Léon and Louise (5 page)

Léon was often on the point of asking the landlord of the
Commerce
or his daughter about the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse, but he refrained from doing so because he realized that in a small place no good could come of a strange youth enquiring after a local girl. One night, though, just after he had paid, the café door burst open and someone made a swift, light-footed entrance. It was the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse, except that this time she was wearing a blue pullover, not a blouse. She closed the door behind her with a well-gauged shove and strode purposefully up to the counter, greeting the regulars left and right as she went. She halted only an arm's-length from Léon and asked the landlord for two packets of Turmac cigarettes. While he was taking them from the shelf she fished out the coins and put them in the money bowl. Then she cleared her throat and, with the fingertips of her right hand, brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. It wouldn't stay put and promptly escaped once more.

‘
Bonsoir, mademoiselle,
' said Léon.

She turned towards him as if she'd only just noticed him. Looking into her eyes, he seemed to detect, in their green depths, the makings of a great friendship.

‘I know you,' she said, ‘but where from?' Her voice was even more enchanting than his memory of it.

‘Cycling,' he replied. ‘You overtook me. Twice.'

‘Oh yes.' She laughed. ‘It was a while back, wasn't it?'

‘Five weeks and three days.'

‘You looked tired, I remember. You had some funny odds and ends strapped to the back of your bike.'

‘A can of paraffin and a window frame,' he said. ‘And a pitchfork without a handle.'

‘Do you always cart things like that around with you?'

‘Sometimes, if I come across them. By the way, I'm glad your right eye's better.'

‘What was the matter with my right eye?'

‘It was rather bloodshot. Maybe a midge had flown into it. Or a fly.'

The girl laughed. ‘It was a May-bug the size of a hen's egg. You remembered that?'

‘And your bicycle squeaked.'

‘It still does,' she said, lighting a cigarette. She held it between her thumb and forefinger like a street urchin. ‘What about you? Do you prop up the bar here every night?'

Oh, thought Léon. So she knows I come here every night. Oh-oh... That probably means she's already noticed my existence. More than once, too. Oh-oh-oh... And now she comes in and acts as if she doesn't recognize me. Oh-oh-oh-oh...

‘Yes, mademoiselle. You'll find me here any night of the week.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I don't know where else to go.'

‘A big boy like you? Strange,' she said. She put the packets of cigarettes in her pocket and turned to go. ‘I always thought railwaymen were active types – itchy-footed, even. I must be wrong.'

‘I was just going,' he said. ‘May I walk with you for a bit?'

‘Where to?'

‘Wherever you like.'

‘Better not. My way home takes me down a dark side street. You'd probably claim we're soulmates or something. Either that, or try to read my future from my palm.'

And she was gone.

A
n unaccustomed silence had descended on the
Café du Commerce
while the girl and Léon were talking together. The landlord had assiduously dried the same wine glass, the regulars had blown smoke rings at the ceiling and used the glowing ends of their cigarettes to bulldoze the ash in the ashtrays into little mounds. Now that the girl had disappeared beyond the glass door they came to life and started talking – at first only haltingly and hesitantly, but in joyful anticipation of the moment when Léon would also disappear and enable them to discuss every facet of the little scene they'd just witnessed. Sure enough, before long Léon buttoned his uniform tunic and waved goodbye to the landlord. Unable to restrain his urge to communicate any longer, however, the latter caught hold of Léon's sleeve, insisted that he have a glass of Bordeaux for the road, and told him all he knew about the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse.

Little Louise – she wasn't conspicuously short, but people called her that to distinguish her from fat Louise, the sexton's wife – had been taken in by the inhabitants of Saint-Luc like a stray cat two years earlier. Many people claimed she was an orphan who hailed from one of those villages on the Somme of which not one brick had been left on another after the Germans' spring offensive in 1915. Nobody knew anything for sure; when anyone asked Louise about her origins in the early weeks, she silenced them with such feline ferocity that they never dared raise the subject again. She spoke French with a clarity and lack of accent that defied geographical attribution but made it seem likely that she came of good family and had gone to good schools.

Like Léon, Louise had come to the town under the auspices of the direction of labour programme. She worked as an office girl at the town hall, where she ran errands, made coffee and watered the pot plants. She had learned on her own initiative to use the typewriter that had hitherto languished untouched in the mayor's outer office. Little Louise was a bright, lively girl who proved adroit at all she did. The pot plants flourished as never before, the coffee tasted excellent, and she was soon typing immaculate letters.

The mayor, who was very satisfied with her, was surprised to notice after a few weeks that he was, despite himself, becoming extremely susceptible to her unaffected, tomboyish charms. Being conscious of the thirty-year age difference between them, however, he imposed the utmost restraint on himself in his dealings with his office girl and treated her with feigned detachment or aloof courtesy. He did, however, yield to the temptation to make her a present of his old bicycle, which had been standing unused in his barn for years. This Louise used for her official errands, which she carried out in a prompt and reliable manner.

Early in the mornings she rode it to the post office and emptied the mailbox; at half-past nine she fetched the croissants, and just before midday, if unexpected business awaited him in the office, she summoned the mayor from the
Café des Artistes,
where he habitually partook of his apéritif. In the afternoons she was out on her bike again. She delivered judicial demands for payment, official instructions and smallish sums of money, together with mayoral orders to the beadle, the road-mender and the chimneysweep. But the hardest thing was the invitations she had to convey, on the mayor's behalf, to the families of soldiers killed in action. Thoroughly noncommittal, these invitations simply contained a request to their unwitting recipients to present themselves at the town hall at a certain hour on such and such a day. In the early months of the war the persons concerned read them with a shrug and obediently set off for the mayor's office, where they stood in front of his desk, unsuspectingly kneading their caps, and enquired what could be important enough to summon them away from their work. Reading aloud from a sheet of paper, the mayor thereupon informed them in resonant tones that their son, husband, father, grandson or nephew had died a hero's death at such and such a place on the field of honour in the service of the Fatherland, a sacrifice for which the Minister of War in person and he himself, the mayor, expressed their profound condolences and the gratitude of the entire nation.

The mayor sought to mitigate the ensuing scenes of despair, to which he was defencelessly exposed, by consoling the inconsolable with allusions to heroism, patriotism and rewards in the world to come. These they couldn't help construing as a slur on their grief because, if they couldn't have their nearest and dearest back, they wanted at least to mourn his passing.

It could even happen that the mayor had to endure three such scenes in his office in a single day. He started to anaesthetize himself with copious quantities of pastis and couldn't sleep at night despite this, his digestion went haywire and his head became heavy, and grief and nameless dread made itself at home in his office, which had hitherto been a place of dignified self-satisfaction. So great was his distress that he more than once came close to walking into the church and entreating the priest for pastoral assistance, even though the cleric had been his arch-enemy ever since the urinal affair.

Such was the situation in the spring of 1915, when little Louise arrived in Saint-Luc and started running errands. She soon grasped the connection between the mayor's invitations and the rustically maladroit scenes in his office. On perhaps twenty or thirty occasions she saw the city father sweating and shaking behind his desk, struggling for words and composure but never managing to shake off his woodenly official manner; and when she knew for certain that nothing would ever change, no matter how long the war lasted, she decided to act. ‘Please excuse me,
monsieur le maire,
' she said the next time she had an invitation to deliver.

‘What is it?' asked the mayor, smoothing his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger and treating himself to a glance at the delectably swanlike curve of her neck.

‘Is this another of these invitations?'

‘What else,
ma petite
Louise, what else?'

‘Who it is this time?'

‘It's Lucien, only son of the widow Junod,' said the mayor. ‘Nineteen years old, the girls called him Lulu. Killed on February 7th at Ville-sur-Cousances. Did you know him?'

‘No.'

‘He was home on leave only this Christmas, I saw him at midnight Mass. He had a nice voice.'

Louise took the envelope and went outside. Mounting her bicycle, she rode at full speed across the Place de la République and headed straight for the widow Junod's house on the western outskirts of town. She rang the bell and handed over the envelope. When the widow had torn it open with her forefinger and was staring at it helplessly, Louise said:

‘You don't
have
to go there.'

Then she took her by the elbow and led her into the house, sat down beside her on the sofa, and told her that her Lulu wouldn't be coming back because he'd been killed in action.

Louise sat silently on the sofa while the woman threw herself on the floor, screaming, and tore out whole tufts of her hair. Having later submitted to being pummelled by the widow's fists and clasped around the neck by her, she let her cry her eyes out with an abandon she might have been too inhibited to display in the presence of a friend or relation. Louise passed her two handkerchiefs in succession and, when she had calmed down a little, lit one of her sugar-dusted cigarettes, pillowed the widow Junod's head on a cushion, and went into the kitchen to make her some tea. When she returned with a steaming cup, she said:

‘Well, I'll be off now. Don't worry about the invitation, Madame Junod. I'll tell the mayor you won't be coming.'

A few minutes later, when she informed the mayor of how she'd handled the matter, he looked stern and said something about taking liberties and breaches of official secrecy, but he was of course extremely relieved and profoundly grateful to have been spared the inevitable scene for once. And when two more invitations cropped up the following day, he didn't send Louise off with an admonition of any kind; on the contrary, he gave her the unsolicited information she needed in order to fulfil her new mission.

‘This one's name was Sebastien,' he said, gazing up at the ceiling so as not to have to look down her cleavage. ‘He was the youngest son of Farmer Petitpierre. A decent lad. He had a hare lip and was good with horses.'

‘And the other?'

‘Delacroix, the notary. Fifty years old and childless, both parents dead. There's only his wife. Now go,
ma petite
Louise. Well, off you go.'

From then on the bereaved no longer had to present themselves at the town hall. Louise simply delivered the invitations to their homes; then they knew what was what and could fully surrender to the first great onset of grief while she sat on the sofa like a mute but sympathetic angel of death. The next day or the day after that, they were usually calm enough to send for Louise because they wanted to know details. Louise would then pay them a second visit and tell them everything that had been officially ascertained: exactly when and where and in what circumstances David or Cedric or Philippe had lost his life, whether he had suffered or died a merciful death, and finally, the most urgent question of all: whether his body had found eternal rest beneath the sod or lay strewn across the mud somewhere, blown to pieces, decaying, and lying around for the ravens to devour.

Although Louise seldom had anything consoling to report, she refrained from false embellishment and always told the truth as far as she knew it, realizing that truth alone can stand the test of time. She took her task very seriously, and the inhabitants of Saint-Luc repaid her with warm affection. Becoming accustomed to the ominous squeak of her gentleman's bicycle, they all listened for it and were glad when it grew fainter instead of ceasing abruptly outside their homes.