Madame Barbara

by Helen Forrester

  The fishmonger said something to her cheerfully, and though she did not understand, she laughed before passing on.

  Une Anglaise, from her clothes, the fishmonger decided, and a pretty one.

  She found herself on a narrow secondary road leading out of the city, and continued along it. On the verges straggled fresh growths of weeds; she did not know their names, but some were familiar to her from the land surrounding her bed-and-breakfast.

  In places, the high hedges that lined her route had been broken down. Through the gaps she saw miles of flat farmland, often irregularly green. Except for one field where several brown and white cows lay chewing the cud, the landscape was empty of human beings and animals, though it looked verdant enough to sustain big herds. She noted the lack of the occasional sound of dogs barking in the distance, a sound so common in England, and that there was not much twittering of birds. Had they been casualties too?

  Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of broken-down walls; a church with a partially destroyed bell tower; a cottage set in from the road, roofless and gutted by fire.

  In what must have been a hamlet, a row of tiny shops or dwellings, doorless and windowless, were sodden with rain. Ivy was already tentatively climbing one damaged wall, and round the front doorsteps rough grass was sprouting.

  Further on, there was a gateway without a gate. It was cordoned off, and a sign said, ‘TERRAIN INTERDIT’. Mines, she presumed a little nervously.

  She thought sadly, as she interpreted the notice, that there must be hundreds of miles of France which were off limits because of half-buried explosives. As a result, if they had survived the invasion, many countryfolk like Michel must be out of work. Michel had said that in the north there were thousands of hectares of land still full of mines and cordoned off from the days of the First World War.

  How many broken lives did these untouchable lands represent, she wondered. How many of the peasant owners, together with their livestock, were dead in both wars, caught between two remorseless armies, bombed and shelled – infinitely expendable – in the violent struggles? And regarded as cowards in Britain? She began to understand the sullen faces she saw occasionally.

  In her silent contemplation of it, she realised that the war had been much more complicated than she had been led to believe by the British popular press and by the newsreels in her local cinema. She remembered a remark that Michel had made – that France had been so unprepared for the war just over, that they had faced the highly mechanised German army with guns pulled by horses. And, he had said, they had been desperately short of men of call-up age.

  It was beginning to rain, so she paused to button up her mackintosh. She wished she had an umbrella, but she had not been able to find one in Liverpool.

  Standing in the middle of a Calvados lane, she considered herself lucky. Not only was her home still in one piece, albeit rather dilapidated, but the wind-swept seaside land on which it sat had not been mined. There was, however, a notable shortage of men of her own age in her village. It was a district of middle-class people who largely worked in Liverpool offices, and their occupations were not on the reserved list. So they had been called up. A good many of them, like George, whose cathedral could be finished after the war was won, would never come back.

  Already shaken by the events of yesterday, Barbara wanted to cry helplessly, because she could not imagine how all the desolation of the war, both physical and spiritual, was going to be healed and some sort of normal life restored. Bayeux was, in her opinion, a fortunate exception; the minute you stepped outside it, the reality of the carnage hit you.

  In England, there were still people around – villages with busy lanes; even badly bombed Liverpool had not been evacuated and was still quite crowded with people. Here, in Calvados, where were the country folk, the cows, the horses? Were they dead – or had they fled? If the latter, would they ever return?

  Since leaving the little vegetable market, she had not met anybody; yet the vegetables she had seen must have been grown somewhere, presumably locally, by somebody.

  To protect her hair from the rain, she took a scarf out of her pocket and deftly wound it round her head into a neat turban, while tears ran down her already wet face.

  As she tucked in the ends of her scarf, she turned to look at the other side of the road.

  On that side, there was a similar entry to a field – bocage had partially shielded her view of it as she approached along the road. Now, she was startled, because, in part, her questions were answered. She wiped her eyes with the back of her damp glove.

  Standing quietly inside the gateway was an emaciated Percheron harnessed to a plough. Beside the huge horse stood a man, his beret held to his chest, his eyes closed. He was muttering something to himself. After a moment, he crossed himself and opened his eyes.

  He briskly fitted his beret on to his head and said something cheerful to the horse, and turned to grasp the shafts. It was then he saw Barbara.

  With a smile, he shouted something to her.

  She did not understand, but thought it might be a joke, so she smiled weakly back at him. He waved, and then called to the horse. As the animal slowly began to move forward, the plough reluctantly bit into the soil.

  The sight of this piece of normal life made her feel better. She wondered if French farmers always said a prayer before they commenced to plough a field. She must ask Michel.

  The rain was light, but she decided to turn and walk back to town. She would try to find a café for lunch.

  As she again passed the cordoned-off gate with its forbidding notice, it occurred to her that the ploughman had probably said a prayer asking for protection against any mines left in his field. Perhaps when he called to her, he had asked for her prayers, too; it could be. His stance, as he started the plough, had been that of someone bravely attacking a difficult problem. She duly sent a little prayer skyward both for the man and his horse, quite forgetting that she had decided that God did not exist. Habit dies hard.

