Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Come again, Madame,’ said Sylvie Cariteau when Charlotte was leaving. ‘They’ve enjoyed it, haven’t you, boys?’

  ‘Yes, yes, come again, come again.’

  That evening Charlotte had to make dinner for Levade. A stranger in the kitchen, she spent several minutes opening and closing cupboard doors.

  Whoever had once owned the Domaine had acquired enough plates and glasses to entertain a hundred people, but it was not until she explored a back annexe that Charlotte found anything that could be eaten. It was a little after six by the time she went in search of Levade to tell him that his dinner was ready. He had told her he worked upstairs but had not said in which room, so she knocked at every door in turn without eliciting an answer until Levade’s voice, sounding dim and abstracted, answered her call, and she heard him cross the room. She waited till he opened the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of his studio, but he moved quickly through the opening, leaving her time to see only a huge bed before he turned the key in the lock.

  He went silently ahead of her to the dining room, where she had laid a place for him at the head of the table. He muttered grace, then poured wine into a crystal glass and drank quickly while Charlotte went back into the kitchen to bring the food. He tucked a white napkin into his collar, as though anxious to protect his paint-bespattered shirt, and leaned back in his chair as Charlotte placed some fatty terrine in front of him. The bread she had found was as dusty as everyone else’s but he tore off a large piece with enthusiasm. He made no comment on the pâté or on the main course, a piece of chicken she had found beneath a wire-mesh cover and reheated with a sauce improvised from what was in the larder. She had found a peach on a tree in the orchard for his dessert, and this, too, he ate without speaking.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no coffee,’ she said, when she cleared his plate.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m going out for a walk now. I’ll be back in about an hour.’

  Now that she was standing close to him, Charlotte could see that he was not as old as she had thought: the white hair was misleading, and his skin, though lined, was not shrivelled or shrunk.

  ‘Was the dinner all right?’

  ‘What?’ He turned as he was leaving the room. ‘Yes. Thank you. Have some yourself.’

  It was not exactly the gracious invitation to lay an extra place in future that she had half expected, but it was something. She didn’t particularly care whether this man liked her cooking or not; she just wanted to remain in his house.

  She was eating what was left of the chicken in the kitchen when she heard a voice calling out in the hall. She hurried over the springy floor of the dining room and found that Julien was paying his second visit of the day.

  ‘Ah, Dominique. Exactly the person I wanted to see. Here’s your suitcase. Has my father gone out?’

  ‘Yes. He went for a walk.’

  They sat at the end of the cleared dining table, where Julien poured them both a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. Charlotte watched his humorous face begin to settle as he organised what he was going to say. He was wearing a pale blue open-necked shirt and a shabby tweed jacket; he looked more like a weekend painter than a professional architect who had just come from his office.

  ‘Do you like it here at the Domaine?’

  ‘Yes, I do. It’s a beautiful house. Rather mysterious, don’t you think?’

  ‘Extremely. I wouldn’t want to be here on my own in the winter.’

  ‘Your father doesn’t mind, though.’

  ‘No. He has ways of keeping himself occupied in the long winter nights.’

  ‘He told me he’s not a painter any more, that he just puts oil on canvas. He sounded rather sad.’

  Julien laughed. ‘Yes. He used to paint wonderful pictures. He can’t get used to the fact that it’s finished. He ought to feel lucky, he ought to be happy that of all the people who tried to paint he was one of the few who managed to produce something worthwhile, who got inside himself and made it all connect. But he doesn’t see it like that. He thinks he’s under a curse, that something is being withheld from him by some cruel, arbitrary power.’

  ‘I suppose most people are reluctant to concede that luck has anything to do with their successes.’

  ‘Yes. Particularly when luck isn’t the principal element, when ability and effort are the most important things.’ Julien smiled. ‘Which room have you taken?’

  ‘It’s a little one on the second floor with a pretty toile behind the bed. It’s charming.’

  ‘Yes, I think I know that one. Presumably it belonged to a servant.’

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘Very like you, I expect, Dominique.’ Julien ran his hand back through his hair. ‘I’m glad you’re staying. I need more people. César is all very well, but he has to bicycle for miles to get here. I shouldn’t really tell you this, but he’s the head boy of the lycée. You probably guessed.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘And Auguste has left us. He told me that he didn’t want to work for the English any more. He’s joined some network run by General de Gaulle.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were any.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he told me. Look, Dominique, I’ve had a message. From Mirabel, the man in charge. He wants you to meet him. He says it’s urgent. He’s got important news for you. He’s going to ring again and suggest a meeting place.’

  ‘News?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘I suppose he’s going to tell me to go home at once.’

  ‘I didn’t get that impression. Perhaps he doesn’t know you were supposed to go back with Yves. Minimum information. Isn’t that your watchword?’

  ‘Maybe. What’s he like, Mirabel?’

  ‘He’s fine. This is his third visit. I know him quite well. He’s a big broad fellow – very strong, physically and mentally.’

  Charlotte went through to the hall with Julien and said goodbye; she felt for a moment bereft as she watched him go down the broad stone steps.

