THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  My ring was answered by a plump, middle-aged woman in black, sleeves rolled back on pink arms, unwelcoming, alarmed at confrontation with a stranger in British battle-dress. She said in reply to my enquiry, _'Je suis madame Lamartine'._ So this was the wife he had deserted for the talkative Madame Chalmar. I had taken her for the maid. 'Are you a British officer? I speak some English.'

  'I met Dr Lamartine during the war. I have a friendly interest in his whereabouts, that's all.'

  'Dr Lamartine is dead,' she told me curtly.

  I exclaimed, 'What happened?'

  'My husband was killed in the big air raid by the RAF on March 3, 1942. He was living across at Montmartre. He had sent me and the children away from Paris when the war started.'

  'I'm very sorry, madame,' I consoled her.

  _'C'est la guerre,'_ she said briefly. 'When did you last see him, monsieur?'

  'In Bordeaux, during the summer of 1940.'

  She looked at me suspiciously. 'What was your business with my late husband?'

  'You've heard of penicillin, I expect?' She nodded. 'Dr Lamartine had a specimen of penicillin mould, which I was sent from England to recover before the Germans could get their hands on it.'

  'Henri would not have given it to the Boches,' she said promptly. 'He was not a collaborator, whatever people say. But there's no use talking about it now.' She started to shut the door. 'You knew Madame Chalmar? She was killed by the same bomb,' Madame Lamartine added with satisfaction. 'To be exact, the firemen found her with my husband's body, very hysterical. She died suddenly shortly after. I do not think she was a very healthy woman.'

  'You knew her well?'

  'No. I would not have wished to meet her.'

  I walked slowly back to the street. I never had any liking for Lamartine. But I thought him stupid rather than sinister. For him to be killed by a British bomb struck me as a rather unnecessary exaggeration of irony. My experience stimulated my curiosity to call on Professor Piйry, his house being not far away by the Bois.

  He had the same maid, puzzled at being unable to place me. He was at home, and received me in the dining-room with the same lurid colour photograph of his son, the fleeing lieutenant. He looked much older and even thinner. His cook's art had become the most pointless in France.

  'My dear Mr Elgar-' He shook hands powerfully but solemnly, holding mine in both his. 'What terrible experiences we have suffered, since you last left this house. With the young Miss Tiplady

  'Miss Tiplady is very well, and now married.'

  _'Eh, bien…_ we wondered if you ever got home safely to England. Those days of 1940 brought no credit to any of the Allies. Not to us French, because we ran away. Not to you British, because you snatched back all your planes. Not to the Americans, because they should have declared war on Hitler there and then. But you have heard of Jean-Baptiste? My son?' I shook my head. 'He was shot. By the Germans, as a hostage.'

  I was so appalled that I could say nothing. I had noticed that the professor still wore a black crepe band across his lapel. His was a suffering of which I had often heard during the past few months, but never encountered face to face. He waved me to a chair. 'We are getting over it now. We see him as dead for the honour of France, like any other soldier killed in action.'

  'But when did this happen?'

  'In 1942. Of course, in 1940 my son had to report back to the Army, and was immediately locked up by the Germans. He had a hope they might release him, because of his English-to interpret the broadcasts of your BBC, something of that nature, but the Boches had enough interpreters of their own and weren't inclined to trust a Frenchman. I got him out early in 1941, on what they called _en congй de captivitй._ Jean-Baptiste had been working in my laboratory at the Franзoise-Xavier, and the Germans were releasing in a conditional way _le personnel sanitaire,_ as well as men to run the railways, the electricity and gas, and so on. My God, he was better off then than millions of others captured in the fields, or even sitting in their barracks, some of them kids just called to the colours, who'd never even had a rifle in their hands. Do you know what these were saying at the Armistice? That it obviously meant demobilization for everyone, they'd be back in their homes in a fortnight. Instead, they were marched off to Germany, without food, sleeping in fields, and kept for the rest of the war securely behind _les barbelйs.'_

  He paused, leaving me to feel the pain of his silence for almost half a minute.

