs were lit only by the light coming up from the hall; smells of food drifted up with the scent of flowers and I thought of Willmouse's banquet and gave a little sob. He was locked in by this inexplicable Eliot and only I cared, mounting guard beside him, but a guard with a bad pain and half in tears. "Willmouse. Willmouse." Still no answer. I could imagine him rigid with shock. "I hate Eliot," I said. Then I jumped. In his cat-quiet way he had come up the stairs and was laughing at me.
When he saw the tears he stopped laughing. He said, "I'm sorry. I had to do that."
"Willmouse is little. He wanted to see a banquet."
He said, "I know," and then, "I am not as bad as you think." He was carrying a tray; on it was the chicken chasseur from the menu keeping warm under a small glass cloche, gaufrette potatoes, some of what we called 'party toast', toast melba, butter, a meringue and a glass of grenadine; it was a bit of the banquet, but I was not going to relent.
"He won't eat it," I said distantly.
"We shall see," said Eliot. He unlocked the door but kept me out. "Leave him to me," he said.
I went into the Hole because something had happened to my pain; there, in that smelly little cupboard, I found out.
Even there wonder overcame me. Wonder and fear. I shivered. ". . . with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet," Mr Stillbotham had said; no matter how reluctant, one was pushed into the full tide. Dazed, I came out of the Hole and went into Joss's room and found what I needed in her drawer. It was no use trying to reach her, she was at dinner . . . and so is Mademoiselle Zizi, I thought. Madame Corbet, Mauricette were busy. I had to manage for myself with those strange first necessities of being a woman, and it was unexpressibly lonely. When I was comfortable I began to cry with excitement and self-pity. I was still crying when I went back on the landing.
I could hear Eliot's voice inside our room; then I thought I heard Willmouse give a tiny laugh like a crow. Eliot was even more of a magician than I thought. Always if Willmouse were punished he did not speak for at least two days. I listened and, yes, I heard him laugh again. Then Eliot came out. "Still here?"
"Yes," I said, muffled.
"I think he will eat it all," said Eliot. "He liked the drink."
"You needn't lock the door!" That came out like a cry.
"I said I would and I must," said Eliot. "I will come up later." Then he looked at me. "You are in a state, Cecil. What is the matter?"
He should not have asked that; the tears came flooding.
"Is it Willmouse still?"
I shook my head.
"What is it then?" He put his arm round me, bending down. "Tell?"
Who could resist Eliot when he was Eliot? Eliot, not that other cold stranger. "Never talk to anyone about these times," Mother had said when she told us, "especially not to a man. Women should be private." In Southstone I think I should have shrunk suitably from telling Eliot, but Les Oeillets was different and it came out with a rush. "I . . . have turned into a woman."
I did not know how else to put it---Mother had not taught us any of the words---but Eliot did not laugh. He asked, "Just now?"
"Just now," and the tears flowed.
"That isn't anything to cry about," said Eliot gently.
"It . . . hurts."
"Not when you consider how exciting it is."
"Exciting?" That was unexpected.
"Of course."
"But . . . how?"
"Because now you are ready for love."
Love! Probably nothing in the world that Eliot could have said at that moment could have helped me more. Love! Like Mademoiselle Zizi, Juliet, Cleopatra, Eve, like . . . Joss, level with Joss. "I, Cecil," I whispered, dazzled.
"You."
"But . . ." The tears came back. "I am not pretty like Joss."
"You are not pretty like Joss. You are pretty like Cecil."
With my Bullock sturdiness, my pinkness and mouse hair? "I, pretty?"
"Very," said Eliot, and he kissed me on the mouth.
"That scoundrel," Uncle William called him. I only know that night he seemed like an angel to me.
He had to go to dinner, but he took me downstairs and put me to sit in the office which was empty; somehow, in the rush and hubbub, he got Toinette, who was motherly, to make me some tea. How did he know there were only two things in the world I could have swallowed, things English and familiar, bread and butter and tea. I had not known tea could be had in France, though it was tea such as we had not seen, served in a glass, the leaves in a little paper bag tied with a string and soaking in hot water. It was weak, but it was hot, and I made it sweet and ate four slices of bread and butter. The pain had the edge taken off it now and Toinette patted me and called me 'pauvre gosse'. Soon I felt much better.
It was a long peaceful wait until people began to come from dinner to dance or sit at the tables in the bar. I stole out on the stairs to watch. Nobody noticed me and I was glad. Then Hester came to sit beside me; she had been dancing and was excited. "Joss is the belle of the ball, isn't she?" she said.
Everyone wanted to dance with Joss. When the men tapped one another on the shoulder, taking one another's partner, she changed partners all the time; she was flushed, far more excited than Hester, but that game was going on. Eliot danced with Mademoiselle Zizi, with some of the wives and daughters, with Vicky and Mauricette, but he never seemed to see Joss nor Joss him; she carefully looked away when they passed; she smiled at her partner and tossed her hair back and fluttered her lashes up and down. "Is that flirting?" asked Hester, but I was beginning to see there was another kind of growing pain. I knew Joss was miserable and I ached for her.
"Qui a laissé ces trucs-là dans mon bureau?" Madame Corbet had found the tray with my plate and tea glass. "Is the whole house to be a nursery?" she scolded, and I had to take them to the kitchen. On the way back I had to wait at the service door. They were dancing the carpet dance, the danse du tapis, when the men make a circle and a woman takes a little square of carpet and stands in the centre. When the music stops she kneels down on the carpet in front of the man she chooses, who kisses her and dances with her while everybody claps. He takes her into the circle and this goes on till all the women are in the circle. The crowd had moved back against the wall to watch the dance and I could not get past. As I stood, there was a loud sound of eating in my ear, a smell of sweat and garlic, Paul, and I had another glimpse of what it was like to be Paul. His face and neck were glistening with sweat, his hair hung limply, his apron and shirt were soaked and covered with stains. He must have been washing-up for hours and had taken a moment to eat; he had a piece of sausage clamped in a length of split bread, as he used to make our goûter.
We shouldn't have sent him to Coventry, I thought, and this time was going to make myself speak to him when I saw he had not noticed me; he was watching Joss. When people are watching they forget to pretend and there was something in Paul's face that made me afraid; it was wild, like a wild animal that does not think of itself or any other animal but only of what it wants. Then I learned part of the explanation of why he looked like that; Monsieur Armand called impatiently and Paul turned to go but left the door open and I saw him take a bottle from the shelf behind the door; he tilted it right up before he drank so that I knew it was almost empty. When he put it back he nearly missed the shelf and a moment after I heard a crash of plates.
He came back. Three or four times I noticed him in that door, and then I saw that Joss was smiling at him. She only smiled because she was smiling at everyone, but, "It is flirting," Hester said disapprovingly when I got back to the stairs.
It grew late. Some of the people were going home. Vicky had fallen asleep on a sofa; Madame Corbet looked at her two or three times, then picked her up and carried her to bed. The Brass Instruments Band had finished, but a pianist and violin had taken its place. The music sounded very quiet after the band, and the notes of the violin came softly across the floor, sweet with a faint throbbing that made it sound tender.
Joss was standing just below us, and for the moment she was without a partner. I think she hoped she would be left without one, for she turned this way and that and I was sure she was looking for Eliot. Then she saw him, and for the first time that night they looked at one another. She stood still and I knew her eyes would not plead, only look, unmistakably look. She had had to humble herself to do that, but Eliot walked away to the bar. I clenched my fists. Was Eliot quite impervious? To the throbbing music that seemed to us so beautiful? To Joss? Eliot, who had kissed me upstairs? It was only a moment; the next, Joss was smiling at the piccolo, at the Town Clerk; then she smiled and waved at someone else. I looked to see and it was Paul. The wave was too much. He gave a tug at his apron that broke its string, wrenched it from his neck and threw it away, combed his hair with his fingers and reached her before the piccolo, who was weaving through the dancers. "Mademoiselle Joss," said Paul and bowed.
