Jasmine Harvest Read online

  In order that they could talk while they gathered, Caroline and Betsy elected to work on adjacent rows. But in practice one or other pulled ahead and they lost touch when they went to empty their baskets or when faster pickers caught up with them, necessitating their beginning again elsewhere.

  At one time Caroline was working alongside a crone with baked-apple cheeks and gnarled hands which flashed and hovered among the blossoms with the speed of hawkmoths. She hadn’t, she told Caroline, missed a jasmine harvest since she was seven, and this morning she reckoned she had “had her kilo” within the first hour.

  From her Caroline gathered that one’s first kilogram of the day was a milestone, a status symbol, and, still far short of her own, she was very touched when the old lady plunged both hands into the fragrant depths of her basket and unloaded four heaped fistfuls into her with a nod, a gappy smile and an “Allons! Now you will soon have your kilo, Mademoiselle—no?” before she moved on and out of range.

  Another of Caroline’s fellow workers was a pretty teenager who was concerned far less with kilograms than with the election of a Jasmine Queen for the Fete. Taking it for granted that Caroline knew a certain Genevieve Bresson, she canvassed her opinion anxiously.

  Would Caroline say she had the better chance than ’Vieve, or not? Bien entendu, ’Vieve, to some people’s way of thinking, had everything, but everything! On the other hand she was old—twenty, no less. What was more, she was already fiancée, which should be a disqualification in itself, didn’t Caroline agree?

  It was with “Vieve’s” rival for the jasmine crown that Caroline adjourned for the equivalent of elevenses at about nine o’clock. The improvised canteen was a truck loaded to its tailboards with bread, sausage, fruit and wine, provided free by the estate to the pickers and dispensed by volunteers.

  Among these was Ursule, lending a hand at Berthin’s request not Paul’s, she was quick to assure Caroline, dismissing Paul’s new cooperation with a shrug and a sour “Whatever is behind it, you may be sure it’s to his gain. And where, for example, do you suppose he is now?”

  Caroline didn’t know and said so.

  “He has gone down to Cannes, if you please, to bring Madame Lescure up to view the spectacle of the jasmine picking at its height! For my part, I shall have gone home. I still have my morning’s work to do and Berthin’s luncheon to prepare. And now, my dear, if you’d prefer not to form part of the peepshow, should come with me. What do you say?”

  But Caroline, fascinated by the task and eager to perfect her rhythm, in it, elected to see the day’s picking out. She joined up with Betsy again, and for the next hour they remained within shouting distance of each other.

  It was Betsy who saw Paul and Ariane first. Stopping beside Caroline on her way back from emptying her basket, she jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Look who’s slumming,” she invited. “Are we expected to pull our forelocks or drop curtseys—which?”

  Caroline straightened, rubbing her lumbar muscles with one hand and with the other plucking her sweat-dampened shirt away from her shoulderblades. By contrast with Ariane’s white fringed poncho and her nun-like wimple surmounted by a classic straw boater, she felt and looked like a tramp, and so did Betsy.

  Paul was pointing and Ariane was using her cine-camera. Then they were coming along the girls’ row and Ariane was begging them to pose for her.

  Betsy said rudely, “It’s a free country. What’s to stop you turning your little handle and taking what you please?” before picking up her basket and stalking away to a new position.

  Ariane shrugged. “Poor dear Betsy—so very transparent!” she murmured to no one in particular. And then to Caroline, “You’ll let me take you, won’t you? Just as you are—all gamine and careless and dressed for the part?”

  “If you like.”

  “Paul, too. Get into the picture!” Ariane’s proprietorial forefinger urged him into the same focus as Caroline.

  As he obeyed, “What’s the caption to this one? ‘Brutal Overseer With Slave Down On The Ole Cotton Lot?” he wanted to know.

  “Of course not. If you pretend to be gathering too, I’ll take it ‘still’; we’ll call it ‘Jasmine Morning’ and Caroline shall have a print to remind her of Pascal after she has gone back to England—”

  But before Ariane had adjusted her camera for the shot there was a sharp call of “Caro!” and as Caroline turned she saw Betsy suddenly keel over as if in a faint.