  'Then in 1942…at the beginning of August. Things really started to become very bad in Paris that summer. The German General Schaumburg had been killed, a bomb was thrown at his car. The Nazis were getting nervous, which was a very dangerous state, as I'm sure you know. Of course, they ascribed the attack to "Jews and Communists", but it was the work of the Resistance. Jean-Baptiste was arrested by the SS. Why they should pick on him I don't know, I don't know…'

  The Professor sat in his chair slowly shaking his head, still in tragic bewilderment. 'Perhaps it was because of my position in the medical faculty of Paris. There were plenty of my son's fellow-officers after the Armistice who were left completely unmolested. He was kept in the Fresnes prison, we never saw him nor heard from him. Then a German officer was shot dead in Molitor Mйtro station, near the racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne. The Polizeifьhrer, the SS General Oberg, announced that one hundred Frenchmen would be shot if the assassin was not handed over by the population to the French police in ten days. Well, the assassin was not. My son was shot with the others on the morning of August 1, by the little barracks at the Carrefour des Cascades in the Bois. He was allowed to write a letter first, which I have in that desk. As an additional punishment, General Oberg shut all Paris theatres and cinemas for a week,' he added with a contemptuous snort. 'Which shows how the Nazis equated the value of a hundred human lives.'

  We sat without speaking for some moments. I could not console him, because consolation is a charity which can outrun the power of words.

  'Yes, my son died in action,' Professor Piйry repeated wearily. 'Had that assassin been denounced, do you know what would have happened? All his male relatives-including his brothers-in-law and all his cousins over eighteen-would have been shot. Yes, shot, all of them. Their wives would all have been sent to concentration camps. Their children all taken to a prison-school. This Teutonic thoroughness was made completely clear to us by a proclamation from General Oberg when he took up his job. The General claimed his measures were necessary for the calm and security of the Parisiens. And they say the Nazis had no sense of humour,' he ended bitterly. 'That letter of my son's will be passed down in my family, it shall never be destroyed.'

  I was relieved that a knock at the dining-room door broke the tension. The maid appeared, remembering me now and smiling. She left on the table a brass tray with two minute glasses and a bottle of reddish apйritif, which I noticed from its encrusted neck had been in use for some time.

  'We are still obliged to be frugal,' Professor Piйry explained, pouring out two drinks. 'But things are naturally better than during the occupation, when we had alternate _fours avec_ and _fours sans_-of wine, you know.'

  I asked something which had often been in my mind the past five years. 'What happened in Paris in the days immediately after we left for Tours?'

  'Oh, the Germans showed their noses early on June 14. They came along the rue de Flandre from the porte de la Villette, in the north-east. There was nothing in their way except unarmed policemen to direct their traffic. I saw a column of them about six-thirty, driving towards Neuilly from the Invalides. Soon we had posters plastered everywhere, a kindly young fellow in field-grey without his helmet, holding up three French kids who were eating his bread-and-butter ration. _Abandonnйes, faites confiance au soldat allemand!_ Goebbels at his most expert. Goebbels graced us with a visit in July. Hitler appeared at once, of course. Things resumed an appearance of normal. The tide turned, everyone came back from the roads to see if their belongings had been stolen, a consideration hardly in their minds befor
e departure, I assure you. I could never have left Paris, of course, because of my patients. The cinemas and cafйs reopened. So did the _maisons closes._ I remember we had Faust at the Opйra, and the _Folies Bergиre_ started again. We even had _Sainte Jeanne _by your Bernard Shaw that winter. There was a swastika flying from the Eiffel Tower and the Germans took over the Rue de Rivoli completely, from one end to the other. At noon every day they paraded up and down the Champs-Elysйes with a brass band.'

  The Professor took a tiny sip of his apйritif. 'We had to settle down to some sort of life. The Germans requisitioned all our cars, we had wooden soles to our shoes, we had nothing to smoke and we went about on bicycles. Everybody kept rabbits, and they dug up the Jardin du Luxembourg to grow vegetables. There was a curfew, and any retardataires who missed the last Mйtro had to spend the night squatting in a police station.'