  The consideration of the ploughman’s prayer led her to think about Michel. Was it that he was a farmer and she a townswoman which divided her world from his, and not necessarily his dependence on temporary employment or his need to help his family? He had brought up this fact, so it must be of some importance.

  But farmers were the same the whole world over, weren’t they? In England, town and country frequently mixed and intermarried.

  She had little conception of the obdurate peasant roots of someone like her taxi driver, an attitude lost in northern England in the maelstrom of the Industrial Revolution. No matter what he did for a living, he would take the knowledge with him that he was a peasant, just as a Hindu knows his caste. With him, also, would be the stubborn endurance of his antecedents.

  He had a quick mind, she decided.

  What would he do? What could he do to get himself out of the poverty into which he had been plunged?

  Barbara had seen only the outside of the house in which he dwelled, but, from her childhood experience of living in the north end of Liverpool, she could have described to the colonel what its interior was like – she could judge by the odour of it and the obvious poverty of the people in the alleyway.

  His mother, thought Barbara, must be quite remarkable. But then so was Michel, for the brother must, after all, be a major stumbling block to Michel’s mobility. If Michel had been free to go elsewhere in France, she was fairly sure that he could have found himself a decent job. By no means all of France had been fought over, though its roads, railways and airports had been made a shambles by Allied bombing; the intensive bombing, at least, had been well reported in British newspapers.

  She herself was an only child, a rarity in Catholic Liverpool. She thought wistfully that it must be good to have a sibling who cared about you when you were in trouble, as Michel cared about Anatole. She had little idea of the give-and-take of a family, the quarrels, the vendettas, the tears, the making up. With a father who went to sea, there had been only h
er mother and herself.

  She had forgotten, for the moment, that the Benion brothers had, according to Michel, two married sisters, neither of whom seemed to be doing much for the invalid.

  It occurred to her that it might be kind to send some flowers to Anatole, something to cheer up the beleaguered family. Flowers were not terribly expensive, she had discovered when buying a sheaf for George, particularly if you paid in English money. She would give them to Michel – he need not say who sent them. She wondered idly if Madame Dubois, the lover of roses, had, perhaps, thought of giving some roses to Michel.

  Happy with this idea, she found a tiny café which offered her an omelette with fried potatoes. Except for two workmen drinking coffee in a corner, she was the only customer.

  The omelette was made with fresh eggs, and she ate with gusto. Fresh eggs were rationed in England. There was, of course, a small quantity of dried egg, which she used in her bed-and-breakfast to make omelettes and puddings. It was, however, a poor substitute, which, if it were old, could give one food poisoning.

  Afterwards, she leisurely lit a cigarette and drank a cup of bitter coffee.

  When the workmen had paid their bill and left, the proprietor, curious about her, came over to ask if Madame would like something more.

  ‘Non, merci.’ She smiled up at the woman.

  ‘Madame is English?’ the woman asked in French.

  ‘Oui, Madame. Je suis une visiteuse. Mon mari – un soldat anglais.’ Her voice broke suddenly, as she stumbled along in French. ‘Ilest mort – le cimetière.’ She hastily took her handkerchief out of her sleeve and pressed it against her trembling lips.

  The owner clicked her tongue in sympathy. She said in slow French, ‘My husband was also killed.’

  Barbara sniffed, and said with feeling, ‘I sympathise.’ Then she said, her voice suddenly very weary. ‘L’addition, Madame, s’il vous plaît.’

  Madame brought the bill. Barbara paid it. It was low in English money, dirt cheap.

  Barbara then said in English, ‘The omelette was delicious.’

  Madame understood and beamed.

  ‘Eggs – are they rationed?’

  ‘Non, Madame.’ She ran fingers and thumb together to indicate money.

  ‘Expensive?’ Barbara opened her hands and placed them together to indicate a handful of money.

  ‘Oui, Madame.’ She sounded regretful.

  Barbara said goodbye and left. She cursed her small knowledge of French. She would have liked to ask where she could buy some eggs. It had occurred to her, as she ate her omelette, that eggs or fruit might be a better gift for an invalid than flowers.

  Ask Reservations where I might possibly get some, she thought suddenly.

  She meandered back to the hotel, and went to bed for the afternoon.

  As she drew the duvet over her, she thought what a relief it was simply to rest, to be able to do nothing for a little while.

  As she cuddled down, she remembered with a smile a bumbling government collector of statistics visiting the shipyard in which she had worked during the war. The investigator had asked the two women labourers what they did in their spare time.

  Barbara and her fellow labourer, Mavis, had laughed at her. Married working women were stretched to the limit.

  Even to get to work was difficult; if they had any money, they were dependent upon erratically timed trams or buses, much reduced in number and usually packed.

  To buy almost anything in the shops involved hours of queuing.

  Overwhelming, also, was the constant fear within them that their men would be killed or terribly injured; it was like a nagging toothache.

  All they longed for was the luxury of doing nothing. So they laughed in the face of an official representing a government which had not the slightest idea what married civilian women were quietly facing – which did not care, as long as they turned up for work.

  Peace did not bring them much relief, but for these few precious days in France, Barbara felt herself privileged. She had time, time to weep for George, time to consider a glimmer of a new life, time to do nothing. Except sleep.

