Emergency in the Pyrenees

by Ann Bridge

  He was out the whole day, having left at 6 a.m.—the two young women did some washing and ironing. ‘How well you iron, Luzia’ Julia said, watching the girl’s deft dealings with the collars of Colin’s shirts.

  ‘Yes—don’t you remember how Nanny made me learn to iron?’ They laughed over old times. Then Luzia made her promised ‘dish’, with the steaks she had bought in St. Marie two days before—Julia, sitting and smoking, watched with interest. First the girl rubbed the meat all over with garlic, then dusted it with salt and freshly-ground black pepper, and brushed it with olive oil; she had taken a metal oven-tray out of the Briffault stove. and set it to heat on the electric rings; when it was nearly red-hot she laid the pieces of meat on it—they sizzled and sputtered. ‘This is plancia steak’ she announced, as she brought the dish to the table—Colin, who had come in earlier, fell upon it eagerly. ‘It’s jolly good’ he pronounced. ‘Julia, learn how she does it—then you can teach Aglaia.’ (Aglaia was Colin’s enormously rich Greek wife.)

  Colin, over salad and fruit, told them how he had climbed the Pic d’Eyzies, the great blunt spear-head which closed the end of the valley. Then he expressed a wish to walk again tomorrow. ‘Julia, you can drive my car, can’t you?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A Rover 90. Goodness, haven’t you noticed that?’

  ‘No, but I can drive Rovers—drive any make, in fact! But turn it for me tonight—I hate pulling the wheel round.’

  ‘I did turn it—so it’s all ready for your wine-foray tomorrow. Luzia, can you get me another lunch?’

  ‘Only hard-boiled eggs—you finished the chicken today.’

  ‘That’ll do—and some cheese.’

  The ‘wine-foray’ next day amused Julia, like all the other curious methods of house-keeping at Larége. The two girls had breakfast on the terrace, in the bright early mountain sunshine; then Luzia carried two empty Buta-gaz containers up the steps and along the path to Colin’s car. They drove down into the valley and up a side-road to Labielle, where they dropped the empty cylinders and picked up two full ones—then on down the pleasant road to Ste. Marie. The young Heriots were waiting at a café by the bridge over the Gave, as planned; the two young women were glad of some coffee too, after their early breakfast. The Heriots led them on then, down into the plain to the farmer with the vineyard, a vigorous, oldish man with a grey beard, who first insisted on talking politics with the twins, whom he knew well. ‘Ah, Monsieur Nicolas, why cannot notre Général do something for we others, the farmers?’—there followed a long recital of complaints.

  ‘Write to Monsieur Poujade’ one twin, rather bored, suggested.

  ‘Ah, ce Poujade!—il est foutu!’ Anyhow he only concerned himself with the well-being of the trades-people in the towns, the old man grumbled. Luzia, bored too, and irritated that Julia should be kept standing in the sun, at length intervened, in faultless French.

  ‘Voyons, Monsieur, is it possible to sit? Madame is come with the intention of purchasing some wine, but she feels the heat. If one could leave la politique for a few instants, perhaps?’

  The twins and the farmer were almost equally startled by this brusque firmness. Both Heriots glanced at the Portuguese girl with amused admiration; the farmer, muttering apologies, led the party to a table under a trellis of vines, where they sat in welcome shade—glasses were brought out, and at last they got down to the business of wine. The old fellow made them sample two sorts, at different prices; Julia preferred the more expensive one, and indicated this by a nod to the twin who appeared to be doing most of the talking—the optimistic Dick, she supposed.

  ‘How much do you want?’ he asked, in English. ‘The usual size is a 24-litre barrel.’

  ‘How many bottles are there in that?’

  ‘About 36.’

  ‘Then we’d better have three—it’s hot weather, and we’re going to be up there for weeks.’

  ‘Golly—corking 108 bottles! We’d certainly better come up and help with that’ said the other twin. ‘A fearful job.’ Meanwhile Dick conducted the marchander-ing with the farmer: Madame preferred the better wine; if the price was right she would take three ‘huitièmes’—the local name for the 24-litre casks. The old man half-stifled a gasp of satisfaction, and after more efforts on Dick’s part—prolonged as bargaining only is in France and Ireland, in the western world—Julia’s wine was bought at a quite reasonable price. They had some trouble in stowing the three barrels in the Rover, owing to the presence of the Buta-gaz cylinders, but managed it at length.

