The German Boy

by Tricia Wastvedt

  She invited him to visit in the afternoons from time to time when her daughters were at school. ‘This is our consolation, Michel,’ she told him. ‘We are both lost, both separated from the one we love. We are the same.’

  ‘Am I lost, Delphine? Perhaps I am in love with you.’

  ‘In a different life, this might be so, but I see it in your eyes. I feel it in you, Michel. There’s a woman, a girl you can’t forget although you run away. You fight it.’

  He kissed Delphine’s smooth sunburned shoulder. ‘She’s here. She’s you, Delphine.’

  ‘No, Michel. Not me.’

  Sometimes in the evenings, Delphine sent Eugenie with a can of stew and a carafe of wine for Michael. He slept in a loft above the boulangerie, which cost him nothing in return for lighting the bread oven at four each morning and keeping out the rats.

  He had not planned to stay in Languedoc and had been on his way to Switzerland – the scalding heat of Spain had made him long for ice on his breath – when the letter from Rachel reached him.

  The post was delivered to the café. One morning, Delphine had brought the letter out to him along with his bread and coffee.

  Dear Michael

  I didn’t know where you were or I would have written sooner. Your letter addressed to Neate Street wasn’t forwarded straight away so that’s why I’ve been so long in replying. I tried to find you and no one knew where you had gone. Dad has died. Mum sold the house. Nanna Lydia sold her cottage too and we’re all living in a new Bungalow (house with no upstairs) in Hythe. In case you don’t know, Hythe is by the sea in Kent. Mum said she’d had enough of Peckham. I work in Folkestone, in a dress shop for couture.

  Dad passed away in his sleep on December the 30th. It was a Tuesday. Nanna found him when she went up with his tea. I don’t know what to say to you. There’s no point in coming back now. The funeral was nice. Lots of the neighbours stayed off work and people from the shops came. Mr and Mrs Cole from the grocer’s were there, Mr Faley and Eric from the fishmonger’s, Mr and Mrs Almond and Dottie from the hardware shop. The church was nearly full. Ada Hobbs and her sister Glynis from Eltham did the sandwiches. There were lots of people Dad knew who I’d never even heard of.

  You’ll be wondering if we’re all well and we are, although Nanna is not so sprightly as she was. Tell me where you’re going next.

  Love,

  Rachel

  He stared at the words until they blurred. When he looked up, midges sparkled in the sunlight and a wasp struggled in the cherry jam. Delphine put a cognac in his hand.

  • • •

  The rattling school bus took Eugenie and Augustine away. ‘Au revoir, mes enfants!’ Delphine called to them and waved. She poured a cup of coffee for herself and sat with Michael while he ate.

  On the other side of the square, Madame Baumanière settled herself on her chair with a shawl around her shoulders and the first dabs of pale sunshine illuminating her silver hair. Her neat foot kicked at a cat sauntering too near, and missed.

  ‘Manges-tu, Michel. You are too theen.’ She cackled, sucking in the pads of her cheeks to show the hollowness of his.

  Michel Roz, the Enlishman, was an angel, Madame Baumanière told everyone. Because of him she would live out her years content because her husband’s face would never be lost, even if her mind wandered like an imbecile goat as his had done.

  The night Monsieur Jean Baumanière died, Michael had been woken by the noise of banging on the wooden steps to his loft and there was Delphine with a lantern, standing in the snow and holding Eugenie’s hand.

  ‘Quick, Michel. Monsieur Baumanière, he …’ Delphine looked helplessly at her daughter. ‘Eugenie, explique à lui.’

  ‘Is he ill?’ Michael asked. ‘Should I fetch a doctor?’

  ‘Monsieur Baumanière est mort,’ said Eugenie. Her eyes were swimming with tears and her English had deserted her. ‘Vous devez venir, Michel.’ She pulled his hand.

  At the house, the body of Jean Baumanière was already dressed in a Sunday suit. The bed on which he lay was newly made with an embroidered coverlet and starched pillows. Madame Baumanière leaned over her husband, combing his thick white hair, humming softly. The lamps were lit and the room was too warm in spite of the snow outside.

