BY THE TIME the train arrived in Limoges, the windows were steamed up with a misty drizzle, which, Charlotte found as she left the station, had wrapped itself about the whole grey town.
She had not had a full stomach since the night of her arrival, but Limoges was the kind of place that should have been able to offer every variety of comfortable, traditional dining – modest enough to draw on the fertile local farms, large enough to support big restaurants with menus of Parisian ambition. Charlotte pictured one of those slightly surprising French dinners, such as the one she had had with the Loiseau family in the rue de Tournon, which seem to be coming to a close only to erupt again with the arrival of a loosely set omelette or a pair of roast quails on fried bread.
It was easier to go shopping alone as a woman than to dine alone, and Charlotte exchanged her bread coupon for six ounces of dusty loaf. Her monthly cheese ration having been exhausted by lunch at the Café du Centre at Lavaurette, she was obliged to buy a small piece of fatless cheese for cash from a conspiratorial and suspiciously well-fed creamery owner. He mentioned the possibility of Bayonne ham and tinned peas as well, but Charlotte told him she would be back another day.
That night she sat down on the bed in her hotel room in Limoges and laid out her possessions. There was a small black velvet package lined with foam rubber that contained the set of wireless crystals; a silver powder compact; French branded toothpaste and brush; sanitary towels (made in Toulouse) discreetly pressed on her by Alice at the aerodrome; a piece of paper with scribbled train times she had copied from the hall of the station at Limoges, carefully using French numerals (the fat nine with its short stalk and little upward tail; the one with its great looping sidepiece; a four with only a minuscule vertical); a detective story of the kind that might interest Dominique Guilbert, purchased in Uzerche; a spare set of Dominique’s clothes, two sets of underwear and a folded raincoat. There was also an awkwardly large sum of francs which Dominique was, if asked, obliged to carry for hotel bills and to pay for her father’s medical care.
Charlotte was forced to confront the fact that she was now candidly frightened. It was dangerous to be in Limoges, because this was where Dominique’s father was supposed to be, and it would be easy to expose her story. It was too complicated, however, to get to Clermont from any other point of departure; it would take too long and might cause her to miss her plane back. For the same reason she had, with some relief, ruled out the possibility of bicycling.
She set out the bread and cheese on the table and took a glass from beside the bed. The only water in the room was in a bidet, concealed behind a greasy curtain, and Charlotte felt her face assume its minister of the kirk expression at the thought of it. In the bathroom at the end of the landing she scrupulously washed, then filled the tumbler and returned to her room to dine.
Oh, Peter, she thought, raising her glass and staring at the faded floral wallpaper ahead of her: there is no point in dinner without you, without gin or candles or your rumbling voice. But when she most wanted his words in her head they would not come. She could choose only between her own, obsessive thoughts and the disapproving tartness of Dominique.
For eight or nine days after the news of Gregory’s disappearance his face lay flat against the retina of her memory: exact, complete, an image through which all else was filtered. Then, one morning, she woke up and it had gone. Although she could have described his features pore by pore, even drawn a likeness, the unity, the character itself had disappeared. However she turned the kaleidoscope, the pattern would not come back into focus and she was tormented by its absence.
There was the sound of a church bell striking nine and Charlotte went to look out of the window. She could see over rooftops down a clenched little side street to the angle of a cobbled square; there were a few lights showing behind closed doors, but there was no one outside.
In its peculiar way, this must be what Mr Jackson had warned her against, this haunting loneliness. Jackson could have known nothing of the burden of Gregory’s absence, but even without that it was bad enough. There was no one in whom she could confide; no one in whom her real self could find answering warmth; and even this glorious country, where once she had only to breathe to feel accompanied and fulfilled, had so lost touch with its prelapsarian self that it had become a foreign land.
She went back to the table and looked down at the dusty crumbs; she ran her fingertip through them and tried to hold her thoughts together.
In Lavaurette, Julien Levade was attempting to find out what had happened to Monsieur and Madame Duguay. For two years there had been great movements of displaced people across France, and the division of the country into zones, one occupied, one nominally free, had made it almost impossible to trace individuals. Although Laval’s insistence that the Vichy police be responsible for the maintenance of law in the Occupied as well as the Free Zone might have given a greater unity to police or town hall records, it had been accompanied by an increased secrecy about the movement of Jews. While people of Benech’s opinion viewed policing of the Occupied Zone as a sign of how much French autonomy remained, Julien feared that it simply allowed the Gestapo to let the French police do their interrogation and their killing for them.
