Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “One moment.” I put down the phone and walked back to the breakfast room. Claude looked up. “Somebody from the Post would like to talk to us,” I told her.

  “About time,” she said.

  The journalist came to our hotel that same day, in the afternoon. He was younger than I had imagined, with thinning dark hair, and he wore a brown suit that was loose on him. Probably it had belonged to someone else. He began by asking what our crime had been.

  “Interesting word,” I said. “Not one I would have used.”

  Claude sat back with her legs crossed, as if she was being treated to an evening at the theater.

  I told the journalist about our propaganda campaign, and about our refusal to comply with many of the Nazis’ regulations. I told him about our day in court as well. After I had relayed what Claude had said to Sarmsen about our sentencing, I looked across at her and we began to laugh. Our lightheartedness seemed to take the journalist by surprise.

  He was curious to know what prison had been like.

  I talked about how we were kept apart for the first seven months, and how grateful we were to the other prisoners, who had done so much to lift our spirits. I said we had some very pleasant memories from our stay on Gloucester Street. Once again, the journalist looked startled. I explained that we had made good friends, and mentioned a few of them by name—Hugh Le Cloche, Micky Neil, Evelyn Janrin, Belza Turner, and “the Dynamite Boys,” Arnold Bennett and Peter Gray. These young people from the island were heroes, Claude said, interrupting, and we were hoping to keep in touch with them.

  The journalist leaned forwards. “How did the Germans treat you?”

  “Not badly,” I said.

  I focused on examples of their foolishness, describing how Bode and Wolf of the Gestapo had clung to the belief that we were part of some far-flung and highly sophisticated network. I also mentioned a conversation I’d had with Lohse in which he had tried to ingratiate himself by telling me how much he hated fighting his “cousins,” the English, only to realize, too late, that I was French. When he told me that he also hated fighting the French—you’re my cousins too, he said—I asked him if there was anyone he was fighting who he was not related to.

  The journalist grinned, then glanced at his notepad. “Is it true your house was ransacked?”

  I told him many of our most valuable possessions had gone missing. We had lost artworks by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Frédéric Delanglade, and limited editions of books by Louis Aragon and Lise Deharme. We had lost the Louis XV furniture we had inherited from our parents. We had even lost some of our clothes. Still, we didn’t regret anything that we had done. We would do it all over again. Our only sadness was that our cat had to be destroyed, and that our housekeeper, Edna, and her husband had been imprisoned, even though they were both entirely innocent.

  After two hours the journalist stood up and shook our hands. He told us it had been a privilege to meet us.

  The following weekend I bought a copy of the Post. The article about us took up most of the front page. SENTENCED TO DEATH BY ISLAND NAZIS, the headline said. And underneath, in smaller type: The Story of Two Gallant Frenchwomen. I took the newspaper back to the hotel and showed it to Claude, who was sunbathing on the terrace. She began to read. After only a few moments she lowered the paper and started laughing.

  “Have you read it?” she asked me.

  I said I had.

  “Didn’t you notice?”

  She pointed at the middle of the front page. Inserted into a paragraph that described our interrogations by the Gestapo was a small advertisement that led with the words NON-STOP RELIEF from PILES.

  She started to read out loud from the advertisement. “Germaloids will completely banish your fear of the daily bowel action—”

  “Claude,” I said.

  Still grinning, she put the paper down.

  “Well,” she said after a while, “it certainly puts our heroic activities into perspective.”

  Later that summer, after we had moved back into La Ferme sans Nom, the Bailiff of Jersey telephoned to ask us over for drinks. I thanked him for the kind invitation, but said Claude and I no longer found social occasions comfortable, and that I hoped he would understand if we declined. This wasn’t a social occasion, he told me gently. It would be a quiet evening—just him, his wife Babs, and us. Aware that he had pleaded our case with the Nazi high command, and that his intervention had probably helped to save our lives, we felt obliged, in the end, to accept.

