Life Times (36 page)

‘And how much is one dollar, may I ask, mister?' Jenny had learned by heart, on the plane, the conversion tables supplied by the travel agency.

‘I don't know how much it is in our money – I'm talking about America—'

‘You're not to go down out of the village with him, Clive, ay, only in the village,' his father said every day.

He didn't go out of the village with the family, either. He didn't go to see the museum at Antibes or the potteries at Vallauris or even the palace, casino and aquarium at Monte Carlo. The ancient hill village inside its walls, whose disorder of streets had been as confusing as the dates and monuments of Europe's overlaid and overlapping past, became the intimate map of their domain – his and Matt's. The alley cats shared it but the people, talking their unintelligible tongue, provided a babble beneath which, while performed openly in the streets, his activities with Matt acquired secrecy: as they went about, they were hidden even more than by the usual self-preoccupation of adults. They moved from morning till night with intense purpose; you had to be quick around corners, you mustn't be seen crossing the street, you must appear as if from nowhere among the late afternoon crowd in the
place
and move among them quite unobtrusively. One of the things they were compelled to do was to get from the church – very old, with chicken wire where the stained glass must have been, and a faint mosaic, like a flaking transfer – to under the school windows without attracting the attention of the children. This had to be done in the morning, when school was in session; it was just one of the stone houses, really, without playgrounds: the dragging chorus of voices coming from it reminded him of the schools for black children at home. At other times the village children tailed them, jeering and mimicking, or in obstinate silence, impossible to shake off. There were fights and soon he learnt to make with his fingers effective insulting signs he didn't understand, and to shout his one word of French, their bad word –
merde
!

And Matt talked all the time. His low, confidential English lifted to the cheerful rising cadence of French as his voice bounced out to greet people and rebounded from the close walls back to the privacy of English and their head-lowered conclave again. Yet even when his voice had dropped to a whisper, his round dark eyes, slightly depressed at the outer corners by the beginning of an intelligent frown above his dainty nose, moved, parenthetically alert, over everyone within orbit. He greeted people he had never seen before just as he greeted local inhabitants. He would stop beside a couple of sightseers or a plumber lifting a manhole and converse animatedly. To his companion standing by, his French sounded much more French than when the village children spoke it. Matt shrugged his shoulders and thrust out his lower lip while he talked, and if some of the people he accosted were uncomfortable or astonished at being addressed volubly, for no particular reason, by someone they didn't know, he asked them questions (Clive could hear they were questions) in the jolly tone of voice that grown-ups use to kid children out of their shyness.

Sometimes one of the inhabitants, sitting outside his or her doorway on a hard chair, would walk inside and close the door when Matt called out conversationally. ‘The people in this town are really psychotic, I can tell you,' he would say with enthusiasm, dropping back to English. ‘I know them all, every one of them, and I'm not kidding.' The old women in wrinkled black stockings, long aprons and wide black hats who sat on the
place
stringing beans for Chez Riane, the open-air restaurant, turned walnut-meat faces and hissed toothlessly like geese when Matt approached. Riane (‘She topped the popularity poll in Paris, can you believe it? It was just about the time of the Flood, my father says'), a woman the size of a prize fighter who bore to the displayed posters of herself the kinship of a petrified trunk to a twig in new leaf, growled something at Matt from the corner of her vivid mouth. ‘I've got some great pictures of
her
. Of course, she's a bit
passé
.'

They got chased when Matt took a picture of a man and a girl kissing down in the parking area below the chateau. Clive carried his box camera about with him, now, but he only took pictures of the cats. Matt promised that Clive would get a shot of the dwarf – a real man, not in a circus – who turned the spit in the restaurant that served lamb cooked the special way they did it here, but, as Matt said, Clive didn't have the temperament for a great photographer. He was embarrassed, ashamed and frightened when the dwarf's enormous head with its Spanish dancer's sideburns reddened with a temper too big for him. But Matt had caught him on the Polaroid; they went off to sit in someone's doorway hung with strips of coloured plastic to keep out flies, and had a look. There was the dwarf's head, held up waggling on his little body like the head of a finger-puppet. ‘Fantastic.' Matt was not boastful but professional in his satisfaction. ‘I didn't have a good one of him before, just my luck, we hadn't been here a week when he went crazy and was taken off to some hospital. He's only just come back into circulation, it's a good thing you didn't miss him. You might've gone back to Africa and not seen him.'

The family, who had admired the boy's Madras shorts or his transistor radio, enjoyed the use of his elegant little record player, or welcomed a friend for Clive, began to find him too talkative, too often present, and too much on the streets. Clive was told that he
must
come along with the family on some of their outings. They drove twenty miles to eat some fish made into soup. They took up a whole afternoon looking at pictures.

‘What time'll we be back?' he would rush in from the street to ask.

‘I don't know – sometime in the afternoon.'

‘Can't we be back by two?'

‘Why on earth should we tie ourselves down to a time? We're on holiday.' He would rush back to the street to relay the unsatisfactory information.

When the family came home, the slim little figure with its trappings would be ready to wave at them from the bottom of their street. Once in the dark they made him out under the street light that streaked and flattened his face and that of the village halfwit and his dog; he looked up from conversation as if he had been waiting for a train that would come in on time. Another day there was a message laid out in the courtyard with matches end-to-end: WILL SEE YOU LATER MATT.

‘What's the matter with those people, they don't even take the child down to the beach for a swim,' said the mother.

