A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  ‘Can it be true?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. It’s a well-established tactic to let the enemy destroy your rival. Look what Stalin did outside Warsaw last year. The free Polish underground was wiped out by the Germans, while the Red Army held back on the other bank of the Vistula. It then marched into Poland with its own Polish exiles in tow.’

  ‘But what for?’ Ariane cried. ‘Why would it be worth doing such a terrible thing?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you that.’ She spun round, as if he had accused her; then, seeing that he was continuing to speak, she relaxed. ‘You know the characters better than I do.’

  ‘Vernhes likes power. I would say that is his defining characteristic. Nikola is a far shrewder man than his wild appearance would let you think.’

  Theo put his aching head in his hands.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Ariane asked.

  ‘Nothing. In such a case, Vernhes’ people would hold a revolutionary court, condemn the victim, execute him out of hand. Look what happened to you. But I can’t do that, and I don’t have the evidence to do it properly. Nikola would never speak.’

  The general had been right after all. True justice required more than a jumble of suspicions and guesses, however acute and lucky they might be. He knew, or thought he knew, what had happened to Henri, and that would have to be enough.

  ‘Nikola also told me that you were used to spy on the Germans while they were based here and to feed them false information. A nasty, dangerous little job. Did they ever suspect you?’

  Ariane stood up and walked over to the window. She remained with her back to him, looking out.

  ‘It was the worst thing I have ever had to do,’ she said passionately. ‘Yes, they suspected me all the time, both the Germans and the Resistance. I got information, I gave information, but neither side trusted it. I didn’t want to do it. From the first, I hated it. I begged not to have to do it. The United Committee of the Resistance, that is, Vernhes, ordered me.’

  ‘The trouble with feeding the enemy false information,’ Theo said, ‘is that when it is revealed as false they suspect the source. That never happened to you? Then they try to turn it round, create a double agent.’ In contrast to the emotion in her voice, he spoke as if he were discussing an abstract question of an intelligence technique with his students at the Ecole Militaire.

  ‘No, the Germans were always suspicious, but I was never actually caught out. In a horrible way the information was self-fulfilling. Wherever they went, the Germans would always find somebody to arrest.’ She moistened her lips. ‘There was another reason, too, for them to trust what I said. It was always given under duress: that validated it for him.’ Theo noted the unconscious change in the pronoun.

  ‘The other thing I asked Nikola about,’ he said, ‘was the death of the German officer. I assumed it was a Resistance revenge killing and I thought someone like him might not have had too many scruples about the rules of war. So I asked him if he had done it.’

  ‘And what did he say?’ She turned back to face him now, leaning against the windowsill, her arms folded in front of her.

  ‘With evident regret, he said he didn’t do it. He would obviously have loved to have come back to avenge his fallen comrade. But he knew nothing of what had happened to Henri and the others, nor of what was happening in Lepech that evening. He just made off with five of his men, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Bonnemort.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There were a lot of people who would have liked to kill him, and might have done it, if they had thought there would have been no reprisals.’

  ‘Like Vernhes?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I asked him, too, the same question.’

  ‘If he had killed him? And what did he say? Do you really think a direct question is the best way to reach the truth?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’s not the only tactic I employ, but it has the merit of surprise, which is always an advantage, militarily speaking. You have to choose at once whether or not to lie.’

  ‘And you think you can tell which it is, lie or truth?’

  He looked at her without answering for several seconds, and she held his gaze.

  ‘Verhnes said he didn’t do it. I don’t think he was lying.’

  He had never asked her the direct question, so she had never yet had to lie to him. He wondered if she would take the opportunity to tell him what she knew. They were both aware that the time would come when he would ask her. He was giving her notice, denying himself the advantage that he had taken with the other two. She dropped her eyes; It was clear that this was not the time.

  ‘Theo, I don’t see how any of this helps us with Sabine. You must concentrate on that now.’ She was moving towards the door, refusing his challenge.

  * * *

  Leaving the library she made for the tower. Her old room, that had been the communal sitting room during the summer, used by the aunts and the children, was now abandoned. No fire had been lit and the frost pattern on the windows had barely begun to melt. She sat down at her desk, letting the cold creep into her, as if it could turn her to stone and petrify all emotion.

  Up till now she had let him answer his questions for himself and in Paris that might have been enough for him. Here she had the sense that at any minute someone would stand up and bear witness against her. She was naturally open and the idea of lying was repugnant, especially to Theo. But she had learned many things in the last year and one was that there are some things it is better not to know, even about yourself.

  Nikola’s story, recounted by Theo, was a consolation. It might not be true, but if it were, it cancelled her greatest fear: that she had been, unwittingly, implicated in Henri’s death. She had asked herself constantly if she had somehow alerted the major to what was planned for the liberation of Lepech; if her false information had rebounded at last and aroused his suspicion. Living through the weeks of the Germans’ presence, the turmoil of the liberation, Theo’s lightning return, her flight to Paris with Suzie, she had never thought of anything beyond the moment. Once the horror was over, the memories were inextinguishable. There had been moments when it seemed that the only way to escape from the compulsive recall of events that she did not want to remember was to kill herself, and only some dim sense that she must wait to do it until she had handed Suzie back to her family kept her from acting on it.

