End Games in Bordeaux
Page 27
Later Marguerite said, ‘I don’t know if we’ve come through. I don’t know if we’ve deserved to. But sometimes I think I understand more than you think I do.’
She kissed him good-night, and left him not ready to sleep. He gave himself an Armagnac and turned to an old friend, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, and the disillusioned wisdom of the ageing d’Artagnan.
Envoi
Readers who have followed the lives of the characters through the four volumes of their story may wish to learn something of how they fared after the war.
As Lannes had feared, the burden of gratitude was too much for Yvette. She left Bordeaux and made for Paris where a couple of years later she found work as a model. He never met her again, but occasionally came upon her photograph in one of Marguerite’s magazines.
Lannes withdrew his resignation. He and Marguerite continued to live together, with little that should have been said being said. In 1952 he retired from the police and went to live alone on the little farm in Les Landes which had formerly been his grandfather’s. Occasionally, on birthdays and at Christmas, he returned to Bordeaux and the apartment where Marguerite continued to live. He died in 1972.
Dominique, to Marguerite’s disappointment, never became a priest. He continued to serve in Mitterand’s private office and was himself, briefly, a deputy in the last years of the Fourth Republic. He died of cancer in 1960. François Mitterand himself was President of France, 1981–95.
Alain remained in the army after the war. He served in Indo-China, where he won the Croix de Guerre, and Algeria. Angered by de Gaulle’s betrayal of the cause of French Algeria, he enlisted in the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) and participated in at least one of the attempts on de Gaulle’s life. Arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, he was released in 1972, and became a successful right-wing journalist and an early member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National.
Léon, as indicated, was shot in the basement of what had been Gestapo headquarters in the rue des Saussies, a victim of mistaken identity.
Michel is presumed to have been killed in the Battle for Berlin in which the Charlemagne Legion of the Waffen SS were among the last defenders of Hitler’s bunker.
Five years later, when she had given up hope of his survival, Clothilde married Maurice. They had five children and Maurice agreed that their first son should be called Michel. Maurice wrote an account of his years in Vichy, entitled A l’ombre du Maréchal.
Jérôme became a successful novelist and was elected to the Académie Française. His novel, Un ami de ma jeunesse, a fictional memoir of Léon, won the Prix André Gide in 1969. It was published by a firm in which Léon’s friend Anne worked as an editor.
Edmond de Grimaud was sentenced in 1947 to five years’ ‘national disgrace’, but returned successfully first to journalism, then to politics.
Sigi de Grimaud remained in exile in Spain, teaching in a language school.
The advocate Labiche also remained there. In an interview given to a French journalist in 1957, he declared that there had been no death camps in Germany and insisted that the Holocaust was a Jewish invention, a typical example of Jewish lies.
Fernand continued to run his brasserie. He left the Communist Party when ‘the peach’ left him. She was soon replaced.
Henri and Miriam married and re-opened the bookshop together.
Moncerre at last left his wife, but remained in the police till he retired.
René Martin eventually became a commissaire in the PJ. He never married.
Marthe lived to be one hundred and two, still in that house which had seen so much wickedness. She survived Jean-Christophe who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1951. Maurice inherited the house. Clothilde found no wickedness there.
Sir Edwin Pringle did indeed marry, if only for show, but lost his seat in Parliament in the Labour landslide of 1945. He returned to the Commons in 1950 and was given a peerage by Harold Macmillan in 1959. His boyfriend, the American dancer Max, survived the air-crash, and after the war kept an antique shop in Chelsea. One afternoon in the early Sixties I bought a First Empire cup from him.
In 1947 Karim was spotted – picked up – on a beach by a film director called Jules Faguet, and, though the relationship didn’t last, enjoyed some success as an actor in ‘film noir’ movies. He sent Lannes a Christmas card every year.
Freddie Spinks became a publican in the East End when he left the Royal Navy in 1952. He married three times and had six children, but every spring for forty years spent a few days with Jérôme in what he still called ‘Gay Paree’.
***
Snatches of brief lives, crossing each other’s paths, all deeply and
inescapably stained by memories of the dark years, 1940–44.
Table of Contents
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II
III
IV
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VII
VIII
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XIII
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XVIII
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XXI
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Part Two
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
Envoi