Ignorance (5 page)

Jeanne, poor thing, had nothing so fine. She fixed her cheap square of cheesecloth in place with two kirbigrips concealed under a strip of white ribbon. For the ceremony Maman wore her fur cape, with its two dangling paws. She kept this locked up in her wardrobe, shrouded by an old pregnancy smock. She brought it out just for best: unlike some people, I don't believe in showing off.

I copied my mother's housekeeping ways. Time-consuming practices of thrift.

Waste not, want not, she said: God helps those who help themselves.

The government certainly won't, my father would say. Thinking about the state of the country made him shake with rage. Almost anything could set him off. We tried to avoid upsetting him. Sweeping the floor on a Saturday morning, I'd carefully skirt his chair. If I banged too close, he'd jump, and curse me. His lid would fly off and he'd swipe his fist in the air. At meals, with a captive audience of three, he'd boil over. One Sunday lunchtime, shouting about the cost of living, he thumped the table with his tumbler of wine. Drops flew out and stained the white cloth red and my mother sprang up, crying out. He made to hit her and she cried out again. Calm down! Shut up!

Papa sat back in his chair trembling and wet-eyed. He poured himself more wine and gave me some, mixed with water. After lunch he took me in his arms and hugged me, pressing my face against his jacket. You understand me, don't you?

Maman put the cloth in soak. The stains stayed in, even after regular poundings by Madame Nérin. Pale purple eventually faded to pale blue. That was my one and only damask tablecloth, Maman complained: what's the point of trying to make things nice if people keep spoiling them?

Soon after that it wasn't a question of making things nice. Just of surviving. Making do. We patched and darned, turned sheets side to middle, knitted and unknitted and re-knitted, let down hems and let out side seams. I padded my boots with folds of cloth to keep my stockings from wearing into holes. All through the bitter, insecure thirties, with so many men thrown out of work, with rising prices, we managed. When war came, bringing even greater austerity, we knew how to cope. At the beginning, anyway.

Tighten our belts, my mother said.

War fell out of the sky. Planes nosedived, dropping bombs. The local bakery blew up, rose in the air, collapsed. The baker and his wife and their two children vanished under a pyramid of beams and rubble. Hauled out by local men, the bodies were placed in the cobbler's shop along the street. Monsieur Fauchon was away fighting but his wife opened the door and took in the dead family. Maman was distressed: they should have been put in a Christian house. She and I dodged in, with other neighbours, to say a decade of the rosary. Waxy yellow faces; like shells. Madame Fauchon drew the grey blanket back up over their heads: I suppose we shouldn't be able to bury them for days. Not until someone gives us permission. Maman and the neighbours prayed Hail Mary after Hail Mary. The prayers made the corpses seem less frightening.

When the church bells rang to signal that the Germans had arrived we hid indoors, peeped through cracks in the shutters. A motorcade of metal giants on motorbikes, rifles stacked in their sidecars. Next, a parade of open trucks, each displaying a machine gun. Eight stiff soldiers to a truck, propping their raised weapon, ready to fire. The convoy rolled in smoothly, a machine made up of many moving parts, neatly synchronised. So solemn and so grand! Next to me, Marc chanted: nasty buggers! Buggers buggers buggers! Maman slapped him: quiet, you!

The bells clanged again to mark the Armistice. We gathered in church to pray for Marshal Pétain. High above us, the curé's red face peered over the edge of the pulpit. He raised the silver crucifix and said: the hero of the first world war has become the father of the nation.

We filed out of the pews in silence. At the door, the curé shook hands with my father. He said: you veterans suffered so much on behalf of us all. Now, again, you must set us an example.

Papa hurried us home so that he could stuff the louvres of the shutters with crumpled newspaper, against the blackout demanded by the curfew. We sat and gazed at the photograph of Marshal Pétain that Papa had nailed on the wall behind the stove.

Needs will as needs must, said my mother.

