Children of War

by Martin Walker

  ‘I love it when you cook for me,’ she said. ‘And in the nicest possible way you’ve given me quite an appetite. I can smell the bread from here and it’s always best when it’s warm.’ She had draped the dressing gown around herself in a way that revealed almost as much as it concealed.

  Bruno took her a glass of the white wine and kissed her shoulder, where the gown had slipped away. In the pool house, he plugged in the electric hotplate, washed and sliced the courgettes she had picked. He used his finger to coat them thinly with the walnut oil. By the time he returned from the kitchen with a bottle of mineral water and the bread they had started to sizzle and he turned them.

  Pamela had taken the cushions from the sun chairs and piled them into a heap so they could lounge back as they enjoyed their picnic. She pulled the fresh loaf apart, plunged her nose close to catch the scent, then dipped a crust into the bowl of aillou and washed it down with a mouthful of the chilled soup.

  ‘It feels wonderfully decadent to feed so many appetites at once; eating a picnic with my fingers, a glass of fine wine and making love in the open air,’ she said, and patted the cushions for Bruno to lie down beside her. ‘It reminds me of all the fantasies I had when I decided to move to France.’

  ‘I’m glad I could help you bring them to life,’ he said, smiling as he lay down.

  ‘A good thing you happened to be around,’ she replied, and kissed his chest. ‘For some reason I was feeling amazingly romantic this afternoon. If the postman had turned up, I might have leaped on him.’

  ‘I know your postman,’ he said. ‘He’s on the verge of retirement and he’s only got three teeth.’

  ‘That goes to show just how sexy I felt. But then Prince Charming arrived, just in the nick of time.’

  He put down before her the plate of lightly charred courgettes and Pamela proceeded to feed him, putting a small dab of aillou on each slice and then holding it to his lips before taking one in her turn. She handed him his wine glass and said, ‘Now I’ve got your complete attention I want to talk about Fabiola.’

  Bruno spluttered and some of his soup went down the wrong way. When he had recovered, he raised his eyebrows and prepared to listen, knowing there was no escape.

  ‘She finally told me what happened when she went to Paris. She likes Gilles a lot, really a lot, and went up to see him quite determined to take him to bed. But at the last moment she couldn’t. He was very sweet and patient, she said, and they cuddled and slept together. But there was no consummation.’

  ‘How very sad for them both,’ said Bruno, trying to damp down the mental image her words evoked. ‘Did she say why?’

  ‘She just said that she had to work out something from her past. I asked if she meant she was still in love with someone else, but she shrugged in that way of hers and changed the subject. I always got the impression of a doomed love affair hanging over her, perhaps a married man who refused to leave his family.’

  That could be it, thought Bruno. But Fabiola never talked about her private life, nor much about her past.

  ‘It could be something else,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘You know how much time Fabiola spends at that shelter for abused wives in Bergerac. Maybe she’d been badly treated or beaten up herself.’

  Pamela shrugged. ‘Who knows? When I first got to know her I even wondered if she was gay. Anyway, you know Fabiola; she’s a very private woman. I asked if she had tried seeing somebody for counselling, or a good psychologist, but you know what doctors are like when it comes to treating themselves. She said she’d tried talking with her gynaecology professor, whom she admired, but it hadn’t done much good. Apparently she came from the Périgord and planned to return when she retired. That was one reason Fabiola came here.’

  Bruno shook his head, feeling concerned for his friend but without enough knowledge to do anything. But this could not be allowed to rest there. Bruno knew his own nature; if there was a problem, he’d always try to resolve it. Fabiola had once told him he always assumed there was a solution to any problem, but as a doctor she knew that some cases were hopeless. Perhaps she’d been talking of herself? He’d have to think of a way to help. But he must start by finding out what had gone wrong. Whatever the ordeal, people could often recover. He knew that from his time in the Bosnian war.

