The Matchmaker of Kenmare (25 page)

I kept my word. After some weeks of collecting tales about boglands and their strange and ancient treasures, back I went to watch over my friend. Autumn had sent in its first messenger—someone had started a fire somewhere, burning stubble or old wood. The smell of the smoke lifted my spirits as I stood on the pedals and toiled up the hill.

A packed suitcase waited inside the door.

“I took your postcard as a sign,” she said. “It’s all arranged.”

I sighed:
Why am I not surprised?

“If I planted a wall in your path,” I said, “you’d go through it.”

“I’m doing the right thing,” she said.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.

“I found Hans-Dieter, didn’t I?”

“But it’s only a needle and thread hanging over a map,” I said.

“You know better than that, Ben.”

“Kate, there’s a war on.”

“There was a war on then.”

Next morning, I heaved her case and hauled my bag down the reckless path to the little jetty. Bawn Buckley picked us up and we chugged off, heading for Le Crotoy. Again.

He said, “We’ll be as open as anything. We’ll be all right.”

“Good,” she said, and went to stand at the stern of the trawler, looking back at her coast.

“Do you have a name for where we’re going?”

She had a sidelong glance that could always uncover my thoughts.

“You have no faith, Ben.”

Here we go again. What is wrong with me?
Those were my thoughts, but these were my words: “What are we going to do when we get there?”

I’d asked her the previous night. Hoping to recruit the old lady into my support, I’d spoken the question in the presence of her grandmother. Any effort, I suggested, to find anybody inside the war at that time—especially an American intelligence officer who by definition must remain invisible—that must be as futile an exercise as could be imagined. Whatever her “pendulum” told her, that arena must by now, I suggested, be teeming like an anthill. And the ants had guns.

The grandmother ambushed me with a hostile jab.

“If I had to back Kate’s judgment over yours, that’d be an easy bet to win.”

When I asked later if I’d given the old lady some offense, Miss Begley said, “No,” and that was it. My guess still remained that the old lady would have agreed to any softener of her granddaughter’s loneliness.

Wednesday, 16 August 1944: What beautiful weather we had, and what turmoil I felt. Bawn Buckley exacerbated it by telling me that the two young Germans whom I’d seen coming in out of the sea had been found dead out in the countryside, in some deserted old farm near Ballydavid. Their throats had been cut, he said, but he had no further details. And I had no response in me—actually I had, but I cut it off before it began, unable to fit it into my heart.

We sailed over the deepest part of the ocean off Ireland, and I recollected
how the two young men had dragged themselves in from the waves. I wanted to contact young Bekker’s wife, see his child.

That’s what “neutral” means
, I said to myself.
It means behaving kindly to everyone
. And then I thought,
My God, you’re getting as shallow as Miss B
.

The crossing, almost devoid of other vessels, might have been that of a toy on a millpond. This time we hugged every shore again, along the two straight lines of Bawn Buckley’s navigations. The first line took us along the coast of Ireland, and then along the English coast to Newhaven, the point at which he made a right-angled turn and bisected the English Channel.

“We’re best to look like domestic sailors,” he said, “and I want a straight run at the coast of France.”

He inserted us into that flange of inlet halfway between Boulogne and Dieppe like a man sliding a cork into a bottle.

Onshore, we knew whom to ask; we knew where to go. In the little hotel at Le Crotoy, they welcomed us like heroes; nobody gossiped like the French Resistance, and they all knew about Mr. Seefeld and sang our praises.

They told us of the relief, of the sudden quiet that had descended on them. Every place, they said, the villages, the towns, had fallen silent. Yes, they were still under German occupation, but the presence seemed to have shrunk. They hadn’t seen a Nazi in a week. And they added to the silence, they said, by holding their breath.

First had come the wild rumors, because the Allied vessels had been seen by fishermen working south of Le Crotoy at dawn. Wild with excitement, they’d come rushing home into the little harbor. Miles long, they said the flotilla was, and miles wide, great and gray, spearing through the dawn like a vast and mysterious horde toward Le Havre. Some said that they feared they’d been dreaming.

I set to work with pen and notebook—I could hold such valuable witness to such a great event. And at that moment too, I understood that this calling of mine would make me safe. Miss Begley had no such protection. I asked questions, made notes, wrote them up at night. To any inquiring soldier I was a war observer.

Once I’d made it clear that I hoped to gather some sort of record, people
came to see us. As before, we stayed in the little hotel, with the lanky proprietor, and for a day and a half we listened to reminiscences.

Miss Begley and I had our own to add, specifically of the atrocity that we’d seen in the streets of Saint-Omer, and the locals made us feel that we’d shared in the war as suffered by all of France.

Here is a taste of my collecting—just a few brief examples, all from people who lived in or near Le Crotoy.

Although she listened with as much care as I did, Miss Begley had a different mission. She had two questions for every speaker: Have you heard of an American officer name of Charles Miller? And, Do you know a farmhouse between here and Saint-Omer with its back to the water? She cracked the matter when she asked about the traveling circus and, in a pattern that I know so well from country people, somebody sent for somebody else to tell us the way.

Next day, they lent us bicycles. With the roasting hot day baking our shoulders, we set out to find the farmhouse. We left Le Crotoy by a small lane, and since some of the road signs had been removed, we needed written directions.

