by Allan Massie
‘Still in her sixties. She was only a girl, you know.’
‘It seems incredible.’
‘That she should have tracked me down?’
‘No, not that. That someone who was then is also now. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know why,’ Niels said, ‘it’s always raining when I come to Paris. I never get Hemingway weather.’
The sky pressed on the mansard roofs. Cars threw up showers of dirty water. There had been snow and now people squelched through grey slush, slipping and splashing. There wasn’t a smile anywhere.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Simenon weather.’
We went to our hotel, bathed, changed, reassembled. It was now raining on a sharp diagonal from the north-west. The porter whistled up a taxi.
‘Are you nervous?’
In reply I pressed my daughter’s hand.
‘How do you think she found out about you, where to write and so on? And what can she tell us? She can’t want to make excuses.’
It was one of those moments when you talk only to disturb a silence.
We turned off the Boulevard St Germain, and into the narrow Rue du Tournon. The driver searched for the number I had given him, and drew up between a café and an antique shop. There was a concierge, who admitted that Madame Candice had told her to expect us. We mounted to the fifth floor in an ironwork lift of art nouveau design.
I wouldn’t have recognised the woman who opened the apartment door to us from the photographs I had found in my father’s study at the Château de l’Haye. That was a silly reflection. How many people still resemble their youth? She was medium-sized and thickset with white hair cut straight and hanging loose, as if it had once been long and abundant and then hacked off with an axe. She wore a shaggy sweater and black trousers and the smear of lipstick had been carelessly applied. She had dark glasses on despite the gloom of the apartment.
‘I would have known it was you,’ she said, ‘anywhere. You’ve got Lucien’s eyes. It’s like seeing a ghost.’
We drank coffee which she had already prepared. She urged mille-feuilles pastries on us, active in hospitality as if to ward off the conversation she had gone to such trouble to invite.
‘It’s good of you to come,’ she said several times.
I had explained Sarah and Niels to her, but she kept glancing at him as if he was an intruder.
‘I read everything you wrote for Hugh,’ she said. ‘You got an awful lot right. I was amazed how much. It was, oddly, comforting. The understanding.’
She now addressed me in English.
‘I guess these young people are happier in English,’ she said.
‘You know Hugh Challefray? I hadn’t realised …’
‘Sure, he’s my nephew. Well, my nephew by marriage. He didn’t tell you that? Well, he was always a secretive child. Maybe he thought it would put you off. I don’t know. He tells me he feels bad about it.’
‘It was all your idea? You put him up to it?’
‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘Or only in a sense. By that I mean that I got Hugh interested in your father. He was looking round for a subject for his thesis, you see.’
‘But this is extraordinary,’ I said.
‘Bob Candice’s sister Merrill married Roger Challefray, Hugh’s father. Bob was my husband, you know. So that makes Hugh my nephew. Only in a manner of speaking really, because he was the son of Roger’s first wife Betty, who divorced Roger and went to live in Ireland. Then Merrill married him when Rog was working for UNESCO, so Hugh spent a lot of his childhood with Bob and me and I’ve always thought of him as my nephew. We’ve always been close and Bob and I had no children of our own, you know.’
‘And now?’
‘Well, now you’ve told him I betrayed my lover, which disturbs him somewhat. And it isn’t true, or not the way you have it. That’s why I had to see you. I don’t suppose there’s anyone much alive whose good opinion I care for, except Hugh and yourself. Do you mind if I call you Etienne? It’s how I think of you. I used to hear so much about you, you know. You were on his mind a lot.’
She pulled out a packet of king-sized Chesterfields and lit one with an old leather-covered lighter. Her fingernails were cut short and not varnished.
‘We sometimes dared to talk about after the war, when you would spend holidays with us.’ She drew on her cigarette and expelled smoke through her nose. ‘I knew this would be difficult. I didn’t think it would be this hard to know where to begin.’
