They are in good circumstances, you understand, Aristide is a careful man, my father used to say. He breeds horses a little, too, for our army. Marie was Queen of Beauty at the Landerneau Fete one year. It was then that Jean Henri first met her.'
He said: 'She must have been a very pretty girl.'
'She was lovely,' Nicole said. 'That was when I was little - over ten years ago. She is still beautiful.'
The train ground on in the hot sunlight, stopping now and again at stations and frequently in between. They gave the children dejeuner of bread and sausage with a little lemonade. That kept them amused and occupied for a time, but they were restless and bored.
Ronnie said: 'I do wish we could go and bathe.'
Sheila echoed: 'May we bathe, Monsieur Howard?'
He said: 'We can't bathe, while we're in the train. Later on, perhaps. Run along out into the corridor; it's cooler there.'
He turned to Nicole. They're thinking of a time three days ago - or four was it? - just before we met the Air Force men. I let them have a bathe in a stream.'
'It was lovely,' said Ronnie. 'Ever so cool and nice.' He turned and ran with his sister out into the corridor followed by Willem.
Nicole said: 'The English are great swimmers, are they not, monsieur? Even the little ones think of nothing else.'
He had not thought about his country in that way: 'Are we?' he said. 'Is that how we appear?'
She shrugged her shoulders,. 'I do not know so many English people,' she said frankly. 'But John - he liked more than anything for us to go bathing.'
He smiled. 'John was a very good swimmer,' he said reminiscently. 'He was very fond of it.'
She said: 'He was very, very naughty, Monsieur Howard.
He would not do any of the things that one should do when one visits Paris for the first time. I had prepared so carefully for his visit - yes, I had arranged for each day the things that we would do. On the first day of all I had planned to go to the Louvre, but imagine it - he was not interested. Not at all.'
The old man smiled again. 'He never was one for museums, much,' he said.
She said: 'That may be correct in England, monsieur, but in Paris one should see the things that Paris has to show. It was very embarrassing, I assure you. I had arranged that he should see the Louvre, and the Trocadero, and for a contrast the Musee de 1'Homme, and the museum at Cluny, and I had a list of galleries of modern art that I would show him. And he never saw any of it at all!'
'I'm sorry about that,' said Howard. There seemed nothing else to say. 'What did you do?'
She said: 'We went bathing several times, at the Piscine Molitor in Auteuil. It was very hot weather, sunny all the time. I could not get him into one museum - not one! He was very, very naughty.'
'I expect that was very pleasant, though,' he said.
She smiled. 'It was not what I had arranged,' she said. 'I had not even got a costume. We had to go together, John and I, to buy a bathing-costume. Never have I done a thing like that before. It was a good thing I had said that we would meet in Paris, not in Chartres. In France there are conventions, Monsieur Howard, you understand.'
'I know,' he said. 'John never worried much about those. Did he get you a nice bathing-dress?'
She smiled: 'It was very beautiful,' she said. 'An American one, very chic, in silver and green. It was so pretty that it was a pleasure to be seen in it.'
'Well,' he said. 'You couldn't have worn that in a museum.'
She stared at him, nonplussed. 'But no...' And then she laughed. 'It would be quite ridiculous, that.' She smiled again at the thought. 'Monsieur, you say absurd things, just the same as John.'
It was four o'clock when the train pulled into the little station of Landerneau. They tumbled out of the carriage with relief, Nicole lifting each child down on to the platform except Ronnie, who insisted on getting down himself. They fetched the pram from the baggage-car and put the remainder of their lunch in it, with the kitten.
There was no guard at the guichet and they passed through into the town.
Landerneau is a little town of six or seven thousand people, a sleepy little place on a tidal river running to the Rade de Brest. It is built of grey stone, set in a rolling country dotted round with little woods; it reminded Howard of the Yorkshire wolds. The air, which had been hot and stuffy in the railway carriage, now seemed fresh and sweet, with a faint savour suggesting that the sea was not so very far away.
The town was sparsely held by Germans. Their lorries were parked in the square beneath the plane- trees by the river, but there were few of them to be seen. Those that were in evidence seemed ill at ease, anxious to placate the curiosity of a population which they knew to be pro-English. Their behaviour was most studiously correct. The few soldiers in the streets were grey faced and tired looking, wandering round in twos and threes and staring listlessly at the strange sights. One thing was very noticeable; they never seemed to laugh..
Unchallenged, Howard and Nicole walkedxhrough the town and out into the country beyond, on the road that led towards the south. They went slowly for the sake of the children; the old man was accustomed now to the slow pace that they could manage. The road was empty and they straggled all over it. It led up on to the open wold.
Rose and Willem were allowed to take their shoes off and go barefoot, rather to the disapproval of Nicole. 'I do not think that that is in the part,' she said. 'The class which we represent would not do that.'
The old man said: 'There's nobody to see.'
She agreed that it did not matter much, and they went sauntering on, Willem pushing the pram with Pierre. Ahead of them three aircraft crossed the sky in steady, purposeful flight towards the west, flying at about two thousand feet.
The sight woke memories in Rose. 'M'sieur,' she cried. 'Three aeroplanes - look! Quick, let us get ulto the ditch!'
He calmed her. 'Never mind them,' he said equably. 'They aren't going to hurt us.'
She was only half-reassured. 'But they dropped bombs before and fired their guns!'
He said: 'These are different aeroplanes. These are good aeroplanes. They won't hurt us.'
Pierre said, suddenly and devastatingly, in his little piping voice: 'Can you tell good aeroplanes from bad aeroplanes, M'sieur Howard?'
With a sick heart the old man thought again of the shambles on the Montargis road. 'Why, yes,' he said gently. 'You remember the aeroplanes that mademoiselle took you to see at Chartres? The ones where they let you touch the bombs? They didn't hurt you, did they? Those were good aeroplanes. Those over there are the same sort. They won't hurt us.'
Ronnie, anxious to display expert technical knowledge, endorsed these statements. 'Good aeroplanes are our own aeroplanes, aren't they, Mr Howard?'
'That's right,' the old man said.
Nicole drew him a little way aside. 'I don't know how you can think of such things to say,' she said in a low tone. 'But those are German aeroplanes.'
'I know that. But one has to say something.'
She stared at the three pencil-like shapes in the far distance. 'It was marvellous when aeroplanes were things of pleasure,' she said.
He nodded. 'Have you ever flown?' he asked.
She said: Twice, at a fete, just for a little way each time. And then the time I flew with John over Paris. It was wonderful, that...'
He was interested. 'You went with a pilot, I suppose. Or did he pilot the machine himself?'
She said: 'But he flew it himself, of course, m'sieur. It was just him and me.'
'How did he get hold of the aeroplane?' He knew that in a foreign country there were difficulties in aviation.
She said: 'He took me to dance, at the flying club, in the Rue Francois Premier. He had a friend - un capitaine de l'Aeronautique - that he had met in England when he had been with our Embassy in London. And this friend arranged everything for John.'
She said: 'Figurez-vous, monsieur! I could not get him to one art gallery, not one! All his life he is used