  'Didn't you manage to get any encouragement from the outside world?'

  'Listening to foreign broadcasts meant the concentration camp, but of course most of us risked it. The papers all presented the war after 1941 as a struggle between the European Forces and the Bolsheviks. That was the Pйtain line. Laval had the effrontery to make a speech here about the immense German sacrifices to this end on our own behalf. They founded _La Gerbe_-"The Sheaf"-which was supposed to be a balanced intellectual weekly, _pour les hommes de bon volontй de tous les partis._ But it was all Nazi hypocrisy, its disappearance was a minor joy of our Liberation.'

  'What about de Gaulle?'

  'They called him a tool of the Jews. Whom they collected in the _Vйlodrome d'Hiver-_the indoor cycle race-track-and deported to the concentration camps.'

  The door opened. Madame Piйry appeared, dressed in black. She started crying as she greeted me, through association with her son. 'He was not alone,' she said. 'Now that everything has come out, the Germans shot 29,660 French hostages.'

  The news of death never seems to come singly, or perhaps the first blow makes us more sensitive to the others. I reached London the week before Christmas, where I had booked a room at a small hotel in Cavendish Square. Among my waiting letters was a telegram sent the day before from Budleigh Salterton, saying that my mother was 'seriously ill'. By the time I arrived there, she was dead. She had just turned sixty and had suffered a stroke. 'She was so loyal, so devoted and so hardworking,' the old lady kept repeating in a heartbroken voice. 'One simply doesn't find servants like that any more.' My mother left me Ј200, the savings of a lifetime. It was useful to buy a second-hand prewar car. My only emotion was a ghost of the liberation I felt so guiltily on the death of Rosie.

  I had a lonely Christmas, but I hate obligatory jollity. In the New Year I won my expected job at Arundel College, Senior Lecturer with the old professor only three years to go. I should be 37 when I succeeded to the chair, exactly the age when Florey had burst into Oxford. I had decided that, like Florey, I should set my staff searching out unfinished lines of research. But for the cure of cancers, not infections. That was the next exploration for man's restive mind.

  I never had so much confidence in my science and myself as that New Year of 1946. Perhaps the Millennium being enacted by Mr Attlee's government had something to do with it. But cancer is still uncured. And I ended up as a professor as futile and frustrated as most of the others. My divorce was more permanently rewarding. I consulted a jolly, chubby, bearded solicitor just released from commanding a submarine, who peppered his advice with expressions about surfacing, crash diving and depth charging. 'There are three times the petitions as before the war,' he said with satisfaction. 'Couples who married in the Forces discover a terrible shock, living together for longer than a fortnight's leave at a time. Without the duty-free cigarettes and drinks, too. Got another target in your periscope?'

  The following week I opened my Times to find that Sir Edward Tiplady was dead. I telephoned Archie, who seemed insistent that I join Elizabeth and himself at the funeral.

  It was a dull and drizzling afternoon at a crematorium on the edge of a vast estate of little red-brick council houses at Shepherd's Bush. I went by Underground in my new utility suit. I arrived as Lady Tip in a mink coat was stepping out of Sir Edward's angular 1935 Rolls Royce. She had spent most of the war living in Claridge's Hotel, with several exiled kings and Alexander Korda.

  Archie was looking gaunter and gloomier than ever, Elizabeth lovelier. She wore a smart black costume, the straight skirt reaching half way down calves in black nylon stockings, her dark hair in a small round black hat with a deep frill of stiff black muslin. The Packers were there, but said nothing about Clare, though I saw how they were bursting to. I barely remembered what my first wife looked like, until I found among my mother's effects a small photograph album annotated in her copperplate hand with the dates of unmemorable outings. It struck me how happy I looked, but perhaps I was obliging the camera

  Archie offered me a lift in their small car, elaborately excusing his use of official petrol by some imminent meeting in the Ministry. 'I happened to come across one of your reports from Germany on industrial intelligence. Not at all badly done,' he observed to me, I thought most condescendingly. 'Cripps, Dalton and Bevin are very interested in that particular exercise, I hope you realize. I had a special meeting with them at the Board of Trade last August.'

