The Roses of Picardie Page 4

  Ah yes, but we now recall, from our inquiries of last week, that there is considerable doubt as to whether Monsieur du Touquet did indeed pay his way into the Casino and as to the manner in which he achieved entry. This recollection brings us back to the whole mystery of the Vicomte’s death. It is in order to cast light upon this that we have opened up for you the above panorama of history. For given that history, and given the circumstances of the Vicomte’s so sanguinary death, we believe that there is but one explanation of the whole guignol…an explanation both fascinating and shocking…with which we shall enlighten our charming readers next week.

  To be continued

  Oh, poor Clovis, Balbo Blakeney thought: will they never let him rest? He put down the Paris Fiche on the anteroom table, wondered how long the Madame would keep him waiting and which girl she would allot him (Electra, the Greek with the moustache? Or Ton-ton, who was rather good at pretending to come?), and then thought again of Clovis, last Vicomte du Touquet.

  Balbo Blakeney belonged to a cadet branch of a substantial Norfolk family, being second cousin to the 19th Baron Blakeney of the Marsh. In 1861 (or was it’62? Balbo asked himself) the youngest sister of the 15th Baron had been married to the 33rd Comte de la Tour d’Abbéville (Clovis Maximillian di Cannaregio Baudouin du Bourg de Maubeuge). Since the girl was plain, ill-tempered, thirty-one years old and given to the bottle, the Blakeneys were very eager to be shot of her; but although marriage to the Count was clearly her last chance, the Blakeneys would never have allowed it had they known quite what manner of man was His Excellency. The marriage, in short, was based on reciprocated misunderstanding: the Count thought that the Honourable Caroline Blakeney’s little trust fund could be broken into by her husband (it couldn’t); and Lord Blakeney, though aware that the du Bourgs de Maubeuge had been going down hill for some time, thought that they had not yet reached a state of actual disrepute (they had). Although they still had some money and one respectable house, the house had been mortgaged from cellar to chimney top, largely to provide the somewhat curious entertainments that alone gratified the 33rd Count.

  But questionable as the Count’s affairs had been when he wedded Caroline Blakeney, they were positively radiant (Balbo reflected) by comparison with what was to come later. Not, of course, that he, Balbo had yet been on the scene to witness these things, but Great Aunt Hetta’s celebrated narratives had rendered them vividly enough.

  ‘Foreign muck,’ said Great Aunt Hetta on one occasion to the pop-eyed and velvet-knickered Balbo, ‘that’s all that lot ever was. The only distinguey thing about them was some jewels, which blessed them with wealth and cursed them with early death, some potty tale of that kind, but they’d even gone and lost those – ever so long before. As for this 33rd Count of Arsyville, Clovis Minimax Fartwin de Malbugger or whatever he called himself, he started by decking Caroline out as a schoolgirl at her first communion and shagging her from behind at the altar in the family chapel, and then got her up as an orphan in boots and black stockings and beat her rump until it went purple. And when he found out that he couldn’t get at her money, he really let rip and rigged up a sort of Edgar Allan Poe machine out of The Pit and the Pendulum – though of course you’re much too young to have read that.’

  Great Aunt Hetta’s notions about what was suitable fare for young children had been eccentric, comprehending as they did her own unrefined exegesis (‘It’s the truth, ain’t it?’), but also firm in their way, excluding all fiction whatever as ‘trumped-up fibbing done for money – you need to be grown up before you read it to see what rubbish it is’.

