“How long have you been here?” I asked.
He stared hard at me from the solid glass windows through which he observed the world; frowning as if some important canon of decency had already been violated by my ineptitude: and that this solecism, whatever it was, grieved rather than surprised him. Then he said: “You know we are supposed to talk French here, Jenkins.”
It was hard to guess how best to reply to this admonition. To say: “Out, Widmerpool,” would sound silly, even a trifle flippant; on the other hand, to answer in English would be to aggravate my incorrect employment of the language; and might at the same time give the appearance of trying to increase the temptation for Widmerpool to relapse into his native tongue, with which my arrival now threatened to compromise him. In spite of his insignificance at school, I still felt that he might possess claims to that kind of outward deference one would pay to the opinion of a boy higher up in the house, even when there was no other reason specially to respect his views. In any case the sensation of nausea from which I had once more begun to suffer seemed to be increasing in volume, adding to the difficulty of taking quick decisions in so complicated a question of the use of language. After a long pause, during which he appeared to be thinking things over, Widmerpool spoke again.
“It would probably be simpler,” he said, “if I showed you round first of all in English. Then we can talk French for the rest of the time you are here.”
“All right.”
“But tell me in the first place how you knew of La Grenadière?”
I explained about Commandant Leroy and my father. Widmerpool seemed disappointed at this answer. I added that my parents had thought the terms very reasonable. Widmerpool said: “My mother has always loved Touraine since she visited this country as a girl. And, of course, as you know, the best French is spoken in this part of France.”
I said I had heard a Frenchman question that opinion; but Widmerpool swept this doubt aside, and continued: “My mother was always determined that I should perfect my French among the chateaux of the Loire. She made inquiries and decided that Madame Leroy’s house was far the best of the several establishments for paying-guests that exist in the neighbourhood. Far the best.”
Widmerpool sounded quite challenging; and I agreed that I had always heard well of the Leroys and their house. However, he would not allow that there was much to be said for the Commandant: Madame, on the other hand, he much admired. He said: “I will take you round the garden first, and introduce you.”
“No, for Heaven’s sake — Madame Leroy has already done that.”
Widmerpool looked offended at this speech, and seemed uncertain what should be the next move. He temporised by asking: “What sort of a journey did you have?”
“Hot.”
“You look a bit green.”
“Let’s go into the house.”
“Did you have a change,” he said. “I came straight through by a clever piece of railway management on my part.”
“Where can I be sick?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where can I be sick?”
At length he understood; and soon after this, with many expressions of sympathy from Madame Leroy, and some practical help from Rosalie, who unbent considerably now that I was established as a member of the household — and an indisposed one — I retired to bed: lying for a long time in a state of coma, thinking about Widmerpool and the other people in the garden. The images of Jean Templer and Suzette hovered in the shadows of the room, until they merged into one person as sleep descended.
*
How all the inhabitants of La Grenadière were accommodated in a house of that size was a social and mathematical problem, so far as I was concerned, never satisfactorily elucidated during my stay there. I could only assume that there were more bedrooms than passage doors on the upper storeys, and that these rooms led one from another. The dining-room was on the left of the main entrance: the kitchen on the right. In the sunless and fetid segment between these two rooms, Rosalie presided during meals, eating her own portion from a console table that stood on one side of the hall, facing a massive buhl cabinet on the other: the glass doors of this cabinet revealed the ragged spines of a collection of paper-backed novels. This segregation in the hall symbolised Rosalie’s footing in the house, by imposing physical separation from her employers on the one hand, and, on the other, from Marthe, a girl of eighteen, showing signs of suffering from goitre, who did the cooking: and did it uncommonly well.
Two dogs — Charley and Bum — shared with Rosalie her pitchy vestibule: a state of perpetual war existing between the three of them. Charley was so named on account of the really astonishing presumption that he looked like an English dog: whereas his unnaturally long brown body, short black legs, and white curly tail, made it almost questionable whether he was indeed a dog at all, and not a survival of a low, and now forgotten, form of prehistoric life. Bum, a more conventional animal, was a white wire-haired terrier. He carried his name engraved on a wide leather collar studded with brass hob-nails. Every Monday he was placed on a table in the garden, and Madame Leroy would bathe him, until his crisp coat looked as if it were woven from a glistening thread of white pipe-cleaners. Charley was never washed, and resenting this attention to his fellow, would on this account pick a quarrel with Bum every seven days. Rosalie was for ever tripping over the dogs in the passage, and cursing them: the dogs squabbling with each other and with Rosalie: at times even stealing food from her plate when she was handing on the next course into the dining-room: where we all sat at a large round table that nearly filled the room.
Most of the talking at meals was done by Madame Dubuisson, Berthe and Paul-Marie, the last of whom was said, by almost everyone who referred to him, to be unusually full of esprit for his age: though I was also warned that his remarks were sometimes judged to be “un peu shocking.” When he spoke, his black eyebrows used to arch, and then shoot together, and a stream of words would pour out, sending Madame Dubuisson and Berthe, especially, into fits of laughter at his sallies. These sometimes caused Madame Leroy to shake her head in mild reprovaclass="underline" though Madame Leroy herself would often smile admiringly at the ease with which Paul-Marie succeeded in hitting off life’s paradoxical situations: especially those connected with the relations of the sexes. For my own part I understood only a small proportion of Paul-Marie’s jokes on account of the speed with which he spat out his sentences, and also because of his colloquial manner of expressing himself; but I gathered their general import, which was to the effect that women, owing to their cunning ways, were to be approached with caution. Whether or not they were good jokes I am now in no position to say. I imagine that they belonged, on the whole, to that immense aggregation of synthetic humour on this subject that serves the French pretty well, being adapted to most cases that arise. Indeed, Paul-Marie’s synthetic jokes might perhaps be compared with Uncle Giles’s synthetic scepticism, both employable for many common situations. Jean- Népomucène was much quieter. With heavy-lidded eyes, he used to watch his brother, and give a short, very grown-up laugh at appropriate moments. Most of the time at table Jean- Népomucène’s manner was absent, suggesting that his mind was engaged on preoccupations of his own, perhaps of a similar order to his brother’s reflections, but more gravely considered. Berthe and Madame Dubuisson would sometimes try and tease him about his silences, saying: “Ah, Jean-Népomucène, il est bavard lui,” in this way provoking a verbal attack from Paul-Marie, which usually required their combined forces to beat off.