The Avignon Quintet (113 page)

“Why do you show this to me?” she asked, genuinely curious, and he shook his head as he took back the document and replaced it in his briefcase. “Do you think it is a fake?” This made her angry and she said, “Please go now! You have no right to question me.” He nodded sadly and said, “Very well. Then, my message is that your sister wants to see you if you can tomorrow at four at Montfavet. May I say you will come?”

“Of course I will.”

His heels snapped, he saluted, and went through the door into the garden without another word. Constance sank down in her chair and tried to master her surprise at this extraordinary visit.

She heard the car doors close and the motor start as it slid away down the slope towards the town. At the same moment there came a scuffle of footsteps upon the garden path and Blaise burst into the house with a shotgun under his arm, white with apprehension. “I thought they had come to arrest you,” he gasped, mixing anxiety with relief, “and I was ready to
les descendre tous les deux”
. This was stupid behaviour and she cried, “For God’s sake put the gun away!”

“Have they gone, then?” he said, looking wildly round as if to despatch a couple of hidden Germans lurking in the shadows of the kitchen. “Yes. Gone!” He expelled his breath in a swish of relief. Then in a typical peasant gesture he took a handful of salt from the bowl on the table and scattered it in the fire where it sparked off in blue points.
“Malédiction!”
he exclaimed – it served as an anathema on the departed Boche. “Sit down, Blaise,” she said, and made him a sage tea while she told him the news – namely that Livia was indeed there and that on the morrow they would meet. It gave her a strange feeling of tremulousness as she did so. After so long, and in such a weird context. She went to bed early that night but slept badly, and was glad when day broke with its wide, wind-washed skies which presaged a day of sunny calm without wind, welcome respite after a heavy spell of mistral.

She despatched her routine duties on the next day with a perfunctory impatience, feeling that time was gnawing at her, and at last after lunch took the duty car and aimed it in the direction of Montfavet, circling the ancient walls of the town, and slowing down only for the two military checkpoints where, however, she was waved through because of the pennants on her car. The deep woods, the narrow roads came into play at once, so that within a few minutes she found herself lost in the snowy country; there was ice on some of the small saddleback bridges, and while some streams were frozen others foamed and gurgled and overleapt their narrow banks. It was like a landscape around Oxford which she remembered with a special affection because of a youthful love affair which a special kind of tenderness on the part of an undergraduate had rendered memorable. It was something one could not go back on. Now the deep woods sprang up on every side, and presently the car turned sharply and sidled into the little square planted with planes outside the little grey church, the place of rendezvous. She had switched off the engine to idle across the grass verges and come to rest at the main door of the church, which stood open. She saw nobody for the moment so that she entered the church formally dipping her fingers in the holy water stoup and signing herself. Then she saw Smirgel; he was sitting in the small side chapel on the left-hand side underneath a large, bland painting, and he was making notes in a loose-leaf folder. He looked up with a start, as if surprised to see her there. Constance looked equally at a loss. “She is outside, in the square, she is waiting for you,” he added. Constance turned back and passed from the gloom of the church to the square lit by the bleak afternoon sunglow. Sure enough, standing upright in a somewhat military attitude at the far end under the planes, stood a figure in a field-grey uniform with a nurse’s badge. She did not really recognise her but she advanced with a certain tremulous care, as if she were a bird, so as not to frighten her away, saying, “Livvie, dear! Is it really you?” The nurse appeared to regard her for she nodded, yet she kept her face in half-profile, turned away towards the ivy-covered wall which lined the church precincts. In a hoarse voice she answered, “Yes,” and then, motioning Constance towards her, like Hamlet’s ghost, as if she had something to impart, she said, “Constance, come here.” And with that she sat down upon a stone seat and still keeping her face averted went on, “I could not get in touch before, partly not to compromise you – I did not know what you were doing: partly because …” Here a sort of hard misery took possession of her and abolished the end of the phrase. In anyone less harsh of tone it would have seemed the equivalent of a sob – an uprush of anguish. In her it just sounded unqualifiably hard, like the cinders of old emotions.

