Beyond the Green Hills

by Anne Doughty

  ‘Maybe it’s all the fault of the Ritz cinema,’ she said to herself, one bright March day, as she moved around her apartment, unpacking her suitcase after one more visit to London.

  ‘Springtime in Paris,’ she muttered, as she put the street plan back on her shelf … Audrey Hepburn. Or was that Three Coins in a Fountain? ‘Which was the one where she models the wedding dress?’ she asked herself, as she dropped her underwear in the laundry basket.

  It seemed as if all the films she’d ever seen, shot in Paris, or produced with painted sets in some Hollywood studio, blended together into one sunny, romantic picture. Young lovers drinking coffee in pavement cafés. Sunlight spilling down as they strolled hand in hand in the Tuileries Gardens. Kisses in the moonlight.

  As her mind filled with images she’d viewed from the worn, red plush seats, she laughed aloud. The Ritz had a lot to answer for. All those Saturday matinées she and Jessie had so enjoyed. Ninepence worth of colour and light and never a sad ending among them. Lovers always reunited, families reconciled, implacable enemies converted, or despatched. For a few hours, they’d escaped into a wonderful world where hard work and boredom simply didn’t exist.

  But real life wasn’t like a Saturday matinée, was it? People you loved died. Like Edward. People you thought loved you disappeared from your life. Like Andrew. Friends you enjoyed and valued moved into their own lives and forgot all about you. Like Ginny. Like the friends she’d made at Queen’s. Waves of sadness swept over her as she stood staring at a grubby pair of shoes she’d just taken out of their wrapping paper.

  ‘Come on, Clare. This won’t do,’ she said firmly to herself. ‘You’ll get nowhere if you only look at the losses. Consider the gains.’

  She laughed to herself. That was Emile Moreau’s job. And very good at it he was too. She could almost hear his quiet, slightly hesitant voice as she went into the kitchen and got out her shoe cleaning kit.

  A quiet man, near to retirement, his hair almost white, he would come in calmly after the rigorous financial questioning of one of his younger colleagues.

  ‘I think it is important that we now look, not at your losses, but at the experience your company has gained in the last period of time. If problems have been identified and addressed, then there may well be more potential than your current balance sheet suggests.’

  His gentle manner and soft voice did so much to smooth ruffled feelings and rising anxiety. As she translated what he said, she would think what good sense his words made, if you took them out of the world of business and of money and into your own life. Listening hour after hour to people negotiating delicate issues across the table had taught her more than a new technical vocabulary. It had opened up possibilities she’d never thought of before.

  ‘Don’t ask why you got it wrong, ask what you’ve learnt,’ she said, as she took her well-polished shoes to the wardrobe and closed the lid of the empty suitcase. She pushed it under her bed and sat down with a bump on the padded stool by her dressing table. Surely she’d been thinking about springtime when she’d started unpacking her suitcase. How had she managed to end up thinking of gains and losses?

  Spring came for Clare, not in Paris, where she’d planned to walk under the trees in the Champs-Elysées, but in Provence. Suddenly, one morning, after a meeting in Nîmes, Robert Lafarge asked to be taken to see the wine-making château whose future they’d been discussing.

  It was the loveliest of mornings. The sky was a tender, fresh blue, the air mild but not yet warm. The chauffeur-driven car purred along the narrow roads so soothingly that neither Robert nor the prospective new director said a word to each other. She was free to watch the countryside slip past, the fields of newly turned earth, the red-brown soil combed into ridges and hollows as neatly aligned as a ribbed sweater. The hedges and windbreaks were vivid green with new growth. At the gable end of a solitary barn, a pear tree was already in bloom, its blossom a gleaming white against the worn and mellow red bricks of the dilapidated structure.

  They stopped on the edge of an enormous vineyard. The first new growth had already broken into soft green leaves. The ancient-looking stumps marched up the hill slopes and into the far distance, like one of those drawings that demonstrate perspective.

