Free Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks Page A

principal hotels. Sonia had disliked the seaside since being immersed as a child in the freezing waves of Yarmouth and felt her spirits subside as the summer months approached. How was she to make conversation with the spinster ladies and retired Parisian stockbrokers who would constitute the clientele of the establishment? One day in April, as she was returning to her small house behind Curzon Street, she had an idea; she ran upstairs to the sitting room and pulled out a piece of paper.
    Dear Thomas,
    Thank you for your last letter. I am sorry you have been in trouble with the university authorities again. For heaven's sake, do be careful or you will be sent down and then where will all your plans be? Now that is why I am writing to you, young man, as your chaperone and Guiding Light. You shall have your bachelorhood of science, your MB or whatever you may call it provided you can keep away from the low company you have described at Emmanuel College and the taverns of Newmarket but then what? Are you to practise in Lincoln like poor old Dr. Meadowes with his pony and trap and his gouty foot? Or is to be the fashionable women of Mayfair with their imaginary maladies? Think hard, Thomas. You must be able to go where new discoveries are being made, where the great men of science are gathered together. You must learn to speak their language. I know you were taught German at school, but you need to speak French. You must be able to discourse as easily in Paris as in Vienna. You must never certainly not at this tender age allow your horizon to be limited. To this effect, my dear brother, I have engaged a room for you in a lodging house in the French resort of Deauville this summer. There you will undergo an intensive course in the French language, of which I know you already have the rudiments. By the time you return to your Fenland rooms, you shall be trilingual! Father can be persuaded to pay, I suppose, in the name of Education; if not... Well, I am not the kind of wife to play the coquette, and anyway I do not think it would be profitable. But you must come. It is a fine town, I am told, and a very fit place for a young man to pass his twenty-first summer. Respond at once, saying yes, to your ever-loving and -guiding Sonia.

PS Please do say yes.
    The atmosphere in the dining room in the Pension des Dunes was even stuffier than Sonia had feared, since most of the residents appeared to dread fresh air, frowning and clacking if the waiters left a sliver of door open. There were about forty guests in all, a few families whose small children were made to sit up straight with their hands visible on the table, but mostly grey-haired couples of long familiarity, who faced one another in committed silence. Richard Prendergast ran his finger round the inside of his collar. "I wish they would open a window." "We can have coffee outside," said Sonia. "There's a charming little garden. Did you see it?" "Yes," said Thomas. "With lanterns and red creeper on the walls." The waiter placed a tureen of soup on the table and invited them to serve themselves. Sonia lifted the lid and a smell of cress and summer savoury floated upward. "I see you have grown a beard' Thomas said Richard. "Do all your fellow-students have beards beneath their scholar's caps?" "Almost all. Do you like it?" "It makes you look older," said Sonia. "It's a bother keeping it trim." "You should visit my barber in Leadenhall Street," said Richard. "Now let's hear some French from you, young man." "After two days? You are a hard master. But I can speak to the waiter if you like. Shall I ask him for some wine?" As Thomas looked about the room, he saw an unusual couple seated at a table by an enviably open window. One was a Curé, sweating a little beneath his soutane, the other a young man of about Thomas's age with black brows, a moustache and staring brown eyes. Something about his expression made Thomas want to smile. "I wonder what brings them together," he said quietly to