The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  They talked about the weekend and what they had thought about the other guests.

  ‘I don’t think I’m made for life in the country,’ said Hartmann. ‘My shooting was terrible, and these comfortable shoes – they’re agonising. I’d rather wear the ones I wore in Paris.’

  After they had been driving for about two hours the wheels abruptly stopped turning. The engine made a loud clanking sound and there came a smell of burning metal. Hartmann steered the car to the edge of the road and stopped.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We’ll have to find a garage.’

  ‘But we’re miles from anywhere.’ Anne failed to sound disappointed.

  ‘Yes, I was aware of that, Anne. Why are you laughing?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘It looked like it to me. Look, there you go.’

  ‘Well, so are you.’

  ‘No, I’m not. We might be here for days.’

  Three hours later they had arranged with a local farmer to have the car towed to a garage. The proprietor said it was a difficult job and it wouldn’t be ready until eleven o’clock the following day. With some difficulty they persuaded him to drive them to the nearest town, an isolated place with a solitary hotel.

  The manager was able to offer them a room, the last for fifty kilometres or more, he assured them.

  ‘Aren’t you expected back at work tomorrow?’ said Hartmann. ‘We could get a taxi and try to get you back by train.’

  ‘No, I’ve got the week off. The Patron said I could have a whole week.’

  ‘All right,’ Hartmann told the hotelier. ‘I’ll have to telephone Christine,’ he said to Anne. And tell her I’m still in Paris, he thought to himself.

  Anne had now become almost hysterical with pleasure at the thought of the hours stolen back from nowhere. She began to giggle as she helped Hartmann with the luggage.

  ‘Will you be wanting dinner, monsieur?’ said the hotelier.

  ‘Yes, please. And my cousin would like to take a bath.’

  ‘Your cousin, monsieur?’

  ‘Yes, the young lady I’m with.’

  ‘Oh, I see, monsieur. Your cousin. Well, I’ll show you where it is.’ He scratched vigorously at his moustache as he preceded Hartmann up the squeaking staircase.

  It was nearly eight o’clock, and Hartmann went for a stroll while Anne was changing. Over dinner he told her more about his past life. He chose his words with care, so that he should give an honest account of what it had been like. He never seemed satisfied until he had selected the correct combination of words, and would sometimes go back and verbally cross out what he had said before, until he was sure he had conveyed exactly what he meant. Then he looked satisfied, as if he expected that Anne would herself now register the experience precisely as he himself had done. As he spoke she watched and reflected how much his trust in her was growing, and how kind his face looked when animated. She was surprised by how little her declaration of love for him the night before, and what had followed, seemed to embarrass her, and she was encouraged by the way it seemed to have made no difference to the way he acted towards her.

  After dinner he ordered brandy and they sat in the walled garden at the back of the hotel where it was still warm. No one else was in the garden, though they could hear the sound of voices from the restaurant. As their own conversation began again, Anne felt she would inevitably tell him what she had dreaded. Probably there were still good reasons not to do so, but she had always trusted more to instinct than to reason. Neither the time nor the place was perfect, but nor would they ever be. Then, once she had decided and could sense the anticipation in her stomach, the conversation would not come round to a point from which she felt she could properly begin. Hartmann’s delicacy was such that he avoided areas where, for once, she wished he would intrude.

  It took her in the end some abrupt changes of course.

  ‘My life in Paris seems to have been very different from yours,’ she said. ‘I think I missed the glamorous times of the twenties.’

  ‘I’m not sure they were as glamorous as people always tell you. I remember collapsing governments and fear about the franc as much as nightclubs and artists’ exhibitions.’

  ‘We lived too far from the centre of Paris to know about all the attractions and the nightlife. Though we used to read about it in the newspapers of course.’

  Hartmann nodded.

  ‘I lived with M. Louvet, my father,’ said Anne.

  ‘I’ve heard you mention him.’ He smiled. ‘It’s very formal of you to refer to him in that way, your own father.’

  ‘He isn’t my father.’ Anne leaned forward slightly in her chair. ‘My father’s dead. He was killed in the war.’

  ‘I’m sorry. So many men . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. He killed a man. And then he was shot for it.’

  Anne’s voice had a cold quality, as if she were reciting words already written. Hartmann watched to see if she would go on. She clenched her hands a few times in her lap.

  ‘I may as well tell you.’

  Hartmann said nothing but watched her face, which was impassive as she stretched her mind back into her childhood. She had been born, she told him, in the Cantal district at the southern tip of the Massif Central, in a house buried so deep in the countryside that no one would have known of its existence unless directed to it.

  ‘My father was a shopkeeper. In the years before the war, when there were plenty of people to work the land, he became a sort of wholesaler as well. He used to arrange transport for all the local cheeses, and other produce too. It went to Aurillac and Clermont, then on to Paris. My first memory of him is when he came back on leave from the war. He had been fighting on the Marne and had done well. He had a citation for bravery. He used to play with me in the fields and tell me stories – you know, all the things a father does. It was terrible when he went back. I was far too young to know what it was all about, just that it was something awful he was going back to.

