by Allan Massie
‘Never,’ she said again, ‘never, never, never.’
‘It’s absurd to say there can never be another war.’ Armand liked to astonish his daughters with such pronouncements. ‘Equally, of course, it’s absurd to say that another is likely soon. You’re a fortunate generation, my dears. Your sweethearts and husbands are unlikely to be required. But your sons, that’s another matter altogether.’
‘Armand,’ Tante Berthe said, ‘eat your pudding. You know I don’t like you to talk of such matters to the girls. Or to me.’
Obediently, we dug our spoons into the cake, a gorgeous confection of chocolate, hazelnut and whipped cream, which was Dominique’s greatest pride and the especial delight of Tot and Toinette. Armand accepted the reproof with no more than a whisk of an eyebrow in my direction. But it was Tante Berthe who, pausing with the spoon halfway to her mouth, broke her own prohibition.
‘It’s not as if,’ she said, ‘we have recovered from the suffering caused us by the last one. Give us time for our wounds to heal. Which some never will.’
‘But that’s precisely my point,’ Armand said, waving his spoon in the air. ‘That’s precisely my point. We are worn out, utterly exhausted. Nobody in Europe can think of another war for a long time.’
‘What about Indo-China?’ Freddie asked.
‘Oh, colonial wars. I don’t count them, they’re absolutely of a different order of reality, to employ a phrase which I heard Mauriac use only the other day. No, they are not family wars, you see. Whereas, in this age of ideology, any European war is necessarily and inevitably a civil war too. I grant that may not be the case in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they must be experiencing the most appalling weariness after their efforts, which however you may dislike the regime – and I do, despite everything – were simply enormous. I remarked on this to the General last time he honoured me with an invitation to lunch at Colombey, and I’m proud to say he did not disagree. Only he said, “We must never forget the innocence of the Americans, and consequently their ignorance.”’
‘You are on lunching terms with de Gaulle?’ I asked, impressed.
‘He’s kind enough to seek my opinion, from time to time. And I advise him about his investments …’
I was impressed, for I still regarded de Gaulle as a hero, and was accustomed to defend him to those of my Cambridge friends who were interested in politics, and who all found his activities in the Rassemblement du Peuple Français repugnant or comic, or sometimes both. Jamie was fond of quoting Churchill’s complaint that the heaviest cross he had had to bear in the war was the Cross of Lorraine, and I would answer by asking him why Churchill should have expected the leader of the Free French to put what he interpreted as the interests of Britain or the United States above those of France.
‘But, you dummy, they were the interests of the Allied cause.’
‘Come off it, Jamie, not even a thoroughgoing Englishman can still pretend that the interests of the Allies were indivisible. Look where that pretence landed Eastern Europe.’
‘Mind you,’ Armand said now, ‘I don’t go there too often. It’s a dull house. The General is a hero of course, and a great man, but there’s no conversation there.’
‘He’s devoted to that poor retarded daughter of his,’ Tante Berthe said. ‘He is almost human when he is with her. It’s a beautiful sight …’
‘Do you think, Armand,’ I asked, ‘that he has any chance of returning to power?’
‘Well, I’m an RPF Deputy. Did you know that? So I must think he has. But I confess I don’t see how, and we are in the odd position of not being permitted to engage in what all the other parties – even the Communists, if the others would let them – regard as normal parliamentary politics, alliances and so on, you understand. So it will take a crisis.’
‘And you said there would be no war. So there can’t be another 1940?’
‘No, but there is more than one kind of crisis. And 1940 showed this at least, that the system can’t cope with a crisis … with a national disaster …’
Tante Berthe crossed herself.
‘Pray God we are spared that again,’ she said. ‘With its perversion of values.’
‘Did you know Laval?’ I asked.
Armand crumbled his bread.
‘Laval? Why do you ask that?’
‘Curiosity, nothing more …’
‘Yes, I knew him. Quite well. Not as well as … he was older, of course. A scoundrel, but such charm. And, in his twisted way, a patriot. Did you know he once said there were only two men who could save France in the war; one was Laval and the other was de Gaulle. He died because he was a realist. But that was the horror of 1940, that nobody had a monopoly of patriotism. And the remarkable thing was that the realists got it wrong. Perhaps they always do. Yalta was realistic, and look how it did for the Poles. But this is gloomy conversation for the summer.’
And there was so much he had left unsaid in it too. It was not the moment, and perhaps he was not the man who could bring himself to speak the words.
For years afterwards I believed that it was that conversation, desultory and trivial though it was, which let the cold wind of reality into the summer. It was a rhetorical way of putting it, which later I tried to deny. Reality, I told myself, is private life. Reality is the touch of skin on skin, it is a flower unfolding, it is weather and the wonderful creamy onion tart that Dominique would give us for lunch; reality was the grains of sand on the beach, the wind in the coarse sea-grasses, Freddie towelling herself by my side, most of all Freddie in my arms and her lips pressed against mine. Reality is sensuous and imaginative; rhetoric is its enemy. Politics, I told myself, represented a denial of reality, the preference of airy abstractions over the primal knowledge of sea, rocks, sand, bones, skin.
