TWENTY MINUTES ON foot from Lavaurette was a house with slate-covered towers and a low, rectangular courtyard that included an arched pigeonnier, surrounded by abundant but untended land. It was not quite a château, though it was almost big enough; it was known in the town, to the postman and to its very few visitors, as the Domaine. It was not the sort of house that anyone in Lavaurette wanted to live in: it was too remote, too draughty, too imposing. It was impossible to heat in winter, and in summer impossible to fill, with its echoing salon, immense panelled dining room and numberless bedrooms, none sealed or closed but all kept in a state of suspended life, the beds made, the floors not exactly clean but swept occasionally, the decorations faded but intact.
A family must once have lived here, though even the most fruitful parents could not have filled all the rooms; it would have needed cousins and visitors to justify the half-dozen servants’ bedrooms in the attic, and to prevent the long, connected spaces from imposing their silence. For many years the undisturbed volume of the rooms had swelled against the practical limits that contained it; the air seemed to have expanded within the confines of the house until it could spread no further and had instead become thicker, turning back on itself, and cloaking such movement as there was with quietness.
It was early morning in the Domaine; wood pigeons were calling in the trees beyond the long grass, and the climbing sun was already striking deep inside the house through the open shutters on the east side.
In one of the smaller bedrooms the house’s single inhabitant was sitting up in bed and frantically searching his memory; he was trying to remember if he had dreamed. By his bed was a large pad of paper with pencil notes and sketches, put there for the purpose of instant recollection; but one page had taken him three months to fill, and neither the images nor the words seemed to be of any consequence. The man scratched his thick white hair and sighed. Nothing.
In the corner of the room was a small shrine. On a table, a figure of the Virgin was set on a lace cloth, with a missal and some candles. The man climbed out of bed, a little stiffly, rubbed the tendon behind his ankle, and made his way over to the shrine, where he knelt down to pray. As a convert to Catholicism, he was anxious to do everything the right way, but as a Jew he could not quite shake off a more conversational style of dealing with his Maker. He prayed for himself and he prayed for his departed friends, may God have mercy on their souls, whose names he kept in the missal and spoke out loud. His own family name, Rutkowski, had been changed by his father to Levade, in what he believed was a compromise between the phonemes of his adored, adopted country and an acknowledgement of his Hebrew origins.
He said a brief prayer for his son Julien and for the other children he had sired but had not known. He fiercely regretted that he could feel no tie with these scattered people, whose ages varied from forty to ten; he did not even know if there were four or five or six, though he believed there was a daughter in Limoges. Since his ten-year conversion to Christianity, he had felt troubled by this negligence.
The Domaine had only one bathroom, a minimal space whose door was disguised as the last of a series of cupboards, reluctantly conceded its bare existence in the otherwise dry landscape of the upper floor. It was a long and inconvenient walk for a sixty-two-year-old man to make each morning, but he was unwilling to change to a nearer bedroom because he believed the one he had chosen had particular dreaming qualities.
Levade’s tenancy of the Domaine had been the subject of hostile discussion in Lavaurette. He was reviled by Madame Galliot as a lecher and by Monsieur Benech as a Jew; Madame Gayral believed he was a Satanist. At any rate, he was indisputably Parisian and peculiar; although occasional visitors, including priests, had been seen to take the turning to the Domaine, Levade himself had never set foot in the Café du Centre, had never been seen to buy food or tobacco. He had a housekeeper, a girl from another village who was thought to be mentally defective, and his son took him food and wine once a week – a further reason why Julien, though not disliked, was regarded with caution in Lavaurette.
The main bedroom in the Domaine, an airy, high-ceilinged chamber whose floor-length windows granted long clear hours of light, was rumoured to be the centre of whatever unsavoury, un-Christian activities it was that the old man enjoyed. No reliable witness had returned with a description of the bacchanalian squalor to which he had reduced what was once the parents’ bedroom, a sacred place at the heart of the family, at the centre of an old, traditional house.
An hour after rising, washed, dressed and dreamless, Levade made his way to the locked door of the principal bedroom.
