Dominique and Pauline sit together, saying nothing. Coffee appears, real coffee. A good distraction. When they have all downed the last of it, Uncle Sam opens the larder and pulls out a portable transmitter. He places it on the table and brings it to life, humming waves of sound passing over the kitchen. Putting his headphones on, he taps out a message in rapid-fire Morse code. The exchange is over in less than a minute. He switches the machine off, then addresses the two women. ‘It’s on.’
As the car leaves the farmhouse the driver says, ‘Remember, if we are stopped we’re old friends going to your grandmother’s house. And we’re very sorry to be out after the curfew but we had engine trouble.’ Everybody murmurs their agreement.
As they pull out onto the main road Dominique looks back to see a sign receding into the night, too dark to read.
‘Well, old friend,’ she says, looking at Pauline beside her in the back seat, ‘not long now.’
Pauline is strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, quiet. She is leaving her country, after all. And whatever family or friends she may have here. And this Stefan. They know so little about each other, and most of that invented. A melancholy mood creeps over Dominique. She has known Pauline, it is true, for only twenty-four hours. But they have not been the usual hours, or minutes. And Dominique knows that she’s going to miss this woman, whoever she is. It is at this moment that she takes her hand, the way, indeed, an old friend might or a lover.
‘I hope you like England; you’re going to be spending some time there.’
Pauline smiles at her, accepting her hand. No, Dominique thinks, she doesn’t look like Arletty. She is no mere movie star who has descended from the screen, no magazine beauty, but something else, more deeply striking, that she can’t put her finger on.
‘No Germans in England,’ Pauline says.
‘No,’ says Dominique, releasing her hand. ‘How odd . . . to be free.’
There is a reprimand in Pauline’s eyes. ‘But we are. We chose freedom when we chose to fight.’ Here, Dominique is sure, she is talking about herself. ‘And we would choose that way again. From the moment we chose, we were free.’
Uncle Sam suddenly breaks in, turning round to the back seat. ‘Is this the village?’
Dominique leans forward, eyeing the dark hamlet just come into view. She squints. It is always difficult at night. Another world. She strains to see, unsure until she spots a familiar old tree, bent over and with a wooden pole stuck in the ground supporting one of its branches like a walking stick. It had always seemed to her, as a child, that the tree looked like Old Man Time himself. ‘Yes, this is it.’
‘And the field?’ the driver asks.
‘There’s a rough road that runs down to a pig sty. And on to a stone church.’
The driver turns the car, and moving slowly and cautiously follows the road which, indeed, is rough and pot-holed. They enter the hamlet (little more than a small collection of farmhouses) and come to a stop outside the stone church.
Dominique points into the night, a bomber’s moon illuminating the scene. ‘There’s our field, just out there.’
Everybody gets out of the car and looks about. Whoever chose the spot, Dominique notes, chose well.
The two men take four boxes, with torches inside, from the boot, and the four of them climb over an old stone fence and walk slowly and warily out into the open space of the field, the men with rifles over their shoulders.
The driver checks his watch. ‘Okay, now.’
As prearranged, the four of them take a square black box each and walk to different parts of the open field, forming a rectangle. The boxes have a sliding lid on top that opens and closes, letting the light out and shutting it off. The driver switches his torch on, slides the lid open, and a column of light escapes its confinement and reaches up to the sky. Uncle Sam switches his on. Dominique and Pauline do likewise, testing the lights. All four torches pulsing in the night: on and off, on and off, as they open and close the lids. They wait, anxiously looking up. Minutes like hours, seconds like minutes. Nothing. More time passes, still nothing.
Dominique can barely see the others. Her palms are sweaty, her whole body humming. So, she tells herself, this is freedom. But at this moment Dominique is not sure she can endure another second of it, not sure she is brave enough for such freedom.
Minutes drag by, and just when she’s imagining that she’s got things dreadfully wrong and brought them all to the wrong field, they hear the faint drone of an engine above. Immediately, they switch their torches on, then off. On and off, flashing light defining the landing field. The plane draws nearer and nearer, a small plane. One engine, but that one engine seems to fill the whole sky and she wonders just how long they can last like this until someone hears.
Then sound becomes light, and they watch as the plane descends and bounces to a stop in front of them, silvery and shining. It is like watching a star suddenly fall at their feet. Or a wedge of the moon. Dominique could almost laugh. But there’s no time. Everything happens swiftly. The four of them rush forward, the two men hoisting Pauline up onto the wing and into the cockpit, and this woman whom she has known only as Pauline and whom she has escorted to this field suddenly disappears into the plane, sitting between the pilot and the machine-gunner behind her. Dominique feels a visceral wrench. But just before the plane moves Pauline turns, waves to the three left on the field, then stares directly at Dominique, as though farewelling an old friend she may never meet again. A look Dominique reads as saying we could have known each other more, you and I.
Then the plane turns, time speeds up, and it is abruptly back in the sky: a receding sound, a disappearing light. And the three who are left behind look briefly at each other, a touch of the abandoned about them.
