Charlotte Gray (24 page)

Madame Cariteau found that her touch with small children seemed to have gone; she fought to remember how to talk to them, what they required for entertainment. Luckily, the elder boy seemed to have picked up the rudiments of reading, so, after lunch, when she dispatched Jacob to his bed to rest, she took Andre on her knee and went through Sylvie's old books with him.

It was a narrow decision as to whether Andre Duguay or Madame Cariteau was the better reader. Her greater experience of having seen groups of letters clustered on shop fronts or road signs made her able to recognise some long or complex words, as she would have recognised a human face; but Andre's dogged phonetic technique helped build up the sounds of words that had defeated Madame Cariteau. After some days of resting his head against the old woman's bosom, inhaling her unwashed, ancient but oddly comforting smell, Andre in any case came to know the story of the crocodile and her missing egg so well that he barely needed to look at the words. Madame Cariteau was impressed by his scholarship and by her own unsuspected aptitude for teaching.

To his question, "Where is my mother?" she gave her response in the same words: "They've gone away, but they'll be back. Until then you're quite safe with us." By never varying this formula she managed to make Andre feel that the question was less and less worth framing; and from a hundred times a day the frequency with which he asked it declined to half a dozen.

Madame Cariteau enjoyed looking after the children, and saw it as a natural act of female kindness. Although she accepted that Jewish people were dishonest and anti-French, and that the Vichy legislation to restrain their activities and confiscate their businesses was overdue, she didn't see how the little ones were to blame: after all, it was not Andre or Jacob's fault that they were born Jewish. Her daughter's view was more developed, which was why it was she who had been approached by Julien to look after the children in the first place. That was her business, Madame Cariteau thought: Sylvie was entitled to any opinions she liked, but none of them need affect her own attitude.

Andre, meanwhile, just wanted to be happy, and, having been happy all his life, was driven naturally towards this regular state of mind.

Sylvie Cariteau told her mother she thought he was 'adaptable', and praised him for it, but it was a blinder craving than that. Because he had no power to change his circumstances, his will to survival and his legacy of natural content deceived him into experiencing them as bearable.

Yet something was checked in him. Without his mother's constant touch, he shrank a little; his movements became less fluid; he walked more often than he skipped; he remembered himself more, never any longer forgetting to say please or thank you. Slowly, too, he began to register his father's absence; he missed his physical bulk and the stability it represented; he missed the feeling of bodily release that followed their wrestling matches. And for all the way the observable changes were so small, he also still had fits of misery.

"I think we should speak French, don't you?" said Charlotte.

"All right," said Yves.

"Just as well to get in practice."

They walked down a cart track until they came to a small country road with high hedgerows and cow pastures on either side. The sun had a midday strength by only ten o'clock; the sound of cattle-bells came from distant fields, in some of which the hay had already been rolled into huge circular bales. Charlotte felt well rested and at home; the events of the previous evening had for once driven tormenting thoughts of Gregory from her mind and she had slept well.

The brightness of the late summer sunlight made the landscape look almost surreally French; the farm buildings and the vegetation were so typical that they verged on exaggeration: everything is safe, they seemed to say, everything is unchanged. Yet Charlotte also felt the fraudulence of her own position and imagined that it would be clear to anyone they met. What else could she and Yves be but two British people who had parachuted in last night, bent on undermining the French government and its German masters?

When they eventually passed a young man on a bicycle and exchanged a brief greeting. Charlotte felt an impulse to declare herself, admit the game was up and ask him to take her to the nearest police station; but neither this man, nor an old woman in a farmyard, nor Bernard, the gendarme, whom they passed on the outskirts of Lavaurette, paid them any attention at all. When she told Yves what she had felt, he admitted to the same sensation, and they agreed to put out of their minds at once the peculiar and infantile idea that their true identities were so apparent.

Even so, when they had retrieved their suitcases from the stationmaster's office and gone to the ticket window. Charlotte could not help feeling surprised at the ease with which the first francs she unrolled from the large bundle provided in London were accepted by the clerk, or at the weary manner in which he went through the routine of issuing their tickets.

The idea of being someone else, of being Dominique Guilbert, born in Paris, married to a clerk, was in fact appealing to Charlotte. The anguish of Peter Gregory's presumed death meant nothing to Dominique Guilbert; nor was Dominique in the least affected by the lesions and unresolved knots of Charlotte Gray's childhood: she had her husband and her sick father to think about. The train did not leave till two o'clock, so Charlotte and Yves went into Lavaurette for lunch. The dining room of the Cafe du Centre was half full, mostly with men. Charlotte's eye raked over the waitress an attractive, disdainful young woman, too aware, in Charlotte's judgement, of her good looks and the effect they had on men. She brought them a small meal of indifferent quality and afterwards abruptly clipped the coupons from the Kingston bypass.

They walked back to the station and waited for the train. Before joining the established network in Uzerche, Yves had business to do in Agen a large town further to the south-west. The slow connections out of Lavaurette meant that they would spend all afternoon on the train, and Charlotte bought some newspapers to pass the time. She gave one to Yves, though she was not sure how much of it he would understand; the French he had talked to her so far had been worse than Mr. Jackson had suggested. His other skills must be of a high and unusual quality for G Section to have risked him. Charlotte thought; perhaps one day she would discover what they were.

III 4

Twenty minutes on foot from Lavaurette was a house with slate-covered towers and a low, rectangular courtyard that included an arched pigeonnier, surrounded by abundant but untended land. It was not quite a chateau, though it was almost big enough; it was known in the town, to the postman and to its very few visitors, as the Domaine. It was not the sort of house that anyone in Lavaurette wanted to live in: it was too remote, too draughty, too imposing. It was impossible to heat in winter, and in summer impossible to fill, with its echoing salon, immense panelled dining room and numberless bedrooms, none sealed or closed but all kept in a state of suspended life, the beds made, the floors not exactly clean but swept occasionally, the decorations faded but intact.

