The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  At this point Anne leaned forward in her chair and held her head in her hands. Hartmann reached out to touch her, but she pushed him away, smiling a little, determined to finish the story. Uncle Bernard told her that the extent of the mutinies had been kept very quiet so that morale would not be affected. Then after the war the newspapers had had a story about two young officers who had been shot without trial for cowardice at Verdun. It seemed that in fact they had acted sensibly and there was a public outcry.

  ‘According to Uncle Bernard the army had been looking for a way to get over that embarrassment for some time and the story of my father was a good way to do it. What he had done was not mutiny but murder, and the man he killed was apparently an inspired soldier, so he had damaged the national cause. This was the story the newspapers would tell, anyway. Uncle Bernard had come to warn us. He told us it might be better if we left the district.

  ‘My mother was too shocked to do anything. I just cried because he was dead. I felt no shame. That night I slept in my mother’s bed. She lay there trembling. She didn’t cry at all.

  ‘Uncle Bernard stayed with us for a bit while the story appeared in the papers. It was terrible. Even some of the big papers, the national ones, they printed some of the story because they said the crime was bad and the man he shot would have been a great officer. Also he came from a rich family. In our village and round about the papers had nothing else in them, it seemed. There were pictures of him, and the stories were full of lies. When we went out people would shout at us and throw stones. Mme Hubert was the worst. She met my mother in the shop and said, “I always knew he was a coward, but I never knew he was a murderer too.” And still the papers were full of stories. I don’t know where they found all the things they printed, but none of them were true. I just had to try to remember the father I’d known.

  ‘It was worse for my mother. You know the custom in some places of sending letters, anonymous letters. She was getting lots of these. Once she took me to one side, and even though I was small I could understand her. She said: “Your father was a good man. You must remember him as he was, remember the truth, and never, ever, believe the things other people will tell you. There are some things in life which are too great for someone to endure.”

  ‘I remembered those words. The next week a stonemason came and chipped my father’s name off the memorial to the dead in the village square. I watched my mother’s face. I will never forget it. When we got home people had put things – horrible things – through the door.

  ‘There were one or two people in the village who were nice to us. One man had been in the same place and he said he didn’t blame my father for what he’d done. He said the full story of the mutinies wasn’t half known yet. But most people took their lead from the papers, and Mme Hubert kept up her campaign against us.

  ‘Still my mother refused to leave. She said that would be giving in. Anyway, she didn’t want to leave the house she’d lived in with my father. But the letters didn’t stop. The trouble was, it was more than mutiny, it was murder. This was what people said, and I could see as the weeks went on that my mother was looking ill. She wouldn’t eat, and I could hear her crying at night.

  ‘One day she came back from work and she found that the little black dog, the one we had given the Légion d’Honneur to, was dead. A man from the farm said it must have eaten poison and my mother said she thought she knew who’d done it. I think this one small thing must have been too much for her. The next day, when I came back from school, I found a policeman at the door of the house. He took me to one side and told me that my mother had been found in a barn. She had taken my father’s shotgun and killed herself. I ran into the field behind the house and screamed. And then I ran and ran. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to see anyone again, ever. I wanted to die.’

  Anne’s account became disjointed for a time. No one had wanted the responsibility of looking after her. Her mother’s sister had taken a strong line against Anne’s father, and Uncle Bernard proved untraceable. A local lawyer, who wound up the family affairs, discovered that Anne’s father had left quite a reasonable sum from his business and it was agreed that they should advertise for a guardian for the girl. After a while a certain M. Louvet applied and removed Anne to his house in Clermont Ferrand. She was sent to the local school, where she took Louvet’s name to hide from the shame the papers had brought on her family. What she felt on that first day at school, even she could no longer remember.

  ‘But what happened to this M. Louvet?’ said Hartmann.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But didn’t he help you? Wasn’t he your saviour?’

  ‘Oh yes, he was very kind for a time. But we moved from Clermont to another town nearby and the people started whispering. It was hateful, I can’t describe it. I . . . I won’t talk about this part.’

  Anne looked down to where her hands were tightly clenched in her lap. She swallowed and smiled thinly.

  ‘When I was twelve the money ran out and I had to leave school anyway. We moved to another town where I was sent out to work, but the same thing happened. People began to talk, and the following year we decided to move to Paris. Louvet said we could lose ourselves there. We lived in an awful place near the meatyards in Vaugirard, then we moved to the other side of the city, to Saint Denis. Louvet was supposed to be a businessman, but he never seemed to have any work. I went to find jobs as a waitress, but it was disheartening because Louvet seemed to give up hope. His wife had left him years before and he was still disturbed by that. Although he was kind to me he used up all the money that my father had left and when I was sixteen I think he hoped I’d be like a wife to him – look after him as he got older.