“I came here to help get the truth out of Quatrefages,” she said. “But I have failed, and he has turned the tables on me.”

“Livvie,” said her sister, “why are you turned away like this, why don’t you look at me?”

“I’ve lost an eye,” said Livia laconically. And then continued to speak in a hollow resonant voice and with apparent indifference, asking for news of Blanford and Hilary. When she heard of Blanford’s grievous wound she bowed her head briefly, but said nothing. “And Sam?” she said with a sharpened note of interrogation. Constance drew a breath and answered, “Sam is dead, killed in action.” And as she said so it became for the first time a fact. Sam died now as a reality, as the figment she had been carrying around inside her like an un-aborted child. “Sam dead?” said Livia in the same harsh tone. “Ha!” as if she could not quite believe it. Constance said clearly, “Sam is dead, Livvie. Sam is dead.”

It was astonishing to feel a sort of relief in the depths of the statement, yet it was truly a relief suddenly to feel the ghost of Sam recede, diminish, and then all but disappear – at least to reduce itself to something of quite manageable proportions. It made her ashamed, this unexpected trick of the emotions. What a trickster life was, and how merciless to our self-respect. It was almost as if the open statement had all at once revealed a hollowness in the very calibre of her pain, had shown it up as, if not a sham, at least as something exaggerated.

“Well, that’s that,” cried Livia in her harsh corncrake’s tone. “You will have to lump it, that’s all.”

But with the new sense of liberation brought by this confession Constance was also suddenly feeling the weight of her experiences here in the city. As if she had been unaware of her own fatigue. But Livia was talking now, still with the averted face, still out of the side of her mouth. “I have been up to the house once or twice, but I did not wish to embarrass you – I can imagine your job must need tact. Meanwhile I felt I must talk to you quite urgently if only to say goodbye and to tell you that Quatrefages has turned the tables on me, he has denounced us all as Jews. Smirgel is trying to keep this from the Gestapo but it can only be a matter of time before I am recalled. Perhaps suddenly in a few days.”

“What rubbish,” said Constance. “Surely you can tell them the truth?”

“I became a German subject, unlike you.”

“But it’s preposterous. I shall go and tell them that we are English, if you won’t.”

“I should wait until something happens before doing such a thing. Besides, you are technically Swiss, remember? They would not believe you more than me!”

“I shall ask to see the General,” said Constance with an angry self righteousness. “I shall talk to him.”

Livia shook her head and sighed as she said, “Things are in such a tangle that one could expect anything. I just tell you to warn you, but I ask you not to do anything rash that might compromise me further. Are you going to see Quatrefages?”

“Should I?”

“I don’t know. Why, after all? He is pretending to be mad in order to avoid further interrogation, that is all.”

“I won’t see him,” said Constance on a sudden note of resolve, “specially if he is playing us off against the Nazis.”

Livia gave a world-weary shrug and sighed again, a pain-laden little sound. “Well, I’ll say goodbye, Constance.”

She stood up, still at the awkward half-angle to her sister, face turned away. Constance upon an impulse cried out, “Livvie, dear, do you still believe in …” she did not know quite how to phrase the question that was on her mind “… all this?” she finished rather lamely, though the comprehensive gesture of the hand was intended to encompass everything, the whole world crisis provoked by Nazism. Livia started to move off towards the trees, though she took the time to answer, “Yes. More than ever!” and there was nothing in her tone to belie her response. But she moved away towards the trees with ever-sharpening stride. Constance stopped with vexation which was at once swallowed by compassion for her sister, and she hurried after her saying, “Livia, wait! When shall we meet again?” To this however Livia had no response, and as the distance between them increased it was clear that there was not going to be one. Constance stood and watched the tall figure losing itself among the trees.

She turned back into the dark church to where Smirgel sat, absorbed in the notes he was making. He made room for her in the pew but she preferred to remain standing as she said, “Can’t you do
anything
to help Livia? You know the real truth about us all, after all.” He smiled his slow, obsequious smile. “The unlucky thing is that the information was confided to the Gestapo, not to my department, hence the concern. However it is too early to worry. If anything happens I will come and seek your advice, if I may.”