  When the day came there was a cloudburst, though by the time we arrived at the Bailiff’s house in the hills above St. Aubin the storm had moved on. Stepping out of the taxi, I heard a grumble of thunder out over the sea. There was the smell of the warm road cooling, and the trunks of trees gleamed from the recent rain. The Bailiff’s wife, Mrs. Coutanche, met us at the door. She told us she was disappointed by the weather. She had been planning on sitting in the garden. It was her husband’s passion, she said. He had been gardening on the day the Germans landed. Weeding, in fact. When they came to the house he had greeted them in a crumpled sports coat and a pair of torn gray flannels.

  She showed us into the drawing room, where Mr. Coutanche was crouching beside a cocktail cabinet in a dark-blue pinstripe suit. I had only ever seen him from a distance, speaking from a balcony in Royal Square on Liberation Day. Up close, he had a square forehead and melancholy eyes. On the sideboard was a small bowl of crisps.

  Usually his butler, Coleman, served the drinks, Coutanche told us, but Coleman was in England, seeing relatives, so he would have to do the honors himself. He hoped he wasn’t going to poison us all. His wife’s laughter felt dutiful, and her eyes glittered with a strange, unsteady light.

  When Coutanche had handed us whiskey-and-sodas and toasted our bravery, I thanked him for all the efforts he had made on our behalf. If it were not for him, I said, we might not be here at all. He responded by saying that he had only done what any Bailiff would have done.

  “Crisps, anyone?” Mrs. Coutanche held out the bowl.

  Once seated, Claude asked Coutanche about the difficulty of mediating between the occupying forces and the local population. She was broaching a delicate subject—some thought the authorities in Jersey had bent over backwards to appease the Nazis—but Coutanche simply told her he had always been guided by what was best for the people in his charge. It was a politician’s answer, and I knew Claude would think he was sidestepping the controversial issue she was trying to address. During the occupation, Claude and I had been in the minority. Most people had cooperated with the Nazis, either by looking the other way or by pretending not to notice what was happening, and this mild form of collaboration had been seen as acceptable, or even necessary. Those who had gone so far as to work for the Nazis resented people like us, since our activities had heightened the tension and threatened, at times, to disrupt the status quo. Once the war was over, the guilt felt by these collaborators transformed itself into a self-serving brand of optimism. The past was the past, they would say. Water under the bridge. Anything that made them feel ill at ease—and that included so-called acts of heroism—was blotted out or buried, but there had, nonetheless, been reprisals against those who had consorted with the enemy, the most vicious being reserved for women who had granted sexual favors in return for preferential treatment. One woman was pinned to a tree with nails through the palms of her hands. Another had a petrol-soaked rag stuffed between her legs and was taunted with a match. It was rumored that the most flagrant collaborators were to be removed from the island by British Intelligence in order to defuse the situation, and Coutanche would know all about this. If he was wary, that perhaps was why.

  Before Claude could press him further, I told him about a walk that she and I had taken through St. Helier not long after liberation. As we reached the harbor, two British fighter planes flew overhead, the sound so abrupt and guttural that we didn�
�t hear it so much as feel it, inside our bodies. Moments later, they flew past again, almost scraping the rooftops. A young man in a patched gray suit and clumsy Red Cross boots was standing near us with tears spilling from his eyes. He put both hands over his face, but couldn’t stop crying.

  I turned to Claude. “Do you remember?”

  “I gave him a hug,” she said. “I hugged you too.”

  Coutanche cleared his throat. “It has been an emotional time—for all of us…”

  In the silence that followed, Claude asked if she could use the WC. Mrs. Coutanche showed her the way. While they were out of the room, the Bailiff rose to his feet and switched on a large brown Bakelite radio.

  “Some music, perhaps,” he said.

  By the time his wife walked back into the room, the radio had warmed up, and a dance band was playing. The blare of saxophones and trumpets, the jaunty, light-fingered rhythm of the drums.

