by Elaine Young
* * *
Despite all her enquiries, Rose wasn’t able to find out any more about the elusive Jacques Marteau. Ari chafed at this, not believing that everyone could have forgotten those terrible days.
‘Mon chèr Aristide, we have to be very discreet about the subject of the war. So many people have something to hide about those years. Numbers of people were involved, even against their will, in shameful things that they would rather not be made to remember. So many people compromised their principles in order to live a peaceful life. Some would simply prefer to forget how awful it was. But we will be patient. You should come around this Sunday night when I am having an informal soirée as I do occasionally, especially when the weather gets colder. Some of my friends date back to the old days and we get together from time to time . . . They are a lot of fun and they have become a tradition. I play the piano and we sing old sentimental songs from the war years. Sometimes people dance . . .’ Ari took to going on those Sunday evenings for a drink and gradually her friends came to accept him. When they had drunk more than they should have, their tongues would loosen and the stories would flow. His ears pricked up when the talk turned to the war and someone mentioned the name Jacques. Not a rare name of course, but he felt a surge of hope that it was who he thought it was, the man named Jacques Marteau, who had betrayed his father.
‘Oh, la la,’ said a woman who remembered him, ‘he was so handsome, so dashing. I would have loved to have kept him warm at night. But he had so many women falling over him. It wasn’t worth getting into the queue!’ Men recalled that he had been brave and that they would follow him to death and beyond. There were those too, who were not so sure, those who believed that he had let them down, that he had lied and stolen from them. There were also hints that he had been a double agent.
‘But it could never be proved,’ said old Martin, ‘he always had an alibi, a plausible excuse and such charm that he could be forgiven anything. I think that most men secretly wished they could be like him. And to tell the truth, most women wished their men could be like him too!’ he ended with a guffaw. Ari left it like that. He didn’t want to press people further in case they became suspicious and stopped talking so freely. He was still just a stranger after all.
He began a dossier, writing down all that he heard at these evenings when he got home. He had no plan at first of how he would use the information, but he carefully collected and filed each new remark, no matter how brief, recognising that it could be a valuable clue to the man’s identity and whereabouts.