  ‘You’re miles away,’ Pamela said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He reached out to put his hand on hers. ‘I was wondering how we might persuade Fabiola to try again to find someone who might help her.’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ she said gently. ‘You had that soft look on your face that you get when you’re remembering something.’

  He smiled at her, thinking how well this woman knew him. ‘You’re right. I was recalling some women we knew in Bosnia who had been forced into being sex slaves for Serb troops. But some of them seemed pretty resilient, as if they were determined to recover. Knowing Fabiola, whatever happened to her I’d have thought she’d be the same.’

  Pamela shook her head. ‘The problem is that we don’t really know what happened to her. At least she’s started to talk to me about it. And she’s not running away from Gilles. Fabiola still wants to make that relationship work, and I think we should do whatever we can to help. After all, Gilles is your friend. You brought him down here and introduced them. So in a way, you’re responsible. And we both love Fabiola so we have to help her.’

  ‘I agree,’ Bruno said. ‘If she lets us.’

  12

  Since it was one of Bruno’s varied duties to manage the traffic problems of St Denis, the Rue de la Libération was one of the few aspects of his job that caused him misery. Sometimes he thought it should never have been built. It led from the roundabout in the central square along a narrow street that finally opened out into the main road to Les Eyzies. It was listed as a two-lane road, but there wasn’t really enough room for a truck and a car to pass. The pavements were too cramped for safety, barely wide enough for one person, let alone two. On one side were tall, narrow houses built in the nineteenth century and shoehorned into the narrow space between the road and a steep hill that blocked any light from the rear windows. On the other side of the street slightly newer buildings were squeezed into the equally tight space between the road and the twelve-metre vertical drop down to the quayside and the river.

  The result was a town planner’s nightmare. Without demolishing the houses on one side or the other, there was no way to widen the narrow road. St Denis could not afford to demolish the houses, which would mean paying compensation to the owners. And yet the Rue de la Libération, once a healthy commercial thoroughfare with shops and restaurants at street level, was slowly dying as pedestrians shunned the narrow pavements and busy traffic. Shopfronts were empty or boarded up. The dry cleaner had gone, and so had the estate agent, once he realized there was too little room for the few passers-by to study the photos of houses for sale in his windows.

  It was into one of these vacant shopfronts that Bruno and the Mayor now entered after taking their early coffee and croissants at Fauquet’s café. The two men began to climb the narrow stairs that led to small rental apartments on the upper floors. Cheaply modernized a generation ago, the apartments contained one small bedroom, a living room with a kitchen corner and a tiny shower room with a toilet. They were now used for unemployed families or single parents whose rents were subsidized.

  Bruno led the way to the empty attic on the top floor which had neither shower room nor kitchen, and forced open the reluctant door. The bulb did not work when he flicked the switch and the skylight was too small and grimy to help. He turned on his torch and shone the beam around the dirty floor to pick out two broken chairs and a rusted pot-belly stove. A dusty wooden box held ancient crockery, most of it cracked.

  ‘I’m pretty sure this must be the place,’ said the Mayor, breathing heavily after the steep stairs. Tax records had shown that Madame Poldereau, the widowed mother of Sylvie Desbordes, lived here until her
death in 1944. Once Bruno had supplied the name of Desbordes for the owner of the farm, the Mayor himself had tracked down a wedding certificate for the Desbordes, with Madame Poldereau listed as witness and mother of the bride.

  ‘We don’t know why she didn’t move into the farm with her daughter; there’ll be a story behind that, maybe she didn’t get on with her son-in-law,’ the Mayor said.

  ‘Halévy’s partner told me the children had stayed in a small town for a while before moving to the farm,’ Bruno said. ‘And he specified St Denis.’

  ‘She was one of the few Protestants in town, so if you’re right about the Protestant connection this is where they probably stayed. But I don’t know how we could prove it.’

  ‘What did they do for water?’ Bruno asked, curious.

