The '44 Vintage (28 page)

There was a steaming bowl on the table, but the bandages beside it told their own tale: the soup must be in the pan on the great black kitchen range.

“Corporal Jack, this is my daughter, Madeleine,” Madame Boucard said graciously. “
Ma cherie
, Corporal Jack is a friend and comrade of our David, our own David.”

It required a prodigious effort to look away from the soup to the daughter, but the effort had to be made.

“Mademoiselle,” said Butler.

Madeleine Boucard was almost as beautiful as the pan of soup, with her little, pale, heart-shaped face framed in hair turned to red-gold by the lamplight.

And Madeleine Boucard was also looking at him with the same mixture of alarm and concern her mother had shown.

Butler passed his hand across his stubbly chin, uncertain as to how to react to that look, which made him feel a fraud, because of his red silk bandage.

“Mademoiselle … I’m really quite okay,” he managed to stammer. “But… if you’ve got anything to eat. Like a little soup, maybe?”

Mother and daughter exchanged looks, then Madame Boucard stepped towards the dresser. For a moment Butler hoped she was going to get him a soup-plate, but to his disappointment she offered him only a small tray.

He accepted the tray automatically. “Madame?”

“
Regardez
, Corporal Jack—look, please.”

Butler glanced down at the tray. He saw that it was not a tray at all, but a mirror.

“Look, please,” repeated Madame Boucard.

Butler raised the mirror, and then almost dropped it with shock.

The face under the commando cap and the red silk handkerchief was a mask of dried blood and grime from which two white eyes goggled at him. In some places the blood and the dirt had mingled, and runnels of sweat had scoured the mixture; in others the blood had already blackened and cracked where the skin had creased. The mask was the more frightening and unrecognisable for being his own.

“Sit down, if you please,” said Madeleine briskly.

Butler sat down.

“There now …” She removed the cap and began to untie the handkerchief. “You know, I did not recognise him—David—it is so dark and he is so big, so grown upwards as Maman says. But then it is six years past since he was living with us … it is very tight—
le noeud—
how do you say in English?”

“The knot?”

“The knot—yes, the knot—knot,” the girl repeated the word to herself. “I remember it now.”

“You speak very good English—and your mother and father too, mademoiselle. I mean really perfect English,” said Butler shyly.

“Myself … not perfect, though it is kind of you to say
so
…
eh bien
! It is untied at last… my mother and my father, yes. But then so they should. My mother is half English by birth, and my father, he was educated at an English school … now, I am going to wash these wounds of yours with the warm water … at a most famous and expensive school, where he learnt to play rugby football. Do you play rugby football?”

Butler held his head very still. She was talking to him to take his mind off what she was doing, that was an old nursing trick. And no matter what, it was the least he could do to pretend that she’d succeeded.

“No, mademoiselle. I played soccer, but not very well. My game was cricket.”

It wasn’t difficult really: her hands were as soft as thistledown—
ouch
! That was the dressing coming off.

“There now—that’s done. Now, if you will move your head a little towards the light … so! That’s good… . Was this a bullet?”

“I don’t honestly know, mademoiselle. It may have been a grenade fragment.”

“Mmm … ?” She was finding it difficult now to concentrate on her work and make conversation in a foreign language. “Cricket … a little more to the side please …”

Butler found himself gazing directly down the front of her dress at two small but perfect breasts six inches from his face.

“Am I hurting you?” She drew back suddenly.

Butler closed his eyes. “No, mademoiselle,” he said.

The soft hands continued cleaning him up again. Cautiously he opened his eyes and discovered to his great joy that the breasts were still in view.

“My father played at cricket when he was in England, but it is not played in France …”

Butler held his breath, trying to imprint the vision on his memory. He had never seen anything like this before, except in pictures and photographs. Other men, even other boys at school, had managed to see it all and do it all; but he had somehow never had the opportunity … or the inclination or the time or the courage—or whatever it was … and now he regretted it bitterly. He had passed his exams and learnt German instead, but now those didn’t seem such clever things to have done.

