Charlotte Gray (42 page)

Having managed to escape from the goods' yard over a brick wall, Gregory walked for a mile until he found himself in an apparently unpopulated area. He spotted a cafe through whose windows he could see only empty tables and went in; a barman was moving a greasy cloth back and forth over the counter. Gregory stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth to muffle his voice.

"Telephone," he said in an abrupt way he hoped would discourage conversation, and the man jerked his head towards the back of the room. In a dark alcove next to a narrow door marked 'we' he dialled a number in Clermont-Ferrand. He had never been happy with the vet's diagnosis of his

'fractured' leg, and the exertions of the last four days, culminating in the walk from the station, had produced an excruciating friction in the shin, as though parts of the bone were rubbing together.

He bit his lower lip as he heard the telephone let out its desperate, single peal in the distant mountains of the Massif Central.

The voice of a garage owner, wakened from a wine-heavy sleep, came on the line. Gregory went through the passwords he had been taught in London and hoped his accent would be comprehensible to "Hercule'. In the long and painful exchange that followed, Gregory found it almost impossible to understand what Monsieur Chollet was saying.

Eventually, he extracted from him an address in Marseille which he repeated and checked as many times as he dared until he heard Chollet's patience become exhausted.

"Thank you, Monsieur," Gregory said.

"Goodbye."

"There was a woman looking for you. In the summer."

"What?"

"An English woman."

"Did she leave a message?"

"No. Goodbye."

Gregory put down the receiver. An English woman. How Charlotte would hate being called that. He leaned for a moment on the top of the telephone, and tears presumably from the pain in his leg blurred his vision.

Now at midnight, one hour later, he was waiting in the doorway. He would get into this house. The English woman. He smiled. Whatever it took, he was going to get in.

It was midnight when Andre Duguay sat up in bed and called out his mother's name. There was nothing soft or tender about the call; it was a sound of primitive panic, the expression of a fear that had been rising and working slowly in his mind for several weeks and had finally found utterance in a response to the pictures shown to him in his dream.

Madame Duguay's face was not clear, but then it was not seen objectively in Andre's mind even when he was awake. Yet in the dream he was with her, and he saw those dark features, the face bent over his cradle, whose outline he had over the years uncritically absorbed, so that it had become the face of love. He was with her, he saw her, and she was in darkness among crowds of people wailing.

Down the corridor came the running footsteps of Mlle Cariteau. She had had time to throw a flannel dressing gown over her nightdress, and she stumbled into the boys' room, not wishing to turn on the light in case it woke whichever one had not called out. She could not tell from the cry alone which it was, and at first went to Jacob; then she heard a voice from Andre's bed and went to him.

Sylvie Cariteau wrapped the boy in her arms and stroked his hair.

Childless, she felt the torrent of maternal tenderness go out of her to the weeping child, a force that was angry in its desire to protect him. On the walls of the bare upstairs room there were daguerreotypes of Sylvie's respectable grandparents, uneasy in their Sunday clothes; there were two plaster crucifixes.

For half an hour the granddaughter with no husband rocked the unprotected little boy against her bosom, back and forth, back and forth in the awful night. Levade had lit a candle at the writing table in his bedroom. An hour earlier he had said goodbye to Julien and his mind was still full of the boy. He wrote: Midnight. I thank God for Julien. The joy I have in him is simple. Merely to be near his life brings me delight. This makes me think of dying, because I feel my spirit is one with his and that only by death will our separation be dissolved. I believe we will be in paradise together, and I believe we will become one, as God, through the Trinity, is indivisible from His own Son.

Of course I believe this. I believe it since Christ showed himself to me that night on Dead Man's Hill at Verdun, without arms and legs, nailed to a tree trunk. I didn't understand at the time, but later He came to me again, the same body, this time on a cross. It was the night my cousin appeared to me in a vision; his face was illuminated, though we did not know until the morning that he had died. I believe, because God showed me in a dream my dearest mother as a child, her happiness secured, and I was able as a grown man to care for her, as, when death at last folds time away, I shall again.

And hell will be the absence of God, the complete loss of Him. I have lived in this place and I have felt its void. I lived this time without God because I was not worthy of Him. The chances that I was given I ignored or spurned because I was sunk so deep in sensual things, ambitions, self-deceit. Every day I must affirm my faith.

Every day I must be reconvened.

When I write at times like this, the voice I hear does not sound like my own. But I hope this voice of devotion is the most true of all the different voices I have. My friend Madame Guilbert (she is my friend; I do admire her) has made me think about this. Yet I hope there is some core of goodness in me, and of faith. After all, what else is it that will die?

And when I go, will it be in a hospital for the old, or here in my dreamless bed? When it comes, the doctor will prolong my breathing for a few more useless hours, the priest will lean over me to hear my last and most sincere confession. Some friends will come and be polite.

Some will cry at the recollection of their own lost youth-experiences they must now concede are for ever gone, beyond the redeeming power of the imagination, in the abyss of time closed. And my sinful life will offer them no fine or comforting example.

Somehow they will stick my gaping jaws together, weigh down my staring eyes.

And my head, which has teemed with thoughts for so long, will hold not even the flicker of an idea. My once hot, mobile hands will not be capable even of picking up a paintbrush. Someone will lift up my arm on the bed and it will fall back by my side. They will bundle up the rotting meat and put it in a box. The millions of people who have lived without knowledge of my small life will be ignorant still; the handful who knew me will forget.

