Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I’m sorry I was no comfort to you.’

  ‘I must have asked too much. I asked a child to bear the weight of those unspeakable things, a weight that drove grown men mad.’

  ‘And do you think there was a time, an incident?’

  Gray breathed in deeply. ‘I do remember crying once. I was suddenly caught by this frightening emotion I had so long held in check. I remember it was triggered by something trivial, then it came up out of me with these terrible noises, a sort of primeval howling. I think you came to me. Perhaps you were worried by the noise. Perhaps I shouted at you to go away because I didn’t want you to stay.’

  ‘No. You did want me to stay. You held me, and you held me so hard it almost crushed me. But I don’t think it was that pain that remained with me. It was the sight and the sound of your grief. Somehow you must have conveyed to me the horror of what you had seen. You told me about it. The millions of dead.’

  Gray’s voice was scarcely audible. ‘I was so alone.’

  ‘And is it possible that I would remember it as physical pain?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ He lifted his head. ‘Your memory may have been trying to protect you. To lay a screen across something worse. A child would find it easier to think of being hurt in some way, crushed or beaten, than to look on the misery I had somehow opened up to you.’

  Charlotte was very calm. ‘I think that’s right, I think that may be right.’

  Her father, meanwhile, was distraught. ‘But my dear Charlotte, to think that I did this to you. That I couldn’t face it on my own. That I had to take away all your poor childish innocence to help me bear it.’ He began to weep. ‘The faces of those young men at dawn . . . All that joy that should have been yours.’

  Charlotte stood up and went to her father. She held out her arms.

  Gray came into her embrace and laid his head on her shoulder. He was howling. ‘All that innocence. From my own daughter.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Charlotte, as she held her father in her arms and stroked his face. She felt love erupt in her. ‘It doesn’t matter now, it doesn’t matter any more.’

  7

  BY THE TIME Charlotte returned to London, Peter Gregory had been moved from the convalescent home and sent to an airfield in Suffolk to be debriefed by the RAF. Both of them used Daisy’s flat as a place to leave messages, but there followed a frustrating three days’ delay before he would be free to come back to the capital.

  Charlotte returned to her room in Riding House Street, but it was only for a short time, as a place in the flat was shortly to become vacant again.

  ‘The invitations went out while you were in Edinburgh,’ said Daisy. ‘There’s one here for you. Shall I read it out?’

  ‘Go on.’ Charlotte was on the telephone in the hall of the hostel.

  ‘Colonel and Mrs Michael Ridley invite you to the marriage of their daughter Sally to Mr Robin Morris on 3 June 1943 at St Andrew’s Church, etcetera, etcetera, and afterwards at the White House, Crookham End. Isn’t it marvellous? What are you going to wear?’

  Charlotte laughed. ‘God knows. Is this Robin Morris the stuffed shirt?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘I think I met him once. On a train. Does he work in the Foreign Office or something like that?’

  ‘That’s right. Sally’s in seventh heaven, as you can imagine. Anyway, you can have your old room back if you like. Alison can move into Sally’s.’

  ‘I think I’d rather have Sally’s if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I thought your old room would have sentimental memories.’

  ‘Yes, it does. But it’s a bit small, to be honest, Daisy. And we don’t want to inconvenience Alison, do we?’

  ‘Not very romantic, are you, Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

  Later in the day Charlotte went into the offices of G Section in Marylebone, where Mr Jackson told her she could have a further week’s leave before her new posting came through.

  She walked up Marylebone High Street and over into Regent’s Park. It was a warm spring day. Mothers were pushing children along the paths; there was a certain lightness in their step and in their called greetings. Charlotte passed the coffee stall where she had bought a leaden bun one day in her lunch break from Dr Wolf’s consulting rooms. She could still recall the feeling of intense separation from the world that meeting Gregory had induced in her. She had never really believed that it would work out happily; she had hoped, but she had not believed. Before she left Edinburgh, her father had warned her that it was dangerous ever to think that one had solved buried problems of memory and fear. The human desire for neatness, he said, would always ultimately be defeated by the chaos of the mind’s own truths.

