‘Can we dance?’ she said.
‘Now?’
‘Why not?’
‘What, in here?’
‘No, no, out on the terrace.’
‘But it’s dark and I can’t dance.’
‘Come on.’
Anne took a lamp and hung it from a hook on the back wall of the granary. Then she carried the gramophone and wound it up. As she looked down into the darkness of the valley she saw two moths blunder into the lamp. She remembered her hands, and wondered what Hartmannn would say if he noticed their rawness. But it was too late: she had already put on the first record.
‘We won’t disturb people?’ said Hartmann, from the threshold of the bedroom.
‘Come on, you know there’s no one near. And it’s not very loud anyway.’
‘But I can’t da –’
She took his hand, and pulled him on to the terrace. Hartmann was as good as his word: he stumbled over the rough paving of the terrace, but Anne seemed always to keep out of harm’s way and to guide him onwards. She played the records again and again until Hartmann begged to be released. At last she agreed, and they carried the gramophone, the lamp and the records back through to the main room.
Hartmann poured himself some more wine and stood with his back to the fireplace. The sleeves of his thinly striped shirt were rolled up; he pulled at his tie to loosen it and ran his hand back through his hair. His face had its usual gravity, given by the weight of the head and the dark evenness of the features, offset by a liveliness in his eyes that always had at their centre a point of light, however deep they seemed sunk. It expanded when, as now, he smiled.
It was cool in the room and Anne took her shawl from the back of a chair. She said, ‘I haven’t said “thank you” for the present yet. It’s wonderful.’
‘I hoped you’d like it.’
‘Last night, you know, last night I had this terrible dream. And it was all your fault.’
‘My fault?’
‘Yes, you were horrible in it.’
‘What did I do?’
‘You shouted at me.’
Hartmann laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t think what came over me.’
‘It wasn’t funny at the time.’
Hartmann looked at her curiously.
‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘No. I don’t think so. What matters is whether you’ve enjoyed yourself.’
‘Enjoyed myself? Oh.’ She seemed to lose her breath. ‘It’s been the happiest day of my life.’
Again he found himself caught off balance by the intensity of her response. She took a step towards him. It was dark in the room; the one lamp shone on the floor between them. She moved into the light so she was only a pace away from him.
‘I love you.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know.’ He gathered her in his arms, so that her face was pressed against his chest, where her tears wetted his shirt front. He stroked her hair and felt the outline of her skull beneath it. He thought of the coils of her brain beneath his hand, teeming and looping; he wondered what was thought and what was feeling, what was soul and what was cell – and all the other imponderable things to which he would never find an answer. She clung to him with all her force as if she might draw from him something of herself, some essence which she could keep and take away with her. He could feel her breasts against him and the beating of her heart, and knew he must disentangle himself from her touch before it was too late. He pushed her away, trusting himself only to keep one hand on her shoulder.
With the other he lifted up her face. Over the bridge of her nose and the top of her cheekbones were a dozen freckles, which seemed to him to have the colour and density of those in an opening lily.
Seeing them, he lost control at last. He meant only to kiss away the wetness on her cheeks but the surge of desire was so strong he felt himself beginning to tear at her clothes. He seized the corner of the blouse she had chosen with such care and pulled it from her shoulders.
She murmured, half in remonstration, half in pleasure as she stroked his hair. ‘I love you,’ she said again, as if the words would dignify the clumsy action of his hands.
Hartmann felt the material of some softer undergarment rip beneath his fingers and saw her breasts, patterned with freckles like those on her nose, fall forward, and he lowered his head to them. He felt his hair combed up between her caressing fingers. He sensed in her touch a certain passivity, almost a remoteness, which he welcomed because it foretold submission.
He guided her backwards to the sofa against the wall, his lips not leaving hers. He tried to protect her from his weight as he moved on top. His hands ran up her legs, pushing the tight black skirt upwards, and his eyes, through a panic of urgency, saw her thighs and the dark, stretched fabric at the top of her stocking and the white inner thigh above, before his fingers met softer, fine material. He wrenched his arms free from his shirt and could hear the collar tear away from its stud. He pushed and lifted at the frustrating tangle of her clothes until he saw a soft column of fine hair, like a puff of smoke or a feather, and when he touched her there, she gasped.