But I have faith in God. At moments I have seen with His blessing and through the light of art into a world that transcends this one but lives beside it, like a lost city visible through the now-impenetrable, now-translucent waves. These things I have believed in, and I believe also in the love of my son. Death does not separate us from those we love. It is life that keeps us frustratingly apart. I trust in God that on the Day of Judgement He will reunite me with those I have loved, and that our spirits will at last become truly one. v

It was the day of the drop; but before the evening came, Charlotte had an errand to run in Limoges. She dressed quickly and went down to the scullery, where she found some bread and a tin of what was referred to by the ration ticket as fruit condiment. She swallowed it with a glass of water, tied her headscarf, checked that she had Dominique's papers in her handbag and went outside to get her bicycle. As she pedalled beneath the arch of the pigeonnier she turned back to look at the front of the house, and saw the sun glistening on the tightly closed shutters of Levade's studio. The bicycle juddered over an unseen pothole and water splashed up over Dominique's admirably hard-wearing shoes. All down the avenue of flaking plane trees the birds were singing.

There were only two other passengers waiting for the early train, both elderly women with empty baskets on their arms. Charlotte smiled at them and mouthed a polite greeting, while making it clear she had no wish to talk.

The second-class carriage of the train had seats to spare, and as they nosed into the open landscape, leaving the town of Lavaurette to foment its closed and unsuspected conflicts, she saw the country of her heart reveal itself once more in all its old beguiling colours.

Tonight, unless there was some drastic change in the weather, the drop would go ahead, and in Charlotte's mind it had become an important occasion. She would need warm clothes, and she would wear beneath them whatever she managed to buy in Limoges; she would have a bath, and since the water at the Domaine would not be hot, that would mean braving the public baths at the women's allotted time of six o'clock. There would be dinner with Julien and perhaps with Cesar and some of the other men; then there would be the big plane from home hurling the contents of its hold out into the beleaguered darkness.

The flashing pictures revealed by the train's windows were like the country Charlotte remembered, with its effortless harmony of church and meadow, grey villages and their rooted inhabitants; but the streets of Limoges showed the strains of the present. There was a shoddiness in the way people were dressed and an unhealthy calm caused by the lack of motor vehicles. It did not lower Charlotte's spirits as she walked up past the Jardin d'Orsay, where the flowerbeds were still well tended, though it was only as she came closer that she saw that they had been planted with vegetables.

In her mind she repeated to herself the details of the message Mirabel had given her. Her destination was in the Place des Jacobins; the person she needed was called Georges. She felt no fear as she walked through the streets of the city, though she did not congratulate herself for it.

You were frightened or you weren't: it was not something in your control. She did glance briefly round her, however, as she rang the doorbell. There was no reason for alarm: Limoges was sunk in provincial peace. The door opened and a concierge looked out.

"Good morning, Madame. I'm looking for Georges."

"Who shall I say is calling?"

"A friend of Frederic."

The woman disappeared, leaving the door open. A few moments later, a portly, unshaven man in a cardigan came to the entrance.

"Are you Georges?"

"Yes." He nodded, dislodging some ash from the end of the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth.

"I have a message from Frederic." She gave him the time, the date and the map reference.

To her surprise, he took a pencil from the pocket of his cardigan and wrote down the figures on his cigarette packet. Clearly he had not had the benefits of G Section's mnemonic training.

Georges smiled.

"Would you like to come in for a glass of wine?"

"No, thank you," said Charlotte.

He shrugged; they shook hands and she walked swiftly away. The reward that Mirabel had promised her was so great that she did not wish to jeopardise it by staying.

In any case, there was something more pressing than wine. There was a shop just off the Boulevard de la Cite, where she had been told by Pauline Benoit it was possible to buy clothes, provided you were not fussy about the material. The directions Charlotte had received were precise, and the shop itself was unmissable. Its glossy black-painted front contained a window display that would not have disgraced the rue du Faubourg St. Honore ten years earlier. The window on one side contained mannequins in dresses and suits, their plastic wrists cocked and their slender feet dipped into crocodile shoes: one held a long lapis lazuli cigarette holder to her lips, another appeared to be wearing a mink stole. The other window revealed an encyclopaedic array of underwear. Charlotte looked in amazement at the brassieres, slips, foundation garments, drawers, roll-ons, petticoats, corsets and other devices of whalebone and pink flannel.

As she stood staring, the door opened and a man in shirtsleeves with a tape measure round his neck came on to the step.

"Do come in, Madame."

Charlotte followed, with misgivings. This array could not be legal.

"All these things," she said, pointing to the window, 'do you have '

"Alas not, Madame. Do take a seat." The shopkeeper pulled a high stool up to the counter.

"Those are remnants from the days before the war.

We keep them to remind us of what life was like." He was about sixty, with a round face and a small moustache; he was respectable but with a humorous eye, and Charlotte found that she could not distrust him.

He smiled.

"We have a little stock, of course. Is there something in particular Madame was looking for?"

Underpants that would not take two days to dry; shoes that did not make her feet look deformed; something pretty to wear in the evening ...

"Perhaps a blouse?" she said cautiously.

From beneath the counter the proprietor pulled out a long drawer. It contained four white or off-white blouses made from some synthetic material.

"Hmm ... I'm looking for something a little more colourful. If you haven't any blouses, maybe something knitted."

"Ah-ha, a little knit, yes." The man took a step-ladder and walked down the bare boards of the shop to the back.

While he pulled out various boxes from the top shelf, inspected and replaced them with a mutter. Charlotte thought of the wardrobe full of clothes she had in Scotland: the plum-coloured cashmere pullover, the lilac cardigan, the silk and cotton shirts, the kilts, the pleated skirts, the sleeveless summer dresses so seldom worn north of Berwick, the piles of cotton and silk underclothes.

The shopkeeper returned with half a dozen woollen items and laid them on the counter. To Charlotte's eye, most of them appeared to have been knitted by his mother. He read her disappointment and said, "One minute, Madame. There's something I'd like to show you."