The Rich Are with You Always (18 page)

  For some reason his words made Nora cry. She could not say why. She turned to him and buried her face in his shirt, and she wept. Not profoundly.

  He said nothing. He held her until it passed. And then he took her head in his hands and he kissed her.

  "Kisses are at a premium tonight," he said. "Or do I mean discount? I'm never sure of the difference."

  It helped her to laugh and to face the light of the lamps.

  "It depends on who's giving," she said, "and who's the taker."

At breakfast, the stationmaster waited on John to know what time he desired the train to run to Abbeville. He had a porter to take their luggage, and a fly was waiting for them outside.

  Their bill was only fourteen francs, or eleven shillings and twopence, since they had taken no dinner. John gave a sovereign and was given change in English coin.

  "How goes your war?" he asked.

  "Oh, it was just a rumour,
un bruit
," the manager said.

  "You mean you are not fighting Austria?"

  "
Mais non.
Of course not. They are our friends."

  The goats and their crate had vanished, so someone had collected or stolen them during the night.

  When John had said that their reception by the Boulogne railway would be regal, he had not been exaggerating. They had their own train, with four ballast carriages and the state carriage—the one that King Louis Philippe would use if ever he came this way. One of its seats lifted up to reveal a commode, which delighted Nora.

  They rattled down through Picardy in splendid style, ballasted by the freight carriages in front and behind. Soon, too soon for Nora, they drew into Abbeville, where they had to descend and seek out the diligence.

  "Let's take all three of the seats up in the coupé," Nora suggested, "so that we can keep it to ourselves."

  When he showed his surprise she added, "Well, the journey hasn't cost us a penny so far."

  The coupé on a French diligence is like a theatre box covered with a leather awning and placed where, in an English stagecoach, the driver would sit. The French driver sits astride the lead horse. The conductor sits up on the banquette, behind the coupé.

  John's plan was to go from Abbeville direct to Rouen via Neufchâtel. At Rouen they could take a train to Havre, from where it was a short sailing across the estuary of the Seine to Honfleur or Trouville, either of which was convenient to La Gracieuse. The diligence, however, was going on beyond Rouen, meandering across country, through Lisieux and the pays d'Auge to Caen. And the conductor refused to sell them the coupé seats as far as Rouen only—even though, as they pointed out and as he admitted, he would almost certainly sell them onward in Rouen. "Almost certainly is not exactly certainly," he said.

  Another passenger, a short, genial, self-important man went back into the inn and came out with the list of diligence tariffs, which clearly showed that the stretch from Abbeville to Rouen was separately chargeable. But it made no difference. The conductor was adamant, and the diligence would not depart until the coupé seats were paid for all the way to Caen. "It's only because they are English," the helpful man shouted at the conductor. He, staring fixedly ahead, merely grinned. The other turned to them. "It's only because you are English," he repeated, in English this time.

  John thanked him and grudgingly paid the 49.50 francs for the three seats all the way. "And three francs for the trunk," the conductor added. John put his money away and stared the man out. In the end, the conductor shrugged his shoulders and put their trunk aboard without demanding more.

  Nora was seething. Two things she hated: to cut a string that could as easily be untied and to be forced to buy more of anything than she actually wanted. Drapers who insisted on selling a yard, when all she wanted was twenty-nine inches were a particular loathing. "We have twelve inches to the foot and twelve pence to the shilling, as a special and particular assistance to the feebleminded," she would shout at them. "Yet even that is beyond you!" Here at Abbeville she could not shout a single word the man would grasp. And that doubled her fury.

  It was several miles before the peace and charm of the countryside began to soothe her. Though they were into Normandy as soon as they crossed the Somme, the landscape was still reminiscent of Picardy, with its small fields, rolling hills, and lush pasture—a well-watered land, thick with copses and game covert. Through the hilly country toward Blangis, every little valley had its own surprises—a small red-brick château, an elegant hunting lodge—all stucco pillars and rococo plasterwork—or a half-timbered woodframe farmhouse bent dangerously by its years. At two places they saw builders actually putting up new barns or cowsheds, using timber cannibalized from ancient structures and building in a way that had not changed since the time of William of Normandy.

  Every farm had its low-walled orchard, whose grass was kept smooth by a mare and her foal. And almost every tree was in blossom—apples and cherries, plums and pears together. The orchards were heavy with their white and pink boughs. In the fields and hedges too, everything seemed to have flowered at once—cowslips, wild roses, acacias, lilacs, wallflowers—while cattle and sheep stood half buried in the lush, deep green grasses of the meadows.

  "Look," John said. "Elders in flower."

  In Yorkshire, elder was a midsummer blossom.

  "You'd never think moving a few hundred miles south would make such a difference," Nora said. "We've travelled half a season these three days past."

  "How will our Yorkshire farmers compete when it's as easy to send from Normandy to London as it is from the North?" he asked glumly.

  "Even the sun is different. Gold. Not pale like English spring sunshine. And what's that lovely smell? It's like something you've almost smelled before but not quite."

  He sniffed. "Aye. I know what you mean. I can't put a name to it either."

  They passed a farm where a woman in a dazzling white apron and cap was spreading a good six weeks' laundry over the bushes to dry.

  "It's a rich country," Nora said, puzzled. "You can see that with half an eye. Yet they don't act rich or dress rich. They don't paint their houses. Do they not understand the importance of appearances?"

  "Different habits," John answered. "Different revolution, maybe."

  "No, but look at that food we ate last night. That was as good as the best hotel or eating house in London, if not better. Yet you'd have to seek in the worst parts of Leeds or Birmingham to match the appearance of that house. Think of the custom that woman could have, and the money she'd make, in a proper place."

