For his part, Gregory liked to pass the time by thinking about Charlotte. It comforted him to imagine that while he had fought his way through injury and fever to this temporary haven and that while he braced himself for the danger of his return, she would be quietly going about her routine in London.
He saw her in the narrow room at the end of the corridor, hurriedly dressing in the morning after one of her motionless sleeps. He could not quite remember what the FANY uniform was like, but he was sure that Charlotte would not care for it. She would for some time have been safely back from whatever errand she had been assigned in France, unless, of course, her Lysander pilot had also crashed and therefore failed to pick her up. It seemed unlikely.
She would take a taxi (she would be too late for the bus) to some office, where she would pass a long day which to him would have been intolerably tedious but which to her would seem useful. Then in the evening she would busy herself in the flat, making dinner, listening to the problems of her ridiculous flat-mates. He imagined her curled up in bed, reading into the small hours, and the picture brought him a profound sense of peace.
Levade sat on the train to the concentration camp writing letters to his friends.
Dear Anne-Marie,
I’m afraid our sessions have come to an end. Please take the painting if you want it. It’s no good, but you might like a souvenir of those long afternoons that you so bravely bore. Never lose the grace you have, however the years deprive you of your swift movements. Your arms, I remember so well from that lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, were so beautiful that they obsessed me. But I am a feeble painter who has not for many years been able to go behind these surfaces to what lies beyond. Forget me now, but I will remember you in my prayers.
He was in a third-class compartment guarded by gendarmes in the corridor. They were unhappy in their work and averted their eyes from Levade and his five fellow prisoners. Instead, as the train rattled north, they leaned against the window and carefully watched the weak afternoon sun decline on the foothills of the Limousin.
Levade sealed the letter to Anne-Marie and began another.
Dear Julien,
I’m sorry we didn’t have time to say goodbye. There are many things I would like to have told you. I feel ashamed to have been absent for so much of your life, not having been there to help you. It is a passionate regret to me. The love of a man for his son is a terrible and wonderful thing, one of the greatest that God has given to us. It is comparable to the love of God for man. Think of Abraham, prepared to kill his long-awaited son Isaac, to plunge his knife into the living boy. God chose that test because it was the hardest. And to save the world he gave his own Son. In what a father feels for his son there is much stern hope, but so much tenderness that I cannot describe it to you now. If you have sons of your own you must hold them when they’re young. But you will never keep them in that embrace. They are separate from you, however much you love them, and all you have done, in a moment’s passion, is create the circumstances for their existence.
As for the manner of my leaving . . .
Here, Levade put down the pen because he hadn’t the heart to examine what had happened, or to think what Julien’s motives might have been. He had thought himself into an elevated state of mind in which he was able to accept that what had taken place was in some way ineluctable. The truth had been told: he was a Jew; and he was prepared to live in the consequences of that truth with a providential hope. He became momentarily aware of a selfish desire: he wanted to die; but he was able to deny this wish, or at least subsume it into a more general sense of tranquillity in which his own desires had no active part. Not my will, he repeated to himself, but Thy will be done.
He would return to the question of Julien. Meanwhile he began another letter, to Charlotte.
Dear Madame,
I am addressing this to you at the Domaine, though I don’t know whether you will still be there. I shall give it to the young gendarme in the corridor who manically avoids my eye. Perhaps it will make him feel better.
Is it too late to thank you for your company in my house? I was a bad friend and landlord to you, but to have you there was a comfort to me in many long days and nights. I wish very much that you did not so much love another man, as I believe you could have loved my son. One wishes for things to be content and permanent in a way that one has failed to achieve oneself. But you are a fine person, Madame, you have such courage in your heart, and if not with Julien, then so be it, with someone else.
Did I tease you too much? I wanted to make you strong. The happiness of young people becomes almost the only source of delight to someone of my age. I remember when you told me about your father, and I was pleased that you confided in me. I told you that we can live with mystery, with unresolved conflicts. Now I’m not sure if that’s true. In art, perhaps, these things are good. In your life I think you should try to remember, though whether you can do this by an act of will, I doubt. Memory works at its best unasked.
I wish you very well. For the sake of those who are old and those about to die you must make something glorious of your life. That would mean something to those less free to choose.
When he had signed the letter, placed it an envelope and addressed it, Levade returned to the piece of paper on which he was writing to Julien.
For a long time he stared at the abbreviated paragraph, but still he remained unwilling to break the tranquillity of his mental state. So lost was he in thought that he did not notice the train slowing down as it neared its destination.
Eventually, he continued:
There was an English mystic who came back from her most joyful communion with God saying, “All will be well; all manner of things will be well.”
So, Julien, I believe . . .
But, at this moment, the train stopped at the station with a heavy jolt, and the gendarmes pulled back the doors of Levade’s compartment. He had barely the time to write, ‘I love you’ at the bottom of the letter, to seal and hastily address it before he and his fellow passengers were hurried down on to the platform.
The station was at a town in the flat pastures of the Bourbonnais. The travellers on the platform looked with sheepish interest at the small group of men and women under guard. A senior gendarme took the papers offered to him by a young man who had been guarding them on the train. He told them to arrange themselves in a line and follow him.