  ‘Now, Caroline was a nasty little vixen enough,’ Great Aunt Hetta had gone on to Balbo, ‘and don’t sit there looking so mealy, boy. I tell you she was a sneaking little rat and I mean it, even if she was my own auntie. But even Caroline didn’t deserve what this Count Mauve-Hairs dished her out with, and small wonder she came running home to Norfolk. I wasn’t more than a gel of six then, but I wasn’t no fool neither and what I didn’t work out for myself my old nanny filled in. First off, Caroline was preggers – “though how he got her swelling if he shoved it where she says he did beats me rotten,” said nanny, “everywhere but where he ought to do Missy Caro say.” For seconds, the Count was demanding her back and threatening to exert his legal rights: he wanted his heir to be born in France, he said, so would they send Caro over at once – or else a nice little chunk of money to make up. Well, dear’ (Great Aunt Hetta chortled) ‘Caroline was no picture at the best of times, and when she was preggers she was like something out of the zoo; and what with that, and what with her filthy tongue and her sucking down brandy half the day, my poor Pa would have been glad enough to be rid of her. A chivalrous man he was, but, chivalrous or no, he’d not have been above packing her back to the Count – who, when all was said, was her husband – but Mama spoke up and said, “She’s blood of your blood, and you can’t send her back to that Frenchy sod, so pay up and look big and make up your mind she’s going to drop her brat here.”

  ‘So Pa paid up and looked sick and paid up again and looked sicker, but he stood to Caroline as a brother should, and six months later, despite all that brandy, she whelped an eight-pound boy with a face like a cowpat and a prick as long as a donkey’s, and that was the grandfather of this Clovis du Touquet who’s about your age and coming to stay next week – though Gawd knows why he’s been asked and you watch out for any filthy foreign habits he tries to teach you’ – this accompanied by a sharp tweak at Balbo’s private parts.

  About what happened between the birth of Clovis du Touquet’s grandfather in 1864 and the introduction of little Clovis (aged nine) to Balbo (aged eight) in 1929 Great Aunt Hetta had been even more scathing.

  ‘Caroline and the boy scrounged off my Pa for nearly twenty years,’ she told Balbo on the day before little Clovis was due at Blakeney Staithe, ‘but then Caro’s husband died of a fit of something foreign, and she took the boy to France to see what was left for them. About 1884 that would have been. And precious little she found – except a lot of good cognac in the cellar, so she decided to stay there and drink it. No one to stop her – my Pa had always reined her in a bit here, but no one was going to bother there, least of all her crappy son – and in four years she was dead of the stuff and good riddance. The son – Rupert she called him, not Clovis, to spite her husband – sold the house and the rest of the cognac for what he could get and set up as a high-class pimp, only he wasn’t any good at it, and got lower and lower, till he married one of his own doxies and spawned little Clovis’ father – if he was got by Rupert and not by one of the clients, which is just as likely. Clovis they called him, going back to the family custom, Clovis d’Outremerde or some such rubbish. Born in 1896, and now thirty-three years old, and all he’s good for is picking up the banana skins in a park in Nancy’ – Great Aunt Hetta contemptuously pronounced it like the English Christian name – ‘whatever sort of place that can be. Anyway, ten years ago he got under a bush in his park with a skivvy from one of the local tradesmen’s houses and forgot to use one of his banana skins, because before you could say “ooh la la” there was this little Clovis on the way, the one you’re going to meet tomorrow. The family kept the skivvy on condition she got married, and they let Clovis d’Outremerde sleep in the house in return for doing odd jobs like mending the loos. And they’ve made rather a pet of little Clovis. It was their idea to send him over here to see his English relatives this summer, and that fool Blakeney couldn’t think of a way of refusing. So he’s been asked over from France, and you’ve been asked over from Sheringham to play with him, and as I’ve told you before, watch out for any rude Frenchy tricks he tries to teach yer.’ She aimed a heavy flick in the region of Balbo’s testicles. ‘His full name – and I’m not joking, Balbo, because he’s going to be our guest and we must get it right – is Clovis di Cannaregio (that’s an Italian bit, as if it wasn’t bad enough being French already)…Baudouin which is French for Baldwin…du Bourg…de Maubeuge, Vicomte
du Touquet, or Viscount of Le Touquet, as we should say, which is where the rich froggies go to sun themselves and lose their money at roulette. Quite a grand name for a little boy whose mother is a skivvy in a grocer’s house and whose father picks up banana peel…’