Their torches switched off, they quietly retrace their steps to the car. They are wary, tense and watchful. This is the moment, they all know, at which they are most vulnerable. When a plane, even a small one, lands in the night, it is heard for miles around. Somebody, Germans or French police, will have heard this plane and may well be speeding towards them now. Nobody talks. Lights off, they drive back past the pig sty and up the rough road, pass the stooped figure of Old Man Time, and make their way back onto the country road they came on. Here the driver switches on the dimmed car lights.
The drive into Avranches, where Dominique will be left at a safe house, is silent. Even sad. Whatever the men are thinking is their business. She doesn’t ask. Dominique is in her own world, registering that deep-seated sense of not so much having lost a friend as losing the chance of real friendship. No pretence. No games. Their selves laid bare. But not now. And with that thought she suddenly finds herself dwelling on the grammar of loss as she stares out of the window, moon and stars occasionally appearing when the clouds part: in English, ‘I miss you’; in French, ‘You lack me.’ She smiles, both feel right, one not enough without the other: two parts of a puzzle fitting snugly into each other.
8.
It was there every morning of her youth, visible from her bedroom window, a turn-of-the-century dame, dress falling to the sand. For Dominique, this rock has always been a ‘she’: a woman of a certain age, withdrawn from the mainland.
But withdrawn from what? From the conventions of the mainland to an island world of her own? And if the girl who imagined all this, whose name then was Anne, saw the rock as a ‘she’, does it matter if it’s called Mont Saint-Michel? A stroke of the pen and it becomes Mont Sainte-Michèle. Always there, in plain sight, but never disclosing her secrets. Like those ladies of the Grand Age who were one thing to the world and another to themselves. A lady who keeps her true face hidden from the world.
After spending the night at the safe house, Dominique steps out into the town for the first time in years and, straightaway, heads to the edge of Avranches, to the house in which she grew up. Her grandmother, with whom she lived all through her early years, is no longer here. But the keys, astonishingly, are still where they always were, even if t
here is a sign at the front gate saying the house is now the property of the Third Reich. She isn’t going to let that stop her. She pushes the gate open and enters the house, a bold feeling of reclaiming the property accompanying the act.
She is standing in her old bedroom, looking out across the open fields to the sea and the rock in the distance. She has grown into a woman of a certain age, like the rock itself. She has become, she notes, both sad and yet detached, the very thing she once imagined the island to be.
And although the room should look different, it doesn’t, and there is an odd, disquieting feeling of shrinking back into her youth. The chairs and tables are covered in ghostly sheets, but the books on the shelves are still there. Especially the volumes of Lewis Carroll, whom she read in English. More correctly devoured: the look and sound of the words not even English, often as not, but a language all their own. She picks up an old version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and begins flicking through it, gazing at the illustrations which were always, from the first time she saw them, dark and menacing but also entrancing.
She puts the book back on the shelf and resumes looking out of the bedroom window at the rock. It shimmers in the distance, perpetually in the act of withdrawing from the anguish of the world.
* * *
Forests of myrtle, fields of daisies, yellow and purple. That’s how she remembers it. Dominique is strolling through her old garden where she spent a solitary childhood, where the most deeply satisfying hours of that time were spent. Alone in a secret, imaginary world, and happily so. A world that nobody, not even her grandmother, knew about.
She ducks under the branches of half-bare shrubs in the process of shedding their leaves and, remarkably, all the metal and wooden figures, castles and towers of her childhood remain – even if the paint on the metal tower is peeled and the tower itself is rusty. All the pieces of the make-believe world are still arranged as she left them one day, no doubt thinking to return another time and continue the tale. Another day’s play that never happened. A maiden waits at the top of a rusty tower, a faded knight waits below. And so they will remain.
Dominique kneels, suitcase by her side, resisting the temptation, after all this time, to bring the maiden down from the tower, from her perpetual waiting. It is better this way. The maiden’s heart will never be broken. The knight will not let her down. But even as she tells herself this she feels the tug of the childish impulse to bring the maiden down, and deliver her into happy-ever-after romance.
A different her, with a different name, spent hours and hours in this spot. Time ceased to be in that childhood world: morning suddenly lunchtime, afternoon suddenly dusk. A secret world where she invented secret selves; a private part of the garden that was her own wonderland.
So, how did Anne Desclos become Dominique Aury? Simple. The knight let her down and the maiden’s heart broke. She married too young. A girl still, a maiden, full of fairy tales. And she believed them. Until the knight turned nasty. At some point she ceased to be a maiden or even a princess and became a bitch to be slapped around, because the knight had a nasty side that the fairy tale didn’t tell her about. And when the knight gave her a child he locked her in the tower. And kept the key. And when she protested he slapped the bitch harder, until she wore the bruises of his slapping and blood flowed, for the knight’s nasty side seemed to know no limits, no point of satisfaction or shame. Maniacal eyes bulging, face red and bursting with rage, time after time the knight – having shed all vestige of Romance – slapped the maiden around, blow after blow, and when he was done, took what was his, and left her a blubbering heap on the marriage bed. And then, in the mornings, the knight slipped into his suit, caught the metro and went to work like all the other knights, no sign, no hint of regret, in his words or manner. Leaving the bruised maiden and silent son nothing, no hint of hope to cling to, while they spent the day waiting for his return.
