Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Levade coughed and gave one of his quickly vanishing smiles. ‘So now I just put paint on canvas. The skin of a waitress’s arm.’

  ‘It must be frustrating.’

  ‘Of course. I think about it all the time. Painting was my life and it failed me. I was bound to wonder why. And the solitude has given me time to puzzle over it.’

  Charlotte pushed her shoes off and sat back against the bolster, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms round them. Levade had spoken quite unguardedly, with a fluency that must have derived from having gone over the question so often in his mind.

  ‘Have you talked to Julien about this?’

  ‘Yes.’ Levade sat on a little stool he kept in front of the easel. ‘It was difficult at first because I hadn’t seen him since I left his mother and I thought he might not want to know me. But he’s a very forgiving man. He has a remarkable temperament. In the end I told him everything. When he first came to live in Lavaurette he used to come here for dinner every night. He cooked and then we’d talk for hours. Then I think he found a woman.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Charlotte’s voice was even.

  ‘He didn’t tell me her name. Some woman in the village. He never stays with them long.’

  ‘Like his father.’

  ‘I think he has some difficulties. The difference is that he would like to be faithful, so he’s always disappointed by himself.’

  ‘But you didn’t want to be?’

  ‘Not until I married Julien’s mother, then I did try.’

  ‘And what was it about Julien’s mother, out of all the other women?’

  ‘It was a dream. I’d known her for five years. She worked in a baker’s on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. I used to see her almost every day, and her brother knew a lot of people who were friends of mine. She was older than me, not very beautiful, a rather stout bourgeoise. Her father had a number of shops, they were quite well-to-do. Then one night I had an overwhelming dream of being in love with her. I awoke in the morning and found it was true. I was sick with the feeling. When I told you the other day that I didn’t use the expression of being in love I should have excluded this one instance. I took flowers to the shop, I followed her in the street. I was distraught, yet I had a sense of inner conviction that this was the woman I had to be with. The dream was not a vision or a fragment, it was the statement of a reality. I couldn’t properly remember from that day on what I had felt before. I couldn’t imagine what it had been like not being in love with her.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘I suppose it was the war. Julien was born in 1913 and the next year I was mobilised. I came home on leave from time to time, but it was difficult. The life I was living at the front was impossible to reconcile with what was asked of me at home. I knew it was changing me inside. I felt it was destroying me.’

  Levade’s voice was hard and emphatic. Charlotte felt he wanted to disclose more to her of what had happened to him.

  ‘And yet,’ he said, more ruminatively this time, ‘it was the making in some way of my painting. I left Julien’s mother in 1922 and it was then that my dreams began. But without the four years at the Front . . . I don’t know.’

  Charlotte looked out of the window and saw that it was dark. ‘I should go and make dinner,’ she said.

  Levade did not answer; he seemed to be lost in recollection.

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘If you like. Perhaps you could bring something up here on a tray.’

  After dinner Levade closed the shutters in his studio, handed Charlotte cigarettes, two glasses and a bottle of Armagnac.

  ‘How did you find this house?’ said Charlotte.

  ‘A friend of Kahnweiler’s. The picture dealer. It belonged to a family with several children but none of them wanted it or could afford it.’

  Charlotte put some more wood on the fire, then sat down in the room’s only comfortable seat, a battered, rush-seated armchair. She thought for a moment of winter nights in the Highlands. Before it was somehow taken from her, there had in her childhood been a period of perfect contentment. She must have been very young indeed, yet the experience of it was still real in her mind: a sense of secure order in which the details of domestic life, the taste of redcurrants from the cage in the garden, the sound of a bicycle bell, the smell of paraffin with which her daily chore was to fill the heaters in the hall, the first frisson of hot water as she lowered herself into the bath in a cold but steam-filled room; and the lanes along which she walked – these had been of an enchantment that was complete, not tainted by comparison or loss.

  And these remembered details would have amounted to nothing without love. For some short time at least, Charlotte recognised with a shock, there must have been harmony between herself and her parents. She had forgotten this brief childish paradise.

  Levade took a glass and sat in the wicker chair by the window. He began to talk about his life in Paris. Then he told Charlotte about a house he had once lived in by the sea. It was summer time. Julien, aged about twelve, was packed off by his mother on the train from Paris to be met by Levade at the local station. The village had been inhabited by fishermen and their families for centuries and had yet to acquire a proper hotel. The house to which Levade took Julien was behind a small bay with pink cliffs topped by fir trees. There were upturned boats and lobster pots, tended by the fishermen whose boots left ugly imprints on the sand; no visitors from Paris had ever been before, and they were regarded by the people of the village with puzzled indifference.

  Levade’s whitewashed cottage had a terrace that overlooked the sea; inside, it was bare and simple, with two bedrooms and a small garden at the back. A girl from the village came in every day to clean and make lunch from whatever fish she had bought from her grandfather’s early boat on the way. In the evening, Levade took Julien by the hand and led him across the sandy village square with a wind-battered larch, to the Pension that was housed in a squat brick building with bright blue shutters. Various friends from Paris were staying, also painters, some with small children in sailor clothes and sun-hats, some with their mistresses, and two men who dumbfounded the servant-girls by sharing a single-bedded room.

