A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  Ariane went into Racines to make enquiries. She discovered that the supervision of the town had recently become stricter with the arrival of a new boss at the Kommandatur and a new chef at the Gendarmerie. The latter, she was told, who was French, was almost as bad as the former, who was German. He was from Alsace, a gross figure; he spoke German and had been especially chosen for his toughness in this difficult region. When she explained her plan to Micheline and Florence, the former was sceptical, even hostile.

  ‘You’ll just get yourself arrested,’ she said. ‘Then where’ll we be?’

  Florence, however, supported her, killing a chicken, plucking it and wrapping it in a napkin. She descended to the cellar and brought up a tin of Micheline’s foie gras and a string of dried mushrooms.

  ‘Have we any ham? As an alsacien, he would do anything for a ham.’

  ‘No,’ said Micheline, sharply. ‘There’s no ham.’

  ‘Micheline, it’s for Henri.’

  ‘I’d give my soul for Henri,’ said Micheline, ‘and it’d do more good than that lot. It’s wrong to do business with these types and it’s stupid, too. You’ll see. He’ll take everything and keep Henri. I’ll give you a dried sausage.’

  ‘It’s worth trying,’ Ariane insisted. And it wasn’t just food she was trying.

  She took out a suit that she had not worn for a year, at least since she went to Clermont to find Suzie, and tried it on. Florence looked at it doubtfully.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to do something about that.’ She folded up two handkerchiefs and handed them to Ariane. ‘Stuff those in your bust. Let’s hope he never gets close enough to discover the trick. I’ll take the hem up too, to make it look more up to date.’

  * * *

  Wilder was a small man, smaller than she, and obese. His face was swollen with fat, so that his eyes receded into slits. Short, sandy hair contrasted unpleasantly with his unnaturally dark red complexion. In spite of his gross belly, he rose nimbly as she entered. She listened to his accent as he greeted her and did her best to imitate the slight twang to his French. Yes, she too was from Alsace, at least her family was, and she intended to make the connexion work, along with any other that seemed promising.

  Afterwards she found she had enjoyed the interview. She played her part with verve, flirting with him, emphasising every feminine gesture, every expression of eye and mouth.

  She was distraught, she told him. She was a war widow, living on her property, alone and helpless, and her farm manager had been picked up in the village bar by his gendarmes. He was, of course, totally innocent. A solid family man in his fifties, who had lived in the country all his life. How could he be a terrorist or a communist?

  He responded instinctively, like a dog circling a bitch on heat, prolonging the meeting with questions about the farm, to which she answered charmingly. She watched him dispassionately, and asked herself, if it came to sleeping with him, could she do it? She realised, with a shock, that what would stop her was not the significance of the act, but the fact that he was physically repulsive. She tried to imagine him naked, grotesquely white, patched with reddish hair, genitals hanging heavily, pink, tripe-like tubes escaping from his gut, and was revolted. But she knew that her objections, aesthetic not moral, were meaningless. She would if she had to.

  She stayed until he reluctantly gave the signal that he must attend to more important matters. She recalled him timidly to the purpose of her visit, ‘My farm manager … You’re going to give him back to me?’ She might have been asking for a chocolate, or a kiss.

  ‘As to that,’ he replied, his smile fading, ‘I can’t give you a decision at once. I shall have to study the file.’

  Micheline had been right in her cynicism. However, since Ariane had lugged the suitcase full of food all the way there, she wouldn’t take it back again. She was afraid of being too blatant in her offer of a bribe and left the case by her chair without opening it. In this she was wrong, she discovered later. He was used to goods placed naked on the desk. A glance at the chicken breast would had more impact than ogling her.

  ‘And plumper too,’ she said to Florence and Micheline later, ‘even with the handkerchiefs in my bodice.’

  Her rendering of the breathy, fluttering creature that she had played made Florence laugh and the two of them became almost hysterical. Micheline was mending the girls’ cotton stockings that they wore to mass. They were a patchwork of darns held together by a web of the original mesh. Frowning over her spectacles, she looked particularly severe.

