The Bohemian Girl

Chapter SEVENTEEN
The village inn at Hinon turned out to be less an inn than what Denton’s English friends called a dosshouse. Downstairs was a café; above it were several rooms where, he learned later, the proprietor stowed the village drunks to sleep it off. This happened on Saturday nights, however, and in the middle of the week the rooms went unused - unheated, grubby, bare. The room they were shown - ‘the best room’ - had a nominally double bed in painted and chipped iron, its mattress deeply furrowed in the middle. The bedspread had been darned in half a dozen places, then given up, the most recent tears left unrepaired. Except for a candle and a tin-topped washstand, that was it. The cour was down a corridor and then down a flight of unpainted, much-worn stairs, through a door and across a yard that was decorated with piles of horse dung. There were a long metal urinal and a single stall, its walls and floor soapstone, a hole to squat over.
‘It could be worse,’ Heseltine muttered. ‘The family live here and use the same facilities all the time.’
‘Hell of a place to get drunk in,’ Denton said. Nonetheless, he felt rather sprightly, action brightening his gloom over Janet Striker.
‘Monsieur le propriétaire says that he puts them in the rooms when they can’t stand up any more, but they come down to use the cour and end up sleeping in the manure.’
‘Kind of makes you understand why they move to the city. You going to be able to put up with this?’
Heseltine snorted. His colour was better, his eye livelier. ‘I’ve seen lots worse in the army.’
Denton told him to insist on two rooms, but it turned out they couldn’t have two. Only the one was made up (as what? Denton wondered) and madame didn’t like to climb the stairs to do another. Denton demanded at least more blankets and did manage to get those - he had to carry them up himself - and arranged them on the floor so that Heseltine could have the bed. ‘I don’t want to keep rolling to the middle and finding you’re already there,’ he said. Heseltine seemed relieved, but in the midnight darkness he swore and lit the candle and lay down on the floor himself. The bed was full of bugs.
‘That was rather desperate,’ Heseltine said next morning. They had been up at daylight, walking the village streets until they could be off. ‘I’m all over bites.’
‘The floor was no better?’
‘They came with me in the blanket. I thought some might make their way over to you.’
‘Not so many. For a man who was eaten alive, you seem pretty cheerful.’
Heseltine blushed. ‘It’s good to get away, even to bedbugs.’ Still reticent despite a day and a night together, Heseltine perhaps regretted his earlier confidences.
They had hard rolls and little coils of butter and milky coffee in the café. Men from the village came in and stared at them.
‘We seem to be good for business.’
‘They’re not buying anything. Monsieur keeps shooing them out.’
The villagers were an unappetizing lot. Stout, red-faced, they were mostly agricultural labourers or small farmers whose hands proclaimed their work. Denton wondered if they had ever been more than ten miles from the village. Half of them affected expressions of great slyness, the rest of great stupidity. ‘I’ve seen better-looking people in the steerage of an immigrants’ ship,’ he said.
‘The immigrants are the ones who are bright enough to leave.’
They rented a rickety one-horse carriage to make the search for the place where Himple and Clum had stayed. Heseltine had asked the proprietor of the café, but he had said he knew nothing about any ‘English milord’. Heseltine said he thought the man was put out because Himple hadn’t stayed with him.
‘He must have seen one of the rooms.’
The horse was a surprisingly good one, with a trot that spun them over the unpaved roads, puddles from recent rain splashing up from the wheels. At each farm, each crossroads, wherever they saw people, Heseltine asked after un milord anglais qui peint, and now and then they got a waving arm and gabbled instructions that, Denton found, Heseltine only partly understood. He learned, himself, to recognize the phrase le milord qui peint, which he heard as ‘le meelor key pent’, until he could repeat it himself. He tried it on a woman who was standing at a wattle fence to watch them go by; her answer was voluble and entirely incomprehensible.
‘I’ll let you ask the questions,’ Denton said.
‘It’s always the way - you put the question together in your head, and then the answer absolutely goes by you like an inside-out umbrella in a gale. I don’t pretend to understand everything they say.’ Heseltine was driving, the reins held expertly through his fingers. He flicked them on the horse’s back. ‘Anyway, the local accent is ferocious.’
‘You’re doing fine.’
The day was cold but dry. Pale sunlight warmed their backs; clouds like streaks of whitewash lay against a soft blue sky, and the rows of poplars, like slow, uncertain dancers, waved their tops in the wind. Heseltine said that many painters came there. Denton asked him why.
‘It’s very picturesque.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Oh, you know - lots of old churches and things, peasants in quaint costumes - that sort of stuff.’
Denton didn’t think the peasants were quaint. The men wore short jackets like the one he’d seen at the party with Gwen John; the women wore lace caps and, some of them, enormous white collars. Were they quaint? And why was ‘quaint’ paintable? ‘I’d think a painter would want to paint what’s usual. The real world.’
‘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.