  All day Levade worked out of doors, sitting on the top of the cliff with an easel or walking round the headland with a sketch book. Sometimes he would take a boat and row out of the bay, looking back at the tenacious grey village on the hillside, watching Julien’s sunburnt face as his trailed fingers split the surface of the dark water. Occasionally there would be telephone messages from Paris, uncomprehendingly relayed by the woman on the switchboard; once a telegram boy arrived on the beach; but these urgent communications seemed no more than gestures from a forgotten world.

  The reality was only in the swinging glass-panelled doors of the dining room at night, the snail’s line of sand from the children’s canvas shoes and the cream cheeses they ate with such glee for dessert, while their parents smoked cigars or persevered with the smaller limbs of lobsters; it was in the simple faces of the waitresses and the indulgent smile of the widow who owned the Pension.

  As the summer wore on, the composition of the party changed and its numbers gradually diminished, but Levade felt there was no reason ever to go home. Each night he dreamed, sometimes useless stories, sometimes mere projections of the day that had gone, but also of buildings and cities, of landscapes given back to him from his past, now fully understood and released by the visit of his imagination. He painted with devotion, and the stretch of his mental energy did not deplete him but left his other senses stimulated and serene. He had formed an understanding with one of the girls in the Pension; he gave her books and presents; he talked to her, and in return she was a lover in whom the desire to please seemed limitless.

  ‘I think of it often,’ said Levade, who was now lying on the bed. ‘Sometimes I can almost recapture it, but not quite. I can’t find the exact reality of it.’

  For all that she was interested by what Levade had said, Charlotte could no
t help a certain minister of the kirk reaction. Who had been looking after Julien when Levade was busy with his little girlfriend? What sort of durable Eden was it that saw children as little more than picturesque?

  She said, ‘Do you think all paradises are lost, that that’s their nature?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say lost,’ said Levade, ‘but they must be in the past. What is present can’t be imagined, and imagination is the only faculty we have for apprehending beauty.’

  He stood up and walked over to the brass-topped table to refill his glass. ‘Isn’t that your problem, Mademoiselle? You have lost something, perhaps two things, two states of feeling. You don’t wish to admit it, but perhaps there has been in one of them at least – your love affair – a diminution of your pain. If you admit that, then you’re saying that the ecstasy was not as important as you thought, and since this was the feeling by which you organised your life, you can’t afford to confess that.’

  Charlotte said nothing. She did not know if Levade was right, but she felt a wish to hurt him, to expose his egocentricity in some damaging way. She said, ‘I’m surprised you set such store by dreams. They seem an unlikely guide. I remember a colleague of my father’s, a psychologist, describing dreams to me once as “neural waste”.’

  Levade laughed, a disconcerting sight that involved him throwing back his head so the sinews of his neck stood out. ‘People always make fine phrases when they’re frightened. I remember Proust, at his most desperate to break through the bonds of time, writing something like “reality is the waste-product of experience”.’

  Levade laughed so hard that he had to put down his glass.

  ‘Did you like Proust?’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Yes, I thought it was a funny book. But I was young when I read it. I think there’s a copy in the house somewhere.’

  ‘Funny?’ said Charlotte. ‘I suppose it’s funny,’ she lied. She thought it was the most tragic book she had ever read. ‘I think of it as sad as well. The loss of any hope of happiness through love, the disillusion . . .’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Levade. ‘Anyway, I don’t arrange my life through dreams. I hope for them, I pray for them to help my painting. But I arrange my life through God.’

  On Wednesday, the day before the parachute drop of arms and stores was due, Charlotte went into Lavaurette to buy food. Outside Madame Galliot’s she remembered that they also needed candles and, as she leaned her bicycle against the shop, she saw the caped, official figure of Bernard attaching a piece of paper to the wall. Walking behind him to go into Madame Galliot’s, Charlotte could not resist looking over his shoulder. The poster showed a man drowning, lifting up his hands for help; in the foreground were shown the figures of de Gaulle and Churchill, with friendly arms round the shoulders of a sinister Jewish figure in a coat with an astrakhan collar. ‘Remember Mers el Kebir! Remember Dunkirk!’ read the black, smeared letters. ‘DON’T LET’S THROW IT AWAY NOW!’

  Bernard was staring at the poster in some puzzlement as he smoothed it down with his hands, though Charlotte thought it unlikely it could be the first he had heard of how the British fleet had sunk the French in the Algerian port of Mers el Kebir rather than let it fall into the hands of the Germans. When he saw her, Bernard shrugged. He uncurled another cartoon poster of a handsome Frenchman with chiselled cheekbones and improbably fair hair, lifting by the collar a wicked, unshaved Israelite with grotesque hooked nose and showing him the door of a building labelled ‘France’.

