The Devils of D-Day (3 page)

A short Frenchman in muddy pants, muddy boots and a muddy
brown jacket was standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets. He had a
long Norman face, and he was smoking a
Gauloise
that
appeared to be permanently stuck to his lip. His beret was pulled well down to
his ears, which made him look pretty rural, but his eyes were bright and he
looked like the kind of farmer who didn’t miss a trick.

‘My name’s Dan McCook,’ I told him. ‘Your daughter Madeleine
invited me for lunch.
Er
…
pour
dejeuner
? ‘

The farmer nodded.
‘Yes,
monsieur
.
She tells me this. I am
Jacques
Passerelle
.’

We shook hands. I offered him the bottle of wine, and said,
‘I brought you this. I hope you like it. It’s
a
bordeaux
.’

Jacques
Passerelle
paused for a
moment, and reached in his breast pocket for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.
He hooked them around his ears, and
scrutinised
the
bottle closely. I felt as if I’d had the down-right effrontery to give a vacuum
pack of A&P bacon to a Kentucky hog farmer. But the Frenchman nodded again,
put away his spectacles, and said, ‘
Merci
bien
, monsieur
. I save this for
Dimanche
.’

He ushered me through the stable door into the kitchen. The
old woman Eloise was there, in her dark grey dress and her white lace cap,
boiling a huge copper pan full of apples. Jacques introduced me, and we shook
hands. Her fingers were soft and dry, and she was wearing a silver ring with a
miniature Bible on it. She had one of those flat, pale, wrinkled faces that you
sometimes see staring out of the windows of old people’s homes, or from the
windows of buses on old people’s outings. But she seemed to be independent and
strong around the
Passerelle
home, and she walked
with a straight back.

She said, ‘Madeleine told me you were interested in the
tank.’

I glanced at Jacques, but he didn’t seem to be listening. I
coughed, and said, ‘Sure. I’m making a map of these parts for a book about
D-Day.’

‘The tank has been here since July, I944.
Mid-July.
It died on a very hot day.’

I looked at her. Her eyes were washed-out blue, like the sky
after a spring shower, and you didn’t quite know whether she was looking
inwards or outwards. I said, ‘Maybe we can talk after lunch.’

Out of the steamy, apple-aromatic kitchen, we walked along a
narrow dark hallway with a bare boarded floor. Jacques opened a door in the
side of the hall, and said
,
‘You
would care for an aperitif?’

This was obviously his front
parlour
,
the room he kept only for visitors. It was gloomy, heavily-curtained, and it
smelled of dust and stale air and furniture polish. There were three chintz
armchairs in the style you can see in any large French
meubles
store, a copper warming-pan hanging on the wall, a plastic
madonna
with a small container of holy water, and a
dark-varnished sideboard with photographs of weddings and grandchildren, each
on its own lace doily. A tall clock ticked away the winter morning, weary and
slow.

‘I’d like a calvados, please,’ I told Jacques. ‘I don’t know
anything better for warming yourself up on a cold day. Not even Jack Daniels.’

Jacques took two small glasses from the sideboard, uncorked
the calvados, and poured it out. He handed one over, and lifted his own glass
solemnly.

‘
Sante
,’ he said quietly, and
downed his drink in one gulp.

I sipped mine more circumspectly. Calvados, the apple-brandy
of
Normany
, is potent stuff, and I did want to do
some sensible work this afternoon. ‘You have been here in summer?’ asked
Jacques.
‘No, never.
This is only my third trip to
Europe.’ ‘It’s not so pleasant in winter. The
mud,
and
the frost. But in summer, this is very beautiful. We have visitors from all
over France, and Europe. You can hire boats and row along the river.’

‘It sounds terrific. Do you have many Americans?’ Jacques
shrugged.
‘One or two.

Some Germans sometimes, too.
But
not many come here. Pont
D’Ouilly
is still a painful
memory. The Germans ran away from here as if the devil himself were after
them.’

