Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘It’s the rush hour,’ he said, ‘we shall get stuck in the traffic. I think we had better postpone your ride until tomorrow, particularly as I should be at home soon in case the prince calls me to go and fetch him.’

Jean was disappointed, even though it was only a postponement. He would have liked to ride in London, where he had so far seen no other bicycles, squeezing between the hearse-like taxis and the red buses boasting the virtues of chicken stock and toothpaste. Salah appeared preoccupied.

‘I’m sorry I interrupted your lesson with Madame Germaine,’ Jean said. ‘But she doesn’t really look like a teacher. Is it true that she’s very strict?’

‘Oh … yes, in a way, but not with me. She knows how to be very tolerant too. With her English customers she uses the strong method. She has a lot of customers … I mean students.’

Jean remembered the whip and chains. How did she deal with the bad students exactly? What a strange country. He remembered having read in a book somewhere that there was still corporal punishment in English schools. Madame Germaine must have adapted her teaching methods to the English style … Salah was driving his Hispano-Suiza with an absolute dignity and certainty that he would dominate the evening crowds. He cut off a black Rolls-Royce as if it were a donkey-cart. They crossed Hyde Park as the shadows were lengthening and drove down Sloane Street to the Kings Road. It was pleasant to come back to a district lightened by the colours of spring, to women who did not make themselves up outrageously, to a complete absence of clergymen with red lips and staring eyes.

Baptiste opened the door, and Salah took the bicycle out of the boot and replaced it in the hall.

‘Did Monsieur have a good ride?’ the butler asked.

‘Unfortunately not. There were too many cars. I think I’ll go tomorrow, early in the morning, and do a circuit of Hyde Park, otherwise I’ll start losing my fitness.’

‘Madame telephoned. She deeply regrets that she is unable to come this evening, but she will do her best to be here to meet Monsieur before he leaves.’

It might have struck the reader that Baptiste was exaggerating in his unctuous use of the third person. Jean himself wondered whether the florid-cheeked, grey-whiskered butler, who seemed to be chewing his tongue all the time, was not having a joke at his expense, as the son of a gardener and housekeeper. The feeling that this sententious dogsbody was almost certainly looking down his nose at him made Jean uncomfortable. He would have liked to make Baptiste understand that he was not quite as pitiful as he looked, despite his haversack and short-sleeved shirts with their threadbare collars, and a sweater with its elbows darned by Jeanne. Had he not been to tea at châteaux where this snobbish flunkey would only have been invited to pass the petits fours? But it would be humiliating to tell him so. Jean learnt that day to hide his ill humour by going along with other people’s view of him as something he was not. Or perhaps was, for after all a son of Jeanne and Albert was no better than a Baptiste. He was not yet aware of the infallible intuition among servants that makes them able to detect instantly a person displaced into a milieu which is not their own. Let us remember that Jean was not so well-read at thirteen, and that the revelation would dawn on him later, when he came to read Swift’s Directions to Servants and learn by heart his advice to those employees: ‘Be not proud in prosperity. You have heard that fortune turns on a wheel; if you have a good place, you are at the top of the wheel. Remember how often you have been stripped and kicked out of doors; your wages are taken up beforehand and spent in translated red-heeled shoes, second-hand toupées, and repaired lace ruffles, besides a swingeing debt to the alewife and the brandy-shop.’

So Jean had dinner alone, as he had the previous evening, served by Baptiste, whose affected respect came to feel increasingly insulting. Geneviève did not telephone, and he said to himself that she must be an odd person, too indulged by life or, more specifically, by the prince. He promised himself that he would question Salah about the latter. Behind a mask of kindness and generosity, the prince concealed his true self with all the majesty of his person. You could only guess at what he was really like through the devotion he inspired in Salah and the luxury he provided for Geneviève. Jean would have liked to thank him in person for the postal orders that had helped him to buy his red bicycle, but would the prince even remember sending them?

The next morning a new maid pushed the trolley containing his breakfast into his bedroom,

‘You’re not Mary!’ he said, disappointed.

‘No. I am María.’