“I thought of seeing the General,” she said, for the idea still worked upon her despite all she knew about divided commands and internal rivalries among the occupying forces. Smirgel threw up his hands. “The General!” he said on a note of mocking commiseration. “He is so weighed down by his new command that he can think of nothing else. Since now the possibilities of a second front are beginning to take shape, Avignon becomes a very important strategic point to group both material and reserves. Wait and see in a few weeks.” Vaguely she had followed some of the gossip about a second front, and a possible attack upon the French Riviera coast, which would cut off the German armies in both Italy and Africa. But she thought this was simply part of the propaganda war, not something serious. It was disconcerting, yet heartening, to find that the Nazis were giving credence to such ideas. “Von Esslin is in heaven,” went on Smirgel. “He was pining for Russia and feeling he had been overlooked; now his command is of supreme importance and he has a whole new staff on his back. I don’t believe that he would have time for you, even if he wanted to see you.”

“We’ll see. I must reflect.”

Nor was his somewhat cynical judgement (his frankness astonished Constance) so far off the mark, for Von Esslin, after a long period of apparent neglect, during which the whole region appeared to have been earmarked simply as a back area for convalescents from the Russian fronts, suddenly found himself centre stage with a vastly increased responsibility carrying all the possibilities of professional advancement with it. The change in accent was electrifyingly sudden – fruit of some new propaganda suggestions about a Second Front – and all of a sudden he was having support troops and tank companies wished upon him in quantities too large to camouflage, too numerous to house easily in this rather barren, backward land of austere towns and empty heaths. Not only that – a whole riff-raff of pioneer regiments composed of renegade Russians and Czechs and Poles had been drafted south, designated for new, unspecified labours which had as yet not been defined. All was flux and uncertainty; and meanwhile the Allies had begun to pay some attention to the bridges over the rivers. The disposition of the rivers – it was the real nightmare of Von Esslin. Often in his dreams the great operations board in the Castle Intelligence room floated into his vision: the Rhône, Durance and so on with their great speed and vexatious lateral cuts along the limestone outer skin of Provence. From the beginning of time they had been military hazards – preventing the Romans from reaching Britain, preventing Hannibal from reaching Rome, preventing … He was not sure on which side of the Rhône to keep his tanks, his precious unwieldy panzer forces, now doubled. So he kept them always in uncertain movement, crossing and withdrawing, forming and dispersing. It was wasteful in fuel. But with the new bombing patterns … The British had replaced the slovenly high-level bombardiers of the U.S. Air Force. They came low and were thorough, methodical; very little civilian damage seemed to follow in their path, but meanwhile the goods yards of the railways had begun to suffer, while bits began to fly off the precious bridges, the panzers’ lifeline. Theories of a south European landing on the Riviera were doubtless exaggerated, yet nevertheless this new phase marked everything with a new accent of uncertainty and concern. (He had received two new decorations, which was highly pleasing. His mother was delighted of course.)

But the war had slowed, was beginning to drag a little, while this heavy stockpiling in his area was rather a perplexity. He sent out to hunt for underground caves capable of being enlarged into vast ammunition depots. Of course one thing that was quite easy in such a country of calcareous limestones was to pierce the topcrust with roadmender’s tools, and seek out caverns which might suit such a purpose. But it was tedious and long, and there appeared to be no geodetic surveys of the lonely garrigues which might provide clues. Then all too easily one stumbled into underground workings of abandoned Roman mines only to find that they were full of water, possessed by some secret river, which only gave a sign of life during heavy rain, but then burst its banks, overshot its levels. Not to speak of the Rhône itself, guzzling mud as it swept down from Geneva, increasing velocity steadily until before Avignon it developed almost twelve knots of speed. The slightest level-change in this context meant all the islands and the estuary in the centre flooded, while the water snaked its way into the cellars and granaries of the medieval central quarters of the town.