  Caroline ran, thrusting through and over the knee-high bushes of the intervening rows. But Paul’s longer stride took him ahead of her, and Betsy had straightened and was leaning on him for support when Caroline came up.

  “Betsy! What happened?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Betsy cupped her face in her hands. “I—sort of passed out for a moment. Everything went black. Probably the heat. It’s pretty savage, isn’t it?”

  Apparently the small crowd which had collected agreed with her. There were sympathetic murmurs of “La pauvre petite! Elle s’evanouie! She faints from the heat, and no wonder, for in England, they say, the sun has very little strength at all!” Then Paul was saying gently, “You’d better call it a day, little one. I’ve got the car handy and I’m going to take you home. Would you like Caroline to come with you, or needn’t she?”

  But as Betsy began, “She needn’t. I shall be quite all right with you—” Caroline took the choice out of her hands.

  “Of course I’m coming,” she said. “Marie asked for the day off in order to gather too, remember, and you mustn’t be in the house alone, in case you feel queer again.”

  As she spoke she thought Betsy looked none too pleased. But it was not until she was lying down in the darkened salon of the villa and Paul had gone that she said crossly, “I must say you could have let me get away with it, Caro! You don’t really suppose, do you, that I’d forgotten Marie wouldn’t be here when Paul brought me home?”

  Caroline froze in the act of pouring the Vichy water which Paul had advised. “Get away with it?” she echoed. “But, d’you mean you didn’t really feel awful? You didn’t faint? You—staged the whole thing?”

  At least Betsy had the grace to avoid her eyes. “Not altogether. I had begun to feel I’d had about as much of all that stooping in the sun as I could take—”

  “Then why on earth did you begin again after we had stopped for elevenses?”

  “Oh, I thought I’d give it a bit longer. But when she showed up with Paul and I went off on my own, it seemed a good idea to try it if it would work, and it would have done if you’d had half the tact you were born with,” Betsy retorted sourly.

  “So it was an act! And the idea was—?”

  “To get Paul to myself, of course. I calculated he’d have to suggest bringing me home, and with Marie not here he would hardly leave me alone. And then of course you had to spoil it all.”

  “Well, what did you expect me to do? And as Paul believed you were really on the sick list where would being alone with him have got you?”

  “Well, at least it would have got him away from her for a bit, wouldn’t it?” Betsy countered.

  “As you say—Though if, in order to do that, you’ve got to resort to throwing fake fits of the vapors, I should think it’s certainly high time you decided to give Ariane best,” said Caroline, momentarily too impatient of Betsy’s tactics to feel her usual sympathy for her.

  Betsy sulked for the rest of the day, left the white lies to Caroline when Paul telephoned to ask how she was and refused to go jasmine picking again the next morning.

  So Caroline went alone, and during the next few days saw the whole of the Pascal harvest through as she moved with the pickers from one plantation to another. Every noon she lined up to collect her pay as they did, for on the first morning she had conceived a fancy to spend it on something of no particular intrinsic value but so typically Provencal that she would re-live all this summer’s bittersweet memories whenever she touched or looked at it.

  Without kno
wing quite what she was looking for she scanned the shop windows of Cannes in search of it, and on the morning of the Jasmine Fete to be held in Grasse that evening, she was doing so on the Croisette when Witold Czinner came along and spoke to her.

  “You are indulging yourself in the feminine pastime of window shopping, Mademoiselle?” he smiled.

  “Well, not exactly.” Caroline described her errand, mentioning the sum she wanted to spend.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “One understands. You are looking for the souvenir that isn’t labelled ‘A Present From the Côte d’Azur’ but will remind you of it all the same? Well now, I wonder if you have considered some of the fine ceramics they make in Vallauris? You have been to Vallauris, perhaps?”

  Caroline hadn’t. But she knew of its fame for pottery and had been thinking along those lines, she told him.

  “Then would you care to see some of the pieces we have at Salon Ariane? A minute, two perhaps, and we can be there, if you will come?”

