Sensible Life

  “You are different.”

  Feeling different, Cosmo said, “Has Madame T. taught you backgammon?”

  “Yes, we play. On wet days when Igor doesn’t want to go out.”

  They watched the boats bobbing beside the quay until Jules brought two large ice-creams, placing them down with care.

  Flora sat straight on her chair, pointing her toes down so that they reached the ground. She ate her ice with calculated enjoyment.

  “I take Jules’ dog out for the day sometimes,” she said.

  “The animal I saw you with the first time we met?” Cosmo remembered the idiotic dog, Flora wading, the vast expanse of beach beyond St. Enogat.

  “He belongs to the cure of St. Briac.” She acknowledged their first encounter. “Jules’ dog is a mastiff.”

  “Really?”

  “Very busy people do not have time to exercise their dogs.” She sipped primly at her ice, making it last.

  “That’s a wonderful beach,” said Cosmo. “I was bird-watching. I imagine it’s the sort of beach which would be great for sand eels.”

  “It is.”

  “What does ‘maquereau’ mean?” Cosmo succumbed to curiosity.

  “Pimp,” said Flora.

  “Do you know what a pimp is?”

  “It’s not polite.”

  “No.”

  “He smelled.” She laid her spoon regretfully in the saucer and sniffed the harbour air. Rope, tar, fish, salt, seaweed, drying nets. She filled her lungs. The shopkeeper had smelled stale. She caught her breath, remembering the foetid smell in her parents’ bedroom when she had evaded her ayah and run in to say good-morning. They had yelled at her to go away and scolded the servants. “I didn’t like it in India,” she said.

  Cosmo said, “Would you like another ice?”

  “No, thank you. It was delicious.”

  “Then I suppose we should be getting back,” he said.

  “It’s been absolutely lovely,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

  He wondered whether she listened much to people talking. Some of the turns of phrase were reminiscent of his mother.

  On the vedette crossing back to Dinard, Cosmo said: “Why don’t we make up a party, ask everybody, have a great bang-up beach party on that beach? An end-of-holidays party? Dig for sand eels, have a bonfire and a fry-up on the dunes. They are delicious with bread and butter. My parents, your parents, the Shovehalfpennies, and all the children. It would be fun, wouldn’t it?”

  She said, “Yes,” without enthusiasm.

  As they reached the quay he said, “Perhaps Blanco and I could take you on some day at backgammon?”

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “Yes.” And her face lit up.

  TEN

  THE HOLIDAY, AS HOLIDAYS do, had begun by stretching pleasurably ahead. But now, like elastic, it snapped short; there were only ten days left.

  Cosmo’s idea of a grand picnic party received short shrift when he mooted it. The weather had changed; the wind blew unkindly from the east. It rained, a persistent driving rain which sliced at people’s legs and gargled down the gutters. Queasy children were sick crossing from St. Malo. Families stayed indoors and played snap and racing demon, draughts or chess. They ventured out only to make a dash to the cinema or the casino. The intermingling of the young from the various hotels dwindled.

  The three younger Dutch girls, Marie, Dottie and Dolly, left the Marjolaine to return to their husbands in The Hague and Amsterdam; the party at the centre table shrank to ten, and sometimes eight since Felix and Elizabeth, regardless of the elements, were often out quartering the countryside for menhirs. Sometimes they ventured so far that they stayed the night. Elizabeth, it transpired, was writing a thesis. On these evenings Mabs and Tashie did not go to the casino; it was not worth running through the rain if Felix was not there to invite them to dance the foxtrot and the Charleston. Schoolboy partners who offered were rebuffed; they were unpractised, trod on the girls’ feet, ruined their shoes, smelt of perspiration. Yet, persistent little shoppers, they skipped through the puddles by day, darting from hatshop to boutique, hoping in their young optimism to attract the object of their desire by the brilliance of their plumage.

  Rosa and Milly settled on a sofa in the lounge with their novels, knitting and growing friendship, and watched, the one with amused tolerance—she was used to the effect her son had on girls—the other with pity. It was painful to see the girls making fools of themselves; it reminded her of her social agonies before Angus, godlike, had snatched her from youthful insecurity, married her and made her happy ever after. Well, almost. It did not make her happy to see Cosmo dragged off to play golf in the wind and the rain by his father. Cosmo detested golf; being forced to play would not make him like it any better. She said as much to Rosa.

  “Playing with a pretty girl in any weather, he would like it.” Rosa counted stitches. “One can see he is ready and eager for girls.” She caught Milly’s eye. “Not my lumpen girls, of course. He and his friend watch for girls. It is natural, but their hopes are dashed with each new family’s arrival, poor boys.”

  “A pity Tashie is just that much too old for him, and Mabs too old for Hubert. They consider themselves grown-up. I had hoped that these holidays Cosmo might—with some other girl perhaps—” Milly looked round the hotel lounge, sadly lacking in suitable girls. “Cosmo was off on his own into the country bird-watching before the holidays. I had hoped he would practise and improve his French. He carries a notebook with him and looks up the odd word in his dictionary, but that’s about it. I hardly think what he learns is useful; he only bothers when he overhears an argument or people shouting at each other.”

  “The first English word I overheard and looked up in the dictionary was obscene,” said Rosa, knitting steadily.

  “And not useful?”

  “It was useful,” said Rosa, suppressing a smile. “I must concentrate on my knitting or I shall make a mess and have to unpick.”

  “I wonder what it was.” Milly let her knitting, golf stockings for Angus, rest in her lap.

  “I don’t suppose you know it,” said Rosa, remembering what Jef had said apropos Angus: “After all that he will pick someone innocent.” Thinking of her dead husband, she murmured, “I miss him.”

  Milly, not as innocent as Rosa supposed, thought, What she misses is the carnal side and the use in bed of those words one has to look up. She imagined Rosa’s Jef to have been a Dutch version of Angus. She knitted a row of purl thoughtfully.

  “There is the redhead called Joyce,” said Rosa. “She is of an appropriate age for your Cosmo and his friend Hubert; she is fourteen.”

  “Have you seen her teeth?” exclaimed Milly.

  “She is intelligent. Do her teeth rule her out?”

  “Definitely,” said Milly.

  “Her mother tells me she is to go to one of those American dentists who do marvels. She has beautiful eyes, and a good figure.”

  “Cosmo and Hubert do not see beyond the teeth; they say she looks like a horse.”

  “Most English girls of the better class resemble horses, as do the German ‘hoch’. It is a racial characteristic.”

  “You generalise,” said Milly, laughing. “I do not look like a horse and nor do Mabs and Tashie.”

  “When you and those girls are excited, you look like fine Arabs. Flaring nostrils, the toss of the head, the shaken mane.” Rosa smiled down at her knitting; she enjoyed watching Mabs and Tashie tossing their heads at Felix. Elizabeth had remarked that she expected them to whinny. Elizabeth, of cart-horse build, was fortunate that she had a future in the world of intellectuals. “I mean it as a compliment,” she said. “Have you not heard men refer to girls as fillies?”

  “God, yes,” said Milly, “it sets my teeth on edge. But Cosmo does not seem to have had luck with any girls, be they like horses or frogs. Soon he will be back at school and be kept too busy to think of girls.”

  Rosa sniffed. She did not believe any amount of being kep
t busy suppressed adolescent lust. Her husband had told her about British public schools; he had first-hand knowledge of what young males got up to when herded together. Was Milly as uninformed as she sounded? What did she imagine those boys did? “Jef was sent to an English school by his father,” she said. “It was hoped he would learn an upper-class accent, but he ran away.”

  “I wonder why,” said Milly.

  “The only friend he made at that school was Angus,” said Rosa. “Jef was a very pretty boy.” If Angus had not enlightened his wife about the mores of public schools, it was not for her to shatter her complacency.

  “Angus says a bit of healthy buggery never hurt anyone,” said Milly, knitting, “and he drags poor Cosmo out in all weathers to the golf course to toughen him up. Cosmo says he swings his driver and thwacks the ball and shouts, ‘And that’s for Baldwin’ and ‘That’s for Joynson-Hicks’ and ‘That’s for the Bolsheviks, curse their guts’. He really is worried about the miners.”

  Rosa knitted for several minutes before rallying. “There is the child of that couple who are so wrapped up in each other,” she said. “She has potential.”

  “Do you mean the Trevelyans, who were staying here when you arrived? Angus met them on the boat from Southampton; he thought the wife pretty. I remember they had a child, but much too young to interest the boys. They moved on somewhere. Cosmo took a dislike to them for some reason.”

  “They are still in Dinard,” said Rosa. “They moved to a flat near the quay, leaving the child in the annexe where she has spent the winter with her governess. The mother was here for part of the time, they got special rates for a long stay—out of season—the mother has been in England with her husband for the first months of his leave. He goes back to India at the end of June.”

  “What a lot you know,” said Milly.

  “I talk to the hotel servants, they are fond of the child.”

  “Oh,” said Milly, who hoped she disapproved of gossip.

  “The Mademoiselle has been sacked; no great loss, I gather. The child is left to her own devices.”

  “But her parents—”

  “I suspect that in this weather they spend their time in bed doing the things you look up in the dictionary,” said Rosa. “One sees the child, but she is rarely with her parents.”

  Milly thought Rosa’s suggestion coarse. She was of course Dutch, but even so … She kept her eyes on her knitting. She and Angus had never done anything like that in the daytime.

  Rosa gave her an amused glance. “That child is having a slap-dash education,” she said. “A couple of years with a governess in Italy on the cheap, small pensions, that sort of thing, and then the same in France. I hear she is learning Russian from one of the émigrés and now the parents plan to put her in a school in England when the mother rejoins the father in India.”

  “That’s what happens to the children, long separations. It’s sad, they hardly know their parents in some cases,” said Milly.

  “Perhaps this child does not wish to,” said Rosa.

  Milly thought Rosa was being rather harsh; she had probably got a garbled version from the hotel servants. “I expect she has a grandmother or kind aunts who will take care of her in the holidays.” She felt it necessary to present a happier picture; the child’s parents were, after all, English.

  “There are no aunts or uncles. The only grandmother died recently, I hear.”

  From the hotel servants, thought Milly. “Many parents have quite a struggle these days,” she said. “Look, for instance, at Hubert’s mother, Mrs. Wyndeatt-Whyte—”

  “Such a ridiculous name,” said Rosa.

  No more ridiculous than yours, thought Milly.

  “She has only her widow’s pension,” she said. “She tries to manage on that, and his rich relation will not help with one single penny.”

  “Hum,” said Rosa, feeling she had teased Milly enough. “He is a good-looking and nice-mannered boy. How does he spend his time while Cosmo plays enforced golf?”

  “He learns the piano,” said Milly, “goes for walks.”

  ELEVEN

  BLANCO’S WALKS TOOK HIM no further than Madame Tarasova’s lodging above the horse butcher. On his way he called at the patisserie to buy cakes to share with his tiny Armenian teacher. After a certain amount of heart-searching she had been persuaded to drop the piano lessons in favour of French conversation. This arrangement suited Madame Tarasova; she could stitch at whatever garment she happened to be making while they talked. When she had placed the cakes on a plate, she would resume her sewing while Blanco, sitting astride the piano stool, asked questions. He was consumed with curiosity about the Revolution, thrilled to meet someone who had been in Russia in 1917. Maybe she had played no actual part, but she would have met people who had, people who would have given her first-hand accounts. He questioned her in schoolboy French. “Tell me what you saw. Your experiences, were they exciting?” He was avid for history at first-hand.

  Madame Tarasova, sitting opposite the plate of cakes, savoured them with her eyes.

  “Have one, go on, they are for you,” urged Blanco.

  “Presently,” said Madame Tarasova. “I like to look at them. Look,” she said, “this is for the child, isn’t it a pretty blue?”

  “The one I—”

  “Her maman has commissioned three—this blue, a green and a pink. Quite cheap material, but it is pretty. I would myself have chosen silk.” Madame Tarasova sighed. Blanco pushed the plate of cakes towards her. “Oh, Hubert, you spoil me.”

  “Tell me about the Revolution, The Bolsheviks; what were they like?”

  “Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks.” She helped herself to a cake.

  “Tell me what you saw,” urged Blanco.

  Madame Tarasova threaded a needle. “She will look her prettiest in the pink, but the material is rather ordinary.”

  “The Revolution, Madame?”

  “It was terrible. I was twenty years old in 1917, the year of disaster. So many young officers were killed in the war. They were so elegant, such fine uniforms, sable linings to their greatcoats. There is no sound to equal the musical clink of spurs. You could see your face reflected in their boots—such polish.” On either side of her large nose Madame Tarasova’s eyes gazed into the past. “All their underclothes were silk, of course.”

  Had she been engaged to one of these creatures? Had she lost a lover? How to ask? Blanco helped himself to a cake. “Were some of these officers relations of yours?” He screwed the stool round to watch her face.

  “I watched them riding or driving in their carriages, such fine horses. They went to the great balls and to parties. This was before the Revolution. My heart went with them.”

  “Ah.”

  “The nobles, the princes, the Tsar and Tsarina, their beautiful children. Murdered by the Bolsheviks, oh, the shame and desecration.”

  “Tell me about the Bolsheviks—”

  “You should have seen the clothes the court ladies wore. The magnificent jewels, oh, the pity. Where are those jewels now?”

  “I don’t know, Madame Tarasova. In hock?”

  “The silks and velvets, the lace, those incredible furs. Imagine the sable and mink, Hubert.”

  “Tell me about Lenin.”

  Madame Tarasova pursed her mouth. “I cannot speak that name without wishing to spit. Je crache!”

  “Trotsky, then, tell me about Trotsky.”

  “I would spit on him too.”

  “Stalin? More goo?” suggested Blanco.

  “I will tell you of the wonders of Holy Russia. Of Petrograd, that exquisite city, of the grandeur of Moscow. I know nothing of the monsters who destroyed my country. Where are the beautiful people who drove to the opera, the ballet, the court balls in their sumptuous carriages and sleighs? I can tell you about the beautiful people—”

  Blanco tried again. “Did you ever see Lenin?”

  “Certainly not. Such badly cut suits, he had no idea of dress.”

  “Did you
see Trotsky?”

  “He dressed a little better. No, I did not see him.”

  Blanco pushed the cake plate towards her. She was stitching hard, hemming the bottom of the pink cotton dress with swift jerking movements. He would try another tack.

  “The poor, Madame Tarasova. The serfs. What about the poor?”

  “They were there. They served the beautiful people, cared for their jewels, their clothes. But let me tell you about the clothes, not the serfs; their clothes were dull, of no importance.”

  “Tell me about the common people, the soldiers who died in the snow at the front.”

  Madame Tarasova threaded her needle, holding it to the light, squinting. “They died. There were plenty of them. They had uniforms of rather coarse material.”

  “They were poor,” said Blanco. “Poor.”

  “Jesus Christ made it clear that the poor are always with us, did he not?”

  “And not the officers?”

  “Come to think of it, he never mentioned the officers.” Was she teasing him? “It was the officers who were beautiful. The soldiers were drab.”

  “I don’t believe Jesus Christ was a particularly snappy dresser,” said Blanco. Madame Tarasova did not seem to hear. “So you were not, are not, interested in what Lenin did for the common people?”

  “Only,” Madame Tarasova was stitching fiercely, vindictively, “in that his interference in the natural order of things has made me a poor and common person without even the security of a passport. My Imperial Russia is no more.”

  “If you had stayed in Russia, would you have had jewels and silks and furs?” Madame Tarasova did not answer. “Forgive me for asking,” said Blanco, embarrassed, “but was your family very rich?”

  “What does it matter now?” said Madame Tarasova, sitting in her cramped lodging above the horse butcher. “Look, the dress is nearly finished. It is all the fault of Rasputin and his influence on the Tsarina. He wore filthy clothes, he was a disgusting, drunken, devilish man; the nobles who killed him had great difficulty. He had inhuman strength.”