A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  Suzie had settled into a routine of horror. Lou Moussou’s shrieks of agony and the sound of the pulsing of his blood still echoed in her ears as she worked, her fingers blue with cold and corrugated by the water, as she rolled and turned, rolled and turned.

  The Jouanels were butchering as rapidly as they could, with Henri their assistant. Micheline and Florence supervised their amateur workers and took on the skilled tasks themselves. The pluck was handled by Micheline, who, with her tiny knife, cut the heart from the lungs, put the liver aside for pates and piled up the web-like membrane from the lungs that she used to wrap her stuffings and faggots. By five o’clock when darkness fell, Lou Moussou had been divided into his component parts. The Jouanels departed, each with a sizeable joint of pork rolled up in his apron. They joked about an identity check on the way home.

  ‘Go through the woods,’ Micheline urged.

  ‘No, we can’t ride; the road is too rough. It’s not far, we won’t be caught.’ With the shouts and waves that mark the end of a happy and successful day they left.

  The girls were now given the job of cleaning the winepress. Sabine pumped the water into the bucket, which Suzie threw onto the rocky bloodstained floor, swabbing the pinkish flood out of the door and over the edge of the cliff.

  Normally the processing of a pig would take several days, but the need to remove all sign of Lou Moussou’s existence demanded that they work until late that night. In the kitchen Suzie helped with the mincer, feeding in the raw meat and back fat and tamping it down while Madame de Cazalle turned the handle. At last Micheline cleared the table and served dinner. Suzie, pleading tiredness, rejected her pork chop and crept away to bed.

  * * *

  Sabine had understood first the meaning of what they heard. As the terrible sound of the climax died away, she slid forward on her belly towards the edge of the loft. Suzie, imitating her silence and precaution, advanced to join her. Below them the winepress was in darkness, save for lances of faint light that penetrated the cracks in the door, and in the layers of blackness she could not interpret what she saw: two forms like trees leaning away from one another, yet joined at the trunk, grafted and entwined. Then the sound began again. Not caring whether she was heard or not, Suzie turned back to the funnel, to climb back to the open air and the fight.

  Part Four

  Bonnemort

  10–15 March 1945

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you, Theo.’ His aunt’s voice, disembodied, was faint and crackling, a call from another world. He was already alarmed. The aunts used letters to communicate at a distance. They normally reserved the telephone for mundane local matters or dire emergency. For Aunt Odette to have put through a call to Paris already indicated that it was serious.

  ‘I think you should come to Bonnemort for a few days, if you could spare the time. Or Ariane. We really need Ariane. Could she not come to us for a while?’

  ‘Of course I’ll come if necessary. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Sabine has been … has had an accident.’

  ‘What’s happened to her?’

  ‘Her life isn’t in danger, but she is rather ill. I think you should come, Theo.’

  ‘What happened?’

  There was a pause so long that he thought the line had been cut.

  ‘Hello, hello …’

  ‘… attack …’ Aunt Odette’s voice swelled to audibility and faded again.

  ‘Can you hear me, Aunt Odette? I’ll try to get a line this evening to tell you when I’m coming.’

  He slowly replaced the receiver. Although it was deeply inconvenient, he suddenly saw an opportunity. He must persuade Ariane to come back with him.

  It took considerable determination to fulfil Aunt Odette’s demand. To leave the Big Man for several days on the plea of a family emergency, to persuade Ariane to come with him, was not easy. He expected Suzie to be left behind in Paris to attend school, cared for by Pascal Wolff’s housekeeper. However, Ariane had insisted on her coming, in spite of what she had said earlier about separating the two girls. They went by rail, a journey of twelve hours with three changes. Suzie, installed in a window seat, read her book or gazed out of the window at the wintry landscapes of central France. Ariane spent long periods with her eyes closed. They arrived at Bonnemort late at night, to be welcomed by Micheline, Florence and the aunts who were waiting for them in their old sitting room, which they now reoccupied, on the first floor.

