The Devils of D-Day (2 page)

‘I thought so.
Only Americans stop and
look.’
‘You speak good English.’

She didn’t smile. ‘I was
au-pair
in England, in Pinner, for three years.’

‘But then you came back to the farm?’ ‘My mother died. My
father was all alone.’ I said, ‘He has a loyal daughter.’ ‘Yes,’ she said,
lowering her eyes. ‘But I expect I will go away again one day. It’s very
solitaire out here.
Very lonesome.’

I turned back to the grim brooding bulk of the abandoned
tank. ‘I was told this was haunted,’ I said. ‘At night, you can hear the crew
talking.’ The girl said nothing.

I waited for a while, and then turned again and looked
across the road at her. ‘Is that true, do you think?’ I asked her. ‘That it’s
haunted?’

‘You mustn’t speak about it,’ she said. ‘If you speak about
it, it turns the milk.’

I glanced down at her
aluminium
pail. ‘You’re serious?

If you speak about the ghosts in the tank, the milk goes
off?’

She whispered, ‘Yes.’

I thought I’d heard everything, but this was amazing. Here,
in modern France, an intelligent young lady was whispering in the presence of a
beaten-up old Sherman tank, in case her fresh milk curdled. I rested my hand on
the tank’s cold rusted mudguard, and I felt as though I’d found something quite
special. Roger would have adored it.

‘Have you heard the ghosts yourself?’ I asked her.

She quickly shook her head.

‘Do you know anybody who has? Anybody I could speak to?’

She picked up her pail, and started to walk off down the
road. But I crossed over and kept pace with her, even though she wouldn’t look
at me, and wouldn’t answer.

‘I don’t want to be nosey,
mam’selle
. But we’re getting a
book together, all about D-Day and what happened afterwards. And this seems
like the kind of story I could really use. I mean it. Surely someone’s heard
the voices, if they’re real?’

She stopped walking, and stared at me hard. She was quite
pretty for a Norman peasant. She had that straight nose you see on nth-century
women in the Bayeux tapestry, and opalescent green eyes. Underneath her
mud-spattered jerkin and her sensible skirt and her rubber boots, she had quite
a noticeable figure, too.

I said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to be so sensitive
about. It’s only a story, right? I mean, ghosts don’t exist, right?’

She kept staring. Then she said, ‘It’s not a ghost, it’s
different from that.’

‘What do you mean, different?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

She started walking again, and this time she walked so
quickly I had difficulty keeping up. I guess if you walk three miles to the
cowsheds and back twice a day, your leg muscles get themselves built up pretty
tough. By the time we’d reached the mossy stone gate where I’d turned my car
round, I was wheezing for breath, and my throat was sore from the chill foggy
air.

‘This is my farm,’ she said. ‘I have to go in now.’

‘You won’t tell me anymore?’

‘There’s nothing to tell. The tank has been there since the
war. That’s more than thirty years, isn’t it? How could you hear voices in a
tank after thirty years?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ I told her.

She turned her face away in profile. She had sad, curved
lips; and with that straight aristocratic nose, she was almost beautiful. I
said, ‘Will you tell me your name?’ She gave a small, fleeting smile.
‘Madeleine
Passerelle
.
Et
VOUS
?’

‘Dan, short for Daniel, McCook.’

The girl extended her hand, and we shook. ‘I am pleased to
have made your acquaintance,’ she said. ‘Now I must go.’

‘Can I see you again? I’m up here again tomorrow. I have a
map to finish.’

She shook her head.

‘I’m not trying to pick you up,’ I assured her. ‘Maybe we
could just go for a drink. Do you have a bar around here?’

I looked around at the cold soggy countryside, and the
mournful cows gathering at the fence across the road.

‘Well, maybe a small hotel?’ I corrected myself.

Madeleine swung her pail of milk. ‘I think I am too busy,’
she said. ‘And besides, my father needs a lot of care.’

‘Who’s the old woman?’

‘Which old woman?’

‘The old woman I saw at the stable door when I turned my car
round. She had a white lace cap.’