Clive heard, but was not interested. He had never been in the pink house with the Ali Baba pots. Matt emerged like one of the cats, and he usually had money. They found a place that sold bubblegum and occasionally they had pancakes – Clive didn't know that that was what they were going to be when Matt said he was going to buy some
crêpes
and what kind of jam did Clive like? Matt paid; there was his documentary film, and he was also writing a book – ‘There's a lot of money in kids' books actually written by a kid,' he explained to the family. It was a spy story – ‘Really exotic.' He expected to do well out of it, and he might sell some of his candid shots to
Time
and
Life
as well.

But one particularly lovely morning Clive's mother said as if she couldn't prevent herself, perhaps Matt would like to come with the family to the airport? The boys could watch the jets land while the grown-ups had business with the reservation office.

‘Order yourselves a lemonade if you want it,' said the father; he meant that he would pay when he came back. They drank a lemonade-and-ice-cream each and then Matt said he'd like a black coffee to wash it down, so they ordered two coffees, and the father was annoyed when he got the bill – coffee was nothing at home, but in France they seemed to charge you for the glass of water you got with it.

‘I can drink five or six coffees a day, it doesn't bother my liver,' Matt told everyone. And in Nice, afterwards, trailing round the Place Masséna behind Jenny, who wanted to buy a polo shirt like the ones all the French girls were wearing, the boys were not even allowed to go and look at the fountain alone, in case they got lost. Matt's voice fell to a whisper in Clive's ear but Clive hardly heard and did not answer: here, Matt was just an appendage of the family, like any other little boy.

It was Saturday and when they drove home up the steep road (the halfwit and his dog sat at the newly installed traffic light and Matt, finding his voice, called out of the window a greeting in French) the village was already beginning to choke with weekend visitors.

Directly lunch was down the boys raced to meet beneath the plaque that commemorated the birth in this street of Xavier Duval, Resistance fighter, killed on 20 October 1944. Clive was there first and, faithfully carrying out the technique and example of his friend, delightedly managed to take a candid shot of Matt before Matt realised that he was observed. It was one of the best afternoons they'd had.

‘Saturdays are always good,' said Matt. ‘All these psychotic people around. Just keep your eyes open, brother. I wrote Chapter Fourteen of my book at lunch. Oh, it was on a tray in my room – they were out until about four this morning and they didn't get up. It's set in this airport, you see – remember how you could just see my mouth moving and you couldn't hear a thing in the racket with that jet taking off? – well, someone gets murdered right there drinking coffee and no one hears the scream.'

They were walking through the car park, running their hands over the nacre-sleek hoods of sports models, and half-attentive to a poodle fight near the
pétanque
pitch and a human one that seemed about to break out at the busy entrance to the men's lavatories that tunnelled under the
place
. ‘Ah, I've got enough shots of delinquents to last me,' Matt said. In accord they went on past the old girl in flowered trousers who was weeping over her unharmed, struggling poodle, and up the steps to the
place
, where most of the local inhabitants and all the visitors, whose cars jammed the park and stopped up the narrow streets, were let loose together, herded by Arab music coming from the boutique run by the French Algerians, on the chateau side, and the recorded voice, passionately hoarse, of Riane in her prime, from the direction of Chez Riane. The dwarf was there, talking between set teeth to a beautiful blonde American as if he were about to tear her apart with them; her friends were ready to die laughing, but looked kindly in order not to show it. The old women with their big black hats and apron-covered stomachs took up space on the benches. There were more poodles and an Italian greyhound like a piece of wire jewellery. Women who loved each other sat at the little tables outside Riane's, men who loved each other sat in identical mauve jeans and pink shirts, smoking, outside Zizi's Bar. Men and women in beach clothes held hands, looking into the doorways of the little shops and bars, and pulling each other along as the dogs pulled along their owners on fancy leashes. At the
Crêperie
, later, Matt pointed out Clive's family, probably eating their favourite liqueur pancakes, but Clive jerked him away.

They watched
pétanque
for a while; the butcher, a local champion, was playing to the gallery, all right. He was pink and wore a tourist's fishnet vest through which wisps of reddish chest-hair twined like a creeper. A man with a long black cape and a huge cat's-whisker moustache caused quite a stir. ‘My God, I've been trying to get him for weeks—' Matt ducked, Clive quickly following, and they zigzagged off through the
pétanque
spectators. The man had somehow managed to drive a small English sports car right up on to the
place
; it was forbidden, but although the part-time policeman who got into uniform for Saturday afternoons was shouting at him, the man couldn't be forced to take it down again because whatever gap it had found its way through was closed by a fresh influx of people. ‘He's a painter,' Matt said. ‘He lives above the shoemaker's, you know that little hole. He doesn't ever come out except Saturdays and Sundays. I've got to get a couple of good shots of him. He looks to me the type that gets famous. Really psychotic, eh?' The painter had with him a lovely, haughty girl dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a man's tweeds and deerstalker. ‘The car must be hers,' said Matt. ‘He hasn't made it, yet; but I can wait.' He used up almost a whole film: ‘With a modern artist, you want a few new angles.'

Matt was particularly talkative, even going right into Zizi's Bar to say hello to her husband, Emile. The family were still sitting at the
Crêperie
; the father signed to Clive to come over and at first he took no notice. Then he stalked up between the tables. ‘Yes?'

‘Don't you want some money?'