When I Was Young

by Mary Fitzgerald

  “What?” he asked, pulling his arm from under my neck and propping himself up on his elbow. “What’s so funny?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. I was just thinking of someone at home.”

  “Who?” he demanded in faux alarm. “A boy friend?”

  That made me laugh even more. Jed Winstanley. A boy friend?

  “No,” I gasped. “It’s the farmer next to us. The one who’s looking after our sheep. I was thinking of how he would look without his shirt.”

  Étienne shook his head, not understanding what was making me laugh but he leant over and kissed me. “Silly child,” he said.

  I sat up then. “Do you think of me as a child?”

  “No. Of course not. But you are young and fresh and so, so beautiful.”

  I was astonished. I’d never thought of myself as beautiful.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I feel younger than I’ve been for years. I’ve made decisions, acted upon them and put my life in order. I have found again my strength and purpose.” He rolled onto his back and stared up at the high roof. “Oh Christ,” he sighed, “I lost my way after the war.”

  “Étienne,” I spoke carefully. “What did you do during the war?”

  “Well,” he began, quite casually, “when France fell I went to England.” He grinned. “Robert Brissac and I and some others got on a fishing boat going out of La Rochelle. Robert was sick all the way, he hated the sea, still does, probably. Then we were trained to fight. It was good at first, exciting. I went to North Africa with my troop and we fought alongside the British and the South Africans.”

  “But after that,” I insisted. “You came back. Here, to Anjou.”

  Now he spoke more reluctantly, as though this secret that he’d kept through necessity was still difficult to tell. “I did,” he muttered, “I was asked to become a member of the resistance movement. Robert asked for me. He was the commander in this area and he needed someone he knew and trusted. His group was being betrayed by people who liked money and their own safety more than they did their country. My training was useful, I knew about explosives and had been in battle. Robert did the planning; he directed operations and,” he shook his head at the memory, “he was ruthless. And now… what is he? A respectable wine seller with a devoted daughter. How times have changed.”

  “But what sort of operations?” I needed to know more so that I could get closer to him. I needed to know this man with whom I was hopelessly in love.

  “You ask so many questions,” Étienne said, trailing his fingers down my body and sending such eddies of delight through me that I almost forgot what we were talking about. “What does it matter now?”

  “Tell me,” I begged. “Then I’ll know you like everyone else around here does”

  He sighed. “We put explosives on railway lines when we knew that German troops would be on the train, or they were transporting munitions. We gathered information and passed it back to London. We saved people from the concentration camps, Jews and others.” Étienne’s face hardened still further. “That wasn’t just the Nazi’s,” the disgust in his voice was palpable, “our own people, the Vichy regime, just east of here, sent just as many.”

  “Did you kill anyone?”

  “But of course.” He seemed to think that question redundant and answered me without any show of discomfort.

  “Did you kill Lisette’s father?”

  The birds above us carried on cheeping and flying from rafter to rafter, disturbing the hay dust so that the thin streams of light shining through the holes sparkled with dancing particles. But between Étienne and me an uncomfortable silence descended.

  He lay, not moving, his eyes fixed on the roof and I, sitting up, my clothes disarrayed and my hair falling out of its clips, wished, so wished I’d never spoken. I had pushed the new found closeness between us too far and with too many stupid question had ruined things forever.

  “Who have you been speaking to?” he said, at last. He sounded weary.

  “Luc d’Amboise,” I answered, miserably. “I’m sorry, Étienne. I shouldn’t have asked you but he said everyone knew and I wanted to know too.”

  Étienne sat up and started to button his shirt. “And I suppose it was he who told you that Lisette’s father was not me but a German major?”

  I nodded, then swallowed the bile which was burning in my throat.

  Étienne looked at me, seeing, I supposed, a interfering little idiot whom he should never have got involved with and I was ready for the shouting that would come or even a cold dismissal of our relationship. What had I done?

