“The bloke I’m thinking of has three restaurants: one here, one in Monte Carlo, one somewhere else.”
“What sort of age?”
“Oh, about thirty-five; very good-looking if you like the type. A bit on the plump side, or soon will be.”
“That’s the man. D’you know anything about him?”
“Precious little. I’ve seen him sometimes at the Casino playing Boule. A mug’s game, Boule, old boy. The odds aren’t worth taking.”
“You say he runs a restaurant?”
“Well, I imagine he’s beyond that now. He owns them, supervises. Very select sort of places.” John chewed reflectively. “The one in Nice is in the Rue Diano Marina. Beautiful food at fantastic prices. Soft lights, sweet music. The only people who can afford to go there are the war profiteers. I shouldn’t think he’s very popular.”
“Why not?”
“Well, are the new rich anywhere? Certainly not in France. His restaurants were open all through the occupation, of course, and I’ve heard someone say that they were mostly full of German officers.”
“Is that sort of thing remembered?”
He filled my glass and then his own. “ Good Lord, yes. And will be for years.”
“Have you ever seen Grognard with a girl?”
“What sort?” His voice showed a connoisseur’s interest.
“On the slim side, rather tall, light brown colouring—poise but no show, quick on the uptake—oval face, pretty.”
“Uh-huh? I did see him with a young woman about a month ago. She was quite a looker. It might fit. Remember thinking she can’t be as young and innocent as she looks if she’s with Grognard.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“You ever heard of anyone called Delaisse?”
“No.…” He waited. “What’s all this leading up to, Giles?” “I wish I knew.”
Next day was Monday, and Monday was Alix’s day off. We’d arranged to hire a small cutter and spend the afternoon fishing, and I wasn’t going to be put off by Grognard’s visit. There’d been clouds over the mountains all morning but about noon it cleared and we left the harbour in bright sun.
There were all sorts of things I found I could still do with Alix’s help, and sailing was one of them. In fact it only needed an occasional word from her to set me right. Sometimes she seemed to see for both of us, and quite often I could anticipate what she was going to say. It was queer the way it had grown up between us in so short a time.
Once we got out I’d intended telling her about Pierre, but I just hadn’t the heart to begin it.
Perhaps I was flattering myself, but it seemed to me that she’d changed as well in these few weeks. She’d got younger and more light-hearted, and the flashes of angry cynicism were rarer. I tried to see her in my mind sitting there in the bows, the breeze blowing her hair back from her face. She was wearing a silk frock that slithered when she moved; and she was carrying a big leather handbag with a strap over one shoulder and a zip fastener.
About two the clouds came over again and it began to rain. We were off Cap Ferrat and it meant tacking back all the way, so Alix suggested we should run into Villefranche. We could make use of the freshening wind, and we could get shelter there until the rain cleared.
As we came in, and I followed Alix’s directions, I thought of the Villefranche I had seen when I was a kid, and how it had looked so old and so Moorish and so inscrutable. I remembered the cafés and the little shops along the quay set out to attract the sailors when their ships came in; and behind the quay the old town brooding up the hill with its slit alleys and its tunnels, its broken flights and its secretive gateways, which all looked as if they’d grown into the hillside and stood a thousand years. I remembered being in the town once after dark when the few lonely lamps were lit and black shadows stood in the long cobbled streets and cheap music tinkled through the café curtains.
We got in safely enough and ran for shelter. But Alix’s frock was soaking so after waiting a bit to see if the rain would ease she suggested we should go up to her friends and get coats and perhaps a change of clothing.
She said a bit doubtfully: “ They are my husband’s relatives and friends, you’ll understand.”
“There’s no need for me to go along. I can stay here while you nip up.”
“No,” she said.“ I would like you to come.”
I followed her along the quay and then up a rising street that ran under an archway and broke into steps. We turned and climbed a few more steps, then over a narrow bridge and along a street which ran parallel with the quay.
“This is the Rue St. Agel. On the corner is the Café Gambetta, where we are going.”
It was the quiet part of the afternoon, but there were four men playing cards in a corner of the café as we went in, and a boy of some sort was in charge behind the bar.
The four men stopped playing. I could tell because the cards no longer moved, and the boy came forward, greeting Alix with a reservation in his voice that was no doubt due to me. Where was Mère Roget? asked Alix. Resting said the boy, it would be worth his life to disturb her till four. She had come with her friend for shelter and dry clothes, said Alix; was Gaston in the kitchen? Yes, Gaston was in the kitchen, and we went through some bead curtains into a sort of inner dining-room and from there into the kitchen.
Gaston, a middle-aged man with a wooden leg, was rattling pans about, but spoke to Alix warmly enough. He seemed a bit uncertain what to make of me, yet I was pretty sure from his manner that he’d already heard of me. The warmth of the kitchen was welcome after the rain. Alix left me there for a few minutes while she went upstairs, and when she came down I could tell that she’d changed her frock. She also brought me a coat of some alpaca material and made me change.
“It is Armand’s,” she said. “My brother-in-law. It will be a little short but it will do.”
We went back into the dining-room and Gaston brought us coffee.
