He sat back, feeling he was making progress, but wondering why all this was not much better known in France. It was something to be proud of, that an entire community was prepared to take such risks for the children of strangers. And it gave him a stirring tale to tell the young people in the collège computer club.
It was time to go. Bruno reluctantly closed his computer and called Fabiola to tell her he was on his way. She was already in the stables, saddling Victoria. By the time he arrived, Balzac at his heels, Fabiola had also saddled Hector, Bruno’s own horse. He kissed Pamela in greeting. She smiled but said nothing and returned to checking over the bridles and leathers. Bruno wasn’t sure whether she was embarrassed by the previous evening’s exchange or was damping down her frustration at not being allowed to ride. Pamela insisted that her collarbone was completely healed from her riding accident. Her doctor disagreed.
‘One more week,’ Fabiola said briskly, in what Bruno thought of as her doctor’s voice, the one that brooked no argument. ‘Then you can start some gentle trots around the paddock.’
‘But I can’t think about buying a new horse unless I can give it a test ride. I keep missing absolute bargains because you won’t let me back into the saddle,’ Pamela complained, petting Bruno’s dog and fondling the long, floppy ears. People who liked horses were invariably fond of dogs, Bruno had noticed.
As Balzac snuffled his way around Hector’s legs to greet the horse whose stable he often shared, Bruno sat on the bench to put on his riding boots. He understood Pamela’s frustration, unable to ride but equally unable to keep out of the stables, watching Bruno and Fabiola take out the horses while aching to join them. Without complaint, she performed the physiotherapy and exercises Fabiola had recommended to get her muscles into shape, ready to ride again. He knew she spent hours on the Internet looking at horses for sale.
While she never spoke of the horse on which she’d been injured, she kept a photo of Bess on the table by her bed. Bess had broken a leg in a rabbit hole while galloping down a slope, throwing Pamela, who had been knocked unconscious and broken a collarbone in the fall. Bruno knew that he had no choice but to put the animal out of its misery; the bones had been shattered. Although Pamela had said he’d been right, he suspected that in some corner of her heart she would never forgive him. They hadn’t spoken of the incident since, but Bruno sometimes felt her resentment. Perhaps a new horse would ease matters. He hoped so.
Their relationship had never been easy for him to navigate. After an unhappy first marriage in Britain, Pamela insisted on her independence. She made it clear that she saw no permanent future with Bruno, but was content to treat him as a dear friend whom she welcomed, although less frequently, to her bed. At first, Bruno had assumed this was the result of the abstinence enforced by her injuries, but his doubts were growing. Pamela remained warm and loving, but while he could not define precisely the change he felt in her manner toward him, he felt a reticence in her embraces. One night after a lovemaking that did not seem to have pleased her, he had asked her if something was wrong. ‘It’s not you, Bruno, it’s me, still sad about Bess, I suppose,’ Pamela had replied, kissing him fondly. ‘It will pass.’ But it hadn’t.
He rose, stamped to settle the fit of his boots, and kissed her cheek. ‘You’ll be riding with us any day now,’ he said. She nodded and returned his embrace but her smile seemed distant. He led Hector out into the yard, climbed into the saddle and followed Fabiola up the track that led towards the ridge. When he turned in the saddle, expecting to see Pamela waving at them, she had gone inside.
That suggested he could forget the usual invitation to dine with Pamela and Fabiola, let alone spend the night. Very well, he’d dine alone; something he rather enjoyed from time to time. He had some spinach in the garden which he could pick, wash and quickly simmer. He could slice some of the ham hanging from the beam in his kitchen and chop it into lardons, fry it, and mix them into the spinach, and then poach two fresh eggs from his garden and serve them on top with some freshly ground black pepper. With some of that morning’s baguette, lightly toasted and rubbed with garlic, and a glass of cool white wine, it would be delicious. He could almost taste it.
Then he remembered making that dish for Pamela one evening at her home, and as they finished, a disc of opera she had been playing suddenly turned into a tune he knew; the Barcarolle, from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. It was a lovely, slow but stately piece. With the last taste of wine on his lips, he had extended his hand, raised Pamela from her chair, and led her into a gentle waltz around her kitchen until the music ended. He could even remember the wine, a Tour des Verdots, with its lingering sweetness from a little Muscadelle grape added to the usual Sauvignon–Semillon blend. She had then pressed a couple of buttons on her CD player and the music had played again and then again as she drew him down to the vast sofa that filled one wall of her kitchen and they had made tender, rhythmic and almost dreamy love as the melody unfolded. He felt tears pricking at his eyes at the thought of what he and Pamela had known together, and the premonition that it might be drawing to a close.
Hector picked up speed, easily passing Fabiola, who was riding a much older horse. As his mount stretched into a fluid canter, Bruno’s troubled thoughts of his future with Pamela blew away with the pleasure of the ride. He reined in as they reached the ridge, gazing down over the lush valley of the river Vézère below. Balzac was the first to join him, the young dog now grown enough to keep pace, or at least to keep Hector in sight, rather than ride in the old binoculars case slung around Bruno’s neck that he had used as a puppy.