  Balbo had loved Clovis at first sight. A spindly-limbed and yellow-skinned boy, two inches shorter than Balbo although one year older, Clovis moved with a vivacity and suppleness which endowed his physical defects with the charm of some improbable creature in an animated cartoon. His snub nose stirred in Balbo a sentimental and protective fondness, his cheeky, knowing eyes incited an aching curiosity. Great Aunt Hetta had been right: Clovis put out the air of being up to any number of ‘rude Frenchy tricks’, reprehensible, beyond question, but also magical. Oh, that he would teach them to me, Balbo thought, writhing with frustration as Clovis chattered away in French (offering God knew what marvellous secrets), and Balbo failed to comprehend more than one word in twenty.

  But quite soon they had managed to converse. Clovis, though well enough able, one would have guessed, to take care of himself in his own world, needed all of Balbo’s advice and assistance at Blakeney Staithe. Driven by his need, the little French boy first mimed his desires or doubts, then described them in pidgin French. Balbo would respond by miming or enacting the solution, with a slow commentary in pidgin English. Balbo’s intelligence and love of Clovis, Clovis’ shrewdness and love of ‘face’, quickened a process of elementary instruction into one of sophisticated mutual understanding. Within five or six days the two boys could discuss everything around them, including Great Aunt Hetta, whom they nicknamed by the hybrid phrase Tantie la Finger, a reference to her habit of seating both boys in her enormous lap and fiddling in their crutches while at the same time explaining that this was just what they must not do to each other since it constituted ‘filthy foreign habits’.

  In fact, although they often climbed into each other’s beds to play games which combined violence with endearment, Clovis and Balbo did not indulge in ‘filthy foreign habits’ together, largely because ‘Tantie la Finger’s’ cumbrous caresses, though not particularly disagreeable, had failed to rouse either of them to a point where they wished to investigate such techniques any further. It was more fun to hit, squeeze and gouge, and then to go under the bedclothes together and see who farted the fouler smell. In any case, Blakeney Staithe had more interesting things than beds to offer. Whereas Clovis was a town child, Balbo was a country boy and Norfolk at that; he knew the creatures of the dunes and salt marshes, how to watch them, follow them, catch them, cook and eat them, or (if inedible) preserve them. He also, even at the age of eight, had a considerable didactic gift. Clovis was happy to come with him, listen to him, imitate him, learn from him; and Balbo, as he realized by the time their three weeks were up, had been so busy teaching his own ‘tricks’ that he had left himself no time to be instructed in Clovis’ – fascinating as he had thought, on Clovis’ arrival, that these must surely be.

  ‘What can you show me?’ said Balbo bluntly on their last day. ‘This afternoon I have shown you what lives in this pool. What can you show me?’

  ‘I can show you what lives in the streets,’ said Clovis without recommendation or apology. ‘I will show you this, if you wish, when you come to me in Nancy.’

  For between the boys it was now agreed that Balbo should visit Clovis as soon as possible in France. But it was not, of course, agreed by anyone else. How long had it been (Balbo wondered as he sat in the anteroom awaiting his turn to fornicate) before he had seen Clovis again?

  Eight or nine years, he thought: 1938, that was it. In Amiens…whither Clovis’ parents had moved in the mid-thirties, when the grocer from Nancy decided to shift his family and his business there. Clovis’ mother was now a senior maid in the grocer’s domestic establishment, while a job had been found for his father in the abattoirs. Balbo’s visit, long blocked by Balbo’s parents, had eventually been arranged by the grocer’s wife, who had learned from Clovis of the friendship begun in Norfolk and had wished to sustain it. However, what with one thing and another nearly a decade had been allowed to pass before she managed to bring the two boys together again, and by the time she did they were strangers, having grown apart into widely diverging modes of adolescence and being further separated by the now all too evident disparity in their social positions. Clovis, Vicomte as he might be, was the son of a maidservant and a porter in the shambles, and depended on the patronage of his mother’s employers, with whose sparing aid he hoped to complete several joyless and statutory years of grind at a provincial university before becoming, with luck, a lawyer. Balbo was the child of a country gentleman in ample circumstances and was about to begin a year’s tour of Europe, at the end of which a place was waiting for him at Lancaster College, Cambridge, where he would have the spending of a large allowance and be under no obligation to do a stroke of work if he did not choose to.

