A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

Suzie said nothing. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. What had they been studying when Madame Ariane had produced that saying? Anyone who scorned her stepmother was Sabine’s friend. She would not stop to ask herself why.

  ‘He hated her, too.’

  ‘Why?’ Suzie asked, herself rather than Sabine. ‘Why does he hate Madame Ariane? Why do people hate me because I’m Jewish?’

  Sabine ignored these questions as irrelevant, so Suzie asked, ‘What happened then?’

  ‘We went for walks. He wanted to know about Bonnemort.’

  ‘What about Bonnemort?’

  ‘All about when the Germans were here. He wanted to know about you, for example. He was surprised that you were Jewish. He thought you couldn’t be, because you stayed so long.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Oh, Henri. Henri was in the Resistance, but he wasn’t any good, so that’s why he got killed.’

  ‘Sabine,’ Suzie’s voice was shocked. ‘You hate Madame Ariane, so I can see why you let him talk like that about her. But you loved Henri. How could you let him say such things?’

  ‘I only listened,’ Sabine said defensively.

  ‘But you talked as well. That’s why he wanted to see you. He was finding things out from you. What did you tell him?’

  ‘I only told the truth.’

  ‘Sabine, it’s not whether it’s true or false, it’s who you tell it to. Don’t you remember …’

  She was about to recall Madame Ariane’s words after their visit to Lavallade on the Fourteenth of July, but it was pointless to quote her to Sabine. How dangerous life with Sabine had been. Even more than she had realised at the time. Sabine might, on impulse, have told someone, anyone, about her being Jewish, at any time. But she hadn’t done so. She had held the gun, which Suzie had given her, to her head, but she had never pulled the trigger. In the instant of gratitude for that concealment, Suzie knew what Sabine had betrayed.

  ‘You didn’t tell him about … what we saw in the winepress?’

  ‘You mean her and the major?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sabine, how could you?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done.’

  Suzie had been so deeply revolted by the sounds they had heard that she had difficulty in recalling the memory now. What they saw must have meant what Sabine said it meant. She could only remember the dust in her nostrils and under her eyelids, the mist of cobwebs between the beams, the terrible sounds, the hoarse gasping of Lou Moussou struggling to die.

  ‘But it’s the truth!’

  * * *

  They had been walking along the path of the walls of Lepech Perdrissou. It was six in the evening. Above them in the falling darkness the plane trees held out their gnarled lopped branches like lepers’ hands, amputated and twisted. She had been laughing, dancing along sideways, relishing the memory of that scene, grotesque and anguished, which proved what she knew instinctively: that love was pain. He had often asked her before, ‘Did you ever see them alone together?’ She had understood exactly what he wanted to know and had evaded his questions with vague and irrelevant answers. She did not know why she told him then, when she had kept silent before.

  She began to sing a playground song, one she had heard in the mouths of the big boys.

  ‘It’s only natural, after all,

  To take a girl …’

  She left the quatrain unfinished, but he had heard those words too, filtering through the open windows of the classroom while he marked books during the recess. Without making any effort to pursue her, he waited until she was within reach to catch her wrist.

  ‘So you did. You saw them together?’

  She pulled away, but his grasp did not relax, and she continued to sing, turning her head away from him.

  ‘It’s only natural, after all …’

  They had already reached the grassy mounds that marked the old gates and they walked between them, taking the road past the walled orchards that surrounded the town. His glance swept the dark and empty road before he struck her, hard. She swerved just in time and the blow caught her, not on the side of the head, which had been his target, but on the neck. She shrieked and swung to the ground, still held at the wrist. Scrambling up, like a dog on a leash, she received the next blow of his closed fist square on the cheek. Involuntary tears sprang to her eyes.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ she cried, defiantly. ‘What’s it to you what I saw or what they did?’