‘Give her time,’ said Fabiola, drawing alongside. ‘As soon as Pamela gets a new horse and starts riding again she’ll be fine.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Bruno replied, wondering whether this was what he truly wanted. He had enjoyed the affair with Pamela, but lately had begun asking himself if he should continue a relationship that had no future, even if they could return to the easy affections they had enjoyed before Pamela’s fall.
‘No more grape-pickers in the vineyard,’ he said, shading his eyes to peer down at the ordered ranks of vines that stretched behind the small château. ‘The harvest must be in.’
‘I’ve been invited to the vendange supper but Julien hasn’t told me yet when it is,’ she said. Like Bruno and half of St Denis, Fabiola was a shareholder in the town’s vineyard.
‘They can never fix a date because they never know in advance when they’ll be picking. And the pickers will be moving on to another vineyard tonight. I imagine it will be at the weekend, Saturday or Sunday evening, when the pickers can come back to enjoy it.’
Bruno knew he would be involved in the cooking, which would mean filling and lighting the firepit the previous night. Four big sangliers provided by the town’s hunting club were already waiting in the giant freezer of the town’s retirement home. They’d go onto the spits for roasting soon after dawn. He made a mental note to check with Julien, who ran the vineyard, about the arrangements. He hoped the event wouldn’t clash with Sami’s return. That reminded him of something.
‘How much do you know about psychology?’ he asked Fabiola.
She turned to look at him in surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’ She picked up the reins as if eager to ride.
‘It’s about an autistic young man from St Denis called Sami, a nephew of Momu,’ he said, and explained the background.
‘I did some at medical school but it’s not really my field,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Let’s ride.’
She kicked her heels into Victoria’s flanks and started off along the ridge, a trot that became a canter and then a gentle gallop, as fast as Fabiola’s aging mare could handle. They stopped close to the end of the ridge, where the woods began to creep onto the high ground and the slope down to the river fell steeply away. From here, the town of St Denis nestled in the glow of the evening sun, half gold and half red as it sank through the scattered clouds to the horizon. Bruno had never known better sunsets than t
hose he saw from this point. They made him think of the lowlands stretching to the estuary of the River Gironde and the long thin strip of the Médoc peninsula that produced the great wines of Margaux and Pauillac, of St Julien and Sainte Estèphe. He wondered whether they would someday sink beneath the waves of a rising sea, taking with them part of the soul of France.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘About wine,’ he replied.
‘As your doctor, I sometimes wonder whether I should warn you not to drink too much.’
‘You aren’t my doctor,’ he replied. Rather than mix friendship with medicine, Bruno usually consulted an elderly doctor in the next village whose brother produced excellent wines near St Foy la Grande, just over the border from the Bordeaux appellation, and who accordingly counselled his patients that a glass of good Bergerac rouge before retiring would help almost any ailment. In more difficult cases, a glass of the same wine on waking might also be recommended. On the infrequent occasions when Bruno went to see his doctor, he more often left with a bottle of the family’s Château Puy-Servain than with a prescription.
Before they turned off onto the bridle trail through the woods that would take them to Pamela’s house, Bruno looked back to the east. The twilight was stealing over ridge after ridge as the land rose to the Massif Central, the high plateau of dead volcanoes that lay at the heart of France and was the source for most of its rivers. Other than the large town of Brive, there were no cities in that direction until Lyon, more than three hundred kilometres away. And Toulouse was nearly as far to the south, with only Cahors along the way. Doing the sums in his head, Bruno reckoned there were close to a hundred thousand square kilometres in those sparsely populated uplands where the Jewish children of wartime had found sanctuary. Little wonder that many of them had been able to stay hidden.
‘I’m on call tonight, so I’ve been invited to eat pizza with the pompiers in the firehouse,’ Fabiola said as they rubbed down the horses. As in most of rural France, the firemen also provided the medical emergency service, so the duty doctor often spent the evening in their friendly company. Bruno had an open invitation to join them, but that spinach supper, alone with Balzac and the latest Prix Goncourt winner he’d borrowed from the town library, sounded attractive. He wasn’t sure how much he’d read of L’art français de la guerre, despite his interest in the novel’s theme of France’s colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. He wanted an early night and felt too tired to be good company.
As he knocked on the kitchen door to say goodnight to Pamela, he saw that the table had been set for two. A tureen of potage was already steaming on the table and he could smell roast chicken and lemon, one of her dishes he could never resist. She had changed out of her jeans and put on a blue dress she knew Bruno liked, and she was wearing make-up, which she seldom did for informal suppers at home.
Did that mean she’d like him to stay the night? Or had she dressed to look alluring so that he would feel all the more chastened, knowing what he was missing? At least with French women he felt a kind of intuition, a shared cultural understanding that allowed him to decipher much that was unspoken. But Pamela was not French, however well she spoke the language. And sometimes he felt that all the dictionaries in the world would not suffice to help him fathom the subtleties of her meaning.
