GREGORY’S FRENCH MISTRESS set him to read from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. She would go through a sentence first, then ask him to repeat it. A woeful expression passed across her face; sometimes she could barely wait for him to reach the end of the phrase before she remonstrated.
‘No, no, you are still saying roue. The word is rue. Like this. Rue.’ Her lips puckered and whistled.
Gregory repeated the sound he heard, but not to Madame Fanon’s satisfaction. ‘Rue,’ she barked.
‘Rue,’ he replied.
‘Non, non, non. Rue.’
‘Rue.’
‘Mais non! RUE!’
‘Rue.’
Gregory inspected the unconvincing hairline on her neck. He thought she wore a wig, yet there was no doubt that at the front the hairs sprang naturally enough from her rounded forehead: rooted, chestnut, salted with realistic grey.
‘I’m sorry, Madame Fanon, I’m afraid I’m a very poor student. Do you mind if I have a cigarette?’
She pushed a little brass ashtray across the tablecloth. ‘You should say “Madame”, not “Madame Fanon”.’
‘There’s so much to learn. Which part of France do you come from?’
‘From Montauban.’ Madame Fanon seemed relieved to put Saint-Exupéry aside for a moment. ‘It’s in the south-west, not far from Toulouse. It was the birthplace of Ingres.’
‘And is there any sort of resistance going on there?’
‘Oh yes.’ Madame Fanon’s face worked beneath its powdery creases. ‘From the beginning there has been activity in the south-west. These men and women are of independent spirit. It has always been the case in our part of the world.’ She stopped and looked at Gregory, as though deciding whether or not to trust him. She sighed. ‘But for many people the Occupation is the opportunity they have waited for all their lives. For as long as I can remember there have been people who wanted a revolution because they believed the Republic had failed. Now with Marshal Pétain they think they are achieving it. The presence of the Germans is necessary because it allows the Vichy government to act without a democratic process. No Germans, no revolution. They only wish the Germans would be more helpful.’
‘I see. I just imagined they were under the invader’s thumb.’ Gregory had never considered French politics, least of all the possibility that, for whatever circuitous reason, the Germans might be welcome. Perhaps Madame Fanon had got it wrong.
He looked about the cluttered sitting room. Madame Fanon had come hastily to join her husband in London, and the stratum of her snatched possessions lay thinly over the long-accumulated furnishings of the absent English owners. A glass photograph frame from which a boy in uniform with his hair cut en brosse grinned out manfully sat on a shelf packed with the novels of Warwick Deeping and Hugh Walpole.
‘You need to practise your French. It’s no use coming to me three times a week if you’re not talking the language in between. Don’t you have any friends who speak French?’
Gregory stroked his jaw with the tips of his fingers. ‘I’ll have to think about that.’
When he got back to the station that night he found that his transfer papers had come through. He went to the Rose and Crown with Borowski for a farewell drink; or, in the end, to drink enough to make them incapable of remembering where anyone was going. Gregory was suddenly fired by the idea of France: if the situation was as hopeless as Madame Fanon portrayed it, then the people who cared about it, those independent spirits she described, would need the help of the big British planes ploughing through the night. It would be good, it would be purposeful, it would be . . .
Beer was cascading down the front of Borowski’s uniform as the glass yard slopped its contents from his full mouth and desperately working throat. Gregory watched Borowski’s Adam’s apple shuttle up and down until it stuck at the top of its run and the beer splashed out over his cheeks and blinking eyes, forcing him to lower the yard with spluttering regret.
After the Rose and Crown they went back to the mess, where Gregory bought a bottle of whisky to mark the occasion. In another room the younger pilots began to play a game in which the furniture was piled into the middle of the floor and they had to make a circuit without letting their feet touch the ground. The winner was a sullen Norwegian whose prize was to have his trousers pulled down and his genitals smeared with boot polish. Someone told a joke about the King’s African Rifles.
Gregory tried to climb the stairs of his cottage, but he could not seem to gather enough momentum; each time he reached the fourth or fifth stair he found his body halt, balance and tip back again. At the third attempt he took a long run-up and managed, at the crucial stair, to keep his weight moving forward. He climbed the rest on hands and knees, like a child. He undressed roughly and dropped his clothes on the heaving floor.
