Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  He got no further. Charlotte reached up to him and clamped her mouth over his. She wrapped her arms tight around him and squeezed as hard as she could. When she felt Julien’s body slacken a little, she let go. With her lips still close to his, she said, ‘You must come now. Your father needs you. Do you understand?’

  Across Julien’s gradually sobering face there ran successive expressions of surprise, alarm and furtive schoolboy pleasure. At least he understood, Charlotte thought, as he coughed, collected himself, and apologised briefly to Roudil, who was wiping his cheeks with a handkerchief. Julien and Charlotte walked up the hill, unspeaking, flinching beneath the curious eyes that followed them.

  Two or three times Julien began to speak, then checked himself. ‘I’ve been foolish, Dominique,’ he finally brought himself to say. ‘I must thank you for stopping me when you did.’

  Up in the square, in front of the hôtel de ville, they sat on a bench and looked down. They could still see the German convoy, half a dozen troop-carrying lorries with canvas lashed over supporting hoops, an armoured car and a requisitioned black Citroën of the kind, Charlotte recalled, Monsieur Chollet had been working on in Clermont. German soldiers were sitting on the sandy roadside drinking from enamel cups while their junior officers went in search of provisions.

  Charlotte watched Julien’s face but did not dare to speak. He rested his chin in his hands, then shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps this is a good thing, I don’t know. Perhaps . . .’ He shrugged. ‘At least it now means we’re all in it together, there must now be a general, unified resistance . . . And yet, I just can’t believe it – to see those men in uniform, those stupid farm boys and factory hands from Hanover or Bavaria or wherever it is they come from, here in Lavaurette . . . Somehow in Paris it seemed different. It was easier to think of it as diplomacy that had gone wrong and to see the German troops as just a new and rather impatient kind of police. You could see it all as just another political mistake – God knows, we’d got used to those. But here, they look so alien . . .’ He shook his head.

  Charlotte felt very much for him in his confusion and in the frustrated sense he seemed to have that all of this could somehow have been avoided.

  ‘We must be very careful, Octave,’ she said.

  ‘I know. And, by the way, you called me by a different name just now. When you kissed me.’

  ‘I know. It would have been foolish to call you “Octave” in front of people who know that’s not your name.’

  Julien looked at her, narrowing his eyes, not into their usual candid smile but into something more perplexed. ‘You’re a remarkable woman, aren’t you, Madame Guilbert? Very decisive.’

  ‘When I was sixteen I had a school report that said I was too passive.’

  Julien let out a great snort of laughter. ‘Passive! My God.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Charlotte. ‘Someone must take control in these circumstances.’

  ‘I liked it when you kissed me.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was political.’

  Julien’s full smile came out. ‘I see. And it would take a comparable emergency for it to be repeated?’

  ‘At least.’

  There was a pause, and Julien looked down at the ground, sketching patterns in the dust with the rim of his shoe. He said, ‘Do you remember when you first decided to stay, and you said you felt the real action had not begun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you feel now?’

  ‘I feel this is it,’ said Charlotte. ‘But I don’t feel downhearted. I think the enemy is now out in the open, and that’s a good place for him to be – where you have him in full sight.’

  Julien pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. ‘I know the Germans will try to squeeze us, they’ll try to make us work for them in some way. And there’ll be a war here in the south. Some people won’t like that, they’ll put the keeping of order above everything.’

  ‘But you want to see fighting?’

  ‘Of course I do. And you couldn’t say we’ve been hasty. It’s two and a half years since we were invaded.’ He smiled. ‘You look worried.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte. ‘I was just thinking of all that quiet work you’ve done from your office – the times you’ve telephoned me at the Domaine or left a message with César’s mother, all the calls from the wireless operator, the times you’ve spoken to the Communists – yes, don’t look surprised, I know you’ve had no choice from time to time – and all this without once giving a glimmer of how you truly felt. I hate to think that all your work might be spoiled by one foolish outburst.’

  ‘It’s not true that I’ve given no indication of what I think. I was always honest about the failings of Vichy. Then, when I started this activity I thought it would look suspicious if I suddenly changed my tune. So it’s become a double bluff.’

  ‘But you’ve got to do something about this morning. That was too much.’

  Julien laid his hand on hers. ‘You’re right. I shall go to the Café du Centre this evening and I shall confuse them. I’ll say that on balance we have no choice but to co-operate with the Germans. I shall use the word “realistic”.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why don’t you come too?’ Julien looked into Charlotte’s face.

  ‘Servant girls don’t go out to bars. And I’m a married woman.’

  ‘I know, but after this morning everyone will think we’re sleeping together anyway.’

  ‘So are you saying we might as well?’

  ‘No, I didn’t say that, I—’

  ‘Listen, Julien – I’m going to call you that this one time. You’re a wonderful friend to me. I’ve never had a friend like this before. I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me over these last few weeks. It’s not just that we’re co-operating professionally, as it were, we’d be friends anyway. Don’t you feel that?’ Charlotte’s voice was eager and loaded.

  ‘Yes.’ Julien did not sound nearly as sure. ‘Yes, of course, Dominique.’

