Old Sins (6 page)

He flung her aside, motioned the other soldier to release Maurice, and they left, clanging the door shut behind them. Julian moved towards Amelie as she stood weeping quietly, held out his arms; she moved into them. Maurice joined them, and they stood there, the three of them holding one another in the cold dark hall, for a long time.

‘Come, Maurice,’ she said in the end, ‘you must go back to bed. The Germans have gone, they did us no harm, and you were very brave. Jean-Michel,’ she added to the old man, who was sitting silent and shaking on the stairs, looking at her helplessly like a child himself, ‘you too, are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ he said, getting wearily to his feet, ‘I’m all right. Let me take you up to your room, Maurice.’

‘Maman, you come with me, please.’

The boy was white-faced, sobbing quietly, shaking with fear and cold.

‘It’s all right, Jean-Michel,’ said Amelie, ‘I’ll put him back to bed. Go and take a brandy for yourself and try to sleep.’

They started up the stairs together, and Maurice looked back, holding out his hand to Julian. ‘Can Philippe come too, Maman, and read me a story?’

‘Of course, and I will come and hear the story too.’

Julian was reading a translation of the
Just So Stories
to Maurice. He found the stories soothing, their humour refreshing, and when he was homesick comforting, and Maurice adored them all. Tonight he read the story of The Elephant’s Child, for a long time, unwilling to relinquish the mood of closeness and tenderness that bound them together; finally Maurice fell asleep and Amelie led Julian out of the room and into her sitting room.

‘Brandy?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Thank you for all you did tonight. You are so good for Maurice. I should have said so before. I’m sorry. And I’m glad you are here.’

‘I am too,’ he said, smiling at her.

‘Are you really only eighteen?’

‘No. A little more.’

‘I thought so.’

They drank the brandy. ‘Come and sit here by me,’ she said, and started suddenly to cry.

‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘don’t. It’s all right. You’re so brave.’

‘I’m lonely,’ she said, ‘so lonely. And so hopeless.’

‘Don’t be. You’re not alone. And we can’t afford to lose hope,’ he said. And he took her in his arms, simply to comfort her, and suddenly there was another mood between them,
urgent, almost shocking in its violence. He turned her face to kiss it.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not here. Maurice might come. Upstairs.’

It was the first time he had slept with anyone so sexually accomplished. He was not totally inexperienced, but the things Amelie showed him that night, a blend of gentleness and almost brutal passion, stayed with him always. They made love over and over again, until the dawn had broken, and they were both exhausted, and the world for both of them had narrowed entirely to one room, one bed; to piercing desire, to tender exploration, and again and again, the surging roar of release. In the morning she looked at him as they lay there, unable to feel anything any more but a sweet weariness, and she kissed him, all of him, first his lips, then his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, buried her face in his pubic hair, tongued his penis gently, and then raised herself on her elbow and smiled at him.

‘I haven’t done much of this sort of thing,’ he said, taking her fingers and kissing them tenderly, one by one, ‘not with anyone who – well, who knew so much. I’m not very practised.’

‘You did very beautifully,’ she said, in English, ‘you are a fine lover. Now,’ briskly, getting up from the bed and pulling on her robe, ‘get up. This is not a good idea. It would get out and they would be suspicious. It must not happen again.’

It never did.

In time Julian did more challenging and dangerous work. He became, amongst other things, quite a formidable forger, and spent a year in the house of a country postman, who produced a large percentage of the documents issued to escaping prisoners en route to the South or to England.

He developed a love of Northern France and its curiously English, lush countryside; he was captured, interrogated and escaped; he spent three months of the German occupation hiding, his cover finally blown, living rough, killing wild animals, catching fish; he made himself extremely ill eating poisonous fungi he mistook for mushrooms and lay for days in a cave, too weak and in too much pain even to crawl from his own vomit. But he recovered. And he escaped from all of it, returning home in 1945 hugely changed; the charming,
flippant boy a complex man, his courage and his brilliance unquestionably established. He had learnt to live with solitude and with fear; he had learnt to fix his mind absolutely on the end and to disregard the means; he had learnt to be ruthless, cruel, devious and totally pragmatic; he had learnt to trust no one but himself; to set aside sentiment, personal loyalty, and perhaps most crucially self-doubt.

