Gun Before Butter, page 17
Lucienne nodded vaguely; she didn’t mind. She put down Femina and reached for her gloves which she had left lying across the far corner. Only then did she see that it was the man with the black Peugeot. Clear blue eyes; polite, no hint of impudence. She hadn’t seen him without a hat before; his head was a pleasant shape; he had short brown hair, looked young and tanned. He bowed with his usual good manners.
‘I regret that I should disturb . . . ’ No hint of recognizing her.
‘You don’t disturb me at all, Monsieur.’
‘Thank you, Mademoiselle.’ The head waiter bowed and slid a menu forward; he did not look at it. ‘Oysters, Monsieur Raphael, and an entrecôte, bordelaise – not too blue. Plenty of marrow, a green salad, a few plain boiled potatoes and a bottle of Auxerre today – the Irancy.’ The waiter melted into obscurity; Lucienne, bored with her Femina, put it down with a slap and speared a last stray mushroom.
She did not know why she spoke – perhaps out of curiosity, to know whether he had recognized her.
‘Auto running well?’ He smiled; he had known her, then.
‘Certainly. It is a good workhorse, and, of course, I get it well looked after; it seems content . . . . The book does not interest you – or have I regrettably broken your concentration?’
‘No, by no means. I’m just glad of an excuse to put it down a little.’
‘What is your opinion of it? – or is it still too early to say?’
‘I find it – a little silly and a little disgusting . . . even if it is a prizewinner.’
He swallowed bread and an oyster, neatly. ‘I’m extremely pleased to hear you say so. I read it myself last week. It appears to be admired, but I thought exactly the same as you did.’
The waiter drifted up and took away Lucienne’s plate.
‘A little cheese. And a filter.’
‘I found,’ deliberately, between oysters, ‘the girl a little difficult to swallow . . . . Unlike oysters.’
‘I find her a fool, and unreal.’
‘That’s interesting. You will be a better judge of her than I am.’
‘I don’t think I’m a particularly good judge of other women. Not at all in fact; I don’t know any.’
‘You can know yourself. But perhaps you only mean that you prefer the company of men to women?’
‘That’s true; I find that at work.’
‘I find that quite normal,’ eating the last oyster with regret. ‘I must admit that I like the French oysters better than I do the Zeelanders.’
‘I like them all,’ said Lucienne, surprising herself a little.
He grinned. ‘Well so do I, to be honest. It was an affected remark, intended probably to impress you.’
She responded at once to this scrap of honesty; as little as that and still rare enough. He could not have known that he had originally gained her confidence with a frivolous remark about oysters.
‘I don’t believe in women like that. And I certainly don’t like them.’
‘But such things happen, all the same.’
‘Not to me they don’t.’
‘You are subjective.’ He ate his steak; he had been rude, too personal. Her coffee dripped slowly; she looked to see how it was getting on, angry at having made a stupid, childish remark. He wished – what did he wish? Not to apologize; that would only make things worse. But to break the tiny crust of ice; to talk to her again. Would she snub him now?
‘Have a glass of wine.’
‘Yes please.’ She was afraid she had put him off for good by her clumsiness; her relief made her almost too eager.
He wiped her glass out solemnly with a clean napkin, waving away any officious waiter.
‘I’m pleased to offer it you, because it’s really good. Tell me whether you like it.’
‘It’s perfect. I’m no judge, I’m afraid.’
‘Then you can have the pleasure of learning. Why not, since it is important, after all, to learn about the things one enjoys? If only to learn how one may enjoy them more.’
‘Yes. I like eating, and drinking. I would like to learn. I’m just beginning to find out what is likely to be nice in restaurants.’
He smiled at that. ‘And why – important too, in restaurants. Not much, as a rule, I’m afraid. It is a business I know something about. But this is one of the best in Brussels.’
‘My father was quite expert about wine. But when he told me about it, as about other things, I was childish, and stupid. I didn’t pay attention, telling myself it wasn’t important. It was so with a lot of things; I regret it now.’
