All the Days and Nights (26 page)

Reynolds listened. There was no
whisk, whisk, whisk
now. Too far away. A car came down the causeway and turned in to the parking lot. When night came, the buses would all be gone and the parking lot would be empty.

In this he was arguing from what had happened before. The tourists got back on the sightseeing buses, and the buses drove away. By the end of the afternoon he and Dorothy were the only ones left. After dinner they walked up to the abbey again, drawn there by some invisible force. It was closed for the night, but they noticed a gate and pushed it open a few inches and looked in. It was a walled garden from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours. There was nobody around, so they went in and closed the gate carefully behind them and started down the gravel path. The garden beds were outlined with bilateral dwarf fruit trees, their branches tied to a low wire and heavy with picture-book apples and pears. There was no snobbish distinction between flowers and vegetables. The weed was unknown. At the far end of this Eden there was a gate that led to another, and after that there were still others — a whole series of exquisite walled gardens hidden away behind the street of restaurants and hotels and souvenir shops. They visited them all. Lingering in the deep twilight, they stood looking up at the cliffs of masonry and were awed by the actual living presence of Time; for it must have been just like this for the last five or six hundred years and maybe longer. The swallows were slicing the air into convex curves, the tide had receded far out into the bay, leaving everywhere behind it the channels by which it would return at three in the morning, and the air was so pure it made them lightheaded.

Before Reynolds turned away from the window, three more cars came
down the causeway. Here and there in the parking lot a car was starting up and leaving. Though he did not know it, it was what they should have been doing; he should have rounded up Dorothy and the children and driven on to Dinan, where there was a nice well-run hotel with a good restaurant and no memories and a castle right down the street. But his clairvoyance was limited. He foresaw the accident that would never take place but not the disorderly reception that lay in wait for them downstairs.

O
N
the way into the dining room, half an hour later, they stopped to show the children how the omelettes were made. The very tall man in the white apron had been replaced by two young women in uniforms, but there was still a fire in the fireplace, Reynolds was glad to see; they weren’t making the omelettes on a gas stove. The fire was quite a small one, though, and not the huge yellow flames he remembered.

“Cinq,”
he said to the maître d’hôtel, who replied in English, “Will you come this way?” and led them to a table in the center of the dining room. When he had passed out enormous printed menus, he said, “I think the little lady had better put her knitting away. One of the waiters might get jabbed by a needle.” This request was accompanied by the smile of a man who knows what children are like, and whom children always find irresistible. Trip ignored the smile and looked at her mother inquiringly.

“I don’t see how you could jab anybody, but put it away. I want an omelette
fines herbes
,” Dorothy said.

The maître d’hôtel indicated the top of the menu with his gold pencil and said, “We have the famous omelette of Mont-Saint-Michel.”

“But with herbs.” Dorothy said.

“There is no omelette with herbs,” the maître d’hôtel said.

“Why not?” Reynolds asked. “We had it here before.”

The question went unanswered.

The two younger children did not care for omelette, famous or otherwise, and took an unconscionably long time making up their minds what they did want to eat for lunch. The maître d’hôtel came back twice before Reynolds was ready to give him their order. After he had left the table, Dorothy said, “I don’t see why you can’t have
it fines herbes
.”

“Perhaps they don’t have any herbs,” Reynolds said.

“In
France
?”

“Here, I mean. It’s an island, practically.”

“All you need is parsley and chives. Surely they have that.”

“Well maybe it’s too much bother, then.”

“It’s no more trouble than a plain omelette. I don’t like him.”

“Yes? What’s the matter with him?”

“He looks like a Yale man.”

This was not intended as a funny remark, but Reynolds laughed anyway.

“And he’s not a good headwaiter,” she said.

The maître d’hôtel did not, in fact, get their order straight. Things came that they hadn’t ordered, and Trip’s sole didn’t come with the omelettes, or at all. Since she had already filled up on bread, it was not serious. The service was elaborate but very slow.

“No dessert, thank you,” Reynolds said when the waiter brought the enormous menus back.

