by Ruth Brandon
‘I can’t believe it,’ Juliette said. The whole thing seemed unreal. She half-believed this wasn’t the real Emmanuel at all, but an apparition. However, when she put out a hand and touched him, he seemed solid enough – though even thinner than before, and older-looking, his hair receding, and new lines on his face, which was grimy and stubbled. But real.
He told her he’d been moving around – impossible to get in touch. But he was working nearby, at least for a little while. He couldn’t stay, for reasons they both knew – he’d waited to come till he knew Juliette would be alone.
‘You can stay tonight, at any rate. Papa and Maman won’t be back till tomorrow evening, and I told Suzanne I’d look after myself.’
Later, Juliette looked back on those fleeting hours as the nearest she ever really came to happiness. At the time, though, it was almost impossible to enjoy them fully, because the future, in which nothing was certain, was already almost upon them. At five in the afternoon on the second day, Emmanuel said he must be off. Her parents would be back soon, and in any case, he had an appointment to keep.
‘Shall we see you again?’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it’s just a question of where and when. I’ll try and drop you a line.’
So life went on, with its absence of young men, its short-ages, its bitterness. People heard that their sons had died working as slave labourers in Germany. In Meyrignac the Kommandantur was blown up, and in reprisal twelve local men were shot in the pétanque alley, under the plane trees. There were rumours of refugees – airmen who had been shot down, Jews on the run from deportation – but no one ever admitted having actually seen one. Antoine continued wakeful, but Juliette, on her nocturnal perambulations, avoided the garden room. Occasionally a postcard would arrive for her, unsigned, but proof that Emmanuel was still alive, and still thinking of her.
And then, suddenly, the Germans were in vicious retreat. In St Front, there was panic: troops were rumoured to be burning and raping in the next village, and for a day and a night the entire population (fortunately it was summer) took to the woods. One of Etienne’s friends, the owner of a nearby château, rang to say that they had had a looting party. The local Gauleiter had had his officers make a list of all the antiques and artworks they had noticed in the various châteaux where they had been billeted, and the Germans were systematically removing them, to be sent back to Germany ahead of the retreat. ‘They’ll be round at your place next,’ he said. ‘You might just have time to hide your best pieces.’
Juliette, Etienne and Véronique stood in the study around the Caravaggio. It was by far the most valuable item in the house, and Helmut, who had been so struck with it, must inevitably have mentioned it. Véronique wanted to hide it in the secret space behind the bookcases. But Etienne wouldn’t let her. ‘If they know about it they’ll know we’ve hidden it – in any case, imagine the mark it’ll leave – and they’ll tear the place apart to find it,’ he said. ‘I’d rather sacrifice one picture than lose the house.’ He was adamant. Nothing was to be hidden. If the Germans came, they came. ‘What does it matter?’ he said. ‘It’s only things. If that’s all we lose, we’ll be a good deal luckier than most.’
All that day and all the next they sat and waited to be robbed. But nobody came, and nobody came. The Germans had gone, and La Jaubertie, alone of the local grand houses, had been spared. For some reason (and Juliette thought she knew what that reason might have been) Helmut must have seen to it that they were not on the list.
The next thing anyone heard, Paris had been retaken and France was free once more. And that was when the murmuring began. For of course, now that the Germans were defeated, everyone suddenly discovered that they had supported the Resistance and had never contemplated co-operation with the hated Boche. And as this had clearly not been the case – as everyone knew that there had indeed been collaborators, people who had been more than happy to go along with the new regime – the search for scape-goats was on. Madame de Beaupré’s politics were well known; and had not Etienne been only too happy to take over the mayor’s job when his old adversary Peytoureau had resigned it? Hadn’t that German officer been billeted on the Beauprés at just about the right time . . .? And nothing taken from the house. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together.