The newspaper Charlotte read on the train was the first indication she had of how greatly the country had changed since her last visit. She had previously found French newspapers arid and charmless. She had been influenced by the way in which they had been introduced to her as a teenager by the father of her exchange family, Monsieur Loiseau, who spoke reverently about Le Figaro and its great, murdered editor, a Monsieur Gaston Calmette, who had had the honour of being the dedicatee of Á la recherche du temps perdu. Dutifully she had persevered through reports of stock exchange movements, foreign policy and structural developments at the Justice Ministry.
The paper she flicked through on the train to Agen seemed less interested in reporting than in propaganda: fatherland, patriotism and the dangers of Bolshevism were invoked in almost every article. She counted eight photographs of Marshal Pétain, who seemed to be presented as a sort of supra-political figure, giving the reader an excuse not to have to think about public affairs. There were cheerful reports of leagues and societies dedicated to the rebirth of traditional folk songs, and pictures of children in a variety of uniforms. To Charlotte they looked like English brownshirts or Hitler youth, though oddly enough there was hardly any mention of the fact that France was partly occupied and wholly subjugated by the Nazis.
The society encouraged by the uncritical articles was one of camp fires, khaki shorts and breeding. A cartoon showed a Spirit of France with its arm round a uniformed child; the figure that embodied this sacred spirit was not a banner-clenching Marianne but a giant Gaul in a skirt, with a blond walrus moustache and shoulder-length fair hair. To Charlotte it was as though England beneath the Blitz had chosen to invoke the spirits of Caratacus and morris dancing.
The tone of the articles was not just stoical or resigned, but extraordinarily cheerful: a new Europe was being built, and the finest brains of France’s bureaucratic class – by a natural sequence of logic, therefore, the finest brains in Europe – were at the heart of this process, working from a number of hotels in Vichy. It was accepted that some political power had been temporarily ceded, but this was viewed by the writers of all three articles on the editorial page as a worthwhile manoeuvre. They argued on strategic grounds that the Germans would provide a strong framework within which French interests could best operate after the imminent end of the war. On tactical grounds, they said, the current state of emergency helped hasten through some overdue reforms, such as terminating the democratic excesses of the Third Republic. And on moral grounds they thought that a degree of mortification of the flesh (rationing, curfews) was not only well deserved, but would renew the national vigour that had fallen into a state of flabby, Jewish decadence.
Charlotte offered the newspaper queasily to Yves, who shook his head silently, as though unwilling to risk his French in front of the three other people in the compartment.
After an hour the door slid open and a policeman asked to see their documents. He wore a different uniform from any they had seen before, but the three French people in the carriage seemed unsurprised by his request and meekly offered up their papers. Charlotte looked out of the window while he examined the identity card of Dominique Guilbert, checked its photograph against her averted face and wordlessly handed it back. She noticed that Yves managed to look both resigned and slightly truculent at yet another official’s questioning his bona fides; the policeman himself seemed irritated by his task and slid the door closed with a minimal grunt. Charlotte had to check the beginnings of a smile of elation; she turned it into a yawn as she surveyed the passing countryside of south-west France. The phrase that came to her was ‘piece of cake’.
At half past six the train eventually slowed beside a steep, wooded hill in which Charlotte could make out occasional patches of white stone and a couple of houses. Agen, Agen, barked the station tannoy in a jangling south-west accent. Yves and Charlotte descended from the train and walked along the platform to the main concourse, where they found a left-luggage office. Yves carried a small briefcase.
Across the street from the station was a wedge-shaped building painted pale blue, with ridged plasterwork like a wedding cake, called the Café Hôtel Terminus.
‘We’ll meet there after you’ve taken me to my address,’ said Yves.
Instead of taxis, there were only horse-drawn carts outside the station. In Agen itself there were hardly any cars, and those that there were moved ponderously, powered not by petrol but by charcoal-gas engines – a cumbersome cylinder stuck into the boot. In atmosphere the town was fully southern: the street that took them down to the Boulevard de la République had roof tiles and wrought-iron balconies of an almost Italian kind; yet at this time of day, the hour that in Rome or Naples would have seen the chattering passeggiata, there were few people on the streets and nothing for them to look at in the shop windows except photographs of Marshal Pétain. There was a sullen, despondent air that the hot evening and the sound of women’s voices through open shutters did nothing to dispel. A young man came toiling towards them on a bicycle, pouring sweat from the effort of pulling an adapted trailer in which sat two elderly, self-conscious people in Sunday clothes.