Posters went up: handsome German soldiers wagging forefingers, telling us what we could and couldn't do. They looked like kindly teachers. They did a lot of marching. Whenever you went out you saw them swinging past. No more colours: just a uniform khaki green. Green beans, said my little brother Marc: string beans! The Germans re-named our streets and squares in German, hung swastika flags from our buildings. They moved into our houses. Anyone with a spare room promptly got a German soldier billeted on them. The German military band played German music in the park on Sundays. My mother sighed. Well. At least things have calmed down.

A month before, Belgian refugees had streamed through our town, making their way south. A chaos of people in cars, farm carts, on bikes, pushing prams, just walking with suitcases, bundles of possessions. We gave them food, as you had to. After the Belgians, a wave of people from Normandy washed up. More food had to be given away. People from Ste-Marie also fled south in panic. Then, gradually, they straggled back. What else was there to do? We ourselves had set out on foot for Bordeaux, pushing a handcart, got fifteen kilometres down the road. Journeying to nowhere. When Papa collapsed, we turned round and came home, like so many others. In her panic Maman had left behind in the back yard the basket she'd packed with her wedding sheets. The yard had been broken into, and the basket of linen had vanished, but we found the shop itself mercifully intact, unlooted.

Brace up, little ones, said my mother: life goes on. Everyone still needs shopkeepers!

The men who'd been called up to fight returned home. Not all of them. Some remained imprisoned in German camps. But Monsieur Fauchon from along the street came back. The Mad Hermit, too. Occasionally I spotted him going in to the cobbler's shop, which had opened for business again.

Though I'd passed my
Brevet
, I had not been able to find a secretarial job, and so I helped my parents behind the counter. On the days when we were allowed to sell sugar, the queue stretched round the corner of the block. People grumbled at risen prices. Maman would snap: it's not our fault! Customers came in with their food stamps and talked about little else but rationing, how hungry they were. We were hungry too. We stumbled through the harsh winter sawed from inside with hunger pangs. When I complained, my mother shouted. You're not a child any more! Grow up! You've just got to cope!

We crept through the grey-green months of the following year. You can't sleep properly when you go to bed hungry. I prayed for food. I prayed for the war to end. By my fingernails I clung to my faith that God would not fail us, that he would help us survive.

Maurice appearing in my life was my miracle. I wrote down the date at the back of my old school exercise book. Only I knew what it meant.

March 1942. Easter still far off. A dark, raw morning. Rain pattered against the window. Too cold to strip and wash. I got dressed under the bedcovers, put on two petticoats, two pairs of socks. I went out, hooded in an old grain sack, to take the shutters down, came back in and stamped about to try and get warm. We drank our morning broth, then my mother wrapped a shawl round herself and went off in search of bread, leaving me in charge. She said: I don't want you standing in a queue for hours. She didn't like German soldiers looking at her daughter. When we went out to church she made me cover my head and most of my face with a scarf. I had to keep my eyes lowered and not look at the invaders. Not give them that satisfaction of being feared.

In fact I didn't fear them. I peeped at them without my mother noticing. Inside their stiff clothes they were human beings, just like us. Many of them were young. The contrast between their severe grey-green uniforms and boyish faces made them seem vulnerable, appealing. Many of them must have seen comrades fall and die. They had suffered, just as we had.

We were allowed to open to customers only on certain days each week. Today we were closed. I sat at the counter on my own. Taking the shutters down had provided me with some light so that I could peer at the books. I was supposed to be checking the accounts. Shivering in the draughts, I hadn't started yet. Too cold to do sums. I huddled in my coat, my shoulders hunched up towards my ears and my hands tucked into my sleeves. We couldn't afford to light the stove down here. Oil cost too much. The only way to fight the cold was to try to shrink, to give it less of yourself to bite on. I wasn't going to let the cold win.

I wasn't going to let the shop win, either. Ill-lit, gloomy space, sawdust silting the corners, pockmarked brown lino floor, the brown walls hung with empty shelves. I'd spent my life in it. The shop was like the war. If I let it, it would eat my youth. It would go on and on and never end. Nothing would ever happen to me. I'd grow old and die with the war still going on.

