Chapter 5 Le Rendez-vous
Le Rendez-vous
Flynn was meeting a Frenchwoman called Delphine Dubois for a drink.
She had been working at the Festival for only a short time, doing something menial in Homes and Gardens, and it was she, rather than Flynn, who had suggested the drink, approaching him while he was wandering rather listlessly around the South Bank site.
He presumed by “a drink” she meant a date—a man and a woman having a drink together signalled little else, as far as he could see.
He had only agreed because it would have seemed rude to turn her down flat on the flimsy pretext that she seemed arrogant.
She might just be shy, he thought, prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt.
She was interesting, in that she was closer to Flynn’s own age than many of the women who worked in Savoy Court and was the opposite of the Festival’s usual willing female serfs and eager demi-debutantes.
Her choice of venue—the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden—was apparently where she stopped for a pastis every evening on her way home. She was already there when he arrived, sighing impatiently (“Enfin!”) as if he were late, when in fact he was a good fifteen minutes early.
An hour (it seemed longer) progressed in the same rather desultory vein. She drank her pastis while Flynn stuck to his usual whisky. It made him feel mildly nauseous, a condition so common for him that he hardly noticed.
Delphine wore a black dress and had a chic white silk scarf tied around her neck, knotted to the side.
The scarf was printed with little Eiffel Towers in red and blue—a patriotic nod to her homeland, presumably.
He could smell her scent—he recognized it as one that Ivy Shears favoured, although he wouldn’t have been able to name it.
(“Shalimar,” she said when asked.) Delphine Dubois was not particularly alluring—she had a big bump in her nose and a wide mouth, emphasized by harsh red lipstick that itself only served to highlight her nicotine-stained teeth—yet she had a grown-up kind of sexuality which was missing from the eager serfs and demi-debutantes, who frequently behaved as though they were in a Girl Guide pack.
She moodily smoked her foul-smelling cigarettes while brooding over her Ricard, all the while complaining about her British colleagues.
And the British weather. And British food.
Even British literature got it in the neck.
“We have Molière, Flaubert, Stendhal, Victor Hugo—giants of literature. Who do you have?”
“Shakespeare?” Flynn offered. “Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes?”
“Pah,” she said, waving her cigarette dismissively. She had disparaged his pack of Players and was smoking her own Gauloises.
And this was a filthy country, she added.
The people were grubby, their clothes unwashed, their buildings unpainted.
And there were bombsites everywhere. “Well, we were bombed,” Flynn felt it necessary to point out.
We didn’t surrender our city, like you did, he wanted to say, but bit his tongue.
It would hardly be conducive to an entente cordiale.
She was right, of course. London was filthy and shabby and depressed.
The Festival, with its nursery colours and bright lights, the introduction of modern design and its optimistic faith in the future, was to be the beginning of a cure, Gerald Barry’s tonic.
Flynn started trying to explain the philosophy behind the Festival to Delphine, but he began to bore even himself.
Why didn’t she just go back to France? he wondered.
Because she was in exile, she stated morosely.
He supposed it was a declaration of an existential condition rather than of being banished from the country of her birth.
Was she a refugee? There were a lot of both pre- and post-war refugees from Europe who worked in the Festival Office.
He thought it might be insensitive to ask, and she seemed altogether too enervated to volunteer any further information.
For quite a lot of their short evening together, she behaved as though she was enduring his company on sufferance and couldn’t wait to escape—an increasingly mutual feeling.
The rest of the time, when she wasn’t being deliberately cantankerous, was spent, conversely, in a seemingly manic display of flirting—leaning so close to Flynn that he nearly choked on her perfume, coyly whispering nonsense in his ear, pouting and batting her eyelashes in a parody of seduction, even though she was demonstrably not attracted to him.
Occasionally she would address him in a rapid torrent of her native language that his own grammar-school French found almost impossible to decipher.
He thought she might be deranged in some way.
Indeed, she did say “Je suis dérangée” when he challenged her about her inconsistent behaviour, although it was hardly a challenge, just a polite Englishman’s mild query as to whether she was “feeling all right.” A query that was met with a mute gesture of dismissal.