  They all had lunch in Ste. Marie; the twins insisted on going home with them to unload their cargo, but the party split up—Dick firmly took Luzia in the Heriot car, while Nick drove with Julia. He soon asked about Luzia, and her family—Julia told him.

  ‘H’m. Well I think Dick’s had it. She doesn’t look in the least Iberian, and of course a Duke’s all right, but I suppose she’s an R.C.?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘His Lordship won’t like that,’ Nick said gloomily.

  ‘Aren’t you going ahead rather fast?’ Julia said.

  ‘Nothing like as fast as Dick, once he gets started!’ Julia brushed this off with a laugh.

  There was no sign of the Heriot car at the car-turn, nor of the other two. Nick turned the Rover for Julia, and then humped the two gas-cylinders along the path and down into the house, where he expertly connected one to the stove, and tried it out. ‘That’s O.K.—we’ll leave the wine till that lazy hound returns from his pleasures,’ he said, with a slight drawl. (Julia began to hope that this relative slowness of speech might enable her to keep the twins apart.) She made tea, which they drank on the sofa under the big window; it had been hot all day, and the deep-walled house was pleasantly cool. Presently they heard another car, and in walked Dick and Luzia. Dick did the explaining—‘I took her up to the dam, to show her where she can have a swim.’ Julia smiled; so far as she knew Luzia could not swim—it is not a very common form of recreation among the Portuguese aristocracy—but she merely asked the pair whether they wanted tea or sherry? Nick soon hunted his brother out to carry the three huitièmes down from the car—‘Her Ladyship won’t like it if we’re late for dinner.’ They propped the three little barrels up, very neatly and skilfully, on short thick blocks of wood behind the big bottling-table, so that the taps could be inverted and the wine flow. ‘And when shall we come up and bottle for you?’ Dick asked. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Ai Jésoosh! Give us a little time for repose!’ Luzia exclaimed. Nick, after a meaning glance at Julia, was stooping down to count the empties under the great table—Dick asked ‘What did she say?’ Luzia looked apologetically at Julia.

  ‘Miss Probyn, I still forget sometimes.’

  Julia, laughing, explained. ‘Ai Jésus is a rather low-class Portuguese expression; it means “Oh Jesus!”’

  ‘But why does she call you Miss Probyn?’ Dick was full of curiosity about anything that concerned Luzia—Julia explained again.

  ‘You don’t look in the least my idea of a governess!’ the young man said, gazing at his tall beautiful hostess. ‘Was she any good, Luzia?’

  Oh, so it’s Luzia now, is it? Julia thought to herself. The Portuguese girl blushed very faintly, and looked annoyed.

  ‘Madame was everything that is good—teaching, and all—to a rather ignorant pupil’ she replied, coldly.

  Nick, straightening up from under the table, said that they were twelve bottles short—‘But we’ll bring those when we come. Day after tomorrow?’

  ‘No, the day after that’ Julia said firmly. ‘And thank you very much.’ This was a dismissal, and the twins left. Luzia looked at her watch, and lit up the big stove with chopped wood from behind the table. ‘There is time to roast the veal—and if your cousin is going to want des sandvitchs every day, we had better have some cooked meat. You go and rest’—which Julia did, again lulled by the sound of cowbells and falling water. A sweet place, truly.

  Colin came in late, when
Luzia was saying that they must eat the roast soon, or the meat would be dried up.

  ‘No, no sherry—I had a drink at Barraterre’s. I’ll just wash.’

  In fact Luzia had been right—Colin did want sandwiches on both the following days, so the cold veal came in very usefully; each evening he returned late, saying that he had had a drink at Barraterre’s. This rather surprised Julia; Colin was not usually a frequenter of inns, he normally preferred to drink quietly at home. Could he be on to something? But she asked no questions.

  On the second day Luzia was invited to tea at the Monniers; she decided to take a walk up the slopes first, so Julia was left to a long afternoon alone in the house—she lay and took her snooze on the sofa in the big room, to be at hand if anyone should come to the door. Someone did.

  After supper, when they were having coffee out by the spring, the silver saw of the mountains now dark against a rose-flushed sky, Colin asked, with rather elaborate casualness—‘Did you ever hear of a type up here called Bonnecourt?’