“But for the war I would have gone to school in England too—to a school in Chelt-en-ham. Do you know Chelt-en-ham?”

“No, mademoiselle,” Butler croaked. “But … you speak English so well no one would … know that you hadn’t been educated there.”

“Oh, that is because Maman has this rule—nothing but English at meals.” She drew back to survey her handiwork, and he lifted his eyes just in time to meet hers. She smiled at him. “In fact, the only times I have spoken French at meals was when David lived with us. Then it was only French—poor David, I was sorry for him … well, a little sorry. He was very clever. His accent was not good, but he learnt everything so quickly.”

She sounded almost as though she hadn’t much liked Audley, Butler thought. But then at twelve and thirteen boys and girls generally didn’t much like each other, even when they spoke the same language, so far as he could remember.

All the same he felt himself envying Audley desperately all the advantages he had had. He, Butler, had a lot of ground to make up, and very little time.

Perhaps no time at all.

Here and now especially no time at all.

“You have known David long?”

“David?” Butler stared at her stupidly, then looked quickly round the kitchen. The mother had gone—from the moment he had sat down he had forgotten about her. But she had gone, anyway.

“You have known him long?” she repeated the question.

“No.” He swallowed. “You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he heard himself say.

“Oh …” She looked at him in surprise, only half-smiling. “My father once said … that is what the soldiers will say … but you are the first, the very first.”

“You are the very first girl I’ve said it to.” It was like hearing someone else speaking, but somehow that made it easier.

“Perhaps you have not seen many girls. You have been too busy fighting, perhaps,” she said lightly. “But you will see other girls. Then you will say it to them also.”

“I’ll never see any other girls, I shall only see you.”

She looked at him seriously, no longer even half-smiling. “
Vous ne perdez pas de temps
.”

Butler struggled with the French words, although their meaning was plain enough. He had been thinking the very same thing only half a minute before, after all.

“I have not
lost
any time, mademoiselle. I don’t have any time to lose. In an hour or so from now, we shall have gone—David … and I. We have a job to finish. Then we will return to our regiments— somehow.”

“But—“

Butler raised his hand. “No. I don’t want you to say anything, or promise anything. I will make the promise.”

“But Corporal Jack—“

Corporal Jack
…

Well, that was just part of the promise, he decided. Half his brain had been telling him that he was crazy—that she was beautiful and he was lightheaded with hunger and tiredness, and that anything which happened so quickly had to be shallow-rooted in those facts.

But the other half had already promised him that nothing he wanted badly enough was out of his reach.

Not Corporal Butler, but Second Lieutenant Butler.

Captain Butler.

Colonel Butler.

Colonel and Mrs. Butler.

Mrs. Madeleine Butler.

With his red hair and her red hair—red-gold hair—they would have red-headed sons and daughters for sure.

“I will come back to this house after the war,” said Butler. “And I won’t be just a corporal either—I shall be an officer. And …” Suddenly he felt himself run out of steam. “And …”

She regarded him gravely.

He had to say something, but now for the life of him he couldn’t think of anything to say. All his new-found eloquence had deserted him without warning.

“And then we shall see,” said Madeleine Boucard gently. “Very well, C— … very well, Jack. When you come back to me we shall see—you have promised that, then.”

Butler nodded.

“Good. And now I will bandage your head, if you will permit me.”

She smiled at him, and touched his cheek lightly with her hand. “And you know what?”

He shook his head dumbly.

“I think I will hold you to that promise,” she said.

How Madame Boucard guessed right—and wrong

“
ANOTHER GLASS
of wine—allow me to fill your glass, Jack,” said Monsieur Boucard politely.

“No, sir—thanking you kindly, sir.” Butler stopped his hand just in time from covering his wineglass. Such vulgar actions were obviously out of place in this company, and he was as desperately keen not to be caught out by them as he was determined not to be trapped again by the deceptively gentle wine of Touraine.