  ‘I used to sleep in bed with my mother at night and we would say our prayers together. She wanted to have brothers and sisters for me, but she said we would have to wait until after the war. She told me we were sure to win soon and then it would all be over.

  ‘My father used to write to us quite often and we were thrilled by his letters. So many people in the village had had bad news already. There was a woman called Mme Hubert, a widow, who had lost both her sons in the first year. My mother said I must be nice to her, but I hated her. I don’t know why. She became a “godmother” to two young soldiers – you know how women used to adopt young men like that. She was always writing to them and telling us how brave they were.

  ‘Then my father was wounded and he came back on leave. He was at home for three or four months. I think it must have been in 1916. As he got better he would tell me stories again, but never about the war – just fairy tales and funny stories. My mother was very happy to have him home and she hoped his wound would take a long time to get better. He took me all around the fields and hills where we lived. I was only a tiny girl and I couldn’t walk far, so he carried me on his back. He said I would easily fit into his knapsack and if I was lucky he’d drop me inside and take me back to war with him.

  ‘Mme Hubert, she said if he was fit enough to play with me he should be fighting. She said both her soldiers, her godsons, had been wounded but hadn’t left the front. I think she was jealous of my mother because my father was still alive and she had lost everyone. Anyway, he went to the military doctor at Clermont and they said he was fit to go back. His regiment was at Verdun.

  ‘We didn’t know much about it. He never talked about the fighting to us, or certainly not to me. I think he just wanted to talk about the things any father would, not about war and death. In the village, people had heard of Verdun and they said it was a glorious fight.

  ‘My father kept on writing. He didn’t say much about what he was doing. He just talked abou
t my mother and me. He said he was the luckiest man at Verdun, with his two pretty girls to come home to . . . There were three friends, him and Uncle Bernard, who came from our village, and another man whose name I can’t remember. This other man was killed and my father was very sad about that. I think they’d kept each other going, the three of them, since the beginning. Also he said he couldn’t sleep for the noise. At one time he said they hadn’t slept for twelve days. Mostly he just talked about what he wanted to do when the war was over, and of the fun we’d have together. He worried about our safety. He’d brought in his old shotgun from the barn and showed my mother how to use it in case we ever had intruders. In fact it was a very peaceful place, but it was funny that he was worried about us when you think what he was doing.

  ‘He was at Verdun until the end. He said most of the army had been there at one time or another. When he came home again on leave – it was in winter, I think it was January – he had changed. He still looked handsome, with his big moustache and his brown eyes, but something had happened to him. I used to hear him talking in his sleep. But that wasn’t it. It was as if some light had gone out in him. When he looked at me his eyes were blank. Even as a small child I could see this. He still took me on his knee and he still carried me over the fields. Once he took me on his back all morning and we sat by a stream and he took out some bread and cheese and we ate it by the water. Then he squeezed me and he said, “I love you so much I can’t bear it,” and then he cried.

  ‘That night he told my mother and me a little bit about the war. We had a small black dog, it was something my parents had been given by a local farmer when they married. My father said it was just like the black spaniel that belonged to the commanding officer in one of the famous forts at Verdun – I can’t remember what it was called. They held out there for days. So my father said we were to be very proud of the dog. He wasn’t really a spaniel, he was a farm dog, but we didn’t mind. We pretended to give him the Légion d’Honneur, and my father laughed then, for the first time really since he’d been back.

  ‘My mother by this time was working in a factory. She still believed we’d win the war and my father would come back safely. I think there was this feeling then in our village. Everyone thought it was a matter of honour. But I could see her look at him in the evenings, when he was sitting by the fire, and even I could see how worried she was. Perhaps other people could sense a change in him. I remember Mme Hubert saying to my mother that she hoped he wasn’t going to be a waverer. She said “her” boys would carry on whatever the cost. “Whatever it costs, Madame, whatever it costs,” she was always saying.

  ‘The last night before my father went back he gave me a bracelet he had made from part of a shell. He had done a lot of carvings on bits of metal and he had made a ring for my mother. He hugged us both in the kitchen and called us his two little girls. He told us to look after one another. My mother held on to him and cried, so he couldn’t pull himself away. I watched him at last walking up the road. He didn’t turn round or wave, he just walked away.

  ‘The weather went very, very cold. Do you remember? We had a letter from my father saying there was a new man in charge of the army and they were hoping for a quick victory. And then we heard nothing. All through the spring it went quiet. The papers said our army had been defeated somewhere. Still we heard nothing from my father. My mother said we were certain to hear if something was wrong. Eventually there was a letter from Uncle Bernard saying my father had been wounded in April and couldn’t write, but that he was fine and sent his love.

  ‘We never heard again. All through that year and the next the only word we got was from Uncle Bernard who never referred to him by name, but just said something about the other fellow, you know the one I mean, he’s doing all right too. My mother said it was something to do with censors. But she was worried out of her mind. If he was so badly hurt, why didn’t he come home?