If he had been clean it might have been different. Mauricette had danced and Monsieur Armand, "but not Toinette or Nicole," said Hester. Monsieur Perrichaut called out sharply and a gentleman, who Mauricette told us was Monsieur Dufour of the Commissariat, came up and said to Paul as he stood just below us, "Et toi, mon gaillard, rentre chez toi et restes-y." Monsieur Dufour was, I suppose, in charge of Paul, but Paul had emptied all of that bottle and he shouted so that the words were heard through all the rooms above the music, "Galeux! Gros dégueulasse!" to Monsieur Dufour.
Other men came up; the older ones talked soothingly, but the Town Clerk took hold of Paul, who shook him off.
"Paul! Fais-pas l'imbécile," cried Mauricette and ran for Madame Corbet.
"Rentre," said Monsieur Dufour curtly. "C'est ce que tu as de mieux à faire," but Paul had Joss by the hand.
Joss did not know what to do. Gently she tried to take her hand away. "Dance me," said Paul in his poor English.
"They don't want me to," said Joss.
"Foutez-nouse la paix!" Paul shouted at them. "Elle n'est pas une sacrée snob."
Without his apron Paul looked tall and, in his untidiness and dirt, almost savage among those Sunday clothes. Joss shrank from him though she was trying not to shrink. "Attendez, Paul," she said, "wait," but he was putting his arm round her, when suddenly between them was Eliot.
He had cut in front of Paul so quickly that no one had seen him come up and almost from inside Paul's arm he took Joss and danced with her away down the room. At the same moment Monsieur Dufour caught Paul by the shoulder, the Town Clerk took his other side, and between them they marched him to the door where Madame Corbet and Monsieur Armand were waiting. "Tordu!" shouted Paul as they took him away. "Pelé! Galeux! Fumier!" The words died away along the passage. Hester was crying, "Poor Paul! Poor Paul!" I felt too miserable to speak.
Joss and Eliot did not speak either as they danced. She kept her eyelids down so that her face looked closed; Eliot's was set.
The music stopped when they were by Mademoiselle Zizi, who had come to the foot of the stairs and was watching. Eliot slowly took his arm away but kept Joss's hand. Joss's chin began to shake. For a moment I thought they would have made it up, that he would take her into the garden in the moonlight among the fair lights, but Eliot did another of his incomprehensible things---"He was trying to look after her," said Hester; "he always did look after us,"---he held out his free hand to Mademoiselle Zizi, who gave him her hand wonderingly. He put Joss's into it. "Take her to bed, Zizi," he said.
"No!" They said it together. Joss's was a curt refusal, while Mademoiselle Zizi sounded as if she were being stifled. "No!"
"Yes," said Eliot gently and inexorably. "The party is over now." He turned away abruptly and said, "Good night."
"Eliot, where are you going?" It was a cry from Mademoiselle Zizi.
"Into the garden to smoke," he said, still gently, and stepped outside.
Demo version limitation
IT WAS a morning filled with absences. That sounds contradictory, but it was the absences that made themselves felt. There were two chars-à-bancs parties for breakfast, Americans on their way from Germany to Paris, and we saw once again how hard hotel people worked. Mauricette told us that when the Brass Instruments Ball had finished it had been past one o'clock, but she, Madame Corbet and Paul had had to set to work, sweep out the dining-room and hall and lay sixty places for breakfast . . . "And they will not have coffee and rolls," Vicky told us. "They will have grapefruit, bacon and eggs, hot rolls, jam, coffee and tea and milk." Monsieur Armand, Madame Corbet and Mauricette had to get up at half past six; we knew that because we were woken by cries for Paul.
A long time had gone by last night before I had taken myself out of that room and got into my own bed with Joss and Willmouse. All I could think of was how heavenly warm she was.
"Well?" She had been wide awake.
Why did I not tell her what I had seen? 'I have seen nothing, nothing at all', that was what I was saying over and over again in my head, and aloud I said briefly, "He has gone."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure."
I had imagined myself lying awake, seeing it over and over again, but at once I had fallen asleep.
"Paul. Pa-ul. Paul!" That was Mauricette. Then came Madame Corbet's steps and she flung open our door, 'without knocking', as Joss observed. Madame Corbet was too hurried to see we were three in the bed together and she did not scold us. "Have any of you children seen Paul . . . Paul Brendel?" She always spoke as if we did not know him.
It was a relief to see Madame Corbet. If she wanted Paul I could not believe he would not come. "When did you see him?" she asked.
"At the party last night," said Joss.
"Tscha!" and Madame Corbet shut the door.
Wakened by the noise Hester and Vicky came in. We were all awake now, in spite of our late night, wide awake except Willmouse, who was fast asleep on the far side of our bed. Nor would he wake.
"Madame Corbet, Willmouse, our little brother, hasn't woken."
"Then wake him."
"We . . . we can't."
Everyone was out of temper that morning and Madame Corbet snapped, "What is wrong with him?"
Nothing was wrong with him except that he was asleep, fast asleep, pale, but he was often pale. When we shook him his head rolled, when we opened his eyelids his eyes showed the whites. "I don't like that," said Hester. It certainly looked alarming. We sat him up, but he sagged back on the pillow. He was cold and breathing a little strangely. "Is he ill or asleep?" I asked.
"I don't think you sleep when you are ill," said Joss. "He is just . . . too asleep."
That was what we told Madame Corbet. "Grands Dieux!" she said. "Why worry me for that? Let him sleep."
When ten o'clock came and he had not stirred we began to worry more. The house was swarming with the Americans; they were taking snapshots of the staircase, of the place under the urn where Rita and Rex had found the skull---as it was so early and Paul had not been found, the bloodstain was left out---and there was no hope of getting anyone to look at Willmouse. Joss made up her mind. "I'm going to the hospital," she said.
"To tell Mother?" I spoke out of my yearning; inexpressibly that morning I was longing for Mother.
"Don't be an idiot," said Joss. "I am going to ask Monsieur le Directeur if Willmouse is all right."
"You could telephone."
"I can't in French. I don't know how to get the number," and Hester said, "I wish Eliot were here."
Eliot's was the third absence. He had gone to Paris, Mademoiselle Zizi told the Monsieur from the Police, Monsieur Dufour, who came asking questions.
I had come into the hall on my way upstairs; the chars-à-bancs had driven away, Les Oeillets was quiet again, but in the hall was Monsieur Dufour sitting on a chair, rubbing his chin with the end of his cane, his hat on one of the console tables. I was examining him out of the corner of my eye when Mademoiselle Zizi came from her room. She was in a pale-green dressing-gown, her hair twisted up, her face just as it was without rouge; she suddenly looked to me most beautiful.
"I regret I kept you waiting, Monsieur."
"Une demi-heure," said Monsieur Dufour, but he did not sound angry. His eyes were brown and very kind. He kept them on Mademoiselle Zizi.
They spoke in French, but I could follow them. "I wanted to see Monsieur Eliot," said Monsieur Dufour, "but Irène says he is not here."
"He has gone to Paris, Monsieur."
"At three o'clock in the morning." I wondered what effect it would have on them if I had said that.
"He has a business there?"
"So I understand."
I began to think there was some deep feeling between these two; Monsieur was warmer to Mademoiselle Zizi than she to him; she still distantly called him 'Monsieur'.
"How did he go to Paris if his car is here?"