Fancy a girl deceiving her husband like that! Poor young man, it was hardly his fault if he wasn’t around. For some-how, now, everyone knew about Emmanuel – how he was none other than the famous Bizouleur, whose Resistance network had organized an underground railroad that had saved literally hundreds of unfortunate refugees.
One morning Suzanne arrived looking grim. A mob was gathering on the road, she said. They were saying that Antoine was the German’s child, and everyone knew what happened to women who had slept with the occupiers. Obviously it wasn’t true, at least about the baby (and here Suzanne, who of course knew Juliette had been pregnant before she arrived at La Jaubertie, gave a sly look that made clear her guilty pleasure in Helmut’s company had not gone unnoticed). But delicate questions of when exactly conception had taken place were unlikely to hold much sway in a situation like this.
They all knew what this meant. Juliette would be pulled out into the crowd, and there, in the middle of them all, holding her baby, her head would be shaved. After that, bald and weeping, she would have to run a jeering gaunt-let every time she went out, not just once, but for months, until her hair had grown back and the sign of shame had finally vanished. Who could survive something like that? It would kill her. It would kill them all.
‘Come on,’ said her father. ‘There’s only one thing to be done. We’ve got to get you away. Go and pack a few things for you and Antoine, and we’ll go.’
She didn’t ask what he had in mind – she didn’t need to. Hastily she ran to her room and packed a bag – the lightest she could manage: a few of her own things, a few of Antoine’s. The rest could be sent on. She ran back down, picked up Antoine, kissed her mother, and followed her father to the cellar door.
He was carrying something – she couldn’t quite make out what – but she didn’t pause to ask what it was. Shutting and locking the door behind them, she followed him down the winding stair and out into the twilit cellars, with their smell, so familiar from her childhood, of mingled sawdust and mushrooms. She knew where they were going now.
The cellars at La Jaubertie were very ancient, far older than any portion of the above-ground house. The lime-stone hills in this part of the world were honeycombed with caves, and it was upon one such system that the house had originally been built. The cellars now were lit from shafts at ground level, but although round romanesque arches and huge beams supported the house above, and the walls, half buried under the detritus of centuries – discarded bottles, salt troughs, old logs, broken furniture – were of dressed stone blocks, the floor beneath their feet was earth, while stalactites here and there depended from the ceiling.
Etienne, following the light of a torch, walked swiftly to the far end. Here the wall was hidden behind a stack of old door frames and other assorted woodwork, the relics of some long-past building works. He slid behind the stack – and vanished.
Juliette, following, retraced the steps of a thousand child-hood games of hide and seek. For, as every child who had ever lived in the house knew, the caves on which La Jaubertie was built did not stop at the cellar, but extended much further. She didn’t remember this stack of wood – it had obviously been moved since she had last come this way – but she knew what it concealed: a low natural arch that led from the cellars into the caves beyond.
The cellars proper were lofty and spacious, but in the cave the roof was low, and the way littered with stones. Holding Antoine tightly by the hand – fortunately he was now walking – Juliette followed the beam of her father’s torch.
For about ten minutes they stumbled along in the cramped semi-dark, and then, suddenly, the passage opened out, as she knew it would, into a large, dry space. Here Etienne put down the
torch beside an as yet undifferentiated heap of objects, pulled a box of matches from his pocket, and lit a hurricane lantern.
By this new light, they could see that the heap consisted of a neat pile of bedding, a camp stove, some cans of food, and a few bicycles. Etienne pulled out two bicycles, a man’s and a woman’s, and picked up the object he had carried here from the house. It was a child’s bicycle seat – Juliette’s own old bicycle seat, on which she had so often ridden behind her mother or father when the family cycled out into the country for a summer jaunt. With the familiarity of long practice Etienne fixed it to the woman’s bike.
‘Nearly there now,’ he said. ‘Not that I need to tell you.’
Handing Juliette her bike to wheel, and holding it while she sat Antoine on the child-seat, he took the other and strapped her bag on to its back carrier. By the light of the hurricane lantern he traced an upwardly sloping path that she knew led to the cave’s mouth. She said, ‘Was this where you brought them?’ It was the first time she’d spoken since they left the house.
