Madame Barbara

by Helen Forrester

  I must have a little time; I can’t do anything much in the few days before Barbara leaves. I must somehow keep in touch with her in a way that will not scare her – so that she, at least, remembers me.

  As he washed and shaved in a litre of cold water, he argued irritably with himself that, though he could not even think of marrying anyone for the foreseeable future – he would not admit that he meant until Anatole died and he could find work further afield – there was nothing wrong in enjoying Barbara’s company for the few days she was here.

  He had never intended so much as to hint to her that, from the moment she had stepped into the taxi, he had found her so attractive. Now she knew – and his life was changed totally.

  While he fed Anatole with bread and milk, made from a stale roll left from yesterday, his mind went round and round like a spitting Catherine wheel. His life was half done; yet still he could not, thanks to the sales Boches and the subsequent invasion, do more than dream of the comfort of marriage – or a family. Not that he wanted to bring children into this cruel world, simply to see them slaughtered or starved out by Germans; the sales Boches would, doubtless, spill over the border for the fourth time in a hundred years, as soon as they had bred themselves enough cannon fodder to achieve it.

  He wondered if Barbara wanted children. Regardless of that, he felt she would be a great partner in life. It would be a joy to have someone to share everything with – his ideas, his modest ambitions, whatever money he managed to make. Someone he could look at with pride.

  He did not want to condemn her to work outside her home all her life, as many married French women had always done. She would die, he felt sure, if she had anything like the weight of work that his mother had endured.

  So, how, Michel Benion, do you propose to keep a wife as frail as that?

  The first answer was negative, but firm. It confirmed his earlier decision: never return to the farm.

  He seized the filled, smelly slops bucket and the empty water bucket and took them down to his landlady’s kitchen. As he put down the water bucket in the kitchen, on his way to the outside latrine to relieve himself and to empty the slops, he muttered to her, ‘Bonjour, Madame Blanc.’

  She looked up from her morning bowl of coffee, and smiled absently at him.

  There was a rusty water tap on the outside wall of the house, and Michel rinsed the bucket and washed his hands under it before re-entering the kitchen.

  Madame Blanc was a generous woman in her way and was fond of Michel. She watched him fill the water bucket from her kitchen pump. He seemed unusually taciturn this morning. Normally he would joke with her as the big bucket filled. Today he had an abstracted air; in fact, he looked sullen, which was most unlike him. She heaved herself up from the table, picked up a newspaper and tucked it under his arm.

  ‘For Anatole to read,’ she told him.

  He replied morosely, ‘Merci bien, Madame.’

  She wondered if Anatole had taken a turn for the worse, so she enquired about him.

  ‘He is as usual, Madame. Thank you.’ Michel swung the heavy bucket out of her sink, picked up the empty slops bucket, turned carefully and trudged back up the narrow staircase.

  ‘Humph,’ muttered the lady sarcastically. ‘He must be in love.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Upstairs, Anatole licked his dry lips, and said, ‘I wish we could make coffee up here.’

  ‘Patience, mon frère,’ Michel responded as he handed his brother the newspaper. ‘Maman will be back soon. She’ll make it for all of us on Madame’s fire as soon as she comes with the bread.’ He did not need to tell Anatole that coffee was expensive even if you could get it, and not to be brewed lightly.

  He plonked himself down on the end of his brother’s bed, and grinned at him a little ruefully. Though Anatole was indubitably a burden to him, Michel dreaded his impending death, and, in consequence, his own intense loneliness.

  Before the war, he had felt that together with Suzanne and her property, he and his brother would build up their smallholdings into a highly productive business again. They would improve their breeding strains and use more intensive methods of raising the birds, about which he had learned from young farming friends and from reading well-thumbed copies of agricultural magazines, one or two of which sometimes reached the café in the village that he frequented.

  Anatole had attended only primary school, but he was, Michel knew from long discussions, much more open to new ideas than their father had been.