  The encounter, then, was at first an utter failure, and Balbo’s sojourn in the grocer’s house (nominally as the guest of Clovis but in fact as that of the family, who had both boys to meals at which they were waited on by Clovis’ mother), was hideously embarrassing for all. The grocer’s wife, a kindly if economically-minded woman, realized that something was painfully wrong but could not conceive what to do about it. In the end it was Balbo who divined the answer. Although reminiscences of Blakeney Staithe, of Tantie la Finger or the fauna of the sea marsh, now made Clovis snarl like a pi-dog, one such recollection, calculated by Balbo to operate on Clovis’ regard for ‘face’, saved the entire situation: ‘Do you remember,’ Balbo had said, ‘that time at Blakeney when you promised to show me “what lives in the streets”? I know you meant Nancy then, but the streets of Amiens must be just as exciting. So come on, Clovis show me.’

  Clovis, challenged, had shown him. Amid the cheap bars and cook-shops, the cafés and cathouses of downtown Amiens, their friendship had revived. Madame the grocer’s wife and Madame the Countess her servant accepted with relief the boys’ repeated absence from meals, almost total absence from the suburban household. Meanwhile Clovis and Balbo cruised, mingled, investigated. Balbo lost his virtue and caught crabs; Clovis laughed when shown them, shaved off Balbo’s bush for him, applied an ointment he knew of, and then, suddenly baring his own thighs (and showing a mauve rhomboid birthmark on the left one), casually commanded Balbo to toss him off and himself served Balbo likewise. This did not happen again (‘Alors. mon vieux, on n’est pas Tantie la Finger’), but the incident was remembered from time to time, with affectionate and mildly deprecating giggles, as being ‘une mode moins chère et moins dangereuse que les filles’. An autumn fair provided a shabby yet oddly enchanting scene (painted pleasure domes of pasteboard under September trees) for their last week of innocent depravity, at the end of which they parted with warm tears, Balbo to meet his bear-leader in Paris and proceed on his tour of Europe, Clovis to a chilly precinct of blue brick and legal learning. They would meet again in the summer of 1939, they promised, as soon as Balbo was back from Italy and Clovis released from his studies.

  But before that summer could come Balbo had been called home by anxious parents and Clovis called for a poilu. By September of 1939 Balbo would have been similarly conscripted in England, had not the subject which he was to read at Lancaster been on record as Natural Philosophy (i.e. Science). Scientists, even suckling ones, were privileged and Balbo gratefully accepted his privilege. Ignoring a plume of white feathers which Great Aunt Hetta sent him as a present for Christmas, Balbo buried himself quietly in snug wartime Cambridge, did his work conscientiously, discovered a talent for certain branches of biochemistry, was encouraged to research, was appointed a Fellow of Lancaster, and was sent, late in 1944 and with the rank of Major, to an ‘Army Special Treatment Centre’ (so called) on Salisbury Plain. Here he was required to investigate possible methods of infecting the enemy with bubonic plague by dropping plague rats by parachute, an ingenious scheme which came to nothing (rather to B
albo’s relief) since the rats, intelligent as they were, could not be got to understand that it was their duty to infest German soldiers only and to stay clear of allied troops advancing. However, Balbo was deemed to have passed the war usefully and with honour (forgiven even by Great Aunt Hetta once he had been gazetted in a military rank), was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, accepted the distinction but did not write himself MBE, and returned to Cambridge early in 1946 to pursue a more congenial line of experiment which had to do with the efficacy of alcohol as an haematic disinfectant.

  He was relieved to be out of the Army; yet however unpleasant and demanding his war work might have been, it was noticeable that he came back looking younger than when he went: he had always had a smooth, youthful complexion; now it was more so than ever, his forehead, in particular, being totally without mark, crease or line.