  ‘I never heard of him, but he came to the house this afternoon.’

  ‘Why?’ Colin looked startled.

  ‘To ask if we wanted a leg of isard? Of course I said Yes.’

  Colin looked a little annoyed. ‘What on earth is isard?’

  ‘The local chamois, or ibex, or something—anyhow Mrs. Stansted told me to get hold of some if I possibly could; it’s delicious, according to her.’

  Before Colin could speak again Luzia broke in.

  ‘Oh, how I wish I had not missed him! He is a murderer!—and one so seldom actually meets them.’

  Colin turned to her. ‘Why do you say he’s a murderer?’ he asked rather sharply.

  ‘Oh, because he is—and such a clever one! He is not from the village, by origin; he lived further to the west, and also partly in Paris.’

  ‘That doesn’t make him a murderer’ Colin began—Julia shut him up. ‘Do let her go on, Colin. Yes, Luzia?’

  ‘He used to come here to stay, at the inn, with a lady; then one year he came without the lady, and paid court to an heiress in the village, who had a good house and a rich terre, and married her, and settled down. He is a splendid alpiniste, and he persuaded her to learn to climb too, and to please him she did; but he managed to drop her off the Pic d’Eyzies!’

  ‘How?’ Colin asked.

  ‘Oh, apparently it all sounded quite correct at the enquiry: the sharp rock, the broken rope. But after a proper interval of deep mourning’ Luzia said, looking amused, ‘he went away and married the original lady; and now they live in the heiress’s house, and she lies in one of those huge stone tombs, like chicken-houses, in the church-yard—I saw her name on Sunday when I went to Mass.’

  ‘Really, Luzia! Where on earth did you pick up such a story?’ Julia asked, rather scandalised.

  ‘Oh, from this one and that.’ Luzia, doing all the errands, was beginning to find herself quite at home in Larége. ‘Only today, when I was fetching the bread, Mme. Barraterre was telling me what a wonderful isard-hunter this Bonnecourt is. He knows every mountain, and pass, and path, and shoots more of these animals than anyone else.’

  ‘When did he say he was going to bring you this leg?’ Colin asked Julia.

  ‘He didn’t say. If he’s shot it, I suppose tomorrow—if not, when he has shot it. I think he expected to see Mrs. Stansted, and was rather surprised to find a stranger; but anyhow he promised to bring it to me.’

  Chapter 3

  Colin stayed at home all the next day, but there was no sign of Bonnecourt. By the evening he was obviously fussing—obviously at least to Julia, who had known him all his life. Over sherry, out by the spring, while Luzia was preparing supper, she put a blunt question—‘Colin, what exactly are you trying to find out, here? What are all these walks in aid of, and this drinking at the pub?’

  Even with Julia, Colin could not easily break his ingrained habit of being cagey.

  ‘Oh, the usual sort of thing—routine collecting of information.’

  ‘I think you’re being very silly to stall like this’ his cousin said coolly. ‘It’s obvious that Luzia and I, sitting here all the time, might be able to help you quite a bit—especially Luzia. But we can’t unless we know what you’re after.’

  ‘Why especially Luzia?’ the young man asked.

  ‘Oh, because she gets around, as I can’t just now—doing the shopping, and fetching the milk from that farm; she talks to everyone, and everyone talks to her—you heard her last night.’

  Colin sat silent, frowning a little.

  ‘Anyhow your job is no news to her’ Julia pursued.

  ‘What do you mean? She’s a foreigner.’

  ‘Yes, but it was she who went out into her Father’s kitchen at Gralheira and spotted the chief Communist agent, who was after that Hungarian priest Hugh Torrens was getting out, and produced quite a lot of other information; she was only a child then, of course, but Hugh thought the world of her. She’s very intelligent. You’d do much better to come clean, Colin.’

  Colin, though impressed by the mention of Major Torrens—who like Philip Jamieson was one of his superiors—could only bring himself to come partially clean, and in a very generalised fashion. There were known, he said, to be Communist groups at Tarbes, a garrison town beyond Pau, and also at Toulouse; their main organisation was almost certainly in Spain, and it was suspected that there was a fairly constant coming and going across the Pyrenees, by the small and little-known smugglers’ paths. He was trying to check on these and to find out which, if any, of the local people acted as guides.