  At this stage his actions were still familiar, the punishment of a impertinent student. It was she who broke the pattern, who did not submit as she was supposed to do. It was long past that point when she was on the ground with him crouched over her that she said, at last, ‘Yes, I saw them together, walking together, talking together. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it? So now I’ve said it,’ devaluing her confession as she made it. He had not let go of the stick that he had picked up earlier, but his voice was calm, gentle.

  ‘And what did you see?’

  She was only whispering, her strength to shout gone, yet her words were full of venom. ‘They were fucking, fucking.’

  As she said it she sobbed. She knew that she had given away a source of power. She endlessly had lived the memory, rehearsed that curious amalgam of agonised sounds in which pain was wrung out with an obsessive pleasure. She had thought that he of all people would understand the significance of what she had heard, but all he wanted to know was when, where, how.

  ‘Did you see them together often?’ he demanded. ‘Did you hear what they said?’

  She lay exhausted on the sodden ground, resigned to telling him. ‘I heard them speaking, but they used German so I didn’t understand. Madame Ariane spoke good German. That’s why he liked her. It wasn’t like yours, with lots of French words in it.’

  In part, she had meant to placate him, by complimenting him on his bad German. In part, she wanted to threaten him, by hinting at how much more she had seen. The next blow came without warning. He did not bother to check whether he was unobserved, for they were well away from the village now, the forest closing around the road, arching above it to shut out even the sky.

  ‘How do you know how well I speak German?’

  She wanted to retract then, all of it, for she saw that the patterns of the past were broken and she could not guess what he would do next. His fury was beyond reason. ‘I don’t, really …’

  ‘Yes, you do. You just said I spoke bad German. There’s only one way you could know that. You spied on me too, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘You do know.’

  The punishment for knowing would be more severe than it ever was in class for not knowing. She had been tricked. She should have kept it to herself, as one of her own treasures. And it did her no good; she gained nothing from having pleased him with the story; it had not mitigated his fury. She put up her arm to protect her face, and heard it crack under the blow from his stick.

  * * *

  ‘Do you remember,’ she said to Suzie, ‘the time when he was there with the major? The major had his gun out and we thought he had captured him. But he hadn’t. They were talking together in German. You remember that? It was true, wasn’t it?’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Unable to face lunch, Theo asked for a bowl of soup on a tray in the library. As he ate, his eye fell on Sabine’s jigsaw on its board, still uncompleted. It was difficult to imagine in what circumstances Sabine had told Vernhes about Ariane and the major. The fact that, according to his wife, Sabine hated her, added another layer of unreliablity to the web of stories. Had Vernhes accepted in good faith a malicious tale fabricated by Sabine?

  He needed to talk to his daughter, but he could not imagine how to engage her in conversation. Children were another race whose language he did not speak. Even if he had little hope of learning anything from them, he could at least tell them the truth about Ariane. He picked up the board a
nd carried it carefully up the stairs.

  When he entered Sabine’s room he found the two girls there and a silence that suggested they had stopped speaking as he opened the door. Sabine was almost submerged in her bed. Suzie was sitting beside her.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked his daughter.

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ Her reply, although patently untrue, confirmed that Suzie had got her to speak again.

  He organised the puzzle on a small table in front of the fire, persuading Sabine to get out of bed and to join him and Suzie. She did so with reluctance, but once seated in front of the jigsaw, her interest was roused and she began to turn over the pieces, testing them against the finished part.

  ‘I still don’t know what the picture is,’ he complained.

  ‘Don’t tell.’

  ‘It’s a picture of …’

  Sabine and Suzie had spoken simultaneously.

  Suzie addressed Sabine. ‘It’s only fair that he should understand what it’s meant to be. We know what it is, why shouldn’t he?’ She turned to Theo. ‘It’s a picture from an old manuscript. There’s a knight riding a horse and he has killed someone who is lying underneath him. It’s decorated round the edge with leaves and branches. And there’s a big letter Q. It’s very complicated.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  They worked on the puzzle for a while in silence. Theo, who was looking at it upside down, soon abandoned any effort.