Sarah got up and crossed to the window. She stood there a long time looking out at the rain and the wet roofs across the street. We all watched her and didn’t speak. Then she turned round and sat down on the sofa beside Anne. She kicked off her shoes, drew her knees up and hugged them.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We’ve come here for the story and we wouldn’t have done that if we believed it ended just the way Daddy wrote it. We know it must be tough for you, even if you did offer it yourself. So take your time. We’re in no hurry. Why don’t you begin at the beginning. Be conventional. When you first met Lucien. Did Daddy get that right?’
Anne smiled, as you might smile leafing through an old photograph album and catching a day when the world was good.
‘You’re not to worry,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s too long ago for tears. It’s a life Niels and me,’ she freed her left hand and touched his hair, ‘never knew. But we’ve all now lived with the story a long time. Especially Daddy, and he never wanted to, really. So we would like … so you see? Help us to understand.’
‘The fact that we’ve come here,’ Niels said, ‘that Monsieur de Balafré has come here, proves that it’s not a question of blame. It’s maybe for both of you, and for Sarah at one further remove, a matter of letting the dead sleep quiet in the earth.’
‘You’re bigger than he was,’ she said to me, ‘and you try to look as if you don’t care, which he never could, but you’ve the same expression in your eyes. And your mouth’s the same … if I start by saying he was the love of my life does that make it sound like an operetta?’
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘It sounds right.’ She glanced at Niels, and I knew that for the moment at least these two were safe, in love, together.
‘But what about Mr Candice?’ she said. ‘Bob, did you call him? What about him?’
‘Oh, he was an American. I married him, and we had a good marriage. He died last year in the fall, too young, he wasn’t seventy. We met in ’46 – he was a lawyer attached to the Commission – and married in ’48. We had a good relationship, but he never set my heart on fire. And I disappointed him too, because – well – he knew there was something missing. Once, when he had an affair with his secretary, he let me know I was like a cracked plate. We made do and mended, but it hurt him that I couldn’t be as jealous of his live girls as he was of your dead father. This is off the track,’ she said, ‘I’m going to fetch a bottle of wine. Sarah, would you care to help me with the glasses?’
There were photographs all over the room, several of Lucien. I wondered if she’d displayed them during the years of her marriage, or whether they’d remained hidden away in a bottom drawer, to be taken out and gazed on when Candice wasn’t there. There was one, in a silver frame, of a group at a table with bottles of glasses and coffee-cups and the remains of a meal. Colette was whispering something in a girl’s ear while Lucien smiled. I could hardly recall having seen him smile in a photograph before. It was a smile that for the moment accepted things as they were. The girl’s face was shaded by Colette’s hair. Her head was inclined towards the old lady and she was waving a cigarette in the hand beyond. Her arm had fallen into the sort of line that Ingres might have demanded from a model.
‘So long ago,’ she said, picking up the photograph, ‘like yesterday. When Bob Candice died I came back to Paris. I couldn’t have done that twenty years before, it would have been too painful; now it seems it would be painful to live anywhere else. I walk on the quais and think what things mi
ght have been like. It’s my refuge, daydreaming. Moreover, most of the people I think of as my enemies are dead. Certainly the chief of them.’
She handed me a glass of Beaujolais.
‘Begin at the beginning, you said? Well, for me, the beginning was an old house in a dull town in Brittany, not even on the sea, about thirty kilometres from Rennes. My father taught at the university there and would stay in the city the night before his lectures and come home in the afternoon in the little train. He was a kind man whose only interest was Celtic archaeology. He died just before the war, and our childhood was passed in a quiet house full of ugly heavy furniture, with a long narrow garden surrounded by a high wall. We spent our time writing stories. I adored Alain, my second brother, and it was because of Alain that I fell in love with your father. For I was in love with him before we met on account of the letters Alain wrote to me from the front. Alain was always honest with me, and the thing you didn’t guess in your reconstruction was that he was terrified of showing fear when they went into action. He was so terrified that he could not sleep some nights, he told me, for fear, but lay awake sweating. And then Lucien gave him courage. He thought he was wonderful, and so different from all the other officers in the regiment. So, when Alain was dead and I was in the Ministry of Education, and found myself transferred to Paris, I was desperate to meet your father. His failure to arrive that morning was a Godsend, and I went to collect him, determined to make him fall in love with me. I used to tease him about it later, but he could never believe me. That was the most difficult thing for Lucien, accepting that he could be loved. He had been hurt, you know, by your mother’s infidelities.