I swallowed some more calvados, and it glowed down my throat
like a shovelful of hot coke. ‘You’re the second person who’s said that,’ I
told him.
‘Der
Teufel
.’

Jacques gave a small smile, which reminded me of the wav
that Madeleine smiled.

‘I must change my clothes,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to sit
down for lunch looking like a mud man.’

‘Go ahead,’ I told him. ‘Will Madeleine be
down.
’

‘In a moment.
She wanted to put on
cosmetics. Well... we don’t have many visitors.’

Jacques went off to clean himself up, and I went over to the
window and looked out across the orchard. The fruit trees were all bare now,
and pruned, and the grass was white with cold. A bird perched for a moment on
the rough fence of silver-birch at the far end of the garden, and then
fluttered off. I turned back into the room.

On the sideboard, one of the photographs showed a young girl
with a wavy I9403 hairstyle, and I guessed that must have been Madeleine’s
mother. There was a
colour
picture of Madeleine as a
baby, with a smiling priest in the background, and a formal portrait of
jacques
in a high white collar.
Besides all these was a bronze model of a medieval cathedral, with a ring of
twisted hair around its spire. I couldn’t really work out what that was
supposed to mean, but then I wasn’t a Roman Catholic, and I wasn’t really into
religious relics.

I was just about to pick up the model to take a better look
when the
parlour
door opened. It was Madeleine, in a
pale cream cotton dress, her dark-blonde hair brushed back and held with
tortoiseshell combs, her lips bright red with lipstick.

‘Please...’ she said. ‘Don’t touch that.’

I raised my hands away from the tiny cathedral. ‘I’m sorry.
I was only going to take a look.’

‘It’s something of my mother’s.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all right. Don’t think about it. Did father give you
a drink?’

‘Sure.
A calvados.
It’s making my
ears ring already Are you going to join me?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t drink it. They gave it to me
once when I was twelve and I was sick. Now, I only drink wine.’

She sat down, and I sat opposite. ‘You shouldn’t have
dressed up
specially
for me,’ I told her. ‘But all the
same, you look beautiful.’

She blushed. Not much, just a small tinge on the cheeks, but
it was a blush all right. I hadn’t come across that kind of modesty for years.

I said, ‘I had a real weird experience last night. I was
walking back to my car, and I could have sworn I saw something on the road.’

She looked up. ‘What was it?’

‘Well, I’m not too sure. It was like a small child, but it
was too thin and bony for a small child.’

She looked at me for several silent seconds. Then she said,
‘I don’t know. It must have been the snow.’

‘It scared the hell out of me, whatever it was.’

She picked absentmindedly at the braiding on the arm of her
chair. ‘It’s the atmosphere, the ambience, around the tank. It makes people
feel things, see things, that aren’t there. Eloise will tell you some of the
stories if you want.’

‘You don’t believe them yourself?’

She shrugged. ‘What’s the use? All you do is frighten
yourself. I’d rather think of real things, not of ghosts and spirits.’

I put down my glass on the small side-table. ‘I get the
feeling you don’t like it here.’

‘Here, in my father’s house?’

‘No – in Pont
D’Ouilly
.
It’s not exactly the entertainment
centre
of northern
France, is it?’

Madeleine stood up and walked across to the window. Against the
grey winter light, she was a soft dark silhouette. She said, ‘I don’t think so
much of entertainment. If you’ve lived here, in Pont
D’Ouilly
,
then you know what sadness is, and anything at all is better than sadness.’

‘Don’t tell me you loved and lost.’

She smiled. ‘I suppose you could say that. I loved life and
I lost my love of life.’

I said, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’ But at that moment, a
gong rang from across the hall, and Madeleine turned and said, ‘Lunch is ready.
We’d better go in.’

Today, we had lunch in the dining room, although I suspected
that they usually ate in the kitchen, especially when they had three inches of
mud on their boots and appetites like horses. Eloise had set out a huge tureen
of hot brown onion soup on the oval table, with crisp garlic bread, and I
suddenly
realised
that I was starved of home cooking.
Jacques was already standing at the head of the table in a neatly-pressed brown
suit, and when we had all taken our seats, he bowed his thinning scalp towards
us, and said grace.