  ‘I’m not going to be able to stay much longer at Bonnemort,’ he said eventually. ‘I shall have to go back to Paris, in a day or so. Ariane will stay here with you two until Sabine is well enough to travel and then you will all come back to Paris together. We shall live in our flat, all of us together as a little family.’ He had no authority from Ariane for saying this. He simply willed it.

  Suzie turned towards the window, as if detaching herself from this plan, and Theo, suddenly understanding, corrected his view of the future. ‘That is, until the war ends and Suzie’s mother and father return and she can go back to live with them.’

  He paused, holding his temples between his thumb and middle finger, wondering how to begin. The girls looked up curiously, taking the gesture for a sign of emotion, as he supposed it was.

  ‘Sabine, you are going to live with me and Ariane from now on, and I want to tell you something about her. All through the war, while she was living here and looking after you, she was working, with Henri and Micheline and Dr Maniotte, whom you may remember, for the Resistance. Not, like some people, just at the last minute, in the few months before liberation, but right from the beginning. She took very great risks and was incredibly brave. At the time you didn’t know what she was doing, because she wanted to protect you and make sure that you were not involved. One day you will learn about what she did. The most dangerous and difficult time for her was last year when the Germans came. Just when it seemed that the worst was over and the Allied army had landed to liberate France, here at Bonnemort you had to face the SS. Not least of her worries was the danger to you, Suzie. If the Germans had realised who you were, you, and she, would have been deported immediately.’

  Suzie nodded, holding up a piece of the puzzle, turning it one way and then the other, trying to see what it might represent. She was wondering whether, if Sabine had understood that, she would have denounced her, in order to get rid of Madame Ariane.

  ‘But the hardest thing she had to do,’ Theo went on, ‘was to act as a spy for the Resistance, to tell them anything she could learn about what the SS was doing here. So she had to pretend, sometimes, to be friendly with the Germans in order to carry out her mission.’

  Suzie was now watching him fixedly. Sabine appeared absorbed in the puzzle.

  ‘You may have seen, or heard, some things that you thought were odd, or wrong, but I want you to understand their true meaning. Things are not always what they seem. Ariane will never tell you what really happened, nor explain what she did. But I want you to know about it.’

  Now that his speech was ended, Theo was at a loss. His audience was silent, without reaction. They both picked up pieces of the jigsaw and studied them carefully. He could not tell whether his words had been received as a revelation of truth, with relief, with scepticism, or with bewilderment.

  ‘We were spies, too,’ Suzie remarked eventually. She did not look at him, concentrating on a small red piece of jigsaw, trying to insert it in different ways, then rejecting it.

  ‘Suzie.’ Sabine’s voice was minatory.

  ‘Well, we were.’

  Theo had revised his impressions of the infantile Suzie of their first meeting. She now seemed more mature than Sabine.

  ‘We watched everything that was going on at Bonnemort when the Germans were here.’

  ‘Did you realise what Henri and Madame Ariane were doing?’ Theo asked. He did not want to end these confidences prematurely by broaching the story of the major at once.

  ‘Henri, no,’ Suzie said. ‘I suppose we should have guessed because he was never here. But Madame Ariane, yes.’ The small red piece was at last set in its proper position. ‘We watched her with the major, but because no one explained things to us, we thought she might be a traitor.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  Sabine broke in. ‘Because she let the major kiss her.’ Her tone was one of accusation and self-justification.

  ‘I could see,’ Suzie went on, ‘that when the major put his arm around her, she did not like it. He did it in a threatening way. I could see she was afraid, because I was afraid, too. I knew what it was like to be afraid. Sabine didn’t agree.’

  ‘You understand now, I hope, Sabine,’ her father said. She did not reply, moving the pieces around, in search of one particular shape.

  ‘But I could understand what they said, because they were speaking in German,’ Suzie went on, ‘and Sabine couldn’t. And although I didn’t always tell her …’ here she darted a glance at Sabine to see how she reacted, ‘I knew that Madame Ariane sometimes told the major things, when he asked her questions. So I was worried. I didn’t think that she would really work for the Germans. But I thought that if she was too afraid, she might give something away by mistake.’