  Now the farm was a mud heap – a highly dangerous one – and Anatole would soon leave him. And into his life had come this beautiful woman, who had probably no idea of how a traditional French peasant lived out his bitterly hard existence. His mind went round and round in useless turmoil.

  How could he give her a life which would not, at best, reduce her within ten years to the kind of bent old woman that his poor mother was? Even in the city, he knew from his sisters, life could be hard for women.

  Anatole licked his dry lips again and asked for some water, which Michel immediately gave him. As he put his arm under his brother’s shoulders to lift him a little so that he could sip the cup of water, he was again astonished that anyone as big and heavy as Anatole could shrink to a feather lightness, so that he could be lifted like a child.

  Anatole sank back on his grubby pillow and watched Michel rinse the cup in a pannikin and throw the slops into the covered bucket.

  When the younger man again sat down on his bed, Anatole, with all the clarity of vision granted to the dying, grinned knowingly and asked weakly, ‘Who is she?’

  Michel was startled. He looked sheepishly down at the back of his hands. He shrugged, and was mute.

  ‘I won’t tell Maman.’ Anatole’s voice had a rasping sound. Conversation was an effort. Though he was so ill, he felt sometimes that he was being bored to death, lying on a bed watching birds on the windowsill or rain clouds pass over. He welcomed anything that could divert him, anything that allowed him to have a share in the world revolving round him.

  ‘Come on. Share,’ he whispered. ‘Why else are you so keen to find a different kind of work? Why else are you so restless at night? And where’s your tongue? You didn’t really speak much when you came in last night. Not like you at all.’

  So Michel poured out his bewildered thoughts. He told him everything he could about Barbara; and, since Anatole did not laugh at him, he felt better.

  Anatole was highly entertained. The confidence allowed him to re-enter a world from which he had felt himself cut off, a place in which he had no power or influence. Here, he might be able to bring influence to bear by giving what advice he could.

  ‘This complete lunacy is love,’ he announced quite cheerfully. ‘You lucky devil.’

  ‘I know that, imbecile! I don’t know what to do about it, though. To be truthful, I don’t think there is anything I can do about it. She is a most respectable young woman, and I can’t play around – at least, I wouldn’t harm her reputation in any way.’

  Anatole nodded, and was quiet while he considered these admissions. ‘Do you really want to marry her? It doesn’t sound to me as if she could cope with farm work.’

  ‘Of course I want to marry her – if I can. And, as for farm work, I don’t feel I could ever cope with it myself any more.’

  ‘But you want her badly?’

  ‘Mon Dieu, yes!’

  Anatole was again silent. He did not want his brother to see the sudden tears in his own eyes, so before he answered he glanced out of the window and watched the male swallow do a power dive after an insect. Then, with a dreadful sadness, as if he were half choked and every word were an effort, he rasped out, ‘I used to feel like that for your friend, young Henri.’

  ‘You did? Vraiment? You amaze me.’ Michel was shocked. He said bewilderedly, ‘I know you were always kind to him. He loved talking to you.’ He made a wry face. ‘And I know when Father tried to find you a wife you always put him off.’

&nb
sp; ‘It’s true. You see, I never cared for women.’ He sighed. ‘I never touched Henri; I truly loved him and he was much younger than me. I thought that, if I waited a few years, he might learn to love me. Once he was an adult, it would be different. And it was so.’ His eyes closed as if he were in pain. ‘I thought I’d die myself when the Boches got him.’

  Michel suddenly saw his brother with new eyes, as a lot of small memories of him fell into place.

  ‘Bon Dieu! You know, I never thought of that. I was so horrified myself – he was my best friend. I never thought of anyone else’s grief, other than his family’s, of course. How extraordinary. How could I have missed seeing it?’

  ‘You were always pretty innocent, mon petit.’

  Michel made a face. Then he saw, with horror, how he might feel if the Germans had done the same to Barbara as they had to Henri. He looked for a second down a tunnel of pure agony – and much that he had not understood about Anatole was immediately clear to him.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said to the pale ghost on the bed, and, with all his heart, he meant it.