  She knew now that her mother had been right in sending her off to see George’s grave. Beyond confirming the certainty of his death, her trip was giving her the chance to get her breath again before plunging back into the problems of continuing to rebuild something of their pre-war life.

  What on earth would her mother think of Michel’s passionate outburst, she wondered. Would she ever understand the sudden fire of passion in her daughter which he had precipitated?

  She hoped uneasily that Mam, left alone, was managing the old B-and-B all right; as soon as she returned home, she would try to persuade her to take a holiday herself – in the summertime in Blackpool. She loved Blackpool, did Mam.

  Her thoughts reverted to Michel. Since he could not meet her that morning and had given her in his note no hint of how long he would be absent, she presumed that, if he could, he would try to see her in the evening, as promised.

  With this hope in mind, a hope which made her feel dizzy, it was some time before she slept.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  As Michel walked back from locking up the precious taxi in its garage, the euphoria engendered by his excellent lunch wore off.

  It had been such an eventful day that he had, for the moment, on accepting the invitation from the colonel to have a drink, forgotten that he was supposed to contact Barbara.

  Now, as he walked through the hotel’s courtyard, he remembered. He hoped that Barbara would be in the hotel after he left the colonel, and that she would have a reasonable explanation for her conduct; he dare not even contemplate losing her. Yet, he knew that it was vital to keep the goodwill of Colonel Buck; he wanted a written reference from him; furthermore, in his heart, he could not help liking the man.

  As he ran up the steps of the hotel, he was a little nervous about entering the lounge as a guest. He had never been in it before, except to empty ashtrays and collect dirty glasses or, latterly, to find whoever had ordered the taxi. He was acutely aware that a very shabby peasant, even a peasant wearing his Sunday best suit, might be unwelcome in a first-class hotel lounge.

  With a nod to his old accomplice at the reservation desk, he asked, as if he were collecting his client, ‘Monsieur le Colonel?’

  ‘In the lounge.’

  Head held high, Michel entered. He was immediately greeted by the colonel, who rose to meet him as if he were an honoured guest.

  Warily, Michel took the chair offered to him. He noted that there was no sign of the colonel’s two assistants, nor of the hotel manager, a prospective employer not to be offended at any cost.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’

  Michel’s first instinct was to ask for an aperitif. But, if he suggested such a prelude to a meal, Monsieur le Colonel might think he expected to be asked to dinner. He settled for a glass of Calvados.

  The colonel grinned, his greying moustache turning upwards at each end. ‘I’ll try one myself.’

  So in the comfortable gloom of a wood-panelled room, they sipped Calvados together, and reviewed with amusement the quandary of the gendarmes in the police station, who at all costs did not want their superiors to know that an incident had occurred in their sector during the visit of an American senator.

  ‘The Paris Americans – they complain?’

  ‘I doubt it. The embassy people were gone the very second it happened; the chauffeur must have seen just a hint of trouble in his rear-view mirror.’

  ‘Le rétroviseur?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the word. I doubt if anything will come of it.’

  Michel gave a theatrical sigh of relief, and they both laughed. They each took a sip of Calvados.

  ‘Tell me. Where did you learn a kick like that?’

  In the best English he could muster, Michel explained the ancient art of savate, kick-boxing while wearing heavy farm boots. ‘Very few men know it now – men who fight without gloves
– pug … pug …’ he said.

  ‘Pugilists?’ suggested the colonel.

  ‘Oui. They use it long time ago,’ Michel replied. Then, encouraged by the colonel, he told how, as a boy, he had been bullied at school.

  ‘Much hurt in bad shoulder if I hit a boy who hit me,’ he said ruefully. ‘But my old great-uncle, who live with us when I am small, say, “I teach you. This hurt your shoulder but not so much.”’

  He allowed himself a small smile and another sip of Calvados. ‘I learn well. In my farm boots, you understand, I kick big boy in the face – first time. Big damage. Nose bleed – lip bleed. He try to catch me. I kick again. Other boys very happy. They do not know this fighting.’ His expression became grim. ‘Nobody touch me again.’

  He continued, ‘Great-uncle teach me. Every day practise. I practise in cemetery while I wait for you – you might notice – think I dance? I am usually distant enough from the graves not to disturb anybody.’

  The colonel said he had not noticed, but the cemeteries were very large, and often he and his men had to walk quite a distance from the entry road where Michel parked the taxi.

  ‘In 1941, I win a little medal,’ Michel told him shyly. ‘I win a fight against another Frenchman. We do not tell the Germans about this little competition that we hold. I do a handstand kick – that hurt me. Hurt the other man more,’ he finished with obvious satisfaction.

  The colonel was fascinated. ‘A handstand kick. How do you do that?’

  ‘Step back from other man, face him. Do a handstand – your back is towards him – same time, swing your heels in his face. Very fast, you understand?’

  ‘And does it hurt your shoulder to fight?’

  ‘In a big fight, yes. One or two blows, non. Not like boxing or wrestling.’ His voice suddenly rose with enthusiasm. ‘The shoulder does not hurt so much as when I begin to learn; it is much improved. Daily exercise – it move more easily. But a handstand hurts.’