He had just lit a cigarette for her when she startled him by saying—very quietly—“There’s a man watching me.”
“Who? Where?” Flynn looked around. The Lamb and Flag seemed to be the exclusive preserve of solitary males, all gazing into their drinks. None of them were looking at Delphine.
“He thinks I can’t see him. He must think I’m stupid.”
Was her performance of extreme courtship—she was trying to nuzzle his ear now and he had to brush her off—intended for the man she claimed was watching her—perhaps to make him jealous?
Or was she just plain, straightforward mad.
Dérangée. “Do you need me to do something about him?” he offered gallantly.
“What an English gentleman,” she said scornfully. “There’s nothing you can do. They’re planning to sacrifice me.”
“Sacrifice? They? More than one?” What kind of strange one-woman melodrama was she engaged in?
“Mon Dieu, I shall die of ennui,” she said with a tremendous sigh when he lit another cigarette for her.
He felt like offering to dig her grave himself, but instead he politely suggested another round of drinks, hoping she would refuse.
The last thing he wanted was to stretch their rendezvous out any further.
His heart sank when she said indifferently, “Yes, why not?”
While he waited at the bar for service, he glanced around again.
Still no one was showing the slightest interest in Delphine.
Two drinkers in the corner were paired up, playing a game of dominoes.
Another had apparently come straight from work: he was wearing an oil-stained boilersuit, but now drained his pint to the dregs and departed.
A man in the corner was absorbed by the game of Patience he was playing, turning the cards over slowly and murmuring disappointment at every reveal.
Another, sitting at the bar, was ticking off horses on the racing page of the Mirror.
In short, none of the denizens of the Lamb and Flag looked to be in the slightest bit interested in watching Delphine, let alone sacrificing her.
Flynn ordered the same again. The man sitting at the bar, a beer drinker, gave a soft sneer at his request for the Ricard, investing it with scorn for the whole French nation.
When he turned his head to look at Flynn, he revealed the messy shrapnel scar that zigzagged down one side of his face.
It looked as though Dr. Frankenstein had been the one who had volunteered to sew it up.
“Any tips for Newmarket?” the barman asked him. “I heard Three Cheers might be the one to watch.” He took a Cockney’s pleasure in his own accent.
The man gazed at a jar of pickled eggs on the bar as if it was a crystal ball before eventually saying, “Nah, Vidi Vici. He’s on great form. He’ll romp home with it. Trust me, mate.”
“Short odds,” the barman said, dissatisfied with the prognostication.
When he ferried the drinks back to their table, Flynn found Delphine applying more lipstick, scrutinizing herself in the little mirror of her powder compact.
As he placed her drink in front of her, she glanced at her watch and gasped (“Mon Dieu!”), as if it had informed her that she was in mortal peril, when in fact she was merely late for something.
“Je suis en retard. J’ai un rendezvous. Zheel m’attend.
” Who or what was Zheel? Flynn wondered.
She snapped the compact shut and stood up abruptly.
“But I just bought you another drink,” Flynn said reasonably. He didn’t know why he was protesting when he was feeling increasingly eager to escape her company. “Meeting someone else?” he asked, trying not to sound as sarcastic as he felt. (This Zheel, perhaps?)
Delphine shrugged the question off with Gallic disdain.
She seemed to blame Flynn for her tardiness.
Flynn sighed. Still, he thought, there was nothing to be gained by letting things end on a sour note, so he escorted her out of the pub and on to Garrick Street, where he managed to hail a taxi for her.
Apparently he didn’t even merit a peck on the cheek, only an au revoir and a dismissive hand raised in the air with her back to him after she had leant in to tell the driver where to go.
They had never even progressed from vous to tu.
Once the taxi had disappeared, Flynn returned to the pub and drank his whisky with a chaser of Delphine’s abandoned Ricard.
Pouring water into the pastis, he watched it turn the foggy yellow of a London pea-souper before downing it in one.
He ordered another whisky. “One for the road,” he said to the indifferent barman.