‘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.
At the landing stage the old ladies rushed away like clumsy sparrows towards the palace and the park, where Jean stretched his legs for a moment before going back to the bank of the Thames. Young men were launching sharp, arrow-shaped skiffs with varnished hulls. Pale-skinned, with red or blond hair, they rowed with an application and seriousness that Jean admired. The blades of their oars dipped without a splash into the dark water and their boats, as if seized by sudden inspiration, flew over the still surface of the river. The cox’s sharp instructions paced the exertions of the rowers, upright and tense like machines, and Jean promised himself that one day he would try rowing, a noble sport that had sculpted fine athletes and imparted to generations a sense of teamwork. It was not a popular sport in France, probably because, as Albert liked to say in his best flights of philosophical fancy, the French were a bunch of dirty individualists who only thought about getting ahead. Besides, rowing’s joys were best experienced on expanses of calm water that reflected nature arranged by man, parks of beech and cedar that sloped down to drink at river and lake, country houses whose images wobbled, vanished and reformed in the passing of motor cruisers and barges.
The boat left again at two o’clock. Jean was first on board, followed by the old ladies, who fell on the tea urn to refill their cups with pungent, scalding tea, and the crew was about to cast off when the flamboyant mulatto rushed up, dragging by the hand her companion in the Borsalino, who was breathless, his clothes half undone. They settled themselves back on the bench at the stern, giggling like children, and then the woman put her hand in her coat pocket and pulled out a pair of bluish lace knickers that she put back on without ceremony. Which bush had they been playing behind? The scene left Jean mystified, and led his thoughts back to the games of Antoinette, to the sweet ecstasies of their incomplete pleasures and the happy silence that followed. There must, then, be two sorts of love, one horrid, rude and immodest, and the other secret, sparking off dreams and gentle pleasures.
Salah was waiting at the landing stage. Jean stepped ashore behind the lustful pair and was astonished to hear Salah say a curt ‘Good evening’ to the mulatto, who immediately stopped laughing and dragged her companion away. The old ladies collected their bags of needlepoint and baskets of food and trotted to a waiting bus.
‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ Salah asked.
‘Enjoy? No, not really. Well, I suppose I saw some things. Do you know that lady?’
‘Slightly. Jamaican, I believe.’
Jean told him the story of the knickers discovered in her coat pocket and replaced without fuss. Salah’s stern expression cracked and he laughed.
‘A strange girl,’ he said. ‘Not to be recommended. You definitely are going to leave with a curious idea of London … I regret now that I let you go off for the whole day. Madame came to lunch. She was hoping to see you.’
‘I’ll see her tonight.’
‘I’m afraid she has just driven away in her Bentley again. She’s spending the weekend with some friends in Kent. I also have to tell you something that may annoy you … She arrived with three friends, a poet, a painter, and the sculptor John Dudley. Mr Dudley is very bizarre. He makes extravagant sculptures from all sorts of things: he will weld an old coffee-maker to an iron, a saucepan on top of a clock, whatever. Apparently it sells. Art lovers can’t get enough of his work. Anyway, when he saw your bicycle in the hall he decided that it was a sublime object and that he would construct a masterpiece from it by crushing it in his hydraulic press. Madame allowed him to take it away …’
‘What?’ Jean exclaimed, his eyes full of tears.
‘Madame asked me to buy you another one tomorrow morning.’
‘Oh Salah, it’s impossible. My bike … you don’t know how much I love it. Let’s go and get it back from this man straight away …’
‘I’m afraid the damage will already be done.’
Tears rolled down Jean’s cheeks. He could have faced almost anything, but not some mad sculptor crushing the bicycle that he cherished above everything else, his finest possession, a perfect bicycle, such as he had never known before and would never know again.
‘Don’t cry, for goodness’ sake! You’re a man, and tomorrow I’m going to take you to buy another one.’
‘An English bike, Salah! You must be joking! The English have never made a proper racing bike. They ride around on bikes that date back to Louis XIV.’
‘Well, look, I’ve got the money, I’ll give it to you and you can buy yourself another one in France.’