‘One question I’ve often asked myself: what would Alain have done in 1940? And I’m sure he would have been guided by Lucien, who really had no doubts then that he had done the right thing. He trusted Pétain, and if that was naive, so were 95 per cent of the French people. So was I.’
She lit another cigarette and drank some wine.
‘All the same, in one sense Lucien was happy in the winter of 1942 when he was able to leave the government. I think by then he knew there was no future for France that didn’t involve terrible suffering. And of course he was shamed by the thing about sending French workers to Germany. If it hadn’t been for me, I believe he would have volunteered to go himself.
‘You’re quite right. His mother didn’t like me, though she did once say to me, “At least you’re French, at least you understand something of Lucien.” But she was jealous because I made him happy, and she couldn’t.
‘And then Hervé. You assumed too much there. You assumed I loved Hervé as I did Alain. But I always knew Hervé was a little mad. He had such charm but he was a fanatic at heart, and my love for him was protective, not trusting. I even warned Lucien against him, that he couldn’t rely on him. Trust. You know that’s the word that dominates my memory of the war years. Who you could trust, who you couldn’t, how far you could trust anyone. We were living in a world in which the most natural conversation could suddenly open up an abyss. Do you know, even after forty years of America, near enough, I don’t believe I have escaped what we learned then: to distrust everything, even love. Perhaps especially love. That’s what the war did. It put fear in bed with love. Love has to trust the future and we couldn’t …’
She paused. The afternoon was darkening.
‘Sarah,’ she said, ‘I’ve a long way to go and I’m almost out of cigarettes. Stupid of me. No, I really only like these. Would you mind going down to the tabac at the corner and getting me a couple of packs? They keep them for me there. Perhaps your young man would go with you.’
‘Of course,’ Sarah said, ‘with pleasure.’
We listened for the clang of the lift door.
Anne said, ‘I didn’t betray your father, but I do have a confession to make.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Actually I have plenty of these,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t tell you this in front of Sarah. I did betray Lucien once. With Rupert. It was an afternoon in September when the heat dried everything up and made distances short. There was the rattle of crickets outside the window. Lucien had gone into the town, to see the Prefect. We looked at each other. He was drinking coffee and his hand shook and, without speaking, we mounted the stairs to his bedroom. I hadn’t even thought of him like that before. Afterwards I lay with my face pressed against his withered arm and heard him say, “I’ve always wanted to possess everything that was his,” and I knew that was true of me too. So, you see, the act of betrayal was in another way a new bond. It made me part of what Rupert shared with Lucien, and him part of what we had.
‘I had a miscarriage. You missed that, or didn’t guess it. It was while Lucien was in prison and after Hervé had been killed. I knew he was dead, and I was afraid Lucien soon would be also, and then my baby died within me. It might have been Rupert’s, I’ve often wondered, but I don’t think it was.
‘I left him from sheer misery. I think you were right there. He couldn’t speak to me after he had been tortured, could hardly bear to bring himself to look at me. His mother had told him about Rupert – I’m sure of that – she knew everything that happened in the house – she used to know without even spying. But it wasn’t on account of that, and not even on account of Hervé, that he couldn’t look at me or touch me. It was shame. He thought the torture had degraded him, when it had only proved him human. And my heart was breaking to be with him, and because I was denied by him. But he understood about Rupert, we talked of it later, before the end. You have to believe me.
‘I couldn’t stay away. It was worse not to be with him. I knew it could never be just the same again. What we keep of the past is always changed by what has happened in between. It can never be three o’clock in the afternoon yesterday, a second time.
‘Yet his face, when he came back and saw me sitting on the doorstep … it was like a saint’s – St Stephen or St John the Baptist … glowing with joy. “Contra mundum”, we said, and contra mundum it was. How, when you understand that, could you have been so … stupid, if you’ll forgive the word, as to believe I could betray him?’
Sarah and Niels returned with the cigarettes.
‘Thank you, but I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it was foolish of me. I find I had another pack here all the time. Perhaps we should have a second bottle of wine … or some tea? No, wine then.