Now I came to think of it the Rolls was on the drive outside. It had not been there last night, but Mademoiselle Zizi was explaining. "Since yesterday Fouret's have had it for graissage. Today Monsieur Eliot drove up with friends. Look, Fouret's tag is on the windscreen if you wish to see it, Monsieur."
She minds his questions about Eliot, I thought, and he does not like asking them. It makes him feel awkward. "This is a routine check on all strangers in the town, Zizi," he said. "We have nothing against Monsieur Eliot."
"What could you have?" asked Mademoiselle Zizi, more cold than ever, but he went quietly on with his questions.
"He stays here?"
"Is that a fault?"
"Zizi. I have to ask. Please understand."
"You know he stays here. The whole town knows."
"Yes," said Monsieur Dufour. He sounded sorrowful but he went on. "He was here at the dinner yesterday evening?"
"You saw him," said Mademoiselle Zizi.
"But he went to Paris in the day?"
"No."
"No?" asked Monsieur Dufour.
"He was here all day," and she flashed, "He was here in the bar writing letters. Then he took an early lunch and spent the afternoon in the cove." Her eyes fell on me trying to make myself small. "If you do not believe me, ask this child," said Mademoiselle Zizi.
My stomach gave a sudden unexpected heave. I thought I was going to be sick. Monsieur Dufour turned those kind brown eyes on me. "Did you see Monsieur Eliot in the cove?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
His eyes dwelt on me a moment . . . did he guess there was something else? Then I felt a soft little touch on my elbow; it was Hester, as usual. Monsieur Dufour passed to her.
"And did you see Monsieur Eliot in the cove?"
"Yes, Monsieur." It came out patly. I do not know how we agreed silently not to tell what else we had seen. Hester added, "He gave us money to go bathing."
"You see!" cried Mademoiselle Zizi, then she burst out indignantly, "But why should you ask questions? You know Eliot."
"I know him," said Monsieur Dufour, and again he sounded sad, "but I have to make my report."
He had picked up his hat, when Madame Corbet came out of the office. "Have you said anything about Paul?" she asked Mademoiselle Zizi.
"Paul. Ah yes!" and Mademoiselle Zizi turned to Monsieur Dufour again. "I suppose it is you we have to tell. It is Paul . . . Paul Brendel, the boy you sent me."
"He was troublesome last night. What now?"
"Only that he seems to have gone," said Madame Corbet.
The strange morning went on. I remember I was cold, though it was the same brilliant heat, so that even Madame Corbet, sitting in the office, had beads of sweat caught in her moustache and patches of wet on her blouse. As the day went on the coldness seemed confirmed, inexorably, as if hope were slowly frozen out.
The doctor came to see Willmouse. Madame Corbet brought him upstairs. "Sixty people to breakfast, the dinner last night, and now they imagine illness," she said. "These children think they own the whole hotel."
She stood at the bedroom door while Monsieur le Directeur bent over Willmouse and listened to his breathing; he felt his pulse and then raised one of Willmouse's eyelids and looked into his eye that still looked horrible with its rolled-up white. "He is tired out with excitement," said Madame Corbet, "so he sleeps."
"Il a été drogué," said Monsieur le Directeur.
"Drogué? What is drogué?" asked Joss.
It was Madame Corbet who answered in a bewildered voice, "Drugged."
"Willmouse?"
Monsieur le Directeur was asking if there were any sleeping tablets in the house that Willmouse could have found. "Coloured ones like sweets," he suggested in French. "Yours?" he asked Madame Corbet. "No, you would not leave them about. Mademoiselle Zizi's?"
"I keep Zizi's," said Madame Corbet. She added that it was impossible.
Impossible, but it had happened. Standing at the foot of the bed with Joss I knew it was not impossible. Unwillingly I knew more. While they had been talking I had seen that supper tray again and the grenadine and heard Eliot's voice saying smoothly, "He liked the drink." But why? I thought giddily, why? Then I remembered how Eliot had suddenly and inexplicably ordered Willmouse to bed when Willmouse had done nothing to deserve it. But . . . and I remembered. Willmouse had been talking . . . about the motor-bike. I almost said it and clapped my hand to my mouth.
That must have been noticeable, for they all saw it.
"What now?" groaned Madame Corbet. "Truly, these children!"
I had to pretend it was toothache. "She looks pale," said Monsieur le Directeur wearily. "Open your mouth." He looked along my teeth. "She had better go and see Dupont," he said to Madame Corbet. "These," and he tapped two teeth, "look to me as if they should come out."
As the day went on it grew heavier; by 'it' I mean this thing I was trying not to know. I was behaving like an ostrich with its head in the sand, but every now and then the head would be pulled out; I hastily burrowed it back into the sand again.
Willmouse woke in the afternoon, but he was drowsy and stupid and his voice was thick. Joss telephoned the hospital, Madame Corbet getting through for her, and Willmouse was given hot tea. He immediately fell asleep again, but he was warmer.
Joss stayed with him, and Hester and I wandered out along the river. We tacitly agreed we should not go and see Mother; I could not have trusted myself near her. We avoided the cove and between us was a weight of silence. Even to Hester I could not speak of what was in me, and as if she felt a barrier she did not speak either, which was remarkable for Hester, until we came out on the towing-path, when---"Look," she said, "the Marie France is gone."
"It had to go sometime," I said. It did not seem important, but there seemed a curious blankness on the river where the little barge had been.
We went in to goûter, getting it ourselves. Mauricette was leaning on Monsieur Armand, reading the paper over his shoulder. "That is why Monsieur Dufour came asking about Monsieur Eliot," she said in French, but I was beginning not to notice if people spoke in French or English. I had been cutting a piece from a baguette and I stopped with the bread in my hand. "Why?" I asked.
"Vol de diamants, à Paris," read out Monsieur Armand. "Coup de main audacieux dans le quartier de l'Etoile. Le malfaiteur s'enfuit avec cent millions de francs de diamants."
"Diamonds?" I asked, and, "What does it mean?" asked Hester.
"Only that there has been a robbery," I said.
"Tell her," said Monsieur Armand, giving the paper to me to do my translation. "Now, nicely, for your sister."
Painfully I began: "An armed . . . Qu'est-ce que c'est 'malfaiteur'?" I asked Monsieur Armand.
"Gangster," said Monsieur Armand, who went to the cinema.
"Armed gangster steals one hundred . . . million . . . it is million?" I asked.
"Million," confirmed Monsieur Armand.
"One hundred million francs'-worth of jewels and escapes. Once a month Mademoiselle Yvonne Lebègue, secretary to Monsieur Roger Dixonne, a diamond . . . merchant," I read, stumbling over the unfamiliar words, "whose offices are in the Rue La Fayette, ninth ar . . . what is that?"
"Neuvième arrondissement," explained Monsieur Armand, which left me none the wiser.
"Collects pierres precieuses . . . precious stones, chiefly diamonds, from a colleague in the Place du Trocadéro. On Friday, towards three-fifteen, Mademoiselle Lebègue was being driven on her way to the Rue La Fayette through the Rue Dumont d'Urville by Jean Sagan, Monsieur Dixonne's chauffeur. She had with her . . . un lot spécial . .. special lot of . . . qu'est-ce que c'est 'pierres taillées'?" Mauricette pretended to cut sharply with a knife. "Oh, cut stones! . . . valued at about one hundred million francs in a small . . . qu'est-ce que c'est 'une mallette d'aluminium'?"