‘The light, the light, please turn out . . .’
He felt a moment of desperation as if what he most wanted might be denied him at the last instant and then, after a brief resistance, there was a relief, a sensation of having come home, somewhere from which he should never have been away. Her fingers were harsh on his back where the shirt had torn sideways, and as his chest bore down on her he inhaled the hot blast of his own breath as his face and tongue moved over her upper body. He was aware of the muscles convulsing in his back and the effort that dampened the tips of his hair against his neck. Very quickly he squeezed her with all the strength of his embrace and gasped in her ear as his body arched and emptied itself in her.
Later in the night he made love to her more calmly, taking slow pleasure in her submitted privacy, feeling the softness of her skin and inhaling the smell of her hair and her neck. Enough light came through the window for him to see the distant pleasure in her eyes.
When he heard her deeply asleep, Hartmann slipped away from the bed, pulled on his clothes, and went outside, down to the apple tree. He sat there, sated, guilty and amazed, until the grudging dawn made each different green of the valley distinct. Then he returned to the terrace and looked through at Anne’s motionless form beneath the blanket. He moved quietly in beside her and felt her arm sleepily reach out to him.
The next thing of which he was aware was the sound of Armand clearing his throat theatrically in the storeroom. He had brought some fresh milk and was moving about the room with noisy tact. Hartmann pulled on his dressing-gown and went to say good morning. Armand told him he was required to be up at the lodge by ten o’clock, when the shooting party would leave. He showed Hartmann how to make coffee in the antiquated copper pot and went wheezing back up through the woods. Anne emerged from the bedroom in a long white dressing-gown. Her face was pale from sleep; it contrasted with the darkness of her eyes and of the hair that fell on to the just-visible whiteness of her shoulders. Hartmann put the bread and some jam on the table and poured out some coffee. Anne lowered her eyes, took a large cup and drank in silence. She seemed taken by a heavy stillness, a quality emphasised by her pallor and her soundless movements. Hartmann had feared she would be embarrassed, but she seemed, on the contrary, relieved; she acted as though a burden had been taken from her. He was impressed by her calm and was himself infected by it. He watched her intently, and when she rose to go back to the bedroom his eyes followed her to the door.
When Hartmann went to join the men to go shooting, Anne decided to go for a walk on her own. He looked at her for a moment, to see if she was hiding some emotion, but could see none and so went up the hill to the car.
Anne walked through an adjoining field and discovered a path that seemed to loop round through some distant woods. By now the sun had risen sufficiently high to take the chill off the morning and to shine through the tangle of branches above her as she walked. From time to time the path came out into a clearing, and once she came upon a small cottage with geese enclosed in a wire pen. A little further on she sat for a while on a bank and surveyed the sinking fields below. The countryside was similar to that in which she had spent her childhood, until it had been interrupted. She thought back to the house she had lived in and to her parents; to her own self-absorbed innocence. Would Hartmann understand if she told him what had happened? Or would he react like the people in the local town when they discovered? Did she dare to gamble his love on his reaction?
She walked on through the morning and heard a rare outburst of birdsong from the trees: not everything, then, had been shot. Be brave, Anne, she heard Louvet drunkenly saying to her; courage is the only thing that counts. If she did not tell Hartmann, then he would not truly know her and could not therefore come to love her as she loved him. But then again, it seemed mad to risk losing such feeling as he might have for her merely for some perverse idea of honesty.
Anne could hear the distant sound of a gun being fired as the heat of the sun began to grow. It was a day in which everything around her seemed to be in harmony; it was impossible to imagine that the hedgerows and the fields and the woods and streams and isolated cottages were in any other than their appointed place. Only she, a human, with her illusion of free will, couldn’t find her true position in it all.
If only the consequences of a deed ended with the grief it caused, she thought, then one could bear up until it passed. But there are some actions which dislocate the arranged order so badly that their effects are never finished, but go on and on through the years, breaking out from the lives they originally affected and contaminating all who come in touch with them. Evil, she thought; perhaps that is what evil does.
