Sensible Life (13 page)

“Come with us,” said Cosmo to Flora. “Help us fetch our surprise from the bus. You are not going back, are you?”

“Of course she isn’t,” said Blanco. “I need her for my message in Russian to Cousin Thing. She can dictate it phonetically, can’t you, Flora?”

“I don’t think it’s a very kind idea,” said Flora surprisingly.

“I am not a very kind person, nor is my cousin, but you will do it because I ask you to.” Blanco held Flora’s arm. He was about to pinch or twist it when, catching the eye of Felix who was walking abreast, he desisted, saying, “What about it, Flora?”

Flora muttered, “All right, Hubert,” thinking that if she told him the words for “I hope you are happy and blessed,” which she happened to know in Russian, Blanco was unlikely to discover the difference.

“Your parents are going back with the smallest children,” said Felix. “Do not forget that you promised me a dance.”

“Dance?” said Cosmo.

“I have my gramophone, I left it with the driver, and a box of records. I thought dancing would be good.”

“A great idea,” said Blanco. “Have you got the Charleston?”

“Of course.”

Flora watched her parents strolling ahead.

“We could visit the casino after dinner for the last time,” suggested Vita. “Our next chance of a casino will be in Calcutta next winter.”

“And the child?” Denys glanced over his shoulder.

“Looks as though she is staying. She’ll be all right, with Mrs. Leigh to keep an eye on her. Mind you behave yourself,” Vita said to Flora. Flora did not reply but disengaged her arm from Blanco. They stood watching the Natural Leader shepherd the little children and their exhausted parents into the charabanc. Vita and Denys, without waiting to be shepherded, had claimed the seat behind the driver, apart from the melee. The driver started the engine and engaged the gears with a crash and the charabanc lurched away. As it gathered speed the watchers heard a ragged rendition of

“Show me the way to go home,

I’m tired and I want to go to bed,”

led by the Natural Leader’s strong contralto.

“Your parents will really enjoy that,” said Cosmo. “Now let’s find our box of surprises.” He went with Blanco to claim the cardboard box they had brought from St. Malo, while Felix collected the gramophone and records. Flora dived under the charabanc to pull out her wicker basket from where it had been reposing in the shade. “What have you got in there?” Felix asked curiously.

“Langoustes.”

“What?”

“Crawfish.”

“Gosh! Where d’you get them?”

“Jules heard about the picnic and sent them to me.”

“Who is Jules?” asked Blanco.

“He keeps a café in St. Malo and is her—”

“Her what?”

“My friend,” said Flora, opening the basket to make sure that all was well.

Felix, Cosmo and Blanco stared in admiration at scarlet langoustes reclining on a bed of seaweed, packed round a jar of mayonnaise. “What a brilliant contribution,” said Cosmo. “Clever little Flora!”

Flora blushed.

“Let me help you carry it.” Felix took one of the handles. “Did your parents know?”

“Oh no,” said Flora. “No.”

“They might have stayed on if they had,” said Blanco. Flora shot him a look.

Back at the beach Mabs, Tashie and Joyce had rebuilt the fire, and parties were returning from exploratory trips up the valley with fresh fuel, branches of furze and dry sticks. Mrs. MacNeice had put potatoes to roast in the hot ash; her husband was busy with the wine and a corkscrew. Elizabeth and Anne contrived a spit for Felix’s chickens and set them to roast.

Everybody exclaimed in approbation when they saw the langoustes, and Rosa held out a hand to Flora, saying: “Sit near me, Flora, have a glass of wine. You deserve it.”

With the departure of the very young, Flora’s parents and the Stubbs family, the picnic entered a fresh phase; people achieved a second wind, grew more relaxed, more intimate. As it grew dark they gathered round the fire to feast and, presently, when they had eaten the delicious langoustes, the not very successfully roasted chickens, the sausages, the pate and salad, and filled in corners with cheese and fruit, they started asking riddles and telling jokes. The fire flared up with salty blue flames and the driftwood crackled and spat. There were bursts of laughter and ripples of merriment as Cosmo told limericks which were capped by Joyce, and with her tongue loosened by wine Flora dictated a message in Russian to Blanco, who wrote it on the back of an envelope borrowed from Felix. Then, “I say!” cried Tashie or Mabs (the two girls were indistinguishable in people’s memories of that period), “what happened to those frightful open tarts?”

