A Free Range Wife Page 17

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Course I know. I was wondering if you were listening.”

  “Castanets?”

  “Oh sure. Hector happens to be a professional Scot. He gets more Scottish every year and he’s hardly seen Scotland since he left the hotel school. That’s twenty years. The real professional nationals are the expatriates.”

  “Like you?”

  “I don’t know what I am any more. I tag along shepherding the children. I’d sooner be in the States, if that’s what you’re asking. When we get an American couple at the château I want to beg them for a spare seat in their car for a home-loving American girl if that’s where they’re going—home. La foi is ‘faith’ and le foie is ‘liver,’ or the other way round, but how the hell do you remember?” She fell silent, concentrating as she overtook grimy vans and lorries with Pnincipat d’Andorre licence plates. “So it goes, as they say.”

  Peckover said, “Has to be the bagpipes. Did ’e bring them to the beach? Can’t be much written for two guitars, flute, and bagpipes. Still play, does he?”

  “He practices. God knows why. Only time he plays in public is Hogmanay, and Burns Night, when they bring the haggis in. He loves piping in the haggis. Black Watch bonnet, kilt, sporran, dirk down the stocking, tartan everywhere. He’s dressed up like a Come to Scotland advertisement. He gives them ‘Westering Home’ or ‘My Ain Folk.’ Something achingly yearning. Is that France down there?”

  The road swung left and the glimpse of France was gone, obscured by the mountain side. Then it reappeared beyond the ochre supermarkets and debris of Pas de la Case, looking exactly like Andorra. Peckover’s heart lifted none the less. He had had enough of Andorra.

  “Last time I saw him, Hector, about ten days ago, he asked me what I was like in bed.”

  The change in her tone as much as what he thought she had said startled Peckover. He had to lean closer to hear.

  “The staff were clearing away, we were having coffee, and he asked with this terrific reasonableness, genuinely curious, or pretending to be. ‘Would you describe yourself mainly as jocular or placid or outrageous or inventive or what?’ I told him he was disgusting. He said, ‘What’s disgusting about words? All I’ve done is say words,’ and he apologised and walked away looking baffled. He wasn’t baffled, he’d made his point. That was Hector’s way of telling me I was disgusting. Okay, I’m a mess, I’m not original in that, but I’m not disgusting. I’ve done nothing disgusting. Why couldn’t he have talked about it if he felt like that? How was I to know? Why didn’t he tell me, we could have talked, we could have discussed separating, divorce—why not?—instead of all his sick, silent, noble, puritan suffering? God . . .”

  Peckover was uncertain whether she was still speaking, she had gone so quiet. Her lips seemed to be moving. He stayed leaning towards her, ready to snatch the wheel if need be, because she was shaking, the tears running down.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Other people’s affairs are always sordid, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Peckover? Sordid and entertaining—right?”

  The work-force had made no obvious progress towards rendering Pas de la Case the show frontier town of the Western Hemisphere since he had driven through on the previous evening. Shutters were going up outside the gimcrack supermarkets; the piled baskets, espadrilles, strings of garlic, and cans of olive-oil were being hauled inside. In the square, laden daytrippers from France were boarding coaches. The Mercedes avoided rubble and skirted the Hotel Refugi dels Isards.

  “D’you want to eat?” Peckover asked.

  “No.”

  “Thirsty?”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to hang about. I want to get home.”

  “Stop there by those cheeses. I’ll get some cans of something. Then I’ll take over.”

  He supposed he should have asked her to accompany him or at least requested the keys. He knew no reason why she would drive off without him but he would not have been surprised were she to do so even without a reason. People were complicated. She had said so herself, unhelpfully.

  The supermarket smelled sweet as if from rotting fruit or somewhere a leaking can of jam. The only cleaning it received, Peckover judged, would be a weekly sweep. He put a six-pack of beer into his trolley and added Coca-Cola, not for himself. Then several bottles of spirits and two sherries as an investment, unless he had mistranslated the price, which was more than likely. Anyway that would do it. He refused to be tempted by the tins of Spanish truffles, which may or may not have been inferior to French truffles but which at Harrods would have cost a Croesus ransom and here were the price of a bus ticket from Leicester Square to Waterloo. Supermarkets, he believed, should be obliged to put up government warnings against impulse buying to protect impulse buyers.