  Standing on the grassy verges that fringed the dry, stony, reddish earth, waiting for the second car to arrive with members of the château’s staff, she felt the sun warm on her shoulders. She looked down and saw daisies winking up at her in the sunlight. On the air, a hint of smoke, a bonfire of hedge-trimmings. Its acrid note touched her heart. She looked at the daisies with longing, imagining herself bending down, regardless of her close-fitting costume and high heels, picking them, putting them in a glass in her hotel room in Avignon, taking them back to Paris, treasuring them more than any of the bouquets she’d ever bought from Madame Givrey’s stall.

  ‘Say, honey, what did the man say?’

  The slow, mid-Western drawl betrayed not the slightest sign of irritation, but Clare was horrified when she realised she hadn’t been paying attention. She’d no idea how this large American came to be a director of a French vineyard, but it was for his benefit she’d been required to accompany Robert Lafarge to the meetings in Nîmes.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Mr Dubois is explaining that, though the soil would appear rather poor and infertile, it is the particular mixture of minerals in the soil and the aspect of the vineyard itself that give the wine its subtle quality. The high proportion of stones under the rootstocks themselves is not purely chance. It has been observed that the incidence of the sun’s rays, striking these reflective surfaces, has a most beneficial effect on the early ripening of the grapes. This allows for more flexibility in the picking and a greater range of possibilities in using grapes of different degrees of maturation,’ she said quickly, managing to catch up rapidly with the ponderous delivery of the earnest, thorough Monsieur Dubois.

  ‘Say, now, isn’t that surprising?’

  Clare glanced up to find Robert Lafarge watching her, a slight brightness in his eye. She returned his gaze quite steadily and wondered – as she often did these days – just how bad his English really was.

  A week later, Robert Lafarge phoned her at her apartment and asked her to dine with him the next evening, if she had no more interesting engagement. He named a restaurant for which she knew evening dress was obligatory, told her he would send a taxi to collect her and assured her they would not mention the establishment in the Place de l’Opéra.

  The day that followed Robert’s phone call left Clare little time to reflect upon his invitation. Louise had been feeling off-colour for a couple of days and finally admitted she wasn’t fit to get out of bed.

  ‘Mam’selle ’Amilton, we have a serious problem with Mam’selle Pirelli’s absence,’ announced Madame Japolsky, as she threw open Clare’s door and strode across to Louise’s desk. ‘There is a piece of work here which is most urgent,’ she went on, swinging round towards Clare, a sheaf of paper in her hand, a look of great severity on her face. ‘I must ask you to set aside what you are doing and complete it immediately.’

  ‘But, Madame, what I’m working on has to go to the printer’s tonight,’ Clare replied, picking up an equally thick sheaf of paper from her own desk. ‘Monsieur Lafarge expects to sign it out by five o’clock.’

  ‘Nevertheless, mam’selle, this German document is essential to Monsieur Moreau. He must have it before his meeting tomorrow.’

  Madame’s voice tone had risen several levels. Always a bad sign. Her left eye was beginning to twitch. When it looked as if she was winking at you, Louise had warned her, you really had to watch out. Paul had once told them when they were lunching together, that he’d nearly turned down the job after Madame took him off to her office and started winking at him.

  ‘I will do what I can, Madame,’ Clare said quietly. ‘But if I’m called on for visitors, or incoming items, it will simply not be possible,’ she added firmly.

  She coul
d hardly tell Madame she had an evening engagement. Madame would assume it was a boyfriend and simply expect her to cancel it. What on earth would she say if she knew she was dining with Robert Lafarge?

  ‘I shall ensure you are not interrupted,’ replied Madame, equally firmly. ‘Ring through to my office at noon and I shall see that coffee and sandwiches are brought to you here.’

  Madame was as good as her word, but even working flat out it was a near squeak. Robert Lafarge’s draft contract went upstairs just before five, but by the time Clare finished the German document the building was empty, except for the caretakers and a courier, who sat patiently outside her door, reading his newspaper, waiting to deliver her translation to Emile Moreau at his home.

