The Warning Bell

by T D Griggs

  I packed the diaries away in their box, and walked back to the reception desk.

  Christine Tremblay looked up brightly at me, the same coquettish sparkle in her eyes. ‘And did you find what you were looking for on this visit?’

  ‘What did happen to the Rosens, Christine?’

  Some of the light went out of her. I think we both knew that the moment for banter had passed.

  ‘Everyone knows what happened to the Rosens,’ she said. ‘They were arrested in 1942.’

  ‘But who arrested them? Where were they taken afterwards?’

  ‘Auschwitz. Most French Jews went there.’

  ‘Are there any records?’

  She sat up very straight and her voice grew guarded. ‘I won’t be able to help you with that. We don’t keep that kind of thing here.’

  I retreated a little. ‘Look, I don’t mean to –’

  ‘Can I tell you something, Iain? Between friends?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Some of the older inhabitants are really touchy about the Rosen story. I think they’re ashamed that it could have happened here in St Cyriac…’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And after all, it was a very long time ago.’

  ‘Right.’

  But I didn’t move. She looked unhappily at me, and in a moment she sighed, picked up her bag and opened it. She took out a white business card and handed it to me across the desk.

  ‘Rabbi Silbermann in St Malo,’ she said. ‘He’s built up an archive of all the Jewish families around here. Nothing formal, but it’s a passion of his. Tell him I asked you to call.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  When I got to the door I glanced back and found she was still looking at me.

  I wanted a moment to think and, flicking the business card idly against my nail, I made my way up to the churchyard. I had almost reached the iron bench by the graves of my father’s crew before I saw Dr Pasqual. He smiled at me and patted the bench beside him. I sat down.

  ‘So very young,’ he said, and nodded at the gravestones. ‘Nineteen years of age. Twenty-two. Seventeen. But that’s how it works, Iain. The rich send the poor to war. The clever send the stupid. But most shamefully of all, the old send the young.’ He rearranged his slender hands in his lap. ‘You’ve been away?’

  ‘For a few days. To see my father.’

  He turned to look into my eyes. ‘Your journey did not bring you the answers you sought, I fear.’

  ‘No. Not all of them.’

  ‘There comes a time when it’s better to let the past rest in peace, Iain,’ the old man said softly. ‘We lived it once, your father and I, and these lads lying here, and Mathieu Garnier, and Paul-Louis Bonnard, and Guillaume Le Toque. And millions of others like us. We hoped those who came after us wouldn’t have to live it again. Indeed, I seem to remember that was the whole point.’

  I thought he was going to say more, but instead he got to his feet. He rested his thin old hand on mine for a second, then moved off down the gravel path, like some ancient and courtly ghost drifting between the gravestones.

  When I got back to the square, kids were skateboarding on the paved area at its centre, performing impossible leaps over the low railings. A group of men were playing boules opposite the Hotel de Ville. More pretty girls in tee-shirts were moving among the early holidaymakers, handing out leaflets about the carnival.

  I spent a moment by the rose arbour, looking in at the Rosens’ sculpture.

  At Henri’s place I sat at an outside table, took out Rabbi Silbermann’s card and called him on the mobile. He picked up almost at once.

  ‘I don’t think I shall be able to help you very much, Monsieur Madoc.’ He had a measured voice – not unfriendly, but giving nothing away, like the voice of a doctor or a lawyer. ‘But of course if Christine suggests it, you must come over and see me. I shall attempt to find something on the Rosen family before you arrive. Tomorrow morning? Say ten o’clock?’ He gave me precise directions and rang off.

  It was windy out on the terrace. The Gay Dog was rolling in the restless water just beyond the wall of the quay, a riot in pink against the sober workboats. The hatch was open, and I could hear the whine of machinery from inside. Gunther appeared from the cabin, bare chested and beautiful, a sander gripped in one hand.

  Henri came bouncing out of the café, apron flapping, seized my hand and welcomed me back. He set a silver tankard down before me with a flourish.