  ‘How’s Sabine?’ Ariane asked, embracing each member of the household warmly. Her question was answered by a Greek chorus of women’s voices.

  ‘She’s alive.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘We’ve taken a nurse, for the nights …’

  ‘So someone is with her all the time.’

  Theo interrupted the cycle of commentary and explanation. ‘What happened?’ he asked again. There was a pause from the four women, as if each was waiting for one of the others to answer. Then they began to reply together.

  ‘It must have been an accident …’

  ‘She was found unconscious …’

  ‘The Baillet boys came to tell us …’

  ‘Old Franco had to bring her home in the cart …’

  ‘We called the doctor …’

  ‘We have to call Dr Arnoux now in St Saud …’

  ‘It was he who told us to call the police …’

  ‘But what happened?’ Again Theo’s voice cut through the recitative. Silence fell.

  ‘Sabine is too ill to tell us.’ It was Florence who replied.

  Ariane rose. ‘I think Suzie should go to bed now. It’s been a very long day.’

  ‘I’ve put her in the little white room,’ said Florence, ‘so she won’t disturb Sabine.’

  ‘Suzie, come with me. Florence will show us what she has arranged.’ She put her hand out to Theo. ‘And I think we should go to bed, too. Well understand everything much better by daylight.’

  Theo went to Sabine’s room and opened the door. A nurse was sitting at a table, reading. At the far end of the room the bed was in darkness, so he could barely distinguish his daughter’s form.

  ‘How is she?’ he enquired, awkwardly.

  ‘Asleep,’ came the reply.

  In his own room the fire was lit and one lamp shone beside the bed. A moment later Ariane entered and began at once to unpack her suitcase. This immediate acceptance of a joint life at Bonnemort, which she had resisted in Paris, alone made the journey seem worthwhile.

  ‘Ariane, what is going on? What happened to Sabine? Why will none of them answer a direct question?’

  When the straight answer came he understood why no one else would reply: because it was impossible to believe.

  ‘Sabine was very badly beaten.’ She came over to him and took his hand. ‘I know. It’s incredible. Florence told me and she was making no mistake. I am not sure whether the aunts have really taken it in.’

  ‘But why? Who did it?’

  ‘No one knows. No one has the least idea. The police know less than anyone, according to Florence, until Sabine is able and willing to speak. Tomorrow you can see the doctor, the nurse, Sabine, the police, and find out what you can.’

  ‘How can I?’

  He lay awake for a long time savouring the comfort of the room in the light of the dying fire. Ariane was soon asleep beside him. The primrose silk curtains, at least fifty years old, so worn at the inner edges that they were as fragile as cloth from a tomb, were reflected in the mirror above the fireplace. The clock on the chimneypiece, doubled by the mirror, was a golden globe held up by an ebony figure. He remembered all of it from morning visits to his mother forty years ago. Yet amid the familiar he was confronted again with the inexplicable. Each time he returned, where Bonnemort should have offered the reassurance of continuity, there was instead a shock of violence. Until Ariane had spoken, he had assumed his daughters illness was an accident, or even a disease: he ha
d interpreted Aunt Odette’s reference on the telephone to an ‘attack’ as meaning pneumonia. Why?

  There was no answer. In all his enquiries at Bonnemort, he felt, he had sought facts and been given feelings. He would approach this with logic. The first hypothesis was that the attack was a chance encounter, having no relation to what had happened last year. This seemed unlikely, unless the police could show him that there was a history of violent attacks in the area. His heart and thoughts seemed to stop simultaneously at this point. Had she been raped? Ariane had not said so. Florence would surely have given her that cardinal information and Ariane would not have held it back from him.

  If the attack was not random, why would anyone bear a grudge against Sabine? For who she was? For whom she was connected to? Himself? Ariane? Henri? For what she knew? His ideas grew wilder, but none of them so wild as to be rejected. He recalled that just over six months ago the house had still been occupied by the SS. Frenchmen had been living rough as guerrillas in the woods roundabout. Ariane herself had been stripped and shaved. He realised now that there was something here that, obsessed with his wife’s supposed guilt, he had failed entirely to grapple with last time.