She spoke French with what Jean supposed to be a strong Spanish accent. Where Mary was blonde and fresh as a strawberry, María was black-haired with a dark complexion and sultry expression. In an entirely different way she was also very nice to look at. Knowing that she would have to draw the curtain, as Mary had, he eyed her legs, which were a bit too wiry and muscled although certainly pretty, even though on that point he might not yet have very well-formed ideas or a reliable definition of female beauty. María was more familiar than Mary, and sat down on the end of his bed.

‘So, are you enjoyin’ yourself in London?’ she asked, revealing a set of fine teeth.

‘Very much, Mademoiselle.’

She burst out laughing.

‘You mus’ no’ say Mademoiselle, you mus’ say: María. I am the maid.’

It should perhaps be pointed out that the low-paid slovens lately taken on at La Sauveté by Marie-Thérèse du Courseau had none of the tantalising quality possessed by Mary and María, with their lipstick and varnished nails. (Marie-Thérèse had put a stop to the Caribbean girls of the past; Jean barely remembered the last pair, who had been nowhere near as pretty as Joséphine Roudou and Victoire Sanpeur.)

‘What are you thinkin’ about?’

‘That you’re very pretty for a maid.’

‘Well, bless me!’

She stood up, did a complete turn on tiptoes and looked at Jean with knitted eyebrows.

‘You are startin’ pretty young!’

As soon as he had finished breakfast, Jean went down to the hall. His cherished bicycle had not moved, but Salah appeared, his cap in his hand.

‘First we’re going to Westminster Abbey, and then we’ll see.’

‘What about my bike?’

‘Let’s leave it here. Baptiste will look after it. Where we’re going is not very good for bicycles.’

Regretfully Jean agreed to leave his bicycle behind. The Hispano-Suiza was waiting at the kerb, so familiar now that it no longer impressed him. At Westminster he felt cold. He preferred the church at Grangeville, with its smells of candles and incense and the sound of the abbé’s big feet plodding between the pews. The visit did not last long.

‘Now what would you like to see?’ Salah asked.

‘I don’t know. Where do those boats go to?’

Large boats were taking on lines of passengers at Westminster Bridge.

‘To Hampton Court. It’s a long way. You get there in time for lunch, and you come back in the late afternoon.’

‘Actually I’d really like to go for a boat ride on the Thames.’

Salah was very reluctant, and Jean had to persuade him that it was safe to go on his own. It was not every day that one encountered lecherous clergymen.

‘If anything happened to you, Madame would never forgive me.’

‘On the telephone she told me herself that I should go to Hampton Court. Nothing will happen to me. Go and have a French lesson.’

Salah smiled and allowed himself to be convinced. On the boat at first Jean saw only old ladies in frilly dresses, clutching cups of milky tea. He counted three three-cornered hats and a number of shoes with buckles. The first part of the trip, past docks and wharfs, was gloomy, but the old ladies expressed themselves delighted. They found it ‘charming’. The truth was that they were short-sighted and not actually looking at anything, but entirely taken up with refilling their teacups from the urn that was provided. Fortunately Jean found an unusual couple to distract him at the boat’s stern: a short, stocky, bald man who had a jaw like Mussolini’s and a Borsalino jammed on his head was literally licking the face of a mulatto woman with bleached and not very well straightened hair. Everyone seemed to be ignoring the woman’s antics as she tittered and squirmed, crossing and uncrossing pretty legs sheathed in fishnet stockings, and those of the man, who was getting increasingly impatient. Their Anglo-Italian pidgin seemed to be delighting both of them. Jean watched them, fascinated, until the man caught him looking and glared furiously. The boat slid on up the black, slack river between banks occupied by factories and empty spaces. Just before Hampton Court the countryside finally appeared, soft and green and rolling, dotted with pretty houses with slate roofs and surrounded by gardens in bloom. He imagined them inhabited by army officers with ruddy cheeks, children in velvet breeches, and pretty tennis players. The old ladies on board, stimulated by their innumerable cups of tea, waved enthusiastically at everyone they saw. Having found the docks charming, they had no words left to admire the English countryside. The man with the Borsalino went on licking his mulatto, who was squirming like a dog on heat; her pointed tongue looked as if it had been dipped in raspberry jam.