  Even the apartments below had no kitchens in those days and no bathrooms, the Mayor explained. There had been a standpipe in that tiny yard at the back and a communal latrine. At night they would use chamber pots and take them down to empty every day.

  Bruno went out to the hallway, unscrewed the light bulb on the landing and used it to replace the broken one in the attic, but the extra light revealed little more. He pushed open the door that led to the second room but it seemed empty except for dust and mouse droppings. On the walls were remnants of old wallpaper, a floral pattern of faded roses against a grey background. Some strips of it hung down like ribbons. Maybe a good forensic crew could pick up some fingerprints, Bruno thought, but he had none of Halévy’s prints for comparison.

  He played the torch around the room at waist height and below, wondering if there might be some childish scrawls, but saw nothing until by the door frame he stopped and bent down to peer more closely. Lifting one of the hanging strips of wallpaper he brought the torch closer and a childhood memory came back of his cousins’ house in Bergerac, a small mob of kids being lined up against the door frame while a grown-up stood there with a ruler and pencil.

  ‘What’s that?’ the Mayor asked, coming across the room to join him.

  ‘Not sure, but I think this could be where they stayed.’ Bruno pointed to the two short parallel lines drawn on the paper. One was about twenty centimetres higher than the other. ‘Remember when you were a kid and you tried to measure your height against the wall?’

  Under the glare of Bruno’s torch, some faded letters could almost be made out. Beside the higher line the wallpaper had been torn, but something remained that might have been the letter D and beside the lower was written Mar and perhaps an i.

  ‘Marie,’ said the Mayor, squinting through his spectacles. ‘It’s the wrong place.’

  ‘The lawyer told me she used the name Marie. It was close to her real name, Maya,’ said Bruno. ‘I think this must be the place.’

  He tried to visualize the scene; two Parisian children and an old woman, a stranger who probably spoke patois rather than the classic French the children could understand. All three of them cooped up here together for however long it took to arrange their move to the Desbordes farm. The children must have been frightened, hardly understanding what was happening to them or who was this stranger trying to help them and give them shelter. In Paris, they would have known kitchens, bathrooms, tucked into bed each night by a loving mother. Bruno shook his head at the thought of the Halévy children, who must have felt like fragile leaves tossed here and there by the great storm of war. The old grandmother, trying to divert them while keeping them hidden away indoors, had thought of measuring them and comparing their heights.

  ‘We have the place, both places,’ Bruno said. ‘What we need now is a plan to turn this into something the Halévy executors will support.’

  ‘This reminds me a bit of the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam,’ the Mayor replied. ‘Obviously we can preserve these rooms, bring in some furniture from the period, try to make it look as it was when the children were here.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Bruno agreed. ‘But I’m not sure we’ll persuade many tourists to climb those narrow stairs just to see some attic rooms. Could we turn the whole house into a museum, maybe about St Denis during the war, something to explain who the children were and why they were in hiding?’

  ‘If we can get funding from the bequest to do that, we could probably raise some more money elsewhere. The Ministry of Education would be the place to start,’ said the Mayor. ‘We could mount an exhibition on the Resistance here in the Périgord.’

  ‘Why not think of something more ambitious that could take in the other houses in this row?’

  ‘You mean a real town museum, the history of St Denis as well as the wartime and the children?’ said the Mayor, a note of excitement in his voice as he pondered the potential of such a project.

  ‘If we plan this carefully, we might be able to use this idea to solve the problem of this street,’ Bruno said. ‘I’ve always thought we’d have to demolish these houses one day and widen the road, but there’s another solution. What if we removed the ground-floor shops – they’re all empty anyway – and put in stone pillars to support the upper floors? Then we could use the ground floor for a much wider pavement, a kind of covered pedestrian precinct.’

  ‘There are six houses in this row. That would be a big museum.’ The Mayor was looking worried. ‘Can we justify that?’