A family must once have lived here, though even the most fruitful parents could not have filled all the rooms; it would have needed cousins and visitors to justify the half-dozen servants' bedrooms in the attic, and to prevent the long, connected spaces from imposing their silence. For many years the undisturbed volume of the rooms had swelled against the practical limits that contained it; the air seemed to have expanded within the confines of the house until it could spread no further and had instead become thicker, turning back on itself, and cloaking such movement as there was with quietness.

It was early morning in the Domaine; wood pigeons were calling in the trees beyond the long grass, and the climbing sun was already striking deep inside the house through the open shutters on the east side.

In one of the smaller bedrooms the house's single inhabitant was sitting up in bed and frantically searching his memory; he was trying to remember if he had dreamed. By his bed was a large pad of paper with pencil notes and sketches, put there for the purpose of instant recollection; but one page had taken him three months to fill, and neither the images nor the words seemed to be of any consequence. The man scratched his thick white hair and sighed.

Nothing.

In the corner of the room was a small shrine. On a table, a figure of the Virgin was set on a lace cloth, with a missal and some candles.

The man climbed out of bed, a little stiffly, rubbed the tendon behind his ankle, and made his way over to the shrine, where he knelt down to pray. As a convert to Catholicism, he was anxious to do everything the right way, but as a Jew he could not quite shake off a more conversational style of dealing with his Maker. He prayed for himself and he prayed for his departed friends, may God have mercy on their souls, whose names he kept in the missal and spoke out loud. His own family name, Rutkowski, had been changed by his father to Levade, in what he believed was a compromise between the phonemes of his adored, adopted country and an acknowledgement of his Hebrew origins.

He said a brief prayer for his son Julien and for the other children he had sired but had not known. He fiercely regretted that he could feel no tie with these scattered people, whose ages varied from forty to ten; he did not even know if there were four or five or six, though he believed there was a daughter in Limoges. Since his ten-year conversion to Christianity, he had felt troubled by this negligence. The Domaine had only one bathroom, a minimal space whose door was disguised as the last of a series of cupboards, reluctantly conceded its bare existence in the otherwise dry landscape of the upper floor.

It was a long and inconvenient walk for a sixty-two year old man to make each morning, but he was unwilling to change to a nearer bedroom because he believed the one he had chosen had particular dreaming qualities.

Levade's tenancy of the Domaine had been the subject of hostile discussion in Lavaurette. He was reviled by Madame Galliot as a lecher and by Monsieur Benech as a Jew; Madame Gayral believed he was a Satanist. At any rate, he was indisputably Parisian and peculiar; although occasional visitors, including priests, had been seen to take the turning to the Domaine, Levade himself had never set foot in the Cafe du Centre, had never been seen to buy food or tobacco. He had a housekeeper, a girl from another village who was thought to be mentally defective, and his son took him food and wine once a week a further reason why Julien, though not disliked, was regarded with caution in Lavaurette.

The main bedroom in the Domaine, an airy, high-ceilinged chamber whose floor-length windows granted long clear hours of light, was rumoured to be the centre of whatever unsavoury, un-Christian activities it was that the old man enjoyed. No reliable witness had returned with a description of the bacchanalian squalor to which he had reduced what was once the parents' bedroom, a sacred place at the heart of the family, at the centre of an old, traditional house. An hour after rising, washed, dressed and dreamless, Levade made his way to the locked door of the principal bedroom.

The newspaper Charlotte read on the train was the first indication she had of how greatly the country had changed since her last visit. She had previously found French newspapers arid and charmless She had been influenced by the way in which they had been introduced to her as a teenager by the father of her exchange family, Monsieur Loiseau, who spoke reverently about Le Figaro and its great, murdered editor, a Monsieur Gaston Calmette, who had had the honour of being the dedicatee of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Dutifully she had persevered through reports of stock exchange movements, foreign policy and structural developments at the Justice Ministry.

The paper she nicked through on the train to Agen seemed less interested in reporting than in propaganda: fatherland, patriotism and the dangers of Bolshevism were invoked in almost every article. She counted eight photographs of Marshal Petain, who seemed to be presented as a sort of supra-political figure, giving the reader an excuse not to have to think about public affairs. There were cheerful reports of leagues and societies dedicated to the rebirth of traditional folk songs, and pictures of children in a variety of uniforms. To Charlotte they looked like English brown shirts or Hitler youth, though oddly enough there was hardly any mention of the fact that France was partly occupied and wholly subjugated by the Nazis.

The society encouraged by the uncritical articles was one of camp fires, khaki shorts and breeding. A cartoon showed a Spirit of France with its arm round a uniformed child; the figure that embodied this sacred spirit was not a bannerclenching Marianne but a giant Gaul in a skirt, with a blond walrus moustache and shoulder-length fair hair.

To Charlotte it was as though England beneath the Blitz had chosen to invoke the spirits of Caratacus and morris dancing.

The tone of the articles was not just stoical or resigned, but extraordinarily cheerful: a new Europe was being built, and the finest brains of France's bureaucratic class-by a natural sequence of logic, therefore, the finest brains in Europe-were at the heart of this process, working from a number of hotels in Vichy. It was accepted that some political power had been temporarily ceded, but this was viewed by the writers of all three articles on the editorial page as a worthwhile manoeuvre. They argued on strategic grounds that the Germans would provide a strong framework within which French interests could best operate after the imminent end of the war.