"Can I be of assistance?" Roche hastened to offer his own expertise, to impress her.
"Dear David—thank you—but no, I'm doing fine. They don't understand a word I say, but they're so sweet and helpful ..."
Lexy flashed a dazzling smile at the little Frenchman, who glowed appreciation back up at her from shoulder level, oblivious of the sour expression on the face of Madame, his wife, in the background.
"I've just got to buy the wine—" Lexy transferred a piece of the smile to Roche, exerting the same sexual force in his direction unconsciously "—you can advise me there. It's all just red or white, sweet or dry, to me. Father's tried to teach me what's what, but ever since I opened a bottle of his Chateau Something-Somewhere for an old boyfriend of Mother's when we were having bangers-and-mash he gets all tight-lipped and upstream and troutish when we talk about wine. All I've managed to grasp is the shape of the bottles—
like that's claret, and the tall brown ones are hock and the dummy5
green ones are Moselle—or the other way round, maybe—and I can tell a shampers bottle of course . . . we've had a bottle of that before, and I quite liked it—" she pointed at the most expensive champagne on the shelf "—and this dear little man recommended it, too."
Roche shot a quick jaundiced glance at the dear little man, whose gallantry was evidently firmly based in avarice, and the dear little man managed an infinitesimal man-to-man shrug, not without difficulty, but also with a nuance of frank man-to-man envy, transmitting the encoded message if all this gorgeous jeune milady anglaise is yours, m'sieur, and I have a living to make and a cold, hard bed in which to sleep, is there not room to make a small sacrifice to your good fortune, eh?
"What are we eating tonight?" he compromised.
"Darling—it's my turn to cook ... so we're having bacon and eggs and mushrooms and bags of pommes frites, and bread and oodles of butter—the famous 'Lexy Special', though it isn't really a Lexy Special without sausages, but I can't get proper sausages here, not English sausages—so what ought we to drink with that, David?"
The question threw Roche utterly. The Lexy Special sounded more like a cross between breakfast and high tea, in the life-style of the lower middle-Class Mr and Mrs Douglas Roche, deceased, than that of Lady Alexandra Perowne, daughter of
—if she was a 'Lady' it had to be the Earl of Somewhere, at the least; and the proper beverage at those Roche meals was dummy5
tea, as supplied by the Co-operative Wholesale Society, not vintage Moët et Chandon.
"Father always says you can drink shampers with anything,"
said Lexy helpfully, pointing to the champagne again, "even with breakfast."
Well, that was close to the mark in this case, thought Roche.
And who was he to go against the advice of the Earl of Somewhere? And especially when Her Majesty was going to pay?
"Let's have that, then," he nodded quickly at her. "But only if you let me buy it for you."
"No, David!" She waved negatively at him. "Besides, I've got to stock up for several days, and—" her eyes left him momentarily, returning with a different expression in them
"— oh golly!"
"Bonjour, m'sieur-dame?"
From the way the dear little man quailed and strove to de-materialise himself, Roche knew who was speaking before he turned towards the speaker.
"Qu'est-ce que vous désirez?" Madame embraced them both with her disapproval, even while directing her question like a spear-thrust at Lexy.
"Madame . . ." Lexy didn't quail, but she did swallow nervously. "Yes . . . well now . . ."
Roche saw instinctively where both honour and duty lay, and self-interest too. Up to now he had hardly distinguished dummy5
himself, but here was a chance of demonstrating a bit of the old cavalry é lan which Lexy apparently admired so much.
"Bonjour, madame," he said, drawing her attention deliberately. For a moment, as she appraised him frankly, he felt more like an infantryman who had unwisely left the safety of his trench than a dashing cavalryman answering the trumpet-call to glory. But the euphoria of his victory over the Voice on the Telephone encouraged him to single combat.
She was all of six inches taller than her husband, almost to his own eye-level, and once upon a time she'd been a beauty, with Meriel Stephanides' colouring in Lexy's measurements.
Imagining away the lines and the wrinkles, and the sag of sallow skin which had once been firm and creamy, Roche wondered what had yoked her to the dried-up shrimp at his back—had it been simple peasant avarice, her beauty in exchange for his money? Or had her boy marched away to Verdun and the Chemin des Dames forty years ago, with all the other likely lads, to Mort Homme and Fort Douaumont, and when he didn't come back, it didn't matter?
Well, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that she wasn't giving him her sour look now, that she was thawing under his appraisal, even that they were exchanging thoughts out of time—might-have-beens in which memory and imagination out-voted the years.
"M'sieur?" She cracked an almost-smile, showing yellow teeth, and not too many of them.
"Madame—" he plunged into his best idiomatic French, the dummy5
words coming easily, and then more easily still, to sketch what he surmised were Lexy's requirements, only omitting that it was for bacon-and-eggs that the champagne was needed.
"Ah ..." she nodded, her eyes ranging over the bottles, then coming back to him, caressing him.
The dried-up shrimp, emboldened by the change in her, made a suggestion, indicating Lexy's choice, and was instantly silenced with a frozen glance.
—That wine was not good, not of the best. That wine (at two-thirds of the price) was better . . .
Roche ordered a dozen bottles. Madame was kind to advise him— perhaps she could recommend a claret? And (a wine for Lexy—a seducer's vintage?) a white wine, even a sweet wine?
—M'sieur speaks French like a Frenchman! And, by the accent, from Paris . . . But M'sieur is an Englishman? And en vacances?
Roche warmed to his task. M'sieur was not on holiday, but on leave. M'sieur was of the British Army, with the honour of serving with the French Army—serving in Paris, Madame's ear did not deceive her—but also a student of French history, of which there was so much hereabouts, in the most beautiful region of France—
(M'sieur was also aware of Lexy, wide-eyed beside him, and that Madame was also aware of Lexy.)
dummy5
—and, as an old comrade of M'sieur Le Due, Milady Alexandra's father, as he was passing through, it had been his pleasure to call on Milady Alexandra, of course . . .
(Bandying words with a shopkeeper's wife, such words, was hardly necessary. But it was all good practice, and it was clearly impressing Milady Alexandra mightily.) (And, when Madame had digested it, and had acknowledged Milady with a little nod, it impressed Milady even more; because, if the nod was not yet quite approving, it was no longer altogether disapproving, and that was undeniably impressive.)
(It never failed, thought Roche with a mixture of cynicism and bleak self-knowledge, and satisfaction: the French were so accustomed to their contempt of the average Englishman for his halting use of their wonderful language that they were disarmed and flattered into helpfulness by any stray anglais who could distinguish a subjunctive from a hole in the road—
the women no less than the men, and perhaps even more so.)