Léon and Louise (3 page)

‘I can Morse, monsieur. Where is Saint-Luc-sur-Marne, please?'

‘On the Marne, you blockhead. Don't worry, the front line is somewhere else now. It's an urgent request, you can start right away. You'll even get paid. A hundred and twenty francs a month.'

This was how it came about that, one spring morning in 1918, Léon Le Gall strapped his cardboard suitcase to the luggage rack of his bicycle, kissed his mother tenderly, hugged his father after a moment's hesitation, mounted his bike, and pedalled off. He accelerated as if he had to take to the air at the end of the Rue des Fossées like Louis Blériot, who had lately flown across the Channel in his home-made aeroplane with its ash struts and bicycle wheels. He sped past the shabby but bravely respectable lower middle-class homes in which his friends Patrice and Joël were just dunking yesterday's sawdusty wartime bread in their coffee, past the bakery that had supplied nearly every morsel of bread he'd eaten in his life, and past the secondary school in which his father would continue to earn his living for another fourteen years, three months and two weeks. He rode past the big harbour in which an American grain tanker was lying peacefully cheek by jowl with some British and French warships, crossed the bridge and turned right into the Avenue de Paris, blithely heedless of the fact that he might never see any of this again. Passing the warehouses, cranes and dry docks, he rode out of the town and into the endless meadows and pastureland of Normandy. After ten minutes his route was barred by a herd of cows and he had to stop. From then on he rode more slowly.

It had rained during the night, so the road was pleasantly damp and free from dust. The steaming meadows were dotted with grazing cattle and apple trees in blossom. Léon rode towards the sun. He had a gentle west wind at his back and made rapid progress. After an hour he removed his jacket and strapped it to his suitcase. He overtook a cart drawn by a mule. Then he met a peasant woman pushing a handcart and passed a lorry standing beside the road with its engine smoking. He saw no horses; he had read in the
Petit Inventeur
that nearly all the horses in France were in use at the front.

At noon he ate the ham sandwich his mother had packed for him and drank some water from a village fountain. In the afternoon he lay down under an apple tree. Squinting up at its pink and white blossom and pale-green leaves, he noticed that it hadn't been pruned for years.

That evening he reached Caen, where he was to spend the night at his Aunt Simone's. She was the youngest sister of the Serge Le Gall whose skull a prison inmate had split with an axe. It was a few years since Léon had last seen her; he remembered the full breasts beneath her blouse, her laughter, her big, red, womanly mouth, and the fact that her kite had soared higher than anyone else's on the beach. Shortly after that, though, her husband and her two sons had gone off to war. Since then, mad with grief and worry, Aunt Simone had been writing three letters a day to Verdun.

‘So there you are,' she said, ushering him inside. The house smelt of mothballs and dead flies. Her hair was unkempt and her lips were cracked and bloodless. She was holding a rosary in her right hand.

Léon kissed her on both cheeks and passed on messages from his parents.

‘There's some bread and cheese on the kitchen table,' she said. ‘And a bottle of cider, if you want.'

He handed her the toasted almonds his mother had given him as a gift for his hostess.

‘Thanks. Now go to the kitchen and eat. You'll be sleeping with me tonight, the bed's big enough.'

Léon's eyes widened.

‘You can't have the boys' room, I had to let that and our bedroom to some refugees from the north, and I sold the sofa in the parlour because I needed room for the bed.'

Léon opened his mouth to say something.

‘Don't make fuss, the bed's wide enough,' she said running her fingers through her lifeless hair. ‘It's been a long day. I'm tired – I don't have the energy to argue with you.'

Without another word she went into the parlour and got under the bedclothes, petticoats, blouse, knickers, stockings and all, then turned to face the wall and lay still.

Léon retired to the kitchen. He ate some bread and cheese, stared out of the window at the street, and drank the whole bottle of cider. Not until he heard Aunt Simone snoring did he cross the passage to the parlour and stretch out beside her, breathing in the sweet-and-sour scent of her female sweat and waiting for the cider's magical potency to transport him into another world.

When he opened his eyes the next morning, Aunt Simone was still lying beside him in the same position, but she wasn't snoring any longer. He sensed that she was only pretending to be asleep and couldn't wait to leave the house. Taking his shoes in one hand and his suitcase in the other, he stole quietly outside.

It was a sunny, windless morning. Léon took the coast road via Houlgate and Honfleur. It being low tide, he hefted his bicycle over the wall and pushed it down to the shore, where he rode along the tideline for many kilometres on wet, hard sand. The sand was yellow, the sea green shading to blue near the horizon. The few children who were playing on the beach wore red bathing costumes. Sometimes, old men in black jackets could be seen standing on the sand, prodding tangled knots of seaweed with their walking sticks.

Because his father and the mayor of Cherbourg were far away and couldn't possibly see him, Léon kept half an eye open for jetsam. He found a long, not overly frayed length of rope, some bottles, a window frame complete with catch and stay, and a half-empty can of paraffin.

He got to Deauville at midday and, in the evening, to Rouen, where he was to overnight at Aunt Sophie's; first, however, his father had urgently insisted that he visit the cathedral because it was one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture. Léon considered giving both his aunt and the example of Gothic architecture a miss and spending the night somewhere under the stars. Then he reflected that, although the June days were long, the nights were still cold and damp, and that Aunt Sophie couldn't have a husband or sons at Verdun because she was a lifelong spinster; she was also renowned for her apple tarts. When he reached her house she was standing in the front garden in her starched white apron, waving to him.