  Still, the trolley’s contents looked fairly miserly. He added a wheel of probably Pyrenean cheese for Miriam, who would find a use for it, perhaps force-feeding him with it for the next three months. Next, a five-litre drum of olive oil—vierge Extra, which sounded tasty. Peckover was not sure how he, or preferably Miriam, was going to get this lot back to London. Perhaps they should bury it in the woods at the Château de Mordan, ensuring, or at any rate implying, a return visit and many a cut-price picnic.

  All things considered, he doubted Mordan would be among their first choices for future holidays in France.

  He looked over a pyramid of tinned sardines and through the supermarket window. In the Mercedes, Mercy McCluskey had shifted from the driver’s to the passenger’s seat and was presenting her face to the driving mirror, applying lipstick. Not with ulterior motives, Peckover was as sure as he was sure of anything. Simply, there were moments when a woman needed to put on lipstick. Come Armageddon, some women would reach for their lipstick, as long as they had a four-minute warning. He did not know what he would do in the four minutes but nothing so positive.

  Jean-Luc was still a four-hour drive away and as well might have been four thousand, Peckover thought, for all the chance his affair with Mercy had of surviving recent developments. Unless of course recent developments drew the pair closer together. Peckover, no prophet, made no attempt to guess.

  Not guessing, instead he dropped into the trolley a bright red cannon-ball of Edam; a monster tin of what he believed, going by the picture, might be palm hearts, which would be a Godsend if ever he and Miriam gave a dinner party for forty; and a catering pack of Toblerone chocolate for Mrs. McCluskey. If she were going to drink all that Coke she would need her solids as well. A shelf of miniature bottles labelled Extrait Pastis delayed him. He tried to make sense of the instructions on the label. Sort of essence of pastis, like concentrated Pernod juice or Ricard, it seemed to be, which you mixed or perhaps filtered—filtré?—through or with a half litre of alcohol and a half litre of warm water. The miniatures cost around twopence a bottle. Miriam could juggle the measurements if necessary, she was the expert. He did not know what straight alcohol was going to cost in Islington or where they found it, but again Miriam would. If she didn’t, didn’t footballers have alcohol rubs? He had heard of horses being rubbed down too, though he did not know with what. He could give Newmarket a buzz. He fed the trolley with a dozen miniatures, adding for good measure a couple of dozen extraits of rum, brandy, and whiskey.

  The soap powders were probably a bargain. He hefted in a jumbo Omo. At the check-out the whole trolleyful came to around a fiver.

  Not that it would last but something almost approaching cheerfulness had crept in. Peckover supposed the proximity of France was one reason; another the cost-conscious Henry having stocked up with bargain goodies; and perhaps most of all the sight of M.M. lipsticking herself, which suggested she intended soldiering on: she was not totally distraught: she had not, like her husband, turned suicidal. Apart from the beer and Coke, which he placed on the back seat, he unloaded the booty into the car’s boot, announcing each item in turn to Mercy, thereby diverting her, taking her mind off more sombre matters, if she
could hear. He took the wheel and entered the line of traffic advancing towards the frontier fifty yards ahead. Adiós, Andorra.

  “Marvellous, the essence of Pernod, could be,” he chattered, diverting her, making her cheerful. “Never seen it before.”

  “You’ll never see it again if the customs stop you. It’s like bringing in heroin.”

  “Don’t be daft. It’s not even alcoholic.”

  “I’m only saying what I’ve heard. Maybe it puts the Pernod work-force out of work. I were you, I’d put my hand on the horn and my foot on the gas and go through like Burt Reynolds.”

  Bloody ’ell! Even had he been inclined to do so he was wedged between an unpassable smugglers’ charabanc in front and on his tail a queue of tourist cars.