  ‘A little something for our new resident!’ he cried. ‘On the house.’

  I thanked him, and tried to make small talk, but he must have sensed that I wanted some time to myself, because he pretended to hear a summons from inside and quickly vanished again. The concoction was delicious – champagne and something peppery which I couldn’t identify. I drank again, then reached for Henri’s menu in its imitation leather cover and pulled out the sheet announcing today’s specials – moules frites, bouillabaisse, tartes aux pommes. I turned it over, found a pen, and began to draw.

  My map of La Division didn’t look much like the smudged and wavering sketch my father had destroyed. Mine was clear and bold. Some hidden mechanism in my memory must have been at work, because it showed more detail than I consciously recalled seeing in the original. I drew the plan of the farmhouse with particular precision, and within it a box inside a box, the inner rectangle dissected by three firm lines, even the scribbled numbers. I still didn’t know what it all meant, but at least I had a map again. My father had not been able to obliterate his own trail entirely.

  37

  The house was full of builders and noise and dust, the smell of paint and the din of power tools. Two trucks were parked at odd angles just below the veranda steps, and the drive was stacked with timber and slate. A skip had been dropped on the overgrown flowerbeds. I could taste plaster dust and crushed vegetation. I climbed the three steps to the front door and looked in. An internal wall came down in a cloud of plaster. In the back bedroom Serge and Kate were ripping out the plywood partitioning. I could hear Kate shrieking with laughter as they did it.

  I retreated to the cabin. Dominic’s model sat in its case in the corner where I had left it, but the rest of the place was still cluttered with junk, old crates, rusted bicycle frames and bits of broken furniture. I carried the model outside, put it out of harm’s way on the grass, took off my jacket and got to work. I moved crates and cartons and rolls of felt and ancient gardening tools and tubs of potting mix and a box full of hardened paint cans and worked my way gradually through to the end wall. Then I scrubbed the whole place, walls, windows and floor, sluicing it all through three or four times. When the floor was dry I brought the model back in and constructed a makeshift table for it by resting an old cupboard door across a couple of trestles.

  I could see straight out across the coast road to the beach from the newly cleaned window. I opened it and spread my hands on the sill. The breeze flickered in off the sea, shivering the foliage in the garden, cooling the sweat on my forearms.

  The latch clicked behind me. Chantal had untied her hair and it flowed over her shoulders. She carried two tumblers of white wine, and wordlessly gave me one of them. She sipped hers and began to prowl around, running a fingertip along the timber walls, and, when she reached it, over the smooth varnished wood of the model’s case, leaving a dark track in the film of dust there. There was something languorous about the way she moved.

  ‘Just imagine, if you turned out to be good at all this,’ she said. ‘Carpentry. Fixing things.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound much like me.’

  ‘That’d be great, wouldn’t it? To be married to someone for eighteen years and start discovering new things about them.’ Her prowling had taken her back to the door, and now she leaned against it and slammed it emphatically shut. She turned the key in the lock. ‘I had a little piece of news to tell you. But something’s put it clean out of my mind.’

  I moved forward and put my hands up und
er her hair. The skin behind her ears was warm and moist. I could feel her pulse beating. I bit the lobe of her ear. I heard her draw a deep breath and she put her glass down clumsily and her arms snaked round my neck. She kissed me and then broke free, moved into the centre of the room and stood in a patch of afternoon sunlight. She pulled her shirt up over her head and unbuckled her jeans and stepped out of them and stretched herself out on the boards like a cat in the sun, and reached up her arms to me.

  I undressed quickly, and knelt over her. The sun fell through the open window onto my back. I was conscious from time to time of the sounds from outside – early evening birdsong, murmured banter between Serge and Kate in the house. Then these sounds receded. Chantal’s skin smelled of sunlight and sweat. I stretched myself deep inside her and her arms locked hard around me and she gripped the flesh over my shoulder blades and I felt her mouth open under me.

