It was dark and raining when Charlotte left the train and made her way into the centre of the town. In the shadow of the improbably grand castle, there were a dozen narrow streets that crossed at regular right angles. In other circumstances the atmosphere might have felt quaint or reassuring, but Charlotte wanted to be out of the rain. In a street called the rue Lambert-Licors she saw the welcome word ‘Hôtel’ stuck half-way up a building and made her way through the glass front door to a cheap wooden desk beneath the stairs. She rang the bell, and a dark-eyed, unsmiling girl of about eighteen appeared from a door behind the desk. Her haughty manner, Charlotte presumed, derived from her looks rather than the dignity of her office. She inspected Charlotte’s damp, untidy figure with the disdain of a northern Irène Galliot.
She took Charlotte to a room on the second floor whose ceiling followed the pitched angle of the roof. Dinner would be served at eight, she said, shutting the door briskly behind her.
Charlotte took off her hat and bedraggled overcoat. From her suitcase she took out her washing things and the bottle of hair dye. It occurred to her that the girl had not told her where the bathroom was, and she went out on to the landing to investigate. All the doors she could find had numbers on them, so perhaps it was on a lower floor. In any case, there was only half an hour to wait till dinner; she would ask then. Back in her room, she inspected the roots of her hair in the mirror on the dressing table. Rather than make a mess of it in the gloomy light of the bedroom, she would wear a scarf to dinner and do her hair properly in the bathroom later. She left the dye by the mirror, took off her skirt and sweater and lay down on the bed.
Tomorrow she would think again about how to complete her journey to Paris. Presumably there were buses as well as trains; perhaps she could buy a bicycle and avoid the SS that way. It would probably take no more than two days to reach the outlying stations of the Métro. She would decide in the morning; in the meantime she would rest and see what Châteaudun could offer for dinner.
The dining room had small windows with orange curtains that gave on to the narrow street at the front; with its cheap wooden light fittings and scarlet embroidered tablecloths, the room had a faintly Alpine feel, as though a man in leather shorts might at any moment emerge from the kitchen with a steaming dish of sauerkraut and glistening pink sausages.
Four other tables in the room were occupied by people who murmured greetings as Charlotte took a table by the window. Some complicated bartering of coupons seemed to be taking place with a grey-haired man she took to be the proprietor, and, when he approached her table, Charlotte offered him some tickets, letting him also see the corner of a banknote she had slipped into the ration book.
There was little sense of Tyrolean plenty in the small beetroot salad that eventually materialised, wordlessly presented by the haughty girl from behind the desk, but there was a quarter carafe of thin red wine and a single slice of chalky bread with which to eke it out.
Charlotte took out a novel she had borrowed from Julien’s shelves, a romance of the kind Dominique might like, and began to read. After a few pages it was clear that the heroine was in for a difficult time with the saturnine stranger she loved from afar. The character’s struggles were completely uninteresting to Charlotte, and she remembered Levade’s pointing out how absurd and irritating most people found the romantic travails of others. How different her own dilemma was, how much more serious . . . She smiled and thought of Levade again, and how he had told her that everyone was convinced that their own plight had a particular poignancy, a special unfairness. She was just like all the other young women; her crisis was as perpetual and as comic as theirs. She pushed away the plate. What did it matter how her anguish compared to that of other people? It was only its own intensity that was important – that, and the value she allowed it in the battle for an understanding of her life.
As the weeks had passed in Lavaurette, she had noticed a change in people’s attitude towards her. In their manner, in the way they looked at her, there was a respect that was sometimes touched with awe. It made her laugh inside. I’m just a romantic girl who’s come to find her lost lover, she thought, but they look at me as though I were a woman of fierce conviction, a person of unshakeable dedication in the fight for freedom.
And yet, she thought, as she picked through the food the waitress had brought, perhaps there was something in the attitude of Julien, Sylvie and César. Perhaps there truly was something they had seen. A market is made at the price that someone will pay; to some extent you are what other people think you are. Why then did she feel in some way provisional, almost fraudulent, as though she had always to apologise for herself or justify her existence?
She looked up as the waitress took her plate, and saw the door from the hall being pushed open by the proprietor. On his face was an expression both obsequious and scared as he stood aside for a tall, broad-shouldered man of about forty-five dressed in the shining boots and grey uniform of the German army.
There were further muttered greetings from the other diners as the distinguished visitor sat down, and the manager scurried across with a basket of bread and a full bottle of wine, from which he poured a genteel amount for the German to taste.
Charlotte’s fearful inclination was to go up to her room at once, but she felt, since the dessert had not yet been brought, that it might look suspicious if she abandoned her dinner. There was no sign of dessert; service to all other tables came to a halt while the German was plied with the best the hotel had to offer. A smiling woman who was presumably the manager’s wife fluttered in from the hall to pour him some more wine, and the waitress brought various dishes of hors d’oeuvre from the kitchen. Charlotte was delighted to see that the Irène Galliot of Châteaudun was completely unaffected by the presence of the German, but dumped down his food with wordless contempt. Equality, thought Charlotte, liberty, fraternity. The Republic is not dead.
Some of the other tables became restive as the German’s banquet wore on, but when he had reached his dessert they were allowed to have theirs too. Finally, there was a general clearing of the room, and, in the pushing back of chairs, doors held politely open, Charlotte found herself addressed by the German. In French that was barely comprehensible he was offering her a drink in the small dark sitting room on the other side of the hall.
Charlotte’s mouth felt dry, not only from the ersatz coffee she had drunk, as she forced herself across the floor. The proprietor switched on a light in the dingy room, placed a bottle of brandy and two glasses on the low table, then, with ostentatious tact, withdrew.