  ‘It’s all over for me now, Michel. It doesn’t matter any more.’

  Michel did not deny the reality of Anatole’s remark. Instead, in a desperate effort to comfort his brother, he suggested, ‘Perhaps Henri is waiting for you?’

  Anatole smiled a little grimly. ‘Hardly, little one. Such love is against Church teaching.’

  ‘Bah! Jesus loved St John.’

  Anatole sighed. ‘So it is said,’ he agreed. Then he continued slowly, ‘Perhaps you are right about Henri. These last few days I’ve felt that he’s very close to me.’ His voice trembled, and Michel thought Anatole would cry; he had cried helplessly a great deal when he had first come home from Germany; but Father Nicolas had spent quite a lot of time with him, and he had seemed to have drawn comfort from the old man; lately, he had appeared more at peace with himself.

  ‘I’m sure Henri is there,’ Michel affirmed with a determination intended to ease his brother’s sorrow.

  ‘He may be.’

  Michel wondered fearfully if Anatole was so close to death that Monsieur le Curé, Father Nicolas, should be asked to visit him; the old man had continued to come occasionally to give Anatole Holy Communion, and his brother must not die without Extreme Unction. The Church’s shattered parishes were more in need of its priests and of their comfort than they had been at any time since the First World War, though Michel felt certain that the number of true believers had shrunk considerably.

  Perhaps he should not call the old priest yet, in case it was premature. He guessed that his mother would know when to call him; better not bother him unnecessarily.

  They could hear their mother slowly labouring up the stairs, and Anatole whispered, ‘We’ll talk again. You, at least, have something to strive for.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  On this quiet Monday, while the Americans had been engaged in investigating a mass grave, Michel had taken a pair of tall English patricians to see where their son was buried.

  The couple had not spoken to him, except to give him the address of the grave and mention that their son lay there. As he closed the door of the taxi on them, Michel had murmured his usual sympathy.

  During the return journey to their hotel, both of them had simply stared silently out of the taxi windows. They seemed to their taxi driver to be the epitome of the famous British stiff upper lip. They had, however, tipped him well, for which he was most grateful.

  Barbara would be waiting for him, he rejoiced, and later, as he drove the Americans back to the hotel, he caught a glimpse of her. She was standing in a niche of the cathedral wall, leaning against a huge buttress, while she smoked a cigarette.

  Until she saw the cab sail by, she had begun to wonder if he would really come. He could easily have regretted his impulsiveness of yesterday. Now, she knew he was merely running behind schedule, and she smiled.

  Ten minutes later, having quickly locked up the taxi in its stable, Michel hurried to her, his face aglow. She got no opportunity to straighten herself, as he pinned her against the wall. She hastily removed her cigarette, before he kissed her soundly on the lips. Enjoy while you can, he told himself.

  She responded instinctively by putting one arm around him, while she held her cigarette well away from him.

  With almost motherly instincts, she thought once again how very thin he was for his height, and feared, once more, that he might himself be carrying tuberculosis.

  Dear God, she prayed, don’t let me be cheated again.

  He held her firmly enough, however, while he whispered endearments in her ear, and the same dreadful longing for him surged in her.

  Reluctantly she pushed him back a little.

  ‘Where can we go?’ she asked desperately. ‘We need more time to get to know each other – we really do.’

  He nodded silently. To hold her should be pure happiness, he felt, and yet he was filled with intolerable sorrow. If he renounced his land, he was nobody. Without land and hens, Michel Benion, poultry farmer, did not exist any more, could not use his solid knowledge of the humble hen to earn even a basic living for a wife. Without his cheery American morticians, he could not even help his mother and Anatole, never mind keep an English widow, who smelled sweetly of talcum powder and probably spent a fortune on makeup.

  He could feel Barbara trembling in his arms.