  ‘Oh, I see. Hence your interest in Bonnecourt; of course he’d make the perfect guide. I wonder why he hasn’t turned up? Well, I’ll talk to Luzia.’

  ‘I wonder if you’d better’ Colin said doubtfully.

  ‘Of course I’d better. Ring up Hugh if you want to check on her—though I doubt if you’ll be able to hear London through the noise the Colorado beetles make at the Post Office!’

  When Julia passed on the gist of Colin’s remarks to Luzia, while they were laying the table for supper, the young girl said—‘This is not altogether clear to me. I will talk to Colin myself. Of course I should like to help him, but I do not fully understand.’ She held up one of the squat tumblers to the light, and polished it with a clean linen cloth. ‘Poor Torrens!’ she said, setting the glass on the table. ‘He was not very clear, but he was more clear than your cousin—perhaps less nervous.’ Julia smiled, amused that Luzia should so soon have noticed Colin’s besetting weakness.

  After supper, drinking coffee, the girl tackled Colin, and showed herself one too many for him from the start.

  ‘Of what do you suspect the isard-hunter?’ she began.

  ‘I didn’t say I suspected him of anything.’

  ‘No, but you asked Julia about him, and today you stay at home all day, hoping to see him. So you must have ideas in this connection. What are your ideas?’

  ‘Well’—Colin paused, and then spoke rather reluctantly. ‘It’s possible that he might be someone who serves as a guide to—er—people crossing the mountains.’

  ‘To Spain, or from Spain?’

  ‘Both’ Colin said, looking upset.

  ‘I understand. To cause dégats at Lacq, and then to escape again.’

  ‘I never said that!’ Colin growled.

  ‘It was not necessary to say it—it sees itself! And you wish to know, definitively, if Bonnecourt does this?’

  Colin looked thoroughly disturbed.

  ‘Luzia, you’d better lay off the whole thing. You can’t go round asking those sort of questions.’ The girl gave him a cool smile.

  ‘One can learn much without asking any questions, if one knows what one desires to know! It shall have attention’ Luzia said firmly. ‘But how I wish ce monsieur would bring the gigôt d’isard!—Mme. Monnier says it is absolutely delicious!’

  Colin hung about for a second day, hoping to see Bonnecourt, who however again failed to ap
pear. The young man had fuller reasons than he had vouchsafed to either Julia or Luzia for wishing to meet the isard-hunter and take his measure. He had been given hints, even at home, that the danger of sabotage at Lacq came less from the Communists than from the O.A.S., the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, who had taken a considerable part in the war in Algeria; the Société des Pétroles d’Acquitaine, which operated Lacq, also had interests in oilfields in the Sahara, now become Algerian territory—hence the bitter enmity of the O.A.S. against Lacq and its owners. But the Communists were certainly going to and fro across the frontier too; and it was extremely important for him, Colin, to know which lot—if either—Bonnecourt was assisting. He had gathered for himself that the man was a fine mountaineer, and also that he occasionally went in for smuggling, so he would know all the smugglers’minute paths and by-ways, and be an ideal guide to either party. It was this knowledge which had prompted his original question about him to Julia.

  When on the third day the Heriot boys came up as promised to help with bottling the old farmer’s wine, Colin was still hanging about. Julia lamented aloud—‘I’d hoped to give you isard for lunch; a man called Bonnecourt came three days ago, and promised to bring me a leg, but he never has.’

  ‘The old wretch!’ said Dick. ‘Usually he keeps his promises.’

  ‘Why, do you know him?’

  ‘Goodness yes—we often go out shooting with him.’ Colin pricked up his ears at this. ‘He’s a splendid type’ Dick pursued—‘the prettiest rock-climber you ever saw.’ It emerged from the twins, in their usual strophe and anti-strophe, that they knew that Bonnecourt sometimes went in for smuggling—‘Just for the hell of it, really.’ Julia mentioned Luzia’s murder story; the Heriots showed real anger. ‘That’s a typical bit of Larégeois spite and malice! His first wife was a perfect fool—she insisted on climbing with him, because she was jealous of his going out without her; but she couldn’t climb for toffee! She jolly nearly killed him as well when she fell—all her own fault—on the Pic.’