  Caroline looked at her watch, and saw that it was noon. “But you must be on your way to lunch,” she demurred.

  His shrug made nothing of it. “There will be time enough for my dejeuner when I have pleased you, if I can,” he said simply. “Besides, I am only too happy to have met you, Mademoiselle. You were so kind at Maison Pascal the other evening that I flatter myself you may be happy to hear that I am at last going back to Warsaw!”

  “You are? Oh, Monsieur Czinner, I’m so glad. When?” Caroline asked.

  He beamed. “Very soon, I hope. It is before I thought possible and even now before it is really prudent, since I am still short of the target of money I set myself. But when I had news that my mother is ill I knew that if I waited I could be too late. So I go now and must pray that it will all arrange itself in the end.”

  “I do hope so, and I’m sure it will,” she assured him. “But what will the salon and Madame Lescure do without you, Monsieur?”

  “Ah, well—happily enough, that arranges itself too. I shall upset nothing by going, for Madame is already planning to close the salon for her own personal reasons. But this is her confidence to me. It is not generally known in Cannes. So you will keep it to yourself, Mademoiselle, please?”

  “Of course.” Standing behind him as he used his key on the door of the shop, Caroline thought. That’s all it needed. If there’s been any doubt of Paul’s intentions ... of Ariane’s, it’s finished now. Now it’s time for Betsy to go. For me too. For me too!

  From among the Vallauris ware which Witold showed her she chose an unpainted jug of the loveliest proportions and two wall plates with Picasso-inspired designs. Wishing also to give something to Ursule when she left, she decided on a pair of old Fragonard prints. As, however, the latter had not yet been priced, Witold suggested he should check with Ariane and send all her purchases up to the villa together with the bill when he had done so.

  Caroline thanked him, wished him bon voyage if they should not meet again before he left France, and parted from him at the bar where he was going for lunch. But she did not catch the first available bus back to Villon. She sat in the Croisette gardens for a long time, thinking. Then she counted the money in her bag and with a sense of forcing Betsy to the brink of a Rubicon, went to the nearest telephone and booked a person-to-person call to Chicago.

  She did not get back to the villa until it was almost time to leave for Grasse with Betsy if they were to secure good places from which to watch the procession of silver band, parading firemen, decorated floats and the ceremony of crowning the Jasmine Queen on the Cours before people had the choice of dancing there themselves or of attending the open-air performance of L’Arlesienne in the nearby public gardens.

  Caroline already knew that her friend of her first morning’s jasmine picking had been elected Queen by a narrow margin over the rivalry of “ ’Vieve.” But ’Vieve was there as chief Maid of Honor, and to judge by the smacking kiss the girls exchanged at the crowning, no malice was being borne by either party.

  Betsy wanted to dance, so until the band struck up she and Caroline toured the booths around the Cours, buying balloons and paper streamers and replying in kind whenever they were pelted with, flowers in the good-natured battles which eddied back and forth around them. There was litter; there was dust; there was stridency; wolf whistles; good-natured jostlings; handshakes; spurts of quarrelling which petered out as swiftly as they flared. It was a community’s age-old giving of thanks for the safe garnering of their harvest, and it was good to be there and to join in.

  As at Paul’s party, almost everyone the girls knew was there, with the exception, to Caroline’s relief, of Henri Mercier. André Mayence, with whom she danced several times, confirmed that since the affair of the fireworks he and Henri had kept their distance from each other and said he didn’t know what Henri did with his leisure time now. In any case, he himself was finishing his laboratory course in a week or two, and after that they need never meet again.

  It was while Caroline was dancing with him that she saw Paul; at first with Ariane; then in a group of men; then dancing with Betsy. After that she lost sight of both of them and was standing alone, looking out across the stone balustrading of the Cours towards Cannes and the sea, when there was a touch on her shoulder and Paul was there beside her.

  “What are you doing, all on your lone? Where’s Betsy?” was his greeting.

  “Betsy? The last time I saw her she was with you,” Caroline told him.