Levade picked up the suitcase Charlotte had packed and felt inside the pocket of his jacket for the three letters. As he passed the youngest of the gendarmes, he held them out to him. ‘Would you post these for me? They’re just letters to my son and a couple of friends.’
The young man looked down at his feet, then glanced to see if anyone had seen. He stuffed the letters into his pocket and grunted.
The senior gendarme led his half-dozen charges down the platform, over a metal passenger bridge and down to a goods’ siding where half a dozen wagons had been coupled.
The men and women waited, looking round for their train and wondering whether the officer had made a mistake.
Then the gendarme went to the side of one of the wagons, unbolted it and pulled it open. It was full of people standing. The gendarme motioned towards the wagon with his hand.
Levade recognised this kind of wooden truck. When he had been released from duties as soup-man at Verdun he had spent a pleasantly undangerous period working in stores at the railhead. Such transport had arrived almost daily, bearing horses.
Perhaps this wagon had once carried the very horse he had tried to eat.
PART FOUR
1943
1
ANDRÉ DUGUAY RAN down the stairs when he heard Mlle Cariteau’s urgent call. It was six in the morning. In the kitchen was the nice young woman who sometimes came to visit them and read stories. André smiled briefly at her, then turned his eyes to the floor. Mlle Cariteau attacked his face with a cloth from the sink while he grimaced and tried to wrench his head away.
‘We’re going to say goodbye,’ said Mlle Cariteau. ‘For a few days you’re going to another house, just for a holiday.’
‘It’ll be nice,’ said Charlotte. ‘You’re going to be on a farm with animals, you and Jacob. Would you like that?’
‘No,’ said André. ‘I don’t want to.’
The two women set about trying to persuade him, by painting pictures of outdoor life with dogs and chickens and games in old barns. André felt suspicious of both.
‘I don’t want to leave, I like it here.’
‘And Jacob’s coming too,’ said Charlotte. ‘You’ll have wonderful games together. Then you can come back later and visit.’
André, who had seemed to be on the point of acquiescing, suddenly shook his head. ‘I want my mother. I want to know where she is.’
Charlotte said gently, ‘André, there really isn’t any choice. Soon this war will be over. Things are beginning to happen. And soon, when it’s finished, you will see your parents again. I’m sure you will. But just for the time being it would be better if you do what we ask. Trust me.’
André was beyond the reach of reason; he felt he had been trusting enough already, and still his parents were not there. His small, muscular body set itself in resistance to all these adult plans; he grasped the edge of the chair next to him and began to wail his defiance.
Mlle Cariteau said, ‘I’ll go and get the little one.’
In the middle of the previous night, André had heard a hammering on the kitchen door, then the sound of voices. He crept to the top of the stairs and through the banisters was able to see Madame and Mlle Cariteau talking urgently to the young woman, Madame Guilbert. As a result of their conversation, he and Jacob had been pushed up into the attic for the night and told to sleep on a pile of old blankets. They clung to one another for warmth in an unaccustomed embrace.
Sylvie Cariteau returned to the kitchen with a suspicious Jacob and the suitcase the boys had once used for tobogganing downstairs. It now held a few clothes Sylvie had managed to extract one evening from the Duguays’ house, the tin soldiers that Julien had brought, the book about the crocodile who lost her egg, an old adjustable spanner of which André had become fond and one or two other small objects of mysterious but intense private significance.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘a friend is coming to pick you up later in the morning and take you to the farm. I just want you to say goodbye to Madame Guilbert now.’
Madame Cariteau appeared in the kitchen and, seeing that André was upset, clasped him against her bosom, where he breathed in the old sour smell of her and felt the heat of her embrace, which once had reassured him, being soft and vaguely female, but now seemed only to emphasise the extent to which she was not his mother.
The night before, Charlotte had arrived, dripping wet, from the Domaine and woken the Cariteaus with her knocking. After she had explained the situation to Sylvie and they had moved the boys to the attic, they sat at the kitchen table and tried to decide what to do with them.
‘I think our best chance is Pauline Benoit,’ said Sylvie.
Charlotte remembered what Julien had said. ‘Isn’t she a Gaullist?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Maybe not.’ Charlotte wanted to say as little as possible.
‘She’s a kind woman. She’d certainly want to help two children.’
When Charlotte left Sylvie Cariteau and bicycled off, as instructed by Julien, to the monastery, Sylvie went quietly through the dark streets to rouse Pauline Benoit. Initially resentful at being woken, Pauline was intrigued by the plight of the boys and and amazed at how successfully Sylvie Cariteau had concealed them.
‘I can’t have them here,’ she said. ‘Obviously. Especially now with Monsieur Levade in difficulty. This is the first place they’d look. We want to get them out of the village. There is one person I can think of. I don’t know her very well, but . . .’
‘Who is it?’
They were sitting by candlelight in Pauline’s small front room. ‘Wait a minute. Let me think.’