But there too was a dilemma, for this was not just any old wine, but the produce of Le Chais d’Auray itself, as Audley had carefully explained. So it was essential to qualify his refusal in some way.

“Not that it isn’t a beautiful wine—“ He caught his tongue before he could add “sir”; there had been one “sir” too many in the previous sentence as it was, and that was another thing to watch.

In fact, there were altogether too many things to watch—even though the food had driven back his fatigue and put fresh heart into him— when all he wanted to do was to watch the lamplight on Madeleine Boucard’s hair.

But that also was forbidden—and forbidden not only by the “don’t stare” rule Dad had clouted into him long ago, but also by another of Rifleman Callaghan’s sovereign remedies which sprang to mind now as gratuitously as when Callaghan had once offered it to the whole barrack room, flushed with beer and conquest:
Happen you fancy t
’
daughter, lads—then just smile sweet at t
’
mother first
!

He had always despised Callaghan, and now he despised himself and felt ashamed to think of the bugger in the same breath as Madeleine Boucard—Callaghan, whose endless seductions of local girls were the shame and the pride of the platoon.

He thrust the coarse memory out of his mind. Jack Butler was not Pat Callaghan, any more than Madeleine Boucard was any hapless local girl—or the Chateau Le Chais d’Auray was a Lancashire Rifles barrack room.

And yet, for all that, he found himself smiling now at Madame Boucard, and seeing in her features the source and origin of Madeleine’s beauty.

And she smiled back at him, and the smile caught his breath in his throat.

The mother, the daughter, the wine and the food, the sparkle of flame reflected on glass and silver and polished mahogany—it was all as unreal as the calm which the books said lay in the centre of a hurricane. It was even more impossible than the other things that had happened to him.

He touched the bandage on his head and let his glance touch the girl, and knew that both of them were real. And he knew that by the same token the promise he had made her was real too, even though he had been out of his depth and out of his class and more than half out of his head when he’d made it—real even though she’d probably only been humouring him, as any nice girl in an awkward spot might do: he couldn’t blame her for that, with a crazy foreign soldier on her hands, a soldier who’d just come out of the dark from nowhere, and who was going back into the dark to nowhere soon enough—No, not real for her maybe. But real for him, and so binding on him that it would make him indestructible until he’d discharged it—

Suddenly he was aware that she had said something to him, only he’d been too busy dreaming as he looked at her, and had missed the words.

“Are you all right, Jack?” Her eyes were dark with concern. Butler shook off the dream. Ever since the fight in Sermigny everyone had been asking him if he was all right; it was time to set the record straight once and for all.

“Aye—never better.” He grinned at her and nodded. Then he swung towards Audley, switching off the grin as he turned. “Fit for duty.”

It somehow didn’t sound the way he’d intended it to sound—it came out not so much as a statement, but more something halfway between a question and a challenge. And yet when he thought about it in the silence which followed he wondered if he hadn’t meant it to be just that: half a question and half a challenge. Because all they’d had since he’d sat down at the table was the small talk of polite conversation between Audley and the Boucards: small talk in which he couldn’t have joined even if it hadn’t been layered below his concern for his own behaviour, so that he only half-heard it anyway … —The excellence of Maman’s supper—Monsieur Boucard’s expressive shrug:
Those living on their own land, with their own produce, they have been the fortunate ones, these four years
…

—And with the wine of Le Chais to drive away gloom—

Alas, not such good years. Except perhaps the
‘43 …

—Not the ‘44?—

Shrug.
The prospects were not promising. Old Jean-Pierre—

—Old Jean-Pierre! As crusty as ever? And Dominique and Marcel? And Dr. de Courcy?—

Ah! Now it is Dr. de Courcy who—

(Boucard had cut off there suddenly, as though an alarm bell had sounded inside his head, and had flicked the merest suggestion of a covert glance at Hauptmann Grafenberg.)

(Hauptmann Grafenberg sat there between Madeleine Boucard and Sergeant Winston, very stiff and formal, swallowing his soup nervously for all the world as though he was as worried about his manners as was Butler himself.)