“Just coffee,” Dorothy said.

Reynolds looked at his watch. “It says in the green
Michelin
there’s a tour of the abbey with an English-speaking guide at two o’clock. We just barely have time to make it. If we have coffee we’ll be too late.”

“Oh, let’s have coffee,” Dorothy said. “They won’t start on time.”

As they raced up the Grande Rue at five minutes after two, he noticed that it was different in one respect: The shops had been enlarged; they went back much deeper than they had before. The objects offered for sale were the same, and since he had examined them carefully eighteen years before, there was no need to do anything but avert his eyes from them now.

The English-speaking tour had already left the vaulted room it started from, and they ran up a long flight of stone steps and caught up with their party on the battlements. A young Frenchman with heavy black-rimmed glasses and a greenish complexion was lecturing to them about the part Mont-Saint-Michel played in the Hundred Years’ War. There was a group just ahead of them, and another just behind. The guides manipulated their parties in and out of the same rooms and up and down the same stairs with military precision.

“There were dungeons,” Alison Reynolds afterward wrote in her diary, “where you could not sit, lie, or stand and were not allowed to move. Some prisoners were eaten by rats! There were beautiful cloisters where the monks walked and watered their gardens. There was the knights’ hall, where guests stayed. The monks ate and worked in the refectory.…”

“It’s better managed than it used to be,” Dorothy said. “I mean, when you think how many people have to be taken through.”

The tour was also much shorter than Reynolds remembered it as being, but that could have been because this time they had an English-speaking guide. Or it could just be that what he suspected was true and they were being hurried through. He could not feel the same passionate interest in either the history or the architectural details of the abbey that he had the first time, but that was not the guide’s fault. It was obvious that he cared very much about the evolution of the Gothic style and the various uses to which this immensely beautiful but now lifeless monument had been put, through the centuries. His accent made the children smile, but it was no farther from the mark than Reynolds’s French, which the French did not smile at only because it didn’t amuse them to hear their language badly spoken.

When the tour was over, the guide gathered the party around him and, standing in a doorway through which they would have to pass, informed them that he was a student in a university and that this was his only means of paying for his education. The intellectual tradition of France sat gracefully on his frail shoulders, Reynolds thought, and short or not his tour had been a model of clarity. And was ten francs enough for the five of them?

Traveling in France right after the war, when everybody was so poor, he had been struck by the way the French always tipped the guide generously and thanked him in a way that was never perfunctory. It seemed partly good manners and partly a universal respect for the details of French history. A considerable number of tourists slipped through the doorway now without putting anything in the waiting hand. Before, the guide stood out in the open, quite confident that no one would try to escape without giving him something.

At the sight of the ten-franc note, the young man’s features underwent a slight change, by which Reynolds knew that it was sufficient, but money was not all the occasion called for, and there was a word he had been waiting for a chance to use.
“Votre tour est très sensible,”
he said, and the guide’s face lit up with pleasure.

Only connect, Mr. E. M. Forster said, but he was not talking about John Reynolds, whose life’s blood went into making incessant and vivid connections with all sorts of people he would never see again, and never forgot.

The wine at lunch had made him sleepy. He waited impatiently while
Dorothy and the children bought slides and postcards in the room where the tour ended. Outside, at the foot of the staircase, his plans for taking a nap were threatened when Dorothy was attracted to a museum of horrors having to do with the period when Mont-Saint-Michel was a state prison. But by applying delicate pressures at the right moment he got her to give up the museum, and they walked on down to their hotel. When he had undressed and pulled the covers back, he went to the window in his dressing gown. Some cars were just arriving. American cars. He looked at his watch. It was after four, and the parking lot was still more than half full. On the top floor of the hotel just below, and right next to an open window, he could see a girl of nineteen or twenty with long straight straw-blond hair, sitting on the side of a bed in an attitude of despondency. During the whole time he stood at the window, she didn’t raise her head or move. He got into his own bed and was just falling asleep when somebody came into the courtyard with a transistor radio playing rock and roll. He got up and rummaged through his suitcase until he found the wax earplugs. When he woke an hour later, the courtyard was quiet. The girl was still there. He went to the window several times while he was running a bath and afterward while he was dressing. Though the girl left the bed and came back to it, there was no change in her dejection.

