Free The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood Page A

him watching me as if worried I’ll contradict and say they’re my friends really, but he grows more confident as the week progresses, and why shouldn’t he claim their friendship? We go around in a group of four and if occasionally I find Charlot regarding Emile as if examining an interesting specimen . . . Well, he uses that expression often, sometimes on me. I am the dung-hill philosopher, without family or home, and to the best of his belief content with that.
    Charlot lives in a huge chateau, obviously. One of several belonging to his family. His mother is beautiful, his father is brave, his family are rich beyond belief. In someone less cavalier the idle boasting would grate. Somehow Charlot carries it off. He takes our homage and protects us lazily. If a Richelieu boy in our year is in trouble with an older boy, Charlot deals with it. He treats everyone as his equal: those younger than him, those older than him, even masters. It takes me two terms to realise he barely sees servants. Another term to realise no one else in my year sees them either. Even Emile learns to look through them. I stop to talk to a red-haired laundry maid and she’s so shocked she turns scarlet and rushes away. She’s young, probably no older than me. The next time she sees me she turns on her heels and hurries back the way she came.
    ‘Jean-Marie . . .’ Charlot and Jerome are in the corridor behind me. ‘You can’t make friends with loons,’ Charlot scolds. It’s the name we use for servants.
    ‘He doesn’t want to make friends ,’ Jerome says.
    I blush. ‘She’s a person.’
    Charlot rolls his eyes. Jerome smirks. They next time we see her, both of them are exaggeratedly polite and she retreats with tears in her eyes. ‘She only likes philosophers,’ Jerome says. But that’s it. She refuses to come near me again.
    Emile goes to stay with an aunt the next summer and I stay at school, somehow happier to be free of his family and have time for myself. I prepare my own food in the kitchens, which amuses the cooks until they realise I know what I’m doing. In between, to keep the colonel happy, I make mixtures that smoke, flash and explode. Filling a paper tube with three kinds of gunpowder I nearly lose my fingers when all three ignite at once before I’m ready. My next tube has cardboard spaces between the powders and a series of linked but separate wicks. The colonel comes to see what I am doing.
    ‘Add colour,’ he says.
    To the flash, the smoke or the explosion? I wonder. In the end I add them to all three and produce something between a flare and a firework that flashes red, smokes a ruddy pink and then explodes in an impressive blast of vermillion. By the time Charlot, Jerome and Emile return from their holidays I have created tubes that will flare, smoke and explode in reds, greens and blues. The colonel is more convinced than ever that I have a fine future in one of the artillery regiments. ‘Show off,’ Charlot says.
    Jerome laughs. ‘Ignore him,’ he says, his Normandy accent thicker than ever from a summer spent at home. ‘He’s just jealous.’
    ‘I was bored,’ I say. As close to an apology as I can manage.
    ‘Next summer you must come home with me,’ Charlot says carelessly. ‘You’ll amuse my sisters.’
    A year passes and summer comes round. Charlot has forgotten or never meant it. He spends the summer at Jerome’s chateau. I spend it at the school. With the others gone, the red-haired laundry maid no longer hurries away at the sight of me and lets me inside her petticoats. The taste on my fingers is acrid, stronger. Roquefort to JeanneMarie’s new Brie. I note both their tastes in my book, with the dates, and resolve to find a girl with fair hair to see if she tastes different again. The laundry maid disappears as summer ends and I discover she’s newly married. By then the others are back, talking about the cold faces turned to them by the girls they love. Except for Charlot, who remains as