For the first time Charlotte felt frightened. The fear was not of being arrested or deported, but a visceral response to the place itself. There were no Germans, there was no coercion; but this southern town, with many dark-skinned people, not French in the same way as Vichy or Illiers, seemed utterly adrift, in a state close to breakdown.
She hurried Yves down narrower streets towards the address whose location, and the route to which, they had both memorised. They made their way swiftly and unchallenged through the hot, pathetic town; they seemed almost the only people with anywhere to go.
They rang the bell on a door next to an empty café and heard footsteps on the stairs inside. A woman with a headscarf opened the door, and after what seemed to Charlotte an unnecessarily protracted exchange of coded reassurances, took Yves inside the house with her.
‘Two hours,’ said Yves as he closed the door behind him.
Charlotte walked a long loop back towards the station, as slowly as possible, to pass the time. She found that her lips were moving silently and that she was talking to Gregory, as she often did when she was alone. Her conversations with him served different purposes according to her mood, though the premise on which they all operated was that he was not dead.
Not dead, she thought, as she sat in the bar of the Hôtel Terminus; not dead in either sense: still breathing, somewhere in France, and the love she felt for him, which existed between them like some fragile but ferocious third entity, that too was still alive.
Was it only the effort of her memory that sustained it and was that effort bound to be worn down, in the end, by the passage of time? She believed not. The survival of the feeling was in some ways more important to her than the survival of Gregory himself. The existence of that transcendent emotion had allowed her to escape from the confines of her personal history; it had granted value to her life. It did not seem to matter whether it had first flared then, or then, at that, or this, or any other moment, because if it was real and had value, then it existed outside time.
Yet she did miss him. Simply, like a child removed from its mother, like any being taken from its source of love, she yearned for him – now, here, this instant in the bar of the hotel, where she drank foul, dark coffee. With her hands she longed to stroke his hair; the pores of her skin missed his touch; she felt sick and closed-off inside because the natural fluency of her thought had become shaped by conversation only with him. She did not feel the shapeless despondency that had afflicted her at various times before: on the contrary, she felt directed, almost galvanised. But the weight of her anguish over Gregory – this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps (she shook her head as her lips moved) unworthy man – filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity that the sighs with which she was obliged to displace it shook her entire body.
She looked up from her table and saw Yves standing above her, looking down a little curiously.
‘All right?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘We should perhaps find somewhere to stay the night,’ said Charlotte.
‘Here?’
‘It’s rather gloomy, isn’t it?’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m sure we could find somewhere a bit more cheerful. Shall we go and explore?’
Yves nodded again, and Charlotte left some coins on the table. She forced all thoughts of Gregory from her mind, trying to channel their unwanted energy into a renewed concentration on the assigned task of looking after Yves.
The problem of room-sharing was one that Yves raised diffidently, in English, in the park to which he directed Charlotte to be sure of not being overheard. It was peculiar enough that it should be she, not he, who did the talking in the hotel, he explained, but downright suspicious that she should then book two rooms. Of course, their identity cards would show they were not married, but that in a way made their travelling together far more plausible: a man would only ever take his mistress, never his wife, on a business trip such as his cover story described, and that was one thing, whatever the changes undergone by this traumatised country, that would still be understood by any real hotelier. His intentions, he would like to reassure her, were of course . . .
Yves dozed upright in an armchair in the corner of the room, having absented himself in the passage while Charlotte undressed. The bed was of three-quarter size, guaranteed to compel intimacy between two people but spacious enough for one to stretch out. For all her comparative comfort, Charlotte slept badly. Through the thin walls she could hear a couple making love, she with whinnying abandon, he with dogged grunts and floor-rattling shoves. The single lavatory at the end of the passage flushed on and off throughout the night while unembarrassed footsteps pounded back and forth over the bare boards of the landing.