‘Oh Lord, who provides all that we eat, thank you for this
nourishment. And protect us from the conversations of evil, in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.’

I looked across the table at Madeleine, and tried to put the
question in my eyes.
The conversations of evil?
What
was that all about?
The voices in the tank?
Or what?
But Madeleine’s attention was fastened on the large
tureen, as Eloise dished up piping-hot platefuls of transparent brown soup, and
whether she intended to avoid my gaze of not, she didn’t look up again until
her father had started to talk.

‘The upper field is frozen,’ he said, dabbing his lips with
his napkin. ‘I ploughed a hectare this morning, and there was ice coming up
with the soil. It hasn’t been so cold here for ten years.’

Eloise said, ‘There are worse winters to come. The dogs know
it.’

‘The dogs?’
I asked her.

‘That’s right,
monsieur
.
When a dog stays close to home, and when he calls in the night, that’s when the
nights will grow cold for three years, one after another.’ ‘You believe that?
Or is that just a French country saying?’

Eloise frowned at me. ‘It is nothing to do with belief. It
is true. I have seen it happen for myself.’

Jacques put in: ‘Eloise has a way with nature,
Mr
McCook. She can heal you with dandelion broth, or send
you to sleep with burdock and thyme.’

‘Can she exorcise ghosts?’

Madeleine breathed, ‘Dan...’ but Eloise was not put out. She
examined me with those watery old eyes of hers, and almost smiled.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m impertinent,’ I said. ‘But it
seems to me that everybody around here is kind of anxious about that tank, and
if you could exorcise it. ..’

Eloise slowly shook her head. ‘Only a priest can exorcise,’
she said gently, ‘and the only priest who will believe us is too old and too
weak for such things.’

‘You really believe it’s haunted?’

‘It depends on what you mean by “haunted”,
monsieur.
‘

‘Well, as far as I can make out, the dead crew are supposed
to be heard talking to each other at night. Is that it?’

‘Some say that,’ said Jacques.

I glanced at him. ‘And what do others say?’

‘Others will not talk about it at all.’

Eloise spooned up her soup carefully. ‘Nobody knows much
about the tanks. But they were not like the usual American tanks. They were
different, very different, and Father Anton, our priest, said they were
visitations from
L’enfer
, from hell itself.’

Madeleine said, ‘Eloise – do we have to talk about it? We
don’t want to spoil the lunch.’

But Eloise raised her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter
This
young man wants to know about the tank, then why
shouldn’t he?’

I said: ‘How were they different? It looks like a regular
tank to me.’

‘Well,’ explained Eloise, ‘they were painted black all over,
although you cannot see that now, because the rust and the weather have taken
away the paint. There were thirteen of them. I know, because I counted them as
they came along the road from Le Vey.
Thirteen, on the
thirteenth day of July.
But what was most strange, they never opened
their turrets. Most American tanks came with their tops open, and the soldiers
would throw us candy and cigarettes and nylon stockings. But these tanks came
and we never saw who drove them. They were always closed.’

Madeleine had finished her soup and was sitting upright in
her chair. She looked very pale, and it was clear that all this talk about the
strange tanks disconcerted her.

I said, ‘Did you talk to any Americans about them? Did they
ever tell you what they were?’

Jacques, with his mouth full of garlic bread, said, ‘They
didn’t know, or they wouldn’t speak. They just said “special
division”,
and that was all.’

‘Only one was left behind,’ put in Eloise. ‘That was the
tank which is still there, down the road. It broke a track and stopped. But the
Americans did nothing to take it away.

Instead, they came along next day and welded down the
turret. Yes, they welded it, and then an English priest came and
said words over it, and it was
left to rot.’

‘You mean the crew was left inside?’

Jacques tore off some more bread. ‘Who can say? They
wouldn’t let anyone near. I have talked many times to the police and to the
mayor, and all they say is that the tank is not to be moved. And there it
stays.’