Sigi looked intensely puzzled, and Grace said, ‘I’m afraid his superman isn’t Napoleon, not yet at least, but Garth.’
‘Goethe?’
‘Oh dear – no. Garth. It’s a strip – I can’t explain, I’ll have to show you some time. It’s rather horrible really, but we don’t seem able to do without it.’
‘Garth, you know, in the Daily,’ Sigismond said. His grandfather had forbidden him to call it the Mirror so he compromised with the Daily. ‘When I’m big I’m going to have a space ship like Garth and go to the –’
‘But what do you know, Sigismond? Can you count? Can you read, and can you name the forty Kings of France?’
‘Forty?’ said Grace. ‘Are there really? Poor little boy.’
‘Well eighteen are Louis and ten are Charles. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I always forget the others myself.’
‘Isn’t he a darling?’ said Grace, as they went downstairs.
‘A darling. Rather dull, but a darling.’
‘He’s not dull a bit,’ she said indignantly, ‘though he may be a little young for his age. It comes from living all alone with me in the country, if he is.’
‘So perhaps tomorrow I take you both home to France.’
‘Tomorrow? Oh no, Charles-Edouard, not –’
‘We can’t stay here. I’ve seen all the leaning towers and pavilions and rotundas and islands and rococo bridges, I’ve moved the furniture and rehung the pictures. There’s nothing whatever to do, and we have our new life to begin. So –?’
‘Oh darling, but tomorrow! What about the packing?’
‘Don’t bother. We’re going straight to Provence, you’ll only want cotton dresses, and you must have all new when we get to Paris, anyhow.’
‘Yes, but Nanny. What will she say?’
‘I don’t know. The plane is at twelve, giving us time to catch the night train to Marseilles. We leave here at nine. I’ve arranged everything and ordered a motor to take us. I suppose you’ve got the passports as I told you to last year?’
‘But Nanny –’ wailed poor Grace.
Charles-Edouard began to sing a song about sardines. ‘Marinées, argentées, leurs petits corps decapités …’
4
Charles-Edouard, Grace, Sigismond, and Nanny arrived at Marseilles in a torrid heat wave. Grace and the child were tired after the night in the train, but Charles-Edouard and Nanny were made of sterner stuff. His songs and jokes flowed like a running river, except when he was actually asleep, and so did Nanny’s complaints. These were a recitative of nursery grievance in which certain motifs constantly recurred. ‘No time to write to Daniel Neal – all those nice toys left behind – the beautiful rocking-horse Mrs O’Donovan gave us – his scooter with rubber tyres and a bell – poor little mite, grown out of his winter coat, how shall we ever get another – what shall I do without my wireless? – the Bengers never came, you know, dear, from the Army and Navy – shall we get the Mirror there and my Woman and Beauty? Oh, I say, I never took those books back to Boots, what will the girl think of me – that nice blouse I was having made in the village –’ Then the chorus, much louder than the rest. ‘Shame, really.’
They were met at the station by Charles-Edouard’s valet, Ange-Victor, in a big, rather old-fashioned Bentley. Ange-Victor was crying with joy, and it seemed as if he and Charles-Edouard would never stop hugging each other. At last they stowed the luggage into the motor, Grace and Sigi crammed into the front seats beside Charles-Edouard, with valet and nurse behind, and he drove hell for leather up the narrow, twisting, crowded road which goes from Marseilles to Aix.
‘I’m a night bomber, have no fear,’ he shouted to Grace as she cringed in her corner clasping Sigi. The hot air rushed past them, early as it was, the day was already a scorcher. Charles-Edouard was singing ‘Malbrouck s’en va’-t-en guerre et ne reviendra pas.’
‘But I am back,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Never never did I expect to come back. Five fortune-tellers said I should be killed.’
And he turned right round, in the teeth of an enormous lorry, to ask Ange-Victor if Madame André, in the village, still told the cards.
‘Shall I tell your fortune now?’ said Grace. ‘If you don’t drive much more carefully there will soon be a widow, a widower, an orphan, and two childless parents in this family.’
‘Try and remember that I am a night bomber,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘I have driven aeroplanes over the impenetrable jungle, how should I have an accident on my old road I’ve known from a baby? Here we turn,’ he said, wrenching the motor, under the very bonnet of another lorry, across the road and down a lane to the left of it. ‘And there,’ he said a few minutes later, ‘is Bellandargues.’
The Provençal landscape, like that of Tuscany which it so much resembles, is marked by many little hills humping unexpectedly in the middle of vineyards. These often have a cluster of cottages round their lower slopes, overlooked by a castle, or the ruin of a castle, on the summit. Such was Bellandargues. The village lay at the foot of a hill, and above it, up in the blue sky, hung the castle, home, for many generations, of the Valhubert family.
As they drove into the village it presented a gay and festive appearance, all flags for the return of Charles-Edouard. A great streamer, with ‘Vive la Libération, Hommage à M. le Maire’, was stretched across the street; the village band was playing, and a crowd was gathered in the market-place, waving and cheering. Charles-Edouard stopped the motor. M. Mignon, the chemist, made a long speech, recalling the sad times they had lived through since Charles-Edouard was last there, and
