Madame Barbara

by Helen Forrester

  The villagers, however, if they thought about it at all, accepted the barber’s version. Stories of French Air Force men who had been encamped nearby during the war were revived, and the fact that a couple of girls from Moreton had already gone to France to marry Frenchmen was sighed over by the ladies. ‘We’re losing all our youngsters,’ they said sadly. But, on the whole, the news was received without animosity.

  Unaware of the gossip, Barbara and Michel struggled in crowded, dirty trains to get to Manchester. As always, the trains were late, and it took time to find the right bus for Bill’s suburb; then to find the road in which he lived. Barbara was glad that she had allowed lots of time for the inadequacies of transport.

  It was a very tired and dishevelled couple who rang the bell of a large semi-detached brick house in a beautifully treed neighbourhood.

  They were welcomed in by a tall, slender lady with fair hair done in pageboy fashion. She was dressed in a two-piece cardigan set, pearls round her neck, the uniform of the middle-class female. Though she rather unnerved Barbara, she was very charming, as was Bill.

  A shy Barbara took one glance at Bill and decided he was a lovely man, Liverpool’s highest accolade for a male. She smiled up at him and held out her hand to shake his. Bill saw a typical Irish face, the kind which peeped out from behind many a black shawl, yet was now made new with a modern hairstyle, a hint of merriment in the eyes, and a fairly self-confident manner.

  He turned to his old friend, standing diffidently behind her, holding his trilby in one hand. Though thin to the point of illness, Michel none the less looked a little more prosperous than he had when Bill had been hidden in his henhouse and then in his attic, and Bill was relieved to see it.

  Barbara was taken away upstairs by her hostess, ‘call me Daphne’, to a bedroom to tidy up and to wash her hands, and thence to a large drawing room on the same floor, to sit by the fire, where a tea tray lay ready on a low table and a kettle simmered on the hearth. They were joined a moment later by Bill and Michel, who seemed to have picked up their friendship as if they had lived next door to each other for years.

  The room stretched the width of the house and was filled with Victorian furniture and boundless knick-knacks. On the walls hung a number of oil paintings, including one, over the marble mantelpiece, of a young girl in the full evening dress of early Victorian times.

  Barbara stared about her with frank interest. Like most British people, she was always aware of class distinction, and she sensed that though they were definitely middle class, the house did not match the young couple living in it. It proved not to be a matter of class, however, but of generation.

  As Daphne stirred the pot, to get the best out of a miserably small tea ration, a big, portly man entered.

  What little hair he had was grey, and, in repose, the heavy-jowled face looked formidable. Barbara immediately had a sense of being out of her depth and that, perhaps, she should rise respectfully in his presence. Since Daphne stayed firmly in her seat, an empty teacup in one hand, she wriggled back into her chair.

  Bill and Michel did get up, however, and remained standing until the older man sank thankfully into an empty easy chair. Barbara and Michel were then introduced to the elder Mr Spellersby, who greeted them politely and hoped that they had not had too much trouble getting to Manchester. ‘Train service is impossible,’ he rumbled.

  Barbara and Michel lied in unison that they had had no trouble at all.

  Then Bill, who was studying medicine at Manchester University, and was interested in its connections with murder, enquired if his father was getting any particularly interesting cases this session. As the older man answered, Barbara began to realise that he was an assizes judge, that he travelled to the assizes courts in various places and that it was his house that they were in. She remembered clearly being taken by her grandfather to see the arrival of the assizes judges in Liverpool.

  No wonder he looked so formidable, even without his scarlet robes and huge white wig and the traditional bunch of herbs in his hands. On the social standing of this man, she thought apprehensively, Michel’s permanent residence in England might depend. She guessed wildly that a judge would know all the right people to ease Michel in. The idea made her feel extremely nervous of making a social blunder of some kind.

  Michel recognised only a man who exuded power, some kind of a judge, and he was, for no real reason, also suddenly nervous. What was he, a poor peasant, doing in the house of a man like that?