  Henri. It must come back to Henri. But how could Sabine be connected with this? He knew from Ariane that the children had never been involved in her Resistance work, had been given no idea of Henri’s role until she had ridden with them to Lavallade for the Fourteenth of July celebrations. Even that risk, so late on, she had regretted.

  The questions revolved, unresolved, until he fell into a heavy dreamless sleep, from which he was woken before it was light by the crowing of the cockerels in the farmyard. As soon as they were dressed, he accompanied Ariane to see Sabine again. The nurse had already left and the patient was awake, lying supine on her pillows. Her arms were extended at her sides on top of the bedcover, one of them in plaster. The bandage that wrapped her head served as a frame to emphasise the condition of her face. One eye was so severely bruised that she could barely open it.

  Ariane gave a little moan of horror and put her hands to her own face in empathy. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took the ends of her stepdaughter’s fingers, where they emerged from the cast, into her own. Theo stood at the end of the bed. She was changed as well as injured. Her round face had been hollowed out in some way. Her shoulders were visible, like a metal coathanger holding up her nightdress.

  ‘Sabine, how are you, little one?’ Theo asked.

  Sabine made no response. He knew that she had heard him, but she made no effort to reply.

  ‘Have you had breakfast yet? I hope you ate well. It’s very important for you to get strong, so that you feel well enough to tell us what happened to you.’

  Theo walked to the window to conceal his rage that anyone should do this to a child. He stood looking at the view of the garden that rose steeply behind the house. The box trees, unkempt, marching up the hill in pairs, were rimed with frost so that they looked like balls of stone. He glanced back at his daughter and felt a stirring of guilt for having abandoned her for five years, for longer, ever since her mother died. Her brown eyes met his gaze crookedly through her swollen lids, fully comprehending. He saw something accusingly resentful and despairing in their expression.

  What he required was facts, precise accounts of actions and deeds. For that he would go this morning to the doctor, the police, to men who would be able to answer his questions.

  * * *

  When he returned from his morning’s enquiries and joined his family for lunch, no one asked what he had discovered. The aunts could only deal with the inexplicable by treating it as if it were normal. Sabine was ill, had had an accident, must be encouraged and helped to get better. The conversation was about the farm, about food supplies, the urgent subjects of the day.

  The morning had been overcast, cold seeping rain falling relentlessly. Now it had stopped and he and Ariane went into the garden together. The clouds had lifted so that the view over the ranges of hills had re-emerged in layers of grey, paler in the distance, darker nearby, like a Chinese painting. The garden dripped. In answer to her queries, he admitted that he had learned nothing that she had not encapsulated for him in one sentence last night. The doctor had given him an account of Sabine’s injuries: a broken humerus, multiple lacerations, concussion, inflicted by a club.

  ‘We used to see such wounds on victims of the Milice, or the Gestapo. They used a special cosh, but you could get the same result with a heavy stick of some kind,’ the doctor had told him.

  ‘Does she speak?’ Theo asked before he left. ‘Can she understand? She hasn’t said a word to me yet.’

  ‘That’s something separate from the physical injuries. There is no reason why she should not speak, although she has not spoken to me or to the police, I understand. She is traumatised, or afraid. You may find that the psychological recovery needs more time than the physical one.’

  Ariane walked with him along the terrace. He took her hand and held it on his arm. She stopped to examine the clumps of grape hyacinths under the bay tree. Facts had got him nowhere.

  ‘And you? Did you learn anything?’

  ‘A lot,’ she said, ‘but not much in answer to your questions. Micheline, Florence, the aunts, all told me things separately, things they can’t bear to talk about openly. Sabine has lost an enormous amount of weight since I last saw her in September. Florence admits that she eats almost nothing. I can’t understand it. She always had a very healthy appetite before, much more than Suzie. And she used to long for sweet things.’

  ‘Did you see her again? Did she speak to you?’ For Theo the refusal to talk was almost the worst thing. The answers to all his questions were there in his daughter’s head, if he could only spin the thread out of her brain.