  “We’ll go through the green channel. They stop one in every forty.” He had made the figure up but it sounded reasonable; varying according to peak hours, the season, staff enthusiasm. “They’re not going to stop us.”

  “Nothing to worry about then.”

  Customs and immigration were undistinguished single-storey buildings on each side of the road. There was no green channel as far as Peckover could see. No red either. The absence of channels he interpreted as a good omen. Here was Latin insouciance. What did they want with channels? They’d be stretched out on the grass behind the buildings with their yellow cigarettes and goatskins of wine describing to each other the women who had loved them. He noted unstretched-out, idling French customs officers in blue, not Andorrans in plum, and at the side of the road one poor tourist bugger parked with the lid of his boot lifted high, contraband strewn all about, explaining how it was a mystery, he had never seen any of it in his life, to two of the boys in blue who shortly would be applying the electrodes. But for the most part the traffic was streaming through unmolested. A blue uniform sauntered in front of the Mercedes, pointed with one arm at Peckover, between the eyes, and with the other arm beckoned him out of the stream.

  “Somebody has to be the one in forty,” Mercy McCluskey said.

  Peckover later acknowledged to himself that if anything had been capable of lifting her spirits, this was it. Germans, he understood, called it Schadenfreude: the biter bit, the copper copped. Uproarious when the boom was lowered on the Law itself. For the moment he was not too perturbed, apart from the extract of pastis, which was akin to bringing in heroin.

  He pulled up beyond the customs building and switched off. “Stay there,” he told Mercy McCluskey, who had no intention of moving.

  Peckover climbed out. The customs officer who had summoned him from the line dawdled along, looked through the windows at beer, Coke, and Mercy, then ambled to the boot. Neutrally he looked from the boot to Peckover, and nodded, neither hostile nor agreeable but a non-smoking, impersonal pipsqueak trained in la politesse, probably a vegetarian, and meticulously preserving his textbook cold-bloodedness until such time as the contraband was spread out and the bastinado might be brought out, or at the very least confiscations and crippling fines, during the extraction of which he would maintain still his impassivity. Coppers could become emotional—Peckover saw it all the time, he was that way inclined himself—but whether customs pipsqueaks were ever other than smug and expressionless, never raising their voices or letting drop their air of disapproval and excruciating moral superiority, he doubted.

  Thinking these thoughts, Peckover felt considerably better. He opened the boot. Why did the victim have to do all the opening, not to mention the putting away, as if to touch were for the customs officer to risk infection? When they did probe a bag they did so with tip of thumb and forefinger, which they liked you to believe they had first had to disinfect. At the end of the day they were cowards though. The cash prize awaiting the customs officer honest enough to tie on a hospital mask before probing was still to be won.

  The officer dipped into the boot, turning the spirit bottles to read the labels, transferring them to the concrete. Everything else from the supermarket he placed beside them. After counting the miniatures he regarded Peckover with what Peckover thought might be the merest trace of pity. He gestured towards the suitcases: the jaded one his own, the decent one with straps and studs, Mercy’s.

  Enough was enough. Delving for his warrant card, Peckover said, “Il n’y a pas rien dans la baggage. Vraiment. Je suis policier de Scotland Yard.”

  Policier sur la piste, he would have added had he been certain this meant “on the trail.” He had a suspicion it might mean he was on a ski slope. He handed the ratbag the blue card. All right, he should have checked what the allowances were, what this foul essence of pastis was. Just the same. What about the Common Market, the free and unfettered passage of goods and bods across frontiers?

  “La police en France et en Andorre aussi me connaît—connaissent?” Peckover plugged on with slow, round vowels and a cracking of consonants. Never since General de Gaulle had delivered that “Français, Françaises—aidez-moi” speech had French been so clearly, resonantly spoken. “Demandez-vous à eux, monsieur.”

  “Comment?”

  Peckover stepped towards the front of the Mercedes. He opened Mercy’s door and said, “Sorry. Come and translate.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “We’ve got a right whipper-snapper. An attractive woman just might unsettle him.”

  A second, older, equally impassive customs officer had joined the first. Together they were perusing the warrant card. Mercy opened her suitcase and brought out a knitted jacket.