  The noises of the world crept back gradually, a distant tractor, waves on the beach. And then a new sound: the hum of Kate’s viola. It was the first time I had heard her play since we’d come here, even though she had started lessons again with Sylvie Bertrand.

  ‘He sits and watches her play,’ Chantal said. I could feel her smile against my shoulder. ‘It’s sweet.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be working,’ I said darkly.

  She kissed my neck. ‘Yes. Just like us...’

  She stood up and gathered her clothes, dressed and walked over to the open window, shivering a little in the cool breeze. She glanced down at the map which I’d left on the table top, and stiffened.

  ‘I made a copy,’ I said unnecessarily. ‘I pinched one of Henri’s menus.’

  She stood looking at the drawing without speaking.

  ‘Is this a problem?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘I just need to close the door on it,’ I said, getting to my feet.

  ‘I understand that.’ She looked at me. ‘The past’s important. But we have a future as well.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Am I getting too caught up in all this?’

  ‘I know how much it means to you. I won’t stand in your way.’ She walked across and took my face in her hands, shaking my head with a little jolt to emphasise her point. ‘Just don’t forget to spend some time in the here and now with me, OK? I’m not used to you as a man with a mission.’

  ‘Right now my only mission is to crack a bottle of Burgundy.’

  Her brow furrowed. ‘That reminds me of what I came to tell you. We’re going to Paris.’

  ‘We are?’

  ‘You aren’t. I’m taking Katrine for a couple of days. Do some mother-daughter bonding. I want to take her to the ballet. You’d hate it, and anyway you need to stay here and play foreman.’ She gathered up our empty glasses and walked to the door. ‘All you have to do is suck your teeth and shout a lot. And keep young Serge from pining away.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll do the same for me.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ she said, and blew me a kiss. She stopped at the door. ‘This is OK with you, isn’t it, sweetheart?’

  ‘Except that the last time I left you and Kate alone you bought a house.’ I bent down to lace my trainer. ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘In a couple of hours. I could only get tickets for tonight.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you could fit me in.’

  She raised one eyebrow, and we burst out laughing like a couple of kids.

  38

  I dropped Chantal and Kate at the SNCF station in St Malo. They were cutting it fine for the seven o’clock train and I watched them race across the concourse with their bags bouncing and their hair flying like schoolgirls. I waited until I saw the sleek locomotive draw out.

  When I pulled up in the drive again I noticed that the light was still on in the cabin. I walked over, pushed open the door and reached for the switch.

  Serge stood up hastily. ‘Monsieur Madoc.’

  He was as surprised as I was. I saw that he had been kneeling on the floor in front of Dominic’s model. The varnished case stood open. His canvas satchel and his tool belt lay on the floor.

  He said: ‘I saw you’d left the window open. I came in to close it. Then I couldn’t resist taking a look at this. It just knocks me out.’

  ‘It does that to me too.’

  ‘Old Dominic made this? It’s just amazing. I’d heard he made models, but I never knew he had this kind of skill.’ Serge shook his head. ‘He’s a character, isn’t he? I sometimes think he’s the only sane one and all the rest of us are nuts.’

  ‘You know him pretty well, then?’

  ‘I see him down at the launch from time to time, when I bring my boat into the estuary. I’ve never been to his place, though. Never seen his models.’

  ‘You should ask him to show them to you. He’d be pleased.’

  ‘He’d be pleased? I’d be bloody delighted.’

  He bent down again in front of the model. ‘Did he make this for you, Monsieur Madoc?’

  ‘For my father. Dominic seems convinced he’s going to come to St Cyriac and collect it one day.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘I think he was glad to get out the first time. I would be too. I’m still not sure how he did it, getting away in an open dinghy, and taking an injured man with him, right under the noses of the Germans.’

  ‘Forget the Germans.’ Serge closed the case reverently. ‘In the Vasse the tides are the big danger.’

  I remembered him saying something like this to me before, and a picture came into my mind of kayakers and kids in catamarans fighting against the current.

