Madame Barbara

by Helen Forrester

  He had been, up to then, unusually open with her, simply because he was totally bewitched by her. Also, he was dreadfully lonely; he had no close friend with whom he could discuss honestly the problems which beset him, except Anatole and, very occasionally, overworked Paul, the electrician who had taught him to drive.

  Certainly, both Anatole and Maman had enough worries already without his adding to them.

  He replied slowly, doubtfully, ‘I wish it very much. But not yet, chère Barbara.’ He paused to think, and then went on, his voice earnest, ‘She worry much about Anatole, about the farm, about my sisters – she does not see them. If she meet you, she know – dead cert – she lose me as well as Anatole. Too much grief, you understand. We wait. We plan first, yes?’

  Barbara saw his point, and agreed with him. Nevertheless, on later consideration, it nagged at her. Bearing in mind the Liverpool custom of a young man taking a girl to meet his mother, meeting Madame Benion would have settled the matter for her; Michel would indeed be thinking of marriage.

  Was the need to relieve his mother from her nursing duties merely an excuse? she asked herself uneasily.

  She didn’t really know him. Was he, perhaps, lying like a trooper?

  Nonsense! His story of his problems made reasonable sense; the argument began to seethe within her.

  Before turning to walk up to Dubois’s garden, Michel looked after her regretfully. A sharp pang went through him; their attraction to each other had not yet put down the deep roots which he knew it needed to sustain it. For him, she represented all he had ever dreamed of, and, like some lovesick swain in a folk tale, he had told her that he had fallen in love with her – told her so precipitately, perhaps too precipitately, but without any doubt in his own mind.

  She had not said that she felt the same. She had responded to his advances, but she had not truly committed herself. She had joked about the idea of marriage.

  He wanted commitment.

  She could, possibly, decide that she had become embroiled in a hopeless situation. To escape it, she could easily cut short her visit to France. Trains for Paris, and thence to Calais, now ran every day. Once in Calais, she could take the British ferry and go home. He sighed. It was so easy to escape, if one had money and no responsibilities.

  She was lucky to be free to escape from Normandy. He wished passionately that he, too, had been born upon an island. England had been heavily bombed, but its beautiful countryside had remained largely intact.

  A wave of depression overwhelmed him, and he muttered suddenly to himself, ‘To hell with Dubois’s roses. I’ll do them later – or maybe tomorrow.’

  As he turned for home, a long-felt resentment at his hedged-in situation overwhelmed him, a sense of betrayal by his own people, hatred of the Germans, the ruination of his own little place in the world by armies bent on saving him. Even the fact that Dubois could afford to grow roses, while he himself was so hungry, made him boil with anger.

  He turned a corner and nearly bumped into a pair of nuns. ‘Pardonnez-moi,’ he muttered mechanically, as he dodged round them.

  His memories seethed up within him, of how the French had been called cowards, by sanctimonious Britons, for submitting to the Germans, an insinuation that they still had to bear.

  He had been loping along quite fast and became suddenly aware that he was very hungry, to the point of physical weakness, which was not improving his profoundly disturbed state of mind. He stopped to lean against a high wall and regain his breath.

  He had not smoked while with Barbara. Now he remembered the cigarettes she had given him. He drew out the precious packet of Player’s Navy Cut; a smoke would assuage his hunger. He shakily opened the packet and took out a cigarette. His hands trembled as he lit it and drew on it. The previous night, he had forgotten about the cigarettes. Now, behind his frantic distress, he reminded himself to offer them to his brother when he got home.

  Smoking would certainly make Anatole cough; but if he were to enjoy anything of his very short life, he had to take chances.

  And so do you need to take chances, Michel, if you want to live a decent life, flashed through his scattered thoughts.

  But he was tired beyond belief, and his mind refused to concentrate, so overwhelmed was he by anxieties.

