‘He says he’s from something called the Inquiry and Control Section. Don’t ask me what that is. Says he’s helping the local mayors interpret all the new rules. In fact, he just sticks his nose in.’
Charlotte looked back at the posters. The odd thing about Lavaurette, she thought as she went past Bernard into Madame Galliot’s shop, was that although on the surface it seemed a tranquil, inward-looking place with its municipal monuments, its empty shops and sleepy squares, it was in fact the site of continuous activity and secret meetings, of numbered postboxes, hidden boys, propaganda and smiling public deceit. Perhaps the Germans were right to leave a local commandant behind.
When she went back to her room in the Domaine she found that a piece of paper had been slid beneath the door. It was a note from Levade which he must have put there while she was out.
Wednesday. 05.15h.
On realising that his love for Gilberte has gone:
‘Of the state of mind which, in that far-off year, had been tantamount to a long-drawn-out torture for me, nothing survived. For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.’
Time Regained, page 9.
When Charlotte read it she thought that her teenage reading of Proust had left her with only clichés, and that she had not really understood the book at all. She resolved to think no more of it or of the unstable ecstasies it described.
At midnight Claude Benech felt for the first time the stout and pimply handle of a firearm against the soft skin of his palm. He laid it on a pile of school exercise books he was marking. What he had to do in order to acquire it had, in the end, been simple: a matter of intelligent observation and knowing whom to inform.
Benech felt his loyalty quicken and intensify in proportion to his new responsibilities. The gun on the table made him see the agony of his country in a clear light: it was time for action, it was time for the great majority of decent people like himself to fight for what they believed in. All his life he had patiently endured the triumphs of the undeserving, seen little men preferred to him, and he had stood quietly by because he believed in order. That was his passion, that was a proper and traditional belief; but order was not everlasting, it had no natural rights: from time to time true men must fight for it.
He lifted the gun again and weighed it in his hand. Its presence made him want to use it.
In the big house on the hill in Lavaurette Gerd Lindemann was reading orders delivered that afternoon by motorbike. The terse yet bureaucratic style of the papers was an affront to him. Until the winter of 1939 he had worked as a dramatic critic on a newspaper and had taken pride in the fact that his notices, while short and given little prominence by the editor, were always immaculately written: to be comprehensive in 350 words required a particular eloquence.
Lindemann’s views on drama were more definite than his views on anything else. He had allowed himself to be left in this unimportant village, this undersized town in the middle of nothing, through his inability to get himself posted anywhere more interesting. He was not the gauleiter of Julien Levade’s imagining, but a reluctant infantry officer promoted to middle rank by virtue of his education and the losses on the Eastern Front. And he was aware that many of the men under his command were not the swaggering, blue-eyed youths who so impressed the French by their arrogance and their self-discipline when they took control of the traumatised country in 1940. The half-dozen soldiers billeted in the attic of the house were surly, small and no longer young. None of them would have been in such an inconsequential place as Lavaurette were it not for the rail connections with the main lines that made the village both a useful junction and a possible target of resistance sabotage – not that there had been any notable activity in the area, Lindemann had been informed.
He went to the fireplace and rang the bell. He enjoyed this feudal procedure and relished the look of fear in the eyes of the little servant-girl who scuttled into the room a minute later. ‘More coffee,’ he said in his workable French. He had barely been able to finish the first pot of whatever it was she had brought, but something would have to keep him alert as he waded through the sheaf of orders. The military strategy was clear enough: get men in large numbers down to the southern coast to defend against Allied attacks from North Africa. This had meant overrunning the Free Zone, but the tactic was to leave as few men as possible to administer it before the arrival of the SS, so the greatest number possible could remain in active units. It was important to encourage the French to do as much work as they could, and Lindemann’s orders suggested ways of achieving this. Laval would launch his Milice in January, and in return for offering their help to the Occupier Laval would, as usual, ask for German collaboration in the matter of boundaries, prisoners of war, payments and so on. The request, as usual, would be declined.
Lindemann smiled. This Milice would consist presumably of various thugs and convicts given early parole, of young hooligans worried that they might otherwise be transported to Germany as part of Laval’s eight-for-one exchange system for prisoners taken in the brief fight of May, 1940. Lindemann could not imagine that anyone else would want to join, but he might have to use these people, so he had better not prejudge them.
To have power over the lives of people was a seductive feeling to someone whose previous influence had been limited to suggesting whether his readers might or might not enjoy a new production of Faust. Lindemann was enough of a psychologist to relish assigning tasks to men under his command according to his own ideas of their abilities and limitations. It was irksome to him, however, that, in addition to his straightforward administrative role, he was now also required to participate in non-military projects.
The occupation of the Free Zone gave much easier access to the large number of Jewish refugees the French had obligingly detained in camps there, as well as to the French Jews who already lived there or had fled from the North. Lindemann was required by his orders to supervise the joining of two trains at Lavaurette and to supply a quota of Jews from the region of which he was nominally in charge. These people were to be transported to Paris and onwards to some unspecified destination in Poland. The official line was that they were going to be working in camps, just like the young gentile Frenchmen whom Laval was swapping for French prisoners of war.
