All the Days and Nights (10 page)

“Where?” Ellen demanded. He pointed to
“Tournedos aux truffes du Périgord.”
“That’s not chicken,” Ellen said.

“Well, it’s no good, then,” Ray said.

“No good?” the maître d’hôtel said indignantly. “It’s
very
good!
Le tournedos aux truffes du Périgord
is a
spécialité
of the restaurant!”

They were only partly successful in conveying to him that that was not what Ray had meant.

No, there was no roast chicken stuffed with truffles.

No chicken of any kind.

“I’m very sorry,” Ray said, and got up from his chair.

H
E
was not at all sure that Ellen would go back to the restaurant in the Hôtel du Domino with him, but she did. Their table was just as they had left it. A waiter and a busboy, seeing them come in, exchanged startled whispers. The maître d’hôtel did not come near them for several minutes after they had sat down, and Ray carefully didn’t look around for him.

“Do you think he is angry because we walked out?” Ellen asked.

Ray shook his head. “I think we hurt his feelings, though. I think he prides himself on speaking English, and now he will never again be sure that he does speak it, because of us.”

Eventually, the maître d’hôtel appeared at their table. Sickly smiles were exchanged all around, and the menu was offered for the second time, without the flourish.

“What is
les truffes sous la cendre
?” Ellen asked.

“It takes forty-five minutes,” the maître d’hôtel said.

“Le foie gras truffé,”
Ray said. “For two.”

“
Le foi gras
, O.K.,” the maître d’hôtel said.
“Et ensuite?”

“Œufs en gelée,”
Ellen said.

“
Œufs en gelée
, O.K.”

“Le poulet noir,”
Ray said.

“
Le poulet noir
, O.K.”

“Et deux Cinzano,”
Ray said, on solid ground at last,
“avec un morceau de glace et un zeste de citron. S’il vous plaît.”

The apéritif arrived, with ice and lemon peel, but the wine list was not presented, and Ray asked the waitress for it. She spoke to the maître d’hôtel, and that was the last the Ormsbys ever saw of her. The maître d’hôtel brought the wine list, they ordered the dry white
vin du pays
that he recommended, and their dinner was served to them by a waiter so young that Ray looked to see whether he was in knee pants.

The pâté was everything the Richardsons had said it would be, and Ray, to make up for all he had put his wife through in the course of the evening, gave her a small quantity of his, which, protesting, she accepted. The maître d’hôtel stopped at their table and said, “Is it good?”

“Very good,” they said simultaneously.

The
œufs en gelée
arrived and were also very good, but were they any better than or even as good as the
œufs en gelée
the Ormsbys had had in the restaurant of a hotel on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence was the question.

“Is it good?” the maître d’hôtel asked. “Very good,” they said. “So is the wine.”

The boy waiter brought in the
poulet noir —
a chicken casserole with a dark-brown Madeira sauce full of chopped truffles.

“Is it good?” Ray asked when the waiter had finished serving them and Ellen had tasted the
pièce de résistance
.

“It’s very good,” she said. “But I’m not sure I can taste the truffles.”

“I think I can,” he said, a moment later.

“With the roast chicken, it probably would have been quite easy,” Ellen said.

“Are you sure the Richardsons had roast chicken stuffed with truffles?” Ray asked.

“I think so,” Ellen said. “Anyway, I know I’ve read about it.”

“Is it good?” the maître d’hôtel, their waiter, and the waiter from a neighboring table asked in succession.

“Very good,” the Ormsbys said.

Since they couldn’t have the little balls of various kinds of ice cream in a basket of spun sugar with a spun-sugar bow for dessert, they decided not to have any dessert at all. The meal came to an abrupt end with
café filtre
.

Intending to take a short walk before going to bed, they heard dance music in the square in front of Le Montaigne, and found a large crowd there, celebrating the annual fair of Périgueux. There was a seven-piece orchestra on a raised platform under a canvas, and a few couples were dancing in the street. Soon there were more.

“Do you feel like dancing?” Ray asked.

The pavement was not as bad for dancing as he would have supposed, and something happened to them that had never happened to them anywhere in France before — something remarkable. In spite of their clothes and their faces and the
Michelin
he held in one hand, eyes constantly swept over them or past them without pausing. Dancing in the street, they aroused no curiosity and, in fact, no interest whatever.