Letitia looked at him as he sat before the fire in the drawing room at Maltings the night he came home, his initial joy and pleasure lost in exhaustion and hurtful memories, and realized that he had aged not five years but a lifetime.

Before her sat an old man who had seen and faced the very worst and now had to remember and live with it for the rest of his life; and the fact that he was only twenty-five years old was absolutely irrelevant.

He had lost innocence, he had lost faith in human nature, he had lost trust and to a degree he had lost happiness. And what, she wondered, gazing into the fire with him, and trying to imagine what he saw there, had he found?

Julian turned to her and smiled suddenly; aware, as he always had been, of the drift of her thoughts. ‘It’s all right, Mother, I’m not going to crack up on you. You mustn’t worry about me. It’s not all been bad.’

‘Hasn’t it?’

‘No. A lot of it has been good.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, the loyalty, the friendship. And seeing the sheer power of people’s courage. People were so brave. They risked not just death, that was the easy option; they risked terrible things: prison, torture, the capture of their families. But they went on. It was extraordinary.’

‘It’s a powerful thing, hope,’ said Letitia. Her eyes were bright with tears.

‘Yes, it is. So powerful that it worked. In the end. But it was a long time. And we couldn’t forget, any of us, ever.’

‘Will you go back, will you see any of them again?’

‘I don’t know. I might. It’s hard to know. Nothing would be the same. After being so close, knowing such trust, such – well, love I suppose. Could you go back just on an idle visit? I don’t think so.’

‘Maybe not.’ She was silent. ‘Where did you live? How did you live?’

‘Oh, all kinds of places. All over Northern France. With Amelie Dessange, I told you about her, for a long time. I stayed on a farm for a while, labouring, towards the end. I lived rough for a while, as you know. Most recently I was further up the coast, quite near Deauville, lodging with a funny old chap. You’d have liked him. He was a chemist. Still is, of course. He escaped. God knows how. Only one in his family who did.’ He was quiet suddenly, his jaw tightening; he took a gulp of whisky and then looked at her and tried to smile.

‘Knowing him was very good for me. It’s given me lots of ideas. In fact I know what I want to do now. With my life, I mean.’

‘What, my darling?’ said Letitia, turning the evening determinedly back into a positive occasion. ‘Tell me. I’ve thought about it so much, I do hope it’s not a career in the Foreign Office. Or the army.’

‘God forbid,’ said Julian, ‘they both require a degree of self-abnegation, and I’ve had quite enough of that. No, I want to go into the pharmaceutical business. And possibly cosmetics.’

‘Julian, darling,’ said Letitia, half amused, half astonished, ‘whatever gave you that idea?’

‘Oh,’ said Julian, his eyes dancing, enjoying her slight unease with the situation and this rather unmasculine notion. ‘This old boy. I worked in his lab with him quite a lot. You know I loved chemistry at school. I’d have read it at Oxford if the war hadn’t happened.’

‘Do you think you’ll ever want to go now?’ said Letitia. ‘They said they’d keep your place.’

‘No. Fooling around with a lot of kids. Couldn’t possibly.’

‘It’s a pity in a way.’

‘So are lots of things.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, anyway, you’d be surprised what I learnt. I can make all kinds of things. A jolly good cough mixture. A sleeping draught. Anti-inflammatory medicine. All sorts. And then I started fiddling around with creams and lotions and that sort of thing.’

‘Do you mean skin creams?’

‘Yes.’

‘Darling,’ said Letitia, patting his hand, ‘I’d sell my soul for something like that. All you can buy now is Pond’s Cold Cream. Too awful. You didn’t bring any of your creams back with you, did you?’

‘Fraid not. But I have got the formulas. And when I’ve settled down a bit I thought I’d fix up some sort of lab in one of the outhouses and play about a bit. It’s fascinating stuff, Mother. I know it’s an odd thing to bring back with you from the war, but there it is. I think I could make a business of it. It must be better than an addiction to pornography, or the burning desire to write a manual on fifty-five new ways to kill a man. So many of the chaps got bitter and defeated.’

‘Weren’t you afraid of that?’ said Letitia.

‘No, not at all. I knew I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t allow it.’

It was an extraordinarily revealing remark. Letitia took it in, put it temporarily aside, and then turned back to the future.

‘I love the idea, Julian, but how are you going to get started? It’s not a world that either of us knows a lot about.’