  But to my relief he leant over and gently pushed a strand of hair out of my face before cupping my chin in his hand.

  “Listen to me, mon amour,” he whispered. “I didn’t kill Major Bergmann although I was ordered to. I knew that if I did there would be reprisals, the village would be wiped out, and that would include my mother. So I disobeyed my orders and let him go. Where he went, I don’t know and now when I see that little child who looks so like him, wandering about my farm I am glad. How could I live with her, if I’d shot her father, eh?”

  I put my arms around him then, holding him to me, feeling his strong body next to mine and his heart beating steadily and truthfully. I had been right. I knew he wouldn’t have killed Major Bergmann.

  He spoke again, his voice muffled in my neck.

  “No, my darling, It wasn’t Lisette’s father I killed. It was Jean Paul’s.”

  “Oh!” I gasped, gripping him tighter while my mind whirled with a million questions.

  Étienne gently loosened himself from my arms and stood up. “I have to get back to work now. The men will be here for the evening’s milking and Grandmère will need you in the kitchen. We’ll talk more, later.”

  I watched him stride out of the barn. My lover. I rolled the word around my mouth and felt excited and daring like Becky Sharp but then my head said ‘my killer’ and I couldn’t find a heroine to match.

  After supper that evening Grandmère grabbed me to do the cards with her. I was reluctant because I knew Étienne was waiting for me on the bridge. He’d picked up both the fishing rods and jerked his head to me as he went out of the kitchen door and I’d nodded, indicating that I’d be following very soon.

  “Can I watch you with the cards tonight?” begged Lisette, who was hanging around in the kitchen after giving scraps to the barn cats. “I’ve never seen you do it and it sounds such fun. Is it like a game?”

  “It isn’t a game,” said Grandmère, quite sternly. “It is a way of knowing the future and how you can control it. It is not for children.”

  Lisette’s mouth fell and she started to trail out of the room but I stopped her. “Let her watch,” I pleaded. “It won’t do any harm.” With Lisette in the parlour, I thought, wriggling about on her chair and asking questions, Grandmère wouldn’t have the patience to make it a long session.

  But I was wrong again. Lisette was quiet and attentive, kneeling upright on the chair drawn up to the plush covered table and watched Grandmère shuffle the cards with rapt anticipation.

  “I’ll do you first, Lisette, then you can go to your room,” said Grandmère and smoothed the pack into a crescent on the table. “Now,” she said. “Pick out nine cards.

  Slowly and almost theatrically, Lisette chose her cards and watched as they were laid out.

  “This is you,” said Grandmère, pointing to the Jack of Hearts.

  “But it’s a boy,” protested Lisette.

  “No, it’s a young person. You are a young person. And then here and here,” she pointed to different cards, “this tells me that your life has changed and that new things have happened.” She moved to the second row. “You have had a gift.”

  “My doll’s house,” Lisette squeaked, beside herself with excitement.

  “Could be,” Grandmère smiled. “And here you found something and here you learnt something.”

  “I found Maman.” Lisette’s voice had dropped to a whisper a
nd she gazed at the card that Grandma was pointing to. Then her face brightened. “I’ve learnt my letters, my ABC.” She looked around to me. “I have, haven’t I, Eleanor.”

  “You have,” I nodded.

  Grandma tapped her fingers on the final row. “Here is disappointment and loss but finally hard work which will bring rewards.” She looked up at the little girl. “On the whole, Lisette, it is a very good reading.”

  “Oh, thank you, Grandmère. I loved that.” She turned to me, her face aglow with excitement, conveniently forgetting that she supposed to go to bed. “Now it’s your turn.”

  I quickly chose my cards, anxious to be with Étienne and barely looked at them as they were turned over but suddenly Grandmère gave a little gasp and I stared down at the array in front of me. Every card was black. The Ace of Spades was the first and then other spades and clubs filled the spaces. I could tell from Grandmère’s face that it wasn’t good.