Often he had found that the first few minutes after sleeping with a woman were what determined how long the affair would last. Sometimes he experienced a Darwinian urge to leave at once, the pollination done. Only the advice of some expatriate African roué – that it was the height of bad manners to sleep with someone less than twice – had prevented him from doing so more often. On other occasions he had felt a sense of patient curiosity that he was happy to let time satisfy.
Now when he laid his head on the surfing pillow he had a momentary recollection of the imprisoning pressure of Charlotte’s hand. It was wonderful. This desire of women, it was so overmastering, so deep in the genes. Oh God, he thought, it has an almost moral force . . . And yet, he must not lead her on, he must not let her down. But why not risk it? Why should he care so much about her feelings? Only, of course, because he was falling in love with her. When he thought about her he felt a desperate exhilaration, a feeling so joyful it threatened to sweep away all judgement. It was destiny, it was what he was born for . . . but sleep was overwhelming him.
All day at work Charlotte felt the weight of expectation. She had made a move and consequences would surely flow; the only thing that could not conceivably happen was nothing.
She wrote Dr Wolf’s letters and answered his telephone; she smiled politely at the young men who stepped, or limped, from the lift on to the marble-floored landing and into his consulting rooms. She endured their stares, their silence and their flirtation.
Her fear was that Gregory did not take her seriously. She wished she had somehow, forgettably, disposed of her inconvenient virginity: she hoped it had not disqualified her in his eyes. Yet such a loss could not have been borne lightly; there was fear there, too.
‘Miss Gray. Those letters I gave you. Have you finished them yet?’
‘No. I’m sorry. I was just coming round to it.’
Nothing could at first disturb her waiting. She had behaved well, if ‘well’ could be the adverb in the circumstances of her bedroom. At least she had been decided and resourceful; she had not let him go. Now all she had to do was wait for the dividend of her initiative.
Three days passed and there was no word from him. What she had forgotten in her cautious waiting was the imperative of seeing him: the enchantment of his presence. This need began to wear away her better judgement until by the fourth day she could no longer be sure even of what it was she had known with such calm certainty a short time ago. The desire for him merely to be there now so occupied her thoughts that it left no room for planning or manoeuvre. She laid her head on her arms: I just want to see him, that’s all.
Charlotte was sitting in the flat. The Times had a report from Paris that the former foreign minister Pierre Laval had returned from political exile to become ‘head of government’, leaving Marshal Pétain as head of state. Charlotte did not know how to interpret this news; her views were coloured by the memory of how Monsieur Loiseau used to spit out the name of Laval. Her recollection was that he was some sort of socialist, yet that hardly seemed any longer to be the case. It was perplexing, and the Times article did not illuminate the situation; it merely contributed to Charlotte’s impression that the news was somehow sinister.
She put down the paper and went to open a window. It was the moment of spring when she found herself constantly wearing the wrong clothes; she took off her powder-blue cardigan and carried it through to her bedroom where she opened the window and looked down on to the street. It was the first time since she had been in the flat that it had been warm enough to let the air in, though even now the skin of her bare arms showed a moment of contraction in the breeze.
‘You’re a very determined woman.’ That’s what Gregory had said to her. All right, she thought, then that’s what I will be. I’m not going to wait any longer for things to happen, and the first thing I’m going to do is find a proper job. I will resign from Dr Wolf’s and take up Cannerley’s offer, whatever it entails. Because what matters most to me is Peter Gregory, I will concentrate on other things: by indirections find directions out.
She heard the sound of a latch key. She hoped it was Sally, who was too absorbed in her own life to ask Charlotte questions about hers. There had been for once no early-evening telephone call from St James’s.
‘Charlotte!’ Daisy’s voice rang cheerfully down the passage. Charlotte emerged from her room.
‘Isn’t it a lovely evening?’ said Daisy. ‘Do you think we might persuade someone to take us for a drink on the river?’
Before Charlotte could answer, the telephone rang. Both women moved into the sitting-room doorway to answer it, but Charlotte was quicker.