  ‘Madame says the window must be closed until you make a picture,’ Eugenie whispered. ‘Or he will go to heaven and his face will be empty.’

  Michael fetched his paints and Jean Baumanière was propped higher on his pillows. A coin was taken from his eyelid and his wife indicated that Michael must look at the colour of her husband’s eyes. She lifted the papery lid. ‘Oui, oui. Brun.’ She patted Michael’s hand, and then she demonstrated how the picture would be: her husband would stand behind this high-backed chair in which she would be sitting. His hands would be on her shoulders, comme ça. Give him again the Languedoc sun on his skin, she told Michael; Jean was not always the colour of a plucked goose.

  The tableau would come later but the face must be done with haste before he departed. Here she laid her hands on Jean’s chest, then up, as if she was throwing something in the air. It seemed his soul would not rise from his body gently like a waft of smoke but would fly up wildly like a bird when the window was opened. She could keep him here till dawn but after that he might not leave her at all, and he must. At this Madame Baumanière pressed her hand to her throat. Michael must be quick.

  The portrait of Jean Baumanière’s face was finished before sunrise.

  In the days that followed, Pierre Cordot, the baker, posed for the figure on which the face of Jean Baumanière was to be superimposed. Delphine sat as the young and slender Madame Baumanière, and Michael copied the face from a faded photographic portrait of Emanuelle Baumanière at eighteen.

  No, said Madame Baumanière, it didn’t matter that there would be a discrepancy in the ages of the faces. For Jean, she wanted to be beautiful again. He was as handsome to her now as the day they married, so the picture was as it should be.

  After the burial, Pierre Cordot asked Michael to paint a picture of his sister holding a tray of perfect brioches with her favourite hound at her side. Then Delphine’s brother wanted a portrait of himself and his wife together with their grown-up children. A son who had died at the age of five would be included in the group.

  The Mayor requested a landscape with goats to send to his daughter who had gone to live in Paris. Michael must paint the rosemary, gorse and lavender in bloom together, although they never were, and there should be snow on the rocky summits in the distance with the silhouette of a Cathar ruin. These things would bring his daughter home to Languedoc.

  Michael became a maker of pictures. He was not an artist here. There were no theories on light and colour in Mazamet but only likenesses that must be accurate. He followed his customers’ instructions and made the images exactly as they requested. This was his work; there was no signature or need for one, any more than a baker would sign his bread.

  He knew these paintings would not be liked at Frankie Brion’s soirées and would be considered sentimental. They were not provocative, nor did they say anything intelligent or witty. They did not catch the spirit of the modern age.

  But these pictures were more honest, it seemed to Michael, than anything he had ever painted in London.

  One day he paints a picture for himself. He leans a canvas on a café table and begins.

  It shows the village square. Sunlight spots the ground beneath the planes with lemon and lavender-blue. The stone walls of the café are blocks of sour green and ochre, and the awning casts blue-black shade with some strokes of rose that are Delphine’s dress as she stands in the cool.

  A young man with black hair is sitting at a table but the figure is overlaid by discs of multicoloured light which filter through the leaves. He is leaning back in his chair, waiting. His arm rests on the checked tablecloth.

  One side of the picture – the buildings across the square – is greenish underwater shadow; the black rect
angles of doors, the aqueous glimmer of the windows. A figure, the black of grapes, is Madame Baumanière, who sits against the deeper black with reddish dabs of plucked feathers speckling her lap and the ground around her feet.

  The other side, between the Mayor’s house and the boulangerie, is bleached blue sky.

  The figure of a woman is on the brow of the road that climbs up to the square. The sun is high and she has hardly any shadow. If she were nearer, her dress would have a flower print like the cotton dresses Delphine wears, but at this distance it is creamy white.

  The woman’s long bright auburn hair is tangled by the wind and her dress is blown around her legs. She holds it down, her hand flat against her thigh. With her other hand she holds her sunhat clamped down hard so it doesn’t blow away. The brim is lifting with the breeze but her face is in shadow.