  She turned back into the house. What could Mirabel’s ‘news’ be? Presumably it was some admonition from G Section, some order to get herself picked up and brought back. Of course, she thought, there is only one important piece of news as far as I’m concerned, and that is whether Peter Gregory is alive.

  And in the light of her belief she allowed herself to hope, and almost to believe in the preposterous idea that Mirabel was going to bring her just such news. There was a dry taste in her mouth as she went upstairs to bed: the taste, she thought bitterly, of fantasy.

  8

  ONE WAY IN which the Occupation pleased Claude Benech was that there were fewer things in the shops on which he felt obliged to spend money. Although he was generally self-controlled to the point of paralysis in disposing of his schoolmaster’s salary, he did occasionally feel that his position required him to buy a new suit or shoes for work, and even to show himself on the eve of feast days at the wine-merchant to give the appearance of some civic geniality. It was with a reluctant step that he trod the streets back to his plain apartment, the shopping bag heavy with cheese, wine and unwanted madeleines. In these austere times, however, such fripperies were simply not on sale, and he could take a far greater proportion of his salary to the savings bank.

  Benech flourished in Marshal Pétain’s new world of Work, Family and Fatherland; he would have gone so far as to say that it was the first time in his life he had been happy. Different eras suited different people, and the austerity of the new regime brought out something doughty in him: he was a man of destiny whose fated hour had come.

  Work was something of a passion in any case. He had risen to certain heights at school, where the director had given him the task of administering the time-table for all his colleagues. Benech fell on this task enthusiastically; his desire for position and control outweighed any tedium involved. He flourished in the school, became the object of a silent awe among his colleagues and of fear among the pupils he had previously st
ruggled to control. When, at the end of 1940, religious instruction was restored to schools, Benech, though not until that point a devout person, welcomed it: he had read that the Marshal believed the French army had been humiliated by the Germans because its reserve officers had been taught by Socialist teachers. When the next administration allowed religious instruction to become voluntary, Benech successfully lobbied for it to be retained at his school. He had always hated the way his fellow teachers had supported the Popular Front and various other doomed causes of the Jewish Left, and now he felt vindicated. The Government’s removal of all Jews from teaching in 1940 was a move that delighted him in its elegant simplicity, uprooting with one firm pull both distasteful cause and pernicious effect.

  At school Benech organised youth groups, more or less affiliated to Catholic and national organisations; they went camping at the weekend, put on uniforms and sang patriotic songs. The fact that these groups were banned in the Occupied Zone, because of their militaristic nature, made Benech proud of them: it showed they were threatening, and that the real France had survived in Vichy.

  Fatherland was a subject on which Benech felt secure. What he feared more than anything – far more than German occupation – was a Communist revolution. The Communists had come close to power in Government: they had enabled the Popular Front to come into being. As far as Benech was concerned, that was bad enough; it certainly sufficed to efface the memory of how they had also contributed to the Front’s collapse.

  His feelings towards the Germans were a little complicated. On one hand, he felt personally humiliated by his country’s defeat, and was glad to find internal culprits in the feeble Republicanism of the Jewish Left; on the other hand, he admired the German troops and believed that Laval’s long-term plan, to secure France the second seat at the top table of the new Europe, was a sound one.

  Meanwhile, the Communists were merely using the Occupier as a rallying point for their revolutionary ends; their real enemy was the traditional France of the centuries, not the temporary German inconvenience. The Vichy government had in Benech’s view not only deftly kept the autonomy and spirit of France alive, it had vitally blocked the Communist advance. Vichy was the best – the only – hope of order, the bulwark against Bolshevism, and those who tried to resist it, or to resist the Occupation, were the true and most dangerous enemy. It was not a difficult stretch of logic to conclude that his enemy’s enemy – the Occupier – must be his friend. He would not have put it quite so bluntly, but in opposing the Communists and supporting the traditional France of Vichy, the Germans were certainly, Benech believed, on the right lines. Their continued presence was necessary while the Vichy government sorted out the undesirable elements and set the old country back on course.

  Family was a less happy area of Benech’s life. He had been the middle of three sons who had lost their father on the Marne. They were brought up in Lavaurette by their mother, who indulged her adoration of her eldest son, Charles, a handsome boy who eventually found work with the railways. The youngest, little Louis, was clever and, despite minimal encouragement from his mother, won a scholarship to the lycée, from which he ascended to a different social plane and away, out of their lives. Madame Benech’s attitude to the middle son, Claude, was one of frank indifference. She found his coarse looks disappointing: he had wiry black hair, a long moustache from the age of seventeen, pale, mealy skin and a nervous, would-be ingratiating manner. She did not dislike him, she just did not seem to care; she talked to him as though he were a lodger whose parents had forgotten to take him home.