  Every week he feared that he would not make enough to pay the rent, buy candles and paraffin to give some light and heat for Anatole, keep his mother’s and his own boots repaired, even enough to buy expensive bread on the black market, if the bakers failed to fill the bread ration. These were just the necessities of life.

  Now looming over them like some impending thunderstorm was the fact that Anatole must be given a decent funeral – somehow.

  The thought tore at Michel – how could he face the loss of him?

  His feet dragged, as he hastened round a bend into an alley lined with very old houses, once the homes of small merchants.

  His fatigue seemed permanent. Even when he longed to sleep, he had to relieve his mother in caring for Anatole and that often meant broken nights.

  Despite being enormously excited at having met Barbara, the hours he was giving to her were those when he would normally work, either with the taxi or in the gardens he usually tended. The hours would have to be made up by working ever later.

  And what would he get out of it all? An occasional packet of black market Gauloises – and minimal food and lodging. And probably he would lose Barbara as well.

  As he pushed his way through the crowded alley, he weighed it all up and thought he would choke with sheer frustration.

  On his arrival home, he found his mother alone in their landlady’s kitchen. She was making soup for supper. As he went through to the privy in the backyard, he greeted her, and asked absently if there was anything he could carry upstairs for her. She promised to call him when the soup was ready, so that he could carry up the heavy iron cauldron. Then she remarked on his being home a little early.

  ‘I’ll do Dubois’s garden after supper,’ he muttered. ‘I’m hungry.’

  His mother shrugged. Hunger was a permanent condition.

  Upstairs, Michel opened the door of their room quietly. Even though Madame Benion did her best to keep everything clean, the smell of sickness now rolled out over him. A great lack of soap, which had priced itself almost completely out of reach, or of disinfectant which was practically unavailable at any price, made cleanliness a luxury.

  Anatole seemed to be dozing, their landlady’s newspapers spread on his bed.

  Michel looked round his home.

  How could he ever show this to an Englishwoman? Short of living in the street itself, it spoke of the greatest poverty.

  It never occurred to him that Barbara had seen such places many times before, in a city famous for pollution and the acutest poverty; that she had once lived in a narrow street of tiny row houses, most of them holding more than one family, or at least a lodger or two in addition to a family. Her mother would have been glad to tell him of the frantic effort they had made in order to better themselves.

  He made a wry mouth. What else was a peasant other than poor?

  Insufficient land to support a decent level of existence, had meant his family had always been poor, a poverty endured for centuries. So what’s new? as Colonel Buck occasionally asked. Michel wanted to weep.

  Yet his old home had been comfortable in a rough way, and he felt heartsick when he remembered it. There had been in it the friendly, familiar accumulation of family possessions fashioned through the years by ingenious craftsmen. Feather quilts made by Maman and his sisters had kept them warm in winter; they never lacked feathers. The womenfolk’s knitting had provided sweaters, undervests and socks. From their own apples they had made Calvados, Normandy’s brandy, and had used fallen branches for fire wood. Their hens, a few rabbits and a pig had kept them in meat. Their intensely cultivated vegetable garden yielded both greenstuff and root vegetables, the latter carefully stored to help them through the winters. A single co
w, mated with a bull belonging to Suzanne’s father in return for butter, had, when she was in milk, provided dairy products for both families; the calves had been sold for veal. Nothing that could be produced at home was ever bought. All the ramshackle collection of chicken coops and the barn had, over many years, been built by the family itself. Even their little cart had been manufactured by Michel’s grandfather; only the wheels provided by the local wheelwright. The buying of the small, underfed horse had been a great expense, but one that had repaid the investment; they were able to sell much more produce at a better price to the English community along the coast; and when the Germans moved in, Michel did not know how he would have managed to serve their heavy demands without it.

  Through the generations the family had wrung a living by careful husbandry and the total use of their little patch of Normandy. And there had always been hope: the hope of adding to the size of their land holding either by purchase or by marriage, as in the case of Michel’s arranged marriage to Suzanne.