‘Oh... that’s Eloise. She’s lived at the farm all her life.
She nursed my mother when she was sick. Now, there’s someone to speak to if
you’re interested in stories about the tank. She believes in every
superstition.’

I coughed in the cold twilight. ‘Could I speak to her now?’

Madeleine said, ‘Not tonight.
Perhaps
another day.’

She turned, and started to walk across the farmyard, but I
caught up with her and grabbed the handle of her milking pail. ‘Listen, how
about tomorrow?’ I asked her. ‘I could come around noon. Could you spare a few
minutes then?’

I was determined not to let her get away without making some
kind of firm commitment. The tank and its ghosts were pretty interesting, but
Madeleine
Passerelle
herself was even more so. You
don’t usually get much action when you’re drawing up a military map of northern
France, and a few glasses of wine and a tumble in the cowshed with the farmer’s
daughter, even in the deep midwinter, was a lot more appealing than silent and
solitary meals in the brown garlic-smelling mausoleum that my hotel jocularly
called its dining room.

Madeleine smiled.
‘Very well.
Come
and eat with us. But make it at eleven-thirty. We lunch early in France.’

‘You’ve made my week. Thanks a lot.’

I reached forward to kiss her, but my foot slid on the
churned-up mud of the farmyard, and I almost lost my balance. I saved most of
my dignity by turning my slide into three rapid steps, but the kiss was lost to
the freezing air, a puff of
vapour
that vanished in
the dusk. Amused, Madeleine said,
‘Au
revoir
, M. McCook.
Until tomorrow.’

I watched her walk across the yard and disappear through the
stable door. A cold wet drizzle was beginning to sift down from the evening
sky, and it would probably turn into snow in an hour or two. I left the farm
and began to trudge back down the road towards the Pont
D’Ouilly
,
where I’d left my car.

Along the road, it was silent and soaking and dark. I kept
my hands shoved deep in my overcoat pockets and my scarf pulled up over my
mouth. Way over to my right, I could hear the
Orne
rushing over the brownish granite rocks of its shallow bed, and on my left,
just beyond the hedge, reared the
slabby
blocks of
the cliffs that gave this part of Normandy its name – Swiss Normandy. The rocks
were jacketed in slime and moss, and laced up with hanging tree-roots, and you
could just imagine strange and malignant creatures lurking in their crevices
and cracks.

I hadn’t
realised
how far I’d
walked along the road with Madeleine. It took me almost five minutes before I
saw my yellow car by the verge, and the huddled black bulk of the abandoned
tank. The drizzle was turning into large wet flakes of half-melted snow now,
and I pulled my coat collar up and walked more quickly.

Who knows what odd tricks your eyes can play in the snow and
the dark? When your eyes are tired, you can see dark shadows like cats slipping
away at the corner of your field of vision. Shadows can seem to stand on their
own, and trees can seem to move. But that evening, on the road to Pont
D’Ouilly
, I was sure that my eyes weren’t playing up, and
that I did see something. There’s a French road sign which warns that the night
can deceive you, and possibly it did, but I still think that what I glimpsed
wasn’t an optical illusion. It was enough to make me stop in the road, and feel
a tight chill that was even colder than the evening air.

Through the tumbling snow, a few yards away from the
derelict tank, I saw a small bony figure, white in the darkness, not much
taller than a child of five, and it seemed to be hopping or running. The sight
of it was so sudden and strange that I was momentarily terrified; but then I
ran forward through the snow and shouted, ‘Hey!
You!’

My shout echoed flatly back from the nearby rocks. I peered
into the dark but there was nobody there.
Only the rusting
bulk of the Sherman tank, woven into the brambles of the hedge.
Only the
wet
road,
and the noise of the river. There was no
sign of any figure; no sign of any child. I walked back across to my car and
checked it for damage, in case the figure had been a vandal or a thief, but the
Citroen was unmarked. I climbed thoughtfully inside and sat there for a minute
or two drying my face and hair with my handkerchief, wondering what the hell
was going on around here.