Now I don’t know. I am a middling-to-old holder of a South African passport, who smokes too much and is inclined to overdo the brandy; and I am properly confused. Words I know can matter as much as a full belly. Sarah believes that words can cause movement, and my own life seems to me a ridiculous attempt to deny that she is right.
And that is mad, for I have been broken by words.
Freddie lay on the beach by my side. A little wind had woken in the east and grains of sand were thrown up against her damp thighs. They sparkled there.
‘A diamanté naiad.’ I brushed them off, for the pleasure of running the back of my hand over her skin.
‘I wish this summer could go on forever,’ she said.
‘But it will.’
She leaned over and kissed me. We lay there with her hand resting on me and her hair tickling my lips.
‘I want to be with you forever,’ I said.
We were all but agreed on that. I knew it. Our union was perfect as a rose. We would talk for hours about everything and nothing, and we had as often no need to talk. It was urgent and there was no urgency. We had everything to say, had said everything and need say nothing.
*
I knew all this absolutely. Another morning, unable to sleep, for sheer unbridled happiness, I slipped out of my bed, pulled on flannel trousers and a shirt and sweater, and crept downstairs so as not to wake anyone. The door of the room which Freddie shared with Jeanne-Marie was open, and I entered on tiptoe to enjoy the magic of seeing the moonlight rest on her cheek. The spaniel Henry, on Jeanne-Marie’s bed, lifted his great head and licked my extended hand, and then flopped to the floor and followed me downstairs and out into the garden.
Tante Berthe had a way of managing to isolate whichever member of the family she wished to speak to, even in that higgledy-piggledy holiday house. She took me shopping and then suggested we should go and see a church which would interest me. It was Romanesque, and she wondered how it would compare with Norman churches in England. She talked of different styles of architecture; ‘Architecture is one of the things I know about, it lasts, a feeling for architecture too. I think that’s good. So many things that you care for when you are young don’t. But stones and the way t
hey are arranged have a permanency that you come to value as you get older.’
It was a little church, set high on a cliff, with the sea foaming below. The grass in the churchyard was coarse, grey-green with the sea winds. Gulls swooped squawking down below and as we approached a flock of jackdaws rose with chattering protest from the squat tower.
‘I like to think,’ she said, ‘that my ancestors worshipped here, and they must have done so. My mother’s family came from this village. You have no idea how difficult I found it to persuade Armand to feel at home here, we’re so different of course from the méridionales.’
She called on me to admire the solidity of the church; it had been built to withstand Atlantic gales.
‘And because of that it has withstood history too. Your grandmother has written to me that she was so pleased to see you. You have been much on her mind for years. How did you find her?’
I hesitated.
‘It is not vulgar curiosity that makes me ask. You must believe me when I say so.’ ‘I never thought it was. It’s only that I don’t know how to answer.’
‘Did she talk much of your father?’
‘Less than I expected. She made me free of his study. Tante Berthe, how did he die?’
‘Ah,’ she said, and pulled out a packet of Gitanes, lit a cigarette and pushed the packet across the rock to me. ‘I told Armand I was sure nobody had really discussed that with you.’
‘My grandmother merely says he was a hero, but if he was a hero, how is it that nobody seems eager to speak about it?’
‘Well, of course, it pains your grandmother. She’s a difficult woman, as I’m sure I have no need to tell you. She’s been hurt too deeply, and in consequence she alternates between desire to hurt others and a terrible fear of doing so. Not that I am in her confidence, she doesn’t like me, you understand. I’m a radical in her view, and it’s true, of course, that my family has always been on that side. Do you know much French history?’
‘Well, the Revolution, a bit; and I did a special subject on the Restoration.’
‘Well, you know that the Revolution still divides Frenchmen. There’s a clear line, passing through the Dreyfus case. My family and yours have always been on opposite sides of the line. That’s all.’
‘And Armand?’
‘He straddles it, thanks to me, which is why your grandmother dislikes me, in the most civil and punctilious manner, of course. She has never said a word to Armand against me, not since our marriage, though she tried hard to stop it. And now we correspond in the most polite terms once a fortnight. Only she knows that I am reluctant to let the girls visit her. Naturally she holds that against me, but it can’t be helped. There’s a picnic in the car, would you like to fetch it?’
We spread rillettes of pork on the good bread of those days, and drank cider, which I divined Tante Berthe regarded as an expression of her difference from the Southern family into which she had married, experiencing in doing so a discomfort and difficulty of which I had had, till this moment, no inkling at all. I had been regarding Armand and her as a married couple of unusual and very pleasing felicity, blessed with loving and wholly lovable daughters and surrounding themselves with a warmth and comfort that seemed to come close to the expression of an ideal way of life; and now, all at once, I was aware of strain.
‘You brought me here for a purpose, didn’t you? Not just to look at the church?’
She shook her head but did not reply.
‘Not just to look at the church, and enjoy the sea breezes.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ she said, ‘and you’ve been very good about it.’
She gave me a shy smile in which I could see Jeanne-Marie; it was as if the two of them, mother and daughter, fused into one, and this gave me confidence to repeat my question.
‘How did my father die?’