  As he gazed emptily at the garret and at Anatole sleeping by the window, he suddenly remembered his grandmother, sitting in the doorway to get not only the warmth of the sun, but also a good light in which to work. She had been teaching his sister, Claudette, to tat. Claudette had been bitterly resentful when her father had made her give him the money she earned from the resultant lace edging; after a few years of effort, it had, however, proved a nice addition to her small dowry when she married Bertrand and moved to Rouen.

  Somehow, the family had saved precious little silver coins, or, in the case of Michel, kept a Post Office savings account. These little hoards were added to by work outside the farm itself, to help them if infection culled their hens or a bad winter destroyed their garden produce. Apart from going to sea with his Uncle Léon, Michel had once worked as a labourer in a pottery.

  His younger sister, Anne-Marie, had gone to be a maidservant to an English family on the coast. She had seen a standard of living there that had made her ambitious for more than her patient husband, Guy, had ever been able to supply. So she was known as the family whiner – though, in recent years, because of the loss of her home and of her little son, Philippe, in the invasion, she really had had something to whine about, poor girl. Philippe had been a fine little boy, and the whole family had mourned his passing.

  As he stood in the doorway, staring at Anatole – at least Anatole was kept warm and fed, though he looked ghastly – Michel’s sense of despair grew. They had all tried so hard and it had come to naught.

  Like everybody else, in 1939 both brothers had hoped that the war would be averted – or that, at least, the effects would not be felt in Normandy. Thanks to the Benions and their ilk, Normandy was, until the German occupation, relatively rich in agriculture.

  Even in 1944, when rumours of an imminent Allied invasion of Normandy had circulated behind the backs of the occupying Germans, and had become the main topic of subdued private conversation of the peasantry, a few of its inhabitants had laughed over their precious glasses of Calvados and had agreed that they might even make some welcome money immediately after such an invasion. They would, at last, get a fair price for their produce, something they could never extract from the Germans.

  It would help to make up for the débâcle of a war lost, lost because the accursed government in Paris had not properly prepared for it. It was passionately agreed in the village cafés that They – the almighty They in Paris – should have realised that with a population heavily decreased by the Great War, France was sorely lacking in men of fighting age. At least, avowed the village worthies, they could have trained men better so that they were not simply offered up for slaughter as their fathers had been in 1914.

  As Michel stood shakily leaning against the door jamb, his mind wandering in a black sea of misery, he recalled the building of the Maginot Line to thwart yet another German invasion; that had given some small, temporary, sense of safety. But even the poorest peasant could have told Them that they should have continued it along the Belgian border. Was not poor Belgium the cockpit of Europe, weakened by the usual ineptitudes of politicians and wars going back for centuries? How could it hold back a man like Adolf Hitler, who, to attack France, would not hesitate to march through such a tiny country yet again, and, in doing so, circumvent the Maginot Line?

  And what use were the French guns drawn by horses against a highly mobile, mechanised German Army?

  Looking at his pitiful home, these desperate, wild memories bedevilled Michel: the awful disgrace of Vichy; and the acute humiliation of the occupation of the rest of France, which had irrevocably split the country into warring political factions. The pride of the French, his own pride, had lain in the dust, something which personal insults from the Germans had failed to accomplish.

  A totally distraught Michel remembered that their well-respected old leader, Field Marshal Pétain, had, like many Frenchmen, never believed that Britain could win the war. Because of this belief, he had refused to ally himself with them. He had truly believed that the best policy for the survival of France was to collaborate with the Germans. He had staked his excellent reputation upon it and that of his fellow Frenchmen – and he had lost. Michel remembered that the field marshal had said that to make union with England was fusion with a corpse. The corpse had been resurrected, and the result was, finally, the destruction of much of his beautiful department of Calvados. Pétain’s mistaken estimate had been the root cause of the death of English troops there.

  Finally, as the indirect result of the old field marshal’s mistake, an English widow had come to Calvados to mourn a dead soldier – and had ended up in Bayeux’s only surviving taxi. And in his own heart.