‘I urged him to leave Paris and France. But he wouldn’t. There were planes that would have taken us to Madrid or Barcelona, and he wasn’t Laval – there wouldn’t have been international difficulties if they had let him remain – he wasn’t important in that way, they wouldn’t have surrendered him.
‘You were right about Laval, by the way. Lucien actually came to like him and admire him. It was odd, because Laval really had no shame. He was a peasant, that was why Lucien liked him, but it was also what in the end separated them, for Lucien couldn’t have been less like a peasant himself …
‘But he resisted my pleas. He wouldn’t go. So there was nothing for it but to stay with him. I wasn’t in danger myself, or I didn’t think I was, not real danger.
‘We talked. How everybody talked those last days, round and round, like people lost in a maze, beating our thoughts against facts like the sea surging on the rocks …
‘He laughed when he told me of how Drieu had spoken to that little girl in the Ritz bar advising her to wait there for an American. It was almost what I did myself eighteen months later.
‘But I’m rambling, as if I was still in the maze. It’s because I don’t want to arrive at my destination. You understand that, don’t you Sarah?’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said, ‘I think I do.’
Someone in the street below began to play a trumpet. It was the St Louis Blues: ‘I hate to see that evening sun go down.’ The notes, melancholy as the cry of gulls, rose through the failing light.
‘It’s a friend of mine,’ Anne said. ‘We’ve become friends. He really does come from St Louis, but he doesn’t want to go home. He
plays in the street every afternoon, for the last two months now, since his lover shot himself. We sometimes have a drink together in the little bar on the corner. He used to be a professional, but he’s not very good, is he?’
The trumpet’s bray cut through the noise of the traffic, filling the apartment with the sense of things – time, lovers, chances, afternoons – drifting beyond hope.
‘We got on the train at 11.37,’ Anne said. ‘I had at last persuaded him to come to my mother’s home. It was weariness made him agree. The train moved slowly and uncertainly because the line was damaged in places, and we scarcely dared to talk. Lucien sat with his back to the engine, as the suburbs ran away from us. Into the past.
‘They boarded the train on the outskirts of Orléans. Young men, with rifles slung across their backs, cheerful and confident. They asked for him by name. He stood up, and the other people in the compartment seemed to shrink away. It was a boy with tousled black curly hair who took him by the arm. “Are you his girl?” he said to me. “We want you too.”
‘I was pushed into a little cell in the police station, and left alone. I threw myself down on the pallet bed, shaking and weeping. We had had papers, I’d seen to that myself. I had told no one of our plans. When they brought me a hunk of bread and some soup, I asked, “Who informed on us?” Naturally I got no answer. The girl spat in my soup. She called me “a collaborator’s whore”.
‘Lucien had talked so often of his determination to stand trial. When I looked at that spittle curling in my soup, I knew he had no chance. I began to cry, and the girl smacked me on the cheek and then hit me on the side of the head with the bunch of keys she was carrying. Look.’
She pushed back the lock of hair that hung over her left temple and thrust her face forward so that the light fell on a little criss-cross cicatrice.
‘It’s not much, is it. Yet that’s the only physical damage I suffered in the whole war. But it was the first time in my life anyone had hit me.
‘They left me in the dark. It was cold and damp and there was no blanket. I curled up, hugging myself for warmth, and gnawed the bread. In the morning the blood had formed a thick crust over the wound. I begged to be allowed to see Lucien. No good. That went on for two days. They didn’t hit me again, but each time the girl brought me the soup, she spat in it. Once she threw the bread on to the floor, and told me to get down on my knees and pick it up with my teeth. I looked at her, in a battle of wills, which I lost. The cell stank. The chamberpot was overflowing, and I didn’t dare ask for another in case the girl threw its contents in my face. That night two other women – one a girl of sixteen – were thrown in to join me. They’d both had their heads shaved. The older one looked at me as if she couldn’t credit the hair on my head. The young one crouched in the corner of the cell covering her bald head with her arms. When she fell asleep her arms dropped away, and a band of moonlight lay like pale shiny wax on her skull.’