Charlotte Gray (27 page)

Julien's mother, with whom he lived when his father left them soon after Julien's tenth birthday, was a French Catholic whose family could trace its bourgeois path back a hundred years or so into respectable obscurity. Julien survived his father's departure apparently unharmed; his naturally even temperament absorbed the shock and helped his mother to do likewise. His work at school continued to earn the praise of his teachers, who thought it easily within his power to realise his ambition to be an architect.

Julien's involvement with resistance activity at first owed as much to high spirits as to political conviction. He was unsure about the lugubrious general in London; although he liked the idea that only a battle, not a war, had been lost and that a pure spirit of France was being kept alive overseas, it was difficult to say with certainty that this untested, slightly comic person was its one true guardian. The Communist Party was banned, since, through its connection with Russia, it theoretically supported the Allies. Julien had attended a secret meeting in Limoges, where they talked of sabotage and armed resistance, but he felt uneasy about the Communist plans for France, their enthusiasm for Stalin and most particularly for the way they had, a few years earlier, helped derail the Popular Front, the one government for which he had ever felt enthusiasm.

It took an approach from Mirabel on an earlier mission to force Julien into action. His aims seemed attractively simple: blow up as many trains as possible and set up networks which would eventually help kick out the invader.

It was the simple, non-political vigour of his language that attracted Julien. By running errands, taking calls and helping to dispose of parachuted stores, Julien accepted that his actions, however rustic and drink-assisted, did amount to a political statement of a kind.

Although he felt a shiver of unease about showing disrespect towards the Marshal, who had been the national hero of his boyhood, he was unsentimental enough to see the deficiencies of the Government. He was not inspired by its unprincipled haggling over the question of sovereignty, and feared that when the force of Russia and America came to bear, as it surely would, the clinging to the illusion of autonomy would be not a bargaining weapon, but a liability that the Germans would exploit.

The disappearance of Monsieur and Madame Duguay changed everything. The look on Bernard's face provided Julien with an instant of clear and shocking revelation: a chain of compromise and inertia, at no single point perceptible as choice in moral colours, had had in the end a cumulative effect. The complicity of an honest man, thinking only that he wanted to be back with his family for dinner, had closed an evil circle. From that day Julien's flirtatious high spirits concealed a new determination: everyone, he presumed, had his own moment of clarity, but for him the revelation was provided by the look of blameless guilt in a gendarme's eye. His rage, after its first eruption in the hotel de ville, was concealed from the people of Lavaurette. He thought it would be safer that way; but in his subsequent search for information, Pauline Bobotte's switchboard became a hot blur of activity.

Charlotte packed with care in the morning, checking that nothing extraneously British could somehow have found its way into her possessions. Only my thoughts, she said aloud, as she made one final sweep through the room and fixed her mind on her destination: Ussel.

The station at Limoges was already full by the time she arrived, forewarned by experience, half an hour early for her train. She had a cup of coffee in the buffet and, with the taste of roasted wheat seeds in her mouth, made her way down the platform.

The scene reminded her of the countryside on the day of her arrival; there was an element of unsettling caricature. Although it was really she who was being deceptive, it seemed to her that it was the other way round: that the travellers going about their business, the traffic of the provincial station, the manners, dress and customs of the people, indistinguishable from those that had entranced her on her first childish visits, were in fact part of a conspiratorial drama. When the train slid into the platform, however, there was not even the rudimentary attempt at patience that she had learned to accept as the French version of Edinburgh queuing; there was a surge round each door which forced back into the carriages several passengers who were trying to dismount. A few disapproving people, including Charlotte, quickly surrendered to the inevitable force of numbers and joined the press for places.

By force and good luck she found a seat, though there was no room in the rack for her suitcase, which she had to carry on her knees. She could see by the easy way many people threw their bags around that they were empty; when they returned that evening to Limoges from their destinations in the surrounding countryside, the cases would be heavy with eggs, ham, sausage, oil of any kind, and would exude the smells she had noticed on her previous journey with Yves. After the bad temper of boarding had receded and the train had been going for half an hour. Charlotte felt an unmistakably festive air creep into the compartment and found it answered in herself by the double exhilaration of her journey. It was another hot day. The flashing pastures through which they travelled were radiant with a yellowish-green light; the darker shades of the knotted forests and the glimpsed browns of the trunks and branches of oak trees in the established lines that edged the hills made it possible to believe in a future as well in the past they brightly evoked.

Charlotte took out Dominique's detective story and began to read. A man's body was found by his concierge in the hallway of his apartment of the seventh arrondissement; a silver dagger protruded from between his ribs. The concierge was helping a melancholic inspector with his inquiries; the detective would proceed to interview the occupants of all the other apartments in the block, and the author might or might not give some indication as to which one was the murderer. Charlotte found that the only thing that might have been interesting the process of detection had, by a convention of the genre, to be withheld from the story, or there could have been no surprise denouement. After his first fruitless morning the detective went for lunch in a cafe in the Place St. Sulpice, and Charlotte was horrified to hear her stomach roar its envy of his dish of the day: a sausage and lentil stew with green salad 'anointed with thick oil'. The woman opposite her smiled her sympathy as Charlotte begged her pardon for the noise. The young man next to her, perhaps the woman's son, opened a bag on his lap and offered Charlotte the end of a loaf from which extended the edge of a thick piece of ham. After her protestations and his insistence, she took it, and was drawn into conversation.