Léon discovered when getting up on the third day that his muscles were abominably sore. Climbing stairs was agony and the first hour on the bike plain torture; after that it got better. The wind had gone round to the north and it started to drizzle. Long convoys of army lorries came his way. The glum-faced soldiers seated beneath their canvas hoods were smoking cigarettes and clamping their rifles between their knees. At midday he passed a gutted farm. The blackened beams were festooned with green vetch and birch saplings were growing in the pigsties. A smell of mouldy charcoal came drifting out of the empty window embrasures. Stuck in the dungheap was a rusty pitchfork without a handle. This Léon appropriated and added to the other finds on his luggage rack.

He felt sure he was nearing his destination now; Saint-Luc-sur-Marne's church tower ought to come into view beyond the next hill or the one after that. A village with a church really was situated beyond the next rise, but it wasn't Saint-Luc. Léon rode through the village and up the next hill, beyond which lay another village with another hill beyond that. He bent low over his handlebars, tried to ignore his aches and pains, and imagined himself to be a human machine on wheels – one that didn't care how many more hills lay beyond the next one.

It was late in the afternoon when the hills finally petered out. Ahead of Léon stretched an endless plain bisected by an avenue of plane trees as straight as an arrow. Riding on the level was a relief, especially as it seemed to him that the trees shielded him a little from the side wind. Then, coming from behind him, he heard a noise; a rapid, regular succession of squeaks that grew steadily louder. He turned to look.

What he saw was a young woman on an old and rather rusty gentleman's bicycle. She was seated on the saddle, erect but relaxed, and quickly drawing nearer. The squeaks were evidently caused by the right-hand pedal, which fouled the chain guard every time it went round. She continued to come quickly closer and would soon overtake him. To prevent her from doing so he stood up on his pedals, but after a few seconds she drew level, gave him a wave, called ‘
Bonjour!
' and overtook him as easily as if he'd been stationary at the roadside.

Léon stared after her as the squeaks grew fainter and her figure steadily dwindled in size until it had traversed the broad plain and finally disappeared at the point where the double row of plane trees met the horizon. An odd-looking girl, she'd been. Freckles and dark, luxuriant hair bobbed at the back from one earlobe to the other. Roughly his own age. Maybe a little younger or older, it was hard to tell. A generous mouth and a dainty chin. A nice smile. Little white teeth with a funny gap between the upper incisors. The eyes – green? A red and white polka-dot blouse that would have added ten years to her age if her blue school skirt hadn't knocked them off again. Nice legs, as far as he'd been able to judge in such a short time. And she'd ridden damned fast.

Léon felt tired no longer, his legs did their duty once more. A sensational girl, that! He strove to keep her image before his eyes and was surprised to fail so soon. He could visualize the red and white polka-dot blouse, the pumping legs, the well-worn lace-up shoes, and the smile, which, incidentally, had been not just nice but blissfully, breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly attractive in its combination of friendliness and intelligence, bashfulness and mockery. But the separate elements refused, however hard he tried, to form a totality. All he saw were colours and shapes; her overall appearance eluded him.

He could still distinctly hear the squeak of the pedal against the chain guard, also her cheerful ‘
Bonjour!
'. Then it occurred to him that he hadn't returned her greeting. Angrily, he thumped the handlebars with his right hand, making the bicycle swerve and almost falling off. ‘
Bonjour, mademoiselle!
' he said, softly and experimentally. Then louder and more firmly: ‘
Bonjour!
'. Then again, with a touch more manly self-assurance: ‘
Bonjour!
'

Léon renewed the resolution he'd made before his departure, which was to start a new life in Saint-Luc-sur-Marne. From now on, and with immediate effect, he would no longer drink his coffee at home but take it in the bistro and always leave a fifteen per cent tip on the counter, and he would no longer read
Le Petit Inventeur
but
Figaro
and
Le Parisien,
and he would saunter along the pavement, not run. And when a young woman said hello to him, he wouldn't gawp at her with his mouth open, but favour her with a short, sharp glance, then casually reciprocate.

Leaden fatigue had taken possession of his legs once more. Now he cursed the boundless plain. At least the previous hilly terrain had offered an alternation of hope and disappointment; now there was just the unquestionable certainty that he still had far to go. So as not to have to see how far, he rested his forearms on the handlebars, let his head hang down between his shoulders, watched the rise and fall of his feet, and kept an eye on the ditch to ensure he didn't career off the road.

So he failed to notice that, far ahead of him, the overcast had parted and a quiverful of shafts of sunlight was slanting down on the green wheat fields, and that a speck had appeared on the skyline between the plane trees. It wore a red and white polka-dot blouse and grew rapidly bigger. Léon didn't notice, either, that the girl was this time riding without hands. Almost level with him by the time he heard the familiar squeak, she showed him her teeth with the cute little gap in the middle, waved to him, and rode past. ‘
Bonjour!
' Léon called after her, exasperated at being too late yet again. All he needed now, given that she was behind him once more, was for her to overtake him yet again. Determined to avoid this humiliation, he bent over the handlebars and strove to speed up. After only a few hundred metres he peered anxiously over his shoulder to see if she had reappeared on the horizon, but he soon straightened up and forced himself to ride more slowly. After all, it was highly unlikely that this meteoric creature would travel the same stretch three times within a few minutes, and if she did, he would anyway lose the race – which to her wasn't one in any case. He braked to a halt and laid his bicycle down on the gravel verge, then leapt over the ditch and stretched out on the grass. Now she was welcome to come. Lounging there chewing a blade of grass like someone who had felt like having a little breather, he would tap the peak of his cap with a forefinger and call out ‘
Bonjour!
' loud and clear.