Read Online The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page A

Lukash?’
    â€˜What is your Christian name, Mr Rivac?’
    â€˜Georges. Why do you ask?’
    â€˜Because my charming Frenchman has come to life. And I am Zia.’
    They agreed to rendezvous at one o’clock the following day in the churchyard of the little town of Thame, not far from the village of Alderton where Rivac was brought up. By then he would have found accommodation for her and made sure that he had not been followed. He explained to her precisely how to take train and bus and recommended that she should pack the green cloak and cap instead of wearing them.
    â€˜You will recognise me without them?’
    â€˜We have known each other for twenty-four hours. It is quite enough.’
    â€˜Enough?’ she asked mischievously.
    She had expected Georges Rivac to stammer his way out of that one; but he was used now to the way her mind as well as body took off on impudent wings and settled serenely.
    â€˜Enough to be aware of the attractions of which Mr. Spring was good enough to warn me,’ he replied with pretended gravity.
    Rivac left London at once before any organisation—sure to be wildly exaggerated because unknown—could pick up his trail. He carried only his overnight bag, never intending to stay more than a day in England, and chose to walk the few miles from Thame to Alderton rejoicing in his second country and the scent and snow of the hawthorn dividing field from field and field from lane over the low-lying land.
    It was twenty-one years since he had left the village for France, thereafter only returning at intervals to see his grandmother until her death in 1965. He found that Alderton had changed little except for a couple of housing estates where he remembered the cottages of agricultural workers, picturesque outside and inside foul and damp as the mud of winter. At least the neatness of colour-washed bungalows mostly with cars parked outside, was in keeping with affluent Europe however foreign to the stone and rosy brick of the village street. The manor which long before his time had descended the social scale into nothing more than an elaborate farm house had been tarted up and proudly exhibited its seventeenth-century architecture, lawns mown, shrubberies disciplined, a brood mare and a hunter in the white-railed paddock.
    Daisy Taylor who had presided over his youth as his grandmother’s cook and companion received him at her cottage gate, at first shyly and then with tears as he gathered her waistless rotundity into his arms.
    â€˜Well, well, Master Georges! Who would ’a thought it? And there’s a rabbit pie in the oven what you used to be that fond of and I only ’ope you don’t want them red Spanish bangers in it what your dear grandmother used to buy whenever she could get ’er ’ands on ’em. And your room’s nearly ready if you’ll give a minute to get them sheets ironed, for it’s no time ago that Mrs Stone slipped over to say as ’ow you’d telephoned her to give me a message.’
    Yes, it would be the same welcome in France but different, and different in Spain but the same, and equally familiar to Czechs and Poles exiled from their Europe, not to mention butterflying Hungarians! He sat down in the kitchen while Daisy ironed the sheets and chattered of lives and marriages and the scandals which weren’t really, Master Georges, scandals no longer. Twins it was, and it weren’t ’im that wouldn’t marry she but ’er that wouldn’t marry ’e. And our Mr Longwill as you used to catch hares with not to mention that there deer which would ’ave brought you up before the beaks if the sergeant ’adn’t been a particular friend of mine—he’s made a lot of money in London and done the place up a treat. Got a bit above ’imself but there’s nothing ’e won’t do for you if you can put up with the way he carries on.’
    â€˜Married?’ Rivac