Eventually she said, ‘Yes, I think it’ll work. She’s called Anne-Marie. She sits as a model for old Monsieur Levade. Her father has a farm about twenty minutes from here. He knows how to keep his mouth shut. God knows, he’s got enough to be discreet about.’
‘Are you sure they’ll co-operate?’ said Sylvie Cariteau.
‘I’m pretty sure. We can always offer to pay them. And the boys will be much better off on a farm. They might even get some eggs. I’ll take Gastinel’s van and go and see them. I’ll be back by dawn.’
Julien Levade was not a particularly strong man, but he was younger and bigger than the German soldier guarding him, and in the struggle that followed Charlotte’s departure he had more reason to fight. With his arm round the German’s throat he said, ‘Put down your gun and I won’t hurt you.’
His words meant nothing to the other man, who continued to wriggle in Julien’s embrace and to thrash out with his elbows. It was so long since he had fought as a boy, playground disputes with trembling lips where the loser was the child who cried, that Julien could barely remember how to go about it. There was a repellent intimacy about the other’s man hair against the skin of his face.
Julien held a forearm across the German’s throat and locked one hand with the other to increase the grip; in this way, he was able to pull him slowly backwards to the floor, while he retreated step by step to make room. As the German finally lost balance, Julien was obliged to let go, at which moment he kicked out at the rifle the other man still clutched in his right hand. He watched it slide a few feet over the bare floorboards. He drove his heel as hard as he could into the German’s ribs and, while the man gasped, he was able to dive across and grab the gun himself, then scuttle over the floor on all fours and turn round, kneeling to face his enemy with the rifle in his hand.
The German levered himself into a sitting position, in which all soldierly pretence fell away. Panting and snorting from his exertion, he placed his hands together and prayed Julien not to shoot.
Julien stood up slowly and walked back towards the door. Now that he had gained control, he still faced the awkward question of what to do with the man. He could tie him up, but with what? He could shoot him, but really he wished him no harm. As his tearful imprecations made clear, he was just a pathetic creature, caught in a job he did not want, anxious to return to the children he had left behind and whose photographs he was now, to Julien’s embarrassment, fumbling to produce from a wallet.
Perhaps he should just shoot him in the leg, to disable him. Really, these were considerations of war of which his own activities had as yet given him no experience. But there was no use being squeamish, he thought. ‘Take your clothes off,’ he said.
The German looked at him, head on one side, striving to understand. His thinning hair had been tousled by the struggle, and a single long strand hung down over his ear; his face was flushed and looked exhausted in the shadows and pouches of his incipient middle age. Julien mimed what he meant and the German, in ecstatic relief at having understood his captor’s wish, did his best to please him.
‘More.’ Julien gestured with his rifle. The pile of clothes mounted by his ankles, and when he was naked Julien pointed to the door.
Shivering, and no longer pleased, the German soldier walked across the room, his eye on the barrel of the gun as Julien retreated to one side to let him pass.
Down the corridor of the first floor they went, past the door of Levade’s studio, the man’s white buttocks a dim beacon in the darkness. At the top of the stairs Julien stuck the tip of the rifle into his back to remind him that he was serious and kept it there as they groped their slow way down.
In the hall, Julien turned on a light and, keeping the gun steady on its target, backed over to the desk from which Levade had earlier taken his identity papers. Among the letters and documents was a bunch of keys which he took over to the door beneath the stairs that led to the Domaine’s enormous ce
llar. When he had found the right key, he indicated with his head that the German should go through the door.
‘It’s all right. In the morning your friends’ll come. They’ll hear you. Go on. Go on.’ He raised the rifle and fired a shot into the ceiling.
Each angle of his body protesting reluctance, the man moved slowly over the floor of the hall to the open door, one hand raised to protect himself, the other placed across his genitals, in self-defence or in some reflexive modesty beneath the light snow-shower of fallen plaster.
Julien smiled. ‘You’ll be all right. I’ll leave the key here on the table. Go on.’
At the last moment, faced with the icy darkness, the German suddenly protested and turned to fight again, but Julien kicked him through and closed the door against his struggle.
He returned to the bedroom and went through the man’s clothes to see if there was a handgun or anything else that might be useful to him in the days ahead. There was nothing but a few extra rounds for the rifle, which he slipped into his jacket pocket.
He let himself out of the Domaine and took a bicycle from the barn. He could still be clear of Lavaurette by dawn.
Charlotte was unable to sleep in the monastery. She paced up and down in a book-lined room that looked like an office, and, shortly before dawn, returned to the Cariteaus’ house.
She leaned her bicycle against the wall by the back door and remembered all the times she had done this on her visits to the boys; she thought of the night of the drop and of the excitement she had felt as they pedalled away into the night.
She knocked quietly at the door and Sylvie Cariteau let her in. She looked anxious. ‘Madame, it’s dangerous for you to be here.’
‘I wanted to know about the boys. Are they all right?’
‘Yes. Pauline’s just been here. They’re going to live with Anne-Marie.’
‘She didn’t mind?’
‘No.’ Sylvie Cariteau shook her head. ‘I don’t know if she really understood the danger. But she’s a kind girl, Anne-Marie.’
Charlotte Gray Page 40