‘Yes. Mostly they were just passing through, but some-times someone had to stay for a little while.’
‘That’s what they were looking for, that time.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘But I never felt there was much danger of anyone guessing. What better camouflage could one ask for than your mother?’
‘Did she know?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Etienne said. ‘Here we are.’
The cave opened on to a hillside, on the far side of the pinewood through which the Jaubertie path ran. In the val-ley behind them, beside the stream, was a high barbed-wire fence. Nodding towards it, Etienne said, ‘The line of demarcation. Over there it was occupied, but here it was free. In a manner of speaking. At any rate, once they were out here they were safe. Or safer.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll cycle to Meyrignac and you can get the train. With any luck you’ll be in time for the twelve twenty, and that should get you to Libourne in time to pick up the one thirty to Paris. Will Emmanuel be there?’
‘Even if he’s not, I’ve got the key.’
In fact Juliette had had a letter from Emmanuel. He was getting the studio in order, and when it was ready he’d let her know. When that would be he hadn’t said, but if all else failed there was her house. Though she’d rather not go there. What kind of state it would be in, she didn’t like to think. Not to speak of the other reasons.
So Juliette and her father cycled off into the summer morning, along the roads of her childhood, her baby rid-ing behind her just as, years before, she had ridden behind her father. But this time the purpose was not pleasure but to escape people who had met her on those very rides, people she had thought her friends, whose children she had played with and grown up with. Perhaps some of those very children were shouting for her now, as she rode.
Half-blinded with tears, she pedalled the steep roads. Meyrignac wasn’t far – perhaps seven kilometres – but the ride was taxing: even though most of it was downhill, there were some hefty climbs, especially with Antoine at her back.
Half an hour later, they rolled into Meyrignac station. Her father pressed some money into her hand. ‘Good luck, mon chouchou,’ he said, and waved as the train pulled out.
She never saw him again.
12
La Jaubertie, August
‘So,’ she said, when eventually the relentless flow of words trickled to a halt. ‘Is that what you wanted to know?’
Was it? Or was it what she wanted me to know? If those were two different things. You can’t trust the Beauprés. Just because they tell you something doesn’t mean it’s true.
Though of course, Juliette was not the only one here with axes to grind. Quite apart from the families’ political differences, there was the still-rankling question of Arnaud. Olivier’s Mamie must be much the same age as Juliette. I wondered whether she’d been one of the one-time friends Juliette had dreaded meeting, one of the mob that had gathered outside La Jaubertie that summer day.
Dusk was beginning to fall: little flittering bats swooped busily past our heads amid the black silhouettes of trees; every few seconds a midwife toad emitted its two-tone electronic signal – fa-doh. For a while we sat in silence. A jumble of contradictions and questions jostled inside my head. I wondered about that last flight, trying to work out, from what I could remember of the cellar, where the hid-den exit must be – perhaps behind that mound of stones heaped against the end wall? – and where, on the hillside, it came out. But that could be verified. Unlike almost everything else.
In general I thought she’d been telling the truth. Antoine had been born here, the elder Beauprés had behaved as she described, the German officer had lodged at the château and had in some way saved the Caravaggio from the looters. It was the particulars that were troubling. Who was really Antoine Rigaut’s father? About Jean-Jacques’ parent-age there could be no question: I had seen many photo-graphs of Emmanuel Rigaut, and Jean-Jacques looked just like him – there was no mistaking that attenuated build, which he had in turn passed on to his own son. But Antoine had not looked like that. His photos showed someone squarer, blonder, with high cheekbones – unlike either Rigaut or Juliette, but similar to Juliette’s description of Helmut Kopp. Whether this meant anything was of course another matter. Likenesses skip generations: failing a detailed timetable of arrivals and departures, or a blood test, there could be no proof either way. Of course, for the mob such questions had been neither here nor there. For people whose sons and husbands were slave labourers or prisoners, or had risked their lives every day with the maquis – or who had guilty secrets of their own to conceal – the Beauprés offered too tempting and convenient a target. Details were beside the point.