  The sun had gone down. A half dozen paces away oozed the liberated, unmolested traffic, spilling petrol fumes. Now and then halting because ahead a successful smuggler had stopped to celebrate with champagne, but advancing again and accelerating as the frontier and officialdom became of no further account.

  “Bon, ça va, ça va, ça va,” said the older customs man, passing the card back to Peckover. He made a sweeping gesture which appeared to indicate everything might go back into the boot, though he personally was not about to lend a hand, and turned on his heel. The pipsqueak officer sneered and padded after him. Sod off then, Peckover thought. He had been all set to feel grateful, invite them to London for the Policeman’s Ball.

  He gathered up contraband. Mercy was having a problem intruding an arm into an inside-out sleeve. He plucked and fiddled one-handed with the sleeve’s cuff, trying to find her hand inside it. His other hand held to his breast Toblerone and an Edam.

  “Thanks,” she said, then went rigid.

  By the time Peckover saw why, the traffic was advancing again, and the pale blue car which he and Mercy could almost have reached out and touched was drawing away. Peckover and the driver, head turned through forty-five degrees, regarded each other. Though Peckover instantly recognised him, his immediate reaction was, Mr. Balderstone. He found that he too had become a statue, his mouth open in surprise, his hand up Mercy’s sleeve.

  “Stop—McCluskey!” he called out, still not moving.

  The traffic was moving though, and by the time Peckover was on the move, Hector McCluskey was going to be catchable only if someone ahead slowed the flow with champagne. The traffic was accelerating as if determined to be home before dark, which would not be long now.

  Peckover glanced round for support. No one, only Mercy, and accelerating motorists. The customs pair were trekking ever more distantly. Peckover started to run after the blue car and lost the Edam, which bounced once, then bowled redly in the direction of the traffic. He ran a dozen purposeless yards before stopping, not with any great dismay. What would he have done had he caught up? Tapped on the window? Thrown himself across the bonnet? While fancying his chances against Hector McCluskey the chef, minor celebrity, and bagpipe-blower, Peckover was less sure about kamikaze pilots. His chief beef was that he had failed to see the car’s registration. Fore and aft this burst of traffic had been bumper-to-bumper, as the press described Bank Holiday traffic. A bluish, largish car was the best he could have said. The same, he supposed,
he had glimpsed parked in the pines.

  He saw it once again, going well, a hundred yards distant down the winding road from Pas de la Case. He ran back to the Mercedes.

  Oh no. No Mercy McCluskey.

  He looked through the windows. He ran round the car and looked beneath it. The bottles, oil, palm hearts, Omo, stood abandoned on the pavement by the open boot. He turned through a circle, searching. He could not believe it. Why, why? His fists clenched.

  Here she came: the termagent, the sad, unfathomable, beanstick wife, mistress and mother of three, dodging through the traffic in her heavy-knit jacket, holding two-handed the Edam. She was flushed and unsmiling, yet he believed there was an air of accomplishment.

  “Ta,” he said. “Did you recognise the car—is it Hector’s?”

  “Never seen it before.”

  The cheese had escaped car wheels but its cellophane-wrapped skin had turned from red to black, or at any rate grey. Embedded gravel gave it a resemblance to the cheese smothered in grape pips which Miriam brought home from time to time, snitched from her archeologists. Peckover put it in the boot. He loaded the rest of the rubbish.

  “Did you notice a police station?” he asked. “Never mind. Customs will do. Come on.”

  He took her arm and they stepped out across the concrete. He took her arm, Peckover told himself, to comfort her and to be on the safe side. He invented these reasons so as to avoid the real reason, which was to touch her, and failing to avoid contemplating this real reason, he decided he might as well keep hold of her arm. He was fairly flabbergasted by his urge to touch Mercy McCluskey, considering, and by the pleasure holding her arm gave him. He thought the pleasure did not arise primarily from the protective instinct. Not being old enough to be her father, he believed the feeling was not fatherly either. Or brotherly. He decided to let analysis be.