  ‘It’s just as I said. He took everything. It doesn’t matter what you do. You could sleep with him and it’d make no difference.’

  ‘I decided against sleeping with him,’ Ariane said, still laughing. ‘And with that great belly, how could he manage? His cock wouldn’t emerge from under it.’

  Micheline looked yet more disapproving.

  ‘I’m going back in two days’ time to try again,’ Ariane continued. ‘We’ll need a duck this time and butter.’

  When she was admitted to Wilder’s office, she found him in a jovial mood. ‘Another little bag of evidence,’ he said genially.

  She simpered. She had never understood before how it was done. Now she found that she did it naturally: a suppressed giggle, the chin pulled in, the eyes cast down.

  ‘I hope I shall soon have my farm manager back or I shall have no more evidence to offer.’

  He evaded this, tapping his sausage-fingers on the blotter. ‘It’s such a beautiful day, I suggest a cup of coffee in the square.’

  It was mid-afternoon and they sat at a cafe table in the sunshine to drink the ersatz coffee. This is part of the price, to be seen with him, she told herself, as she smiled and smiled and hoped that no one she knew would pass.

  Wilder was talking about food. He missed some of the delicacies of their own area. The foie gras here was not as refined as that of Alsace. And they had nothing like the range of pork products they had in Strasbourg. Eventually he hauled his gross body out of his seat and shook her hand. ‘I’ll say goodbye to you here. Very nice to have made the acquaintance of a lady from Alsace. I hope you’ll find your farm manager comes back to you soon.’

  Her persistence was rewarded. The following day Henri returned to the farm.

  * * *

  Ariane took his cigarette from Theo. ‘So that’s one part of my collaboration.’

  ‘Ariane, I didn’t really think …’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you were right to think what you did. I had to make accommodations. We all did.’

  ‘Ariane, this flat. I want us to move back in here, to start again.’

  She made no reply.

  ‘And there’s Sabine. I can’t leave her with the aunts indefinitely.’

  ‘I can see that, yes.’ She slipped away from him, out from under the covers, stooping over her discarded clothes.

  ‘I feel it is unfair to send her back to the convent, and it seems wrong for Suzie to be in Paris and not Sabine. If we move here we could have both of them with us.’

  She was leaning one foot on the end of the bed, rolling up a thick woollen stocking, fastening it to her suspenders. ‘But I don’t know when we can move in here. And I don’t think Sabine and Suzie should be together.’

  ‘Why not? Don’t they get on? I thought they used to be devoted to one another.’

  ‘They were.’ It was impossible to explain to him what had happened. ‘But at the end, when the Germans were with us, they were … I can’t explain. It was a sort of folie a deux of two pre-adolescent girls.’ She was fully dressed now, powdering her cheeks in front of the huge mirror over the fireplace, about to leave. ‘I’m not ready for this, Theo.’

  Part Three

  Bonnemort

  6 June – 18 August 1944

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Germans arrived at Bonnemort on 6 June 1944, just before lunch. Micheline was in
the kitchen, stoking the range; Florence was in the garden to pull up some leeks; the aunts were in their room with the wireless on; Madame Ariane and the children were in the schoolroom for a lesson in Latin. They were studying The Conquest of Gaul. Everyone had been expecting an invasion for days, French and Germans alike. Marshal Petain had already warned them that morning of what was happening.

  Frenchmen, the German and Anglo-Saxon armies are engaged on our soil. France has thus become a battleground.

  ‘At long last.’

  ‘After four years.’ The old women were in the habit of talking as much to the wireless as to one another.

  The circumstances of battle could lead the German army to take special dispositions in the zones of combat. Accept this necessity. I make this recommendation to you in the interests of your safety.

  ‘Listen.’ Sabine cocked her head like a dog.