‘You speak as though he cannot continue his lessons.’
‘No, he can’t. Dead.’ The word ‘mort’ fell damp and heavy; he covered it with his manners.
‘A misfortune. It robs him of the pleasure among others of teaching you things.’
Lucienne thought this a nice remark. No stupid condolences. She did not regret having mentioned her father for longer than the instant it had taken him to answer her sudden confidence.
‘I enjoy this very much.’
‘Yes, have some more. Auxerre is nice; they make very good wine around there. Not easy to get outside; this is one of the few places in Belgium where one sees it.’ Sounds very pedantic, he thought. I must learn to be less stiff, in the company of this girl.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in Auxerre.’
‘It is a personal remark, and unforgivable, but your French is not learned in Brussels.’
‘No, you’re quite right; I was brought up in Paris. Later, we came to Holland. I am Dutch, really.’
I didn’t need to blurt all that out, she told herself.
‘I am Dutch too.’ Her regret did not last; nor did his really, though he reproached himself. Just the sort of tiny thing . . . ‘Is it a pleasant coincidence?’
‘I think it is, really.’
He pushed away his plate and refilled both glasses. Was it the Auxerre? Was it Lucienne? What led him at that moment to a further, considered, deliberate indiscretion? Was he just sick of never being reckless?
‘Would you think me very impertinent if I asked you, occasionally, to be my guest? I am often in Brussels, but I have no friends here.’
‘I think that would be very nice,’ said Lucienne. This time, neither of them regretted it at all. She felt curious. He didn’t look Dutch, nor behave at all in what she thought of as a Dutch way. But he had not been curious about her; the least she could do was to honour that. Anyway, she didn’t sound Dutch herself. Didn’t even look it, she hoped. Maybe he didn’t care either to be so obviously labelled.
If he had a struggle at getting to know her, if he hesitated at lowering barriers, if he sometimes wondered whether it were not very foolish to abandon carefully constructed and camouflaged defences, she was not conscious of it; she never noticed a thing. She was too busy lowering her own. And too happy to have made a sort of friend. For that was what they were becoming, friends. Her life had taken on another dimension. She did not mind, even if she noticed, the pompous stiffness of his manner at first. Perhaps it was a pleasant change from the over-familiar, casual intercourse of her days. And if his remarks sounded didactic they were more interesting than the unvaried, monotonous quibble of the garage, inflected only by oaths.
He took her out three times to dinner in Brussels at intervals of about a month. They drank a Tavel wine from near Avignon, a yellowish strong Jura wine, and the last time a very fine and expensive Clos de Tart. They had three bottles, and both got a bit drunk. They talked about whatever came into their heads; he did not share her taste for the theatre or the cinema, but he liked pictures, and he liked music. He was enchanted to find out who her father had been.
‘But I am a terrible ignoramus; I know nothing about music, and the music itself only from records.’
He passed towards the end into a long silence, staring at his glass. It may have been only burgundy that melted the strictest of his barriers; perhaps it was also the feeling of togetherness, of sympathy. A beginning of love? He had loved other women; perhaps he was out of practice. Was one always impelled to indiscretions? What did it matter?
‘Lucienne, I would be happy if you came and stayed for a weekend, as my guest. But I live alone. You would mind that?’
‘No. I live alone myself.’
‘And you wouldn’t mind that it is an odd house? A cottage, very isolated; no electric light, even.’
She didn’t care at all.
‘How do you run your gramophone?’
He was glad that was all that worried her. ‘Oh I am most ingenious; I have an arrangement with car accumulators.’
‘It’s a deal.’
‘Sure, you can have Sunday and Monday,’ said Bernard. She had expected a fuss; she didn’t know why. She waited with pleasure till she saw the black Peugeot. Tuesdays, mostly.
‘I have the weekend free.’