I started the Citroen’s engine, but just before I drove off
I took one last look at the tank. It gave me a really peculiar feeling,
thinking that it had been decaying by this roadside since I944, unmoved, and
that here at this very place the American Army had fought to liberate Normandy.
For the first time in my map-making career, I felt history was alive; I felt
history move under my feet. I wondered if the skeletons of the crew were still
inside the tank, but I decided that they’d probably been taken out years ago
and given a decent burial. The French were beautifully and gravely respectful
to the remains of the men who had died trying to liberate them.

I released the Citroen’s brake and drove down the gloomy
road, across the bridge, and back up the winding hill to the main highway. The
snow was crowding my windshield, and the car’s tacky little windshield wipers
were having about as much success in clearing it away
as two
geriatrics sweeping up the ticker-tape after Lindy’s parade through Wall Street
.
When I joined the main stream of traffic, I almost collided with a Renault
which was bombing through the snow at eighty-five.
Vive la
velocite
, I thought to myself, as
I crawled back towards
Falaise
at twenty.

Next day, in the high-ceilinged hotel dining room, I ate a solemn
breakfast of croissants and coffee and
confitures
,
watching myself in the mottled mirrors and trying to decipher what the hell was
happening in the world today from a copy of Le Figaro on a long stick. Across
the room, a rotund Frenchman with waxed whiskers and a huge white napkin tucked
in his shirt collar was wolfing down
breadrolls
as
though he was trying to put up the price of shares in the bakery industry. A
waitress in black with a pinched face rapped around the black-and-white tiled
floor in court shoes and made sure you felt you were lonely and unwanted, and
that you only wanted breakfast because you were an unpardonable pest. I thought
of changing hotels, but then I thought of Madeleine, and things didn’t seem too
bad.

I spent most of the morning on the new curve of road that
comes into
Clecy
from the south-east. A dry wind had
lifted away most of the snow during the night, but it was still intensely cold,
and the village lay frosted in its valley, with the broad hump of the hills far
behind it, and tiny villagers came and went from its doors, tending their
gardens or their washing, or fetching in logs, and the hours rang from the tall
church spire, and New York seemed a very long way away.

Maybe my mind was distracted, but I only managed to finish
half the readings that I’d hoped to take, and by eleven o’clock, as the church
tolled its hour, I was wrapped up and ready to drive across to Pont
D’Ouilly
. I’d taken the trouble to stop at a store in the
village and buy a very reasonable bottle of Bordeaux, just in case Madeleine’s
father needed a little appeasing. I also bought, for Madeleine herself, a box
of
crystallised
fruit. They’re very big on
crystallised
fruit in Normandy.

The rented Citroen coughed and choked, but finally found its
way down the twisting road to the bridge. The countryside didn’t look very much
more hospitable by daylight than it had by night. There was a cold silvery haze
over the fields, and mist was hanging under the elms like soiled net curtains.
The cows were still there, standing patiently in the chill, chewing the
colourless
grass and breathing out so much steam they
looked like roomfuls of heavy smokers. I drove over the stone bridge, with the
Orne
gargling beneath me, and then I slowed down so that I
could take a look at the tank.

There it was – silent and broken – wound in brambles and
leafless creeper. I stopped the car for a moment and slid open my window so
that I could see the corroded wheels, the collapsed tracks, and the small dark
turret with its scaly sides. There was something deeply sinister and sorrowful
about it. It reminded me of the abandoned Mulberry
harbour
that still lies off the shore of
Arromanches
, on
Normandy’s channel coast, a grim memorial to June 6, I944, that no stone
monument or statue could ever adequately replace.

I looked around at the dank hedgerow for a while, and then I
started the car up again and drove along to Madeleine’s farm. I turned into the
gate and splashed across the muddy yard, with chickens flapping and skittering
all around me, and a flock of grubby geese rushing away like athletes on a
cross-country run.

I stepped out of the car, being careful where I put my feet,
and reached in for my presents. A door opened behind me, and I heard someone
walking my way. A voice said,
‘Bonjour, monsieur.
Qu’est-ce
que
vous
voulez
?’