  ‘But I didn’t want to stay in our little apartment. I wanted to be in the countryside again, where I’d come from. Paris was a terrible place to be. My wages actually grew less, not more. Do you remember the riots, a couple of years ago, when they tried to storm the Chamber? Louvet took part in them. He’d joined some league – one of these things you were talking about – something he said would make France great again. He got shot and trampled in the Tuileries gardens. I think he was drunk. He came back with his hand bleeding. It wasn’t very serious, and I put a dressing on it and he went to bed. That night he had a fever and he raved in his sleep. It was awful, the things he said. About me . . . He said he wanted . . . you know. And then he disappeared. I don’t know where he went, though he sent me a letter a week later saying he was emigrating. The letter came from Lyon. I’ve never heard from him again. I think perhaps he went to America. He sometimes talked about it.

  ‘Although I wasn’t sure I liked him very much, I missed him in a way. I was alone, then, in this place. I thought I had to do something for myself. Delphine, one of the girls I worked with, said there was a spare room where she lived. It was in a house near the railway leading from the Gare Montparnasse, but it was a nice room and I didn’t mind the noise. That’s when I got my gramophone, on my birthday. Delphine loved music too and we used to have dancing parties there. It was all right for a time, but I wanted to be out of Paris. I was desperate to see fields and open air. One day when I was walking past the station I picked up a newspaper on a bench. It was a country paper that someone coming into Montparnasse had left behind. I saw the small advertisement for the Hotel du Lion d’Or. I had nothing to lose by answering it. I had learned to write quite well before I left school. Perhaps that helped. Or perhaps it was the fact that I was prepared to accept low wages – anything to be out of Paris. Anyway, I packed my case and left.’

  Hartmann looked at the wall of the small garden in silence and then looked back to Anne. Between the freckles there were small dry marks where the three or four tears, which were all she had allowed herself, had run. Her eyes were deep and shining in the darkness, alive with hope as she turned to him.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  ‘What?’

  It was the Patron. ‘Monsieur, do you mind? It’s nearly two o’clock an
d we must have some sleep, my wife and I.’

  ‘Yes, of course. We hadn’t realised it was so late.’

  Anne stood up, smiling towards Hartmann. She gathered herself quickly, picking up her handbag and her shawl from where they had lain on the chair beside her. There was something of a willed resolve in the brisk normality of her actions after the emotion of the experiences she had recounted; but there was also a new and unforced lightness about her, as though relief and growing hope had quickened the movements of her body.

  Hartmann rose more slowly from his chair, looking down for a moment at the table where he pressed his hand flat. He stood aside to let Anne go into the hotel before him, moving his arm with gentle courtesy. When he looked into her face she saw that his eyes were filled with compassion.

  Anne put her hand gently on his arm as she passed. As they climbed the stairs they heard the Patron lock the door behind them.

  PART THREE

  1

  HARTMANN WAS SUMMONED to Paris by a former army friend and business associate called Antoine Lallement who worked for the government. He needed informal legal advice on a matter of some delicacy concerning a government minister. Hartmann would normally have been intrigued by such an offer, but on the train he found his thoughts elsewhere.

  The story of Anne’s life had tapped a weakness in him he hadn’t known existed. For some days he was persistently troubled by the thought of the small girl running into the field behind her house. He thought of the moment at which she screamed. When he imagined the policeman giving her the news he thought of the incongruity of the lumpish official in his uniform and the minute, uncomprehending girl. The man had brought a simple message: her world, her life as she had known it, was finished. Then Hartmann put himself in her place and tried to imagine what his reaction as a small child might have been. He found it impossible.

  At the start of 1917 it had been easy enough for him to make an under-age entry into a demoralized army. In the ensuing eighteen months he had seen men die in their hundreds, some of them known to him, some in terrible pain and some obliterated by shells so that no part of them remained except some ragged piece of flesh in a tree. Although he had felt briefly shocked, Hartmann, like the other soldiers he knew, required only a day or two away from the front to find the wash of normality restore him. He had felt fear for himself and sorrow for the men who died, but it had not gone deep; some instinct, of self-protection perhaps, had shut out any excess of feeling.

  Anne’s story troubled him in a low, destabilising way. The unfairness of the persecution by the villagers outraged his sense of justice. What further courage had her parents needed that neither had been able to find? Yet Anne herself, starting from nothing, had contrived it. With none of the basis of family love he took for granted, she had confronted this evil and created a life for herself. From a brief remembered experience of normality she had fashioned a convincing and proper identity.

  Hartmann put these thoughts aside and tried to concentrate on work. As he watched the countryside slipping past the window of the train he wondered what business of Antoine’s could be so urgent and so confidential that he couldn’t give even the merest hint of it by telephone. Antoine was someone who enjoyed the exercise of power and discretion, as Hartmann had discovered when they first met in the army; but he was also a trusting and expansive man who wouldn’t have taken pleasure merely in trying to tantalise an old friend.

  Hartmann took up a book, but after reading a few pages he put it aside. His thoughts kept returning to Anne. He couldn’t understand what resilience and courage lay inside her. For the first time since it had ended he was forced to think about the war, an episode of such surreal horror that most people could only face it by ignoring it. Yet here, in Anne’s life, was the clear domestic connection with the bizarre nightmare of the trenches. Some parts of her story had seemed a little vague, but Hartmann recognised the events to which she referred. His first job as a junior officer, fresh from hasty training, had been to tell the weary veterans of Verdun that one more push under the dashing General Nivelle would bring them victory. He was roundly disbelieved. There were things, as Anne’s mother had remarked, which are too much for human beings to endure. When the men came down the line after their spell at the front many of them refused to go up again. They had reached a limit beyond which no amount of urging from a fresh-faced officer would propel them. They would defend, but they would no longer attack.