Charlotte had provided Dominique with a sister in Clermont-Ferrand to cover her intended visit to Gregory's garage mechanic, and the residual Calvinist in her was shocked by the facility with which she described this Germaine's invented life. The young man looked interested, and Charlotte tried to curb her imagination. She touched on the sober subject of her father's illness, then focused the conversation firmly on the others. Both mother and son, as they turned out to be, seemed friendly enough, but there were five other people in the compartment and two in the doorway who could overhear their conversation. Not all would be as sympathetic; and one thing her training had stressed was that the French far outnumbered the Germans in the number and diversity of their police and security services.

It had been a mistake to accept the sandwich and to talk, but she had been hungry and she had been lonely: she wanted to be addressed by someone, even a stranger and even under a false identity. To extricate herself, she began to yawn, and, when a gap of suitable length occurred in the conversation, she feigned an improbable mid-morning sleep.

Ussel in late afternoon, under light rain, was smaller and more pathetic than it had looked on the map. There were garages and squares and shops, but it had the feeling of a trading post, a village that had spread back off the strip of the main road that steeply bisected it. Charlotte sheltered with her suitcase in the bar of a hotel, waiting for the time to pass till she could go to her rendezvous with her hairdresser, Antoinette.

She felt absurdly self-conscious; now that the moment had come for this furtive action her hands seemed heavy, her face a self-advertising confession of guilt. Ussel was much higher than the places she had so far visited; the air was thin, as well as damp, and she felt cut off from the rest of France.

The prospect of pursuing her journey still further, to the volcano-ringed heights of Clermont, on a passionate gamble of her own devising, seemed a foolhardy plan that could have been conceived only by someone at sea level and slightly unbalanced.

She ground the heel of Dominique ugly shoe into the floor of the bar and brought her lips together. She would proceed. At ten to seven she left the hotel and went out into the rain. She walked up the main street and forked left towards the church. She moved briskly, not wishing to catch the eye of anyone in this unvisited town. The streets revealed themselves like photographic prints emerging in solution from her acquired memory. On the Avenue Semard, near the station, she came to the door of a hairdresser's shop; ignoring the "Closed' notice she pushed it open and went inside.

The row of chairs was empty and the room had a sweet, steamy smell. At the far end was a bamboo curtain through which emerged a small white dog, barking feebly and wagging its tail. There was the sound of a wireless playing a facetious song by Charles Trenet. Charlotte held the handle of her suitcase tightly and stood her ground; a woman's voice called to the dog to be quiet. Still no one came, and Charlotte had the feeling she was on the edge of a debacle. She had come a long way to this stuffy little room; and, now that she was here, was it all quite real?

The bamboo curtain divided again and a tall, handsome woman in a blue pinafore came down the step into the salon.

"I'm afraid we're closed, Madame."

"I made a reservation for seven o'clock."

"What name, Madame?" The woman went over to the appointments book on a table by the door.

"Daniele."

The hairdresser ran her finger down the page, snapped the page over as though searching further forward in the book, then turned it back.

"Daniele ... Daniele."

Charlotte felt a line of sweat run down her spine.

The woman turned and, for the first time, looked Charlotte deep and direct in the eye.

"Bad weather for a wash and set."

Charlotte smiled broadly.

"They said that whatever the weather I must insist on Antoinette."

"They were quite right. She's the best."

Antoinette stepped forward and took Charlotte by the hand.

"Let's go through to the back," she said, leading the way through the curtain. They sat at a table in a gloomy kitchen, drinking wine that Antoinette poured from an unlabelled litre bottle.

"You look tired," she said.

"How long have you been here?"

"Do I?" Charlotte's fingers went to her face and pressed the soft skin beneath her eyes.

"Yes, I suppose I haven't slept much for various reasons. A few days. I'm going back to England soon, as far as I know. I have to have confirmation by wireless."

Antoinette had a deep voice and a quiet, sympathetic manner; she had large dark brown eyes and thick, slightly tousled hair, cut just above the shoulder. Watching her as she spoke. Charlotte put her age at about thirty-eight; she had a ruby ring on her right hand but nothing on her left. It was impossible to resist the impression that she was too cultivated to be a hairdresser; something in her manner suggested education and experience beyond trimming and drying.

"They've done a good job on your hair," Antoinette said, taking a cigarette from a packet on the table.

"My God, is it so obvious?"

Antoinette smiled.

"Don't worry. Only to the expert. And your French.

It's almost perfect."

"Almost?"

"Almost."

"I was educated in Belgium. Would that account for it?"

"I think I could believe that."

The scratchy wireless, the windows steamed by rain and the odd towel hanging up to dry reminded Charlotte of the Monday afternoons of her childhood, when her mother would begin to iron the wash; there was a starchy torpor that was seductively depressing. Relaxed by the wine, she felt oddly emotional.

"Are you taking a train back tonight?" said Antoinette.

"There is one I can take tonight. But I'm not going back. I'm going on to Clermont."

"I see. Another errand."

Looking at this woman's quizzical but kind expression. Charlotte had to fight hard to repress her desire to confide.

"That's right," she said.

"You can stay here tonight if you like. There are two trains in the morning."

"Is it safe?"

Antoinette laughed.

"It's completely safe. It's like being in another country. The war and the occupation have passed us by. People are a little irritated to think that there are a lot of Germans tramping round the coast, but that's about all.

France is a big country. Our life has barely changed."

"But what about rationing?"

"We're very self-sufficient. There's a bit less to eat, I suppose, but we manage pretty well. When the garage man mends the farmer's car he gives him a chicken as well as some cash. If I cut someone's hair I sometimes ask for eggs or ham. It's all very friendly."