  While he pondered for a moment about where to go, she swallowed. The tension in her was hard to control. Whatever happens, she told herself, you can’t simply fly into bed with the man. He’s foreign, a total stranger. He may be lying like a Liverpool street vendor, and you’re a decent woman; you don’t want a fatherless French child to cope with on top of everything else. Be sensible, woman. Calm down.

  She pictured suddenly, the immense, fine parks of Liverpool, great stretches of lush green trees and gardens, the refuge of generations of lovers. Nobody minded your cuddling there.

  With this remembrance in mind, she suggested, ‘We could go into the garden of the close again.’

  ‘Non. It is overlooked.’ He grinned down at her wickedly.

  As she felt him stir against her, she said, ‘It might be as well if we were overlooked.’

  He did not quite understand, so she went on, ‘George and I sometimes used to sit and talk in the cathedral or in the yard, where he worked on the stones.’

  An aching lump rose in her throat. I mustn’t think of George, she scolded herself. He’s gone for ever. Dear, stolid George, who would never have dreamed of pinning me against a wall in a public place.

  Like frightened mice, her thoughts scrabbled round her tired mind, and came up against a sobering fact: you’ve had four lonely years, and you’re going to have to live many more of them. Here is your chance to break the cycle.

  The very thought of the dismal continuation of her years of widowhood made her want to cry for her dead husband; he had always seemed so safe.

  She shivered quite violently, as she tried to swallow her tears and calm her mixed emotions, and Michel, in quick response, held her closer.

  She buried her face in his shoulder. She did not look at him because she did not want to betray her distress.

  As he kissed the shining, sweet-smelling curls on the top of her head, Michel knew that all was not well with her. He gently rubbed her back, and it was comforting to her, though, at the same time, definitely seductive.

  ‘Chérie?’

  Reluctantly she looked up at him. He was obviously concerned.

  She tried to smile. This is a new life opening up, she told herself. He’s a sweetheart of a man. Enjoy him, but be careful.

  With the warm, delicate little body pressed between himself and the wall, poor Michel was nearly beside himself with pure desire. He was, however, not as foolish as he had seemed to himself earlier. He was no careless boy; he was a man who longed for a faithful wife.

  He saw the hint of tears in her eyes, and he knew with certainty t
hat, for the moment, he must comfort her.

  When Barbara had mentioned the cathedral, he had decided that such a sacred place would help to keep him in line.

  ‘The cathedral should be empty at present,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘No more Mass tonight. Les curés rest. Come.’

  God must have felt kind today, considered Michel. His house was indeed almost empty, and in its venerable hush he began to relax. In the nave, a nun and, near the front, a single man, both kneeled in prayer. A verger, in his black robes, was leisurely tidying up prayer books and hymnals.

  Michel had not been inside the place since he was a boy, visiting Bayeux with his grandfather. He stared at a glittering altar so breathtakingly beautiful that, for a second, he wondered why it had not been sacked by the Protestant Germans.

  Bah! Priests were not fools; at the very mention of the invasion by the German Army, they must have stripped down and hidden everything of value: the paintings, the altar furnishings, the lamps, the priceless books.

  He remembered suddenly the British commando flourishing the golden crucifix from a parish church en route to Bayeux. He wondered if he had yet discovered that it was probably only a fairly modern brass one, and of little value. The ancient silver of the altar would have been buried in the presbytery garden.

  On first entering the nave of the cathedral, Michel automatically genuflected towards the lovely altar, while Barbara stood woodenly beside him. Then they had walked slowly round it. They finally moved quietly towards one of the side chapels, where they paused before a statue of the Madonna.

  In despair, Michel breathed silently to her, ‘Help me,’ as thousands had done before him.

  Barbara stared dumbly at her blank little face, absolutely certain that there was no hope there. Her single prayer for years had been for George’s safety, and it had gone unheard. One of her school teachers, a nun, had once warned her impatient, energetic little pupil that sometimes God’s answer was simply ‘No’.