  As far as starting a family of his own was concerned, Benech had come close to an agreement a few years earlier with a woman who worked at a bakery, but two weeks before the intended marriage she had disappeared with a farmer. Sylvie Cariteau was probably past child-bearing age, Benech thought; Pauline Bobotte could not be separated – not by him anyway – from her visiting Toulouse businessman; Irène Galliot . . . But he preferred not to remember the hilarious disdain with which Irène had met his hopeful advances. He concentrated his thoughts instead on a young woman he had occasionally seen in the village, a new arrival in Lavaurette who had apparently gone to live at the Domaine to work as housekeeper for the old Jew. There was something suspicious as well as attractive about this woman, and he conjured plans as well as fantasies for her.

  In his new, contented life, Claude Benech had begun increasingly to enjoy the company of other people. He allowed himself two drinks an evening in the Café du Centre, where he felt the regulars viewed him with a certain respect. His opinions had been vindicated by events, and he felt confident about the vigour with which he expressed them. As a man for whom the historic tide was running, he felt it was likely to be a matter of time only before the family difficulties of his life also fell into place. As he put on his coat and climbed on to his bicycle to go down to the Café du Centre, he felt certain that the world was spinning his way.

  That night Charlotte lay down for the first time in her new room. She placed Dominique’s spare set of clothes in a drawer and hung her skirt on a rail behind a scarlet curtain. She had so far guarded G Section’s funds as though any spending might amount to an act of treason, but now she was staying indefinitely she felt sure the war effort would not fail completely if she bought some new underpants. The dense fabric of Dominique’s meant that they often took two days to dry out fully, which had sometimes left her the awkward choice of putting them on damp or wearing the same pair two days running. There seemed to be no clothes at all on sale in Lavaurette, so she thought she might take a train one morning to a bigger town. She wished she had some photographs to put on the bedside table: one of Gregory, and perhaps one of Roderick, even a sufficiently ancient one of her parents.

  Dominique’s voice was less often present in her head these days; Charlotte found that it was she who talked more often to Dominique, explaining the things she did in her name. The idea of being someone else was attractive to her, and that, she recognised as she turned off the light and pulled up the covers, was what had so drawn her to the Domaine.

  She was living someone else’s life. This house was suffused with unknown histories, but instead of seeing them as a disenfranchised spectator, she had become a legitimate actor among them. By assuming a new identity, she had somehow rid herself of the restraints imposed by her own and allowed herself to join the flow of a timeless reality more urgent than the one in which she otherwise moved.

  As she lay there, she remembered reading Proust’s novel at Monsieur Loiseau’s house and being thrilled by what the writer seemed to have done. The more you came to know a place, in general, the more it lost its essence and became defined by its quirks and its shortcomings; the suggestion of something numinous or meaningful was usually available with full force only to the first-time visitor and gradually decreased with familiarity. Yet in his book Proust seemed to have worked the paradoxical trick of making his places universal by the familiarity and attentiveness with which he described their individual characters. Charlotte was so pleased by this sleight of hand that she did not at first see how closely it was related to the effects of time; how it depended on the force of involuntary memory to release the deeper reality from the imprisonment of the years. The novel made it clear enough in the end, but Charlotte, still in her teens, had been too intoxicated by its sentences to take in its final significance. Monsieur Loiseau had not helped her; he had merely been delighted that such a French monument had so delighted his ‘English’ guest; Charlotte later suspected he might not actually have finished the book, but was merely proud of it as a French achievement and pleased by the coincidence of sharing a surname with one of the minor characters, a woman with a house beside the church in Combray with fuchsias in her garden.

  At the Domaine Charlotte seemed to be coming as close as was possible to inhabiting that more profound reality, though it was possible only intermittently; for the rest, she was limited by the practical considerations of her life. She still did not qui
te believe that Gregory was dead. It seemed that he had not made contact with the garage at Clermont-Ferrand, but that proved very little. She had grown so used to his absence that that was now her way of knowing him, and marginal evidence that this absence might be final made surprisingly little difference. There were moments when she gave way to grief, and her vulnerability to such outbursts was kept at a certain pitch by the sheer anxiety of not knowing; at other times, she felt her emotions were simply not subtle enough to accommodate the perpetual uncertainty. Meanwhile there was always Mirabel, and the hope he represented.

  She would carry on living, and eventually the pain would go, or at least she would reach a state of existence in which it was explained. While she waited for this enlightenment, she experienced none of the symptoms that had caused her mother to send her, in her teens, to the psychiatrist in Aberdeen; such depressions could not take root in the changed landscape of her mind. She had become galvanised, perhaps by grief, perhaps by some more intellectual process, in a way that left no room for the failure of energy that was the precondition of such despair.

  In the Domaine she felt energetic, she felt precariously alive. She was in the right place, she was sure, and something was going to happen. Out there the foothills of the Massif Central were covered with summer darkness. In a lit window of a first floor Julien was telephoning quietly, smoking, drinking brandy from an antique glass. Somewhere Peter Gregory was hiding out, unhurt, and patiently planning his return. Downstairs, in the echoic rooms of this traditional manor house, Levade was doing whatever untraditional things he did at night. In Bordeaux the German soldiers stamped their feet.

  I am almost happy, Charlotte thought, and it is a blasphemy to be happy in such grief. Something is going to happen.