“Open tarts? Open tarts?” the boys asked, laughing as at some brilliant witticism. “Tarts? What tarts?” Some of the adolescent boys were a little tipsy by now and repeated the word, finding it both humorous and risqué. “You know. What the sahib and memsahib brought from the patisserie, those tans. What we thought would get full of sand, those tarts. What happened to them?”

Nobody knew and after eating so much nobody cared. “Perhaps they ate them themselves? They went off on their own,” a boy persisted, “for a little quelque chose behind the rocks.”

“Enough of that,” growled Freddy Ward. “Their child is here.”

Hurling himself into the breach, Angus Leigh cried, “And so she is! Now I must tell you the story of the lady at the King of Egypt’s ball. She had an extremely décolleté dress and very large you-know-whats. Have you heard this one, Rosa? Stop me if you have—”

“Here we go,” Mabs and Cosmo groaned. “Go, go, go.”

“Well, when she was presented to His Majesty she dropped a deep curtsy—”

“Dropped a deep curtsy,” sang Mabs and Cosmo.

“—and out popped from her bodice her beautiful breasts, and the King said—”

“Mais, Madame, il ne faut pas perdre ces belles choses comme ci comme ça etcetera,” chorused Mabs and Cosmo.

“Oh, you are rotten,” said their father, laughing, and Rosa, leaning towards him, said, “I seem to remember you first heard that from Jef years and years ago, and he learned it from his father.”

“Ah, Rosa, once we were young. How Jef would have enjoyed this picnic,” and as Rosa and Angus remembered her husband, Flora’s possible embarrassment was saved and Jef’s children Felix, Elizabeth and Anne looked at one another and said, “Father never told that sort of story.”

They had all eaten so much and joked so much that there came a lull; people fell silent, sitting and sprawling round the fire which was sinking low, glowing red with only the occasional spit of blue. A few yards away the tide turned, sighing as each small wave whispered up the sand a little less optimistically than the last. Out at sea an orange moon came surging up, and all the people gathered round the dying fire on the last day of April 1926 sat gaping as miraculously it changed from orange to gold to silver, swinging up into a cobalt sky.

Then Mabs and Tashie, breaking the silence, sang:

Au clair de la lune

Mon ami Pierrot,

Prête-moi ta plume

Pour l’amour de Dieu,

Ma chandelle est morte,

Je n’ai plus de feu;

Prete-moi ta plume

Pour l’amour de Dieu.

Years later, at the moment of his death, Felix would remember those young voices and the recollection of their purity would purge him of his fear, but at the time he cried out: “What about a dance?”

Felix wound his gramophone and put a record on the turntable. Soon they were dancing on the flattened grass round the fire, and some with more temerity barefoot by the edge of the sea.

Blanco danced the Charleston with Joyce, who danced freely, kicking and twisting; there was no time to notice her teeth. Angus danced with Rosa and his wife. Felix danced with Mabs, Tashie, Joyce, Elizabeth and Anne. Cosmo danced with anyone who would risk their toes.

Felix had the Charleston, foxtrots quick and foxtrots slow. Everybody danced. Then, winding up the gramophone, he put on a record of a Viennese waltz and only the older people could remember how to waltz, which they did while their children watched, applauding. Felix, snatching Flora by the hand, said: “You promised to keep me a dance,” and half-carrying her, for she was small and light, said, “Put your arms round my neck,” and whirled away with her along the edge of the sea until the record stopped when he put her down and said, “That was good, wasn’t it?” and Flora said nothing, how could she? She had thought he had forgotten her, but he had remembered.

Then, as they thought the dancing was over, Felix picked up his concertina and began playing a tango.

Sitting or crouching round the fire everybody listened as they gently revived it, poking small twigs into the embers, little scraps of furze, and they tried, for many of them were out of breath, to breathe in time to the music.

Then it was that Freddy Ward caught Ian MacNeice’s eye and they rose to their feet and walked without speaking down onto the flat beach and began to tango. They danced holding themselves erect, wearing their hats as men do in the streets in Argentina, intimate, masculine, absorbed, weaving the threatening graceful steps. And as they danced they shed the years of war and work and love which intervened between now and their youth, when they had worked and become friends in South America, recapturing for a few minutes the fluidity of movement they had then possessed. When the music stopped their wives and children who had watched, amazed, sat silent, afraid to applaud. It was Louis the garde champêtre, lurking suspiciously in the shadows half-way up the cliff, who shouted: “Bravo! Bravo! Encore, les messieurs, encore!”