  ‘Let’s get an architect to draw up some ideas and then run it past the local businessmen and see what they think. A museum like that would need a café and a gift shop. Maybe they could think of other commercial possibilities. At least it gives us a real project to propose to the Halévy trustees.’

  ‘We could call it the Halévy Museum,’ said the Mayor. ‘They’d like that.’

  ‘We’d need to emphasize that we want to use it as an educational centre. When I was researching the Halévy history I certainly learned about things I’d never known before,’ said Bruno. He explained that there could be one room on the history of the Jewish Scouts and their work in protecting children and another exhibit on their role in the Resistance with the fighting unit they formed. There could be another room on the role of the Protestant pastors, he suggested, and there would still be space for the town’s own museum of St Denis. There could even be a small cinema to show educational videos.

  The Mayor nodded, but then he frowned. ‘But what do we do with the social housing people? We’ve got nearly twenty families in these houses. We’d need to find alternative accommodation and there’s no money for that.’

  ‘You’re right, but let’s lay out the problem to the trustees and say here is our idea for a really ambitious project but we’d like their thoughts on how we tackle the various challenges it throws up,’ said Bruno. ‘I get the impression that the trustees want to do something serious and impressive, so we need to propose something that can catch their imagination. And it would do a lot of good for St Denis.’

  ‘But where do we rehouse those families?’ the Mayor persisted.

  ‘You’ve been complaining for years about the waste of that old cooperage off the Rue Gambetta,’ Bruno said. It was a fine stone building, with a big courtyard and that long workshop where they assembled the barrels. It had stood empty for years, since long before Bruno’s arrival. Properly converted, he suggested, it could house twenty families, and in much better conditions than these cramped apartments.

  ‘Get an architect to come up with some sketches and we can call it Résidences Halévy. It’s a historic building so there’ll be restoration grants we can apply for. Let’s think big. We can always scale it down later if we have to.’

  ‘Every time you suggest something, Bruno, it raises the costs even higher. You know how tough things are with the budgets these days.’

  Bruno knew there were times when it was best to give the Mayor the last word, and this was one of them. Then at the landing, the Mayor stopped and turned to face him.

  ‘A lot of this is going to depend on the amount of money available under Halévy’s will,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t hope to do this from our own resources.
So you’re going to have to make sure we make a very persuasive presentation to those trustees.’

  Bruno was not despondent. He’d been thinking about the presentation and wondering whether some glossily professional drawings by an architect might be too predictable. The key to this whole project was the children in the attic and building a fitting memorial to them and the people who sheltered them. That was why he would focus on the educational aspect of the museum, and why he was determined to involve the young people of St Denis.

  Thanks to Florence, the town’s collège students knew computers, and they could come up with some plans for the museum and maybe also for the farm. Why not get Florence and the students to make part of the presentation, rather than leave it in the hands of the Mayor and some local architect more accustomed to designing house restorations and supermarkets?

  As he headed for the airport to collect the lawyer from Paris, Bruno knew his Mayor’s wily political brain would be at work, balancing votes and budgets. The Mayor would see the advantage of using the schoolchildren of today’s St Denis to pay homage to the children of the war years. And doubtless he was also thinking about his own legacy as Mayor. From the Palace of Versailles to President Mitterrand’s giant new Arc at the end of the Champs Elysées in Paris, French kings and presidents had sought to build great monuments that would carry their names down the centuries. A project like this, properly handled, could do the same for the Mayor of St Denis.

  13

  Two people descended from the small turboprop aircraft that landed at Périgueux airport from Paris. Bruno had expected the first, a slim young man wearing an elegant dark suit, white shirt and sober tie. He carried one of the bulky briefcases that lawyers used. The second, an attractive young woman in a classically cut suit in burgundy with glossy dark hair spilling artfully from the loose bun atop her head, surprised him. She strode confidently forward to embrace him, announcing in almost perfect Parisian French, ‘Bruno, I’ve heard so much about you from Isabelle. She said to give you her love.’