Mauricette seized a saucepan and tapped it to show me. "Oh, aluminium case." I had not known cases could be of aluminium. ". . . which she placed under her feet in the car, a large Mercédès. When the Mercédès was almost . . . à la hauteur de la rue . . . at the top of the street near the PTT, a small light-blue car, parked on the right side of the road, drew out suddenly and stopped . . . in a cross? Oh, crosswise! . . . across the road, forcing the Mercédès to stop. At the same time a man appeared by the car, swung open the door by Mademoiselle Lebégue, seized the case, slammed the door and was gone. It was so quickly and quietly done that the chauffeur did not see him at all and, though there were many people on the pavement, no one realised what had happened until Monsieur Sagan jumped out . . . aux cris de 'Arrêtez cet homme! Arrêtez-le!' . . . crying 'Stop that man! Stop him!', and they heard Mademoiselle Lebégue's cries. Meanwhile the small car had driven off. Monsieur Sagan ran through the crowd, but there was no sign of the thief, who must have . . . very well known . . ." I translated literally, "known Monsieur Dixonne's habits to be able to organise this attack in less than two minutes."
"Ah ça! Par exemple!" cried Monsieur Armand, full of admiration. "C'est un peu fort!" He added wisely, "La femme était dans l'coup."
"What woman was in it?"
"La secrétaire," said Monsieur Armand and nodded.
Mauricette said they would catch the thief, the police had the number of the small car. Monsieur Armand said the driver was probably just an accomplice and the car was surely stolen; they would find it presently. "On verra bien, you will see," he said, and I went on reading, "This is the third time there has been one of these . . ." I stumbled.
"Hold-ups," said Monsieur Armand.
". . . in this quarter. Paris police are looking for a man of thirty-five or thereabouts, tall, slim, dressed in thin trousers and a green jacket. The swiftness and . . . au . . . audacity lead them to think it is the work of an experienced thief, perhaps the international bandit Allen, who was behind the jewel raids in Cannes last year, whom all efforts by the police failed to catch." I read on, "What is . . . une grand enquête?" I asked.
"Cherchant partout," said Mauricette.
"Oh! Searching everywhere," and Mauricette said, "Même Monsieur Eliot." She laughed as she said it but I did not laugh. Searching everywhere. Even for Eliot! My mind seemed to give a sharp click.
The newspaper said they were checking all foreign people in a radius of Paris and Mauricette was teasing us. "Vous deux, Mademoiselle Cecil et Mademoiselle Hester, et ma p'tite Vicky, ma p'tite reine," and she picked up Vicky and danced with her. Then she stopped and pointed out a picture in the newspaper to me.
We were in the kitchen where everything was familiar---Monsieur Armand, Mauricette, the pots and pans; even the flies crawling on Monsieur Armand's forehead seemed homely, almost dear; but now everything seemed to slide together into a blur behind the picture of a man and I spelled out the headline above it: " 'I have seen him and shall know him again,' says Inspector Jules Cailleux of the Sûreté Générale, who is handling the case. 'This time we shall get him.' "
I took the newspaper up to Joss. "Inspector Cailleux? He was the one at Dormans," said Joss.
"Yes, on that day . . ." I broke off. I still did not like to mention that day to Joss, but Hester said, "When Eliot was queer."
There was a silence. Then I brought out huskily, "Perhaps he was queer because he did not want Inspector Cailleux to see him."
"Don't imagine things," said Joss sharply, but the sharpness told me she was imagining too.
"Willmouse, wake up. Wake up! Willmouse!"
It was next morning. Late the night before Willmouse had stirred, smiled and woken again. Madame Corbet must have been worried because she came straight up to him and he had had hot soup, some bread and butter, had smiled at us and gone back to sleep. In the night I had heard him rustling. He wanted to go to the Hole and I had taken him. Surely now he must be awake enough to talk . . . or not to talk, I thought desperately.
All night I had pondered, conning over these difficult bits and pieces. Why I? I thought, why should it be I? People are not sent what they cannot bear; Mother had said that in the train, but that was about pain. I could have borne a pain, but this, this horrible knowledge that was in me I could not bear. It's imagination, I said, pushing it out of sight. At all costs, I thought, that was what I must do, refuse it, keep it down, be silent, not talk not let Hester talk, or anyone else. "Willmouse, wake up!"
He opened his eyes. "Have I been asleep?" asked Willmouse.
"Can you understand me?" I said.
"Why not?" He was astonished.
"I want you to promise me something." My tone must have been very solemn, for his eyes were as big as an owl's as he looked at me.
'Is it important?"
"Very important. Willmouse, if they---anyone---ask you if you saw anything, say nothing. Promise."
"Did I see anything?" he asked.
Two parties were coming for lunch. "You must tidy your room," Madame Corbet told me.
"Shall I make the bloodstain for you, as Paul isn't here?" I asked. I had meant to be sarcastic, to show Madame Corbet we knew what frauds they were, but she only nodded. To her it was normal hotel business and she said, "You could bury the skull as well, but first put Rita and Rex in the kennel or they will dig it up now."
"Where are Rita and Rex?"
They were not on the house-step in their usual place, nor inside the house, nor in the garden; then I heard barks from the orchard, barking and whining. I remember that as I went to see what had excited them I passed the box hedge, rubbing a leaf in my hands to catch the hot bruised smell, and dawdled in the orchard to see if any greengages were left. There were a few, on the trees, overripe in the sun, but still firm under the leaves; I ate both kinds and they added to the chaotic feeling in my stomach. Then, with the dog leashes in my hand, I went down the first long alley.
At the end of the alley there was a pit under the wall; it was filled with loose earth and rotting leaves, grass mowings and weeds; everything was thrown there to make a compost heap for Robert's beloved bedding plants in the top garden.
In this heap Rita was digging; her excited whines and barks sent quivers through Rex, who was sitting upright on the grass, his ears pricked. He was holding something in his mouth and his tail thumped proudly at the sight of me; though Rita found it, it was always Rex who brought the skull and he got up now and came to me and put the thing into my hand.
It was an espadrille, grey-white and sodden, with the tapes still knotted. I flinched and dropped it on the ground while Rex looked up at my face and thumped his tail.
"Wait, boy," I said. It was a sound like a croak and I took three steps to see what it was that Rita was digging.
In the brown-yellow of the leaves was something pale. I took another step and the whole orchard seemed to tilt and run into a blur as the kitchen had done when I saw Inspector Cailleux's picture, but now the orchard ran into the sky. The pale thing was a foot, a foot and ankle lying downwards; the rest was under the leaves. There was an edge of blue cotton trouser, but the ankle was bare; its skin looked white and tender as the back of Vicky's neck, a young skin. There was a leaf stuck to it, a little bright-yellow leaf; not knowing what I was doing, I bent down to take it off.
It was stuck; almost absently I scraped it with my nail and my finger touched the skin, and it was cold.
I had been cold for two days, but this cold was different; it was a chill all its own. Shivers went over me and my lips began to shake. The foot was cold and stiff with a dreadful stiffness. The smell of decay that rose up from the leaves and rotting weeds filled my mouth and nose and seemed to me the smell of death. There was no escape now. My head had come out of the sand and I had to know. The foot had worn the espadrille, Paul's espadrille . . . and this was Paul.
"GREENGAGE INDIGESTION!" said Madame Corbet.
She had come upon me sick on the garden path. "Too many greengages," she said, and her topknot shook not with pity but with indignation.
I did not contradict her. I could not, I could onlv gasp and moan; and she was right, it was as if I were trying to fling out Paul, Eliot, Les Oeillets, all of it; a sudden rising of my stomach to my mouth in the same way that the orchard had run up into the sky.
"Too big a girl to eat so many," scolded Madame Corbet.
"I'm not big. I'm little, too little," I wanted to cry, but I could not speak; she had to help me, unwilling as she was, until at last I could lean against her and get my breath. "Are . . . Rita and Rex shut up?"