  Charlotte resented this dour note at the moment of her joy and freedom, but recognised that he was probably right. She would never really know what had happened, but between them they had come close enough to the truth. It would suffice, she knew, because in the days that followed, the feeling of relaxation continued. As she walked through Regent’s Park, she felt that a long-broken circle had finally been closed: as a grown woman she had re-established contact with her childhood self, and there was now a continuous line through her life.

  Peter Gregory arranged to meet Charlotte the next evening in Daisy’s flat. Daisy said she could organise for all three tenants to be out until at least ten o’clock, so they would have plenty of time to themselves.

  Gregory took a train to London in the morning. He had booked a table for dinner at a restaurant near the flat, and somehow had to pass the day. In the afternoon, he went to a cinema in Leicester Square, but found it impossible to concentrate on the film, a patriotic naval adventure, full of improbably stoical sailors. The expectation of seeing Charlotte was so intense that he felt as though his skin was going to burst beneath the pressure.

  He walked out of the film and down to the river. What would he say to her? What physical reaction was going to take place? Would his wounded leg give way? Would he shake so much that he would have to sit down? Later, he went to a pub in Chelsea, where he sat in the window and drank beer. He thought of Forster and all the others he had flown with. Those few, hot weeks had burned themselves into his memory and into the flesh of who he was, but in the turmoil of his nervous anguish he no longer felt that by continuing to live he was in some way unfaithful to them.

  He bought some flowers from a barrow on the Brompton Road as he walked north in the early evening. His leg was beginning to hurt, and he hailed a taxi to take him the rest of the way. He had concealed the champagne in a briefcase with an evening paper, so that when she opened the door all she would see were the flowers. It was not too presumptuous.

  He was talking to himself in the back of the cab. He was more frightened than he had ever been in flying. What terrified him was the thought of some hideous physical collapse, of his bones and blood breaking.

  He was trembling as he went up the steps and rang the doorbell. He stared hard at the painted wood of the door as he waited. He could not picture Charlotte’s face.

  The door opened, revealing at first shadow and space, then all at once a young woman in a summer dress with a cardigan draped over her shoulders.

  Gregory stepped inside and wordlessly held out the flowers. Charlotte took them from him, then dropped them on top of the briefcase as she opened her arms and gathered him in, pressing her cheek against his. He smelled the lily of the valley on her neck and burst into tears.

  Later, in the restaurant, he told her about Jacques and Béatrice, how they had cared for him and how he was determined to revisit them. When he came to the part of the story that took place in the Mayor’s front room, he noticed that Charlotte had stopped eating and was holding her knife and fork in mid-air. He described his journey to Marseille, but left out the more adventurous episodes, deterred by some residual airman’s code against what the men called shooting a line. He talked a little of the crash and his injuries, and spoke
of Nancy and of Gianluca, who had been as good as his improbable word.

  All the time Gregory talked, he felt compassion emanate from Charlotte, not some passive sympathy, but a radiant force that seemed to soothe his wounds and make past unhappiness appear something insubstantial, hard even to remember.

  Then Charlotte told him how she had been to visit Monsieur Chollet in Clermont-Ferrand, and of her despair when he said he had had no word. She described her friendship with Julien and Levade, and told him how Levade had died.

  Her story was more complicated than his, and towards the end she gave up. She held out her hand across the table and took Gregory’s. She sat for a long time staring into his eyes, holding his hand in hers.

  When they went back to Daisy’s flat, Gregory opened the champagne and they drank to Jacques and Béatrice; to Monsieur Chollet in his oily garage; to Gianluca and Nancy; to Levade and Julien; to Sylvie Cariteau and little Anne-Marie. Charlotte could not bring herself to mention André and Jacob.

  ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ said Gregory.

  ‘You don’t have to go just because the others are coming back.’

  ‘I don’t think I could face Daisy tonight.’