  The lush swoop of strings.

  Mrs. Coutanche asked about our house. I told her it had been looted and vandalized, and that I had spent all summer trying to restore some order. I had even hired a couple of local men to remove a section of the concrete wall which the Germans had built at the end of our garden. At least we had our view of the bay again, I said. We had also traveled from one end of the island to the other in a car belonging to a doctor friend of ours, trying to recover our stolen possessions.

  “Any success?” Mrs. Coutanche asked.

  I told her about an afternoon in late August. Claude and I had been in Grouville, on the trail of a missing Max Ernst collage, when we saw a woman strolling along the seafront in one of Claude’s favorite coats. When we challenged the woman, she claimed the coat was hers. It was a gift. Claude wanted to know which Nazi officer had given it to her.

  “A fair question,” Coutanche said.

  “The woman was furious,” I told him. “She gave Claude a push, and Claude tripped and fell.”

  I had helped Claude to her feet. She was shaken, pale. You know what? Claude said to the woman. Keep the bloody coat. I will, the woman said. People on the promenade were staring. Claude let me lead her away, but we had only walked a few steps when she jerked her arm out of my grip and turned around. She had just remembered the word the islanders used for women who had fraternized with German officers. Jerrybag, she said. Then she said it again. Louder. So everyone could hear.

  Mrs. Coutanche shook her head and looked at the floor.

  “And the Max Ernst piece?” Coutanche asked.

  “It was a false lead. I don’t think we’ll ever see it again.” I suddenly realized that ten minutes had gone by, and Claude had not returned. “I should check on my sister,” I said. “She’s not been well.”

  As I climbed the stairs, I wondered how long the Bailiff and his wife expected us to stay.

  I knocked on the bathroom door. “Claude? Are you all right?”

  “Nearly finished,” she said.

  Back in the drawing room, I said that Claude would be down soon. We sat with our drinks and listened as the band played a foxtrot. Mrs. Coutanche stood up and opened a window. Cool night air drifted in. Her husband had crossed his legs, and his right foot moved in time with the music.

  As the foxtrot ended and applause burst through the room, Claude appeared in the doorway. She had shaved off both her eyebrows.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Coutanche said. “Well.” She turned to her husband and smiled brightly. She was attempting to laugh the whole thing off, but she was uncertain of her ground. I sensed that she might even be frightened. I glanced at Claude. She gave me a little shrug.

  “Would anybody like a top-up?” Coutanche said. “I think I could do with one.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Claude, too, held out her glass.

  A new dance number began as Coutanche mixed the drinks. His wife’s smile had faded, and she was examining one of her rings.

  “When Herodotus traveled to Egypt in the fifth century BC,” Claude said, once Coutanche had handed us fresh drinks, “one of the aspects of society that most fascinated him was its attitude to cats.” She sipped her whiskey. “This is excellent.”

  Coutanche gave her a salute that looked vaguely nautical. Was he drunk?

  “Cats protected the grain stores from mice and rats,” Claude went on. “They also killed snakes. Tomb wall paintings show that Egyptians took cats hunting with them in the marshes. If there had been no cats, the people would probably have starved.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mrs. Coutanche said.

  Claude lit a cigarette. “In the temple of Beni Hasan, which was dedicated to the feline goddess Pahket, a cemetery was found. There was a layer of mummified cats beneath the ground—thousands of them. Some had gilded faces. Pots of milk had been buried with them. Vermin too. Provisions for the afterlife. Cats weren’t just loved. They were revered.” She tapped half an inch of ash into a nearby ashtray. “When a cat died, the people it belonged to would go into mourning, as if they had lost a relative. All the members of that particular family would shave off their eyebrows.”

  I turned to the Bailiff and his wife. “Our cat was put down while we were in prison—”

  “His name was Kid,” Claude said. “I named him after Captain Kidd, a pirate my uncle wrote about in one of his biographical fictions.”