  At this moment a small, bald man with a raincoat and wire-rimmed glasses climbed out of a black car and came over to inspect Bernard’s work. Charlotte had never seen him before in Lavaurette. He had a self-important air and wore polished shoes that seemed to come from a big city.

  When he had inspected the poster, he turned to Bernard. ‘Who’s this?’ he said, pointing at Charlotte.

  ‘Madame Guilbert.’

  Charlotte held out her hand, but the bald man kept his by his side. He looked her slowly up and down, walked round to look at her in profile, then marched off without speaking back to his car.

  ‘Who was that extraordinary man?’

  Bernard shrugged. ‘He’s called Pichon. The Government’s sent him down from Paris. He’s travelling round.’

  ‘Is he a policeman or what?’

  ‘He says he’s from something called the Inquiry and Control Section. Don’t ask me what that is. Says he’s helping the local mayors interpret all the new rules. In fact, he just sticks his nose in.’

  Charlotte looked back at the posters. The odd thing about Lavaurette, she thought as she went past Bernard into Madame Galliot’s shop, was that although on the surface it seemed a tranquil, inward-looking place with its municipal monuments, its empty shops and sleepy squares, it was in fact the site of continuous activity and secret meetings, of numbered postboxes, hidden boys, propaganda and smiling public deceit. Perhaps the Germans were right to leave a local commandant behind.

  When she went back to her room in the Domaine she found that a piece of paper had been slid beneath the door. It was a note from Levade which he must have put there while she was out.

  Wednesday. 05.15h.

  On realising that his love for Gilberte has gone:

  ‘Of the state of mind which, in that far-off year, had been tantamount to a long-drawn-out torture for me, nothing survived. For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.’

  Time Regained, page 9.

  When Charlotte read it she thought that her teenage reading of Proust had left her with only clichés, and that she had not really understood the book at all. She resolved to think no more of it or of the unstable ecstasies it described.

  At midnight Claude Benech felt for the first time the stout and pimply handle of a firearm against the soft skin of his palm. He laid it on a pile of school exercise books he was marking. What he had to do in order to acquire it had, in the end, been simple: a matter of intelligent observation and knowing whom to inform.

  Benech felt his loyalty quicken and intensify in proportion to his new responsibilities. The gun on the table made him see the agony of his country in a clear light: it was time for action, it was time for the great majority of decent people like himself to fight for what they believed in. All his life he had patiently endured the triumphs of the undeserving, seen little men preferred to him, and he had stood quietly by because he believed in order. That was his passion, that was a proper and traditional belief; but order was not everlasting, it had no natural rights: from time to time true men must fight for it.

  He lifted the gun again and weighed it in his hand. Its presence made him want to use it.

  In the big house on the hill in Lavaurette Gerd Lindemann was reading orders delivered that afternoon by motorbike. The terse yet bureaucratic style of the papers was an affront to him. Until the winter of 1939 he had worked as a dramatic critic on a newspaper and had taken pride in the fact that his notices, while short and given little prominence by the editor, were always immaculately written: to be comprehensive in 350 words required a particular eloquence.

  Lindemann’s views on drama were more definite than his views on anything else. He had allowed himself to be left in this unimportant village, this undersized town in the middle of nothing, through his inability to get himself posted anywhere more interesting. He was not the gauleiter of Julien Levade’s imagining, but a reluctant infantry officer promoted to middle rank by virtue of his education and the losses on the Eastern Front. And he was aware that many of the men under his command were not the swaggering, blue-eyed youths who so impressed the French by their arrogance and their self-discipline when they took control of the traumatised country in 1940. The half-dozen soldiers billeted in the attic of the house were surly, small and no longer young. None of them would have been in such an inconsequential place as Lavaurette were it no
t for the rail connections with the main lines that made the village both a useful junction and a possible target of resistance sabotage – not that there had been any notable activity in the area, Lindemann had been informed.

  He went to the fireplace and rang the bell. He enjoyed this feudal procedure and relished the look of fear in the eyes of the little servant-girl who scuttled into the room a minute later. ‘More coffee,’ he said in his workable French. He had barely been able to finish the first pot of whatever it was she had brought, but something would have to keep him alert as he waded through the sheaf of orders. The military strategy was clear enough: get men in large numbers down to the southern coast to defend against Allied attacks from North Africa. This had meant overrunning the Free Zone, but the tactic was to leave as few men as possible to administer it before the arrival of the SS, so the greatest number possible could remain in active units. It was important to encourage the French to do as much work as they could, and Lindemann’s orders suggested ways of achieving this. Laval would launch his Milice in January, and in return for offering their help to the Occupier Laval would, as usual, ask for German collaboration in the matter of boundaries, prisoners of war, payments and so on. The request, as usual, would be declined.

  Lindemann smiled. This Milice would consist presumably of various thugs and convicts given early parole, of young hooligans worried that they might otherwise be transported to Germany as part of Laval’s eight-for-one exchange system for prisoners taken in the brief fight of May, 1940. Lindemann could not imagine that anyone else would want to join, but he might have to use these people, so he had better not prejudge them.