‘I need to talk to you,’ Pamela began, ladling some of the home-made mushroom soup into his dish. That sounded ominous, he thought, particularly after her visit to his bedside the previous evening. She spooned in some crème fraîche as he opened the bottle she had put on the table, a very drinkable red from the town vineyard. ‘It’s about Fabiola,’ she added. ‘I’m worried about her. You know she went up to Paris at the weekend, to see Gilles?’
Bruno shook his head as he sipped at his soup. No, he hadn’t known, but he was not surprised. Gilles was a journalist he had known in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, now working for Paris Match. They had renewed their friendship over recent months when Gilles had come down to St Denis on two different stories and had been attracted to Fabiola. Having seen them dining together one evening, Bruno reckoned that Fabiola seemed equally attracted to him. He approved: Gilles was a fine man, honest and kindly. Bruno’s one concern was that Gilles might lure away the best doctor St Denis had known to join him in Paris.
‘Did she tell you how it went?’
‘She didn’t have to. She came back early, obviously unhappy, but refused to talk about it. Something must have gone wrong.’
‘It’s her own business, Pamela,’ he said.
‘I know, but I was just wondering if you might ask Gilles what happened, if they are still seeing each other. He’s your friend, after all.’
‘Men don’t much ask one another about that sort of thing.’ He poured a splash of red wine into the small amount of soup that remained in his bowl, swirled it around to mix it and then raised the bowl to his lips and drank. Called chabrol, it was a custom of the Périgord.
‘Well, I’m pretty sure they hadn’t slept together before and she was quite excited when she left, looking eager and happy. I think the weekend in Paris was meant to be it, you know, as though she’d made her mind up to go to bed with him. After all, she’s been here a year and there’s been no other boyfriend.’
‘I thought they were doing fine. They seem well suited,’ Bruno said, wondering how long it would be before he was allowed to taste the chicken that smelt so good. ‘But if it didn’t work out in Paris, I’m not sure we can do anything about it, nor even if we should. This is something between the two of them.’
‘Maybe there’s a misunderstanding that we could help them clear up. You could have a man-to-man talk.’
Bruno could imagine himself squirming with embarrassment as he tried to probe into his friend’s love life. Bruno was about to say that he wouldn’t like it if somebody asked about his affair with Pamela, but thought better of it. That could start another conversation Bruno did not want to have, so he decided to change the subject.
‘I love that lemon chicken of yours and it smells wonderful. I can hardly wait, but let me tell you about this strange bequest St Denis might be getting.’ He launched into an explanation of the Halévy children until Pamela rather grumpily cleared the soup plates and opened the oven to bring out the chicken.
As he spoke, into the back of his mind crept the piquant thought that it was intriguing to be dining with an attractive woman and not know whether he would be invited to sleep with her that night. He found himself making an extra effort to be charming, in the hope that Pamela would soften. There might be no future for them, but this was the present. The future could take care of itself.
7
The Mayor had decided that his own status, as a former member of the French Senate, would smooth Sami’s path at the airport. It would also, Bruno thought to himself, cement the Mayor’s support among the handful of Muslim voters in St Denis. His car was much more comfortable, so Bruno was happy to agree. The bench seat of his elderly Land Rover would have crammed him, the Mayor and Momu too tightly together and left no room for Sami.
The message from Zigi had been waiting in Bruno’s emails: ‘Your boy en route to Dushanbe with returning platoon of troops. We burned his clothes, shaved his head and beard to remove lice, showered him twice and fitted him with some old fatigues. He ate like a wolf. His ETA Évreux tomorrow 10.40 then chopper to Merignac ETA 14.30. Toubib sedated him heavily and gave him all the shots we get. You owe me big dinner, Zigi.’
Landing at Évreux meant the Brigadier had intervened to shift the port of entry, which must have annoyed the army, having to ferry the returning platoon back to Creil. It should also mean a minimum of bureaucracy at Mérignac on the military side of what was mainly a civilian airport.
‘I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could tell us that Sami had disappeared from Toulouse,’ the Mayor said to Momu as he took the road for the autoroute that led to Bordeaux. He and Bruno had agreed that the Mayor would lead the questioning. It w
ould seem less of an interrogation if he spoke while driving.
‘We didn’t find out until we went down for one of our regular visits,’ Momu replied quietly, looking straight ahead through the windscreen. Bruno leaned forward from the rear seat, not wanting to miss a word.
‘When was that, exactly?’
‘Four years ago, in May, about a year after Sami had gone to the school.’
‘Did you hear from him again?’
‘One postcard, in September that year, posted from Germany. It just said he was well and thinking of us.’ Momu paused, and then spoke in a rush. ‘I didn’t think he could write, that somebody else had written it for him. But it was him alright, from something he said about Karim, a place they used to go to catch goujons. They called it the beach, a private name they had. He loved those little fish, all fried with lemon juice.’
That made Bruno smile. Each summer he’d take the kids from his tennis class down to the river with nets to catch the tiny fish, take them back by the kilo, roll them in flour and fry them up in the kitchen at the club.
‘And that was all you heard until this week?’
‘Yes. We thought he was dead.’ Momu’s voice was heavy with guilt.
‘What did they tell you at the mosque?’
Children of War Page 6