  Out of the open window they could hear the tolling of a bell carrying over the hills from the village. The cure had heard the news too. Pealing or tolling, a celebration or a tocsin, you could take it as you pleased. They returned to their routine, in spite of Sabine’s pleading for a holiday. Madame Ariane had chosen the chapter, ‘The Fight on the Atlantic Coast’.

  ‘With the completion of these operations,’ Sabine was translating, holding a ruler under the words, ‘Caesar had every reason to think that Gaul was pacified…’

  Had Madame Ariane known, Suzie wondered, that it was going to be today?

  Florence, in the garden, was the first to be afraid. She heard engines, which could only mean one thing: no one but Germans had petrol and drove on the roads in the middle of the day. She was already running across the farmyard to alert Madame Ariane, when the dog Lascar, whom they had trained to watch the drive, came bounding through the gates, barking. The terriers joined in for the sake of it, not yet knowing why they were giving the alarm.

  They roared in like thunder, the noise of the engines reverberating from the walls, a land-borne blitzkrieg. First came the motorcycles, bouncing ahead of the convoy, swooping into the courtyard in front of the big house, followed by a staff car and, more ponderously, the armoured trucks.

  Micheline stepped out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on the skirt of her pinafore, saw the domed helmets above the handlebars and gave a wail of horror. Madame Ariane and the children were already at the door of the tower. She seized the two girls by their shoulders, pushing them ahead of her as she ran, and thrust them, stumbling, onto the path that led up the hill among the trees.

  ‘Run. Get away as far as you can.’ She stepped back and waved Micheline and Florence past her.

  Florence, taking a last look from the curve in the path, saw Madame Ariane standing under the arch to face the invaders. The roaring of the motors had reached a crescendo, men shouting, dogs barking in descant. She ran after the others, following her mother’s back into the underwater green of the forest. The noise died away as they distanced themselves from home. Sabine and Suzie ran fast at first, fleeing up the slope ahead of Micheline and Florence. They halted when their sprint left them breathless and waited, panting, for the other two to catch them up.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A bit further yet.’ Florence took the lead and walked purposefully. The undergrowth swished back from her thighs, slapping against Suzie who was following closely on her heels. After about twenty minutes she left the path, bending low through the bracken. After ascending a slope she opened a space between two bushes and said, ‘In you go.’

  They crept into the hole and crouched inside, listening to the beating of their hearts in their ears, a drumming that gradually dropped away to leave the busy silence of the woods.

  Suzie examined the low, semi-circular chamber, stroking the rock walls with the palm of her hand, wiping the stone dust and cobwebs onto her pinafore.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘About a kilometre from the road to Les Landes.’

  ‘No, what is this place?’

  ‘They built these hides centuries ago, they say, to conceal food from the soldiers who came to steal from the peasants. Now it’s just a woodman’s shelter. They won’t find us here.’

  The children were enchanted with their hiding place. They began to play houses, planning to live there for ever, gathering up the leaves and pulling down the cobwebs that hung from the tree roots in the roof.

  Micheline commented drily, ‘I’ve never seen you so keen to help with the housework at home.’

  She and Florence were crouched on their haunches by the entrance. She said to her daughter, ‘You’d better go on to Lepech and tell them there. Try to get a message to your father.’

  ‘I’ll come back here then?’

  Micheline pondered. ‘In a while I’ll go back to see what’s happened. We’ll meet here and decide where to go for the night.’

  Florence crawled out.

  ‘We want to stay here,’ Sabine said, whining. ‘We like it here.’

  ‘You may prefer a softer bed after you’ve tried lying on these stones for a bit.’

  ‘They’re no harder than my bed in the convent.’

  ‘Nonsense. You don’t know when you’re well off, miss. Now, you’re to stay here and not go wandering around the woods. I’ll be back within an hour, I hope.’ She, too, clambered out, more ungainly than her daughter. The girls listened to the sound of her departure until the bouncing of displaced stones ceased.