  As she walked across the echoing entrance hall, under the dimmed night lights, she wondered if she would even have time to have a shower when she got home. But luck was with her. The Metro was very quiet after the rush hour. She was able to walk quickly in the uncrowded corridors and a train came along the very moment she reached the platform. She arrived home twenty minutes before the taxi was due to pick her up.

  ‘Amazing what you can do with practice,’ she said, as she peeled off her clothes, dropped her shoes on the rack and took off her make-up with a few vigorous sweeps.

  The shower was heaven. A few minutes later, she splashed her face with cold water and sat down at her dressing table. Louise had taught her how to make-up in six minutes.

  ‘It is easy, Clare, but you must give it your complete attention. It helps too if you are naked. Then if you drop something it doesn’t matter.’

  As she did what she’d been told, she suddenly remembered the story of the night Louise dropped eye oil on her only available dress.

  ‘There was nothing else for it,’ she said, rolling her dark eyes and throwing her hands in the air in a wonderful gesture somewhere between supplication and despair. ‘It was my only dress – I had to wear it. I spent the whole opera visit clutching my evening bag to my stomach to cover the mark. And it never came out.’

  Clare had no such dramas. With one evening dress at the cleaners and another still being pinned on the model at the bank’s couturier, she didn’t even have to decide what she should wear. Tonight, it would be her very first evening dress, a blue silk, not unlike the one Louise had lent her for her first visit to the opera.

  Dressed and ready, with minutes to spare, she hung up her costume in the damp shower cabinet to let it recover from the day’s sitting and took out tomorrow’s costume from the wardrobe, ready for the morning. As she heard a taxi draw up outside, she blessed Louise for teaching her all the tricks she herself had learnt in her first year at the bank. Tonight, she’d never have managed without them.

  ‘So, you see, I too have an intimate knowledge of horses, though I never learnt to ride.’

  Robert Lafarge paused, took the menu the head waiter presented to him and studied it with the same intense concentration Clare had seen him apply to balance sheets and company reports.

  ‘If I might suggest …’ he began tentatively, looking up and watching her, as she ran her eye over the impressive document in its red and gold leather cover.

  She closed the menu and smiled at him. Not only was she sure that his judgement would be reliable, in a restaurant he clearly knew well, but she was so hungry she had no doubt she could manage whatever was put in front of her.

  ‘When the Marquis went off to war in 1914, naturally he took his groom with him,’ he continued, as the head waiter disappeared. ‘Sadly, neither he, nor my father, ever came back. My mother had never been strong, though she had borne ten children. She died a year after the war ended,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘So who looked after all of you?’ she said quickly. ‘Did you stay together or were you shared out round relatives?’

  ‘Well, there were only four of us by then. My mother had ten children, yes, but some were born dead, some died as babies. My favourite sister died when I was fourteen. She was a year younger. She had tuberculosis, like my mother. It was very common in the countryside in those days.’

  ‘Yes, it was the same at home,’ she said, nodding sadly. ‘While I was at secondary school, there was a big tuberculosis campaign in Ulster. They checked out school children with reaction testing and we all had chest X-rays. About ninety per cent of children in our area had actually been in contact with tuberculosis. Some of them had developed a high immunity. I was lucky, I was one of those. But I must certainly have been with people who’d had it.’

  He listened attentively, pausing only for a moment to acknowledge a tall, silver-haired man, a member of a small party settling at a table nearby.

  ‘It seems to have been a weakness in my family, but it may have saved my life!’

  ‘However did it do that?’

  She had to wait for the answer while Robert immersed himself in the wine list that had just been handed to him.

  ‘You know a great deal indeed about the making of wine, my dear Clare, but will you allow me to instruct you in the drinking of it?’

  She laughed and listened carefully to his discussion with the wine waiter. The name of the claret he chose to accompany the saddle of beef was not one she’d encountered, but she’d read that its year had not been a good one. She smiled to herself as she listened. Typical Robert Lafarge. This particular vineyard had escaped both the late frost and the early autumn rains and consequently had had an exceptional year.