“After that,” said Cosmo respectfully, handing a glass of wine to each performer, “one hardly dares, it seems an anti-climax to have fireworks.” Freddy Ward and Ian MacNeice, smiling rather sheepishly, said, “Fireworks? Are we to have fireworks? So that’s what you have in your mystery box. How wonderful, what fun, what a surprise!”

People recollecting the picnic in later years remembered the surprises and how each surprise had surprised. The food, the wine, Flora’s langoustes, the jokes, Mabs and Tashie singing, Felix’s gramophone, Freddy and Ian dancing, the moonrise, and finally the rockets and Catherine wheels. We forgot we had to go back to school, they said. We forgot the General Strike, and of course next day it rained. My God, how it rained: we piled into the vedettes in pouring rain and that curious child, what was her name, can you remember, stood on the quay without a mackintosh, weeping. She can’t have been weeping for her parents; they had no time for her, they were so obsessed with one another it could almost be said they neglected her; some people actually said so. It was quite odd to see a child cry like that.

Flora, watching the vedette chug out in the driving rain towards St. Malo, wept for Cosmo and Blanco leaving on the boat, for Felix who had already gone in his car, for the terrible discovery that she was in love with three people at the same time.

When in old age she constantly forgot people’s names, things which had happened a week before, titles of books, the ephemera of living, Flora would brilliantly remember standing on the quay at Dinard in the driving rain, watching the launches pull away.

There were so many travellers, such a rush to get back before the strike, that there was a supplementary boat, and both boats were overloaded and low in the water. Passengers unable to crowd into the shelter of the cabins stood shoulder to shoulder, collars turned up, hats crammed low over noses. Cosmo and Blanco had tried ridiculously to open an umbrella, but it instantly blew inside out. The umbrella’s owner had bellowed in protest while the wind whipped away their laughter.

Her parents, who had found room in a cabin in the first boat, were out of sight as she watched the launches bounce into the choppy cross-current. Had they waved goodbye? Her view had been partially blocked by the group of porters who had brought the travellers’ luggage from their various hotels; they stood gossiping and counting their tips while Mabs and Tashie, forgetting that they were grown up, reverted to excited childhood, waving umbrellas as they shrieked into the wind: “Goodbye, goodbye, see you next holidays.”

They had waved the same umbrellas half an hour earlier when Felix had driven away with Elizabeth. “Come and see us in England,” they had yelled. “Come and
stay.
Why not come and
stay
? Do, do come and stay!” Somehow, somewhere they had found coloured umbrellas, a rarity at that time, Mabs a green, Tashie a blue. Then, when Felix was lost to sight, they had asked Joyce Willoughby, all packed up and wearing her school uniform, for her address, as though they had been great friends, equals even, throughout the holidays.

Flora had followed the travellers to the quay and watched them board the vedettes. Joyce had become separated from her parent and attached herself to the Leighs; Cosmo had given her a hand down to the boat. Perhaps her parents had said a perfunctory goodbye? Flora could not remember. There had once been a terrible accident with an overloaded launch, a lot of people drowned; she did not wish this to happen today. Neither Cosmo nor Blanco had waved to her; why should they? She had kept out of sight, not wishing them to see the tears coursing down her face. In age she recollected the sensation of hot tears mixing with cold rain. She remembered that perfectly.

And she remembered the grief; it had been tempered by a despairing rage, a passion which shook her whole body as she stood in the rain.

When the vedettes were lost to sight, disappearing in the sheeting rain, she had turned and run through the wet streets to the beach, across the sands, up the hill past the casino, past the turning to the Rue de Tours and Madame Tarasova, to the tram/train which, raising steam for its journey across the coast to St. Enogat and St. Briac, was letting off loud shrieks and whistles as it began to move. She had scrambled on board breathless, crippled by a stitch, gasping as she sought to elude her unbearable loss, her shocked realisation that she loved, was in love with Felix, Cosmo and Blanco all at once, equally.

In old age Flora would smile, remembering the child who believed that love was for one person, for ever, for Happy Ever After.