  The judge, as he drank the tea provided by his daughter-in-law was, however, extremely amiable. This nondescript little Frenchie was the reason that he still had a son. He had not forgotten that fact. As he emptied his teacup, he smiled on him and said, ‘I am most grateful, sir, for what you did to help Bill when he was shot down in France. Must have been very difficult for you, with a German gun site on your property.’

  Michel shrugged. ‘I do what most of us do then. We do what is possible to ’elp the Allies.’ He did not know what more to say, but then added impetuously, ‘We have big problems with les Boches.’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ replied the judge. ‘However, I am most grateful to you.’

  Michel looked over at his friend and grinned, as he said, ‘I am most ’appy he return home.’

  Mr Spellersby turned to look at Barbara. The shy young woman, sitting by Daphne, was, he understood, the man’s future wife. Kept a bed-and-breakfast, Bill had said once. She looked quite capable of doing that. Neat little woman, Irish probably. Quite pretty.

  He glanced again at Michel. The family owed a big debt to this nut-brown Frenchman, who looked as if he had not had a decent meal for months. They would talk about it after dinner. He hoped that Daphne had found something decent to eat for their dinner. Rationing was a curse.

  He asked Bill to get him a whisky, and enquired if anyone else would like one. Daphne said she would. The others elected sherry.

  Thankful to have escaped whisky, Michel mumbled ‘Bon appétit’ and sipped cautiously at a sherry; it was excellent.

  The room fell silent.

  Daphne did her work as hostess, and began to get a little conversation going with her visitors, by asking about the situation regarding rebuilding Normandy. This successfully deflected attention from the distant sounds of arrivals in the hall below. Daphne said hastily that she must go to the kitchen to see how dinner was progressing, and excused herself.

  The judge got slowly to his feet and remarked that he had one or two things to look at before dinner, and also departed.

  Michel stood up with Bill until he had left the room, and then Bill said casually, ‘I noticed that you’re limping?’

  ‘I slip on a rock last night.’

  ‘Like me to look at it?’

  Barbara blessed the fact that she had found a pair of socks of her own to lend to Michel, in replacement for the ragged pair he had been wearing. She knew she had been unkindly neglectful of the injury, and she hastened to say to Michel, ‘Let Bill look at it, Michel. I thought it would be almost all right by now.’

  Diffidently, Michel removed his shoe and sock, and the leg of his new suit was rolled up to the knee.

  Bill bit his lip when he saw that, though the leg muscles were hard as iron and the ankle swollen, the leg, generally, looked like a stick.

  As he rolled the foot gently to test the extent of the sprain, he asked if Michel had been ill.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are too thin, old man.’

  Michel replied ruefully, ‘I work hard.’

  ‘Is food very short in France?’

  ‘We not die. Food is short.’ How could he tell Bill of the hardships, the hunger of the last twelve months – and particularly of the last three months, when he had eaten minimally in order to save money?

  Bill got up from his knees, and then gently leaned down to tip Michel’s face upwards and pull down the lower lid of one eye. Definitely run down, he decided.

  ‘Hm. You said in your last letter that y
ou would be staying in England at least six weeks?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied a puzzled Michel.

  The medical student glanced up at a suddenly anxious and mystified Barbara, and smiled at her. ‘He’s very run down,’ he said to her. ‘Feed him everything you can get hold of before he picks up flu or something serious. And make him rest for a week or two, at least.’ He returned to the ankle, and said, ‘I think we’ve got an elastic bandage. I’ll bind this for you. Put cold compresses on it and it should ease in about a week. If it doesn’t, show it to your local doctor. Excuse me for a minute while I go to look for the bandage.’

  The minute he was out of the room, Barbara, acutely aware that, in her rage and disappointment, she had been totally neglectful of the sprain, turned to Michel. ‘You should have told me the ankle still hurt,’ she upbraided him.

  He pulled a face. ‘You angry with me. I am quiet.’