  Then why does he look so hurt? Charlotte thought, as she removed his hand from hers and gave it back to him. She said, ‘I must go back to the Domaine. I have work to do. Will you telephone this evening and let me know if anything happens?’

  Charlotte walked down to where she had left her bicycle, outside Madame Galliot’s ironmongery, and on the way she went past the war memorial and its chiselled Marianne, with her seasick expression and her eyes dazzled by the list of names on which she stood. On the Avenue Gambetta the German lorries had started their engines and were beginning to move off in a loud, fuming line to the south.

  Claude Benech was puzzled by developments. He had not expected to see German soldiers on the streets of Lavaurette. Their presence suggested either that the Occupier felt at liberty to override Marshal Pétain at any time it suited him or that there was a threat of Allied success to the south that made defence of the French ports imperative. He could believe neither of these possibilities. Of one thing he was quite sure, however: the German occupation of the whole country increased the chances of Communist disorder. There would be hotheads, like Julien Levade perhaps, and other more sinister Bolshevists, who would try to turn this new development to the advantage of their long-held wish to undermine the traditional France. Benech had thought a good deal about politics in the last year or so, and had grown quite confident of his analyses and predictions. If he was right, it would mean that a man such as himself, a patriot, would need to become firmer and more vigilant. Of course, that did not mean he had to be ponderous or crude: he would carry on as normal, and what could be more normal than a visit to the Café du Centre?

  Irène Galliot greeted him with her minimal politeness as she swayed through the bar on her way to the dining room. Benech’s eyes hung on the sight of her tightly-skirted rump as she smacked the swing doors open with her hip, bending a little forward to keep the four plates of food she carried away from h
er clean white blouse and, in doing so, inadvertently granting Benech a glimpse of her smooth cleavage, whose shadow was abbreviated by a prim yet suggestive line of white lace. Then she was gone, and Benech turned sadly back to the bar, where Gayral pushed over his drink.

  The wireless was playing on a high shelf, a song of inappropriate frivolity about an absconding postman.

  Benech inveigled himself into a conversation with a group of other men, who included Roudil and Julien Levade. Their talk was soft and depressed. Benech noticed how solicitous Julien was towards Roudil, bringing him coffee from the bar and enquiring about his building business.

  The quiet mood of the room was violently interrupted by the sound of Marshal Pétain on the wireless, swiftly turned to maximum volume by Gayral.

  The dozen people in the bar stopped what they were doing to listen to the old man’s girlish voice with its dry, hesitant cough. Drinks were held half-way from the table. Irène Galliot froze in the doorway with a pile of empty plates. Roudil’s ancient eyes looked up imploringly to the wireless as though he might actually see the face of the great soldier who had understood the plight of men such as himself in the furnace of Verdun, who had been their saviour then.

  At the end of his hopeful, patriotic and unapologetic address, Pétain played the Marseillaise. The sound of the reluctant, rumbling march filled Benech with a cool certainty. Roudil, he noticed, covered his face with his hands. The emotions provoked by the music were evidently powerful: even Julien Levade appeared to be struggling to contain some turbulent inner conflict.

  2

  ONCE A WEEK, after she had cleared breakfast and seen Levade safely into his studio, Charlotte took over the bathroom for the morning. The wood-burning stove that heated the water generally did so well enough for one deep bath, in which she washed her hair with a powerful concoction from the recesses of Madame Galliot’s shop.

  As she lay in the water, Charlotte tried to prepare herself for what Mirabel might say to her. Until the Germans arrived her existence, apart from visits to André and Jacob, had been free from risk. Presumably that would now change; she would have to see what Mirabel thought. He had cancelled their first meeting some weeks earlier, but, according to Julien, was more insistent than ever that they meet this time. Perhaps he would order her to return home, and she would plead with him that she could still be useful in France. Even if he insisted, it was still open to her to refuse: she could simply not turn up at the appointed time for the plane. It would mean that G Section would disown and dismiss her, but she had no long-term ambitions with them. It was not as if she would be in any more danger, because they could offer her no protection in France anyway. What they would not like about it was the thought of what she knew and that the longer she was there the more possible it was that she would be caught and interrogated. The German presence in the Free Zone made it more likely, but the truth was that she had little to tell. G Section’s tactic of minimum information had worked well: she did not know Mirabel’s assumed name, his real name or where to find him. She thought she could convince him that for the time being, at least, she was more of an asset than a risk. What excited her about the rendezvous was her hope, amounting almost to a belief, that Mirabel, with his superior connections, would know where Gregory was hiding.

  When she had roughly dried her hair, she set about redyeing the roots, where the natural colours were starting to show through. She wore gloves to protect her hands and worked the dye in with a paint brush borrowed from Levade’s studio. She was two thirds of the way through Antoinette’s bottle; as she upended it into her gloved palm, she thought of the steamy shop and wondered how Antoinette was managing up in the rainy mountains with Gilberte and her fortnightly visitor from Clermont-Ferrand.

  Charlotte peered into the blue-framed mirror above the basin and saw the reflection of her anxious brown eyes. She smiled at herself, instinctively turning to a better angle beneath the harsh light.