A
T
midnight, standing on the balcony outside their room, they could still hear the music, a quarter of a mile away.

“Hasn’t it been a lovely evening!” Ellen said. “I’ll always remember dancing in the street in Périgueux.”

Two people emerged from the cinema, a few doors from the Hôtel du Domino. And then a few more — a pair of lovers, a woman, a boy, a woman and a man carrying a sleeping child.

“The pâté was the best I ever ate,” Ellen said.

“The Richardsons probably ate in the garden,” Ray said. “I don’t know that the dinner as a whole was all
that
good,” he added thoughtfully. And then, “I don’t know that we need tell them.”

“The poor people who run the cinema,” Ellen said.

“Why?”

“No one came to see the movie.”

“I suppose Périgueux really isn’t the kind of town that would support a movie theater,” Ray said.

“That’s it,” Ellen said. “Here, when people want to relax and enjoy themselves, they have an apéritif, they walk up and down in the evening air, they dance in the street, the way people used to do before there were any movies. It’s another civilization entirely from anything we’re accustomed to. Another world.”

They went back into the bedroom and closed the shutters. A few minutes later, some more people emerged from the movie theater, and some more, and some more, and then a great crowd came streaming out and, walking gravely, like people talking part in a religious procession, fanned out across the open square.

K
ATE
Talbot’s bantam rooster, awakened by the sudden appearance of the moon from behind a cloud on a white June night, began to crow. There were three bantams — a cock and two hens — and their roost was in a tree just outside the guest-room windows. The guest room was on the first floor and the Talbots’ guest that weekend was a young man by the name of Arnold, a rather light sleeper. He got up and closed the windows and went back to bed. In the sealed room he slept, but was awakened at frequent intervals until daylight Saturday morning.

Arnold had been coming to the Talbots’ place in Wilton sometime during the spring or early summer for a number of years. His visits were, for the children, one of a thousand seasonal events that could be counted on, less exciting than the appearance of the first robin or the arrival of violets in the marsh at the foot of the Talbots’ hill but akin to them. Sometimes Duncan, the Talbots’ older boy, who for a long time was under the impression that Arnold came to see
him
, slept in the guest room when Arnold was there. Last year, George, Duncan’s younger brother, had been given that privilege. This time, Mrs. Talbot, knowing how talkative the boys were when they awoke in the morning, had left Arnold to himself.

When he came out of his room, Mrs. Talbot and George, the apple of her eye, were still at breakfast. George was six, small and delicate and very blond, not really interested in food at any time, and certainly not now, when there was a guest in the house. He was in his pajamas and a pink quilted bathrobe. He smiled at Arnold with his large and very gentle eyes and said, “Did you miss me?”

“Yes, of course,” Arnold said. “I woke up and there was the other bed,
flat and empty. Nobody to talk to while I looked at the ceiling. Nobody to watch me shave.”

George was very pleased that his absence had been felt. “What is your favorite color?” he asked.

“Red,” Arnold said, without having to consider.

“Mine too,” George said, and his face became so illuminated with pleasure at this coincidence that for a moment he looked angelic.

“No matter how much we disagree about other things,” Arnold said, “we’ll always have that in common, won’t we?”

“Yes,” George said.

“You’d both better eat your cereal,” Mrs. Talbot said.

Arnold looked at her while she was pouring his coffee and wondered if there wasn’t something back of her remark — jealousy, perhaps. Mrs. Talbot was a very soft-hearted woman, but for some reason she seemed to be ashamed — or perhaps afraid — to let other people know it. She took refuge continually behind a dry humor. There was probably very little likelihood that George would be as fond of anyone else as he was of his mother for many years to come. There was no real reason for her to be jealous.

“Did the bantams keep you awake?” she asked.

Arnold shook his head.

“Something tells me you’re lying,” Mrs. Talbot said. “John didn’t wake up, but he felt his responsibilities as a host even so. He cried ‘Oh!’ in his sleep every time a bantam crowed. You’ll have to put up with them on Kate’s account. She loves them more than her life.”

