The Hour of The Donkey (33 page)

Wimpy didn’t look at him. ‘I-can’t-walk-Harry…’ his lips hardly moved as he spoke ‘ . .. we’ll have-to-wait… to-get … the-cart.’

Bastable focused on the hand-cart in the gateway, with its scatter of bundles and belongings. Not ten yards from it a large grey open car was parked in the track,with a group of German officers in and around it. A long file of soldiers was threading its way along the track, past the car. From behind him, coming from the open fields behind the house, he could hear the roar-and-squeal of tanks.

He was aware of being squeezed by two equal fears, each the more terrible for its inevitability.

They would come … and they would search the house, and they would find the battledress … which he had left, which
he
had left. And that would be the end of it, then.

That was inevitable. It would happen.

Therefore, because that was his fault—the end of it … therefore he had to get the cart first—
now
.

That was also inevitable: he would make it inevitable because he would do it, because he had left himself no choice but to do it.
Now—

‘I’m-going-to-get-the-cart,’ he whispered to Wimpy. ‘You … take-the-child.’

The little limpet held on to him like grim death, as he had known she would, tightening matchstick arms and legs convulsively round him and sobbing wordlessly s he prised them loose.

‘Harry—‘ Wimpy began doubtfully.

‘
Take-her-damn-you
!’

At last he was free of her. For a final instant he met Wimpy’s eyes across her shoulder.

‘Harry … act stupid—dumb . .. and frightened, Harry—‘

Bastable turned away, towards the garden and the enemy, lifting both arms above his shoulders, the square of white linen dangling from one hand.

His legs felt weak, yet stiff at the same time, and the sweat lay cold on his face. He could hear all the sounds around him, each one an individual sensation, but they were all meaningless: only what he could see ahead of him mattered.

The hand-cart was nearer.

The German officers were arguing. One of them had a map held open—no, a map-case of some kind—

Suddenly they looked up at him, and in the same instant someone shouted loudly and angrily.

Bastable looked in the direction of the shout and saw a German soldier running towards him The German shouted again and threw his rifle to his shoulder. Bastable stopped in instinctive terror, cringing from the rifle.

Someone else shouted—it was one of the officers from the group by the car. The German soldier lowered his rifle, but still kept it levelled at Bastable’s chest. The officer barked out another order, and the soldier advanced menacingly, until he was within two yards of him.

Now it was finished. It had all been madness from the start, from the very beginning, but row it was finished.

The soldier swore guttural words at him, unintelligible sounds which could only be questions or orders, but which only served to increase his abject helplessness.

He looked around desperately, taking in the sharp images of his despair, knowing that they couldn’t help him: the garden, with its sweet-williams flowering brightly, the trees—chestnut trees—the long grey car and its occupants—its peak-capped officers festooned with field glasses and pistols and maps—and the pathetic contrast of the handcart, with the old couple’s belongings—
Oh, God, help me! Help me
!

The soldier shouted at him again, jerking the rifle to point his questions.

Bastable lowered one arm cautiously and pointed at the hand-cart.

The soldier cast a quick glance at the cart, then returned to Bastable wearing an expression of irritation rather than anger on his face.

‘Nein, nein—‘ The short explosive gibberish which followed was accompanied first by a vigorous shake of the steel-helmeted head and then by a nod towards the house which translated the likely meaning of the words.

‘
Clear off at once, you stupid bugger!
’

Bastable stood his ground. He was still frightened—he was indeed so frightened that even if he had decided not to stand still he wasn’t sure that his legs would have obeyed his brain—but he was also prey to other fears which refused to release him.

Simply, he had to have that bloody cart.

He pointed at it again.

The soldier sighed, reversed his rifle, took two quick steps forward and hit Bastable in the chest with the flat of the stock.

The blow wasn’t hard, it was more of a push than a thump, but Bastable knew with a sickening certainty that if he still refused to retreat then the next one would be very hard indeed.

‘
Halt!
’

The sharp command came from the right, out of his vision, but the soldier’s instant obedience to it transformed Bastable’s choice of evils into no choice at all: that was an officer-voice, and now it was discovery, not injury or retreat, which he faced.