  Michael wonders if he could paint out the hat or bring the figure nearer, but the picture is complete and the face is hidden.

  ‘Oooh, très belle,’ breathes little Augustine, her chin at his elbow. She has been skipping and is breathless. ‘Eugenie!’ she shrieks to her sister. ‘Viens voir. C’est une peinture de la femme de Michel.’

  ‘No, Augustine,’ says Michael. ‘It’s just a woman.’

  Eugenie runs across to look. ‘She comes here, votre femme?’ she asks him.

  Madame Baumanière is struggling from her chair. She smirks delightedly when she sees the picture. ‘C’est l’amour. La fiancée!’

  ‘The figure is to balance the composition,’ Michael tells her. They crowd in and he has no room. Augustine has oil paint on her face.

  Delphine comes across and stands close beside him. She puts her hands on his shoulders and he feels her warmth through his shirt. ‘Ah, oui,’ she says softly.

  They all understand, even Eugenie and Augustine; an artist gives himself away.

  He had thought he left her behind in London but now he understands that she has been with him all along – through the weeks at Eddie Saunders’s farm in Kent, on the ferry to Calais, in Amsterdam, on the journey south to Sicily, then Spain, and then north across the Pyrenees to Mazamet, where he sees her walking in the sun with the wind tangling her hair while he sits waiting.

  • • •

  On the morning he leaves, Augustine and Eugenie give him drawings they have made themselves. Augustine: a goat with a bell. Eugenie: the café with herself standing at the door. Delphine hands him a heavy package tied up with a cloth. It is food for the journey and looks enough to get him back to London.

  His rucksack has so much tied around it he has trouble lifting it on to his shoulders, and now Madame Baumanière wants to give him something too. She beckons from her door. He puts the rucksack down again.

  They are both used to miming with some words that might or might not be understood and conversation is easy with her now.

  It is so dark inside her house after the sunshine in the square, for a moment he cannot see. She pats his sleeve and points into the shadows. He wonders if he will have the strength to carry whatever it is she is about to give him.

  ‘La carabine,’ she says, and jabs him in the chest. ‘Pour toi.’ She quivers with emotion and wrings her veiny hands. He lifts the hunting rifle from its iron rest on the wall above the fireplace and she sucks her teeth as if he might drop it on the floor and break it.

  For a rifle, it is beautiful. It has been oiled, the strap is supple. The polished stock is inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl in a design of flowers and trailing ribbons. The delicate decoration suits this graceful deadly thing. He rests the butt on his foot and holds the barrel upright. The rifle is almost as tall as Madame Baumanière.

  He has never held a firearm before and he lifts it and holds it across his chest. He handles it awkwardly although he feels the pleasing balance of the weight. The old lady snuffles into her handkerchief and talks quickly; he understands he must take the rifle because she will not go hunting. Jean is dead and the rifle must not die too.

  Afterwards, she waddles over to the bureau, batting a cat from a chair on the way, and returns with something in her hand. It is a silver heart-shaped locket, as fat and smooth as an egg, and it hangs on a piece of tattered lace. On it is engraved a curling letter E.

  ‘E – c’est moi,’ she says. ‘Emanuelle.’ Then she pulls at his sleeve and puts the locket in his hand. ‘Pour Elisabeth.’

  • • •

  On the train to Paris, he shared his food with a family travelling in the same compartment and found he’d learned enough French to understand most of what they said.

  ‘You are leaving France? Are you mad?’ the husband teased good-naturedly. ‘I’ve heard the English have no wine except in church. How can they be anything but miserable.’

  ‘Look at his face, Hervé,’ the wife said. ‘It isn’t only wine that warms the soul.’

  The parents and their three plump fair children ate the bread and pâté Delphine had made and afterwards the children and the father slept, all toppled sideways on the wooden bench against the mother, who was pressed against the window. Although the weight of the four of them was pinning her in her seat, Michael could see that her thoughts were free with her family not needing her for a while. She gazed out at the landscape wheeling by.