“Let’s drink it out here,” she said, and we moved out on to an open veranda with the rain drumming on the roof. There was a good deal of space all round us, and I didn’t need to be told that we overlooked the bay.
I said: “I don’t think you can expect your husband’s family to take to me like an old friend, Alix.”
“Oh, that’s all right I’m rather glad you are going to meet them.”
“Do they know about Grognard too?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
I said: “ I ought to tell you. I’ve been going to all day. Pierre came to see me last Friday.”
She was startled. “ Pierre? Where? At your flat?”
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to warn me against the dangers of trespass.”
“Trespass?”
“Poaching and trespass on his property. The property being you.”
“Oh.…” She picked up her bag and unzipped it, rustled about inside: “How silly of him. How childish.… He has no right to interfere.”
“That’s what I thought.” But I should have been happier if she’d sounded more decided.
“What did he say?”
I told her what had gone on.
“And you didn’t—ask him about my husband?”
“No.”
“You’re very trusting Giles.”
“Not specially so. But I trust you. Why shouldn’t I?”
“I have to tell you,” she said, “ that Jacques, my husband, is dead.”
The rain was stopping now; the spots overhead were intermittent, but it was still gushing off the gutter.
I said: “I half guessed that. Or that you’d separated. Of course I wasn’t sure.”
She said in a flat unemotional voice: “He was in the Resistance, Giles. He was one of the leaders although he was only twenty-three. He was a journalist; it helped him to get about. Even during the occupation they were allowed some freedom of movement if they pretended to be—not unfriendly. He volunteered for activ
e sabotage work. He was a man without fear—full of high spirits, reckless. Just being with him was an adventure. I met him in February three years ago, and we were married in the April. Six weeks afterwards he was arrested. In May they hanged him in the public square in Nice. They left his body hanging there for a week.…”
I said after a bit: “ I’m so very sorry. I’d no idea.”
“They left his body hanging there for a week. Every day I used to pray, dear God, may they have cut him down—but he was still there. I used to tell myself it wasn’t the Jacques I knew and loved, that Jacques had gone, was far away. But it didn’t work. He was still there … moving when the wind blew, changing colour …” She put up her hands to her face with a sort of defensive movement, but decked it. “ You understand then why people have to be buried—before your image of them is destroyed.”
I didn’t say anything. Now that the rain had stopped you could hear the stir of the sea down below.
“I still dream about it,” she said. “I wake up sweating all over. That’s funny, isn’t it? …”
I said: “ You were very much in love with him.”
“Yes. I was very much in love with him.”
Neither of us said anything then for a long time. There was a canary somewhere chirping in a cage.
“Oh, well,” she said. “We had six weeks—though he was away half that time. It’s as much perhaps as you cart expect, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the answer at all.”
“Father Mathieu talks about resignation to the will of God. I spoke of that to—to someone I know—and he said the will of God is the priest’s name for anything that looks like the will of a stupid ape.”
“It’s a point of view.”
“Well, hasn’t it been so in your case too? Doesn’t everything seem wanton, aimlessly wicked?”
“… You should have asked me six weeks ago. I’d have cheered for your friend then. Now one feels faintly less worked up. That’s your doing.”
After a minute she got up. “ Have you a cigarette, please?”
I lit one for her and knew that her lips weren’t quite steady. I said: “God knows, I’m completely uncertain about everything. We all are these days. But it’s all much too difficult to put in simple terms.”
“Can it be put in any terms?”
“I don’t know.… As for you …”
She stirred her coffee, which must have gone cold. “As for me?”
It was on my lips to say, “There’s Pierre Grognard,” but I knew somehow that it wasn’t so. She might be going to marry him, but he didn’t make up for the man she’d really cared for.
“Something may work out.”
“Yes,” she said. “Something may work out.”
I turned at a sound in the doorway behind us, and Alix said:
“Ah, Mère Roger, this is my English friend, M. Gordon.”
Mère Roget had a deep voice and a hard hand. I pictured her as a woman of about sixty, formidable and untidy. She wore carpet slippers.
“Gordon is a French name, m’sieu.”
“Is it? It’s also English and Scottish.”
“There is a village near here called Gourdon, which is also known as the Eagle’s Nest because it is high in the mountains.”
“That is Gourdon, Mother. Giles’s name is Gordon.”
“Nevertheless it is said it was the birthplace of the Gordons. Have you ever been there, m’sieu?”
“No. But I shall go”
“A wonderful view. But pardon, of course, I forgot”
So she also had heard of me.
“We were out sailing Mother, and got caught in the storm.”
“Well, it is over now. In an hour you will be able to start back.”
Later we went into the back room, and Armand, the brother, came in; and then two more men. All the men were a bit surly, Mère Roget polite with a hint of reserve. I wondered if they were pro-Grognard or merely anti anyone who threatened to replace Jacques. I would have liked to go, but couldn’t leave without Alix.
There was a piano in this room, and someone started strumming on it, while the place filled up. It’s always more difficult to pick out things when there are a lot of people in a room. A fisherman with the agreeable name of Roquefort began to sing the choruses, and several of the others joined in. Alix was in the kitchen talking to Mère Roget, and I felt rather out of it.
Eventually the pianist gave up and noisily refused to do any more. He slumped over to a table near by and I could hear him gulping his wine.
They were a queer bunch, more mixed than one expects to find even in a French café. Two people at the next table were discussing the effects of inhaling chloride of ethyl. They were the first cultured voices I’d heard except Alix’s.
Alix said: “ you play yourself, don’t you, Giles?”
She’d come in unnoticed in the din and had evidently been watching me.
“I used to know ‘Bluebells of Scotland,’ ” I said shortly.
I might have guessed that that wouldn’t register.
“Would you play something now?”
“Good God, no!”
“Please. To please me.”
“It’s high time we went. It’ll take us two hours to get back.”
“Never mind. Just a little tune. Do you know anything French?” Some of the others were listening.
I said: “You’re embarrassing me very much, Alix. I haven’t touched a piano for three years. Well go now and say goodbye to Mère Roget.”
She put her hand on mine. “ Please, dear Giles.”
It was a bit silly to get hot and indignant, but I couldn’t help it. The last thing I wanted was to be made conspicuous.
“Hell!” I said, and got up and groped round to the piano. Somebody clapped politely.
I’m not a good pianist by any respectable standards—partly because when I was ten I found I could play any tune I could whistle without learning the notes. But in the old days I’d been able to make a show among friends.
Now I wasn’t among friends. I sat on the chair in embarrassment and couldn’t think what to play. Quite a lot of the people had stopped talking.
I thought of a thing my mother had played and that I’d learned from her, a short thing by Liszt which ends up with a whole pianoful of octaves and is generally the sort of showy piece that fits a bad temper.
Anyway I went crashing into this, desperately out of practice and playing a piano for the first time without seeing it. But perhaps annoyance helped and I got through the whole thing with only about six mis-hits.
When it was over quite a lot of people clapped and I heard them say: “ Tres bien!” and “Bravo!” and “ Écoutez le donc!”
I wiped my hands down the sides of Armand’s alpaca coat and tried “ Gardens in the Rain.” Debussy is a good starter in most company, if the company isn’t chichi, and he went over well here. I dropped three bars in the middle, but nobody seemed to mind. Everyone had stopped talking.
“Go on, please,” said Alix, who’d got round to the piano.
Then I suddenly thought of those Provencal songs I’d learned here twelve or thirteen years ago. By this time I was feeling better about it all and gathered the company was feeling better about me. Halfway through the first song Roquefort the fisherman came up to the piano, and after a bit of coughing and shuffling he joined in. Others followed him. But they sang quite decently, not shouting each other down. When I’d played four, someone handed me a glass of wine and Gaston patted me on the back, and they all crowded round asking which others I knew.
In the end it was dark before we left, and we had to leave the cutter in the harbour and go home by bus. They said they would phone up the man who owned it—they all knew old Gros-Jean—and put it right with him. They’d have it returned in the morning.
In the bus Alix said, delighted: “ It was just on the impulse, I had a feeling that something was needed to make you feel at home and make them … accept you. Then
when I saw your expression when Vallon was playing I remembered you said you could play. But of course I didn’t guess it all …”
I grunted, feeling a bit ashamed of myself after the show-off.
“I know you were angry about it at the time,” she said. “But not now?”
“Absolutely unpardonable.”
She patted my hand. “Now you’re a friend there. You will always be welcome.”
The crowded bus roared and swayed madly towards Nice, full of talking laughing, arguing passengers.
When we got out I said: “ Friday, as last week?”
“I’ll try.”
“Promise.”
“All right I promise.… But it may not be for very much longer, Giles. I wish I could say different”
“You wish you could say different”
“Well … In a way.… You understand.”
“You mean you wish you could say different—for my sake.”
She didn’t speak. Some of the bubble had gone out of her.
“Whether I understand that or not,” I said, “there’s one thing I find hard to take in. Your husband being what he was—and you thinking of him as you do—doesn’t it make it specially hard going for Pierre?”
“Why?”
“Well—he made money out of the occupation, didn’t he?”
“Who told you that?”
“Someone I know.”
“Well, it’s not true … or it’s only half the story.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
She stirred something on the ground with her toe.
“Pierre kept his restaurants open and was much patronised by the Germans. Of course he made money out of that. In fact he openly collaborated. But he really used his restaurants to pick up information from them and pass it on to the F.F.I. In fact he was a member of the same resistance group as Jacques. He was arrested just before Jacques and only escaped death by a miracle. He was decorated for his work. He was Jacques’s closest friend.”
Chapter 7
I got a letter from Cousin Lewis.
DEAR GILES [it ran].
Thanks for yours of the 19th. I saw a Treasury official about your case yesterday, but he was not too hopeful. Permits can only be issued on health grounds if it can be shown that the condition of the patient’s health necessitates his going or staying abroad. The most obvious case is that of a man with tuberculosis needing to winter in Switzerland. But his view was that the condition of your eyes was something which would remain the same anywhere and therefore there were no grounds for a permit being issued.
Night Without Stars Page 5