“Why are we doing this?”

“You’ll see,” she said.

On a deserted road we came to a bridge, a flat, inglorious span across a broad neck of water. I made us stop and get off the bicycles, and I walked to one side and then the other, looking for something that I couldn’t name or define. If you travel, as I do, all around a countryside, you can’t avoid déjà vu—and sometimes it’s true. It can be an uncomfortable feeling, as it was when my search for Venetia took me on digging expeditions into woodlands and along seashores. But here? In rural France?

Miss Begley watched and said nothing. Standing beside a shattered pillar, I peered down into wide stands of reeds and sedges. If, all across my life, I could have mapped my own instincts, if I could have harnessed the unspoken in me, the barely conscious impulse that drives me to do the unusual, I’d have solved my problems a long time earlier. I had indeed been here before, without knowing where I was.

One side of the bridge bore the marks of extensive burning, and as the light refracted, I saw the metal in the stream. The British had built fighter planes smaller than I imagined, and the wingspan of this machine scarcely reached into the middle of the river.

I called Miss Begley, and we stood there looking down, in a silent requiem for the pilot.

“D’you think they found his body?” she asked.

I said, “My bet is that we’re the first to see this.”

As we lingered, another cyclist drifted onto the bridge, a woman in her fifties, gray hair cut with a sword, defensive, steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Bonjour, M’sieu-dame”
—she spoke it like a prosecutor, and was about to ride by until we pointed. She halted and looked. From her handlebar basket she took a notebook, then told us that her husband, a local coroner, would look into it.

To Miss Begley she said in the tones of a scold, “France is not yet free. Why are you here?”

Miss Begley tried to engage her in conversation. The woman said that
no French person would ever speak to a stranger again, and rode off. Miss Begley jumped on her bicycle, rode after her, and made her halt. In a conversation that seemed vigorous, the woman gestured, and Miss Begley rode back—with further and more explicit directions to the farmhouse.

Yet, we didn’t set out. Instead, Miss Begley parked her bicycle against the parapet of the bridge and began to clamber down the bank to the submerged and rusting aircraft. I followed her, under a sun that promised to roast my neck.

“Don’t look,” she said, and began to strip.

I said, “I won’t.” But then, remembering our moments in the past, I said, “What does it matter?”

She replied, “You’re right.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“If it was your brother in that plane,” she said.

And I thought,
What you mean is—“If it was my husband.”

Stark naked, she slipped into the water and disappeared. A moment later, her head bobbed up, wearing a coronet of green slimy weed.

“There’s a body in there,” she said. “I can see him.”

By now, though, she had churned up the mud, and I could no longer get a clear look at the downed plane.

“We haven’t got the strength,” I said. “Not even the two of us together,” and she agreed.

I took off my shirt and helped to towel her dry. She found a piece of calm grass and stretched out naked, saying, “The sun will finish the job.” A moment later, with eyes closed, she said, “I’m glad I couldn’t see his face.”

The farmhouse door stood wide open. We rode by and back again, and then down a lane at one side to ascertain that the building did stand with its back to the water. Nothing from the roadway suggested it, yet there
we saw it—the finger of lagoon, trees overhanging. Miss Begley’s cheeks flashed up the doll’s red spots of excitement.

We knocked and we called. I think we were timid; Miss Begley suggested that they might be asleep. As ever she got it right—a warm afternoon, just after three o’clock.

“But the door is open?” I argued.

She said, “That’s only their newfound freedom.”

We moved back and sat on the grass of their perfect little lawn. From time to time one of us would rise and knock on the door again, wait for a moment—and then return to sit on the grass.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

“Charles was in this house last week.”

“What?”

“I told you.”

I said, “But how can you be so sure?”

“The woman on the bicycle confirmed it,” she said. “She met Charles last week.”

In an hour we heard the voices and we rose, called out, and knocked on the door. Husband and wife recognized us immediately with hugs and kisses and, in the husband’s case, tears.

I had long feared for them. We sat in the same room as we had that first night, and again when we brought Herr Seefeld back. They asked about him—more kindly than I expected.

When we’d exhausted that topic, I asked about Hugo Barrive from the maquis. I did so to open a path for Miss Begley’s inquiry, which she now made.

“He was here last week—full of energy and delight.”

I asked, “Was he alone?”

Miss Begley butted in. “Was there was an American with him?”

They looked surprised. “How do you know?”

“If his name was Charles Miller—”

“We didn’t hear his name.”

“What did the American look like?”

We could have had no doubt.

“A big man,” they said.

“A scar,” they said.

“A wound healing on his neck,” they said.

“How would we go about finding him?”

They shrugged. He is with the Americans, they said, or the British, they weren’t sure. Hugo had said that they were going down to Étretat, south of Dieppe.

They invited us to stay for dinner, which in that part of France takes place around six o’clock in the evening. We ate some piquant stew. All the talk remained focused on the war—what happened to such-and-such a farm; who died and how; what became of the two Jewish families in Le Crotoy who were taken away one morning in a truck; they didn’t know. Where did the local Resistance hide the German officer that they kidnapped last year and recently handed over to the Americans? In the priest’s house, they said.

Miss Begley assisted my French as I asked if things seemed different since the Allies had invaded. Here, recorded by me, is the reply they gave interpreted by Miss Begley: