by Nevil Shute
‘There,’ she said at last, standing back to survey their work. ‘It is the best that can be done.’ She eyed him diffidently. ‘Will it be possible for you to sleep so, Monsieur Howard?’
He said: ‘My dear, of course it will.’
She laughed shortly. ‘Then, let us try.’
Over the palliasses he stood looking at her, blanket in hand. ‘May I ask one more question?’
She faced him: ‘Yes, monsieur.’
‘You have been very good to me,’ he said quietly. ‘I think I understand now. That was because of John?’
There was a long silence. She stood looking out across the room, motionless. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘That was because of the children.’
He said nothing, not quite understanding what she meant.
‘One loses faith,’ she said quietly. ‘One thinks that everything is false and bad.’
He glanced at her, puzzled.
‘I did not think there could be anyone so kind and brave as John,’ she said. ‘But I was wrong, monsieur. There was another one. There was his father.’
She turned away. ‘So,’ she said, ‘we must sleep.’ She spoke practically, almost coldly; it seemed to the old man that she had set up a barrier between them. He did not resent that; he understood the reason for her curtness. She did not want to be questioned any more. She did not want to talk.
He lay down on the palliasse, shifted the rough, straw-filled pillow and pulled the blanket round him. The girl settled down upon her own bed on the other side of the children.
Howard lay awake, his mind in a tumult. He felt that he had known that there had been something between this girl and John, yet that knowledge had not reached the surface of his mind. But looking back, there had been little hints all the time that he had been with them in the flat. Indeed, she had used John’s very words about a cocktail when she had said in English that: ‘A little bit of what you fancy does you good.’ Thinking back, he remembered the little twinges of pain that he had suffered when she had said that and yet he had not realised.
How close had their friendship been, then? They had written freely to each other; on top of that it seemed that they had met in Paris just before the war. No breath of that had reached him previously. But thinking back, he could remember now that there had been a space of two week-ends in June when he had seen nothing of the boy; he had assumed that duties with the squadron had prevented him from coming over to see him, or even from ringing up. Was that the time? It must have been.
His mind turned to Nicole. He had thought her a very odd young woman previously; he did not think of her in quite the same way now. Dimly he began to realise a little of her difficulties with regard to John, and to himself. It seemed that she had told her mother little about John; she had nursed her grief in silence, dumb and inarticulate. Then he had turned up, quite suddenly, at the door one day. To her secret grief he added an acute embarrassment.
He turned over again. He must let her alone, let her talk if she wanted to, be silent if she chose. If he did that, perhaps she would open out as time went on. It had been of her own volition she had told him about John.
He lay awake for several hours, turning these matters over in his mind. Presently, after a long time, he slept.
He woke in the middle of the night, to the sound of wailing. He opened his eyes; the wailing came from one of the children. He sat up, but Nicole was before him; by the time he was fully awake she was out of her bed, crouching down by a red faced, mournful little boy sitting up and crying bitterly.
It was Willem, crying as if his heart was going to break. The girl put her arm round him and spoke to him in soft, baby French. The old man rolled out of his blanket, got up stiffly and moved over to them.
‘What is it?’ he enquired. ‘What is the matter?’
The girl said: ‘I think he has had a nightmare—that is all. Presently he will sleep again.’ She turned again to comfort him.
Howard felt singularly helpless. His way with the children had been to talk to them, to treat them as equals. That simply did not work at all, unless you knew the language, and he knew no word of any language that this little Dutch boy spoke. Left to himself he might have taken him upon his knee and talked to him as man to man; he could never have soothed him as this girl was soothing him.
He knelt down clumsily beside them. ‘Do you think he is unwell?’ he asked. ‘He has perhaps eaten something that upset him?’
She shook her head; already the sobs were dying down. ‘I do not think so,’ she said softly. ‘Last night he did this, twice. It is bad dreams, I think. Only bad dreams.’
The old man’s mind drifted back to the unpleasant town of Pithiviers; it would be natural, he thought, for bad dreams to haunt the child.
He wrinkled his forehead. ‘You say that he did this twice last night, mademoiselle?’ he said. ‘I did not know.’
She said: ‘You were tired and sleeping very well. Besides your door was shut. I went to him, but each time he very soon went to sleep again.’ She bent over him. ‘He is almost asleep again now,’ she said softly.
There was a long, long silence. The old man stared around; the long, sloping floor was lit by one dim blue light over the door. Dark forms lay huddled upon palliasses here and there; two or three snorers disturbed the room; the air was thick and hot. From sleeping in his clothes he felt sticky and dirty. The pleasant, easy life that he had known in England seemed infinitely far away. This was his real life. He was a refugee, sleeping upon straw in a disused cinema with a German sentry at the door, his companion a French girl, a pack of foreign children in his care. And he was tired, tired, dead tired.
The girl raised her head. She said very softly: ‘He is practically asleep, this one. In a minute I will lay him down.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘Go back to bed, Monsieur Howard. I shall not be long.’
He shook his head and stayed there watching her. Presently, the little boy was sound asleep; she laid him gently down upon his pillow and pulled the blanket round him. Then she got up. ‘Now,’ she said quietly, ‘one can sleep again, until next time.’
He said: ‘Good night, Nicole.’
She said: ‘Good night. Do not get up if he should wake again. He is no trouble.’
He did not wake again in the two or three hours that was left of the night. By six o’clock the place was all astir; there was no chance of any further sleep. Howard got up and straightened out his clothes as well as he could; he felt dirty and unshaven.
The girl got the children up and, with Howard, helped them to dress. She, too, was feeling dirty and unkempt; her curly hair was draggled, and she had a headache. She would have given a great deal for a bath. But there was no bath in the place, nor even anywhere to wash.
Ronnie said: ‘I don’t like this place. May we sleep in a farm to-morrow?’
Rose said: ‘He means to-night, m’sieur. He talks a great deal of nonsense, that one.’
Howard said: ‘I’m not quite sure where we shall sleep to-night. We’ll see when the time comes.’
Sheila wriggling her shoulders in her Liberty bodice, said: ‘I do itch.’
There was nothing to be done about that. To distract her mind Howard led her off with the other children to the end of the hall, where the German cook was dispensing mugs of coffee. With each mug went a large, unattractive hunk of bread. Howard left the children at a trestle table and went to draw their bread and coffee.
Nicole joined them as he brought it to the table and they all had breakfast together. The bread was hard and tasteless and the coffee bitter, acid stuff with little milk. The children did not like it, and were querulous; it needed all the tact of the old man and the girl to prevent their grumbles calling the attention of the German cook. There was some chocolate left of the provisions he had bought upon the road from Joigny; he shared this out among them and this made a little relish to the meal.
Presently, they left the Cinema du Monde and, pushing the pram before them, made their way towards
the railway station. The town was full of Germans parading down the streets, Germans driving lorries, Germans lounging at the doors of billets, Germans in the shops. They tried to get chocolate for the children at several shops, but the soldiers had swept the town clean of sweets of every kind. They bought a couple of long rolls of bread and a brown sausage of doubtful origin as provision for their journey. Fruit was unobtainable, but they bought a few lettuces.
At the railway station they passed the barrier without difficulty, surrendering their billeting pass to the German officer. They put the pram into the baggage-wagon on the train for Brest, and climbed up into a third-class carriage.
It was only when the train was well upon the way that Howard discovered that la petite Rose was nursing a very dirty black and white kitten.
Nicole was at first inclined to be sharp with her. ‘We do not want a little cat,’ she said to Rose. ‘No, truly we do not want that cat or any other cat. You must put him out at the next station.’
The corners of the little girl’s mouth drooped, and she clutched the kitten tighter. Howard said: ‘I wouldn’t do that. He might get lost.’
Ronnie said: ‘She might get lost, Mr. Howard. Rose says it’s a lady cat. How do you know it’s a lady cat, Rose?’
Nicole expostulated: ‘But Monsieur Howard, the little cat belongs to somebody else. It is not our cat, that one.’
He said placidly, ‘It’s our cat now.’
She opened her mouth to say something impetuous, thought better of it, and said nothing. Howard said: ‘It is a very little thing, mademoiselle. It won’t add to our difficulties, but it will give them a good deal of pleasure.’
Indeed, what he said was perfectly correct. The children were clustered round intent upon the kitten, which was washing its face upon Rose’s lap. Willem turned to Nicole, beaming, and said something unintelligible to her. Then he turned back, watching the kitten again, entranced.
Nicole said, in a resigned tone: ‘As you wish. In England, does one pick up cats and take them away like that?’
He smiled, ‘No, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘In England only the kind of person who sleeps on straw mattresses in cinemas does that sort of thing. The very lowest type of all.’
She laughed. ‘Thieves and vagabonds,’ she said. ‘Yes, that is true.’
She turned to Rose. ‘What is her name?’ she asked.
The little girl said: ‘Jo-Jo.’
The children clustered round, calling the kitten by its new name, trying to make it answer. The kitten sat unmoved, washing its face with a tiny paw. Nicole looked at it for a few moments.
Then she said: ‘It is like the lions, in the Zoo de Vincennes. They also do like that.’
Howard had never been to the Paris zoo. He said: ‘Have they many lions and tigers there?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘They have some. I do not know how many—I have only been there once.’ And then, to his surprise, she looked up at him with laughter in her eyes. ‘I went there with John,’ she said. ‘Naturally, one would not remember how many lions and tigers there were in the zoo.’
He was startled; then he smiled a little to himself. ‘Naturally,’ he said dryly. ‘But did you never go there as a child?’
She shook her head. ‘One does not go to see these places except when one is showing the sights of Paris to a friend, you understand,’ she said. ‘That was the reason that John came to Paris, because he had never seen Paris. And I said that I would show him Paris. That was how it was.’
He nodded. ‘Did he like the zoo?’ he asked.
She said: ‘It was a very happy day that. It was a French day.’ She turned to him a little shyly. ‘We had arranged a joke, you see—we should speak only in French one day and in English on the next day. On the English day we did not talk very much,’ she said reminiscently. ‘It was too difficult; we used to say that the English day ended after tea …’
Mildly surprised, he said: ‘Did he speak French well?’ Because that was most unlike John.
She laughed outright. ‘No—not at all. He spoke French very, very badly. But that day, on the way out to Vincennes, the taxi-driver spoke English to John, because there are many tourists in Paris and some of the drivers can speak a little English. And John spoke to him in English. Because I had a new summer hat, with carnations, you understand—not a smart hat, but a little country thing with a wide brim. And John asked the taxi-driver to tell him what the French was for’—she hesitated for a moment, and then said—‘to tell me that I was looking very pretty. And the man laughed a lot and told him, so then John knew and he could say it to me himself. And he gave the driver twenty francs.’
The old man said: ‘It was probably worth that, mademoiselle.’
She said: ‘He wrote it down. And then, when he wanted me to laugh, he used to get out his little book and read it out to me.’
She turned and stared out of the window at the slowly-moving landscape. The old man did not pursue the subject; indeed, he could think of nothing adequate to say. He got out his packet of caporal cigarettes and offered one to Nicole, but she refused.
‘It is not in the part, that, monsieur,’ she said quietly. ‘Not in this dress.’
He nodded; lower middle-class Frenchwomen do not smoke cigarettes in public. He lit one himself, and blew a long cloud of the bitter smoke. It was hot already in the carriage, though they had the window open. The smaller children, Pierre and Sheila, were already tired and inclined to be fretful.
All day the train ground slowly on in the hot sun. It was not crowded, and they seldom had anybody in the carriage with them, which was a relief. As on the previous day, the German troops travelling were confined strictly to their own part of the train. On all the station platforms they were much in evidence. At towns such as St. Brieuc, the exit from the station appeared to be picketed by a couple of German soldiers; at the wayside halts they did not seem to worry about passengers leaving the station.
Nicole drew Howard’s attention to this feature. ‘It is good, that,’ she said. ‘At Landerneau it may be possible to go through without questioning. But if we are stopped, we have still a good story to tell.’
He said: ‘Where are we going to to-night, mademoiselle? I am entirely in your hands.’
She said: ‘There is a farm, about five miles from Landerneau, to the south. Madame Guinevec, wife of Jean Henri—that was her home before she married. I have been there with my father, at the time of the horse fair, the fête, at Landerneau.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘What is the name of the people at the farm?’
‘Arvers,’ she said. ‘Aristide Arvers is the father of Marie. They are in good circumstances, you understand, Aristide is a careful man, my father used to say. He breeds horses a little, too, for our army. Marie was Queen of Beauty at the Landerneau Fête one year. It was then that Jean Henri first met her.’
He said: ‘She must have been a very pretty girl.’
‘She was lovely,’ Nicole said. ‘That was when I was little—over ten years ago. She is still beautiful.’
The train ground on in the hot sunlight, stopping now and again at stations and frequently in between. They gave the children déjeuner of bread and sausage with a little lemonade. That kept them amused and occupied for a time, but they were restless and bored.
Ronnie said: ‘I do wish we could go and bathe.’
Sheila echoed: ‘May we bathe, Monsieur Howard?’
He said: ‘We can’t bathe while we’re in the train. Later on, perhaps. Run along out into the corridor; it’s cooler there.’
He turned to Nicole. ‘They’re thinking of a time three days ago—or four was it?—just before we met the Air Force men. I let them have a bathe in a stream.’
‘It was lovely,’ said Ronnie. ‘Ever so cool and nice.’ He turned and ran with his sister out into the corridor, followed by Willem.
Nicole said: ‘The English are great swimmers, are they not, monsieur? Even the little ones think of nothing else.’
> He had not thought about his country in that way. ‘Are we?’ he said. ‘Is that how we appear?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I do not know so many English people,’ she said frankly. ‘But John—he liked more than anything for us to go bathing.’
He smiled. ‘John was a very good swimmer,’ he said reminiscently. ‘He was very fond of it.’
She said: ‘He was very, very naughty, Monsieur Howard. He would not do any of the things that one should do when one visits Paris for the first time. I had prepared so carefully for his visit—yes, I had arranged for each day the things that we would do. On the first day of all I had planned to go to the Louvre, but imagine it—he was not interested. Not at all.’
The old man smiled again. ‘He never was one for museums, much,’ he said.
She said: ‘That may be correct in England, monsieur, but in Paris one should see the things that Paris has to show. It was very embarrassing, I assure you. I had arranged that he should see the Louvre, and the Trocadéro, and for a contrast the Musée de l’Homme, and the museum at Cluny, and I had a list of galleries of modern art that I would show him. And he never saw any of it at all!’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Howard. There seemed nothing else to say. ‘What did you do?’
She said: ‘We went bathing several times, at the Piscine Molitor in Auteuil. It was very hot weather, sunny all the time. I could not get him into one museum—not one! He was very, very naughty.’
‘I expect that was very pleasant, though,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘It was not what I had arranged,’ she said. ‘I had not even got a costume. We had to go together, John and I, to buy a bathing-costume. Never have I done a thing like that before. It was a good thing I had said that we would meet in Paris, not in Chartres. In France there are conventions, Monsieur Howard, you understand.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘John never worried much about those. Did he get you a nice bathing-dress?’
She smiled: ‘It was very beautiful,’ she said. ‘An American one, very chic, in silver and green. It was so pretty that it was a pleasure to be seen in it.’