Part 12 (1/2)

'Ah!' Pop said smartly, picking it up in a flash. 'Les apres.'

Alphonse looked witheringly about him for a second or two and then held a short conversation with Mademoiselle Dupont, who said: 'Alphonse is suggesting either crepes Suzette for dessert or bombe surprise.'

It was at this moment that Angela Snow came out of her half dream to hear Ma insisting on jelly and custard for the children and to find herself being shamelessly and mentally undressed by Alphonse's over-large handsome eyes.

'I think myself the crepes Suzette,' she said, staring straight through Alphonse. 'They'll keep him busier at the time.'

'That about settles it then,' Ma said.

'No it don't though,' Pop said. 'What about the cake? Got to have a cake. Midnight, champagne, and all that lark.'

'Oh! Pop, lovely!' Mariette said and suddenly ran round the table in one of her moments of spontaneous delight to kiss Pop with luscious grat.i.tude. 'Cake and champagne it's like being married all over again!'

'Second honeymoon, Charley, second honeymoon,' Pop said, hoping the cheerful pointed words wouldn't be lost on him. 'Second honeymoon.'

Charley, using his loaf, looked as if he understood. Then Mademoiselle Dupont said Alphonse would be most honoured to make the cake. And if there were any other things, any other thoughts suddenly a great sense of excitement ran through her, as if the party were really her own, and she ended by half-running out of the salle a manger into the Bureau in another fluff, repeating half in French, half in English, a few uncertain sentences which n.o.body could understand.

For another half hour, while Charley, Mariette, and the children went to the plage and Pop for a gentle snooze on the bed, Ma and Angela Snow sat outside on the terrace, drinking coffee. By this time the sun had appeared but the air was quite autumnal. Already at the end of the terrace a few leaves of the plane trees pollarded to give shade in hot weather were turning yellow and even falling to the ground. The bead-like strings of coloured lights, shattered by storm and still unrepaired, gave the trees an air of premature shabbiness that was like a small herald of winter. It was all too true, as Mademoiselle Dupont had remarked to Ma only that morning after breakfast, that the season was coming to its end. The guests were departing. Soon the hotel would be empty. The French had no taste for the sea when October began and in another week or two the little plage would be wrapped away for winter.

Presently Angela Snow was saying how much she was looking forward to the party and what a lot you missed by not being married: the anniversaries and that sort of thing.

'Suppose you do,' Ma said. She'd never really thought of it.

'I'll have to settle down myself I suppose one of these days,' Angela Snow said.

'Oh?' Ma said. 'Why?'

She didn't mind a sc.r.a.p everyone knowing that she and Pop weren't married most people took it for granted they were and anyway it looked the same, even if it wasn't and she remained quite unperturbed and unsurprised when Angela Snow, who liked to be frank in everything, said in an off-hand way: 'Don't you ever think of marrying Pop?'

Ma threw back her dark handsome head and roared with laughter.

'What?' she said, 'and give him a chance to leave me?'

'Scream,' Angela Snow said. 'Suppose he might at that.'

'Off like a hare.'

Angela laughed so much over her filtered half-cold coffee that she spilt most of it into the saucer. It was undrinkable anyway: as she had long since discovered, filtered coffee always was. But she nevertheless supposed the French would always cling to it, just as the Scots did to herring and oatmeal.

'Well, must go,' she said. 'Must see what the adventurous Iris has been up to. Let me know if ever he does.'

Ma laughed in her friendliest fas.h.i.+on.

'Who? Pop? I'll send you a wire. That'll give you a bit of a start on Mademoiselle Dupont.'

'Oh! is she in the hunt too?'

Ma said she was afraid so. She'd be in a whale of a tizzy by the time that party was over.

'And not the only one.'

Graceful and elegant, Angela Snow stooped to kiss Ma a sporting good-bye, telling her at the same time to give Pop her best love, which Ma warmly promised to do, with k.n.o.bs of bra.s.s and tinkling cymbals, as Pop himself was so fond of saying sometimes.

'G.o.d bless,' Angela said. 'Have to fix a hair-do somehow before that party. For two pins I'd have my blasted face lifted as well.'

'Where to?' Ma said, laughing again. 'You keep it as it is. Pop'd never forgive you.'

Angela Snow went back into the hotel on the pretext of telephoning a hairdresser but in reality on the off-chance of running into Pop as he came downstairs. But the lounge, the reception desk, and the stairs were all deserted and she suddenly realized with unpleasantness that she might run into Alphonse instead. She didn't care for Alphonse. The process of being mentally undressed by strange men had never amused her. Nor, for some reason, did she like men who parted their hair down the middle. But now and then she couldn't help wondering what the virginal Iris would make of those too large, too handsome eyes.

'Did Mademoiselle wish for something please?'

It was Mademoiselle Dupont who came at length to the door of the Bureau and called the words. In reply Angela Snow said she was wondering about a hairdresser and was there one she could go to in the town?

'There is nothing exciting here. Nothing soigne. One must go to Morlaix or Brest.'

'Oh? Then I might go to Brest.'

'Philippe: that is the name.'

'Philippe,' Angela Snow said. 'Do you go there?'

'I regret not often. I can't afford it.'

'No? Not even for the party?'

Mademoiselle Dupont, who had been torn all day by the question of whether to have a hair-do or a new corset for the party and had almost decided on the corset, could only gaze in silence at Angela Snow's exquisitely smooth aristocratic yellow hair and wish that her own were like it, so that such difficult dilemmas and choices never arose.

'Got to make the party a success you know,' Angela Snow said.

'I think that Milord Larkin', Mademoiselle Dupont said rather loftily, 'will see to that. He has the flair.'

Drawn up sharply by the second mention of the word milord that day, Angela Snow had no time to make any sort of comment before Mademoiselle Dupont fluffed again and said: 'I am right in thinking that? Yes? He is a milord?'

'Down to the ankles,' Angela Snow said. And like every Englishman he's sure his home is his castle.'

At the mention of the word castle Mademoiselle Dupont was unable to speak. A castle a chateau. There was something overpowering, tres formidable, about the word castle.

'You must ask him to tell you about it,' Angela Snow said.

'I will ask that,' Mademoiselle Dupont said quietly.

After Angela Snow had departed Mademoiselle Dupont went upstairs. In her room she took off her dress, as she did every afternoon, and lay down on the bed. Like Angela Snow she had hoped for the chance of running into Pop on the stairs but nothing had happened and she lay for an hour alone and in silence, thinking largely of milord Larkin, the castle, and how altogether surprising the English were, but also of the entrancements of marriage and a lot of other things. She remembered the occasion when Pop had caressed her, brief and idle though it had been, with a warm swift hand, and how he would for ever remember her bedroom when he caught the scent of les muguets.

At the end of it she decided there was nothing for it but to have her hair dressed at Philippe's and buy the new corset too. After all, she thought in typical French fas.h.i.+on, the bill for the party would be a big one and she would be able to afford it out of that.

She would have her hair done in that Empire style that was now so fas.h.i.+onable and that she knew would give her the illusion of height she needed so much. The corset must be a black one, trimmed with lace in parma violet at top and bottom, and every time she thought of it she started trembling.