Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  He climbed the stairs and went along the passage to room number 14. The grimy little window overlooked an interior courtyard in which the cooker outlet from the kitchen emitted a grey, unwholesome vapour. Gregory lay down on the bed and, despite his best intentions of only resting, fell asleep.

  It was dark when he awoke. He made his way back to the street by the harbour. There was still the same bustle of German troops unloading stores, standing behind lorries, smoking; there were still French police strutting about in pairs.

  It was past midnight when he decided he could wait no longer; if he did not move soon he would faint with hunger and fatigue. When the door of the house he was watching opened at last, he went across the street and stopped the middle-aged man who was leaving.

  ‘Pascale?’

  ‘First floor.’ The man jerked his head backwards and hurried off.

  Gregory went up the bare stairs and knocked at a green-painted door on the landing.

  It opened a few inches and he found himself looking at a woman with stern, grey eyes.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Pascale. I . . .’ Gregory’s French deserted him. He closed his eyes and felt the floor begin to buckle underneath him. ‘I’m English,’ he said in his own language. ‘For God’s sake help me.’

  The door opened and he stepped inside.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said the woman, also in English.

  ‘My God, you’re American.’

  He fell forward against her, and she dragged his bony weight across the room to a divan by the window.

  Charlotte became particular in her work at the Domaine, as though it were something that interested her. She forced herself to take pride in the cleanliness of the floors and furniture and to make dinner, even if it was barely edible, at least a punctuation of Levade’s undifferentiated hours.

  She began to think more and more about home. The sight of the black-bellied Halifax above her, the curious pilot making one more sweep above the benighted land before heading north for England, had made her think of those laconic men, their flying suits, their beer, their shoulder-shrugging that concealed an inglorious belief in what they did. She thought more and more of her parents and of her brother; if he was now abroad, as he had so long hoped, they would be worried for his safety. Roderick had a way of being at the centre of improbable storms; he was always on the train that broke down, invariably in the foyer of the cinema that caught fire.

  The combination of fatigue, exhilaration and the after-effects of drink made her able to postpone thinking about her night with Julien. Then, as her mind became rested and clear, she found her first response was a self-righteous sense of loyalty to herself. Why not?, she caught herself saying to her reflection when she combed her hair in the morning: it’s my life, I’m responsible to no one but myself. She rather admired her own daring, and felt protective of the vulnerable being that was still there in the centre of her – child, woman, it made no difference – and to whom she owed her greatest allegiance. I will stick by my own decisions, she valiantly thought, as she laboured in the icy rooms of the Domaine.

  Yet her bravado was slowly deflated by feelings of shame and insecurity. She loved the idea of Dominique, had used her without compunction for her own advantage, and regretted having descended to invoking her as an alibi for her own idle lust, betrayal or selfish need for reassurance. Dominique represented to her the plight of a typical woman expelled from some domestic paradise by forces outside herself, and Charlotte was deeply sympathetic; for a few days her misuse of Dominique weighed more heavily with her than her infidelity to Peter Gregory. He had been for so long absent, for so long kept alive not by any realistic belief but more by her neurotic need for him, that to believe she had been unfaithful required a sophistication of feeling that was beyond her.

  Slowly, however, guilt cleared its ingenious paths, and Charlotte began to suffer fears that only her fidelity had kept him living – a superstitious dread that he would now give up or die. She felt she had compromised the only thing in her life that had had the redeeming power of goodness and purity; it made no difference that it was just one night, with a man of whom she was profoundly fond. Fidelity was a matter of absolutes, not degrees; it would have been no worse if she had slept with every man at the farm that night. Her long patience was about to be rewarded by word from Mirabel, and, at the crucial moment, she had failed.

  From day to day her most pressing problem was with Julien. She felt embarrassed by the difference she presumed in their feelings; she thought he was in love with her and that she was bound to disappoint him. Her only hope was that men, perhaps, were different in such matters and that his obvious desires for her were not necessarily eloquent of any deep feeling. Meanwhile she discovered some reflex in herself – so contradictory of her conscious feelings that she could only imagine it as a primal instinct – which craved reassurance that he did actually care for her, and that their night together would not be a single, unrepeated act. She wanted to go back to him.

  Charlotte despaired at the confusion of her feelings, but managed to decide one thing clearly at least: that she would as far as possible avoid seeing Julien until her thoughts were clearer.

  One morning she was washing in the icy water of the bathroom basin, splashing it all over and scrubbing with soap to store up cleanliness so she could postpone a return to the public baths. Again, she had the strange sensation that someone was watching her, but this time she did not have time to cover herself and investigate because the door was opened from outside.

  ‘Ah, Madame Guilbert. Excuse me. I need to go out and I wanted you to know that I am expecting a delivery this afternoon. Some paints.’ Levade shrugged. ‘Pointless, I expect. I’ll just smear them on the canvas. But you never know.’

  Charlotte, dripping, cold, and hastily arranging a towel about her, felt embarrassment for them both. Levade simply stared at her with level eyes. She began to protest at his intrusion, but it seemed quite pointless.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll listen for the door.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll be back by two.’