  ‘How did you hear this?’ Theo asked. ‘Did you listen at the keyhole?’

  Suzie looked at him witheringly, to make him realise that he had misjudged their level of skill as spies. ‘Several times we hid in the gallery when they had dinner in the salon bleu. Madame Ariane never ate, but the major used to make her cut up his food. He had a false hand, you know. I think he could have probably cut up his own food; he just pretended he couldn’t, to make Madame Ariane do it for him. He was like that. He liked to feel he had power over people. We once heard him tell how he denounced a Jew whom he recognised. That was in Germany, not France.’

  ‘We saw them …’

  Suzie thought Sabine was going to say, ‘We saw them … fuck’, but at the last moment awe of her father prevented her.

  ‘… together.’ She was twisting a piece of the jigsaw to force it into position. ‘In the winepress.’ She wrenched it out and tried a new place for it.

  ‘We discovered a way into the winepress by accident,’ Suzie explained. ‘It’s a hole in the ground all covered by trees and brambles. We climbed down it and found ourselves in the loft in the winepress. From there you could see everything and no one knew you were there.’

  The children concentrated on their jigsaw in silence, as if there was nothing more to be said on the subject.

  Theo watched them. This was the moment he had searched and waited for. He was being offered proof, the evidence of eyewitnesses, of what had happened between his wife and the German. He had only to ask and he would be given it. Even as he recognised the opportunity, he knew he was going to turn away from it. He imagined what Sabine meant when she said ‘together’, and rejected the evidence.

  ‘Were you watching the night the major was killed?’ he asked.

  Both children were scrabbling am
ong the pieces, searching, not finding.

  ‘Suzie, have you seen a piece with a cross-bar going like this?’

  ‘No.’

  They continued to seek for the elusive piece. ‘But we’re building it up quite well on that side,’ Suzie added encouragingly.

  They were not going to answer any more questions, Theo realised. They looked so vulnerable, Sabine with her jaggedly cropped hair and bruised face, Suzie with her evasively hesitant expression, locked in a world of childish play. They probably knew more than anyone else about what had happened, but did not know that they knew. The information was coiled into their games and fantasies in a form unusable and unrecognisable to him.

  ‘Henri should have asked us to help him,’ Suzie remarked a few minutes later. ‘We would have been able to tell him a lot of things.’

  ‘He wanted to protect you. Too much knowledge was dangerous.’ The children did not respond. It was as if he had not spoken.

  ‘If Madame Ariane saw the major and she was working for the Resistance …’ Although she did not lift her head, Suzie seemed to address Sabine. Long pauses separated each of their utterances. Theo listened.

  ‘Try this.’

  ‘There must have been other people doing the same thing …’

  ‘We saw Monsieur Vernhes when he met the major too …’

  ‘That was in the forest …’

  ‘Perhaps he was also working for the Resistance then, if he went to see the major.’

  ‘We tracked the major. We thought he was going to meet Madame Ariane …’

  ‘But when we found the car, there were two men talking …’

  ‘We didn’t hear what they were saying …’

  ‘Except he spoke very bad German …’

  ‘The major didn’t speak French at all …’

  ‘This is what you want.’ Suzie handed a piece to Sabine, who took it, tried it, rejected it.

  Theo at last asked, ‘What did he want with the major, Mr Vernhes?’

  To that there was no reply. An absorbed silence lengthened until Theo realised that they were going to say nothing more. He rose and went out and the children did not stir as he shut the door. They had unexpectedly given him confirmation of Nikola’s story. This was why Vernhes had come this morning, why he had felt it necessary to threaten him. He feared that Theo had gleaned information about him, or would soon do so. He had asked carefully whether his enquiry was official or personal, had reacted angrily to the idea that Theo might report anything to the authorities. What Nikola had said must be true.