Not that
faced
was the right word, for he was too scared to lift his eyes from the patch of dirt on which they had focused sullenly after the thump on the chest, a circumference which just included the muddy jackboots of his tormentor.

As he watched the jackboots they came to attention.

The officer spoke sharply again, and the boot-heels clicked.

A very small pebble and fragment of dried mud stood out in high relief in the pathway. A small black beetle scrambled frantically across it, zig-zagging and lurching as though aware of its danger but obstinately determined to disregard it.

‘M’sieur—‘

Oh God! The German officer was addressing him in French!

‘M’sieur … kes-ke-voo-voolay, m’sieur?’

Meaningless. The beetle mounted a larger pebble, slithered sideways and rolled over on to its back, its legs waving helplessly in the air. Bastable raised his eyes five degrees, to take in a new pair of jackboots. They were noticeably superior to the soldier’s boots, not only recently polished under their coating of dust but also narrower and better-fitting.

‘M’sieur?’

The voice went with the boots. There were Germans and Germans, as he had good cause to know from his own experience now; yet it seemed more strange that any one of them should speak to a French peasant so courteously, thought Bastable suspiciously.

But whatever the question he had no reply to it, only a gesture. Without looking up, he pointed once more at the hand-cart.

‘Comment?’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘Ach—so! Mein Gott—‘ The German officer rapped out an order so peremptorily that Bastable was startled into looking up.

‘Schnell, schnell!’ the officer chivvied the soldier.

The soldier grounded his rifle hastily and pushed back the hand-cart, revealing the little old Frenchwoman, who had lain almost hidden among the fallen bundles on the far side of it.

The German soldier bent down and gathered her up into his arms, her head cradled in the crook of one arm, her legs hanging down limply from the other. As he lifted her, one of the carpet slippers dropped to the ground. He looked questioningly at his officer, who nodded towards Bastable. The soldier marched stiffly round the cart and presented the tiny black-clad corpse to Bastable, extending her as though she was weightless.

Indeed, she was a mere featherweight. The child he had held in his arms a few minutes ago had more substance to her, so it seemed, though perhaps that had been an illusion created by the limpet-grip and the beating heart. Either way, he had no experience on which to draw other comparisons, this was his first dead grandmother, just as little nameless Alice had been his first live baby. All he could think of was that, of all the experiences he had tried to imagine, and to steel himself against these last months, no wildest dream had prepared him for such realities.

‘Ay be-an, m’sieur,’ said the German officer, nodding again at him. ‘Noos aliens parlay aveck votrer patron.’

Parlay?

Speak.

Bastable didn’t want to speak.

He wanted the hand-cart.

He lowered the corpse of the old woman into the cart and swung the handles to point it towards the house, ignoring the Germans—

And stopped abruptly, as he saw that the German officer was already ahead of him, striding purposefully up the pathway towards the doorway, towards Wimpy.

WIMPY HAD
acquired a hat from somewhere. When he had got it, Bastable had no idea; but now it was on Wimpy’s head—the old Frenchman’s Sunday hat, something like an Anthony Eden homburg, but a French version of it from an earlier era, with different proportions of brim and crown. The trouble was, it suffered from the same defect as the suit itself: it was just one full size too big, so that it came down low on Wimpy’s forehead and appeared, indeed, to be resting on his ears; and the net effect of the whole outfit turned Wimpy into a preposterous figure, out of a Charlie Chaplin two-reeler.

But Harry Bastable was a million miles away from the back stalls of the Tivoli Cinema and laughter, as the German officer advanced towards this travesty; half of him wanted to run away, but didn’t know where to fun, and the other half wanted to help Wimpy, but didn’t know how to do it.

Yet he had to do
something
, because he couldn’t just stand there holding the cart with the old woman on it.

He had come for the cart, and he had got the cart. Only now he had also got the old woman, because that was what the German officer had assumed he had come for. So
now
he had to behave as the German officer would expect him to behave—he had to behave as the man he was supposed to be would behave!