Her concentration was not helped by Daisy’s frantic mime from the doorway: her body had become a question mark, her lips italic capitals forming the word HIM? Charlotte turned her back and laid the cool bakelite against her cheek. She twisted the furry, fraying cord between her fingers. She didn’t see the comic details of domestic life because she was so engulfed by joy.
Charlotte had her hands on Gregory’s bare shoulders and could feel the blade bones jut beneath her palms. The physical sensations of sex were so bound up with her apprehension of Gregory as an individual that she could not reach any separate conclusions about the acts themselves. She had not needed to seduce him or assure him; from the moment of their reunion he had made it clear what he had in mind.
When they had come back into the house he could not even wait till they had climbed the stairs. His hands were running over her clothes as he pressed her against the wall, kicking the front door shut with his heel. He had lifted her skirt as they stood there, put his palm against the skin of her inner thigh and teased a hem with his lifting finger. She removed his hand, then took it in her own as she led him upstairs.
He seemed to know so many things to do, so many ways of touching her. She had to dispose of any sense of modesty as he undressed her, kissed her, but the unspoken condition of her doing so was trust: the more freedom she allowed him, the more he must be bound to appreciate what it meant to her, and what she expected from him in return. How odd, she thought, that all the things she imagined made her and other women attractive to men – their hair, their eyes, the things they said, their elegant clothes – were surrendered in this undignified spreading of arms and legs; yet far from resenting this change, he seemed excited by it.
There was some pain at first, but it did not last, and his murmured consolations were not what she was interested to hear. She wanted him to release himself in her, as soon as possible. The urgency of his physical passion seemed an emblem of the loss of trust she sensed in him. She moved against his rhythm and held him tightly inside. He seemed to want to continue, but she made it impossible for him to hold back.
She took her hands off his shoulder blades and ran them down to his haunches to pull him further into her, squeezing him as she did so till he emitted a surrendering, despairing sigh. Now she had him; and she had started a cycle of desire in herself at the moment he finished. Gregory seemed to sense this, and Charlotte wondered how he could. How many women must he have done this with? What tricks of their breathing had he learned? What half-caught exhalations told him when to stop and when to carry on? She felt his searching hand and his mouth against her ear. Quickly she was again on the brink of some decisive moment, and again she saw no choice but to let herself go.
It seemed incredible that this bodily feeling was so specific, when her purpose in it all was to use the act only as a means to some vague, profounder union, far removed from flesh and sheets and physical sensation. Meanwhile her ears were filled with the sound of a soft but frantic gasping, and it was some time before she identified it as her own.
When she got out of the bed to make tea for herself, to fetch whisky for him, Charlotte felt the old self-consciousness come back. She wrapped a dressing gown round her with a swiftness that made the flaps and cord flail. Gregory had lit a cigarette and balanced an ashtray on the bed by the time she returned.
He pushed back the hair from her forehead and face and kissed her cheek. ‘You’ve got beautiful skin,’ he said. He ran his finger down the side of her neck and over her throat. He kissed her ear.
‘You speak French, don’t you?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘I’m having a difficult time with my Madame Fanon. It’s a hell of a language, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But why do you need it?’
‘In case I crash. I at least need to be able to ask for help. They’d rather I was able to pass myself off as French so that I could make my own way back over the Pyrenees, but they accept that that’s not possible.’
‘Are you so valuable to them?’
‘I’m afraid so. All pilots are. The training is long and expensive. They hate losing us.’
‘You won’t crash, will you?’
‘Charlotte, I must tell you that I seem completely incapable of crashing. I’ve been straight through a squadron of Messerschmitts after my ammunition had run out and wasn’t even scratched. I’ve flown upside down a hundred feet from the ground to give the impression of being out of control and somehow managed not to touch a tree. Even when my plane’s been damaged it’s seemed to fly normally.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
When he did not answer, she said, ‘When will you be going to France?’
‘In a few weeks’ time. Provided I’m passed fit to fly Halifaxes.’
‘A few weeks . . . It’s not long, is it?’
‘It’s long enough. They’re easy to fly. I’m more worried about the French.’
‘I meant it’s not long . . . not long to go if you didn’t come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back. I’m indestructible.’