However, it had occurred to Lindemann that if work was the purpose, they would hardly be transporting old people, pregnant women and large numbers of children, and he was rather surprised by the willing acquiescence of the French government and police in the scheme. Perhaps the ever-optimistic Monsieur Laval was hoping for some concession on sovereignty in return for his help.
Lindemann found this part of his task slightly absurd. The girl came back with the coffee. Was she Jewish?
‘Wait.’ He looked at her. She was small, dark. She could be. But most of the French were like that – not as bad as the Poles, but not as fine as the Swedes or Danes. ‘All right. You can go.’
How was he supposed to find all these people? What if they were only half-Jewish? Apparently Vichy had offered racial definitions which were even stricter than those issued by the Nazi Commission for Jewish Affairs in Paris. A man called Pichon, sent from Vichy on a tour of the region to help the local prefectures, had volunteered to help. Lindemann shook his head. He couldn’t decide about this.
At the same time, Peter Gregory was standing in a doorway in a narrow street just behind the harbour at Marseille. Rain was dripping from the stone lintel above his head. A misunderstanding over trains had brought him into a city which a few weeks earlier might have offered him some hope of escape, but was now the centre of German military operations. He had his eye on a house diagonally across the street, but he could not move for the amount of activity all round.
His back and shoulders were aching from the three hours he had spent concealed beneath a train in the goods’ yard, having observed that the Gestapo control at the station exit appeared to be questioning all travellers. The tenuous line of sympathisers that had kept him going from the site of his crash to the Mayor’s house and on for four more days towards the Pyrenees had been broken by his mistake with the train.
Having managed to escape from the goods’ yard over a brick wall, Gregory walked for a mile until he found himself in an apparently unpopulated area. He spotted a café through whose windows he could see only empty tables and went in; a barman was moving a greasy cloth back and forth over the counter. Gregory stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth to muffle his voice. ‘Telephone,’ he said in an abrupt way he hoped would discourage conversation, and the man jerked his head towards the back of the room.
In a dark alcove next to a narrow door marked ‘WC’ he dialled a number in Clermont-Ferrand. He had never been happy with the vet’s diagnosis of his ‘fractured’ leg, and the exertions of the last four days, culminating in the walk from the station, had produced an excruciating friction in the shin, as though parts of the bone were rubbing together. He bit his lower lip as he heard the telephone let out its desperate, single peal in the distant mountains of the Massif Central.
The voice of a garage owner, wakened from a wine-heavy sleep, came on the line. Gregory went through the passwords he had been taught in London and hoped his accent would be comprehensible to ‘Hercule’. In the long and painful exchange that followed, Gregory found it almost impossible to understand what Monsieur Chollet was saying. Eventually, he extracted from him an address in Marseille which he repeated and checked as many times as he dared until he heard Chollet’s patience become exhausted.
‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ Gregory said. ‘Goodbye.’
‘There was a woman looking for you. In the summer.’
‘What?’
‘An English woman.’
‘Did she leave a message?’
‘No. Goodbye.’
Gregory put down the receiver. An English woman. How Charlotte would hate being called that. He leaned for a moment on the top of the telephone, and tears – presumably from the pain in his leg – blurred his vision.
Now at midnight, one hour later, he was waiting in the doorway. He would get into this house. The English woman. He smiled. Whatever it took, he was going to get in.
It was midnight when André Duguay sat up in bed and called out his mother’s name. There was nothing soft or tender about the call; it was a sound of primitive panic, the expression of a fear that had been rising and working slowly in his mind for several weeks and had finally found utterance in a response to the pictures shown to him in his dream.
Madame Duguay’s face was not clear, but then it was not seen objectively in André’s mind even when he was awake. Yet in the dream he was with her, and he saw those dark features, the face bent over his cradle, whose outline he had over the years uncritically absorbed, so that it had become the face of love.
He was with her, he saw her, and she was in darkness among crowds of people wailing.
Down the corridor came the running footsteps of Mlle Cariteau. She had had time to throw a flannel dressing gown over her nightdress, and she stumbled into the boys’ room, not wishing to turn on the light in case it woke whichever one had not called out. She could not tell from the cry alone which it was, and at first went to Jacob; then she heard a voice from André’s bed and went to him.
Sylvie Cariteau wrapped the boy in her arms and stroked his hair. Childless, she felt the torrent of maternal tenderness go out of her to the weeping child, a force that was angry in its desire to protect him.
On the walls of the bare upstairs room there were daguerreotypes of Sylvie’s respectable grandparents, uneasy in their Sunday clothes; there were two plaster crucifixes.
For half an hour the granddaughter with no husband rocked the unprotected little boy against her bosom, back and forth, back and forth in the awful night.
Levade had lit a candle at the writing table in his bedroom. An hour earlier he had said goodbye to Julien and his mind was still full of the boy. He wrote: