by Allan Massie
‘I doubt if that’s what they want.’
‘Perhaps I should speak of this to Bracal,’ Lannes said. ‘He’s the investigating judge, after all, who, as I say, has been examining the chap’s acquaintance, the man Peniel. Do you think I should do that?’
‘I don’t think that would be necessary, Jean. I’ll do what I can to smooth things over. But please don’t embarrass me in this way again. We don’t interfere with the Service. You must accept that as an order.’
Not even, Lannes didn’t say, when they interfere with us?
All the same, Lannes knew that he would indeed find an opportunity to raise the matter with Bracal. You had to find a way of protecting your back, and it was obvious the Alsatian wasn’t going to do that for him. Meanwhile he had other things on his mind, visits to make.
* * *
The old professor laid aside his book when the maid ushered Lannes into his study, first placing a ribbon in it to mark his place.
‘I don’t know why I bother to do this,’ he said. ‘I’ve read it so often that I sometimes think I could find my way about it blindfold. Indeed I read it only for – what shall I say? – consolation isn’t the right word. But it’s a book for all time and more peculiarly for ours, though it was written more than a hundred years ago.’
‘What is it?’
‘La Charteuse de Parme, to my mind the greatest French novel. You’ve read it of course, superintendent?’
‘A long time ago,’ Lannes said
‘You should read it again. If only because of its sense of politics as a recurrently calculated readjustment of roles. For instance, even as the Prince persecutes the Republicans, he considers how he might be wise to seek to establish a relationship with them, and so effect a new balance of power. Isn’t this a true picture of what is happening here in France now? A readjustment, or redistribution, of roles, with actors alert to the new part they will soon be playing. How else to account for the assassination of the Admiral? Very Stendhalian. But you haven’t come to hear me chatter about literature. Why are you honouring me with a visit?’
‘It’s difficult to explain,’ Lannes said.
‘That wretched woman who was murdered? I can’t think you suppose that either Anne-Marie or I can contribute anything to your investigation beyond what you have already learnt from her. So it’s Michel?’
‘Yes, it’s Michel.’
The old man’s lips moved. He pulled at his moustache, then, speaking as if his words came from far away, he said: ‘One always fails when speaking about those one loves. He’s a boy made to be happy and he’s condemned to be young in our ruined France. Does that make sense?’
‘I know what you mean. The same thought has occurred to me about all our young people, not only my own children.’
‘I think, superintendent, you are too sensitive for your profession. Do you drink sherry? It’s a taste I acquired when I did some research in England, at Cambridge, many years ago.’
He picked up a little hand-bell and rang it. The maid appeared and he asked her to bring the sherry decanter and two glasses from the dining room.
‘There were always sherry parties there,’ he said. ‘It’s a cerebral wine.’
Neither spoke till the maid had supplied them with a glass of the wine which was the colour of pale straw and had an astringent taste.
‘Do you want to speak to Michel?’
‘I think I may have to, but to you first, in the hope that … ’ He paused. ‘I like the boy. My daughter is in love with him, there’s no doubt about that, and she is sure he loves her. It’s first love for her, and perhaps for him too. I’ve nothing to complain of. With regard to that. First love, it’s beautiful, but those who experience it are vulnerable. Peculiarly vulnerable it seems to me. I don’t want Clothilde to be hurt.’
‘And you think Michel will hurt her?’
‘What he wants – intends – to do is hurting her.’
‘I won’t pretend I don’t know what you mean. It distresses me too.’
‘Can you prevent it? That’s what I’ve come to ask.’
The professor laid his hand on the book which he had placed on the little table by his side.
‘Michel’s like Fabrice, Stendhal’s hero,’ he said. ‘An ardent boy, an idealist, passionate, in search of adventure, not, I fear, very clever or possessed of good judgement. But … he doesn’t listen to me. He’s fond of me, even grateful to me, but he doesn’t listen. I could tell him he’s heading for disaster, careering towards the abyss, and he would dismiss my warning as coming from someone who has lived too long to know anything. The certainties of the young are frightening for one of my age. In the novel Fabrice alarms those who love him – it’s also part of his attraction.’
As it was of Alain’s, Lannes thought, feeling a new sharp stab of anxiety.
‘Germany will lose the war,’ Lannes said. ‘I’m sure that’s inevitable now, but there will be horrors before it does, and horrors here in France too. Can’t you convince him of that?’
‘Could you?’
‘I don’t know. Probably not. Would you like me to try?’
‘Our poor France,’ the professor said. ‘She’s devouring her children.’
XXVI
Léon was cold, but Paris was wonderful; even the pinched impoverished Paris under a low steel-grey sky was wonderful. The trees were bare. He adjusted his scarf and huddled into his thin overcoat. He was waiting, as he had been instructed, on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens by the statue of the boy called Le Marchand des Masques. The boy who was naked except for shorts carved in such a way that they seemed to be moulded close-fitting to his buttocks was holding up a mask, as if inviting Léon to wear it. I don’t need it, he thought. I’m nobody here; I don’t exist as I was. I should be afraid, well I am afraid often, but I’ve never been more alive. The boy’s so sure of himself and his beauty, no one would refuse him; he’s like Alain, that last morning in the dawn when we embraced and he got into the car and I watched it lose itself in the mist. Paris is full of Germans, there’s danger everywhere, and I’ve never been happier. It’s absurd.
He picked up his newspaper. It was the collaborationist Je suis partout which he had been told to carry. It was disgusting, everything in it was disgusting, except for the literary articles, and even some of them were repulsive too, but it didn’t matter; I’m alive, he thought, in Paris, and happy.
The girl approached. She wore an ankle-length black coat and a ridiculous perky fur hat.
‘I like your choice of newspaper,’ she said.
‘It’s the voice of our times,’ he replied.
The obligatory exchange amused him. It was unnecessary. After all, they’d done this before. But you stuck by the rules. They’d hammered that into him. Into her too of course. And there was another response he had been given to use if he scented danger.
She leant forward and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Gosh, your face is cold. Are you all right?’
‘But of course.’
‘Put your arm round me,’ she said. ‘There’s a policeman over there. Remember we’re lovers. I think he’s watching us. He followed me into the gardens. Now kiss me. On the lips.’
He held her close, nuzzled her ear. She screwed round and whispered, ‘You’re shy with girls, aren’t you? I can always tell.’
‘He’s moving away,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I expect he just fancied you and is disappointed now.’
She disengaged herself.
‘It’s not just shyness, is it? Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Has he really gone? I don’t want to turn round.’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Right then.’
She took an envelope from her bag.
‘This is urgent,’ she said. ‘They want it off today. It’s coded of course, so it doesn’t make sense, but it’s important.’
‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said, ‘that we do this and we don’t know what it is we are doing and we don’t know each ot
her, and never will, but yet are colleagues?’
‘That’s how it is. It’s best that’s how it is.’
* * *
Jérôme certainly wasn’t lonely – quite the reverse; much in demand, his social life busy, enjoyable too, in this bomb-battered London where everything was provisional. They’d found him a room in Charlotte Street, and every night there were pubs to go to and often a party after closing time. Being French was an advantage because everyone knew the Free French were kept supplied with Algerian wine, and so he always had a bottle to take along, which he did the more willingly since he drank hardly anything himself. The RAF boy Max, who seemed to be Edwin Pringle’s lover, was friendly, had even, it seemed, taken a fancy to him, and they laughed about Pringle together. Max had been a dancer before the war – ‘Chorus-line, darling,’ he said – and took him to theatrical parties. He had an American accent but British passport, which, he said, is ‘why I’m a soldier of the King, or rather one of his boys in blue’. He was stationed somewhere out of London but this scarcely seemed to inhibit his social activities. They had gone to bed a couple of times because, as Max said, ‘Why not? I’m training to be air crew in bombers, and so who knows what Fate – that big word in inverted commas – has in store for me?’ On the other hand there were no emotional complications because Max had always gone for older men though ‘Edwin’s a joke, the old sweetie, I admit that, and before him I was crazy about a guy in the Foreign Office who decided it was all wrong and he would deny himself sex, not for religious reasons you understand, but because he’s a Communist or at least what they call a fellow traveller. It’s all right being that now, of course, since Stalin has become everybody’s Uncle Joe. Poor lamb – my friend, that is, not Stalin – this self-denial, abstinence, makes him even more miserable, but that’s life.’ This led Jérôme to tell him about the Fascist boy in Bordeaux, and they sighed and giggled together. Accordingly when Edwin Pringle invited him to his Christmas house party, Jérôme checked first that Max would be there, which meant there was no danger for him, and accepted.
There were days, many of them, when he felt guilty himself, to be happy and having fun in London when Alain and Léon were God knows where in France, and in danger, but that’s how it was. He went to the office every morning and wrote the pieces he was told to write, and made his broadcasts once a week, and was assured he was doing good work that was valued. It might be true, he didn’t know, and in any case, it was the work he was assigned to and he was serving France, and the idea of a France that would be free again, as best he could. It wasn’t what he had dreamt of when they had taken the train out of Bordeaux, and, often waking early, cold and looking out at a London that was still dark and gloomy and often enveloped in dense fog, he felt ashamed and inferior to Léon and Alain, but he accepted that what made him ashamed also brought relief.
The truth is, he said then, that I’m really a coward, a pansy coward who enjoys life and is afraid of danger; and in this mood he began to write a novel.
* * *
Alain waited, as instructed, by the statue of Louis XIV in the Place Bellecour, ‘under the horse’s tail’. To his surprise he recognised the man who approached him: he had known him in the training camp in England as Robert Palisson. He was both a cynic and a fire-eater, a hook-nosed man of the Right who despised Vichy. Now he held out his hand and said, ‘So you’re Clovis now. I’ve become Raoul. Welcome to Lyon, welcome to the absurdity of Occupied France. Have you eaten? No? Good. I’m starving.’
He led him to a bistro in the Place Morand. The patron showed them into a back room where none of the dozen tables was occupied.
‘You’ll be all right here, Raoul,’ he said. ‘But you’d better give me your ration tickets. I have to account for everything, sod it. There’s sausages and lentils. All right? And a flask of Beaujolais.’
When they were alone and eating, Raoul said, ‘And so, my little Clovis, here we are in our beautiful France, and tell me, how do you find the Resistance?’
‘I’m confused,’ Alain said.
‘That’s a good beginning. That’s the best beginning. Let me tell you, there is not a single Resistance. There are many. First of all there are the Communists who distrust those of us who come from London, and would rather do without us, but can’t because they need the money we alone can supply. They’re devoted to Resistance but you can’t, my dear Clovis, trust them an inch because they’re all waiting for the happy day when they can launch the Revolution and cut our throats. Apart from that they’re splendid chaps. As of course are members of other Resistance groups who started off in Vichy and still revere the Marshal and have convinced themselves – some of them anyway – that he has always seen Vichy as a holding operation, no more than that. And then there are all the part-timers, the “after hours Resisters” I call them. You have to understand their position. They’re in work, have offices, shops or factories to go to, a home to return to with their wife and children. They live under their own identity unlike you and me, and, though they’re sincere – oh, no doubt they’re sincere – belonging to the Resistance? Well, it’s a snob thing really for some of them, and for others, the optimists, putting down a marker for life after the war when they can show off their good conduct medals. And then – have some more wine, these sausages aren’t bad, are they, whatever they’re made of, better not ask the patron – there’s the politicians. All they want to do is print newspapers, distribute tracts and prepare for their political future. And get money from us, of course, to do all that. Basically they’re shits. But sometimes useful shits, even if they have been blown towards Resistance only as the winds of the world have shifted. And then finally there’s us, the Gaullists from London, and we’ve got to control them all, otherwise it’s not just us, but France, that is in the shit. Is that clear, or are you still confused?’
‘It’s very clear and it leaves me more confused than ever,’ Alain said.
‘Good boy. You’re catching on. I should get you a gun. You don’t have one yet, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. But tell me, what’s my role? Nobody’s really explained anything properly.’
‘Now there’s a surprise. Let’s just say, you’re assigned to me as my right-hand man, and don’t worry, we’re going to have some fun. Some day, if we survive – big if of course – we’ll look back on these days as the happiest of our lives.’
* * *
‘It’s so kind of your mother to say she’s happy to have me stay with you over Christmas,’ Maurice said, ‘but are you sure she really means it? Wouldn’t she rather have you to herself alone?’
‘Not at all,’ Dominique said. ‘She was delighted when I asked if you might come, and Maman never pretends, she’s utterly honest and sincere. Anyway she likes you, and so does Papa.’
‘Well, I’m delighted too. I love the work we’re doing – well, you know that, you love it yourself – and it’s valuable and important, but we both need a break, a holiday even if it’s only for a few days. The kids are splendid but they’re wearing, you can’t deny that.’
‘I wouldn’t even try to. There’s just one thing, Maurice. Alain, you know what I’ve told you which isn’t much, because I don’t know much myself, and I’ve refrained from asking questions – it’s better that way – but I think he’s not to be mentioned. Papa may speak to me about him, I don’t know, but otherwise, well otherwise, there’s a veil of silence. You understand? It’s awkward and, I think, painful.’
Maurice looked very grave.
‘Of course I’ll ask no questions. I can see it’s difficult. Like so much now, almost everything I sometimes fear. My own father, as you know he’s always frightened me rather, but it sometimes seems to me he’s frightened himself now, frightened of what the future may bring, I mean. I’m looking forward to seeing your parents again; they were so kind to me when I was in trouble. And your sister of course.’
‘Clothilde? Oh yes, I wouldn’t mind having you as a brother-inlaw. I’m not joking. You’re my be
st friend after all. Almost my only real one actually. So what could be more appropriate?’
The train drew out of the station. Vichy would soon be left behind as the December afternoon darkened and snow fell on the hills.
XXVII
So he would speak to Michel, that was agreed. The boy’s grandfather had gone so far as to say that it would be a weight off his mind – ‘Even though,’ he added, ‘I reproach myself for, as it were, failing in what should be my duty myself. But that’s how it is. I’m what they call a back number, in the boy’s eyes, a relic of a dead civilisation. I don’t think I exaggerate. So if you will shoulder the responsibility … ’
‘After all,’ Lannes said, ‘it’s on behalf of my daughter too.’
Suppose the silly boy did indeed join this Legion of French Volunteers and was killed on the Eastern Front, as was all too probable, would Clothilde in time forget him – as most things, even the worst, are forgotten – or would it blight her life? He hadn’t tried to deter Alain from joining de Gaulle’s Free French, even though he knew how this would distress Marguerite.
He swung his blackthorn stick as if beheading an imaginary thistle. Damn these politicians who on account of their vanity and with vast carelessness for the lives of others had loosed Hell on the world.
If the boy wasn’t killed, could he ever return to France after Germany had been defeated, and, if he did, what would be his fate? Years in prison, at best.
Moncerre and young René were in the inspectors’ room next to his office and both got to their feet when they saw him.