He had seen large camps for Jewish refugees being built throughout the Free Zone by the Vichy government, unprompted by the Germans, and could not understand his country’s reluctance to take in these refugees; it puzzled him that every new arrival from the East was so furiously resisted. Unwilling to accept them, the Government was still more loth to help the refugees escape, even when it became clear that the Germans had designs on them: instead of encouraging them to leave through the free southern ports, it put them behind barbed wire to await an unspecified disposal.
Most of these people had come from Poland, some from Germany, a few from other European countries. When Julien was told that French Jews were also being rounded up in Paris, he had at first dismissed the rumour as Communist-inspired. His grandfather Max Rutkowski had loved his adopted country with the passion of the immigrant who has found the civil freedoms denied him at home and become embedded in his new society. His admiration of France was increased by emotional gratitude, so that he ascribed even his professional success and family harmony to the beauty and justness of the heavenly civilisation in which he lived. Although Max Rutkowski’s own father was Catholic, he was proud of his Jewish blood, and of the religion in which he had been brought up, and felt confident enough to acknowledge it in the Paris suburb where he lived. By the time he became engaged to a French Jewess, Rutkowski had, for administrative convenience and out of love for its French sound, changed his family name to Levade, but he had no hesitation in bringing up his son, Auguste Levade, in the faith. Although, in the third French generation, the question of nationality was less urgent for him, Julien had, through his grandfather Rutkowski and his father Levade, acquired a reflexive admiration for his country, which his patriotic education had enforced.
Julien’s mother, with whom he lived when his father left them soon after Julien’s tenth birthday, was a French Catholic whose family could trace its bourgeois path back a hundred years or so into respectable obscurity. Julien survived his father’s departure apparently unharmed; his naturally even temperament absorbed the shock and helped his mother to do likewise. His work at school continued to earn the praise of his teachers, who thought it easily within his power to realise his ambition to be an architect.
Julien’s involvement with resistance activity at first owed as much to high spirits as to political conviction. He was unsure about the lugubrious general in London; although he liked the idea that only a battle, not a war, had been lost and that a pure spirit of France was being kept alive overseas, it was difficult to say with certainty that this untested, slightly comic person was its one true guardian. The Communist Party was banned, since, through its connection with Russia, it theoretically supported the Allies. Julien had attended a secret meeting in Limoges, where they talked of sabotage and armed resistance, but he felt uneasy about the Communist plans for France, their enthusiasm for Stalin and most particularly for the way they had, a few years earlier, helped derail the Popular Front, the one government for which he had ever felt enthusiasm. It took an approach from Mirabel on an earlier mission to force Julien into action. His aims seemed attractively simple: blow up as many trains as possible and set up networks which would eventually help kick out the invader. It was the simple, non-political vigour of his language that attracted Julien.
By running errands, taking calls and helping to dispose of parachuted stores, Julien accepted that his actions, however rustic and drink-assisted, did amount to a political statement of a kind. Although he felt a shiver of unease about showing disrespect towards the Marshal, who had been the national hero of his boyhood, he was unsentimental enough to see the deficiencies of the Government. He was not inspired by its unprincipled haggling over the question of sovereignty, and feared that when the force of Russia and America came to bear, as it surely would, the clinging to the illusion of autonomy would be not a bargaining weapon, but a liability that the Germans would exploit.
The disappearance of Monsieur and Madame Duguay changed everything. The look on Bernard’s face provided Julien with an instant of clear and shocking revelation: a chain of compromise and inertia, at no single point perceptible as choice in moral colours, had had in the end a cumulative effect. The complicity of an honest man, thinking only that he wanted to be back with his family for dinner, had closed an evil circle. From that day Julien’s flirtatious high spirits concealed a new determination: everyone, he presumed, had his own moment of clarity, but for him the revelation was provided by the look of blameless guilt in a gendarme’s eye. His rage, after its first eruption in the hôtel de ville, was concealed from the people of Lavaurette. He thought it would be safer that way; but in his subsequent search for information, Pauline Bobotte’s switchboard became a hot blur of activity.
Charlotte packed with care in the morning, checking that nothing extraneously British could somehow have found its way into her possessions. Only my thoughts, she said aloud, as she made one final sweep through the room and fixed her mind on her destination: Ussel.
The station at Limoges was already full by the time she arrived, forewarned by experience, half an hour early for her train. She had a cup of coffee in the buffet and, with the taste of roasted wheat seeds in her mouth, made her way down the platform.