By midday, however, when she reached the lodge, her spirits had lifted; and by the time she had gone with one of the maids to the spot where the others were converging for lunch they were buoyant. The men returned from shooting in their shirt sleeves, carrying their broken-barrelled shotguns and discussing the morning’s bag – not a large one, it seemed, since only Marcel was a practised shot. Some of the guests would be returning to dinner at the farm, but those with further to go, like Hartmann and Anne, would leave that afternoon. This did not spoil lunch for Anne, since she viewed the journey back with Hartmann as something to be enjoyed even more than the picnic in the sun. She looked at him as he lay on a rug, partly shaded beneath a tree, talking to Isabelle. One or two strands of hair on the back of his neck were damp with sweat, and she could see a slight patterning of it on the back of his shirt.
They returned in Hartmann’s car to the granary to pack their bags. Anne looked around her and tried to score into her memory as many details of the place as she could. The worn rug, the bed, the roughly constructed terrace, the apple tree at the foot of the garden – all now seemed fixed in her mind with immutable precision; but she knew how details could gradually be lost from such pictures until even the outlines became faint.
The convoy of cars rumbled down from Merlaut and out on to the road. Back at the farm there were farewells to be said and Anne was made to promise that she would return. Isabelle shook hands, and Anne thanked her for what she said was the best weekend imaginable, wishing there was a way of indicating that for once there was sincerity in the polite phrases which were all she could muster. Hartmann managed to disentangle himself from the other guests, and at last they were on their way, the car creeping over the stony drive until they met the road.
They talked about the weekend and what they had thought about the other guests.
‘I don’t think I’m made for life in the country,’ said Hartmann. ‘My shooting was terrible, and these comfortable shoes – they’re agonising. I’d rather wear the ones I wore in Paris.’
After they had been driving for about two hours the wheels abruptly stopped turning. The engine made a loud clanking sound and there came a smell of burning metal. Hartmann steered the car to the edge of the road and stopped.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We’ll have to find a garage.’
‘But we’re miles from anywhere.’ Anne failed to sound disappointed.
‘Yes, I was aware of that, Anne. Why are you laughing?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘It looked like it to me. Look, there you go.’
‘Well, so are you.’
‘No, I’m not. We might be here for days.’
Three hours later they had arranged with a local farmer to have the car towed to a garage. The proprietor said it was a difficult job and it wouldn’t be ready until eleven o’clock the following day. With some difficulty they persuaded him to drive them to the nearest town, an isolated place with a solitary hotel.
The manager was able to offer them a room, the last for fifty kilometres or more, he assured them.
‘Aren’t you expected back at work tomorrow?’ said Hartmann. ‘We could get a taxi and try to get you back by train.’
‘No, I’ve got the week off. The Patron said I could have a whole week.’
‘All right,’ Hartmann told the hotelier. ‘I’ll have to telephone Christine,’ he said to Anne. And tell her I’m still in Paris, he thought to himself.
Anne had now become almost hysterical with pleasure at the thought of the hours stolen back from nowhere. She began to giggle as she helped Hartmann with the luggage.
‘Will you be wanting dinner, monsieur?’ said the hotelier.
‘Yes, please. And my cousin would like to take a bath.’
‘Your cousin, monsieur?’
‘Yes, the young lady I’m with.’
‘Oh, I see, monsieur. Your cousin. Well, I’ll show you where it is.’ He scratched vigorously at his moustache as he preceded Hartmann up the squeaking staircase.
It was nearly eight o’clock, and Hartmann went for a stroll while Anne was changing. Over dinner he told her more about his past life. He chose his words with care, so that he should give an honest account of what it had been like. He never seemed satisfied until he had selected the correct combination of words, and would sometimes go back and verbally cross out what he had said before, until he was sure he had conveyed exactly what he meant. Then he looked satisfied, as if he expected that Anne would herself now register the experience precisely as he himself had done. As he spoke she watched and reflected how much his trust in her was growing, and how kind his face looked when animated. She was surprised by how little her declaration of love for him the night before, and what had followed, seemed to embarrass her, and she was encouraged by the way it seemed to have made no difference to the way he acted towards her.
