Half an hour later, washed and changed into dry clothing, they were back downstairs, ready for a brisk walk before dinner—Nora's first meal since eight that morning and John's first meal of the day.
"I was wrong about the war," the manager said.
"Oh?"
"Yes. It was the Austrians who have declared the war on France."
They walked down the north quay of the port. There were two steamers and one sailing ship in dock, all English. Outside the custom house, the goat crate lay abandoned on the jetty. An old woman was reaching her hands into it, trying to milk the nanny. John, taking pity on her, offered her an English sixpence, but she laughingly rejected it and explained, in flawless English—for naturally she was English—that she was milking the goat from charity, not poverty. "I am a sister to Lord Dorland," she said, enjoying their discomfiture.
They went on as far as the fish market and the English churches, opposite the railway station. John pointed to it: "A bit of genuine Stevenson."
"Aye," she agreed. "It has that solid, dependable look. Is that the Napoleon column?" She pointed to a tall monument on a hill over the town. She had been reading her Murray.
John chuckled. "This town's full of monuments to futile hopes of invading England. Did ye see a little brick ruin on the cliff north of the harbour? That was built by Caligula while he waited in vain to cross our channel."
"And I must see the château," she said, "where they locked up Napoleon III when he tried to land."
They turned up the hill, toward the old town. "The moral of it seems to be: If you want to get anywhere, don't start from Boulogne."
His words were prophetic, for they never reached the château. At the corner of the Rue de la Lampe, where it opens into the marketplace, Nora suddenly turned back and pushed John to face into a shop window.
"Earthenware pots?" he asked.
"No," she said quietly. "But look across at the nearest vegetable stall and you'll see a man. In a tall hat. With check trousers."
John looked. "Well, talk of the devil!" he said.
"And the girl with him?"
"Oh, yes! Or is it her?"
"I'd swear it. The point is: Do we acknowledge them?"
He was astonished. "Why ever not?"
"Well," she said, not liking to be pressed. "An English innkeeper arm in arm with one of his female servants in a French seaport."
He parodied a shock far greater than hers. "I hadn't thought of that. You are right, my dear. Come, let us hence."
Her arm straightened like an anchor cable, pulling him back. "Don't be hasty," she said.
He abandoned his posture and looked fondly at her. "Have you forgotten, love, what you said when I asked you to marry me? The very minute I asked?"
She coloured.
"You said," he went on, "that I hadn't tried you and you might be barren. And you said: 'Shall us not live together a while?'"
"That was before I knew better," she replied crossly.
"Not in my book." His eyes would not let her escape. "I loved the lass as said them words; and I love her still, see thee."
In the end she had to smile, and her smile was unstinted. "Thou art soft as a suckin' duck," she told him.
"Mebbe," he agreed. Then he straightened himself and dropped the dialect. "So we'll cross this road and we'll greet them and chat with them and maybe we'll have a little glass of something in a café and we'll go our ways. And we'll do naught but give out that what's their business is their business."
She was already pulling him across the road, following a large cart piled with seaweed.
How to attract the attention of two people so rapt in each other's company and in the living moment that the world might catch fire around them? John and Nora stood at right angles to them, at the edge of the stall, smiling, waiting to be noticed and then recognized. "Good news," John said out the corner of his mouth. "There's a wedding ring in it."
After what seemed an age the man looked up. He looked harder, he looked astonished, he looked delighted. "Mr. Stevenson!" he called. "And Mrs. Stevenson too." He snatched off his hat and shook hands with her and then with John. "My dear, you remember Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson, our favourite guests at the Tabard? Allow me"—he turned back to them—"to present Mrs. Cornelius. Mrs. Sarah Cornelius. Sarah NevilI as was. As I'm sure you'll remember! What? Forget Sarah?" He rattled on as they, smiling under his barrage, reached over the stall and shook hands. "The treasure of the Tabard? The finest jewel…"
"Tom!" Sarah laid a finger on his lip and shook her head.
"Too much, eh? Too much?" He sighed. "Yes, too much. Yes."