‘Good,’ was all he said. She was a thought chilled – she could not know that he had regretted that vinous enthusiasm, and more than once. He had come meaning to put her off. When he saw her face he had neither the will nor the courage. ‘I’ll pick you up, then, at Venlo station. Just wear country clothes.’
She was already happy when she crossed the frontier at Roosendaal. She had not been in Holland for over a year; even a frontier railway junction was charming and sympathetic. It was cloudy, but still and warm; Dutch June weather. In Venlo she found him hard to recognize; she had never seen him except in business suits. In gay spirits she went out with him to the car.
‘You’ve bought a new auto?’
He laughed. ‘No, I have two. The Peugeot is in to be serviced in Germany. I move around a lot, and rely on the auto – simpler in the end to have two.’
The back seat was full of parcels.
‘Are you fond of Kassler rib?’
‘I love it.’
‘Good. Red wine and cabbage, then. But you don’t know yet that I am a good cook. It’ll be nice.’
Anything would have seemed nice to her just then. She exclaimed with pleasure at the shooting-lodge.
‘You really live here? But it’s wonderful.’
He was pleased with her enthusiasm – he had in fact taken pains to make it look nice and to have everything very clean – not that she suspected that sheets had been put on the bed just for her.
‘But it’s your bedroom; where will you sleep?’
‘On the settle – oh I often do.’ He liked her directness. ‘You won’t have to worry that you might be invaded – I had a lock put on that door.’ She gave him a smile for that, amused and pleased. She took to everything with enthusiasm; getting water from the well charmed her.
‘I’ve never done it myself, and now I have. What a good taste, after horrible Brussels water.’
‘But don’t drink too much of it; I’ve a cellarful of wine and we’re going to drink a lot.’
‘Lovely to be among trees. Not very like Holland – we may even walk on the grass.’
‘I know just what you mean. But why d’you think I choose to live here?’
‘Oh the lovely copper pot!’
‘Nuisance to keep clean, rather.’
‘I’ll clean it. And your books, wonderful. Conrad too, fantastic.’
‘Yes, I read a lot, here. Here I don’t think about business; I just enjoy life.’
She was impressed. A man who made, obviously, a lot of money – after all, a Peugeot and a Mercedes . . . – who preferred to get his water from his own well, and read Conrad by oil-light, surrounded by beech-trees. She could understand that; she was suddenly intensely glad she had come, and was going to get to know this man.
‘You are king, of all this.’
‘Not quite king. One never is, you know. Perhaps skipper next to God.’
‘Like Captain Lingard.’
‘Yes, the brig Flash. This is my effort at that.’
He made grilled entrecôtes on the top of the stove; a smoky charred smell that went well with the tarragon and the sneeze-sharp boiling vinegar of the Béarnaise. There was bread, and watercress, and big lumpy streaky local tomatoes; good. Not many dishes; she washed them while he lit the lamps and chased a noisy June-bug out; it was beginning to get dusk.
‘One can’t walk easily at night, in the woods, otherwise we might have gone out.’
‘I’m wonderfully content. Couldn’t we make some music?’ She was looking at his records. ‘Figaro and Kleiber –wonderful.’
‘I’ll get a few more things to drink.’
‘Why do you have the motor-bike?’ admiring the bottles in the shed. ‘You have lots of transport.’
‘Yes, I like lots of transport; I use it to get away on, and for work it’s handy often. We’ll go for rides on it; more fun than the auto.’
It was, perhaps, the happiest weekend she had spent since her childhood – why not, since it was her childhood she rediscovered? She was not required to have any worries or responsibilities – one of the nicest aspects of the desert-island feeling. He did not make the slightest move to touch her – she had not supposed for a moment he would, and was pleased; it was, to her, a question of loyalty. Anyway, sex is such a bore. Nothing interfered with her unselfconscious enjoyment, and the hours moved with a quiet, liquid rhythm like the slow movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.
What did they do, the whole weekend? What the brook did.
Lucienne would remember the smells; woodsmoke and the smoke of the lamps; grass and moss covered in dew; the very clear clean air of a beech wood, and the ancient complicated smell of indoors – a rich musty smell of earth and wood and flagstones, very welcoming.
