Free Léon and Louise by Alex Capus, John Brownjohn Page A

are. Parisian chumps of the first order, all four of them.’
    â€˜An expert on the subject, are you?’
    â€˜The one with the blue sunglasses, who’s hiding his face under his hat, thinks he’s at least as famous as Caruso or Zola, when his name’s Fournier or something similar. And the one with the moustache, who’s reading the financial paper and frowning – he thinks he’s Rockefeller because he owns three shares in a railway company.’
    â€˜And the other two?’
    â€˜They’re just high-class chumps who never say hello or talk to people in case they grasp what bores they are.’
    â€˜People do get bored,’ Léon retorted. ‘I do sometimes, don’t you?’
    â€˜That’s different. When you or I get bored it’s in the hope that something’ll change sometime. They get bored because they’re always hoping that everything will stay the same.’
    â€˜To me they all look like perfectly normal family men. They’ve slunk out of the house on the pretext of going to the baker’s. Now they’re treating themselves to fifteen minutes’ peace and quiet before going back to their villas and rejoining their nagging wives and petulant children.’
    â€˜You think so?’
    â€˜The one in the blue sunglasses spent all night quarrelling with his wife because she doesn’t love him any more and he could happily have dispensed with that information. And the one with the newspaper is dreading the interminable afternoons on the beach, when he’s expected to play with his children and hasn’t a clue how to go about it.’
    â€˜Shall we go to the fishermen’s café?’ asked Louise.
    â€˜We aren’t fishermen.’
    â€˜That doesn’t matter.’
    â€˜Not to us, maybe, but to the fishermen. They’ll think we’re Parisian chumps, just because we aren’t fishermen.’ Léon drew the curtain aside and looked out of the window. ‘The wet cloud’s gone.’
    â€˜Let’s go, then,’ said Louise. ‘Let’s go home, Léon. We’ve seen the sea now.’

    Permeated by sun, wind and rain showers, fresh sea air and a night without much sleep, Léon and Louise set out for home. Their route took them back along the same roads, across the same hills and through the same villages as they had seen the day before. They drank water from the same village fountain and bought bread from the same bakery. Their bicycles hummed along dependably, and before long the sun reappeared. All was as it had been the previous day, yet all was imbued with magic. The sky was wider, the air fresher and the future brighter. Léon felt he was truly awake for the first time ever – as if he had come into the world tired and the whole of his life hitherto had wearily traipsed along until this weekend, when he’d woken up at last. There was a life before Le Tréport and a life after Le Tréport.
    At midday they had some soup at an inn, then snoozed in a barn beside the road. And although all that had so far happened is pure legend, what began that midday, while they were asleep in the barn, is the account my grandfather often liked to give many decades later of how, at the end of May 1918, he became embroiled in the Great War for the first and only time. He always told his story with charming restraint. It was believable and accurate in every detail, even after countless repetitions, save for one little fib which every member of the family saw through. This was that, for reasons of propriety, Louise wasn’t a girl but a workmate named Louis.
    When Léon and Louise – or Louis – woke up after an hour’s nap in the barn, they heard, through its tiled roof, a distant rumble which they mistook for a thunderstorm. Hastily climbing down from the hay loft, they pushed their bicycles outside and rode off, their hair and clothes full of straw, in the hope of