  He walked away down the corridor, and Charlotte quickly dried herself. Did he really see only through the eyes of art? Was his gaze so pure that he saw only the shapes of Renoir or Modigliani? She was slightly nettled by his indifference. At least now perhaps he’ll consider my breasts as fine as Anne-Marie’s, she thought, as she pulled on her clothes.

  Downstairs there was a letter for Madame Guilbert. On a single sheet inside were the words: ‘Meet me Wednesday, 16 hours. Same place. Mirabel.’

  Charlotte crumpled the paper joyously in her fist. She loved Mirabel; she loved the way he kept his word; she loved the care he had taken to make his handwriting look so French.

  ‘I think I’m dreaming for two,’ Charlotte told Levade that afternoon when he had invited her into his studio to examine his new paints. ‘Something has caused a great storm of dreams in me. They’re not pictures, though, they’re more like actions.’

  Levade seemed uninterested. Other people’s dreams, Charlotte remembered her father telling her as a teenager, are the most tedious conversational topic on earth. You can fabricate an interest in gossip on the grounds that it at least springs from an actual experience, however trite; dreams lack even this weak claim on our attention. Dr Gray had resented the importance ascribed to dreams by most practitioners of his science and had himself tried to hurry his patients through their recitations.

  Levade was looking at the painting of Anne-Marie. ‘She’s a charming woman, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘There’s something powerfully feminine about her. But the painting tells us nothing. It might just as well be a photograph.’

  ‘What about the skin on her arms?’ said Charlotte, though she still found it was not to Anne-Marie’s arms that her eyes were drawn.

  ‘Just paint.’

  The dream Charlotte wanted to tell him about was one from the night before, in which she had re-experienced the moment in he
r childhood when her father had betrayed her. To overcome Levade’s resistance to the topic of dreams, she had to cast it as truth, as something that had happened, as in fact – so far as she could tell – it had.

  She climbed off the bed where she had been sitting and walked across the bare boards until she stood between Levade and the light from the window, so she could be sure of his attention. Her tongue seemed stuck for a moment to her teeth; she licked her lips and looked over at him.

  ‘When I was a child of about seven my father did something to me that has troubled me ever since. He caused me pain in what seemed like an innocent embrace. I opened my arms to him as a child would, and when he let me go something terrible had happened. Everything was changed.’

  Levade’s hand was motionless, the paintbrush poised a small distance from the canvas.

  ‘He assaulted you?’ Levade’s eyes were fixed on Charlotte’s face.

  ‘He hurt me.’

  She told him how she had come upon her father weeping, and how, when she had tried to comfort him something had taken place. He had pushed her away, he had slapped her . . . but the pain felt worse than this, like a violation, like an end of innocence.

  ‘Did he really hit you? Or was it more like . . .’

  ‘It sounds extraordinary,’ said Charlotte, ‘but I don’t know. There was physical pain, but I couldn’t say in what part of my body. The damage he did me was so personal and wounding that I’ve often thought it must have been sexual. Yet the truth is that I can’t remember. My mind didn’t understand at that age, and I just shut it away. I was left with a fear that it might happen again. It was the most real, most powerful thing that’s ever happened to me, yet I can’t remember exactly what it was.’

  ‘It’s not strange,’ said Levade. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You do?’ Charlotte looked at him in disbelief. For almost twenty years this half-assimilated thing had lain in her mind unconfessed, a trouble to her thinking, feeling life, and she had never thought that anyone could comprehend.

  Levade breathed in; his face became radiant with interest and his body seemed to slough off its habitual air of defeat. ‘What would a child’s mind do with such an experience? It could only push it to one side and try to bury it. It’s possible that you may never know what happened; it may be beyond the reach of memory. And perhaps that’s not a terrible thing. Human beings can live with mystery, with unresolved conflicts.’

  Charlotte thought of the painting he had shown her. ‘Yes, but the trouble is that it affected my life. My childhood until then had been wonderful. There seemed to be no flaw in it. Although my father was not a demonstrative man, I felt surrounded by love, I was insulated from the world. Every taste and every sensation came to me with this innocence, with this guarantee of love and safety. Then, from that moment, all that certainty, all that bliss was gone.’

  ‘How did it show itself? Did it make you unstable?’

  ‘Later, in my teens, I was ill, I was treated by various doctors. They called it “depression”, but I don’t think they knew what it was. Perhaps it wasn’t related to the incident.’

  ‘What did the doctors say?’

  ‘I only told one of them. It was in Aberdeen. He didn’t believe me. He got up out of his chair. He was angry.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I felt trapped. I had to break out of it. I . . .’ Charlotte was finding it difficult to breathe.

  ‘What did he say?’

  Charlotte began to sob, long, scorching breaths from deep in her abdomen. ‘He said I was . . . a liar . . . an evil girl. He . . .’

  Levade put his arm round her shoulder, and Charlotte thought how strange it was that something that had been so long suppressed should emerge in the embrace of a person she had until then so distrusted.

  Levade made her sit on the bed while he went downstairs and prepared some tea, which he told her would be soothing for an ‘English’ woman. He returned with a small pot of black herbal tea and pressed a cigarette on her as well.