  Michel was swamped by helpless rage. Underlying it was the insult of being regarded by the triumphant Allies as a collaborator of the enemy, no matter how much you had suffered, how brave you had been. What an irony!

  Masked by her pretty manners, what did Madame Barbara really think he was? Just another French coward? A collaborator? Or, perhaps, just a dirty peasant to play with, like a cat playing for its amusement with a mouse?

  Surely not? And yet, in his tortured state, he wondered.

  The longer he stood staring at his miserable home and his dying brother, the worse he felt.

  Barbara had made no profession of love. Had she responded to him simply from physical need?

  Or was she perhaps really seeking a subtle revenge for her husband’s death? Had she led him on as far as she could, prepared to drop him when she felt like it, tread on him as if he were a spider which had crawled out of the barn wall?

  He told himself he was mad to think that Barbara would ever be so mean. On the other hand, he had never dreamed that Suzanne would betray him; yet she had done so.

  Suddenly, he began to laugh at the cruelty of circumstances, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What had he done to deserve it? There was Suzanne’s German lover, with a farm with crops on it – and soon he would have Suzanne and her three-year-old son as well; while he, Michel, had nothing but a heap of mud on to which, because of land mines, he dared not even walk.

  His mad laughter grew and grew until he could not stop. A huge pain rose in his chest.

  Amid the chaos of his mind, he saw again his martyred friend, Henri, and his awful death. Had Henri died in vain?

  The wild laughter became a great sob, and then he was crying, sobbing helplessly.

  Anatole’s eyes had shot open at the first explosion from his brother. He laboriously turned to look.

  ‘Michel!’

  Michel was leaning against the door jamb, his arms wrapped round his head. The dreadful noise of his frenzied weeping filled the room and echoed down the stairs.

  Doors flew open.

  Madame Benion heard him. She took the soup pot off the fire, and then ran to the foot of the stairs. It was indubitably Michel’s voice.

  Anatole – in extremis! She flew up the first flight of stairs, only to bump into her landlady
coming out of her bedroom.

  ‘Anatole?’ queried Madame Blanc, as she immediately followed Madame Benion up the next flight, her flabby weight making her pant.

  ‘I fear so,’ replied Madame Benion through tight lips, as she swung round the banister and up the last flight.

  Lit by the skylight in the roof of the hallway, Michel was still leaning against the door jamb. He continued to sob uncontrollably.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ exclaimed both ladies between pants.

  Madame Benion glanced first at Anatole.

  He looked as he had done for weeks. He greeted her anxiously. ‘Maman, what’s the matter?’

  She had turned to Michel, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ she asked him quite anxiously. He turned a grief-stricken face towards her.

  ‘Non.’ He continued to weep, tears pouring down his lined face.

  ‘What are you crying for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he sobbed.

  She thought that it was some kind of hysteria, so she promptly slapped his face.

  It had little effect, and she immediately regretted the blow.

  ‘Come in, my son,’ she said more gently, and put her arm round his shaking body. She looked back at her silent, worried landlady and then at the staircase where two of the other tenants stood staring at them.

  Though frightened to death, she feared to call a doctor. Seeing Michel so distraught without apparent reason, he might well send him for attention to an insane asylum, something to be dreaded; yet she badly needed help.

  She remembered how Anatole had wept similarly for days on his return home and how the local priest, a stranger to her then, had comforted him. The priest now visited her elder son regularly and she herself went to him for Confession.

  ‘Chère Madame,’ she whispered to the landlady, ‘would you send for Monsieur le Curé, notre Père Nicolas’? Ask him to come urgently. He was so understanding when Anatole first came home, you remember?’

  Madame nodded. She turned to the first tenant standing at the door, a gawky youth, who was watching with great interest the drama before him. She asked him if he would go to the presbytery. He nodded, took one more glance at the scene before him, and ran down the stairs.