  ‘In 1939 when France mobilised, I failed the medical examination,’ he went on. ‘As a poor physical specimen with scars on my lungs, which I had not known about, I had to be given a task within my limits. I was made a Paymaster. Even armies require financial management,’ he said wryly. ‘So I was in Paris when the Germans made their advance. As you know, there was no fighting in Paris and it was not bombed as London was. I was quite safe. Unlike my wife and family.’

  His tone was completely controlled, but she watched him carefully, nevertheless. For a moment, he paused, glanced briefly around the dining room with its panelled alcoves and brilliant chandeliers and seemed about to move on from what he’d hinted at.

  ‘What happened to them, Robert?’ she asked, gently, surprised to hear herself use his Christian name for the first time.

  He smiled awkwardly.

  ‘I am not entirely sure, Clare, though I have tried for years to find out,’ he began, fidgeting slightly in his high-backed red and gold chair.

  ‘Because my wife was pregnant with our second child, she went to stay with her sister in one of the villages on the edge of the Ardennes when I was called up. No one had thought an attack would come in that area. Some of those villages were destroyed by the Germans. There were, however, many refugees who took to the roads ahead of the advance. There is evidence that my wife and her sister escaped with their children. But, as you may know, the columns of refugees were strafed with machine-gun fire as they fled. My brother-in-law managed to trace some of the survivors from his village after the surrender. From all he could gather he was convinced his wife and mine died together with our children, and they were all buried together. The baby would have been only a few weeks old. Of it, there is no trace whatever, though one survivor insists my wife was carrying a baby in a sling before the Stukers came.’

  ‘So the child could have survived?’

  ‘Yes, he could. I had a letter months later that my wife had written, telling me we had a son. Someone must have found it tramped in the dust and put it in a post box after the surrender, but I was unable to trace them. I gave up hope of finding my son, if he survived, some time ago. Sometimes it is best to give up hope and get on with living. If hope is returned, well and good, but if not, one will not have spent time in vain longings. I think you may have already discovered that for yourself.’

  Clare was completely taken aback. She’d been so absorbed in Robert’s story she’d not noticed until the end of it that he had addressed her as ‘tu’, a sign that their relationship had crossed the invis
ible line between acquaintance and intimacy. She’d felt just the same surprise that second summer in Deauville, when, just as suddenly, dear Marie-Claude had said, ‘Do let’s call each other “tu”.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ she said quietly. ‘But my loss seems small compared with yours.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That is a mistake so many good people make. They compare their loss with the loss of others and judge their own the less. It’s not a good idea. Loss cannot be measured by some objective scale. One must look at the person, the loss, and the resources they have to cope with it. Even then, it seems to me one cannot be objective. A loss that would cripple one individual serves only to challenge and enrich another.’

  At that moment the soup arrived, forcibly reminding Clare just how hungry she was. She thought about what he’d said as he sampled it carefully, broke the crisp crust of a roll and settled back to enjoy it.

  ‘How did you lose your parents?’ he asked, without looking at her.

  ‘Typhoid fever in 1946,’ she said, trying to be as matter-of-fact as he had been about his family. ‘It was the last epidemic of typhoid in the UK. They died within two days of each other.’

  ‘And you were not ill?’

  ‘No. Like you, I was lucky. Pure chance. I didn’t like milk and milk was the carrier.’

  ‘And your brothers and sisters?’

  ‘I have only one brother. Younger. William. He has always been difficult. He still is. Because I didn’t drink milk, he wouldn’t either. So we both survived. He lives with my father’s parents.’

  ‘And you went to your mother’s parents?’

  Clare smiled as the waiter took away their soup plates.

  ‘No, it wasn’t quite like that. I went to live in Belfast with my Aunt Polly, who is lovely, but I was very unhappy there. When my grandmother died, I decided to go and look after my grandfather.’