Bohemian Girl, The (29 page)

‘This is a real world, isn’t it?’

‘Real bedbugs and real peasants. But they don’t paint the bedbugs, and they make the peasants look a hell of a lot less like apes than they do in real life. I don’t get it.’

‘The light is said to be awfully good,’ Heseltine murmured. ‘And the skies.’ It was like him, Denton was learning, to talk about what ‘was said’ rather than what he thought. The more time they spent together, the more Heseltine spent on the surface of any subject.

‘I don’t get travelling all this way for it.’

Heseltine laughed. ‘A French painter went to London to paint.’ ‘I could see painting London. London’s the real thing. But this—’

‘The coast is thought quite dramatic.’ Heseltine seemed to feel he had to defend the place they’d come to. ‘These people are the ones the French sent off to settle Canada, you know. Some of them are the heroes of your Longfellow’s poem
Evangeline
.’

Denton knew very well who Longfellow was, and he had some idea of what
Evangeline
was about. He said, ‘That wasn’t Canada.’

‘No, your state of Louisiana. We British shipped them there after we won some war or other.’

Denton thought of the Louisiana boys in the prison camp at the end of the Civil War. Dressed in rags, mush-mouthed, they had seemed to him loutish and alien, but religious and passionate with a brutal anger that was still dangerous in their defeat - what a sergeant had called ‘good haters’ - and they had spoken in accents he couldn’t understand. He tried to see them in the peasants they passed but wondered if what was common to them was their insularity and suspicion and not their Frenchness. ‘I don’t think Louisiana did much to improve them.’

They found the farm late in the afternoon, when it was colder and the sun was without warmth. A great flock of crows came out of a field and flew over them, swinging like a wheel as if to have a better look at them before dropping into a clump of oaks. The mostly flat landscape, marked by hedgerows and ditches and two rows of poplars along the road, looked angular and inhospitable, a distant, square-topped steeple the only interruption of the austerity of line. To their right, away from the coast, the land sloped gradually upwards; at the top, a distant house and a vast barn were silhouetted. The air smelled of the sea.

To their left, farm buildings - a stone house, stables and two stone barns - enclosed a courtyard, its harsh urine-and-manure smell meeting them before they reached it. The farmer, if there was one, was away; the woman who came to the house door was heavy, suspicious. She wore the wide white collar and lace cap, and Denton thought she looked about as quaint as a London cab driver. Heseltine yammered at her - le meelor key pent came into it a lot - and she stayed back in the shadow of her doorway as if she were trying to hide. She had a habit of looking away out of the corners of her eyes. Her mouth was set, unhappy. He supposed her favourite word was
non
.

‘She says that there was a milord who painted near here, but I’m having the devil’s own time getting details out of her.’

‘Ask her if there were two men.’

More gabbling, then, ‘She wants to know who we are.’

‘Tell her we’re both meelors and we’re looking for our pal the meelor key pent.’

More talk, and Heseltine said, ‘I told her the young one is your son.’

‘Oh, good grief.’

‘I had to tell her something. She thinks we’re from the customs. There’s a lot of smuggling here.’

Denton looked around at the drab landscape. ‘Tell her my son has run away from home and I’m trying to find him because his mother’s heartbroken.’

Heseltine spoke in French; the woman answered. He said in English, ‘This is not a sentimental woman.’

‘She doesn’t care about the grieving mother?’

‘She’s worried about her cows.’

‘Give her some money.’

They had been standing there for several minutes. Denton shivered despite his ulster. The wind had risen, bringing an edge to the cold. The wrangle went on and on until a big, red-faced man drove a herd of milk cows past them and through a gate into the farmyard. Denton got a glimpse of hoof-pounded mire; he had a memory of the Chicago stockyards. When the man came back, he pushed the woman into the house and pulled the door closed and said something in French so aggressively that Denton knew he had asked what they wanted.

Suddenly, both the questions and the answers became short. Le meelor key pent had been there, not here - a big arm, with a hand like a slab of beef, gestured behind them at the distant house and barn. Yes, with another man. Yes, yes, they were gone. What was it worth to them to see where they had lived? It was clear even without translation that he didn’t care who they were so long as they paid.