  There were days when she scarcely thought of Peter Gregory, days when she convinced herself that he did not exist and that her memory of him was false; yet she still believed that only she could give him back his life and that only he could plausibly join her future to her past. She had had time to inspect the feeling from every angle, to imagine, even wish for, its diminution, but while her mind offered many choices about emotions and their value – how much they should be honoured, how much resisted, how changeable they could be, how naturally mortal – her intellectual conviction remained stable. Now she was going to find him.

  As she stood, naked from the waist up, inspecting herself in the mirror, Charlotte was stirred from her reverie by the sudden conviction that someone was watching her. Covering herself with a towel, she grabbed the door of the little bathroom and pulled it open. The corridor was empty.

  That afternoon, her dulled hair wrapped beneath a scarf, she was sweeping the long corridor of the first floor when the door to Levade’s studio swung open.

  ‘Madame Guilbert? Would you care to come in for a moment?’

  Charlotte followed him into the studio, broom in hand.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ said Levade, indicating the canvas on the easel. There was a picture of a woman in a green silk skirt whom Charlotte recognised as his model, Anne-Marie. He had caught her expression of slightly timid seriousness; he had made her look like an intellectual person, a teacher or philosopher, yet had depicted her bare-breasted in a green silk skirt and set her in an imagined room whose dimensions were surreal.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ said Charlotte. She did not think it wonderful, though she recognised it as the work of someone who was good at what he did.

  ‘What do you like about it?’ Levade stood with his arms crossed. He was for once wearing shoes, and had a jacket over his habitual untucked shirt.

  ‘I just like the girl. Anne-Marie. I like the way you’ve painted her.’

  ‘The likeness?’ It was difficult to see how he managed to load the simple word with intense scorn.

  ‘I’m afraid so. Look at her pale skin. And the way her eyes are almond-shaped yet not narrow, the centre so large and open. It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen that in a woman before.’

  Levade sighed. ‘What about the skin?’

  ‘It’s lovely. The paleness. But not white or deathly – it still looks healthy.’

  Levade gazed at the picture in silence. ‘It’s no good at all,’ he said. He went over to a small circular table and lit a cigarette. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t care. Anne-Marie is merely an exercise for me. There’s something of her I’m trying to get right. Do you know what it is?’

  Charlotte looked at the painting again. There was no doubt that the eye was drawn, willingly or otherwise, to Anne-Marie’s breasts, whose exposure was the more obvious for the background against which the figure was set.

  ‘It’s her arms,’ said Levade. ‘The skin on her arms. That’s why I asked her to be my model. She was working in a café not far from here, and I stopped there one day last year. It was summer and her arms were bare. She leaned across me to put down a plate and I was transfixed by the colour and texture of them.’ He shook his head and flicked the ash of his cigarette on to the floor, then went and stood in front of a small table on which were some religious statues and a candle.

  He gazed back at the painting with an expression of resigned distaste.

  ‘The arms are very good,’ said Charlotte. ‘But perhaps one’s eye is drawn away from them too much.’

  ‘Does it worry you, the nudity? Even after so many statues and classical models? After Michelangelo and Ingres and—’

  ‘I don’t really think it’s that kind of picture.’

  ‘You think it’s lascivious?’

  ‘Not completely, because there are other things happening. But a little bit, yes.’

  ‘Put that broom down.’ Levade walked over to the window and gazed up at the thick woods that fringed the gardens to the north. His lined face looked older than his lean body in th
e mild, clear light of the afternoon.

  ‘Sit down.’ He thrust his arm towards the bed, and Charlotte perched herself, trying to look relaxed. Levade stayed standing by the window. She watched his half-turned face carefully: the thudding artery in the neck, the wizened Adam’s apple dragging up between the flaps of skin on his throat as he spoke again.

  ‘Have you heard any news of your husband?’

  Charlotte felt repelled by Levade, but reluctant to admit that her repulsion was not absolute. ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘Do you love him? Do you miss him?’

  ‘No. There’s another man I love.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Pierre.’

  Levade turned into the room. ‘Tell me about him.’

  Charlotte hesitated for a second, but the temptation was too great. It occurred to her as she spoke how long she had carried the unshared weight of her feeling for Gregory; her waking and many of her sleeping hours had been filled with this sullen, secret ache. As she started to find words, the feelings formed themselves and rushed in through her abandoned discretion. She felt the emotions surge up and animate her movements; her hands were clawing at the air, rotating, and there was a flush rising in her neck, creeping over her jaw. In the most emotional moments of the story she still watched Levade’s eyes, to see if he was listening, and she saw that his head did not move, that his eyes did not leave her, and she felt the radiance of his interest.

  She was shocked when he said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I believe the pain and the passion, but I don’t believe this Pierre is a – what was it, airman from Rennes. I think he’s English, as are you, Madame.’

  Charlotte swallowed and looked down to her hands, now stilled and resting in her lap. ‘Does it matter?’ she said.

  Levade pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Not in the least. The rest of the story is true, I imagine.’

  ‘I came to France to find him. Everything I told you about how much I miss him, how I fear for his life – all the feelings of love I described, all those are true.’