Casting Off (7 page)

Archie, who had put a drink for her on the table by the sofa, had disappeared.

‘He’s probably having a bath. He spends ages in them doing the crossword,’ she said.

They sat on the sofa.

‘Let me examine you,’ he said. ‘You’ve grown up so much.’

‘Well,
up
,’ she said. ‘But not sort of – in other ways. Not like the others. Louise has become rather a beauty – it’s generally acknowledged – and Poll is
so
pretty and elegant. They’re both quite exotic, but I’ve just become a larger caterpillar – or a moth compared to butterflies.’

He looked at her. Her face was thinner, but still rounded, flushed now with excitement and streaked with tears, her eyelashes wet around eyes the frankness of whose love struck him then with an almost painful force.

‘This is the most joyful day of my life,’ she said.

‘You have eyes just like your mother’s.’

‘You never told me that.’ She began to smile, but her mouth trembled.

‘And you’ve lost your freckles, I see.’

‘‘Oh, Dad! You know I don’t get them properly until the summer.’

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘I shall look forward to them immensely.’

During the rest of that first evening with her, which they persuaded Archie to share, he saw both how much she had grown up and also how intensely she had missed him: this last was revealed to him obliquely in various things that she asked or said. When Pipette had gone to Home Place and described the journey west, she’d realized that a lot of her imagining about him had been right. ‘Not exactly the same adventures,’ she said, ‘but the same sort of ones.’

‘And after D-day,’ she had remarked later, ‘I thought you might turn up at any minute. I suppose that was rather silly?’ But she had immediately sensed that this was back to dangerous ground: earlier, she had asked him why he hadn’t come earlier and what had been happening to him, and when he had said it was too long a story for now, she had at once desisted; the old or, rather, younger Clary would have continued with a relentless cross-examination, but that first evening she seemed to know that he did not want to talk about that . . .

Which, he reflected now as he sat in the train on his way to London and Archie’s flat, had been quite unlike the behaviour both of the Admiralty and the rest of the family. The Admiralty, of course, had a right: he recognized – belatedly – that he had behaved very badly from their point of view, that the four years of isolation and intense intimacy had impaired his sense of reality, or values. Different things had imperceptibly come to seem important: saving his own skin had evolved to continual anxiety about Miche’s – if she was discovered to be harbouring him she would be shot. They had made a number of hiding places and he had become as wary as an animal of any activity near the farm – could hear the sound of a motorbike or any other engine even before she did. For the Germans did turn up from time to time, at infrequent intervals, to extract food from them and other farms. They would take chickens, eggs, fruit, butter if it was to be had, and once, on an occasion that had afterwards caused Miche to sob with rage, one of her three pigs. Sometimes these things were punctiliously paid for, sometimes not. But apart from the major preoccupation of staying alive there had been two other elements to his life then – each unpromisingly begun from the lack of any alternative – that had gradually come to absorb him completely. The drawing had started because he had nothing better, or even else, to do. She had a pad of thin, lined paper on which she wrote the occasional family letter – to her sister in Rouen, to an aunt who was a nun in a convent near Bayeux. Even on the blank side the lines showed through, but he became used to this. He had started by drawing aspects of the kitchen, which was large and accommodated all indoor life except sleep. There, Michèle cooked and washed and ironed and mended, packed up eggs or chickens or rabbits – the last two live – for selling in the market where she went every other week. In season, she would put fruit she had picked into punnets, or preserved into jars, bundle herbs: anything she grew or raised to sell was got ready to carry on her bicycle with the small wooden cart behind it. Here he passed much of his time, idle, unless she found some task for him, but always he had to be poised for flight. The first drawings had been merely pleasant distraction, but quite soon he found himself becoming more serious, more critically responsible about them: he recognized that he was out of practice, and some time afterwards that it had been years since he had done any drawing without feeling faintly guilty and self-indulgent (Zoë had always resented him spending any of his spare time on what she called his Art). Now he had time to practise as much as he liked. And Michèle, once she realized that it was more to him than an idle ploy, went to great lengths to provide him with materials – chiefly paper, some pencils and once some charcoal. These she obtained occasionally on market days – there was not much there, she said, only things for the pupils of the local school, but once she came back with a small box of watercolours.

His second preoccupation had been, of course, Michèle. He had first gone to bed with her after about four months at the farm. It had been a matter of straightforward lust and the comfort it provided. They had had a bad day – in the morning the goat was found mysteriously dead, a disaster since it had recently produced a kid who would now have to be fed by bottle on the precious cow’s milk. She had been deeply upset because she could think of no reason for the goat’s death. She brought the kid into the kitchen and tethered it in a corner, and while they were improvising a teat out of a piece of chamois leather, they heard a car door slam and men’s voices. There was no time for him to get to the concealed cellar (which meant removing floorboards) or out to the loft in the barn. She had pointed to the stairs and he had gone up them just as there was a rapping on the door. He had not dared to mount the second stairway – a mere ladder – to the attics for fear of the noise it might make. Her bedroom door was open, but the large bedstead stood high from the floor with no bedclothes voluminous enough to conceal anyone lying under it. There was nothing to do but to stand behind the open door and hope to God that if they did search the house they would not look behind it. There was an element of murky farce about the whole thing, he felt, before he heard the sounds of their departure, but even then he waited, as Michèle had taught him to do, until she called him.