Charlotte touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers.
‘Why did you change your mind about me?’
Gregory shifted his weight on the pillow. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have done. Do you mind?’
‘Mind? Oh no . . . Don’t frown so much. It’s all right.’
He seemed unable to change his anxious expression.
‘I wanted to help you,’ she said. ‘I wanted to make you feel better.’
When Gregory had gone for his train Charlotte coaxed the bathroom geyser into noisy take-off. She supposed she would now have to pay attention to Daisy’s contraceptive lectures: she had managed to avert her eye when Daisy hoisted her skirt, planted her foot on the edge of the bath and demonstrated the art of douching; she had discreetly thrown away an unsolicited gift of something called Volpar Gels.
Charlotte did not bother to straighten the bed, but, bathed and in a clean nightdress, slipped beneath the still-warm covers and felt her body plunging towards sleep. There was hardly a moment to think about what she had done or how it had differed from her long-held apprehension.
Why was I so fearful? She had time only to phrase the question to herself before sleep unpicked its grammar.
In her brief bodily paradise Charlotte did not hear Daisy and Sally noisily attack the bathroom in the morning, nor their clattering departure for work, nor even Terence’s bumbling from room to room. Her own alarm clock had remained unset in the preoccupying pleasures of her going to bed.
She awoke when the noise of a car horn in the street penetrated her still-open bedroom window.
She had been profoundly happy in her healing sleep, and was disorientated when she sat up. It was almost half past ten. She flew across the room and pulled on her clothes in an ecstasy of fumbled fastenings. Smoothing her skirt, pushing a comb into her hair, she rushed out of the flat with her toothbrush still in her mouth. She hailed a taxi and swallowed the toothpaste as she sat in the back of the cab, dabbing on some powder and checking the results in the mirror of her compact.
She let herself into Dr Wolf’s building and ran up the stairs. His consulting-room door was closed, so Charlotte settled at her desk and began to open the letters.
After about twenty minutes Dr Wolf’s door opened and a young man in army uniform came out, smiled at Charlotte and made his way towards the stairs.
‘Ah. Miss Gray.’ Dr Wolf’s head appeared from his room. ‘How nice to see you. Is everything all right?’
Charlotte began to apologise. She had forgotten to set the alarm, she told him; but without the crucial events that preceded this amnesia, the story did not sound good.
Dr Wolf said, ‘I see.’
‘I’m sure I can catch up. I won’t go out at lunchtime. I’ll make sure everything’s up to date. I’m very sorry.’
In the course of the morning, Charlotte came to see that this was the ideal moment to resign. When lunchtime came, Dr Wolf took his coat and hat from the pegs in the outer office.
Charlotte said, ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time. I’ve very much enjoyed working for you, but I feel that the time has come now for me to—’
Without listening to Charlotte, Dr Wolf had begun speaking at the same time. ‘Miss Gray, I need a receptionist I can rely on. I don’t require her to show initiative or to be an original thinker.’ There was a sarcastic weariness in his voice. ‘There were those letters I had to ask you about the other day. There was the problem with the table at my club. And now you seem unable to get up in the morning . . .’
Charlotte, who found it embarrassing to have to break her news to Dr Wolf, was ploughing on with her own speech, looking down at her hands as she spoke: ‘. . . And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the work, it’s just that I feel I could contribute more to our effort in this war if I . . .’
‘I have no doubt that you are a young woman of many parts, Miss Gray, but you are not suited to being a doctor’s receptionist. I think we would both be happier if you looked for some other employment.’
When Charlotte understood that Wolf was dismissing her, she was so surprised that she began to laugh. It was preposterous: she was only doing the job out of a willingness to help; it was not as if she couldn’t have found something more interesting to do; and then apparently not to be up to the task of answering the telephone or writing a few letters . . .
She stood up. ‘You’re right. You ought to have a proper receptionist and I ought to do something else. I hope you don’t feel I’ve wasted your time. Of course I’ll stay till you find a replacement.’
Charlotte was aware of an incoherent excitement starting to seethe inside her. It was edged by the cool clarity of relief: only by solving the problem had she finally brought it into full view.