Charlotte Gray (41 page)

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 not 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 a 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 basses 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 m 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 cliches, 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 under-sized 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 not 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 over-running 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.

To have power over the lives of people was a seductive feeling to someone whose previous influence had been limited to suggesting whether his readers might or might not enjoy a new production of Faust.

Lindemann was enough of a psychologist to relish assigning tasks to men under his command according to his own ideas of their abilities and limitations. It was irksome to him, however, that, in addition to his straightforward administrative role, he was now also required to participate in non-military projects. The occupation of the Free Zone gave much easier access to the large number of Jewish refugees the French had obligingly detained in camps there, as well as to the French Jews who already lived there or had fled from the North. Lindemann was required by his orders to supervise the joining of two trains at Lavaurette and to supply a quota of Jews from the region of which he was nominally in charge.

These people were to be transported to Paris and onwards to some unspecified destination in Poland. The official line was that they were going to be working in camps, just like the young gentile Frenchmen whom Laval was swapping for French prisoners of war.

However, it had occurred to Lindemann that if work was the purpose, they would hardly be transporting old people, pregnant women and large numbers of children, and he was rather surprised by the willing acquiescence of the French government and police in the scheme.

Perhaps the ever-optimistic Monsieur Laval was hoping for some concession on sovereignty in return for his help.

Lindemann found this part of his task slightly absurd. The girl came back with the coffee. Was she Jewish?

"Wait." He looked at her. She was small, dark. She could be. But most of the French were like that not as bad as the Poles, but not as fine as the Swedes or Danes.

"All right. You can go."

How was he supposed to find all these people? What if they were only halfJewish? Apparently Vichy had offered racial definitions which were even stricter than those issued by the Nazi Commission for Jewish Affairs in Paris. A man called Pichon, sent from Vichy on a tour of the region to help the local prefectures, had volunteered to help. Lindemann shook his head.

He couldn't decide about this.

At the same time, Peter Gregory was standing in a doorway in a narrow street just behind the harbour at Marseille. Rain was dripping from the stone lintel above his head. A misunderstanding over trains had brought him into a city which a few weeks earlier might have offered him some hope of escape, but was now the centre of German military operations. He had his eye on a house diagonally across the street, but he could not move for the amount of activity all round. His back and shoulders were aching from the three hours he had spent concealed beneath a train in the goods' yard, having observed that the Gestapo control at the station exit appeared to be questioning all travellers. The tenuous line of sympathisers that had kept him going from the site of his crash to the Mayor's house and on for four more days towards the Pyrenees had been broken by his mistake with the train.