‘No,’ said Julian, accepting her involvement without question, ‘but we can learn. Would you like to help?’

‘Of course I would. I’d love to. But I haven’t got any money. Not on the scale you’d need, anyway. And James certainly hasn’t. It’s no use looking here for backing. And I can’t imagine there will be any about for quite a long while.’

‘I didn’t mean money. You can always find money if you’ve got ideas. And I’ve got lots. And anyway there’s going to be a big boom in a year or two, you see. People will be spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Or rather there was no yesterday. To annihilate. To forget.’ Another silence. ‘So I do think it’s an excellent time. Both to raise money and to start new ventures. And I really would appreciate your help. I know you’d be very good at it all. Where are you going?’

‘To get a bottle of wine. To toast your future.’

‘Our future,’ said Julian firmly. ‘Our company.’

He was right: there was a boom. But it was a little longer coming than he had anticipated. The first two years after the war were almost as austere as the preceding five. Companies were manufacturing as fast as they could but the Attlee
Government was obsessed with economic recovery and everything worth having was being exported. One of the more enraging sights of 1946 was a windowful of desirable things bearing the message ‘for export only’. Everything the heart and indeed the stomach could desire was still rationed; and without the patriotic fervour of war to ease the pangs, people were growing immensely irritable.

One night James Morell, who had become increasingly estranged from his brother, came in from the farm, sat down and ate his supper without a word, and then, taking a deep breath, announced that he would like Julian to move out of Maltings; he was planning on getting married, he said, and sharing a home with anyone, however agreeable, was not a good beginning to any marriage. The house was his, he ran the farm, Julian had been talking for months about how he was going to start his own business; it was time, James felt, that he went and got on with it. He had some money, after all; James was tired of supporting him.

Julian, first amused, became irritable; his outrage increased when Letitia took James’ side and said she quite agreed, that he should go, and that she had no intention of encroaching on James’ marital status either.

‘We shall go to London together, and start a new life,’ she said, somewhat dramatically, adding that James was perfectly right in his view, that Julian had been talking about his plans for quite long enough and that it was time he put them into practice.

‘It’s all very well,’ said Julian, reeling slightly at this double onslaught, ‘but I don’t have any money, I can’t get a house in London. Or start a business. There’s no money to be had anywhere.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Letitia, ‘have you not heard of the mortgage? And you have some money your father left you. You said yourself only the other day that it was melting away, as if that fact had nothing to do with you. Very silly. I’ve thought so for a long time. And anyway, I’ve got a little money. We’ll manage.’

James, relieved that the interview with his mother and brother had been less embarrassing and painful than he had
feared, said he thought he would go and visit Caroline Reever Smith, the noisily good-natured object of his affections, and hurriedly left; Julian looked at Letitia over the supper table a trifle darkly.

‘Thanks for your support,’ he said. ‘I hope you realize you’ve just talked us out of a home.’

‘Oh, Julian, don’t be so ridiculous. You sound like a spoilt child. Of course I haven’t. Where is your spirit of adventure? I’ve talked us into a new one. It’ll be the greatest fun. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a long time, as a matter of fact. Now, I think we should live in Chelsea. In fact I don’t want to contemplate living anywhere else. Goodness, I can’t even begin to believe it after all these years. Just off Walton Street, I think: Harrods round the corner, Peter Jones down the road, Harvey Nichols, Woolland’s.’

‘You sound as if you’re reciting a litany,’ said Julian, laughing.

‘I am. I feel exactly like someone who’s been excommunicated, and just been allowed back into the fold.’

‘All right, I don’t care where we go. Lots of pretty girls in Chelsea anyway.’

‘Lots. Now darling, you’ve also got to think about premises. For your business. Let’s forget about starting big and waiting for the banks, and just start. All you need is something very modest, a big garage even would do for now, which you could fit out as a lab. I expect you could contract out any kind of bottling and labelling. The thing to do at this stage is get the biggest mortgage available on the house, and keep your capital for the business. You’ll find that harder to raise money for, and you’ll get a bigger tax concession on a personal mortgage than anything. Anyway, I’ll put in any money I can rake up. I’ve been meaning to sell a few shares anyway, they’re just beginning to recover nicely. Only I’ll leave it as long as I can.’