  “What does it mean?” I asked, now interested and even concerned. I didn’t really believe in the cards, there was enough of my mother’s scepticism about me to know that this was nonsense but Grandmère believed and that made me worried.

  “The Ace can mean death,” Grandmère’s voice had dropped and I looked quickly at Lisette, afraid that this would frighten her.

  “Maman died.” Lisette’s little voice rang out very calmly. “That’s what it means.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Grandmère muttered, “but…” her hand hovered over the ten of spades and then the nine. “These are not good cards, Eleanor. You must take care.”

  “Do them again, Grandmère,” Lisette begged. “Make them nice for Eleanor.”

  “No,” she said, gathering up the cards. “Not tonight. We’ll do them tomorrow, it’ll be better then. Now, Lisette. It’s bed time.”

  When I tucked the child into her bed she put her skinny arm around my neck. “Will you be my maman now, Eleanor?” she whispered. “Because I do love you and I want you to stay here.”

  “I can’t,” I said, hugging her. Her face fell and little tears glistened in her sleepy hazel eyes. “But,” I said, quickly, “I can be like your big sister. Then, wherever I am, you’ll know that I love you and am thinking about you. And you’ll be thinking about me.”

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered, turning on her side and closing her eyes. “I would like that very much.”

  I stood on the bridge beside Étienne. The rods lay propped against the railing, unused so far this evening. He had been too restless to fish and when I finally walked onto the bridge he strode towards me and grabbing me fiercely kissed me so hard that my lips felt flattened and bruised. The rest of my body, though, throbbed with pleasure.

  “Christ,” he groaned, pulling his head away. “I can’t get enough of you. You have bewitched me.”

  It was the same for both of us. I felt as though I’d wandered into an enchanted kingdom and he believed I’d bewitched him. After all these years I still marvel at the extraordinary chance that of all the people in the world, we two, who were utterly right for each other, had met. It had to have been magic.

  The moonlight was bright on the water and a little breeze sang through the leaves of the willows when Étienne confessed to a crime he’d committed sixteen years before and which even as he spoke could send him to the guillotine.

  “I was a kid, nineteen,” he started. “Stupid and drunk when I went into town to find a woman and, God help me, I found Mathilde. She was in a bar, flirting with the customers and when she flirted with me, I thought it meant something. Of course it didn’t, or at least it meant buy me drink, give me money and I think I knew that, even then.

  I couldn’t stop myself, you know. I went, time after time, having sex with her in a filthy room above the bar, helping her with the rent, buying her clothes. Later I discovered that I was only one of many, many men who were ‘helping with the rent.’”

  I held his hand and rested my head on his shoulder while he told his story. Much of what he said was beyond my understanding, then, a few weeks into my seventeenth year, my sheltered life had kept me from the darker element of human activity but I understood enough. Most of all, I understood that Étienne had been young, inexperienced and ready to believe in the best not the worst of people.

  “One night,” he continued, “a man came into her room when I was there. A man I’d never seen before and he just walked in as though he owned the place, which of course he did. He picked up my wallet and emptied the money out of it, then he said that I had made Mathilde pregnant and I was going to have to pay. Not just once but every month or he would send his friends to burn down the farm.”

  “My God!” I said. “Who was he? Did you pay him?”

  “She said he was her brother but I didn’t believe her. I thought he was another lover and I was, oh God, I was jealous. And no, I didn’t pay him. I was drunk and angry and I leapt off the bed grabbing back the handful of notes he’d taken from my wallet.” His voice dropped into a bleak murmur. “The man produced a knife and we fought. I killed him.”

  Étienne stopped his terrible story and turned his face down to me. “I’ve only told one person this before and I’m taking a chance, I suppose, telling you.”

  “No chance,” I said, gripping his arm. “Nothing you could ever do is wrong in my eyes.”

  He smiled then, rather sadly. “I have done wrong and I know I will again, my little love. I am a flawed man.”