The shop bell rang; the door scraped open. Large shoulders filled the doorway. Raindrops glistened on an overcoat of fine black wool. No: cashmere. A man with dark eyes, aquiline nose in a bony face, jet hair sleeked back. My eyes gobbled his coat. I'd never seen anything of such quality. The water just slid off it rather than soaking in. Raindrops ran from his shoes, polished brilliant black, puddled on to the lino. He doffed his hat. Soft black felt, looking brand new. His black eyebrows twitched together: he must have been expecting my father, not a girl. He grinned. Even white teeth under his black moustache. He came towards me. He smelled of lemon verbena soap. Such a fresh, sweet-sharp scent in our shop that smelled sourly of damp.

Bonjour
,
mademoiselle
. Is your father in?

Papa appeared from the yard, coughing as usual, and took the visitor upstairs. I ran for the mop and swabbed up the pool of wet he'd left behind. My father yelled for coffee. I put on water to boil, ground a few roast barleycorns in the little coffee-grinder. It squeaked a dance tune and I hummed along with it. I took the coffee in on a tray, the cups set on a clean napkin, spoons laid in the saucers. The big, sleek visitor was sitting with my hunched father by the stove. Beside him, Papa dwindled. A fold of loose chin. A flap of stomach. He merely grunted as I set down the tray but the visitor looked enquiringly at him. I edged towards the door. I slowed, my hand twisting the doorknob.

My daughter Marie-Angèle, said my father.

I turned. The man gave me a nod: Maurice Blanchard,
mademoiselle
, at your service. He exuded aliveness, a smell of money and newness and cleanliness. Under his coat glossy and sleek as fur his muscles flexed gracefully, energetically.

He stretched out his hand for his cup. His signet ring glinted gold. My father gave the jerk of the head that meant: out you go. Downstairs in the shop I searched for the comb my mother kept on a ledge under the counter. My fingers brushed against woven straw. Maman had gone out with just her purse, leaving her handbag behind. Perching on my high stool, I opened it, got out her compact. Just a few grains of powder: enough to do my face. I ran her stub of lipstick over my lips, found her comb and tidied my hair.

When Maurice clattered downstairs, my father behind him, into the shop, I put my chin in the air and tried not to notice him. Putting on his hat, he nodded at me again:
au revoir
,
mademoiselle
. He looked into my face, winked at me.

That night, in bed, I hooked my exercise book out from underneath my pillow, found a stump of pencil. I wrote down the date, circled it and wrote a big M for Maurice. Then I hid the book under the mattress.

Maurice came again a few days later. From his coat pocket he produced a brandy flask: can't drink this foul coffee otherwise. No disrespect intended,
mademoiselle
. Into his and papa's cups went the golden drops. Papa seized his cup, drained it in a gulp.

To give myself an excuse to stay in the room, I got out the darning basket and started sorting through a pile of clothes. Shirts with frayed cuffs. My brother's grey woollen Sunday trousers, held together by darns, the darns wearing back into ever bigger holes. Papa said: what do you know about business? Maurice said: it's a question of seizing opportunities. Unwinding a ball of grey darning wool, I sat well back in the corner, so that Papa would forget I was there. After a few stitches, my hands felt too stiff with cold to sew. I tucked them into my cuffs, fingered my bare skin inside my sleeves. Good shivers now, not bad shivers. Maurice leaned forwards, his hands on his knees: I started at the bottom, and climbed up. A self-made man!

Papa grunted. Maurice sat back, absentmindedly stroked the arms of his chair, padded with blue material, now balding and shiny. Spotted with grease. My mother always meant to re-upholster the chairs, but never found the time. Now there was no material in the shops so no point fretting. Maurice sat back, looked down at his hands. He took out a big white handkerchief and wiped his fingers. Best thing I ever did was apply for promotion and leave Limoges. The job here gives me far more scope. He glanced in my direction. Inside my sleeves I clasped my hands to my forearms. I'd never been to Limoges. I'd never been anywhere, not even on the annual church pilgrimage to Chartres.

Maurice turned his gold signet ring, polishing it. Papa said: so this new job of yours entails what, exactly? Maurice explained. From his office in our town hall, he managed the organisation of food coupons for the whole area. He said: everybody's food cards are on file. Everybody's name is there. Papa said: so you know who everybody is.