Sarah laughed and clung to his arm.
"How marvellous," Nora said. "We were wondering about you only this morning, when we caught the train at London Bridge."
"They all say you've gone to the West Country," John told him. "We heard you'd sold out. But when did you marry?"
"Oh, recently, recently," Cornelius said.
"It's such a whirl." Sarah laughed and clung to his arm even tighter.
"Well, we must congratulate you," John said. "Though it's too late to wish you happiness, for I've never seen it shine so clear."
"We can wish its continuity," Nora said.
"More than that," Cornelius held out an arm to scoop them back into the road, "we can drink to it."
"Or eat," John said. "If London's best tavern keeper can't find Boulogne's best eating house, he deserves the West Country."
The stallholder shrieked something abusive at them as they left—the first clear words of French Nora had heard. Cornelius whipped round at once and, unabashed, shouted at her:
"Ah, quelle musique affreuse! Vous chantez, madame,
comme la vache qui pisse."
It stopped her in mid-flow and brought shouts and laughs of delight from shoppers and other stall folk.
"It's an old Breton saying," Cornelius said as they began again to walk. "But I fancy it travels well. Now"—he smelled the air around him—"to put on my sniffing cap and find us a good table d'hôte."
The place he took them to looked more like a slum than an eating house.
"Close your nose and eyes to the sanitary arrangements," he said as they walked down a dark, narrow stone passage, littered with mussel shells and fish offal. "They think sanitation is an English disease. They prefer to cure the gripes with gassy spa water."
"What did you say to that woman?" Nora asked.
Sarah cut in hastily. "It was improper, Mrs. Stevenson. Now, Tom—we shall at least begin the evening decorously."
"Voilà!"
he said, throwing open the door of a long, dark, low-ceilinged room. Four fishermen sat by the window, playing cards in the last straggling light of day. A man and a woman sat at a candlelit table at the other end. What the rest of the room contained was anybody's guess.
"I knew he'd bring us here," Sarah said.
Nora had never seen anything less appetizing. She was already preparing to have a convenient spasm of abdominal symptoms.
"Like a thieves' kitchen," John said.
"Like?" Cornelius laughed and pressed them forward into the gloom. "There's a table over there somewhere."
"Par ici, m'sieu."
A huge woman, who bounced and rebounded with every step, came through a door opposite, bearing a candle in a pewter stick. "Ah! Monsieur Corneille!" She curtseyed and put the candle on their table. There was no escape.
"Madame Thierry!" Cornelius bowed elaborately. "The best cook—what! The most incomparable cook in Boulogne. Perhaps in the entirety of Normandy!"
"Oh, non non non non non"
Madame knew enough English to follow Cornelius' particular words.
"En Boulogne—oui. Peut-être. Mais la Normandie entière! Oh…"
She shook her head and cackled with motherly laughter, throwing up her hands in benediction and then drowning Cornelius in her obese clutch as she kissed him on both cheeks. Twice.
They sat down, their eyes growing used to the dark. The candlelight softened their contours and warmed the colour of their skin, lending an eager sparkle to their eyes and, when they smiled, to their teeth. If John had really thought Sarah "quite plain" it would have been a hard opinion to defend that evening. True, she was no great beauty. And though not yet twenty-five, her face already showed the ravages of sorrow, loneliness, and hard toil. Nora, who had once been inside her old room, back at the Tabard in London, and found it furnished with books of poems and sermons and the stories of Dickens, had guessed she was the penniless daughter of a poor clergyman, perhaps orphaned and for some reason unable to take a place as a governess.
But this evening, whatever sorrows she may have endured were far behind her. She was enchanted by Cornelius and seemed astonished that he even noticed her. Whenever he said anything amusing, or just mildly interesting, she turned to John and Nora to make sure they enjoyed his wit and savoured his learning as profoundly as she did. She wanted to share him with the world. And she wanted the world to share him too. She hung on his every word.