  ‘You’ll have to soon. When you come to Sally’s wedding.’

  ‘Am I invited?’

  ‘You will be.’

  Gregory looked round the sitting room. He said, ‘Do you remember the first time we came back here after lunch in that awful hotel in Streatley? You were so shy.’

  ‘I had a good deal to be shy about.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now . . .’ Charlotte sighed. ‘Now I feel so many things. I feel exhausted by happiness.’

  ‘Not sad?’

  ‘Well, there are never just the broad sunlit uplands.’

  Gregory also sighed. He took out a cigarette, keeping himself in control, not wishing to force anything.

  Charlotte suddenly turned and unleashed her most unguarded, intimate smile. ‘And what do you feel?’

  Gregory put down the cigarette. ‘For the time being I feel that I would like it if, just for a moment, just for a second, you would wrap your arms round me and let me feel your skin on mine. That’s all I ask.’

  Charlotte came towards him. He looked into her face and saw that there there was a power of acquired self-knowledge that had steadied her eyes’ once prodigally sensitive and unsettled gaze. He stretched out his hands, hesitantly, and touched the bare flesh of her forearms.

  ‘That’s all you ask,’ she said in her humorous, forgiving voice, as she held him hard against her. ‘My darling, that’s all there is.’

  But he came back in the middle of the night, bribed his way past the night watchman of her block in Riding House Street and knocked softly on her door.

  ‘Oh my darling, my darling,’ she said.

  She told him everything this time, about her father and her lost childhood, about Julien and the boys and Levade, and, as she saw the anguish in his tearful eyes, Charlotte had for the first time in her life the exquisite exhilaration of being understood.

  He made love to her in the narrow bed and covered all of her with his hands and his lips. She had no modesty or inhibition; she looked at herself through his dazed eyes and felt powerful with the desperation she ignited in him. When they made love again, she thought for a moment of Levade. She felt he would have approved, and she laughed for a moment, not without sympathy for the man who had died, but because she was alive.

  It was growing light outside when she could leave him alone long enough to sleep. She could see smoky rain pattering on the roof tiles.

  8

  A WEEK LATER, Charlotte went in to G Section headquarters to receive details of her posting to Suffolk. Before she left, Mr Jackson handed her a letter.

  ‘This was brought back by one of our chaps yesterday. I’ve given him the most tremendous ticking off, as you can imagine. If he’d been found with this on him they’d have known at once what sort of game he was in. That’s the trouble with agents. Once they’re out there, some of them seem to feel invincible.’ He gave her a knowing look. ‘Anyway, I hope it’s good news.’

  Charlotte recognised the handwriting before she opened the letter and saw the signature: ‘Octave’. She took the letter to Regent’s Park and walked up to a semicircle of chairs arranged in front of the bandstand.

  My dear Danièle,

  I doubt whether you will ever read this letter, but I want to write to you anyway, to set out my thoughts. And who knows, perhaps some Englishman will bring it back to London. You know how reckless these English are.

  I am in a very cosy little farm in the hills, quite a long way now from our own town. (I’ll be at least prudent enough not to mention actual names.) I’m with César, who is a splendid young man, and half a dozen others in their twenties who have come to escape the Statutory Work Order. We have enough arms for the time being and are receiving more volunteers all the time. Monsieur Laval’s perpetual desire to please the Germans has rebounded greatly to our advantage.

  I have heard no news from my father, but I’m hopeful that the worst rumours about camps and so on are not true. C. told me that, alas, the boys were taken. I pray for their safety. C. travels a lot and brings news as in some way he has managed to keep up good appearances as a model citizen.

  I, on the other hand, am not so well respected in the town and must keep my head down. The death of a certain person has not been connected in any way with me as far as C. has been able to discover. I can say no more about this in any detail. However, following scenes at which you were present (or later scenes at which you can guess), our friends in grey do not like me.