"I put them in the kennel," said Madame Corbet, annoyed. "I even have to do that. I have everything to see to. Everything! Have you finished?" she asked sharply.
"I---I think so."
"Then go and lie down. You will not have any lunch."
Thankfully I escaped and went upstairs. In our room I went to the washing-stand which had not been emptied and cleaned. If it had, we were not allowed to touch it until the visitors were gone. I washed and washed my hands; I think I was trying to wash away the feeling of that cold and the smell of the dead leaves. I remember I was trembling, and the beating was back in my head. "You know what you have seen," said that beating. "You know. There is no shadow of doubt. You will have to do something now. What are you going to do?" I should have liked to have crept into the unmade bed and pulled the clothes over my head, but Toinette was at the door. I escaped from her and went into Vicky and Hester's room.
Toinette had finished in here, it was tidy and clean; Nebuchadnezzar, getting very withered now, was in his basket on a chair by Vicky's side of the bed; there were fresh flowers, pimpernels, daisies and wild geranium in Hester's liqueur glass. As I noticed it I had an overwhelming desire to look at Eliot---Eliot who had done . . . that. I opened the drawer where she hid her photograph from Toinette. The little frame was lying on its face. I picked it up, and it was empty.
I was still staring at the empty frame when Joss came in. "Madame Corbet says . . ." she broke off. Then, "I took it," said Joss.
"The photograph?" She nodded. "So that they shouldn't . . ." I do not know why I asked her that. She could not know who 'they' were, but as if she did know she shook her head. "I told Hester I wanted to copy it . . . make a portrait." Her face was so set and hard it looked like a stone carving of Joss. "But you didn't," I said and asked, "What did you do with it?" She did not answer and I said, "You gave it to Monsieur Dufour."
"No."
"Then what?"
"I sent it to Inspector Cailleux."
"The Dormans man?"
"Yes."
"Joss!"
"Eliot shouldn't play fast and loose." She was not stone now. "That is what they call it and that is what it is; keep you, then push you away, take you and push you away. It's cruel. It's not only me; he has done it to Mademoiselle Zizi, and Monsieur Armand says the diamond merchant's secretary woman as well. He played with us, like . . . like chess, she and Mademoiselle Zizi and me."
"He wasn't playing with you."
"Shut up," blazed Joss. "Shut up!" but I was steady.
"He didn't play with any of us," I said. "We were the only people he didn't play with."
Joss went to the window and stood with her back to me.
"When did you do it?" I asked.
"Yesterday. As soon as I knew, after you had brought me the paper, I wrote and went down to the office and asked for a stamp. Madame Corbet gave it to me. I went out to the comer and posted it. It caught the post."
"You don't know it was he."
"If it isn't they won't come," said Joss, but we were both waiting for them to come. "I knew it as soon as I saw the paper," said Joss.
"Just from Inspector Cailleux?" I said, marvelling.
"Not from him. From Eliot," and she cried, "That was what made him so unhappy."
"They will get it this morning," I said slowly.
"And Paris isn't very far," said Joss.
There was a silence. We were both listening. Then, "What will they do to him, Cecil?" asked Joss. "Will they put him in prison?"
"They have to catch him first." That was ripped out of me, a hope. Then I knew that I ought not to hope. I said, "Joss . . ."
She had sat down on the bed; she was still listening for sounds outside and, almost absent-mindedly, she raised her eyes to me. "They won't put him in prison," I said.
Her eyes came alive. She rapped out, "Why not?"
"Because if they catch him I think he will have to be hanged." Holding to the bedpost I told her what I had found. When I began she put out her hand and caught my wrist as if she would stop me; it was a stranglehold and my hand went limp and white; when I had finished and she let me go the blood rushing back into it hurt excruciatingly. There was another silence, then, "They don't hang people in France," she said. "They guillotine them."
"It's the visitors for lunch," I said that quickly when we heard the car slow at the gates.
"It's too early," said Joss.
We were in her room and had only to go to the window to see what car it was, but we stayed huddled together on the bed. The car drove in and stopped. Joss laid her cold hand on my cold one. "Cecil, you look."
"I can't."
"You can. You didn't send for them."
I did not go to the window but went downstairs just as Monsieur Dufour walked in. "What, again?" said Madame Corbet, who was crossing the hall.
"Again," said Monsieur Dufour; his voice did not sound kind but curt and angry. Behind him were two other men; one was big, in a tweed jacket, and carried a despatch case; the other was small, and I held to the banisters as I recognised him. Yes, it was the Dormans man with the sandy hair and moustache, even the sand-and-olive-coloured suit; he had been in the newspaper, now he was here. Inspector Cailleux had come. A curious little sound came from me and seemed to float out into the hall.
As Monsieur Dufour talked rapidly and angrily to Madame Corbet she caught sight of me. "Go into the garden and call Mademoiselle Zizi," she commanded in French.
Mademoiselle Zizi must have been lying in the long chair on the terrace, but I think she too had heard the car because as I came to her she was standing and as still as Joss had been. Did she have some sixth-sense warning? I reached her and she gripped me. "Who is it?"
"The police."
"Police!" Her face looked suddenly older but her eyes were like a child's, filled with fear, looking far over my head.
"Where is Irène?"
"With them. They want you." I paused. "Mademoiselle Zizi . . ."
No answer, only the fingers gripping me, kneading my arm.
"Mademoiselle Zizi." I said it more loudly. Her eyes came back to me, but they looked quite senseless. With my free hand I gave her fingers a sharp slap, but she did not seem to feel it.
"Zizi!" Madame Corbet came down the terrace, "Zizi. Vas-y."
Then Mademoiselle Zizi did let me go. She looked at Madame Corbet and backed away from her. "You!" she said, her voice ugly. "You sent for them."
"I? Why should I?" Madame Corbet put out her hands, but Mademoiselle Zizi still backed away from her.
"It was you."
"Zizi. Qu'est-ce que tu nous racontes?"
"It was you."
"Hush," I said like a grown-up. "Listen. Listen!" and I stamped my foot. They stared. "There is something you should see before you go in. It . . . he . . ." I thought I was going to be sick again and tumbled the words out, "It's in the orchard."
"What 'it'?" but I could not tell them.
"Look, quickly, in the heap where the leaves are thrown."
"Et maintenant qu'est-ce que tu nous racontes?"
"Quickly."
"What is it?" but I had taken refuge in being a child and had begun to cry. "Something . . . I think . . . I found. Oh, look! Look quickly. I will go in and say you are coming, but go. Go."
The policemen were in the bar where Mauricette was bringing them drinks on a tray. Monsieur Dufour was walking up and down, looking miserable and angry; the other two were sitting calmly at a table; Inspector Cailleux was looking round him with what I imagined was a detective look, taking every detail in. I could see Joss on the stairs, her hand holding the rail.
"Et Mademoiselle de Presle? Elle vient?" barked Monsieur Dufour at me.
With Joss watching I was dignified in spite of my red eyes. "Dans un petit moment," I said, closing the garden door behind me; but Monsieur Dufour sprang forward and wrenched it open, for, just then, down in the orchard Mademoiselle Zizi began to scream.
WHEN ANYTHING happens in a house the children are treated like cattle. We were rounded up, herded upstairs and into our rooms; as we went up we could hear Mademoiselle Zizi having hysterics, and Monsieur Dufour trying to calm her. Madame Corbet had to leave her to him, for as usual she had everything to do: control Mauricette, Toinette and Nicole, who seemed to want to have hysterics too, enlist Monsieur Armand's help, telephone the doctor, install Inspector Cailleux in the little salon and allow his assistant to use the telephone in the office. I have always wondered what happened to the parties for lunch.
