‘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.