  "But would she be happier? That woman? That particular woman, could she be happier?"

  "Well, happiness isn't everything," Nora said, lightly offended; then, seeing his playfully solemn look, she dug him in the ribs and said, "Come on now!"

  He looked away, shook his head, and smiled.

  "Anyway," she said, "that's where Cornelius and Sarah are going to come topside. Best of everything. Food and standards."

  Their way into Rouen took them to the south of the station and the driver refused to go out of his way to drop them off. As soon as they were into the city, Nora knew she would have to come back here during her stay with the Rodets. Its narrow streets of leaning timber houses, opening into wide, multiangular "squares," were so reminiscent of York; though the churches, with their fussy Gothic decorations and open stone-lattice spires, more like something in cast iron than stone, could never have been English.

  "Murray's Handbook calls it the Manchester of France," Nora said. "They're spending as much, anyway."

  Every church and public building they passed was shrouded in scaffolding and the footings of every wall were buried in medieval rubble, its place taken by modern stone ready to have the decorations recarved in it.

  "It's almost better without the baubles and bobbles," John said. "Don't you think?"

  "There's more workmanship in the other," Nora replied, not wanting to contradict him.

  A market was being held in the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville. Nora sniffed deeply, savouring that international reek of horse and cow and sheep. "That's a familiar smell," she said. There were familiar words too.
Moutons
said a printed notice over the sheep pens; that had been the third word in the
vocabulaire
on page 18 of Miss Woods's book. It still surprised her that all these words in all those lists were in daily use here—and, more than that, were actually the words people preferred to use. At an emotional level, she still found that hard to accept.

  One notice, alongside
moutons,
she did not understand. She nudged John and pointed to the notices in turn. "Horses," she said. "Cattle. Sheep. I've got those. But what's
Louerie d'Ouvriers?
There's no animals there."

  He smiled. "Look harder."

  She obeyed. "No," she repeated. "I can't see any. Too many labourers in the way."

  He laughed then. "That's it," he said. "There's where you buy your workmen."

  She looked again at the labourers, aghast. "Like a hiring fair in a cattle market?" she said. "That's slavery."

  "Ayoop!" John said. "There's a man of mine among 'em. The big fella." He nodded toward a giant of a man in a leather jerkin and moleskin trousers who stood morosely, a little apart from the rest. "Jack Duquesne."

  The diligence pulled to a halt at the edge of the square, next to the workers' market. Its arrival caused a minor stir as people ran forward to put blocks under the wheels, and the driver jumped down to unhitch the horses and lead them away. Pie vendors and drink sellers pressed around. "I'll get something we may eat upon the train," John said as soon as the ladder was brought and they had been helped down. But he brushed the sellers aside and went straight to the tall man in the workers' market. Nora followed.

  The man still stood as he had when John first saw him, his eyes fixed on nothing. There was something at once pathetic and menacing in his stance.
I'd
be desperate before I employed you,
Nora thought, looking him up and down.

"Jacques!" John called, only three paces from the fellow.

  Like a marionette he came untidily and unconvincingly to life; only when he saw—or his wild eyes focussed on—John did he seem to fall together. "Lord Jean!" He gave a short laugh and stretched forth a hand and arm bigger even than John's; when he stood straight he was inches taller than John too. Like many Normans, he had raven-black hair and intense blue eyes. His strange smile bared more of his lower teeth than his upper ones. He had a bulldog jaw and knuckles like oak galls.
"'Pechez, 'pechez,"
he quoted and laughed again.

  But the merriment soon vanished from his eyes; its passing left his face creased as if at the strain of muscles long unused.

  "What is it, Jack?" John asked. He turned his shoulder on Nora and spoke softly in French.

  She put a finger on his backbone and pushed. "Oh yes!" she laughed.

  But he shrugged her off impatiently and continued to stare at Jacques, who said something in French of which Nora caught only the first and last words—my wife and Corporal Forbes. And though he said it more like "Caporal Forbus," it was enough to make her solemn too, for Corporal Forbes was the navvy's name for
Cholera morbus—
plain cholera.

  She looked at his face more intently then, especially at his eyes, bloodshot with weeping or drink or both. John said something that made him faintly smile. It restored a dignity his face had lacked until then; at once it seemed doubly monstrous that he and his fellows should be standing there next to the sheep and cattle, part of the same market. John pointed to the diligence and then vaguely northward. Jacques nodded and, stepping out of the hiring pen, walked briskly over to the vehicle. The rank smell of him enveloped Nora as he gave her a respectful bow and passed by; it was the odour of hot, rotting leather mingled with the gluepot stink of debauchery.

  Oooh! she mimed to John when the man had passed. He smiled grimly and looked at the ungloved hand Jacques had shaken. "You buy some bread and cheese and cider," he said.

  "Aye. Lend us your French!" she taunted.

  John nodded at Jacques. "His wife…" he began.

  "I caught that," she said. "Cholera."

  He looked at her with surprised respect. "You'll do," he said. "Trouble is he got drunk and went wild."

  "So unlike a navvy," she said.

  "On our working." John did not share her amusement. "At Yvetot. Broke two trucks, lamed a horse, and hit Hogan. We could overlook the other two, but you can't have a man hit the boss. I'll have to talk to Hogan, see how bad it was."

  "What's he at?" Nora asked.

  The man had stripped to his waist and was folding his leather jerkin to make a shoulder pad. He stood against the diligence while the conductor and another lowered Nora's trunk down onto him.

  "He'll never carry that!" she said.