The German in his way was rather charming, Charlotte thought. He seemed diffident, almost shy in his courtship, hampered no doubt by his stumbling French, for which he several times apologised.
Charlotte concentrated on being Dominique, and her fear made her plausibly abashed. Even within the role of modest married woman, however, there were choices she could make in how to deal with her situation. Dominique might well be so terrified that she would do anything the man suggested; Charlotte had to find a response that was both realistic and discouraging.
Initially, she kept bringing her husband into every answer, to stress her unavailable state, but then found the German politely enquiring more and more about the work and life of this ever-present man. Charlotte eventually had to plead that it was too painful for her to talk about him. She asked the German about his home and what he was doing in Châteaudun. He did not understand the question about home, or perhaps affected not to, and only shrugged and muttered briefly about his orders.
The peculiar thing about him, Charlotte thought, was that he seemed to be quite unaware of the fact that he was the enemy, the armed occupant of her presumed country. The only word she could think of to describe his attitude was ‘friendly’, and from this she could only deduce that his motives were improper. After twenty minutes of laboured conversation, Charlotte began to yawn.
‘Excuse me. I’m very tired.’ She held her hand over her glass as he made to pour more brandy. ‘I think I must be off to bed. Thank you very much for the drink.’
The German stood up stiffly, and a trace of displeasure came into his heavy, handsome face. He stood back to let Charlotte pass into the hall, where the proprietor was waiting nervously at the desk. He opened the front door for the officer, but the German looked only briefly into the night, where it had begun to rain, and shook his head. He pointed upstairs.
‘Let me see the rooms,’ he said. ‘For my men. To sleep.’
His manner was now less charming; it was as though the memory of his military duty had made him cold. The manager fumbled with the room keys that hung on a little perforated board behind him; in the dim wattage of the overhead bulb Charlotte saw the bubbles of sweat on his upper lip. He began to climb the stairs, with the German officer behind him. Charlotte hesitated for a moment, then followed.
On the first floor the manager began opening the flimsy doors of the rooms that were not occupied, allowing the German a brief glance inside.
‘Good night,’ said Charlotte loudly, as she began to climb towards her room on the second floor. ‘Goodbye.’
Neither man answered.
Charlotte closed the door of her room and listened. She heard more doors being opened and closed, then she heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There was a jangling and a thudding along the landing, though no sound of voices. The noise came closer to her room. She heard the German speak, briefly, something that sounded like an order, and there was the noise of one man’s footsteps departing down the stairs.
Charlotte stood with her ear to the door. There was no sound. She was certain he was still there, so he must be standing in the corridor. He must have seen all he needed to see; surely now he would have to go.
There came the reverberation of boots on floorboards and a violent knocking on her door. Charlotte sprang back into the room and tried to compose herself.
She said nothing, but the knocking came again. She went over and opened the door a little. The space was filled with grey uniform. Charlotte met the German’s eyes and gave what she hoped was a smile of surprise, mixed with modesty. She tried to look friendly, but as though she did not wish to be disturbed.
‘May I come in?’ He had resumed his more diffident manner.
‘Just for a moment. It’s not that I . . .’ His French seemed to fail him.
‘It’s very late,’ said Charlotte.
‘Just for a moment.’ His foot was in the door.
Once inside the bedroom his manner became nervous. He walked round the room, his eyes constantly moving, as though he did not want to let them rest on some feminine intimacy.
‘I want to say that I am sorry if I am not proper.’ He had picked up Charlotte’s room key and was flipping it back and forth absently in his hand. ‘Many difficult things arrive in wars,’ he went on. ‘We do not do what we want.’
‘Of course.’ Charlotte had no idea what he was trying to say. She had kept the door open to increase the impression that this was no more than a final word.
The German put down the key on the dressing table and picked up the bottle of hair dye. He tossed it from one hand to another as he walked round the room.
‘I have friends, I have brothers who are like me.’ He turned his eyes, now large with sincerity, on to Charlotte, but her appalled gaze was fixed on the bottle of hair dye. As it spun back and forth through the air she could plainly make out the label, which stated that it was dye and was decorated with a picture of a freshly coiffed female head. There were only the dregs of the dark fluid inside, but it was of a colour and consistency that the German could not possibly mistake for anything else.
‘I have my wife at home. It is difficult for all of us, and to be righteous is my last hope.’
The bottle flew in its highest arc yet, from left hand to right, the brunette liquid slapping up the sides. Suddenly Charlotte thought: it is not his lack of French that is making him incoherent: he’s shy – he’s frightened of making a fool of himself.
‘I fully understand,’ she said. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’
‘Yes.’ He looked down at the bottle in his hand.
‘And one day soon the war will be over.’ Smiling brightly, Charlotte extended her hand, as though this was the honourable conclusion to an entirely successful piece of social intercourse. She stepped back a little as she did so, to reveal the beckoning escape of the half-open door.
‘Yes, yes.’ The German held out his hand to Charlotte, switching the bottle to his left hand as he did so.
‘Good night,’ said Charlotte.
‘Yes. Good night.’
She had backed him into the doorway.
He stood for a moment, unmoving.
‘Please.’ Charlotte held out her hand and pointed to the bottle.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Thank you.’ With the last remnants of Dominique’s determined propriety, Charlotte narrowed her eyes into an expression of polite but incontrovertible farewell. ‘Goodbye.’
The German nodded, stepped out of the room and made off down the stairs. Charlotte held the bottle in both hands, close to her bosom. Her heart was thudding so hard that it was making her palms tingle. Good God, she thought, what have I become that even German officers are scared of me?
She went out on to the landing and ran to a window that overlooked the rue Lambert-Licors. She saw the street splashed by a rectangle of light as the front door of the hotel opened, then heard the rumble of a military vehicle being started in the rain.