The scene reminded her of the countryside on the day of her arrival; there was an element of unsettling caricature. Although it was really she who was being deceptive, it seemed to her that it was the other way round: that the travellers going about their business, the traffic of the provincial station, the manners, dress and customs of the people, indistinguishable from those that had entranced her on her first childish visits, were in fact part of a conspiratorial drama.
When the train slid into the platform, however, there was not even the rudimentary attempt at patience that she had learned to accept as the French version of Edinburgh queuing; there was a surge round each door which forced back into the carriages several passengers who were trying to dismount. A few disapproving people, including Charlotte, quickly surrendered to the inevitable force of numbers and joined the press for places.
By force and good luck she found a seat, though there was no room in the rack for her suitcase, which she had to carry on her knees. She could see by the easy way many people threw their bags around that they were empty; when they returned that evening to Limoges from their destinations in the surrounding countryside, the cases would be heavy with eggs, ham, sausage, oil of any kind, and would exude the smells she had noticed on her previous journey with Yves. After the bad temper of boarding had receded and the train had been going for half an hour, Charlotte felt an unmistakably festive air creep into the compartment and found it answered in herself by the double exhilaration of her journey.
It was another hot day. The flashing pastures through which they travelled were radiant with a yellowish-green light; the darker shades of the knotted forests and the glimpsed browns of the trunks and branches of oak trees in the established lines that edged the hills made it possible to believe in a future as well in the past they brightly evoked.
Charlotte took out Dominique’s detective story and began to read. A man’s body was found by his concierge in the hallway of his apartment of the seventh arrondissement; a silver dagger protruded from between his ribs. The concierge was helping a melancholic inspector with his inquiries; the detective would proceed to interview the occupants of all the other apartments in the block, and the author might or might not give some indication as to which one was the murderer. Charlotte found that the only thing that might have been interesting – the process of detection – had, by a convention of the genre, to be withheld from the story, or there could have been no surprise dénouement. After his first fruitless morning the detective went for lunch in a café in the Place St Sulpice, and Charlotte was horrified to hear her stomach roar its envy of his dish of the day: a sausage and lentil stew with green salad ‘anointed with thick oil’. The woman opposite her smiled her sympathy as Charlotte begged her pardon for the noise. The young man next to her, perhaps the woman’s son, opened a bag on his lap and offered Charlotte the end of a loaf from which extended the edge of a thick piece of ham. After her protestations and his insistence, she took it, and was drawn into conversation.
Charlotte had provided Dominique with a sister in Clermont-Ferrand to cover her intended visit to Gregory’s garage mechanic, and the residual Calvinist in her was shocked by the facility with which she described this Germaine’s invented life. The young man looked interested, and Charlotte tried to curb her imagination. She touched on the sober subject of her father’s illness, then focused the conversation firmly on the others. Both mother and son, as they turned out to be, seemed friendly enough, but there were five other people in the compartment and two in the doorway who could overhear their conversation. Not all would be as sympathetic; and one thing her training had stressed was that the French far outnumbered the Germans in the number and diversity of their police and security services.
It had been a mistake to accept the sandwich and to talk, but she had been hungry and she had been lonely: she wanted to be addressed by someone, even a stranger and even under a false identity. To extricate herself, she began to yawn, and, when a gap of suitable length occurred in the conversation, she feigned an improbable mid-morning sleep.
Ussel in late afternoon, under light rain, was smaller and more pathetic than it had looked on the map. There were garages and squares and shops, but it had the feeling of a trading post, a village that had spread back off the strip of the main road that steeply bisected it. Charlotte sheltered with her suitcase in the bar of a hotel, waiting for the time to pass till she could go to her rendezvous with her hairdresser, Antoinette.
She felt absurdly self-conscious; now that the moment had come for this furtive action her hands seemed heavy, her face a self-advertising confession of guilt. Ussel was much higher than the places she had so far visited; the air was thin, as well as damp, and she felt cut off from the rest of France. The prospect of pursuing her journey still further, to the volcano-ringed heights of Clermont, on a passionate gamble of her own devising, seemed a foolhardy plan that could have been conceived only by someone at sea level and slightly unbalanced.
She ground the heel of Dominique’s ugly shoe into the floor of the bar and brought her lips together. She would proceed. At ten to seven she left the hotel and went out into the rain. She walked up the main street and forked left towards the church. She moved briskly, not wishing to catch the eye of anyone in this unvisited town. The streets revealed themselves like photographic prints emerging in solution from her acquired memory. On the Avenue Sémard, near the station, she came to the door of a hairdresser’s shop; ignoring the ‘Closed’ notice she pushed it open and went inside.