And her escape. Had it really happened like that, or had they, as Meyrignac gossip proclaimed, in fact caught her? One side or the other was substituting the desperate wish for the ghastly, or thwarted, reality. But which? And if this was so cloudy, what confidence could be placed in the rest of her tale? What else might she have changed – or simply left out?
Still, as between Juliette and her son, there was no con-test in the truth stakes. When it came to the picture’s ownership, he was lying. Of that I was certain. Why, that was the question.
After a while I broke the silence. ‘What happened to your father? You say you never saw him again. Did he die? He can’t have been very old.’
‘He was killed that autumn in a hunting accident.’ Juliette’s tone was scornful and she raised her eyebrows dismissively as she spoke.
That dated the photo in Mamie’s envelope: it must have been taken in September or October, 1945. Didier Peytoureau, returned from underground, had evidently known about Etienne de Beaupré’s activities. Perhaps that was why he had been photographed with him – Didier’s friendship a proof of Etienne’s bona fides. If so, that hadn’t been enough to save him: word hadn’t got around, or if it had, had not been believed. Everyone knew that Juliette’s mother, whether or not in technical terms a collaborator, had been sympathetic to the invaders. As for her father, had he not agreed to serve as mayor under the hated regime? – unlike his old political opponent Alban Peytoureau, whose son, now dead, had been considered not good enough for Mademoiselle de Beaupré. Such things were not easily overlooked nor forgotten.
‘You don’t believe it was an accident?’
She shrugged, a graceful, expressive gesture recalling a time when her neck was not yet concertinaed with wrinkles. ‘Who knows? Accidents do happen. Every year the papers are full of them. But there were an awful lot that particular autumn. You couldn’t help noticing.’
‘But people must have known he wasn’t a collaborator by then. Lots of people must have known that.’
‘I don’t think so. You had to keep those things very, very quiet. And afterwards, why would he talk about it? He wasn’t that sort of man. Of course there may have been one or two who knew. But most people had no idea what my father did until your Queen came here, t
o thank us personally.’
‘Was that when the photograph was taken, the one on the stairs?’
Juliette nodded. ‘She came in 1954. By then, of course, my father wasn’t here any more. But my mother was glad enough to take the credit,’ she added drily. ‘A visit from the Queen of England was something I don’t expect she’d ever imagined.’
1954, I thought. By then the Queen of England was in fact her visitor’s daughter. Yet another unimportant detail. A queen was a queen – and in this context, this was the queen that mattered.
‘Were you and Emmanuel in Paris then?’
‘Yes. He was very surprised to see me and Antoine when we first arrived. Not particularly pleased. During the war he’d led this extraordinary life, very dangerous, always moving about, and I don’t think he found it easy to adapt to just everyday existence with a small child. And of course everything was a terrible mess. There’d been Germans living in the studio while we were away, and in my little house. They’d used his papers for kindling, and burned half the furniture. And – well, anyway, we cleaned it all up, and life began again, and I got pregnant again. But in the end we couldn’t make it work. We’d married very young. And too much had happened to us separately.’
‘What a life you’ve led.’
She sighed. ‘Unfortunately.’
‘Fortunate, unfortunate . . . I could never have done all the things you did.’
‘With any luck you’ll never have to find out. It’s not really anything personal. When you look back you realize it’s a question of when and where you were born, nothing more.’
‘Yes, but going to Paris in the first place. That was brave.’
She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t bear the alternative, that’s all. That, yes, that was a decision. But everything else just – happened. That’s how it is, circumstances take over. There was Emmanuel. There was the war. There were the children. That especially. Do you have children, Madame Lee?’