  ‘There you are, Charlotte,’ he said, and it occurred to her that although he made an issue of discovering it, he had never until that moment used her name.

  Levade began to cough, a horrible, deep retching sound that left him panting and momentarily incapable of speech.

  ‘Are you all right? That sounds terrible.’

  ‘This house is cold at night. That’s all.’ He waved away her concern.

  ‘How old was your father when these things happened?’

  Charlotte sucked at the bitter tea. ‘I was born in 1917 and I was about six, so if he was born in 1887—’

  ‘So he’d been in the war?’

  ‘Oh, yes. All the way through. I think he must have been very lucky. He once told me almost all the officers were killed.’

  ‘Did he tell you much about the war?’

  Charlotte struggled to overcome her habitual repulsion at the thought of conflict, and her father in it.

  ‘Not a great deal. He took us to see the graveyards when we were children. He told us it must never happen again. I think my brother and I found it hard to take in. I don’t think children can understand things on that scale. Then, as we grew older, he spoke of it less and less. He became more withdrawn in every way, not just about his own past experiences.’

  ‘Did he ever tell you stories about it?’

  ‘Not that I recall. We had a general impression of waste and death. Though I do remember one odd thing he mentioned. I remember it because it was so incongruous. It came out of the blue. I suppose I was about ten and it was one of those rare days when we did things together like a real family. We went to a loch and rowed on the water. Then we had a picnic lunch . . .’

  . . . Gray was lighting a pipe to keep the midges off. He held the box of matches over the bowl to help it draw, then puffed a blue cloud into the thin and silent air. His wife laid out a tartan rug on the heather and took a thermos from a wicker basket.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, William?’

  ‘What? No. I’ll have a dram. Did you put some in?’

  Amelia Gray handed him the whisky flask in silence, and he filled the little silver lid, then raised it to his lips. The familiar spirit spread its slow comfort through his body as he propped himself against a rock and looked down towards the glistening water where his children played.

  ‘Would you look at that lassie, Amelia? Look at the way she runs. She’s like a boy.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said his wife. ‘We’re so lucky, aren’t we?’

  Gray raised an eyebrow and looked over at her, his head nodding in the interested but sceptical manner he had developed in the lecture-room. There was the golden-legged girl chasing her brother up the margin of the loch; he heard her shrill, protesting voice and saw the tireless movements of her twisting body, as slim and muscular as an eel. So what was that storming sadness in her brown eyes when he spoke to her alone?

  There was his boy, raw-boned, his voice already cracking with unexpected bass notes, a brave and vigorous child he had welcomed with all his proud young father’s heart into a world that was still then, at that innocent time, with whatever fitful setbacks, becoming slowly and demonstrably more civilised, more habitable for his children and their future sons and daughters.

  On this summer morning in the Highlands, the last coldness of the air just burned off by the sun, he could almost believe that nothing had been lost, that the powerful harmony of the rocks and water, the sound of generations and their laughter, were rolling on to some natural and joyous end. But everything had changed.

  Sometimes at night he woke to find himself screaming, drenched with sweat. Usually, he was at the head of the communication trench, looking into the eyes of his disbelieving platoon commanders as he told them the attack would be in daylight. In daylight? He saw their stricken faces. Something they had concealed from one another, even from themselves, assumed at that moment the contours of a clear, impending truth. Twelve hours later, the size of i
t had become apparent; but even as he went among the emergency dressing-stations, encouraging the shattered men with his acquired brusqueness, Gray knew that it would take years to understand what they had seen that July morning.

  He began to curse his survival. He was viewed by his men with incredulity: he not only had the will to survive, he even seemed to care who won. His unyielding efficiency, his brightness of manner and intellectual curiosity made the men fear him, as though his reserves were more than human. But the weight he carried was concealed from them; it was the burden of continuation. He watched the companies in his battalion renewed from top to bottom as the years wore on, their officers the first to go, but only he seemed unable to attract the fatal release. He knew that each day he nerved himself to carry on was a depletion of the life he might hope to lead when the war was over.

  One of his platoon commanders, an inward, difficult man called Wraysford, had seen at one moment what it was costing him. He had looked into Gray’s eyes and described the perfect blankness he had seen there, though Gray was doubtful whether he had diagnosed its cause. He had tried once to confide in this man, but when he reached out to him, he saw that his soul was too far shrunken down inside him to be capable of responding.

  Charlotte and Roderick ate sandwiches on the rug and played with the small white dog who sniffed about the plate of hard-boiled eggs. When Gray looked at his daughter’s wide brown eyes and the fine white down on her bare arms he felt indescribably old and tarnished. Yet he loved the girl, still, in his shocked and weary heart, he loved her, and he wished until the wish became an agony that he might have passed on to her a world that would have been worthy of her childish glee.

  Roderick had just outgrown the high point of his boy’s inquisitiveness, but there were still occasions when he turned to his father for information. Now he asked about soldiers and dungeons and why kings and barons didn’t simply kill the prisoners they took.

  Inspired by the beauty of the open landscape, the sound of birdsong from the bright sky, Gray for once did not tersely deflect the question but answered as the father of a boy and girl should, with friendly interest and detail.