  I will wait until the war is over. Things will be forgotten if we win. In fact, history is already being rewritten. C. tells me that since the war has turned, many of the Marshal’s oldest supporters are saying they never trusted him and that the General was always the best bet. Some of the most dedicated Pétainists are already beginning to talk about ‘our Anglo-Saxon friends’ and ‘the noble Tartar’!

  We will win; somehow we will win. And we have kept alive something of France to make the victory worthwhile. That is the achievement of the dark days.

  How long it will take, I don’t know, because it’s very complicated. Within an hour or so of here I know of three different resistance groups. One of them detests the other more than it detests the Occupant! This is a civil war as well as a national war; it is a fight for influence and for possession of history. It is squalid, Danièle, it is mean and horrible, and the only way our group keeps going is to remember its clear objective: to defeat the invader.

  I expect you’re safe at home now. Perhaps you’re even back with your lover. Dear Danièle, your friendship was a wonderful thing to me at that time of greatest darkness. Being a man, an awful base creature, I do also treasure the memory of the night of the drop, and I will never forget it. But I know that it was not the most important thing, and I do know that your future is elsewhere.

  As for me, I’m very excited by what we can do. Despite the squalor and the shame and the bloodshed that will come, I feel great hope. We will be free, and we will have a true government again. I will return to Paris and I will see my old boss Monsieur Weil restored and in his pomp, ordering oysters from the big restaurants on the Boulevard de Montparnasse.

  Will you come down for the opening of the hotel? What a party we’ll have. And I’ll come to visit you as well, many times in the years to come. Thank you for everything, Danièle, my friend, my dear, dear friend. A thousand kisses, ‘Octave’.

  The day of Sally’s wedding dawned hot and clear. Charlotte awoke in the bed in Sally’s old room, having come down from her holding school in Suffolk the night before. Sally was with her parents, but Daisy and Alison kept the bathroom occupied for the first two hours of the morning. Charlotte was still in her dressing gown when they heard Michael Waterslow’s imperative hooting in the street below.

  Daisy pulled up the window and shouted th
at he and Gregory should come upstairs. Charlotte dressed in her bedroom and hurriedly put on her make-up in the finally vacated bathroom. When she went into the sitting room, she found Peter Gregory and Michael Waterslow drinking bottled beer, while Daisy and Alison completed their preparations.

  Michael was in a morning suit, Gregory was in uniform, his unusually neat appearance spoiled by a small speck of blood on the collar of his shirt. Charlotte kissed his smooth cheek.

  ‘Must you have that stick?’ she said.

  ‘I thought it made me look distinguished.’

  ‘Just as you like.’ She straightened his lapels and smiled.

  All of them were ready: they stood in a circle inspecting each other’s appearance. Alison, a slender, dark-haired woman, was in a pre-war Hardy Amies suit; she indignantly pointed out that Charlotte’s dress had too many pleats in the skirt and that both the collar and belt were wider than wartime restrictions allowed. Daisy was wearing a floral print dress with a turban and sunglasses.

  After almost an hour in the car, as they approached rural Surrey, Gregory asked Michael if he would mind making a short detour. He had made an arrangement to meet someone, he said, some time after midday. In a village with some Tudor and more mock-Tudor houses with pots of geraniums outside their doors, Gregory directed Michael to a pub called the Rose and Crown. The bar was cool and dark after the hot June sunshine outside.

  ‘Greg! I never thought you’d make it!’

  Borowski loomed out of a shadowy corner and took Gregory’s hand. ‘You remember Leslie, don’t you?’

  ‘Still alive, Brind?’ said Gregory.

  Leslie Brind touched the wood of the bar before shaking hands with Gregory, who introduced the others.

  Charlotte watched the delight the men took in each other’s company as they poured drinks into one another and competed in their mocking rudeness. Gregory was persuaded by Borowski to stay for just one more, and then by Brind for just one more on top of that, but they were still in good time for lunch at the town nearest to the wedding. It was market day, and many of the stallholders were packing up and going off in search of food and drink. Michael swung the car beneath an arch in the high street, into a lane that ran down beside the White Hart Hotel and to a car park behind.