  * * *

  When the Germans had arrived she had been afraid, but afraid of the wrong things. She had feared injury and death and fire and looting. She had imagined the aunts shot on the stairs and Suzie taken away to Germany, Florence raped and Micheline tortured. She had not visualised the insidious effect of proximity, the wearing down of living side by side with the SS.

  It had begun in such a small way, at the meeting of the United Resistance on the evening of 6 June. The Allies had just landed. The Germans had just occupied Bonnemort. She had crept out of the house, evaded the guard and, with Henri, reached the appointed house on the other side of Lepech Perdrissou. Vernhes had been there with about five others. She had reported the major’s parting remark that they would be away the following night. Vernhes, noting that she spoke German as if it were a moral fault, asked that any information, however trivial, that she could pick up be relayed at once to him. The following morning on her ride she had watched the German convoy snaking down the track and onto the road, turning east. She rode fast to the village and passed on the message. At the junction with the route nationale a few miles further on, a child with some geese was posted to gawp at the trucks and report which way they were heading. This early warning system was simple and effective. It was the kind of thing she enjoyed. If only the spying had gone no further than that.

  Looking back, she saw that the major had chosen his victim from the start, from the moment that he forced her to dine with him, to cut up his food. She had felt him watching her when he was at Bonnemort. Although the family and the troops were forbidde
n to enter one another’s zones of the house and grounds, the major did not apply the prohibition to himself. He did not actually penetrate the family’s rooms upstairs in the tower, but he roamed freely in other parts of the house. She came across him in the entrance hall, in the farmyard, in the stables. She felt besieged; she hesitated to leave the sitting room; she scanned the garden from the window before going outside.

  He finally caught her in the stables early one evening. She could still feel the pleasant chill on her skin, damp from the heat of her ride, as she stepped into the dimness of the barn out of the evening sun. She had walked through the storeroom to the tack room beyond when she heard the sound of a boot on the rock floor. The rivulet of sweat on her back turned to a runnel of ice. She was trapped. She gave no sign of having heard him, hanging up the bridle and humping the saddle onto its pole.

  The footsteps rang loudly, on their deliberate approach. She retreated to the furthest end of the room and remained there, frozen like a rabbit in the grass waiting to leap out in a desperate, hopeless run for life. She never made that leap. She didn’t even try. Over and over again, afterwards, she asked herself why she had done nothing, why she had not dodged, run, scuffled, swung her fist. What good was all her resistance if she had not resisted then? She sometimes told herself it was fear: for herself, for the aunts, for the children, above all for Suzie. It was true that she had been afraid; she was always afraid. But during those seconds when action was demanded, it was not calculation of fear and consequences that held her back. It was a recognition of, a submission to, overwhelming power. Every time the memory of that first encounter forced itself upon her, she tried to replay it as it should have been played.

  He walked inexorably towards her, blocking her against the wall. Took her neck in his good hand. Kissed her. His face, roughly bearded, luminously pale, with a light sheen of sweat and a strange, sharp smell, like a tainted apple.

  She could perhaps tell Theo about that. It was bad enough, but such things happen in war. Occupiers have powers to which the defeated have to submit. What she would never admit to him was the effect that those powers had had on her. She wished she could forget it herself.

  She remembered the night of the thunderstorm. She hadn’t been able to sleep. She hadn’t even gone to bed and finally, to escape from the oppressive stuffiness of the house, she had walked outside, sat down on the terrace to smoke a cigarette that she had made of Micheline’s dried herbs. She had inhaled the odd fragrance, listening to the dry boom of the thunder, like distant artillery, watching the curtains of lightning in the sky over the hills to the south. She knew why she had chosen to sit in the German zone of the garden. She could explain it as defiance: by sitting there at night she was recovering her own property, challenging the major’s right to take it from her. In truth the defiance was of another order: defiance of common sense, of caution and of right behaviour. To be there was an invitation, which he accepted.

  When Vernhes decided to extend her role from gathering information to passing false information in the other direction, she had objected that her relationship with the German officers was not such that she was likely to tell them anything. They would be suspicious from the start. She begged not to have to do it. Vernhes had insisted. It was an order and he had the authority to give it. He was now the commander of the battalion of the United Resistance in the region.

  The major made it easy for her. He liked to use force or the threat of force, so each occasion that she had something to tell him had the appearance of compulsion. Yet she knew that although he put his hand on the pulse of her neck, or struck her with his false hand, it was for show. She was in a cage made of her own submission and could not escape. The violence was unnecessary.