  They seated themselves on either side of the cave entrance to watch her go, in identical posture, their knees drawn up, like a pair of matching statues. They could hardly have been more different in their appearance. Sabine, the taller and larger, had a broad, white face with rudimentary features dominated by brown eyes, as hard as toffees. Her fine, dark curly hair, held back fiercely by grips and bands, had released itself in their rush through the woods and sprang forward in coils around her neck. Opposite her, Suzie rested her chin on her knee. Her blonde hair, cut in a pudding-basin style around her pointed, anxious face, made her look much younger than Sabine, although they were about the same age, thirteen.

  ‘We could eat our lunch,’ she suggested. She could judge a piece of bread to its last gram, and the hunk that Micheline had brought with her was bigger than the slice usually scrupulously doled out for lunch. She spread her legs to catch any crumbs in her skirt and began to nibble her bread.

  ‘We should really find something from the forest to eat with it,’ Sabine said. ‘Gather some berries, or trap an animal.’

  ‘No berries now,’ Suzie said practically. ‘No mushrooms, no nuts, no blackberries, not until September. A long wait.’

  The bread disappeared quickly, even though it needed plenty of mastication to wash it down without water. Sabine licked a fingertip and pressed it into the grains in her lap, transferring them to her mouth.

  ‘Let’s play.’

  She crawled forward, taking Suzie’s shoulders in her grip, leaning her forehead against hers. ‘I’ll stare you out. Whoever looks away gets a Chinese burn.’

  A moment later she angrily slapped Suzie’s cheek. ‘You’re not playing. You’re not even trying.’

  She took Suzie’s wrist tightly in both hands, twisting them in opposite directions. Suzie did not cry out, but she grimaced and tears appeared in the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Don’t, Sabine, please don’t. I keep thinking, wondering what’s happening at home.’

  The Brehmer Division had patrolled the region three months ago to clear the area of terrorists, leaving a pall of fear to dissuade people from helping the partisans. Stories had circulated of the Germans’ violence: ten people executed at Lartigue after a Maquis raid; twenty-five hostages shot, a village razed; a round-up of Jews in Racines, old people who hadn’t been able to hide or run away, taken by bus to the river bank and shot. But all these things had happened a long way away; it was more than thirty kilometres to Racines.

  ‘I heard a story,’ Sabine was whispering, her voice a harsh sibilant. �
�Henri was telling Micheline last week. I was in the scullery, and I knew he’d stop if I came out, so I hid behind the door.’

  Outside in the sunshine crickets were singing. Suzie tried to concentrate on their rhythmical, mindless music, but Sabine’s voice was compelling.

  ‘They took the boy from La Tuiliere last week. He was in the field with the sheep when a bus full of Milice stopped on the road and forced him to get in. They said the partisans had passed that way and he must know them. They took him to Racines to the Hotel du Parc and they tortured him.’

  ‘Sabine …’

  ‘Do you know what they did? They hit him in the face. They kicked him in the shins. Again and again.’

  Suzie glanced at Sabine who was making boxing gestures with her rolled fists. She looked down at the stones on the threshold where a party of ants was crossing into their lair in a disciplined column.

  ‘Then they stripped him naked and tied him to a table, face down, with his hands in handcuffs underneath. This was in the bar, at a cafe table. Imagine sitting there, at that table to take a cup of coffee where someone has been beaten. They beat him with a cosh with a lead ball on the end, which ripped his flesh, or with a leather belt with a buckle. They took turns to join in the fun. When one was tired, the others took over.

  ‘During the night he was tied standing up in the cellar with some other captives. That’s how Henri knew what had happened to him.’

  A lizard lay in the sunshine in a crack between two stones. Suzie could see its neck swelling, falling, swelling.

  ‘In the morning they brought him back to the bar and hung him upside down by his feet. They shouted, Where are they? Where are the partisans? Who helps them? Who gives them food? They beat him and beat him until his kidneys burst and he died. Then they took his body out on one of their trips in the bus and threw it in the ditch. He never said a word.’