'Could you drive a car like that?' he asked gently.
'Mais oui - c'est facile, ça' French came more easily to this little boy than English. 'You climb up in the seat and steer with the wheel.'
'But could you start it?'
'You just push the button, et elle va. That's the 'lectric starter.' He pointed to the knob.
'That's right. But it would be a very big car for you to manage.'
The child said: 'Big cars are easier to drive than little ones. Have you got a car?'
Howard shook his head. 'Not now. I used to have one.'
'What son was it?'
The old man looked down helplessly. 'I really forget,' he said. 'I think it was a Standard.'
Ronald looked up at him, incredulous. 'Don't you remember?'
But Howard couldn't.
The other child was Sheila, just five years old. Her drawings littered the floor of the salon; for the moment her life was filled with a passion for coloured chalks. Once as Howard came downstairs he found her sitting in a heap on the landing at a turn of the staircase, drawing industriously on the fly-leaf of a book. The first tread of the flight served as a desk.
He stooped down by her. 'What are you drawing?'
She did not answer.
'Won't you show me?' he said. And then: 'The chalks are lovely colours.'
He knelt down rheumatically on one knee. 'It looks like a lady.'
She looked up at him. 'Lady with a dog,' she said.
'Where's the dog?' He looked at the smudged pastel streaks.
She was silent. 'Shall I draw the dog, walking behind on a lead?' he said.
She nodded vigorously. Howard bent to his task, his knees aching. But his hand had lost whatever cunning it might once have had, and his dog became a pig.
Sheila said: 'Ladies don't take pigs for a walk.'
His ready wit had not deserted the solicitor. 'This one did,' he said. 'This is the little pig that went to market.'
The child pondered this. 'Draw the little pig that stayed at home,' she said, 'and the little piggy eating roast beef.' But Howard's knees would stand no more of it. He stumbled to his feet. 'I'll do that for you tomorrow.'
It was only at that stage he realised that his picture of the lady leading a pig embellished the fly-leaf of A Child's Life of Jesus.
Next day after déjeuner she was waiting for him in the hall. 'Mummy said I might ask you if you wanted a sweet.' She held up a grubby paper bag with a sticky mass in the bottom.
Howard said gravely: Thank you very much.' He fumbled in the bag and picked out a morsel which he put into his mouth. Thank you, Sheila.'
She turned, and ran from him through the estaminet into the big kitchen of the inn. He heard her chattering in there in fluent French to Madam Lucard as she offered her sweets.
He turned, and Mrs Cavanagh was on the stairs. The old man wiped his fingers furtively on the handkerchief in his pocket. They speak French beautifully,' he said.
She smiled. They do, don't they? The little school they go to is French-speaking, of course.'
He said: 'They just picked it up, I suppose?'
'Oh yes. We didn't have to teach it to them.'
He got to know the children slightly after that and passed the time of day with them whenever he met them alone; on their side they said: 'Good morning, Mr Howard,' as if it was a lesson that they had been taught - which indeed it was. He would have liked to get to know them better, but he was shy, with the diffidence of age. He used to sit and watch them playing in the garden underneath the pine-trees sometimes, mysterious games that he would have liked to have known about, that touched dim chords of memory sixty years back. He did have one success with them, however.
As the sun grew warmer and the grass drier he took to sitting out in the garden after déjeuner for half an hour, in a deck-chair. He was sitting so one day while the children played among the trees. He watched them covertly. It seemed that they wanted to play a game they called attention which demanded a whistle, and they had no whistle.
The little boy said: 'I can whistle with my mouth,' and proceeded to demonstrate the art.
His sister pursed up her immature lips and produced only a wet splutter. From his deck-chair the old man spoke up suddenly.
'I'll make you a whistle, if you like,' he said.
They were silent, staring at him doubtfully. 'Would you like me to make you a whistle?' he enquired.
'When?' asked Ronald.
'Now. I'll make you one out of a bit of that tree.' He nodded to a hazel bush.
They stared at him, incredulous. He got up from his chair and cut a twig the thickness of his little finger from the bush. 'Like this.'
He sat down again, and began to fashion a whistle with the pen-knife that he kept for scraping out his pipe. It was a trick that he had practised throughout his life, for John first and then for Enid when they had been children, more recently for little Martin Costello. The Cavanagh children stood by him watching his slow, wrinkled fingers as they worked; in their faces incredulity melted into interest. He stripped the bark from the twig, cut deftly with the little knife, and bound the bark back into place. He put it to his lips, and it gave out a shrill note.
They were delighted, and he gave it to the little girl, 'You can whistle with your mouth,' he said to Ronald, 'but she can't.'
'Will you make me one tomorrow?'
'All right, I'll make you one tomorrow.' They went off together, and whistled all over the hotel and through the village, till the bark crushed beneath the grip of a hot hand. But the whistle was still good for taking to bed, together with a Teddy and a doll called Melanic.
'It was so very kind of you to make that whistle for the children,' Mrs Cavanagh said that night, over coffee. 'They were simply thrilled with it.'
'Children always like a whistle, especially if they see it made,' the old man said. It was one of the basic truths that he had learned in a long life, and he stated it simply.
'They told me how quickly you made it,' she said. 'You must have made a great many.'
'Yes,' he said, 'I've made a good many whistles in my time.' He fell into a reverie, thinking of all the whistles he had made for John and Enid, so many years ago, in the quiet garden of the house at Exeter. Enid who had grown up and married and gone to live in the United States. John, who had grown up and gone into the Air Force. John.
He forced his mind back to the present. 'I'm glad they liked it,' he said. 'I promised Ronald that I'd make him one tomorrow.'
Tomorrow was the tenth of May. As the old man sat in his deck-chair beneath the trees carving a whistle for Ronald, German troops were pouring into Holland, beating down the Dutch Army. The Dutch Air Force was flinging its full strength of forty fighting planes against the Luftwaffe. A thousand traitors leapt into activity; all through the day the parachutists dropped from the sky. In Cidoton the only radio happened to be switched off, and so Howard whittled at his hazel twig in peace.
It did not break his peace much when they switched it on. In Cidoton the war seemed very far away; with Switzerland to insulate them from the Germans the village was able to view the war dispassionately. Belgium was being invaded again, as in the last war; the sale Boche! This time Holland, too, was in it; so many more to fight on the side of France. Perhaps they would not penetrate into France at all this time, with Holland to be conquered and assimilated first.