After Mademoiselle Zizi stopped screaming a horrible calm lay over the house, the house not the garden; the garden was full of police, and Rita and Rex bayed frantically in the kennel. Each time their noise rose it meant a fresh batch of police had arrived. Monsieur Armand saw us looking out of the windows and came up and shuttered them. "Better not to look," he said gently, but we could not help looking through the cracks, all except Joss, who sat as if she had been frozen on the bed.
A dark-blue van drove up.
"What's that?" asked Willmouse fearfully.
"I expect it's some stores for the kitchen," I said, trying to soothe him, "only some stores."
"It's the dead car," said Vicky, who was not supposed to know anything. "It has come for Paul."
The truth spoken so flatly shocked us and we stayed perfectly still listening to the tramp of feet. "He's on a stretcher," said Vicky, peering, "all covered up."
I had a hiccough that shook me from my heels to my head. Hester began to cry. "Paul saved up for his lorry," she said. "Why? Why did God do it?"
"God didn't," said Vicky, "it was Eliot. Monsieur Armand said so."
"It was all my fault," said Joss. Sitting on the bed, she twisted her hands together. "If I had gone on painting. Cecil told me to but I would go to the party."
"We went to the party too," said Hester loyally.
"If I hadn't smiled at him . . ."
"Well, if we had never talked to him . . ." I could say that.
". . . he would never have come up the ladder," said Joss, not listening.
"Did he come up a ladder?" Hester and the Littles asked. "Why?" they asked round-eyed.
"To . . . look at Joss."
"Why?"
"Men do at women," said Willmouse.
I told them how Eliot came. "He needn't have come. It was because he thought we were in trouble. He could have gone," I said. "He shook the ladder and Paul fell."
"Nobody meant it, it happened," said Hester; she added mournfully, "And now Eliot has gone."
"I saw him go." They all turned to me, listening carefully as I told them.
"That was how he was dressed," said Willmouse, nodding when I described the clothes. "But . . . I can't believe it," said Willmouse. He looked stunned.
"I can," said Hester, and, feeling our surprise, she explained, "Eliot always said, 'I'm sorry. I had to do that.' If you are all right really, really all right, you don't do things that are sorry."
Presently Madame Corbet appeared. "He wants to see you."
"Who?"
"Inspector Cailleux."
"In our scarecrows?"
"It doesn't matter," said Madame Corbet as one who savs. 'Nothing matters now.'
She drove us downstairs, all except Joss, who was not to be ordered. "I shall come when I'm ready," she said.
Inspector Cailleux was in the little salon. We had never been allowed to enter it; now we were to go in, in our scarecrows, and sit on the yellow satin chairs, but first we had to wait. The door was open; we could see Monsieur Dufour and the tweed-coated man. When we peeped round we saw that Inspector Cailleux, in his funny-coloured suit, was sitting at the pretty centre table with its painting of Cupids and ribbons; it seemed terrible it should be used for this. Another man was at a table carried in from the bar and put in the window. He was writing, but the other three were talking; by straining every sense I could just keep up.
"I cannot believe it," Monsieur Dufour was saying. He was walking up and down. "Everyone knew Monsieur Eliot. Why, he was here, dining at this big dinner with us all that night. He must have a nerve of iron."
"He has," said the clipped soft voice of Inspector Cailleux.
"What does he say?" whispered Willmouse.
They must have heard Willmouse whisper, for Inspector Cailleux asked, "Can those children understand French?"
"Very little," said Monsieur Dufour, "except the big one perhaps." He came to the door and glanced at us. "She is not here yet," and he asked, "Shall I close the door?"
"No, leave it. It's too hot," said Inspector Cailleux.
The talk went on. "But how?" Monsieur Dufour was saying. "How? Monsieur Eliot was here all afternoon. You have heard."
"I have heard. That does not mean to say he was."
"But he was. We have evidence. Here all afternoon. Then how was he in Paris, in the Rue Dumont d'Urville, at three o'clock. If this were his work he had an accomplice."
"He had no accomplice," Inspector Cailleux's voice sounded tired. "He works alone, or practically alone; there may be a man hired to drive a car or to telephone, but then he is discarded. We have caught them, Dufour, and they know nothing. Often they don't know who he is. He's too clever to have accomplices; sooner or later one of them would give him away. No, never accomplices, only tools, simple people; especially women."
"Especially women." I knew Monsieur Dufour was thinking of Mademoiselle Zizi; I was thinking of the simple people, of us.
"But how? How?" said Monsieur Dufour again. "I don't understand."
"If we could understand, it would not be Allen."
"What are they talking about?" asked Willmouse, and I lost the rest until Inspector Cailleux said slowly, "I know that man's work as if it were my own."
"Tell us," Willmouse commanded me urgently and I translated sentence by sentence as best I could, but it was hard work listening and telling.
"But . . . right under our noses!" said Monsieur Dufour.
"Under your noses," said Inspector Cailleux. Then he threw down his pen. "What's the good? He has had thirty-six hours. He is hundreds of miles away by now."
"I don't think he is," said Willmouse when I had translated.
"What do you mean?"
"I know where Eliot is."
"Where?"
"On the barge," said Willmouse, "the Marie France." The Marie France had gone and I remembered that soft strange hoot in the night.
I gazed at my little brother. "But how did you know?"
"He was dressed for it," said Willmouse simply. He added, "Barges go very slowly, but I don't suppose they will think of looking for him there."
"Cecil!" said Hester urgently.
I looked up. Mademoiselle Zizi had come into the bar. I had seen her once without her make-up, but now her face seemed to have come through it. She was a strange grey-white colour and her face was knotted as if it had cords in it, and her hair was tumbled half down on her shoulders. She looked at us, then into the little salon and pointed to it enquiringly and then at us again.
We shook our heads.
Her eyes turned from one to another of us; they seemed to be asking us, and she put her fingers to her lips. Slowly, solemnly, we nodded.
Madame Corbet's quick voice was heard in the hall and Mademoiselle Zizi turned almost in a panic to go. In the doorway she met Joss.
Joss stopped when she saw Mademoiselle Zizi. For a moment they faced one another. Then Mademoiselle Zizi spoke.
"They have told me. So! It was you who sent the photograph."
"Of course." Joss crossed in front of her and said, "Let me sit down, Hester."
In the little salon the voices grew louder. We listened and I said, "They're talking about us."
"We have seen everyone now," Monsieur Dufour had said.
"Except the children." That was Inspector Cailleux.
"They cannot be very important. At least, only the big girl."
"They may be very important. Call them in. I shall take the small ones first; and remember," ordered Inspector Cailleux, "don't speak to the big one. Ignore her."
"It will make her nervous."
"I want her nervous," said Inspector Cailleux.
Monsieur Dufour came to the salon door and beckoned us in. He started when he saw Mademoiselle Zizi. "Zizi," he said, "you should be resting."
"Resting!"
"Well, something. Don't stay here. Please," and he said, "Irène, take her." Madame Corbet put her arm round Mademoiselle Zizi and led her away as we filed in.
"Asseyez-vous, mes enfants."
Because we knew our scarecrows were very dirty we sat on the edge of the yellow chairs. Last of all Joss, her chin high, spots of red in her cheeks, took a chair by the door.
"Must the little children be in this?" asked Monsieur Dufour in French.
Inspector Cailleux did not raise his head. "They are in it," he said.
He wrote for a few minutes, then suddenly he sat up and looked at us, one after the other. I felt myself go hot, then cold. I think we all had blanched faces. Hester looked like . . . like a peeled nut, I thought; as for Joss, it seemed she had put on her mask painted with those two bright spots.