  ‘Idiot!’ she exclaimed forcefully. ‘And why are you so thin? I was shocked when I saw your leg.’

  ‘I not eat too well. I am anxious to come to you.’

  ‘Well, if I have to go out and catch rabbits for you, you are going to be fed. I want to marry a man, not a skeleton.’

  ‘Ha! You marry me, eh?’ He looked impishly at her.

  ‘Of course, I will, you chump. It’s where we’re going to live that I’m arguing about.’

  He stumbled to his feet and kissed her clumsily. Then, he hastily sat down again as he heard Bill approaching the door.

  The ankle was neatly bandaged. It felt much more comfortable, and Michel thanked him effusively.

  Bill once more got to his feet. ‘Daphne says that dinner is ready. Do you think you can walk down the stairs now?’

  ‘Dead cert,’ Michel replied quite gaily.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Bill opened the door of the dining room, and stood on one side to let Barbara and Michel enter first.

  They took one step into the room and stopped dead.

  The room was in darkness except for two huge candelabra gleaming on a large table. Their light glinted on silver and lit up dimly the faces of a number of people seated quietly round it.

  With a mischievous grin, Bill leaned over Barbara’s shoulder and turned a light switch. A fine chandelier flooded the room with light, dazzling the new arrivals.

  There was a scuffling of chairs being pulled back.

  ‘Michel Benion!’ shouted both male and female voices. ‘Welcome to England!’ Glasses were raised, his health was drunk.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the light, Michel swallowed. At the head of the table stood the judge beaming at him. The standing guests, glasses in hand, were laughing at his confusion, as they drank his health. Other than Daphne and the judge, there were six men in Royal Air Force uniform, one lady in Army uniform accompanied by her husband in civilian clothes, and five nicely dressed wives of the servicemen.

  Bill pushed the couple gently into the room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Michel Benion and his fiancée, Mrs Barbara Bishop.’

  He turned to Barbara and Michel. ‘All our uniformed guests owe grateful thanks for their lives to people like you; they were all rescued at different times from France.’ He proceeded to name them, one by one. When he got to the lady in khaki, he said, ‘Mary is an accomplished archer; she picked off sentries with bow and arrow, a wonderful silent killer, until she had to run for her life. I believe the Germans were more scared of her than of any of the rest of us, weren’t they, Mary?’

  As Mary shyly denied this, the judge called for everyone to be seated.

  Michel was alarmed to find himself next to the judge, but Bill opposite him smiled in a friendly way, and the judge rumbled comfortably about amazing men and women, and gradually Michel’s panic subsided.

  Barbara was seated at the other end of the table, beside Daphne and opposite a young airman with a badly scarred face.

  She did not blink at his dreadful appearance, but smiled a little flirtatiously at him, and asked whether he had been a pilot. Relaxed at her refusal to see him as anything other than normal, he replied that, no, he’d been a rear gunner.

  It was general knowledge how dangerous a position in a plane that of rear gunner was, so, while Daphne directed her serving woman, Barbara soon got him talking about how his machine had been shot down. He had been the only survivor, he told her, and been found bleeding on a pile of tarpaulins in the yard of a French brickworks. He had been taken in and hidden by the workmen, who had got a doctor to him.

  The uniformed men began to talk, each wanting to tell Michel and Barbara of the miracles of rescue performed by the French. Occasionally, their wives also managed to get in a word of gratitude to him between their husbands’ stories.

  The elderly servant brought bowls of soup to them, while Bill undertook to serve the wine.

  By his second glass of wine, with soup and a generous salad already inside him, Michel began to bloom. By the time he had consumed large portions of pheasant and vegetables and a huge bowl of fruit with mountains of thoroughly illicit cream on top of it, he was quite at home, and telling the judge of the awful smell his son had had to endure in a chicken coop.

  In Barbara’s heart, hope began to grow.

  At the end of the meal, other toasts followed, including one to Absent Friends. The party was suddenly very sober, and Bill rose to say that they had traced the second man the Benions had sheltered, only to find that he had, later, died in the fall of Singapore.