After dinner he ordered brandy and they sat in the walled garden at the back of the hotel where it was still warm. No one else was in the garden, though they could hear the sound of voices from the restaurant. As their own conversation began again, Anne felt she would inevitably tell him what she had dreaded. Probably there were still good reasons not to do so, but she had always trusted more to instinct than to reason. Neither the time nor the place was perfect, but nor would they ever be. Then, once she had decided and could sense the anticipation in her stomach, the conversation would not come round to a point from which she felt she could properly begin. Hartmann’s delicacy was such that he avoided areas where, for once, she wished he would intrude.
It took her in the end some abrupt changes of course.
‘My life in Paris seems to have been very different from yours,’ she said. ‘I think I missed the glamorous times of the twenties.’
‘I’m not sure they were as glamorous as people always tell you. I remember collapsing governments and fear about the franc as much as nightclubs and artists’ exhibitions.’
‘We lived too far from the centre of Paris to know about all the attractions and the nightlife. Though we used to read about it in the newspapers of course.’
Hartmann nodded.
‘I lived with M. Louvet, my father,’ said Anne.
‘I’ve heard you mention him.’ He smiled. ‘It’s very formal of you to refer to him in that way, your own father.’
‘He isn’t my father.’ Anne leaned forward slightly in her chair. ‘My father’s dead. He was killed in the war.’
‘I’m sorry. So many men . . .’
‘It wasn’t like that. He killed a man. And then he was shot for it.’
Anne’s voice had a cold quality, as if she were reciting words already written. Hartmann watched to see if she would go on. She clenched her hands a few times in her lap.
‘I may as well tell you.’
Hartmann said nothing but watched her face, which was impassive as she stretched her mind back into her childhood. She had been born, she told him, in the Cantal district at the southern tip of the Massif Central, in a house buried so deep in the countryside that no one would have known of its existence unless directed to it.
‘My father was a shopkeeper. In the years before the war, when there were plenty of people to work the land, he became a sort of wholesaler as well. He used to arrange transport for all the local cheeses, and other produce too. It went to Aurillac and Clermont, then on to Paris. My first memory of him is when he came back on leave from the war. He had been fighting on the Marne and had done well. He had a citation for bravery. He used to play with me in the fields and tell me stories – you know, all the things a father does. It was terrible when he went back. I was far too young to know what it was all about, just that it was something awful he was going back to.
‘I used to sleep in bed with my mother at night and we would say our prayers together. She wanted to have brothers and sisters for me, but she said we would have to wait until after the war. She told me we were sure to win soon and then it would all be over.
‘My father used to write to us quite often and we were thrilled by his letters. So many people in the village had had bad news already. There was a woman called Mme Hubert, a widow, who had lost both her sons in the first year. My mother said I must be nice to her, but I hated her. I don’t know why. She became a “godmother” to two young soldiers – you know how women used to adopt young men like that. She was always writing to them and telling us how brave they were.
‘Then my father was wounded and he came back on leave. He was at home for three or four months. I think it must have been in 1916. As he got better he would tell me stories again, but never about the war – just fairy tales and funny stories. My mother was very happy to have him home and she hoped his wound would take a long time to get better. He took me all around the fields and hills where we lived. I was only a tiny girl and I couldn’t walk far, so he carried me on his back. He said I would easily fit into his knapsack and if I was lucky he’d drop me inside and take me back to war with him.
‘Mme Hubert, she said if he was fit enough to play with me he should be fighting. She said both her soldiers, her godsons, had been wounded but hadn’t left the front. I think she was jealous of my mother because my father was still alive and she had lost everyone. Anyway, he went to the military doctor at Clermont and they said he was fit to go back. His regiment was at Verdun.
‘We didn’t know much about it. He never talked about the fighting to us, or certainly not to me. I think he just wanted to talk about the things any father would, not about war and death. In the village, people had heard of Verdun and they said it was a glorious fight.