  Ariane’s voice was suddenly sharp. ‘She won’t talk to me, Theo. It’s no good thinking it. She hates me,’ she said flatly.

  ‘What do you mean, she hates you?’

  ‘Exactly what I say. From the moment I took her from the convent, after you left, she hated and resented me. I can’t tell you what I endured: rudeness, insolence, mockery …’

  ‘Ariane, you are the adult and she is the child. You had all the power. How could she …’

  ‘Oh, Theo, that’s easy to say.’ She took her hand from his arm and strode up the steps towards the higher terrace. ‘You’ve never tried to look after someone else’s child, who holds you responsible for her parent’s death.’

  ‘But you weren’t responsible …’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t. That has nothing to do with anything. It was a nightmare, living with her. And the worst time was when the SS were here. Sabine infected Suzie. The two of them were like mad creatures and in the end …’ She stopped abruptly, turned round and began to walk slowly back to the house. ‘Anyway, there’s no hope that Sabine will speak to me. I would suggest that Suzie might talk to her, if I didn’t feel that their relationship had been strange, unhealthy. You’re her father. You’ll have to wait until she’s prepared to talk to you.’

  He did not follow her inside. From the woods he could hear the creaking double call of a hen pheasant, reminding him of chill grey afternoons like this, out shooting with Henri. He missed him badly. The old grey wall, demarcation line between forest and garden, had collapsed at one point, the stones tumbling down the hill, the inner ones, newly exposed, shining gold, like the brilliance of flesh gaping through a wound. Neglect and decay; the absence of Henri showed everywhere. He could not for the moment think of what more to do about Sabine, yet he needed action. He had not come here from Paris to sit beside the library fire and read a paper. He decided to make another attempt to meet the Russian Nikola who had perhaps been with Henri when he was captured and could tell him how it happened.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  From somewhere up the slope beyond the cottage at Pechagrier Theo heard the rhythmic blows of an axe. He walked round the house, disturbing a couple of red-necked hens, which ran from him squ
awking, hopping with surprising agility into the branches of a bare fig tree. He passed a wired-off vegetable garden, where leek fronds, onion shoots and yellowing cabbages were scattered without pattern in an expressionistic muddle. A dog bounded down the hill, barking fiercely, followed by his master, carrying an axe, which he looked ready to wield at an intruder who displeased him. Like the dog, he halted at a distance to view his visitor.

  ‘Mr Nikola?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could I have a word with you, if you’re not too busy?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Henri Menesplier.’

  ‘Oh, very well. Come on up.’

  Looking at Henri’s lieutenant, he saw someone who was defined immediately as Russian. He was a big man, tall and solidly built, with a round, bald head that made up for its lack of hair on the skull by its profusion on the jaw; a thickly curling brown beard tinged with grey. Below the massive forehead was a face like a hunk of uncooked bread, doughy and pliable.

  ‘I’ve about finished,’ he said. ‘You can take the tools.’

  He handed them to Theo and he himself dragged a sack of logs behind him.

  ‘So, you’re a friend of Henri’s?’

  ‘Yes. He was like my older brother. I’m Theophile de Cazalle from Bonnemort.’

  ‘You’re the one who was supposed to be dead? Rose again with the liberation?’

  It took some time to reach the point of conversation. First the wood had to be tipped onto the wood pile, tools chucked into the tangle of instruments on the shelf in the porch, boots and coats removed and hung on a hook so overburdened that they simply slid off onto the floor, before they could enter the house, in stockinged feet, through the back door. The Russian closed the door of the living room behind them with care.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating a rush-seated armchair, sagging and frayed, that looked like a natural growth projecting out of the flagstones of the floor. A sudden chirruping and Theo ducked instinctively as a missile of Cretan blue swooped past him. Canaries and budgerigars, yellow, blue and green, filled the air. In one corner the red glow of a lamp in front of an icon was almost obscured behind a half-drawn curtain.