  'How are you enjoying revolutionizing the country?'

  'I'd be enjoying it much more if my ulcer didn't play me up. It's all tremendously hard work. But tremendously exhilarating. This time we're setting methodically about building a just and equal society in Britain, instead of shouting vaguely about "A Country Fit For Heroes To Live In", like Lloyd George.'

  'You don't seem to have got very far yet,' I told him. There was continued rationing of everything from bacon and butter to soap and shoes, a scarcity of everything else, and nightly gloom from street lights left unlit to save electricity.

  'Of course we have. We've already the date for nationalizing the coal mines,' he told me, sounding offended.

  He was dropping Elizabeth in Belgrave Square. 'Come in and have a cup of tea,' she invited me. Archie did not seem to object. 'Don't forget we're dining with Mummy at Claridge's,' she instructed him, as he drove off.

  The flat was undamaged, and much as I remembered it from the beginning of the war. 'Do you know who poor daddy called in when he had his heart attack?' Elizabeth asked me. She entered the kitchen at the back, still with her frilled hat on. 'Lord Horder. He wouldn't have anyone else.'

  'Your father was immeasurably good to me.'

  She lit the gas under the kettle. 'At heart he was a pansy, wasn't he?'

  'Yes.'

  'Did he make advances towards you?

  'Not physically. He would never have dared. And it would have repulsed him. He was far too sensitive.'

  'I thought that pansies had just as much sexual drive towards each other as men and women?'

  'That's true. But there're a number of men who love women and find physical sex repugnant.'

  'Hand me that teapot, there's a darling.'

  'Archie's left us alone in the flat? Without even a servant on the watch?'

  'Why shouldn't he?'

  'Isn't that typical of Archie. He always does what he thinks he should, rather than what he wants. It's a form of self-honesty, I suppose. And that's so much rarer than honesty towards other people.'

  'It's why he became a socialist. Because he thought he should. He could have fulfilled himself much better by spending his money as dutifully as any other millionaire.'

  'It's why he let me play the parasite on him so long. And kept that awful man Watson.'

  'Very _cordon noir,_ wasn't he? Did you know that Watson was a crook? He'd done the most awful things, killed someone and escaped with his neck. He learnt how to cook in prison. I wonder what happened to him?'

  'Probably got a job as catering officer in the Army.'

  She laughed, pouring steaming water to heat the silver pot. 'It's why Archie married me. Because he saw it as exactly
what he _should _do, as the best thing for both of us.'

  'To save you from the unspeakable disgrace of marrying the butler's boy?'

  'You should never have let me get away with it. You should have carried me off and married me when we escaped from France. I'd have gone willingly, darling, honestly.'

  'I shied away because I was afraid of being hurt. Surely you of all people can understand how I grew up with an inferiority complex? It's kept me from a lot of delicious things in life. Perhaps even from claiming the fame for discovering penicillin.'

  'I hope you don't take sugar? We've used all the ration.'

  'You've never been happy with Archie, of course?'

  'Not really.'

  'If you would really have married me in 1940, why were you such a bitch to me before the war?'

  'I was frightened. Don't forget, I'd grown up with you as unattainable to me as I to you. Then my mother bolting, and realizing that my father was a pansy. I felt insecure, so I played the bitch. A lot of girls do that. Women appear to be unfeeling, when they're only frightened of their feelings. During the war I wasn't frightened of anything at all. It was the same throughout the country, wasn't it? Everyone had something more important to think about than their complexes. All the madhouses were empty.'

  'When's Archie likely to be back?'

  'Hours. Poor dear, he thought he would spend every day bringing justice and light to the world. Instead, he passes all his time in a beastly office at the Elephant and Castle, arguing over details of pensions and things with lawyers.'

  'He's left us alone because he thinks he should show how he trusts us.'

  'Oh, Jim, you are exasperating. He left us alone because he thinks I deserve a little adultery.'