"Which of you took this photograph?"
It was said so casually, and in English, that we started. I do not know what we had expected---to be bullied, asked our names and ages, or have our thumbs twisted---but he was simply holding the snapshot up.
"I did," said Hester with modest pleasure.
"And you are . . ." he looked at a paper, "Hester?" She nodded. "Ten years old?" Hester's curls bobbed again. "Ten years old," said Inspector Cailleux in French to Monsieur Dufour, "and she has succeeded in doing what no one else has ever done, getting a photograph of Allen." Then in English, "I must congratulate you, ma p'tite. It is most valuable."
"Valuable?" The pleasure was wiped from Hester's face. "You mean . . . my photograph helped you?"
"Helped me! It brought me straight here," and to Monsieur Dufour again he said, "I am one of the few, the very few, who have seen Allen. I had him once . . . for an hour."
"He got away?" Monsieur Dufour sounded almost pleased.
"He got away." Inspector Cailleux's voice forbade any more questions and I remembered how the newspaper had said: '. . . whom the police failed to catch.'
"I must ask you for the negative"---Inspector Cailleux was speaking to Hester again---"but we shall give vou something very pretty in exchange. A doll. You would like a doll?"
"No," said Hester, her eyes horrified.
"Eliot gave me a doll," said Vicky. "We don't want yours."
"Listen," said Inspector Cailleux, "I am going to speak to you as if you were not children but grown up. You know this man Allen?"
We shook our heads.
"You know Monsieur Eliot?"
We nodded. "He's our friend," said Willmouse.
"Your friend is a thief," said Inspector Cailleux. Hester and the Littles were listening to him solemnly and he warmed. "A thief who stole in many countries, deceived people, took their money and was often cruel to them. I must tell you that sometimes he killed them."
"Like he did Paul?" asked Vicky, interested.
"Vicky, you are not to say things like that," Joss cut in from where she sat by the door.
"If you please, Mademoiselle . . ." said Inspector Cailleux.
"But . . ." began Joss hotly.
"I must ask you to be quiet. I shall come to you . . . later." He made that sound so frightening that I had to press myself down on my chair not to gasp.
Inspector Cailleux returned to the Littles. "He killed Paul," he said. "Are you going to like him after that?"
Hester, Willmouse and Vicky said instantly, "Yes."
Inspector Cailleux looked nonplussed and perhaps a little angry. When he spoke again his voice was sharp. "Like him or not, you have a duty. You know what duty is?"
We all nodded. Eliot was our friend . . . but when a friend kills a friend? And with a paperknife. I felt sure now it was the paperknife, or what we had thought was a paperknife. A rift was being torn between us and Eliot; each word that Inspector Cailleux said made that rift more.
"If you know anything, have seen anything strange or out of place, about this man Allen or Eliot," he was saying, "it is your duty to tell me."
Dead silence.
"Your duty," said Inspector Cailleux and his eyes went over each of us again. I dared not put my hands down on my chair in case they left marks as they had left them on the windowsill.
Hester was the most honest of us and the most easily worked upon. I had guessed she would feel she had to say something and in the silence she put up her hand.
"Well?"
"He . . ." said Hester as if her throat were dry, "he . . ."
"Yes?" said Inspector Cailleux encouragingly. "He?"
"He lay in the cove . . ." said Hester.
"Yes?" said Inspector Cailleux again, but I had pinched her and she shut her lips.
Again there was silence, but this, of course, could not go on; they were the police. I thought Inspector Cailleux had seen that pinch; detectives saw everything or they would not be detectives. He was looking at me without appearing to look, and it was borne in on me afresh that I was the only one who knew . . . everything, I thought. I could not help another little gasp, and this time his eyes looked straight at me for a second. They looked away at once, but I knew I was marked; quite rightly, not even Joss, who had been so quick to guess, knew all the pieces that fitted together. Each of them knew something, but I knew it all. What was I to do? Here in front of Inspector Cailleux all dreams and wishes fled. These were the police. Soon I should have to tell.
It was beginning to come out.
"You were the one who had the sleeping dose." Inspector Cailleux had turned to Willmouse and he asked Monsieur Dufour, "You think Allen gave the dose to him?"
"The chef, Monsieur Armand, says Monsieur . . . Allen took up a tray for the boy. We think, but we do not know."
"We can guess," said Inspector Cailleux, and to Willmouse, "What was on the tray you were brought?"
"Food," said Willmouse, "banquet food; chicken and party toast and a meringue. A beautiful meringue," said Willmouse, remembering.
"Anything to drink?"
"Grenadine."
"The supper things were washed up," said Monsieur Dufour, "so that, of course, we do not absolutely know."
"We can guess," said Inspector Cailleux again and his pale eyes studied Willmouse. "This child knew something."
"What could a child of his age know?"
Inspector Cailleux shrugged. "Children are everywhere, like insects. They can know anything."
"H'm," said Monsieur Dufour thoughtfully. "They say he slept for two days. It must have been strong."
"The drug or the reason?"
"Both," said Monsieur Dufour. "But it was abominable! To drug a child!"
"This was Allen," Inspector Cailleux reminded him. "The little boy is lucky to be alive."
"Who are they talking about?" Willmouse whispered more urgently to me.
"You."
"Why?"
"Because they think . . . Eliot . . . put you to sleep."
"Eliot?"
"Yes."
"Why? Why?" said Willmouse imperiously to Inspector Cailleux.
"Because, my little man, you knew something he did not want you to tell. It was not a very pleasant thing to do to you, was it?"
"It was silly," said Willmouse. He was wounded. "Why didn't he ask me not to tell? He needn't have put me to sleep. He could have trusted me."
"Was this man God to them?" asked Inspector Cailleux. He was getting angry and the questions came fast.
"Why did he send you to bed?"
"I was out late."
"Why were you out late?"
"I had been for my walk."
"Where did you go?"
"Along the river."
"Did you see anything?"
They were coming closer . . . like bloodhounds, I thought, and prickled with apprehension. "Did you see anything?" asked Inspector Cailleux peremptorily.
"I saw the barge," said Willmouse.
"What barge?"
"The Marie France."
"What was the barge doing?"
"Nothing," said Willmouse truthfully, but Inspector Cailleux was looking deeply into him.
"Do you like barges?" he asked.
"No."
"Then there was something especial about this one? Something you saw perhaps? Perhaps?" rapped out Inspector Cailleux.
"I would rather not talk to you,' said Willmouse.
"I am not playing," cried Inspector Cailleux and hit the little table with his fist so that it shook. Vicky burst into tears.
"I don't like it," she wailed, "I want Mother."
As if Mother's name had been a touchstone we all began to weep, except Joss, who was still dissociated from us; I was ashamed but the tears were gathering, unbearably heavy and hot, in my eyes. Mother. If only Mother were here for us in this terror! But there was no one, no one for us, and we quailed like little rabbits, chased and cornered, ready to be snared. Helplessly we wept. There was more to come, more shockingness, but we had moved Monsieur Dufour. He protested, "I told you this was not for children."
"Some of them are not children."
We jumped. Mademoiselle Zizi was standing in the doorway. At the sight of her distorted face even Vicky was quelled.
"You are asking them questions," said Mademoiselle Zizi. "Why? You need only ask her." She pointed at Joss. "Ask her what the ladder was doing on the lawn under her window, why the marks of it were on the grass." Madame Corbet had come running after Mademoiselle Zizi, but Mademoiselle Zizi shook her off. "Ask her."
Inspector Cailleux looked at Joss, who had risen like a girl in class. Slowly I rose too, but no one noticed me.
