‘I certainly wish I was going with you,’ Tad said once more as he was leaving, and Grant wondered if seeing the South of France as one big honky-tonk was any more absurd than seeing it as mimosa. Which was what it was to him.
‘France!’ said Mrs Tinker. ‘When you’ve only just come back from foreign parts!’
‘The Highlands may be foreign parts, but the South of France is merely an extension of England.’
‘It’s a very expensive extension, I’ve ’eard. Roonous. When was you expectin’ to be back? I got a loverly chicken from Carr’s for you.’
‘The day after tomorrow, I hope. Friday at the latest.’
‘Oh, then it’ll keep. Was you wantin’ to be called earlier tomorrow mornin’, then?’
‘I’ll be away before you come in, I think. So you can have a late morning tomorrow.’
‘A late mornin’ wouldn’t suit Tinker, it wouldn’t. But I’ll get me shoppin’ done before I come in. Now you see and take care of yerself. No burning the candle at both ends and comin’ back lookin’ no better than when you went away to Scotland in the beginnin’. I ’ope it keeps fine for you!’
Fine indeed, Grant thought, looking down at the map of France next morning. From that height on this crystal morning it was not a thing of earth and water and crops. It was a small jewelled pattern set in a lapis-lazuli sea; a Fabergé creation. Not much wonder that flyers as a species had a detached attitude to the world. What had the world—its literature, its music, its philosophies, or its history—to do with a man who saw it habitually for the thing it was: a bit of Fabergé nonsense?
Marseilles, at close quarters, was no jeweller’s creation. It was the usual noisy crowded place filled with impatient taxi-horns and the smell of stale coffee; that very French smell that haunts its houses with the ghosts of ten million coffee-brewings. But the sun shone, and the striped awnings flapped a little in the breeze from the Mediterranean, and the mimosa displayed its pale expensive yellow in prodigal masses. As a companion picture to the grey and scarlet of London it was, he thought, perfect. If he ever was rich he would commission one of the best artists in the world to put the two pictures on canvas for him; the chiaroscuro of London and bright positive blaze of Marseilles. Or perhaps two different artists. It was unlikely that the man who could convey the London of a grey day in April would also be able to paint the essence of Marseilles on a spring noon.