  ‘Tell me about that, Serge. Tell me about the tides.’

  ‘Your dad must’ve been lucky. Nobody could sail out of the Vasse against a flood tide – when it’s coming in, that is. The current would be too strong. And the Vasse is special. It’s even got a bore sometimes.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A bore. The river’s quite deep, but it’s narrow, and the riverbed takes a couple of sharp turns up beyond Bourgogne’s boatyard, where the cress beds are. When the tide comes in, it pushes the river back and kind of dams it up. But as soon as the tide turns, the river gets the upper hand all at once, and that dammed-up water comes rushing out. That’s called a bore.’

  I’d heard about a similar phenomenon on the River Severn, and the image of it had always given me the creeps. I pictured a wall of water, swift and soundless and sinister, rolling mud and dead branches.

  ‘The bore on the Vasse isn’t much,’ Serge said. ‘It’s only about a half-a-metre high even at the fullest tide. But the point is, once that tide turns, it turns fast.’

  ‘So my father must have caught the ebb?’

  ‘Sure. And a bore would have been better still. That would have whisked him out to sea like a cork in a millrace. That’d be why the Germans didn’t see him. Blink and he’d be past. But the timing had to be absolutely right.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no way of knowing what the tides were really doing that night?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ll look it up for you.’

  ‘You can do that? Look up one particular night? After all these years?’

  ‘The moon and the tides don’t change. You get one reading, and you can work back as far as you want. Computers make it easy. I’ll get onto it.’

  He scooped up his bag and his tool belt.

  I said: ‘There’s no rush, Serge.’

  He stopped, uncertain now whether he should go or stay. The satchel was a shabby army surplus affair, unbuckled and open. A well-thumbed textbook and two leather-backed sketchbooks were visible inside the flap. I noticed that the bigger of the two was open and I caught a vibrant flash of colour from the page. I reached over and touched the cover.

  ‘May I look?’

  He hesitated, but did not quite refuse, and I lifted the book out of the bag and turned it to the light. The watercolours were exquisite. I could see at once their inspiration – the spiral structure of shells, tresses
of weed, the angular armour of crabs – handled in a startlingly abstract fashion which was both sensuous and precise.

  ‘Serge, these are beautiful. Are they coursework?’

  He shook his head. ‘These are really just for fun. I’m studying marine biology at IFREMER. Do you know it? The marine science institute.’

  ‘Isn’t that in Paris?’

  ‘They’ve got five centres. The closest one’s in Brest. I do it by correspondence, mostly.’

  He took the book from me a little roughly and stuffed it into his pack. ‘The Shoals are my special project. I go out there whenever the tide is low enough, early in the morning or at night. That way I can get here during the day.’

  ‘You go out in the dark? In that little boat of yours?’

  His chin came up. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’ I remembered what I had read about the Shoals; that they became quicksands with the incoming tide, capable of swallowing people, wreckage, even ships. ‘You must have a passion for wild places.’

  Serge shrugged, but I could see that I had struck a chord. He fiddled with the buckles of his bag for a while and then stopped, staring not at me but at the wall.

  ‘There’s such beauty out there, Monsieur Madoc. On the Shoals. On the sea. There’s such beauty all around us, and we never see it. We never see the pattern in it. It’s as if we’re too close. As if the rhythm’s too slow for us to hear the music.’

  I had not expected anything like this from Serge, and I could see all at once what it was about him that Kate found so attractive. He was an outsider. He might act tough, but that was because his sensitivity to the world made the rougher contacts painful and he had to fend them off.

  ‘Where do you live, Serge?’

  ‘Oh, down the coast a bit. My family owns some property outside Lannion.’

  ‘A farm?’

  His defences came up at once. ‘You were expecting a gipsy caravan? All campfires and duelling violins?’ He hefted his backpack and gestured at Dominic’s model. ‘Sorry. I should have asked you before opening it.’ He walked to the door.