  “But what you did was an accident. Self defence.”

  “No. It wasn’t. I wrestled him to the floor and took his knife. Then I drove it into his heart.”

  I could see the scene in my head, the grubby half lit room, the tumbled bed, the two men grappling on the bare floorboards and Mathilde lying back on the bed with a horrible smirk on her face. Did the smirk vanish when it was Étienne who got up from the floor with the bloodied knife?

  “I waited,” Étienne continued, “until the bar and the streets were empty and I carried the man to the railway line and put him on the track. The train came almost immediately.” Étienne’s face was pale in the moonlight, as he remembered that terrible night. “It was the overnight express, not stopping at the station and it thundered through taking the body with it. His jacket must have caught on something because the body or what was left of it was found more than fifty miles away.”

  “Oh God,” I choked. “That’s dreadful.”

  Étienne put his arm around me. “Yes, it is, my darling and I am tortured by it. But let me tell it all and then there’ll be no secrets between us.” He took a deep breath. “This is almost the worst part. When I went back to Mathilde she said she was going to tell the police. I’d killed her brother and got her pregnant and she wanted revenge. God, I was so terrified I almost drove the knife into her.” He shrugged. “I should have done, there and then. Whatever happened to me would have been better than the years of misery that followed. But, at the time, she said she wouldn’t tell, if I married her. Gave her respectability and a home for the child she was expecting. I thought I had no choice, I believed her.”

  Clouds started to drift over the moon. I stood close to him, our arms touching and I stared through the gloom at his hands gripping the railing so hard that his knuckles stood up, white hillocks in the darkening night.

  “D’you know,” he said, “she never did tell and could have, easily, during the war when I was away. I don’t know why, she hated me, hated the farm and she wasn’t frightened of anything, ever. Perhaps Riverain was a convenience. She carried on her trade both here and in town. Not for the money, she was addicted to it. She was just evil and taught the boy to be the same.”

  “But Luc said,” I started and then quickly stopped.

  Étienne turned his face away from the river. “Luc told you that Jean Paul was not my son, yes?”

  I nodded.

  He gave a bitter laugh. “Quite right again. After the marriage ceremony at the mayor’s office Mathilde said we were to visit her friend. She took me to
a stinking little house in the back streets where her friend came to the door with a child in her arms. Jean Paul. He was about six or seven months old and nothing to do with me. ‘This is the baby we’re expecting’, she laughed. ‘You killed his father so you can bring him up.’

  I never shared a bed with her again.”

  We went inside then and up the back stairs to the comfort of my white room and lay quiet and thoughtful until sleep overtook us.

  Chapter 23

  In the days that followed I thought about Étienne’s story and several times he asked me if it had changed the way I felt about him.

  “No,” I said and meant it. My love for him was absolute.

  “It should, you know,” he said one afternoon when we were working in the vineyard and he’d asked me again. “It should tell you that I’m a violent man and perhaps not to be trusted.”

  “It doesn’t.” I folded my clasp knife with which I’d carefully cut away some overhanging tendrils and exposed more bunches of grapes to the sun, and put it in my pocket. The sun was beginning to move across the hill and I would have to get down into the kitchen. Grandmère had taught me how to make meringues and I was making the desert this evening.

  “You’re just looking for compliments now,” I laughed and he laughed too and threw his arms around me so that we both tumbled and rolled onto the dusty ground beneath the vines. Lisette, who was little further away, saw what we were doing and with a squeal of delight ran up and launched herself on top of us.

  “Is Papa tickling you?” she giggled.

  “Oh, yes, he is,” I said. “Naughty Papa.”

  Étienne grinned. “It’s your turn now, Lisette,” and I scrambled to my feet and ran down the hill leaving them laughing and breathless until Lisette escaped and followed me into the kitchen.

  “Whatever have you been doing,” Grandmère tutted. “The pair of you have bright red cheeks and are covered in soil.”