Excluded from the conversation of the grown-ups, George finished his cereal and ate part of a soft-boiled egg. Then he asked to be excused and, with pillows and pads which had been brought in from the garden furniture the night before, he made a train right across the dining-room floor. The cook had to step over it when she brought a fresh pot of coffee, and Mrs. Talbot and Arnold had to do likewise when they went out through the dining-room door to look at the bantams. There were only two — the cock and one hen — walking around under the Japanese cherry tree on the terrace. Kate was leaning out of an upstairs window, watching them fondly.

“Have you made your bed?” Mrs. Talbot asked.

The head withdrew.

“Kate is going to a house party,” Mrs. Talbot said, looking at the bantams. “A sort of house party. She’s going to stay all night at Mary
Sherman’s house and there are going to be some boys and they’re going to dance to the Victrola.”

“How old is she, for heaven’s sake?” Arnold asked.

“Thirteen,” Mrs. Talbot said. “She had her hair cut yesterday and it’s too short. It doesn’t look right, so I have to do something about it.”

“White of egg?” Arnold asked.

“How did you know that?” Mrs. Talbot asked in surprise.

“I remembered it from the last time,” Arnold said. “I remembered it because it sounded so drastic.”

“It only works with blonds,” Mrs. Talbot said. “Will you be able to entertain yourself for a while?”

“Easily,” Arnold said. “I saw
Anna Karenina
in the library and I think I’ll take that and go up to the little house.”

“Maybe I’d better come with you,” Mrs. Talbot said.

The little house was a one-room studio halfway up the hill, about a hundred feet from the big house, with casement windows on two sides and a Franklin stove. It had been built several years before, after Mrs. Talbot had read
A Room of One’s Own
, and by now it had a slightly musty odor which included lingering traces of wood smoke.

“Hear the wood thrush?” Arnold asked, as Mrs. Talbot threw open the windows for him. They both listened.

“No,” she said. “All birds sound alike to me.”

“Listen,” he said.

This time there was no mistaking it — the liquid notes up and then down the same scale.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Yes, I love that,” and went off to wash Kate’s hair.

F
ROM
time to time Arnold raised his head from the book he was reading and heard not only the wood thrush but also Duncan and George, quarreling in the meadow. George’s voice was shrill and unhappy and sounded as if he were on the verge of tears. Both boys appeared at the window eventually and asked for permission to come in. The little house was out of bounds to them. Arnold nodded. Duncan, who was nine, crawled in without much difficulty, but George had to be hoisted. No sooner were they inside than they began to fight over a wooden gun which had been broken and mended and was rightly George’s, it seemed, though Duncan
had it and refused to give it up. He refused to give it up one moment, and the next moment, after a sudden change of heart, pressed it upon George
— forced
George to take it, actually, for by that time George was more concerned about the Talbots’ dog, who also wanted to come in.

The dog was a Great Dane, very mild but also very enormous. He answered to the name of Satan. Once Satan was admitted to the little house, it became quite full and rather noisy, but John Talbot appeared and sent the dog out and made the children leave Arnold in peace. They left as they had come, by the window. Arnold watched them and was touched by the way Duncan turned and helped George, who was too small to jump. Also by the way George accepted this help. It was as if their hostility had two faces and one of them was the face of love. Cain and Abel, Arnold thought, and the wood thrush. All immortal.

John Talbot lingered outside the little house. Something had been burrowing in the lily-of-the-valley bed, he said, and had also uprooted several lady’s slippers. Arnold suggested that it might be moles.

“More likely a rat,” John Talbot said, and his eyes wandered to a two-foot espaliered pear tree. “That pear tree,” he said, “we put in over a year ago.”

Mrs. Talbot joined them. She had shampooed not only Kate’s hair but her own as well.

“It’s still alive,” John Talbot said, staring at the pear tree, “but it doesn’t put out any leaves.”

“I should think it would be a shock to a pear tree to be espaliered,” Mrs. Talbot said. “Kate’s ready to go.”

They all piled into the station wagon and took Kate to her party. Her too short blond hair looked quite satisfactory after the egg shampoo, and Mrs. Talbot had made a boutonniere out of a pink geranium and some little blue and white flowers for Kate to wear on her coat. She got out of the car with her suitcase and waved at them from the front steps of the house.