‘Tell him yes, we’ll pay to see where they stayed. Tell him we’ll pay for a place to stay tonight, too - clean, no bugs.’

Something in that caused an explosion of red-faced resentment. Heseltine said, ‘It was suggesting they aren’t clean. He says they’re as clean as the angels.’

‘Tell him about last night.’

Heseltine spoke, then pulled up a sleeve and showed his bites. The farmer was thrown into loud laughter, displaying dreadful teeth, and was suddenly as good-natured as he had been surly. He clapped Heseltine on the shoulder. It was so comical to him that he had to go inside and tell his wife.

‘He says he’ll put the horse in the barn and do something or other with the buggy; I couldn’t follow it. He wants a hideous amount for us to spend the night - I could stay at Brown’s in London for what he wants to charge us, but—’ He looked around at the dour scene, now falling into darkness.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘We’re hardly beggars.’

But they were each given a room with a tiled floor and a bed piled high with feather-filled quilts. Overhead were hand-adzed oak beams. A water pitcher, a basin, a chamber pot, a candle. A painted armoire that could have been one year or five hundred years old and held somebody else’s clothes, both male and female - had he taken away some couple’s bed? No other light, no heat.

And then the food.

The ill-tempered housewife was apparently used to feeding a dozen ravenous people; two more made no difference. They sat down at a huge table with the red-faced farmer at one end and an empty chair at the other - the woman never sat until they were almost done - and three younger men and two women between them on benches on each side. Heseltine sat at the end of one bench, Denton opposite him. Three younger women, really girls, helped the unhappy wife serve a meal that, if not quaint, was authentic and enormous and superb: a dish made with freshly killed chickens and beans and pork; another of what he took to be wild rabbit in a dark gravy; part of a pike that must have weighed a dozen pounds when it was caught; home-made sweet butter, home-made pot cheese; a dark, pudding-like thing he decided was made from congealed blood; haricots and endive and potatoes the size of cricket balls; three rough breads that had been baked that afternoon and, an oddly Germanic touch, a sweetened bread with gooseberry jam. They began with a soup that might have made a meal in itself, thick with dried peas, rich with carrots and onions and flavoured with rosemary. After the soup, the other dishes began to appear, Denton thinking each one would be the last. Glasses of both beer and wine were put in front of him.

At one point, Heseltine met his eyes and widened his own, smiling, shaking his head. Heseltine was keeping up what seemed to be a pretty good flow of conversation in French. A couple of the younger women looked rather flushed when they talked to him; so did he.

The women, Denton thought, were daughters or daughters-in-law; the men were sons, or husbands of the women. They were not a cheerful lot, certainly not talkative: farm work was hard, they seemed to say, and food was fuel. But what fuel! They stoked it in and reached for more; the women, although diffident, ate their share.

Why
, he thought,
did Himple and Crum ever leave?

After the older woman had sat and eaten quickly, when the men were done and were leaning back, when desultory talk had started, the women cleared off the dishes and the meats and brought a bowl of apples and a kind of cake made of apple slices and tasting of yeast, then three kinds of cheese. Denton had loosened his waistcoat; now he made a face at Heseltine. A bottle appeared. Heseltine said it was apple brandy, the local speciality.

The sons and the women drifted away. The farmer sat on, insisting that they sit with him. His face got redder. So did Heseltine’s. So did Denton’s, he supposed. Denton found himself talking about farming, the talk curving down the table to pass through Heseltine, then back, but Denton and the farmer looked at each other and it was as if they were speaking the same language. Then they were drinking the apple brandy, and the farmer, standing now, flaming-faced, shouted, ‘Ah-ee spik anglaish! Sheet! God-dam! Ha-ha-ha! Sheet! God-dam you! Ha-ha-ha!’

And then Denton was in the big bed, under the warm feathered quilts, the rough sheets cold, then warming to his cold skin, the wind outside rattling the glass in the windows but unable to touch the comfort within.