“That girl,” he said finally.

“I’ve been watching her too,” Dorothy said.

“She’s in love. And something’s gone wrong.”

“They aren’t married and she’s having a baby,” Dorothy said.

“And the man has left her.”

“No, he’s in the room,” Dorothy said. “I saw him a minute ago, drinking out of a wine bottle.”

The next time Reynolds looked he couldn’t see anyone. The room looked empty, though you couldn’t see all the way into it. Had the man and the girl left? Or were they down below somewhere? He looked one last time before they started down to the dining room. The shutters in the room across the court were closed. That was that.

A
T
dinner Reynolds got into a row with their waiter. For ten days in Paris and ten more days at a little seaside resort on the south coast of Brittany they had met with nothing but politeness and the desire to please. All the familiar complaints about France and the French were
refuted, until this evening, when one thing after another went wrong. They were seated at a table that had been wedged into a far corner of the room, between a grotto for trout and goldfish and the foot of a stairway leading to the upper floors of the hotel. Reynolds started to protest and Dorothy stopped him.

“Trip wants to stay here so she can watch the fish,” she explained.

“I know,” he said as he unfolded his napkin, “but if anybody comes down those stairs they’ll have to climb over my lap to get into the dining room.”

“They won’t,” she said. “I’m sure it isn’t used.” Then to the children, “You pick out the one you want to eat and they take it out with a net and carry it to the kitchen.”

“I have a feeling those trout are just for decoration,” Reynolds said.

“No,” Dorothy said. “I’ve seen it done. I forget where.”

Nobody came down the stairs, and the trout, also undisturbed, circled round and round among the rocks and ferns. Though the room was only half full, the service was dreadfully slow. When they had finished the first course, the waiter, rather than go all the way around the table to where he could pick up Reynolds’s plate, said curtly, “Hand me your plate,” and Reynolds did. It would never have occurred to him to throw the plate at the waiter’s head. His first reaction was always to be obliging. Anger came more slowly, usually with prodding.

The service got worse and worse.

“I think we ought to complain to the headwaiter,” Dorothy said. Reynolds looked around. The maître d’hôtel was nowhere in sight. They went on eating their dinner.

“The food is just plain bad,” Dorothy announced. “And he forgot to give us any cheese. I don’t see how they can give this place a star in the
Michelin
.”

When reminded of the fact that he had forgotten to give them any cheese, the waiter, instead of putting the cheese board on the table, cut off thin slices himself at the serving table and passed them. His manner was openly contemptuous. He also created a disturbance in the vicinity of their table by scolding his assistant, who had been courteous and friendly. In mounting anger Reynolds composed a speech to be delivered when the waiter brought the check. Of this withering eloquence all he actually got out was one sentence, ending with the words
“n’est plus un restaurant sérieux.”
The waiter pretended not to understand Reynolds’s French. Like a fool Reynolds fell into the trap and repeated what he had
said. It sounded much more feeble the second time. Smirking, the waiter asked if there was something wrong with their dinner, and Reynolds said that he was referring to the way it was served, whereupon the waiter went over to the assistant and said, in English, “They don’t like the way you served them.” It was his round, definitely.

R
EYNOLDS
glanced at his wristwatch and then pushed his chair back and hurried Dorothy and the three children out of the dining room and through the lobby and down the street to the outer gate, and then along a path to higher ground. They were in plenty of time. The sunset colors lingered in the sky and in the ribbons of water. The children, happy to have escaped from the atmosphere of eating, climbed over the rocks, risking their lives. Dorothy sat with the sea wind blowing her hair back from her face. He saw that she had entirely forgotten the unpleasantness in the dining room. She responded to Nature the way he responded to human beings. Presently he let go of his anger, too, and responded to the evening instead.