She was standing in the open doorway of the kitchen, watching the dust settle on the cart track that led to the road. She walked to the sink and spat out the clove of garlic she had been chewing. He knew now that she always put garlic in her mouth when the Germans came. ‘They do not like,’ she had said the first time they had come. There had been three of them, an officer, his driver and another one whom she thought was SS – the only one who spoke any French. They had asked a lot of questions of the usual kind, who else lived at the farm? how did she manage, then, on her own? what did the farm produce? and so on. It had taken so much time, she said, because with Germans she always behaved stupidly. She did not understand what they said, and then she would give stupid answers. Then she turned on him and said it was his business to listen for people coming – she had enough to do. He (foolishly) said something about the car engine being quieter, and then she really went for him. However they came they could kill us, she said, he could not be such a fool as not to understand that. Germans in cars could be more dangerous – officers, people who gave the orders. If he could not take the trouble to listen, he had the choice of spending all his time in the cellar where he would be utterly useless and nothing but trouble for her. For the rest of the day she neither spoke to nor looked at him, made loud noises with pans, set a bowl of soup on the table for him but did not eat herself, and muttered imprecations to the kid that he felt were meant for him. That was the blackest day since the morning he discovered that the destroyer had sailed without him. In the evening, when she called him down from his room, he saw a bottle of Calvados and two glasses on the table. She had washed herself and her hair was coiled neatly on top of her head (she had pulled it down when the Germans came so that it looked thoroughly unkempt). She asked if he would like a drink and he said, yes, very much. When it was poured and she had pushed the packet of Gauloises to him, having taken one herself, and he had lit them, he said that he had been thinking, and had decided that he should not stay. Where would he go? He should try to get a boat from Concarneau. He would not get a boat. It had been discovered that someone had left in that way and now all boats were checked by the Germans before leaving the harbour. He would not get a boat. There had been a short silence. Then he had said that boat or no boat, he ought to leave. Why? Because it simply was not fair on
her
. If he were not here she would be perfectly safe, would not have this constant anxiety. It was too much to ask of anyone, let alone a – he remembered floundering here – perfect stranger.

She had stared at him for a moment with an expression he could not fathom. A stranger, she had repeated eventually. You have lived here for four months – with a stranger! No, he hadn’t meant that exactly. Just that he did not feel that he had the right to jeopardize her safety.

She ignored that; she supposed it was because he was English that he felt her to be such a stranger. The cold English, people had always said, but she had not known any English person until now. They were facing each other across the table. She pulled her black woollen shawl more closely to her and folded her arms. In any case, she said, if he
did
leave, he would not get far. His French was not good enough for him to pass as a Frenchman, he had no papers and also it was known that he had some association with her – or would be very fast if he was caught. He did not understand this, but when he questioned her, she said that, although nobody spoke of it, something was known. Also, there was a record about her after Jean-Paul had been killed. The Germans kept excellent records of such things. So! she finished. So! She shrugged and poured more Calvados. He felt both challenged and at a loss – uncomfortably powerless. It occurred to him then that although he was deeply beholden to her, he did not like her. There was a bitterness, a smouldering resentment about her that was alienating. My bloody ankle, he thought. If that hadn’t happened, I’d have been away from here, might be home by now. And then something strange, that afterwards he could not in any way account for, happened. For a second – he
became
her: at least his own feelings, responses, needs, anxieties dissolved to be replaced by hers. Alone, having nursed her parents to their deaths, her man taken brutally from her and with him her future of marriage and children gone by a murder where justice had no power, she had been left to do a man’s as well as a woman’s job in this remote place. Lone women were raped by the enemy: it was common knowledge. Every single time they came, that possibility – likelihood – was there. Today she had been through the fear of that. She had got Pipette away, she had harboured himself: in neither case was there the smallest advantage to her. Her outburst about it being his business to listen for vehicles approaching the farm was perfectly reasonable. He had grown careless, and then to say that he must go, and call her a perfect stranger was both chilling and offensive.

‘I’m sorry I called you a stranger. I’m sorry you find that my French is so bad. I’m sorry I suggested going without thinking of the consequences for you—’

He had taken her hand and she now put it over his mouth. ‘Enough! You have said enough,’ she said. She was smiling – he could not remember seeing her smile before and her dark eyes had an expression that was both cynical and tender. They had become different people.

That night after supper – a stew of rabbit cooked with apple and onions – after they had bolted the doors and fed the kid they had gone upstairs and when they reached the door of her room she took his hand and drew him in. He had put his arms round her and kissed her small red mouth. ‘Much garlic,’ she had said and he had answered that he was not a bloody German, just a cold English. She had smiled again. ‘I will warm you,’ she said.

For months he had seen her in her voluminous black skirt – often with an apron added to it, her heavy fisherman’s jersey, her thick cotton blouses, her shawl – naked, she took his breath away. High, separated breasts, an unexpectedly slender waist, below which there was the generous curve of her hips, her limbs muscular and rounded, wrists and ankles delicately articulate – the revelation was a marvellous shock.

Even now, in the dusty train, he could feel his body responding to the memory of that initial sight of her.

After that first night they were no longer
Monsieur
and
Madame
, no longer addressed each other as
vous
, although it was some months before either recognized what was happening to them.

Here he had to stop – some way beyond that was the beginning of pain, the knowledge that there could not be a future with her, that one day this amazing isolation with her would come to an end, and the closer that they became the more completely they would have to part. He had thought, at the beginning of their parting, on the boat and the first few difficult days after it, that he must, he should, banish all thoughts of her; now he knew just how difficult it was to do that for more than a few hours at a time. It was not made easier by his relationship with Zoë, which had, he thought now, all the anxious courtesy of two people trapped between two floors in a lift – a kind of wary limbo that neither seemed able to overcome.

Perhaps, he thought, he would feel better if he talked to someone about it: he would become clearer, more able to deal with the situation. And the obvious person to talk to would be Archie.

Two

August 1945

‘I really wish we hadn’t asked him. He’ll eat up all our food and keep on wanting to go to the cinema. And he’ll probably be no good at all at painting.’