  Coutanche leaned forwards in his chair. “When you came back from the bathroom, I knew your appearance had altered in some way, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out how.” His gaze darted from Claude’s face to mine and back again. “I looked and looked, and I simply couldn’t see what was different—and then, suddenly, I could. Peculiar, don’t you think?”

  “It’s not the first time it has happened,” I said.

  Mrs. Coutanche steered a bright, seemingly disdainful glance in my direction. “Why? Have you lost a cat before?”

  Everybody stared at her, even her husband. Lowering her eyes, she scrutinized her drink.

  Coutanche began to talk about Egypt, which was a country he seemed to have read about, and which was, therefore, a subject on which he could hold forth at some length, and the matter of Claude’s bizarre behavior was glossed over and pushed into the background, but never, I felt, entirely forgotten.

  Within a few days of his appointment to the parish of St. Brelade, the new rector called on us. When I answered the door, he was standing on the terrace, the glory of the garden behind him like a kind of halo. He had a confident, almost condescending manner, as if his presence in our house was a rare honor. Being well connected was clearly important to him, since he managed to mention several members of the island’s aristocracy before I could even show him into the drawing room.

  “I’m told you live here with your sister,” he said when he was seated with a cup of tea.

  “Yes. She’s upstairs, working.”

  “Close-knit families: the cornerstone of any decent society.”

  “I’m not sure we provide much of a cornerstone,” I said.

  He received my words thoughtfully, and with a certain gravity, as if I were confiding in him, or confessing. Though this felt presumptuous and I objected to it, I found myself elaborating.

  “We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves. We’re very private.” I paused, and then, to my surprise, went further still. “We live differently to others.”

  “You weren’t always private—during the war, for instance…”

  “I’m not sure who you’ve been talking to.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “It was our privacy that was the secret of our success,” I told him. “If we hadn’t kept ourselves to ourselves, if we hadn’t been something of a mystery, the authorities would have suspected us much sooner.”

  The rector looked towards the window. He seemed to decide the subject was controversial, and that he had pursued it as far as he could. His wr
ists, I noticed, were covered with silky black hairs.

  He was about to speak again when the door opened and Claude appeared, a cigarette between her lips. The skin under her eyes was dark, as if colored in with ink, and the thinness of her neck made her head look big. It wasn’t just the months in prison that had undermined her, though for someone with Claude’s fragile constitution that might, in itself, have been enough. She had also lost some of those who were closest to her. Béatrice Wanger had died in New York, of lung cancer. Lilette Richter had died too, after suffering months of chronic stomach pain. And Robert Desnos was missing, believed dead. Towards the end of the war he had been arrested by the Nazis and sent to a camp. We had no details. All we knew was that he had not returned. As for the friends who had survived, they seemed to have stopped writing to her. She was lonely, she had told me. She was ill with loneliness. Not so long ago, an abscess on her kidney had almost killed her. She had started to talk about moving back to Paris.

  The rector stood. When they had shaken hands, Claude took up a position by the fireplace, one elbow resting on the mantelpiece, her right ankle crossed over her left. Though what she was wearing was understated—a white cable-knit sweater, loose trousers of gray serge, and a laborer’s cloth cap—the rector didn’t seem to know where to look. It was still unusual, at that time, for a woman to be seen in trousers.

  “I’ve always been fascinated by your profession,” Claude said.

  The rector adjusted his black robes. “I prefer to think of it as a calling. A vocation.”

  “I like to think that I was called too,” Claude said.

  “Though not to the Church…”

  “No.” Claude stubbed out her cigarette. “I have to say, I expected more of the Church during the war.” The rector’s eyes followed her from the fireplace to the open window. “I’ve read the Bible—as much, at least, as I could stand—and I seem to remember there being a great deal of talk about charity. About looking after those who are less fortunate than ourselves.”