  “That she ought first to be very sure she wan—have joined up with you again. I’m afraid that when she parted from me, I wasn’t any more popular with her than I frequently am with you.”

  Caroline allowed the barbed comparison to pass. “You—not popular with Betsy? That would be something new,” she said.

  “No, seriously—You see, she forestalled the diplomacy you and I had planned by volunteering that she was practically engaged to this Edward Brant and asking my advice as to how she ought to break with him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That she ought first to be very sure she wanted to break with him, and be equally sure she was prepared to face the immediate future without him and without the cosy feeling that being engaged must give any girl. To which she replied that her feelings weren’t quite the point, were they? She would be breaking her engagement because it wasn’t fair to go on with it when she had fallen in love with someone else. And as long as she had done the right thing by Edward, she supposed she would have to take her chance with the ‘someone else’.”

  Caroline sighed. “Oh, dear! And then—?”

  Paul offered cigarettes, lighted hers, then his own. As he did so, “Well, rather obviously I couldn’t take up that cue, could I?” he said.

  “I suppose not. So what did you say?”

  “Ah, that’s where you’ll think I failed her, I’m afraid. I told her a shade too vigorously that if she wanted the truth from me, she hadn’t the right to break with Edward until she had seen him again, and my advice was to go back to England and think it over very carefully before she did.”

  “Which was, of course, the very last thing she wanted to hear from you, of all people!”

  “Poor babe, she scarcely waited to hear it. She muttered. ‘Oh, Paul, how can you?’—reproach in every syllable, and dashed away.”

  “Where from? Where were you?”

  “In the Gardens. I didn’t follow her at once, and since I came back there was no trace of either her or you until just now.”

  “I’ve been in the Gardens too—with André Mayence,” said Caroline. Together she and Paul scanned the dancers in search of Betsy until he said, “I suppose she would hardly have left you flat and gone home alone?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. But perhaps I’d better see if her car is still parked.”

  “You won’t go alone. I’ll come with you.” As they pressed their way through the crowds towards the car park he added, “I want to check on my own car, too. On the way over, Ariane drove. Sh
e only looked in at the Fete before going to dine with some friends on the Rue Carnot just below the Gardens. But if she didn’t take the car’s ignition key with her by mistake, she must have left it in position, for I find I haven’t got it.” Arrived at the car park they parted company. It took Caroline only a minute or two to check that, though Betsy was nowhere to be seen, the car was still where they had left it. But when she went to tell Paul so, she found him in hot altercation with the attendant.

  He turned to her briefly. “This doesn’t make sense! My car has gone, and this fellow has just described Betsy to me—” He turned back to the man. “You say Madame got into the driving seat and drove away as if she had a perfect right to do so?” he asked.

  “But yes, Monsieur! That is, she took the wheel and switched on the engine, but she did not leave at once—”

  Paul said to Caroline, “As you know, they didn’t issue any tickets, and they asked that we shouldn’t lock the car, in case it had to be moved. As I thought, Ariane had left the ignition key at the ready, and he says that as he recalled ‘Madame’ had driven in, he didn’t question her driving out again. But of course he has only got the sex right—he mistook Betsy for Ariane.” To the man he said, “Well, if Madame didn’t leave at once, what did she do?”

  “She asked what was the worst, the most dangerous road out of the town, for she wished to take it, wherever it led.”

  At that Caroline plucked at Paul’s arm. “That can’t be true! Betsy hasn’t enough French to be able to ask any such thing.”

  He frowned. “No, she hasn’t, has she?” But when he put this to the attendant the man agreed that Betsy had spoken in a mixture of English and halting French which he did not understand.

  "So I call my son Pierre who knows English, and he tells Madame what she wants to know.”

  “And this Pierre of yours—where is he?” demanded Paul.

  “Hélas, he has gone to the dancing for a little minute. But he told me that this was what Madame was asking, and that, though he doubted if he was right to tell her, he directed her to take any road north out of the town and then to ask for the one which runs up to the mimosa Plantage Fragonard and beyond, for if she wanted hazards, that was the road for her. Whereupon Madame thanked him and left.”