  She had slept little and badly all the time that the Germans were in occupation of the house. Sometimes, sitting up in her bed at night watching the stars through the open window, she would tell herself that it was part of the skill of the bully to make the victim feel as if she were to blame, as if she had willed her own subjection. She did not convince herself. She should never have allowed herself to become his creature. She thought of Lucien Maniotte dying, silent, under torture; Henri beaten and starved in prison in Racines, and was filled with shame.

  Yet the next time he used coercion, she submitted once again.

  He would summon her late to the library, where he had made his office. When the summons came, her palms began to sweat lightly and she held them to her sides, pressing them into her cotton skirt to calm herself. He would be seated when she entered and kept her standing while he talked, a monologue, which required only a listener.

  She saw his pistol lying on the blotter on the desk in front of him. She fixed her eyes on it as soon as she entered, its implicit threat stoking her terror of what he would require this time.

  When he ordered her to approach, she did so. Would he have shot her if she had turned and run out of the room? She did not try to escape, so she never knew. Unbuttoning himself, he pushed her to her knees. When she turned her head aside, her eyes closed, his false hand rammed her face round; the gun in his right hand clattered against her teeth. He used it as a lever in a lock to force her mouth open, tearing her lip. Her head was held as if in a vice, that moved it like a machine, his false hand on one side, his live one, still holding the gun, its butt pressed against her skull. Her ears were full of the crackling of her hair.

  * * *

  She found she was holding her head now. The memory would spring on her without warning as she sat at her desk. Or it would wake her in the night, making her retch, as she had then, tears of rage and shame starting from her eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Suzie opened the door of Sabine’s room and entered quietly. The bedroom she had shared for two years seemed puzzlingly strange. Then she realised that although nothing in the room itself had changed, the smell, the familiar animal scent of her own lair, was different. A sharp medicinal odour mingled oddly with that of woodsmoke, the background scent of Bonnemort in winter. Sabine’s head was all but hidden in her pillows and, as she made no movement, Suzie assumed she was asleep. She sat down on the chair by the bed.

  She noticed that her side of the dressing table still carried her collection of objects: an ammonite, a thrush’s nest with, inside it, a wren’s egg that she had found in a deserted nest, a cluster of acorn cups, an ox’s slipper and a tiny blue glass bottle. Their existence as a collection, each one still correctly positioned, surprised her. She had had no intention of coming back to Bonnemort when she left, because she was going to live with Papa and Maman when they came home; she had not cared what happened to her objets trouves. Yet she was touched that Sabine had not swept the whole lot into the bin, as if she thought Suzie might come back to claim them.

  She looked at the segment of Sabine’s head that was visible, a slice of bruised cheek, a tuft of hair, and felt the power of the conscious in the presence of the sleeping. She had been liberated from her; she was no longer afraid. In Paris she had not allowed herself to think of Bonnemort at all. Sometimes the soft snorting of Lou Moussou, or the velvety warmth of Florence’s goodnight embrace recurred involuntarily, not as memory but as sensation, and she had rejected them immediately. Now she saw that she was free. Sabine’s occupation was over; she could not threaten her or tyrannise her, even if the two of them were living together once more. She let out a shuddering breath and glanced at Sabine, to find that her eyes were open and she was watching her.

  ‘How are you?’

  Sabine’s expression was full of anger and resentment. ‘Alive.’

  She could tell at once that Suzie had changed in the months she had been away. The placatory undertone that had always coloured her voice had gone. Sabine had felt Suzie’s absence bitterly when she had first been taken away by Madame Ariane: another debit to her stepmother’s account. She had been furious, jealous, that Suzie had gone and she was left, so she had heaped on the absent one’s head all the terrible things that had ha
ppened at Bonnemort since she had last been there, and since she had gone. Suzie was to blame; she had made her, Sabine, do things she would never have done if she hadn’t had Suzie to do them with, or to. Her father had been angry with her when she had said it was because Suzie was Jewish. But if she hadn’t been Jewish, she wouldn’t have had to hide at Bonnemort in the first place.

  Suzie leaned forward and pulled down the covers a little so that she could see more of Sabine’s face. The swelling round her eyes had subsided a little and the bandage on her head had been removed, showing where her hair had been cut short to dress her scalp. She was unrecognisable as the Sabine with the moon face and the cloud of hair, who had rushed Suzie from the pigsty to the chapel when she arrived at Bonnemort.

  ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’

  Sabine nodded. Suzie stroked the hand that was curled on the edge of the covers, as if she was petting Lou Moussou. She didn’t know what else to do or to say. She saw that tears were slipping down Sabine’s cheeks. They sat silently for a while, then Suzie said, ‘How did it happen? You didn’t have to go back to school, did you?’

  Sabine shook her head. She had stopped crying. Suzie thought that she was not going to reply, but at last she said, ‘After Christmas, he came to find me and asked about my lessons, who was teaching me.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘The aunts.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He offered me some books for my classes. The aunts, of course, didn’t know about the proper courses or anything. They just taught what they liked. When I told him he made fun of what they were teaching me. But even more about her, what she taught us when you were here.’