The decision was like a spark igniting him into action, releasing him from indecision. One moment the cart was stationary, the next it was almost running away with him: it lurched and bucked as its unsprung bicycle wheels rebounded off unseen obstacles. The old woman lost her second carpet-slipper, bouncing up and moving horribly as though she was alive again before settling finally among the bundles on which she lay. The German officer heard the sound of the cart behind him just in time to jump out of its way, almost losing his balance in a clump of delphiniums.

‘Onri! Onri!’ cried Wimpy. ‘Non! Non!’

Bastable pulled back at the cart’s momentum, swinging it broadside in front of the doorway, almost tipping its contents at Wimpy’s feet—he was aware simultaneously as he fought to hold the handles down that the child was struggling in Wimpy’s arms on one side of him and the German officer was trampling down the delphiniums in an effort to keep his footing on the other, and that the old woman’s black arm had swung out of the cart and was entangling itself in the spokes of the wheel.

For an instant everything was moving. Then everything stopped: the child, imprisoned in Wimpy’s arms, the officer, steady in the flower-bed, and the cart stationary, dusty black arm and limp white hand, veined and mottled with old age, hanging down against the wheel.

He caught his breath and stared at Wimpy anxiously, beginning now to doubt the wisdom of his impetuous action. He didn’t know what he ought to do next, and—what was worse—he didn’t know what Wimpy was going to do either, and it was too late to ask, with the German officer here beside them—which was worst of all.

‘Onri, Onri,’ murmured Wimpy, shaking his head.

‘Onri’ was what he had cried out before, but Bastable hadn’t the faintest idea what the word meant in English.

‘M’sieur.’ The German officer stepped out of the flowerbed on to the gravel path lifting his hand in salute.

‘Onri—‘ Wimpy loosened one arm from the child and pointed towards the cart’—gabble-gabble-gabble
madame
gabble-gabble-gabble.’

Bastable regarded him with appalled incomprehension, sensing the German officer’s scrutiny at the same time, and knowing only that the German understood what had been said to him, but that he did not. He lowered the cart handles to the ground gently, to avoid bringing the old woman to life again, and wiped his sweaty hands nervously on the seat of his trousers.

Wimpy frowned back at him, pointed at the old woman, and then swept his hand towards the interior of the house.

Suddenly the meaning of his words became crystal clear to Bastable. In fact, it was so obvious—it was so obvious what he ought to do that he understood also why Wimpy had risked addressing him in French, on the assumption that he couldn’t fail to take that meaning. It was so absolutely and utterly obvious that it shrivelled him with embarrassment that he had been so slow on the uptake and so quick once again almost to give everything away, to ruin everything, with his slowness.

He bent forward between the handles of the cart and lifted the body of the old woman from its resting place among the bundles and packages.

The interior of the house seemed much gloomier than it had been on the first occasion he had entered it, as though the light which penetrated it from outside had lost some quality of brightness which it had possessed only a short time before.

Bastable stood irresolutely by the newel-post, wondering which way to go, where to lay down his burden, yet held back at the same time by the sound of the voices behind him—Wimpy’s voice, so instantly recognizable, yet at the same time so strangely different as that ever-ready tongue curled round those alien French sounds; and the German’s voice, slower and deeper, tackling the same sounds less confidently, yet adding a harsh Teutonic abruptness which somehow made each of them even more foreign.

He strained for a minute to try for at least some inkling of what they were saying to each other. But once again he could make no sense of any of it, from the German’s carefully-constructed phrases, in which each word was preceded by a momentary hesitation, to Wimpy’s fluent replies, in which all the words ran together in one continuous torrent of language.

Les anglais
and
les anglais
were all he could distinguish from either of them—they must be talking about
les anglais
, but that was as far as he could get.

And yet… and yet—there was no hostility in the German’s voice, only a note of polite inquiry. Indeed, if there was an anger, it was in Wimpy’s replies . . and Wimpy
did
also sound impressively and eloquently French—even arrogantly French, with no more concession to his interrogator’s understanding of that language than the Tynesider had made to the SS officer back in the operating theatre.