  Michel had not known this. He had, after the war, written to the airman, at an address given to him before he had handed him over to others to be smuggled out through Cherbourg. There had been no reply, and this had saddened him. Now, at least, he knew what had occurred, though it was bad news.

  He was pressed to say a few words to the company, which he did, stumbling sometimes, as he told them that the British had many friends in France – and friends had simply helped friends in danger. As he had said to Barbara once, he now repeated that the French were only ordinary people doing extraordinary things in terrible times.

  In the drawing room afterwards, the other ladies came to talk to Barbara. Two were obvious aristocrats who had served in the Wrens. Though they were very pleasant, she found it difficult to relate to them. The rest, however, were modest housewives, who, like her, had struggled, unsung, through the major problems of being civilians and therefore of little account in a war. One had been a land girl and had some hilarious stories to tell of life on a Welsh farm.

  As the guests began to rise and say their goodbyes, Bill pressed Michel to stay for a little while, because his father wanted to talk to him. He himself would be in touch again quite soon, because he and Daphne would, of course, come over for his wedding. This latter remark surprised Michel, because it had not occurred to him that Barbara would have invited guests to the ceremony. There was no hope of any of his own family attending, and he had not thought of himself as having friends in England who could be invited. He hastily said that he hoped that both of them would be present.

  After the last of the other guests had gone, Daphne invited Barbara to look over the house with her, and eased her out of the drawing room.

  The interview was not nearly as bad as Michel expected. The judge merely wanted to get a better idea of the man for whom his son so badly wanted a work permit and, later on, citizenship. He knew he could not do anything directly – the man had to apply for himself. He could, however, support an application if he wished.

  Michel dreaded having to tell him that he would not stay in England, but it did not arise. The judge simply learned from Michel what skills he had, what hopes of using them. And Michel said that he had, since Barbara had left France, worked as a supervisor on a poultry farm, and thought he could get such work anywhere, especially as he knew quite a lot about breeding flocks and how to keep them healthy. He grinned disarmingly at the judge, as he said, ‘Hens are like children: keep very clean or they get disease – feed them well or they not grow big.’r />
  This was a world very alien to Judge Spellersby, but he was used to listening and watching his court hour after hour. He realised the self-confidence of the man before him as he spoke warmly of the work he was interested in. He judged him as being reasonably honest, though, he decided with inward amusement, a landowner might lose a pheasant or some grouse to such a practical man.

  Eventually, he departed to his study, and Bill insisted on using some of his father’s petrol ration to run their guests to the station.

  On their way back to Liverpool, Michel and Barbara were sleepy from the drinks they had consumed, and, anyway, the noise of the crowded train was not conducive to conversation. At Liverpool, they changed stations.

  The West Kirby train was, for part of the way, quite full of dock labourers coming off a late shift, and these exhausted men were of interest to Michel. ‘Like Rouen,’ he informed Barbara, eyeing them comfortably.

  Since Phyllis was likely still to be up, they paused to kiss on the doorstep of her home, and took a long time about it.

  It was a very thoughtful Michel who eventually followed Barbara indoors. It had been a bewildering evening, as well as a very pleasant one, particularly to have been surrounded by extremely friendly English people. It left him, however, with grave doubts in the back of his mind, not the least of which was whether he could possibly live with two obviously strong-willed, capable women, who even asked people to his wedding without consulting him – and to be financially dependent upon them would shackle him. At least in France he would have only Barbara, who was completely adorable – when she was not in a rage. And, most important, he would be the provider.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  In the kitchen, they found Phyllis surrounded by bed linen. She was ironing. The deal table had a sheet folded in half as she swept the big gas iron across it, and, on a rack hanging from the ceiling, several neatly folded ones were airing before they were taken upstairs and replaced on the beds. During the morning, Barbara had put them through their antiquated washing machine and had then pegged them out to dry on a line behind the house.