"Love-come-late, love-come-hard," John said afterward. Neither he nor Nora was ever sure that the meal had really been the epicurean delight it had seemed at the time—or whether half its pleasure had not been induced by the company of two such eager, vivacious people, so deeply and so unashamedly in love.
Cornelius teased Madame Thierry without mercy, pretending that if he could only slip away from this gorgon of a wife…And she would cry out in laughing embarrassment and beg everyone in the room, which grew steadily more crowded as the evening wore on, not to listen to a word—and then she would nudge him eagerly and provoke him to say more of the same. For years, Nora treasured a memory of Cornelius, astonished between two huge udders, one on each shoulder, as Madame served across the table. It was the only moment when he was temporarily nonplussed. But he soon recovered. "Hold me feet," he cried. "I think I'm half in paradise!"
They ate a mussel stew, using the shells as scoops and throwing the empties into a tureen on the floor. Then came a dish of beans—just beans on their own—but served with butter and some herbs that made them fit for an individual dish. Then there was a crisp savoury pancake wrapped around a mixture of seafoods and vegetables, shredded fine. Then everybody talked and laughed a lot and ate cheese with little salt biscuits and dry white bread, very soft and crumbly. And afterward came a huge dish of turbot baked in wine and running with butter. And there was all the wine and all the cider they wanted. What did it matter that the table and chairs were of rough, scrubbed oak, only a little cleaner than the floor? Or that the plates and cutlery slid greasily between the fingers? The food was a sybarite's dream.
"Au poile, madame,'
' Cornelius said judiciously, holding thumb and index finger pinched to a nicety and shaking them at her. He teased her about everything except the food; with that, he was like a young priest with the ritual—still reverent. He ate as at a devotion, passing the food carefully around his mouth, provoking Madame's anxiety, chewing, breathing, chewing-and-breathing, smacking his tongue, and then closing his eyes and surrendering to the taste like a voluptuary—while Madame breathed again and beamed at him and clucked her delight at his.
It had never occurred to Nora that food could be so…more-than-serious. Sacrosanct. A religion. "Eee, ye're partial to a good bite, Mr. Cornelius, I can see," she said.
"To be sure," he agreed solemnly. "You find me another appetite you may indulge five times daily though ye live to be a hundred, and you may enlist me there too."
"Where in the West Country are you going, Mr. Cornelius?" John asked.
Cornelius and Sarah exchanged a knowing smile. "Whose West Country?" he asked. "Normandy's West Country. That's where. South of the Cherbourg thumb."
"Are you serious?"
"Never more so. We're buying—have bought—an inn at Coutances, near the sea." He took Sarah's hand.
"You can look right across to Jersey and Brittany," she said. "It's heavenly."
"But why?" John asked. "You're a legend in south London. You've made the Tabard. And now you go and give it up."
Cornelius shook his head. "The writing's on the wall, dear fellow. For them as reads. And it's writ in railway iron. London? It's doomed. Finished. In our lifetime—and we're still young men." He clenched his fists and looked around like a pugilist seeking a challenge. "In our lifetime, London will become insufferable. When I was a lad, before I went to France, a good stiff trot would get any of us out into green fields. There! From Thames bank at London Bridge to green fields. And where's it get you now? I'll tell you. It gets you down the Old Kent Road to Bricklayers Arms, where you can take a train back home for sixpence. Well. I'm going to spend my sixpences on Normandy cider, me. What? I should think so."
"You were in France as a boy?" Nora asked. "That's why you speak it so well."
"My father was an inspector of posts in Brittany. Then he quarrelled with everyone. He was a very quarrelsome man. I daren't go back there. And he came back to England as a teacher. His name was Corneille, Yves Corneille. So—you see?"
"We'll be so much happier here," Sarah said. "Look, where in England could we walk in off the street and find a place like this? And"—she sought for the words—"and…freedom. Relaxation…the ambiance like this. In England we have liberty and no passports, and we work, and we cooperate with the government, and we are orderly and punctual. And it's very nice to live there. But we don't know how to enjoy ourselves. How to relax. Liberty, but no freedom."