Until one day, while the knight was at work, she took the child, left the tower and together, mother and child, they ran away: back to her parents, who heard her tale with great sadness and took their daughter and her child in. And so a new life began. And with her new life, a new name: Anne Desclos became Dominique Aury. AD became DA, she realised later: one the inverse of the other. A new name containing the shadow of the old.
Dominique rises, brushes grass blades from her knees and leaves the arbour that nature created for her games. She picks up her suitcase and slowly, thoughtfully, makes her way out of her childhood garden and her childhood world, the rock still shimmering in the distance.
Soon she is standing in the main square of the town, the market square, staring out across the distant expanse of water that divides this part of Normandy from England. Somewhere over the sea, the woman she knew all too briefly as Pauline Réage is walking through a free city with a new life, a new name, a new passport. But there is also a part of Dominique that is wondering if she was never so free as when she chose danger. Never so free as when her freedom was taken from her and knew what she’d lost.
But as she walks through the square of the town she’s also wondering if most people, deep in their hearts, are frightened of freedom, distrust it, and – despite everything they’ve been brought up to believe and pretend to believe – don’t really want it at all. One of those abiding struggles between opposing impulses: the desire for freedom and the fear of freedom constantly contending for the upper hand.
She pauses, looking around the square. It is early morning: shops are opening, children going to the school she went to, men and women making their way to work or visiting friends. Not a uniform in sight. Not a German to be seen. Only a huge Nazi flag hanging from the town hall window, the spidery swastika ruffling in the breeze, forever crawling over everyone. No one seems to notice. Pétain looks down from the opposite wall. She has a sudden sense of having been thrown into the square, landing with a thud and looking round, dazed, at the unreality of everything. The same feeling she had the day before the Germans marched into Paris and she walked round the deserted streets feeling like the last human on earth, after the apocalypse.
It is a morning more of farewell than reunion, but there is one thing yet to be done before she can quit the town: a duty, an indulgence and a guilty pleasure all in one.
She strolls away from the market, once again struck by the lack of uniformed Germans, not out and about because they are not needed. This morning she sees only a gentle occupation. Like a drugged patient, life goes on smoothly, dully.
The church in which she was almost confirmed, and would have been had it not been for a sudden illness, looms over the town square. She enters and feels the chill air fall on her, as well as a jumble of memories, as if she has opened a cupboard containing all the keepsakes, letters and photographs of a former life.
When she reaches the central aisle, without even thinking about it she drops to one knee and crosses herself. One moment she was standing, the next she was on her knee. A swift, unconscious fall. Along with amazement there is also a certain embarrassment. She looks around to see if anybody has witnessed her genuflection. To her relief, the church is empty.
She rises, passing slowly up the aisle, remembering the places she and her grandmother were apt to sit, all the time aware of some vague, mounting anxiety, then pausing before the painting (artist unknown) with which, for her, this small-town cathedral will always be synonymous.
The recess in which the painting hangs is in shadow, but Saint Teresa’s attitude is clear, unchanged, precisely as it always was: an air of utter surrender, defeat and the sweet sin of pride at having been chosen suffuses her face and body. She bows before God, this saint who was heaven sent to girls of a certain age or a certain kind, to receive His rapture – yielding, but at the same time creating the unmistakeable impression that she has conjured this God up herself. Both in His service, and yet receiving that which she craves.
An angel descends upon this Teresa, luminous even in shadow, and with the casual audacity of one of the o
ld pagan gods lifts her skirts, and Teresa stares back at the viewer, as she always has, with the resolute, defiant pride of a woman who has both submitted to the moment and summoned it up, at once in control and releasing it. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold . . . he appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails. When he drew it out he seemed to draw them out also and leave me all on fire with the great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan: and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it . . .
It is years since she first saw this painting of the saint that she thinks of as her saint and she’s amazed that the painting in all its sacred and profane majesty hasn’t been torn from the wall and burnt in the town square. How could Teresa? Could she not hear, could she not see what she was whispering, what she was writing? Or was that long-craved moment of utter self-annihilation so blindingly overwhelming and complete that there was no self left to watch or to caution? Or is it that the saints simply must turn to the language of lovers in order to tell us of their rapture and is their rapture any less of an experience for having done so?
Dominique surveys the church – the windows, the cluttered walls, the vaulted heavens above, its unapologetic effusion – and turns towards the exit. As she does she hears the soft thud of the church door closing, hears footsteps, and watches as a German officer, hat under his arm, falls to his knee and crosses himself, then, seeing Dominique for the first time, suddenly rises and bows stiffly to her. They say nothing. Just as he is surprised to see her there when he thought he had the church to himself, she too is not so much surprised as astonished to see him in her space. The timelessness of these places makes you forget there is a world out there.
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