He had no hangover next morning. It was remarkable. He was no stranger to hangovers and he was sure he deserved one, but when he had splashed icy water on his face and swabbed out his crotch and his armpits, then pulled on his wool all-in-ones, he stood by the window and realized that he felt wonderful. The day was going to be dark, he could see; it would rain. Still, he felt content - at peace, even. A knock at his door produced one of the youngest girls with a pitcher of hot water. He shaved, washed himself again, dressed and went down to the central room where they had eaten. The farmer was there already. He got up from the table and came to Denton, muttered a question, then peered closely into an eye, clapped Denton on the shoulder and laughed. Later, Heseltine explained that the man believed that apple brandy never left a hangover; he would have been disappointed if Denton had had one.

People came and went. Children’s voices sounded somewhere, the kitchen or some room beyond it. There was no repeat of last night’s feast; rather, men took bread, one a piece of cheese as well, and went out. Heseltine explained that they would come back to eat when the milking and the morning chores were done. Denton understood that routine.

He was given hot milk and a small cup of coffee. The bread was pushed towards him, a hand waved at a bowl of eggs in the shell, presumably boiled, the platter of cheeses. He thought,
I could live here.
He thought,
This is the way we should live
, and then was ashamed of himself, remembering the brutal labour of farming and the price you paid for such plenty. And you didn’t earn it alone: you needed those sons and daughters.

They walked out into a blustery morning with flecks of moisture flying in the air to strike their faces like sea spray. Frost glittered on the stones. The farmer insisted on showing them his castle: the house, huge, one end of it unused and derelict; the yard, ankle deep in dung and the mud made by cow urine. Chickens strode across the mire, several climbing the head-high dungheap in one corner. Along each side of the house’s back door, heavy boots were ranged under the eave, the same foul mud caked on them. The wife didn’t allow anybody to track dirt inside: the men and women, Denton remembered, had worn home-made, heavy slippers in the house. The women wore pattens outdoors but left them inside the door.

On the left side of the yard stood stone stables with five huge Percherons in them, a warm place that smelled like brewer’s mash and urine; along the entire back ran the barn, Norman (or so Heseltine said), slashes like arrow slits high in its stone walls, raftering like a church. The farmer smiled at it all, smug with the pride of possession.

They walked up a cow track to the house where Himple and Crum had stayed. It was a quarter of a mile off, no road to it; on their right, a field of beets lay grey-green, the topmost leaves glinting with frost, the wind gusting through them and changing the colours like water. As they walked, Denton asked questions and Heseltine translated the answers that came back: the milord and the servant came here in the summer; the oak leaves were big; we were cutting hay the second time. They took the house for the summer but they didn’t stay, they were city folk. The milord painted pictures; we’d see him and his easel up here on the horizon. You can see the coast from up there. We supplied them with milk - one of my daughters carried a pail up every morning - and cheese and gammon and vegetables. Sometimes one of my daughters would cook, not always; they asked each time. I made sure they paid her well.

In the beginning, the servant went into Caen and came back with a buggy-load of artificial food. (Denton took this to mean canned goods.) They left some behind; we had to use a chisel to open them; it wasn’t worth it; we sold them back to somebody in Caen.

They kept to themselves. The servant spoke good French, better French than I do, but he didn’t have much to say. The milord smiled when he saw us. He knew a few words. We weren’t their kind of people. Sometimes we didn’t see them for days.

When they left, they gave me five days’ notice. I made them pay another month, because of my losses. They left early one morning in a buggy.
Both of them?
You think one of them stayed to help on the farm?

Denton was thinking of Mary Thomason. ‘Ask him if there was ever a young woman with them.’ He got his answer without translation: the farmer laughed the haw-haw roar of
double entendre
, meaning, Denton guessed, that they weren’t that sort of men.

Denton had given Heseltine one of the photographic copies of the drawings that Augustus John had done. Yes, that was the servant, only he had no beard when he got here. He grew it while he was here. Not much of a beard. He wasn’t much of a man, really. A day on the farm would have killed him.