"Is that a child?" said Mademoiselle Zizi, and to Monsieur Dufour, "You have seen her with your own eyes, how she behaved at the dinner. She drove Paul out of his mind. You saw that too. Well, ask her what happened. The ladder was at her window. Elle a couché avec l'un après l'autre."
I did not understand the word 'sleep' used like that, 'sleep with one after the other', nor its import; I was only sure that in some way it was hideous and unjust and I moved nearer to Joss. "She didn't sleep," I said, "she was wide awake. Why, she came to my room and sent me in . . ."
"You?" Their eyes all shifted to me.
"Tiens! They begin young in England," said Mademoiselle Zizi.
"Don't be a fool," said Joss curtly to me.
"These little children must go out," said Monsieur Dufour, springing up distressed, but Hester and the Littles had already left their yellow satin chairs and come to Joss and me; they did not understand what the talk was about but knew we were threatened and they stood loyally round us.
Once again we seemed small and alone in that French house. Monsieur Dufour was kindly, but he was thinking of Mademoiselle Zizi. Only one person would have defended us---Eliot . . . and he . . . I could not go on. I swallowed, and felt as if the tears were running down my throat.
"So! Two of you," said Mademoiselle Zizi. "And this is what I took into my house."
Your dear house! In that moment of misery I almost said it. Les Oeillets, the gold-green days, the love, to end in this.
It was at that moment I heard a sound in the courtyard outside that made me look up. These were the windows from which Mademoiselle Zizi had so often watched for Eliot, listening for the Rolls. Now I looked out and saw the big gate was shut as it had been on our first night. It had been shut by the police. The sound I had heard was the jangling of the bell.
I do not know how I heard it in the confusion in the room, but it seemed to join on to the bell of that first night; the sound belonged . . . to us? I thought, puzzled.
A gendarme opened the wicket; he spoke for a moment to someone outside and opened the gate.
Inside the salon there was turmoil. The other two policemen had jumped up and Madame Corbet was explaining to them, shouting over our heads while Monsieur Dufour talked to Mademoiselle Zizi as if he were scolding her. Only Inspector Cailleux stayed at his desk, quietly watching.
"Zizi! You haven't a shadow of proof," scolded Monsieur Dufour.
"Haven't I?" She wheeled on him. "Why did I have to put Monsieur Joubert out of the hotel?" Everyone stopped to listen. "They said it was painting!" said Mademoiselle Zizi and she spat the word again, "Painting!"
I had felt Joss quivering, but now happened something so alarming that it burnt out everything else. Joss, dignified, aloof, almost grown-up Joss, crumpled like a little girl. "Mother. I want Mother," she wailed like Vicky.
We stood round her, appalled too. "Help me. Help me," sobbed Joss.
We could not help her. How could we? We barely understood. There was no one to help us now, and soon, soon I should have to . . . Helpless in my tears I looked out of the window and saw that a man had come in through the gate. He was dressed in a grey suit and brown felt hat and was followed by a porter with a handcart and two leather suitcases. There was something very familiar about the man; his small figure looked square and solid in the Frenchness of the courtyard, his skin fresh and pink beside the dark, sallow-skinned gendarme and porter, and there was a wonderful calmness about him. My heart suddenly calmed too. It was Uncle William.
"Uncle William!" The shout I gave filled the little salon. I do not know how we burst out of it, past Mademoiselle Zizi, Madame Corbet and Monsieur Dufour. I think I heard Inspector Cailleux ordering us to sit down, but I was not listening, nor were the others. All of us, even Joss, rushed through the bar into the hall.
Uncle William came in. Joss threw herself into his arms, I had mine round his neck, Vicky and Hester were hugging his legs, Willmouse danced up and down in front of him. Uncle William! Dear, dear, dear Uncle William!
"MY NAME is Bullock."
We had always winced and thought that people must laugh when Uncle William said that, but now nobody laughed, nor did we wince. We kept close behind him; Hester even had a corner of his coat clutched in her hand. "Bullock," and he put down his card on the desk, "of Bullock, Roper and Twiss, Solicitors, Southstone. That is in Sussex, England."
"À votre service, Monsieur," said Inspector Cailleux and introduced the others. "Monsieur Dufour, Monsieur Lemaître. Monsieur Aubry." They bowed. "Madame Corbet," said Inspector Cailleux; he did not introduce Mademoiselle Zizi.
"You have some trouble?" asked Uncle William after he had shaken hands. "The police . . . ?"
"You have doubtless heard at the station or on your way here of these shocking events," said Inspector Cailleux dryly.
"I have heard nothing. I do not speak French," said Uncle William. His calm flat English voice sounded wonderfully unexcited. "I have come to take my sister---if she can travel---and my nieces and nephew home . . . to England," he added firmly, looking at us.
"You said you wouldn't come and you came!" said Hester, stroking his coat.
"How did you know to come now, just now?" cried Joss, pressed close to him.
"But I was sent for," said Uncle William.
"Sent for?"
Freeing himself from us he said, "This came yesterday," and from his wallet took out a piece of paper and unfolded it; it was a telegram. He read aloud, "Come immediately Hôtel des Oeillets Vieux-Moutiers Marne France your sister in hospital children urgently---repeat urgently---need your help."
"But who sent it?" asked Madame Corbet.
"It isn't signed," said Uncle William.
"Someone must have sent it," said Inspector Cailleux and looked round on us all. I tried to put a surreptitious hand on Hester, but I was too late.
"Eliot, of course," said Hester.
"Eliot!" That came from Joss, Mademoiselle Zizi, Madame Corbett and Inspector Cailleux.
"Yes. He always did look after us," said Hester, beaming.
"The fool!" Mademoiselle Zizi's cry rang out as she darted across the room and snatched the telegram from Uncle William. She was crumpling it in her hand, tearing it with her teeth as they caught her. Inspector Cailleux ripped it away and Monsieur Dufour and Madame Corbet struggled to hold her as the little sheet of paper was smoothed out and pieced together on the table.
"Châlons. Eleven twenty-five yesterday morning."
"He was heading for the German border," said Monsieur Dufour.
"Obviously," said Inspector Cailleux and snapped, "Get me Lavalle on the telephone." Then he stopped. "No, wait. Châlons," he said, puzzled. "But Châlons is almost here."
"C'est vingt-et-un kilomètres," said the man in the window.
"Twenty-one kilometres at eleven o'clock yesterday," said Inspector Cailleux.
"He had been at the dinner," reminded Monsieur Dufour.
"But only until about midnight. He had had at least nine or ten hours," said Inspector Cailleux. "I don't understand," but he said it as if in a minute, or minutes, he would understand and he began to pace up and down. Mademoiselle Zizi was quiet now, limp and sobbing against Madame Corbet.
"Could he be walking?" asked Monsieur Dufour.
"With the roads watched?"
"Cross-country?"
"There are roads into Châlons," said Inspector Cailleux irritably and he walked up and down. "Somewhere slow, where we would not look for him. Of course not. We are looking everywhere fast. Very clever, Monsieur Allen. Slow, Vieux-Moutiers, Châlons, into Germany."
"Châlons? You mean Châlons-sur-Marne?" said Uncle William in his pleasant voice. "On the Marne?"
"The Marne!" Inspector Cailleux stopped. "The Marne!"
From the river, into our silence, came the hoot of a passing barge.
First published 1958 by Macmillan
First published 1961 by Pan Books
First published with a new preface 1993 by Pan Books
This edition published 2004 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2011 by Pan Booksan imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers LimitedPan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RRBasingstoke and OxfordAssociated companies throughout the worldwww.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-447-21027-6 EPUB
Text copyright © Rumer Godden 1958, 1993
The right of Rumer Godden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18

