Charlotte Gray (53 page)

Mlle Cariteau said, "I'll go and get the little one."

In the middle of the previous night, Andre 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 Andre 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 Andre 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 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 cellar. 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 Annemarie."

"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, Annemarie."

Charlotte looked about the kitchen, with its huge, blackened range, its pitted oak table and traces of the Cariteaus' frugal meals.

Now that the time had come, she could not bring herself to leave. In this raw, square room something valuable had taken place. With Sylvie and her mother she had formed an understanding that went far beyond their differences. Something elemental and loving in her had found an answering spirit in these two French women, and parting from them now, before they knew how it would end, would be like leaving behind some vulnerable element of herself.

She felt Sylvie Cariteau's eyes on her.

"You must go, Madame. It's almost light."

Charlotte went to the door, then hesitated. She turned and saw that Sylvie's eyes were fall of tears.

"Oh, Sylvie," she said, going back and throwing her arms round her. They clung to each other for a few moments. Charlotte struggled to find words, but then gave up. She knew that they were thinking the same things.

"I will come back," she said.

"Do you promise?" Sylvie Cariteau was smiling now, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her large, red hands.

"I promise." Charlotte kissed her on the cheek and ran from the house. Then, in the early morning light, she pedalled hard out of Lavaurette, Julien's fearful warning still loud in her ears. She reckoned it would take her a day to reach the small town where the wireless operator lived and she knew she should not delay. The farther she went, however, the more tormented she felt by the thought of Levade being held in some detention camp and Julien, exiled in the chilly countryside, unable to reach him to explain what he had done. Her business was not finished, and, until it was, she could not go home.

Late in the morning she stopped to rest at the edge of a field. There was a small stone-built hut, presumably a store or shelter of some kind, but now dilapidated. She pushed the bicycle inside and lay down to rest, but it was very cold. She thought longingly of Dominique woollen vests.

Somehow she dozed in the sunless afternoon, and when she awoke, stiff and hungry, she knew that she had to return to Lavaurette. She would give it a day for the alarm to subside, then go back to the Domaine.

The reason she gave herself was that she needed her identity card and some money, which were still in her bedroom. She did not listen to an inner voice that told her the wireless operator could in due course supply her with both. She bicycled into the nearest village, but the food shops were closed and there was no cafe. At least there were still some tins in the store cupboards of the Domaine, she told herself, as she went back to her stone shelter.

She passed a long night without sleeping. She spent the first part of the next day walking up and down to keep warm, then began to bicycle slowly back. She timed her return to Lavaurette for eight o'clock in the evening, well after dark, but before the curfew. She went on a long circuitous route that avoided the village and brought her through the woods at the side of the house. She found the front door of the Domaine ajar, as though someone had left in a hurry. There were no lights burning. She paused in the hall and looked round: something was not right; she noticed that the door to the cellar was open and that the bunch of keys was in the lock.

She took a torch from the desk and went down the steps into the cold gloom. The beam of light travelled over the dusty wine bins, some of which had empty bottles spanned by cobwebs in whose sticky grip were long-dead flies and globs of thicker dust.

Charlotte walked carefully over the uneven floor of beaten earth, hosing the walls with her torchlight. It was intensely silent, aromatic with the passage of damp centuries.

There was no one there. She climbed back to the hall behind her, replacing the keys in the desk, in their proper place, some housekeeperly instinct prompting her. Still using only the torch, she went into the kitchen, where she opened a tin of ham that she had been saving for some special occasion.

She sliced it hurriedly and consumed it all, with a crust of bread, some walnuts and a glass of stale wine from an open bottle on the sideboard. Then she crept for the last time over the sprung floor of the dining room and went to the top of the house, where she once more packed the possessions of Dominique Guilbert in their tattered leather case and cast a farewell look at the little bedroom in which such extraordinary days of her life had passed: the toile with its figures of eighteenth century gaiety, faded and worn; the servant's bed, the threadbare rug and the view down towards the lake.

She walked along the corridor of the first floor. In the room where she and Julien had been held, she straightened the bedclothes, still rumpled by their simulated passion. She noticed that a chair had been turned over, presumably in the struggle that followed her leaving.