No Comebacks

by Frederick Forsyth

  Those who have ever had to spend time waiting for something unknown to happen, in the presence of someone with whom not a word can be exchanged, will know what it is like. I nodded and smiled. He nodded and smiled. We both nodded and smiled. Eventually he broke the silence.

  'Anglais?’ he asked, indicating Bernadette and myself. I shook my head patiently. It is one of the burdens of the Irish to pass through history being mistaken for the English.

  'Irlandais,' I said, hoping I had got it right. His face cleared.

  'Ah, Hollandais,' he said. I shook my head again, took him by the arm to the rear of the car and pointed. The sticker on the wing bore the capital letters, black on white, IRL. He smiled as if to a trying child.

  'Irlandais?' I nodded and smiled. 'Irlande?’ More smiling and nodding from me. 'Partie d'Angleterre,' he said. I sighed. There are some struggles one cannot win and this was neither the time nor the place to explain to the good father that Ireland, thanks in some part to the sacrifices of Bernadette's father and uncle, was not a part of England.

  At this point the peasant emerged from a narrow alley between two slab-sided brick barns, atop an aged and grunting tractor. In a world of horse-drawn carts and oxen, it may well have been the village's sole tractor and its engine sounded little better than the Mayflower's just before it packed up. But it chugged down the street and stopped just in front of my car.

  With a stout rope the blue-clad farmer attached my car to the towing hook of his tractor and the priest indicated we should climb into the car. In this fashion, with the priest walking beside us, we were towed down the road, round a corner and into a courtyard.

  In the gathering dusk I made out a peeling board above what looked like yet another brick barn. It said 'Garage', and was evidently closed and locked. The peasant unhooked my car and began to stow his rope. The priest pointed to his watch and the shuttered garage. He indicated it would open at seven the next morning, at which time the absent mechanic would see what was wrong.

  'What are we supposed to do till then?' Bernadette whispered to me. I attracted the priest's attention, placed my two palms together beside one side of my face and tilted my head in the international gesture of one who wishes to sleep. The priest understood.

  Another rapid conversation began between the priest and the peasant. I could follow none of it, but the peasant raised one arm and pointed. I caught the word 'Preece' which meant nothing to me, but saw the priest nod in agreement. Then he turned to me and indicated we should take a suitcase from the car and mount the rear step of the tractor, holding fast with our hands.

  This we did, and the tractor turned out of the courtyard onto the highway. The kindly priest waved us goodbye and that was the last we saw of him. Feeling utterly foolish, we stood side by side on the rear step of the tractor, I with a grip containing our overnight things in one hand, and held on.

  Our silent driver went up the road on the farther side of the village, across a small stream and up another hill. Near the brow he turned into the yard of a farm whose surface was a mixture of summer dust and cow-pats. He came to rest near the farm door and indicated we should dismount. The engine was still running and making a fair racket.

  The peasant approached the farm door and knocked. A minute later a short, middle-aged woman in an apron appeared, framed by the light of a paraffin lamp behind her. The tractor driver conversed with her, pointing at us. She nodded. The driver, satisfied, returned to his tractor and pointed us towards the open door. Then he drove off.

  While the two had been talking, I had looked around the farmyard in what remained of the day's light. It was typical of many I had seen so far, a small mixed farm with a bit of this and a bit of that. There was a cow byre, a stable for the horse and the oxen, a wooden trough beside a hand-pump and a large compost heap on which a cluster of brown hens pecked a living. All looked weathered and sun-bleached, nothing modern, nothing efficient, but the sort of traditional French smallholding of which hundreds of thousands made up the backbone of the agricultural economy.

  From somewhere out of sight I heard the rhythmic rise and fall of an axe, the thwack as it bit into timber, and the rending of the split logs as the cutter then tore them apart. Someone was splitting billets for the fires of winter yet to come. The lady in the doorway was beckoning us to enter.

  There may have been a living room, sitting room, lounge — call it what you will — but we were led into the kitchen which was evidently the centre of household life, a stone-flagged room containing sink, dining table and two battered easy chairs by an open fire. Another hand-pump near the stone sink indicated water came from the well, and illumination was by paraffin lamp. I set down the case.

  Our hostess turned out to be lovely; round, apple-cheeked face with grey hair drawn back in a bun, care-worn hands, long grey dress, white pinafore and a chirpy birdlike smile of welcome. She introduced herself as Madame Preece, and we gave her our names which were for her quite unpronounceable. Conversation would evidently be confined to more nodding and smiling, but I was grateful to have a place to stay at all, considering our predicament on the hill an hour ago.

  Madame Preece indicated Bernadette might like to see the room and wash; such niceties were evidently not necessary for me. The two women disappeared upstairs with the handgrip. I walked to the window, which was open to the warm evening air. It gave out onto another yard at the back of the house, where a cart stood among the weeds near a wooden shed. Extending from the shed a paling fence ran a short way, about six feet high. From above the fence the blade of a great axe rose and fell, and the sound of the chopping of timber went on.

  Bernadette came down ten minutes later looking fresher, having washed in a china bowl with cold water from a stone crock. The water coming out of the upper window into the yard would have accounted for the odd splash I had heard. I raised my eyebrows.

  'It's a nice little room,' she said. Madame Preece, who was watching, beamed and bobbed, understanding nothing but the approving tone. 'I hope,' said Bernadette with the same bright smile, 'that there aren't any hoppers.'

  I feared there might be. My wife has always suffered terribly from fleas and midges, which raise great lumps on her white Celtic skin. Madame Preece gestured for us to sit in the battered armchairs, which we did; and made small talk while she busied herself at the black cast-iron kitchen range at the other end of the room. Something that smelled appetizing was a-cook and the odour made me hungry.

  Ten minutes later she bade us come to table, and placed before us china bowls, soup spoons and a long loaf each of delicious fluffy white bread. Finally in the centre she placed a large tureen from which protruded a steel ladle, and indicated we should help ourselves.

  I served Bernadette a portion of what turned out to be a thick, nourishing and tasty vegetable broth, mainly of potatoes and very filling, which was just as well. It constituted the meal of the evening, but was so good we both ended up by having three portions. I offered to serve Madame Preece her portion, but she would have none of it. It was obviously not the custom.

  'Servez-vous, monsieur, servez-vous,' she repeated, so I filled my own bowl to the brim and we tucked in.

  Hardly five minutes had passed before the sound of the log-chopping ended, and seconds later the back door was pushed open as the farmer himself entered for his evening meal. I rose to greet him, as Madame chattered an explanation of our presence, but he evinced not the slightest interest in two strangers at his dinner table. So I sat back down again.

  He was a huge man, whose head scraped the ceiling of the room. He lumbered rather than walked and one had the immediate impression — accurate as it turned out — of enormous strength allied to a very slow intelligence.

  He was about sixty, give or take a few years, and his grey hair was cut short to his head. I noticed he had tiny, button ears and his eyes, as he looked at us without sign of greeting, were a guileless, vacant baby-blue.

  The giant sat down at his accustomed chair without a word and his wif
e at once served him a brimming portion of the soup. His hands were dark with earth and, for all I knew, other substances, but he made no move to wash them. Madame Preece resumed her seat, flashed us another bright smile and a bob of her birdlike head, and we continued our meal. From the corner of my eye I saw the farmer was shovelling down spoonfuls of his broth, accompanied by great chunks of bread which he tore without ceremony from his loaf.

  No conversation took place between the man and his wife, but I noticed she darted him affectionate and indulgent looks from time to time, though he took not the slightest bit of notice.

  Bernadette and I tried to talk, at least between ourselves. It was more for the relief of breaking the silence than to convey information.

  ' I hope the car can be repaired in the morning,' I said. 'If it's something serious I might have to go to the nearest big town for a spare part or a breakdown van.'

  I shuddered to think what that expense might do to our tiny postwar tourist budget.

  'What is the nearest big town?' asked Bernadette between mouthfuls of soup..

  I tried to remember the map in the car. 'Bergerac, I think.'

  'How far is that?' she asked.

  'Oh, about sixty kilometres,' I replied.

  There was nothing much else to say, so silence fell again. It had continued for a full minute when out of nowhere a voice suddenly said in English, 'Forty-four.'

  We both had our heads bowed at the time and Bernadette looked up at me. I looked as puzzled as she. I looked at Madame Preece. She smiled happily and went on eating. Bernadette gave an imperceptible nod in the direction of the farmer. I turned to him. He was still wolfing his soup and bread.

  'I beg your pardon?' I said.

  He gave no sign of having heard, and several more spoonfuls of soup, with more large chunks of bread, went down his gullet. Then twenty seconds after my question, he said quite clearly in English, 'Forty-four. To Bergerac. Kilometres. Forty-four.'

  He did not look at us; he just went on eating. I glanced across at Madame Preece. She flashed a happy smile as if to say, 'Oh yes, my husband has linguistic talents.' Bernadette and I put down our spoons in amazement.

  'You speak English?' I asked the farmer.

  More seconds ticked away. Finally he just nodded.

  'Were you born in England?' I asked.

  The silence lengthened and there was no reply. It came a full fifty seconds after the question.

  'Wales,' he said, and filled his mouth with another wad of bread.

  I should explain here that if I do not, in the telling of this tale, speed up the dialogue somewhat, the reader will die of weariness. But it was not like that at the time. The conversation that slowly developed between us took ages to accomplish because of the inordinately long gaps between my questions and his answers.

  At first I thought he might be hard of hearing. But it was not that. He could hear well enough. Then I thought he might be a most cautious, cunning man, thinking out the implications of his answers as a chess player thinks out the consequences of his moves. It was not that. It was simply that he was a man of no guile at all, of such slow thought processes that by the time he had ingested a question, worked out what it meant, devised an answer to it and delivered the same, many seconds, even a full minute, had elapsed.

  I should perhaps not have been sufficiently interested to put myself through the tiresomeness of the conversation that occupied the next two hours, but I was curious to know why a man from Wales was farming here in the depths of the French countryside. Very slowly, in dribs and drabs, the reason came out, and it was charming enough to delight Bernadette and myself.

  His name was not Preece, but Price, pronounced in the French way as Preece. Evan Price. He was from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. Nearly forty years earlier he had been a private soldier in a Welsh regiment in the First World War.

  As such he had taken part in the second great battle on the Marne that preceded the end of that war. He had been badly shot up and had lain for weeks in a British Army hospital while the Armistice was declared. When the British Army went home he, too ill to be moved, had been transferred to a French hospital.

  Here he had been tended by a young nurse, who had fallen in love with him as he lay in his pain. They had married and come south to her parents' small farm in the Dordogne. He had never returned to Wales. After the death of her parents his wife, as their only child, had inherited the farm, and it was here that we now sat.

  Madame Preece had sat through the oh-so-slow narration, catching here and there a word she recognized, and smiling brightly whenever she did so. I tried to imagine her as she would have been in 1918, slim then, like a darting active sparrow, dark-eyed, neat, chirpy at her work.

  Bernadette too was touched by the image of the little French nurse caring for and falling in love with the huge, helpless, simple-minded overgrown baby in the lazaret in Flanders. She leaned across and touched Price on the arm.

  'That's a lovely story, Mr Price,' she said.

  He evinced no interest.

  'We're from Ireland,' I said, as if to offer some information in return.

  He remained silent while his wife helped him to his third portion of soup.

  'Have you ever been to Ireland?' asked Bernadette.

  More seconds ticked away. He grunted and nodded. Bernadette and I glanced at each other in delighted surprise.

  'Did you have work there?'

  'No.'

  'How long were you there?' 'Two years.'

  'And when was that?' asked Bernadette.

  '1915... to 1917.'