  Antoine Lallement, a respected and senior officer, had taken the view that the men could be pushed no further, but that some sort of formal obedience to orders was necessary until the doomed attempt on the cruelly named Chemin des Dames was abandoned.

  In the first week of June there had been near-panic at the scale of the mutinies in the regiments around Soissons. There were rumours that exemplary measures had been taken. An entire unit was said to have been rounded up and machine-gunned by its comrades. Hartmann was sceptical of the stories. By this time many junior officers had come up from the ranks and identified too closely with their men to have allowed such things. Nevertheless, as officer in charge of communications with the press, Hartmann was shown an order from the Ministry of War instructing that no news of executions be released without the ministry’s approval, for fear that the Germans or, just as bad, the British, should learn the extent to which morale was beginning to break down.

  He had put such events from his mind, thinking only that in the end more lives would be saved if the army stood firm. He wondered now what men like Anne’s father must have felt. He had never heard of murder behind the lines before. It was not exactly surprising but it argued extreme provocation. Yet in the world of continuous noise and death which men had been able to describe only with words like ‘hell’ or ‘inferno’ normal morality was already violated. No one felt inclined to pass judgement on the private actions of others, even on murder. And yet – and here was the pity beyond his imagination – such single actions were connected; they were not entirely random or alone.

  He remembered well the public outcry Anne had talked about which followed the newspaper stories that came out after the war concerning two young ensigns, Herduin and Millaud, who had been shot without trial for cowardice at Verdun. It seemed that both men had in fact been exceptionally brave and that their platoons, who had been forced to carry out the executions, did so with tears in their eyes.

  He also had a vague recollection of the case of Anne’s father. There had been some uncomfortable stories about the true extent of the 1917 mutinies, and the army, or some of its senior officers, had been anxious to put themselves in a better light, particularly after the bad publicity of the Herduin-Millaud case. The story of how a private soldier had murdered his commanding officer must have seemed a good way to redress the balance and show that severe discipline had been necessary. Many of the newspapers, owned or run by members of the small élite that wielded more power than the ever-changing governments, were only too happy to print stories about the heroism of the murdered officer. Among the people Hartmann knew in Paris it was dismissed as a small attempt at propaganda and quickly forgotten. He had not paused to think how such an event might affect the lives of those intimately concerned.

  He was moved also by the picture Anne had given of her parents. He thought of the small girl on her father’s shoulders and wondered what this poor man had been like, with his big moustache and tired eyes and his beloved little daughter. Anne, he thought, could only have been a child of great gentleness, big-eyed, excitable and trusting. And her mother: she sounded a simple woman, dependent on others and presumably beautiful if it was from her that Anne had inherited the light femininity of her bearing. In the brief and mundane connections between the three of them that Anne had sketched he saw a life of tenderness that was enviable. He wondered at how quickly Anne had absorbed its elements to be able to make such a person of herself.

  In the past Hartmann had felt sympathy for friends who were distressed, even the odd rush of unexplained compa
ssion, like the one he had felt for Roussel when they surveyed the house together; but what he felt for Anne was something more unsettling, a feeling which was complicated by his continuing desire for her, which one night at Merlaut had not dispelled.

  As well as this aimless pity he felt awe at her composure. Her life began to look like a rebuke of his own – or so he thought – with its privilege and hedonism. It appeared to him that through no fault of his own he was now faced with the responsibility of her happiness; that by playing with her feelings he had invited her to place her trust in him, and now it was his duty to redeem the horror of her childhood.

  2

  HARTMANN’S CAR HAD finally been mended, and the journey back to Janvilliers had been quickly accomplished – too quickly for Anne, who found that in addition to her usual tasks at the hotel there were a number of extra jobs she was expected to perform as an unofficial penance for having been away. It became difficult to keep alive in her head the bedroom, the terrace, the apple tree and the other details of Merlaut that she had tried to imprint on her memory. She didn’t mind too much, however, since something more important had been salvaged in the understanding Hartmann had showed her. The risk she had taken seemed to have been worthwhile, and the love she had felt for him was now justified and fulfilled.

  While his train sped towards Paris, she went about her work in the kitchen. There came a sound of coughing from upstairs. There was always someone coughing in the Hotel du Lion d’Or. Sometimes it was a bullet-headed Marseillais who stayed once a week in the course of his work, which entailed travelling up and down the coast. Sometimes the sound was of gentility at war with a thin painful choking and came from the dark recess beneath the stairs. Often it was the rich chest-clearing roar of Bruno, preparing himself for a morning’s work in the kitchen; at other times the coughing was spectral and thin and seemed to echo down the corridor upstairs, past all the bedrooms, coming from no one knew where.