  The afternoon wore on, and from time to time Michael got up and paced the corridor, leaned out of the window to smoke a cigarette. He tried to doze but his muscles ached with restlessness.

  A sleeping child had slid over on to the mother’s lap, and with her arms free now the woman took some knitting from a cloth bag at her side. Michael tried to fix his attention on the deftness of her fingers and the needles clicking a different rhythm to the thudding train. She sensed him watching and looked up. ‘The journey is too slow for you, I think. You are impatient.’ She regarded him, her knitting poised. ‘There’s someone who will be happy that you’re coming home. This is so?’

  ‘I’ve been away too long. She will have forgotten me.’

  ‘We women have long memories. Too long. Like elephants.’ She smiled. ‘She will be there.’ She resumed her knitting, frowning a little in the fading light.

  Michael was reminded of Nanna Lydia and an afternoon at Neate Street not long before he left. They were sitting downstairs in the kitchen; Nanna was knitting and he was drawing – some saucepans or bowls, he had forgotten now.

  Nanna had paused, looked up. Her spectacles were cloudy with scratches and he could not see her eyes. ‘Do you know, Michael, once upon a time, I thought there might be feeling between you and Elisabeth.’

  ‘Elisabeth?’ He said it absently, as if he was engrossed in drawing.

  When he offered nothing more, Nanna resumed her work. ‘Old hearts are sentimental. They’re deceived sometimes,’ she said quietly.

  He had felt annoyed. Her musings were an intrusion and he had baulked at giving her an answer because Elisabeth was already too much in his mind. He had to get away from London and from Neate Street and no one would prevent it. If he felt something for Elisabeth – or any woman – it might be different, he told himself, but he didn’t.

  He had been dishonest, he knew now, dishonest even with himself.

  • • •

  The Paris air was soft and there was blossom on the café tables and on the pavements. Everything was a painting Michael recognized and he felt he knew the place already.

  The Frenchman on the train had told him that the Gare du Nord would take him to the Channel coast, but couldn’t say where this station was. Michael thought he would walk for a while then ask for directions.

  The sky was as blue and clean as in the South. He walked in the sun beside the pale green Seine, choppy with the wash of pleasure boats and river steamers. He had thought that if he ever came to Paris, he would climb the hill to Montmartre and the Place du Tertre, as painters did, but he wanted to see these places with Elisabeth. They would come back to Paris together.

  He turned off the street and into a covered market hall. Sunlight
came through the rust holes in the roof and the place was warm and shadowy. He passed crates of sleeping rabbits and ducks, and underwear and tools, lace and cheese. He bought a bag of peaches. The empty stalls still gave off smells of fish or spices or leather. A butcher sawing a carcass admired the hunting rifle and was disappointed that it was not for sale.

  Out on the pavement again, Michael was on a wide boulevard. It was late afternoon and the street was almost empty of carriages and motorcars. A few pedestrians walked in the shade. Ahead of him, a woman in black was carrying a basket on her arm and a small boy in a tablier with chalk dust on the sleeves trotted after her eating the crust of a baguette almost as tall as him. There was a milk cart under the trees with the horse resting in the shade, one hind hoof tipped on its rim and its eyes closed, and the little boy stopped to stroke the horse’s nose. The woman went on past the tables of a café and across the street.

  Michael hesitated, not knowing if he should call the woman back or hurry the little boy to catch up. The child was still beside the dozing horse, stroking its drooping ears, and Michael was aware of someone also watching from a nearby café table. A blonde young woman in a purple summer dress and heeled shoes sat smoking.

  Suddenly the child saw that his mother had gone on without him and he dropped the bread, startling the horse awake. He ran after her. The baguette was left on the pavement.

  ‘You’d better run after him, Michael,’ the woman at the table called out. ‘I’d be flat on my face if I tried to sprint in these.’

  13

  Mr Mole liked to collect the post each morning. He also liked to fetch coal, bang in nails, sharpen knives, lift weighty objects and close doors. There was very little Mrs Oliver and her daughters had not learned to manage themselves that Mr Mole could do, but Mrs Oliver, girlishly, was grateful and admiring.