  'What were you doing there?' More time elapsed.

  'In the Army.'

  Of course, I should have known. He had not joined up in 1917. He had joined up earlier and been posted to Flanders in 1917. Before that he had been in the British Army garrison in Ireland.

  A slight chill came over Bernadette's manner. She comes from a fiercely Republican family. Perhaps I should have let well alone; not probed any more. But my journalist's background forced me to go on asking questions.

  'Where were you based?'

  'In Dublin.'

  'Ah. We come from Dublin. Did you like Dublin?'

  'No.'

  'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.'

  We Dubliners tend to be rather proud of the place. We would prefer foreigners, even garrison troops, to appreciate our city's qualities.

  The earlier part of ex-Private Price's career came out like the latter part, very, very, slowly. He had been born in the Rhondda in 1897, of very poor parents. Life had been hard and bleak. In 1914, at the age of seventeen, more to secure food, clothing and barracks to live in than out of patriotic fervour, he had joined the Army. He had never gone beyond private soldier.

  For twelve months he had been in training camps as others went off to the front in Flanders, and at an army stores depot in Wales. In late 1915 he had been posted to the garrison forces in Ireland, quartered in the chill of barracks at Islandbridge on the south side of the River Liffey in Dublin.

  Life, I had to suppose, had been boring enough for him to have said he did not enjoy Dublin. Sparse barrack dormitories, low pay even for those days, and an endless, mindless round of spit and polish, buttons, boots and beds; of guard duty on freezing nights and picquets in the streaming rain. And for leisure ... not much of that either on a soldier's pay. Beer in the canteen, little or no contact with a Catholic population. He had probably been glad to have been posted away after two years. Or was he ever glad or sad for anything, this lumbering, slow man?

  'Did nothing ever happen of interest?' I asked him finally, in some desperation.

  'Only once,' he replied at last.

  'And what was that?'

  'An execution,' he said, absorbed in his soup.

  Bernadette put down her spoon and sat rigid. There was a chill in the air. Only Madame, who understood not a word, and her husband, who was too insensitive, were oblivious. I should definitely have left well alone.

&nbs
p; After all, in those days a lot of people were executed. Common murderers were hanged at Mountjoy. But hanged. By prison warders. Would they need the soldiery for that? And British soldiers would be executed too, for murder and rape, under military regulations after court martial. Would they be hanged or shot? I did not know.

  'Do you remember when it was, this execution?' I asked.

  Bernadette sat frozen.

  Mr Price raised his limpid blue eyes to mine. Then he shook his head. 'Long time ago,' he said. I thought he might be lying, but he was not. He had simply forgotten.

  'Were you in the firing party?' I asked.

  He waited the usual period while he thought. Then he nodded.

  I wondered what it must be like to be a member of a firing party; to squint along the sights of a rifle towards another human being, tethered to a post 60 feet away; to pick out the white patch over the heart and hold the foresight steady on that living man; on the word of command to squeeze the trigger, hear the bang, feel the thud of recoil; to see the bound figure beneath the chalk-white face jerk and slump in the ropes. Then go back to barracks, clean the rifle and have breakfast. Thank God I had never known nor ever would.

  'Try to remember when it was,' I urged him.

  He did try. He really did. You could almost feel the effort. Eventually he said, '1916. In the summer I think.'

  I leaned forward and touched his forearm. He raised his eyes to mine. There was no devious-ness in them, just patient inquiry.

  'Do you remember ... try to remember ... who was the man you shot?'

  But it was too much. However he tried, he could not recall. He shook his head at last.

  'Long time ago,' he said.

  Bernadette rose abruptly. She flashed a strained, polite smile at Madame.

  'I'm going to bed,' she told me. 'Don't be long.'

  I went up twenty minutes later. Mr Price was in his armchair by the fire, not smoking, not reading. Staring at the flames. Quite content.

  The room was in darkness and I was not going to fiddle with the paraffin lamp. I undressed by the light of the moon through the window and got into bed.