‘Hasn’t Polly talked about it, hasn’t she told you?’
‘Would I be asking if … and …’
‘No, of course not, and perhaps she doesn’t know.’
‘Or care.’
‘Oh, I think she would care.’ Tante Berthe lit another cigarette and again pushed the packet towards me.
‘Yes, I think she would care. She and Lucien loved each other, you know, very much, till, well, till the world came between them. That’s the only way I can put it. The crash of the world. Let me ask you a question, it’s why I brought you here. I think you have become very fond of little Freddie, haven’t you?’
‘Why,’ I said, ‘yes. Yes, I have.’
‘There’s no need to blush, you idiot. She’s a delightful girl and lovely, in a sort of way, an unusual way. She has quality. She’s been coming to stay with us for years – she and Jeanne-Marie have been friends for a long time, and besides, her mother was one of my oldest friends. We all love Freddie. And it’s been obvious of course that you do. And she loves you a bit too, doesn’t she?’
‘Really, Tante Berthe.’
‘At first,’ she blew out smoke which hung blue in the air, ‘at first I hoped it was only a summer affair, but I think you both think it’s more serious. Am I right?’
I was resentful that she should have had this hope, as if she had thought us incapable of seriousness. I hadn’t realised then how impossible it is that people with some store of experience should ever be able to regard the emotions of the young with the respect that the young demand. So I probably sounded indignant when I assured her that we were both utterly serious.
‘We haven’t talked of marriage, of course. Not as something definite … but it’s understood all the same.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘it’s as bad as that, is it? What I’ve been wondering, you see, is whether I am morally required to tell Freddie’s father, and I’ve been hoping I wouldn’t have to. As long as it seemed merely a boy-and-girlsummer affair, I thought it best to let things run their natural course, but if you are talking this way, my poor Etienne, then he will have to be told. And he won’t like it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She placed her hand on my arm.
‘No, of course, you don’t, you poor boy.’
‘It’s our life,’ I said, ‘and even if Freddie’s father disapproves of me – which he may well not – well, if Freddie loves me, and she does, I’m sure of that, I don’t see why. I admit we’re young, but I’m prepared to wait.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I wish I had never started this. It’s far worse than I feared.’
And then, making an absent-minded, indeed unconscious, daisychain from the flowers that grew around us, she embarked, like a reluctant emigrant, on her explanation. What did I know of Freddie’s family? Well, almost nothing, so she must start there.
Freddie’s father, she said, was difficult. He had always been difficult, but that wasn’t really the point. Nor, essentially, was it the point that Freddie was his only daughter, his only surviving child. Well, no, she was wrong, that was the point, the starting-point at least. Had I realised that Freddie was half-Jewish? Of course I didn’t mind about that, that wasn’t what she meant at all, though she had to admit that my grandmother was certainly a different matter. Which wasn’t important, because it could never reach the point of being important.
‘I’m sorry, Tante Berthe, but I’m mystified.’
Patience. She was sorry she was attacking it so obliquely, but when she had finished I would realise how difficult it had been, and so perhaps understand. She was chain-smoking as she struggled to find a way into this story, from which she shrank because she knew it would hurt me. And Tante Berthe was, as I had sensed, a sort of earth-goddess whose mission it was to spread fecundity, and who now found herself moving like the angel of death across a smiling landscape. So she lit one Gitane from the butt of another, narrowing her eye against the smoke and the pity which she felt for me.
‘Did you notice I spoke of Freddie’s mother in the past tense?’
‘Yes.’
‘And has Freddie ever mentioned her?’
‘She was twelve, perhaps thirteen, when they took her away. And her sisters. To Ravensbrück.’
In those days the Holocaust was not what it has since become, a subject trailed and trampled through the newspapers and across our television screens. It was still a barely imaginable horror. I had seen, like everybody else, photographs of corpses piled high at Belsen, photographs which were beyond words and below them.
So now there was nothing I could say, and I looked beyond Tante Berthe at the wide sea, blue-grey with flecks of foam and the seabirds calling, and at the squat Norman church asserting the indisputable survival of fact and faith.
‘Freddie was with us. In hiding.’
‘In hiding? I don’t understand.’
‘They were looking for Armand too, you see, and word was brought to us that they were going to take us … to persuade him to surrender … so we went into hiding, and, fortunately, Freddie was with us …’
‘Guy, Freddie’s father, has never forgiven, or forgotten. How could he? It’s impossible anyone should, and he is a man of deep feeling, a poet manqué. No, it’s impossible.’
‘And does Freddie know?’
‘In the manner that the young do.’
The breeze, which did no more than touch the grasses with movement, sent a cloud scudding over the sun. Tante Berthe drew a cardigan around her shoulders.
‘And Guy always disliked your father, poor Lucien. So, you see, in the circumstances it is impossible that he should permit Freddie … he disliked him from the time they were students. And then politics intervened … so you see that it can’t be. I am sorry for you, and for Freddie.’
‘But I still don’t understand. In fact, I’m mystified. What have politics got to do with it? I mean, it’s a question of Freddie and me, surely. We love each other. Of course I can see that it’s possible he might not approve of me, but unless he’s unbalanced, then surely …’