  ‘By now I was just about old enough to go for walks by myself, and I went over the fields to the places I had been with him and I prayed to God he would be all right. I used to play a game of pretending I was in his knapsack and then I’d jump out and surprise him and Uncle Bernard. I was quite happy in a way. I was convinced he’d be all right because he seemed so powerful to me. I couldn’t imagine him letting anything go wrong. I knew men did die in this war, but at that age I’d no idea what it was like and I was sure he wouldn’t let it happen to him.

  ‘My mother, though – she was worn down by worry. Mme Hubert had lost one of her “godsons” and now she wanted to know where my father was. She was always sniffing around our house, and although my mother told her everything was fine I think she could see from my mother’s face that something was wrong.

  ‘When the war ended we had a letter from Uncle Bernard saying my father had been affected by shell-shock and had gone off to live with a cousin in Switzerland until he was better. My mother convinced herself this was true. My father loved the mountains and it was obvious on his last leave that he had been affected by something. I was just heartbroken that he wouldn’t come back to us. Uncle Bernard was living in Paris now, and my father had asked him to keep in touch with us.

  ‘But another year passed, and then they put up the war memorial in the village, and they put my father’s name on it. The local people believed he was dead, even though they had had no official word of it. In my heart I never believed it. I was sure he was alive. I was sure he wouldn’t betray us.

  ‘One night when I was asleep upstairs there was a knock on the door. It was Uncle Bernard who had come all the way from Paris. We went and sat by the fire and he told us what had happened. He said my father had asked him never to tell us the truth, but to make up a story of how he had died in battle. Uncle Bernard said he couldn’t bring himself to tell us this, so he had invented the story about Switzerland. Uncle Bernard said he loved us and didn’t want to tell us anything that would upset us, but now he had to because there was going to be something in the papers.

  ‘After my father had left us that very cold winter they had to prepare for a big attack. But the men were exhausted, they couldn’t take any more. When the attack began they walked straight into the German guns. The Germans were just waiting for them. After Verdun, after all they had been through, some of the men thought they were being asked to do something impossible.

  ‘Uncle Bernard didn’t tell us everything that night, but he sent a letter to my mother in which he described exactly what happened. They were attacking somewhere called the Chemin des Dames. There was a restlessness among the men. One of the young officers had gone mad and my father and Uncle Bernard had pulled him out of a shell-hole where he had been screaming. Now the men wanted rest, but they couldn’t have it. They were being sent over the top straight into the guns. Uncle Bernard said if it had been at the start of the war it might have been all right, but after Verdun it was different. They were kept at the front two weeks longer than the officers promised. Finally they were sent back down the line. Sometimes they would go to quite nice billets in a town, a little way from the fighting, but this time they were in some place underground.

  ‘Here, behind the lines, they were allowed to sleep a little and mend their clothes. Perhaps my father did some more carving. Then after only two or three days this officer, a man who came from an important family near where we lived, came to tell them to go back up the line. The regiment that was supposed to go had mutinied and wouldn’t take its place. The men hated this officer and they refused to go. There was no plan, no plot. They just refused point blank, all of them. My father pleaded with the officer. He said the men needed a few days of quiet to get their strength back. He said they weren’t cowards, but they had been through more than any man should have to. He said they were prepared to defend but they refused to attack. This is what was happening everywhere. They weren’t cowards but they had had enough.

  ‘The officer was furious. He said he would make them all into water-carriers so they would get killed crawling
around the trenches. The other men were urging my father on. There was a terrific argument and the officer took out his pistol. He said if the men didn’t pack their bags and start to move straight away, he would shoot them. My father said, “Go on, shoot me.” They stood face to face and the officer put his revolver in my father’s ear and told the men he would shoot if they didn’t pack up their kit. By this time some of the men were crying.

  ‘My father shouted at them not to move. Then he and the officer stood toe to toe shouting at each other. A sergeant came in and said he had carried out his orders and that the young officer my father and Uncle Bernard had pulled out of the shell-hole was to be tried for abandoning his position. Then there was a terrible screaming between my father and the officer, with the sergeant trying to intervene. My father tore the revolver out of the officer’s hand. Uncle Bernard said the noise of the commotion was so great that for the first time in a year you couldn’t hear the guns. All the men were shouting and stamping and my father put the revolver to the officer’s head and he shot him.

  ‘There was a long silence. Eventually the men began cheering and they wanted to congratulate my father, but he pushed them away and went to give himself up. A few days later, in the middle of the night, Uncle Bernard and the others were woken by a senior officer and told to fall in. Then they were marched at gun-point for half an hour till they came to a small copse. Uncle Bernard said he had a terrible feeling what was going to happen. A man with a blindfold was brought through the wood by a sergeant and told to stand against a tree. They knew it was my father. Uncle Bernard and his friends were told that if they didn’t shoot straight they would be shot themselves. The commanding officer gave the order and they all fired. They didn’t have a choice. They killed him.’