She remembered his tact. The mornings and the evenings were chilly, June or no June, and she crawled out of bed on Sunday morning – her own loyalty had forbade her to lock any doors – and found the living-room humming with warmth, a big bucket of hot water, and a note. ‘Gone for a walk till 8.15. Have a bath if you like.’
When he came back she had made coffee, and they dipped bread-and-butter into the bowls, while she put Mozart violin concertos on the gramophone. ‘The bishop of Salzburg listened to them during dinner, so why shouldn’t we listen to them during breakfast?’ Afterwards they went out, deep in the woods; she got wet to the knees, and she got her first lesson in natural history. She was such a town-girl – she listened open-mouthed. Why field mushrooms do not grow under trees but toadstools do, why rowan branches are a good protection against witches, why thyme is good for a cold and sage for the circulation of the blood, and how, in the winter, woodcock will explode suddenly out of the dead leaves, frightening one to death.
The sun was high and warm in a bright sky when they got back, though it would cloud over again that afternoon, and they dragged chairs outside, and sat drenched in content with a bottle of white wine.
‘If it’s fine tomorrow,’ lazily, ‘we could go swimming; take the car over the border, up to France if we liked, up the Maas. Down here the water’s not clean – Meuse is better.’
‘Where does the Meuse go to?’ sleepily.
‘Liège, Namur. After that it’s nice. Down into the Argonne – Sedan, Verdun. Very historic.’
‘I would like it. I like history.’
‘Yes. History’s so much more interesting than we are.’
She opened an eye and studied him. Odd how different he was, how completely different from the formal, wary man of Brussels. Did men always look different, then, at home? A mask had been peeled off and let fall on the uneven grass of the clearing. Normal, she supposed. All week they had to be the big tough business man; they had to be able to look vulnerable sometimes. Had her father always looked the same? She thought so, even in his evening-dress ‘working clothes’, but she had been a child; she had not noticed. And what other experience had she of men? You couldn’t count the boys she had known in Holland: they too were children. Franco, say; nicest boy imaginable, but tiresomely simple. As a child she had prized that openness, that rapidity and gaiety, but adult men were deeper, darker water. Secrets; pools and currents one could not guess at. Two years ago she would have feared and hated that; now she was beginning to prize it.
Stam, his eyes closed against the dappled sunlight, was reflecting without rue that he was in danger of loving this girl. It bothered him only that loving threatened his existence. He didn’t care; bringing her here had made him so happy that he was astonished. But his Belgian identity was compromised – he would go no more to that garage. She must not be allowed to know about Gérard de Winter, or about Solange – now that was a worry to him; he would have to consider seriously what should be done about Solange. Here, it would not matter. The veldwachter, the wood-watchers – though it might be better if they did not see her.
He had been indiscreet, but he refused to care; this girl was true to the imaginary woman he carried in his mind. His private life had satisfied him for years now; it had been his refuge from that lousy hotel, that terrible woman. There his life had become a poison. His passion to be free – that romantic nature that had had outlet enough in wartime but so little since – had gone into his secret life. Skilfully he had built it up step by step. But was it true that all his life had just been a substitute, a sedative, until he met this girl? Was he right in jeopardizing it for her?
She could hardly be worth it. He had long ago decided sensibly that a woman worth all that could not exist. Was he not now deceiving himself? Were not the results of that self-deception likely to be fatal – to his enterprise that he had built up so carefully from his wartime knowledge? The business was important. It had made him rich. Now he could get away from the hotel altogether; cut completely loose from Solange. But he could not neglect the business, or even take a holiday from it. In a way he was as much the prisoner of smuggling as he had been of the hotel.
How easy it had been, really. Then it had been respectable to diddle the occupying authorities, and learn the precautions against being betrayed. To him it made no difference whether the authorities were German, Dutch, or Belgian. Butter was easier to get across a border than many other things had been.
