The Winter Ghosts (16 page)

I had no answer to that. It was clear she was increasingly concerned for my mental state. Perhaps she thought I was still drunk or suffering the after-effects of yesterday’s smash. Her eyes flicked away from mine for an instant, then immediately back as though there was something she did not want me to see. Too late, too slow, mocked the voice in my head. The spiteful voice I had heard so often in the sanatorium, setting me against the doctors and nurses, but had thought I had long since vanquished.

The borrowed boots were lying beneath the table. Had I kicked them off when I’d returned to the room? I could see they were pristine. No evidence that they had been worn outside, certainly not in the snow. The toes had no tell-tale stains of frost or dew. I felt the turn-ups on my trousers. They, too, were dry.

‘Look, I remember quite clearly walking to the Ostal.’ I spoke slowly, carefully placing one word in front of the other, as a drunk considers each step before taking it. ‘I followed your map to the letter. Across the square, along the passageway to the left of the church—’

‘The left? You should have gone right.’

I kept talking. ‘Well, it served me just as well in the end. I did linger a moment at the crossroads, a bit of a labyrinth in that
quartier
behind the church, as you’d warned me, but pretty soon I got my bearings—’

‘Crossroads, monsieur?’

‘—and found the Ostal with no difficulty. There was quite a crowd there, everyone dressed up for the
fête,
as you had promised, so it’s quite possible, don’t you think, that you simply missed me in the crowd.’

Her expression was beginning to alarm me. Sympathetic, but genuinely worried. I had seen such an expression before on the face of the ward sister at the sanatorium on the evening I was admitted. An inexplicable gulf, now as then, between the logic of my world and of theirs. I steamed on all the same.

‘I’m relieved to see you didn’t come to any harm in the uproar, Madame Galy. I was worried you might have been hurt.’

‘Hurt, monsieur?’

‘Fabrissa said not to worry. Part of the tradition of the
fête,
I suppose, but I don’t mind telling you, I was taken in. It looked real enough. But, of course, that was much later. Perhaps you had gone already.’ I knew I was talking too loudly and too fast, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘A pleasant chap, by the name of Guillaume Marty, took me in hand, introduced me to . . .’ I faltered, trying to recall the names. ‘Two sisters, a widow, Na Azéma . . .’

Madame Galy was silent. She had given up trying to reason with me. My confidence cracked a little more.

‘ . . . and a husband and wife by the name of Authier, yes, and so many of your other neighbours. But most of the evening I spent in the company of a charming girl.’ I hesitated, suddenly shy. ‘Fabrissa. Do you know her?’

I met Madame Galy’s stare and saw pity in her eyes. A sharp memory of Mother that day in the restaurant near Piccadilly, and the contrasting look upon her face. Not pity then, but distaste. I blinked, furious that such a worthless memory, and one of many such, still hurt me.

I tried again.

‘A most striking girl, with long dark hair worn loose. Pale complexion. The most astonishing grey eyes. You
must
know her.’

Madame Galy shifted. ‘I know no one of that name,’ she said.

‘Well. Well, maybe she came as someone’s guest?’

Before the words were out of my mouth, I knew that was unlikely. If Fabrissa had come with someone else, would she have talked to me all night? Would she have left with me?

‘Then again, she might,’ I mumbled to myself. ‘If she liked me.’

I remembered something else, proof of a kind. ‘My coat,’ I said vigorously. ‘I left it in the lobby of the Ostal. When the brawl started, in my hurry to get us away, I forgot all about it. It must still be there.’

She held her gaze steady. ‘Your coat is still hanging on the hook by the front door where I myself hung it up to dry yesterday evening.’

‘Well, someone must have brought it back for me,’ I shot back, though, in truth, the fight had gone out of me. I couldn’t make sense of things. Madame Galy’s evidence contradicted my recollection of the evening. What more could be said?

‘Fabrissa must have found it and brought it back,’ I muttered. Where was she now?

I was shivering. My feet were suddenly painful on the bare floorboards. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling my ribs beneath the thin tunic.

Madame Galy put her arm around me. ‘You should lie down, monsieur.’

‘Someone must know her,’ I said, though I allowed her to steer me off the chair and towards the bed. She turned away as I took off my trousers, then she lifted the eiderdown and I obediently climbed in. How easily I slipped back into the role of patient. Individual pockets of shiny material hemmed into tight squares of the eiderdown, the colour of nicotine. She pulled it up to my chin, patted it down. Where was Fabrissa? Fragments of our conversation were coming back to me, the awful tragedy of what had happened to her family.

‘Was there much enemy activity around here during the War?’ I asked.

If Madame Galy was surprised at this change of tack, she did not show it. I realise now, of course, she was humouring me. Like the doctors and nurses in the hospital. Rule One: do nothing to provoke or agitate the patient.

‘There was a prison camp near here for prisoners of the Germans at Le Vernet,’ she replied, ‘but it is some distance from here.’

‘I meant rather more along the lines of German units operating in the area? Unofficial action.’

She leaned across me to fuss at the counterpane. Busy, busy hands.

‘We lost many of our young men fighting in the north. Monsieur Galy and I . . .’ She stopped and, for a moment, before she managed to mask it, raw pain flared in her eyes. To my shame, I did not press her. It was only later I learned what had happened to her. To her family.

‘No rogue units?’

‘No, monsieur. There was no fighting here.’

I sank back against the bolster. Fabrissa’s descriptions of the raid on the village, how they’d all fled into the mountains. Her brother. These were real experiences, vividly remembered.

‘So Nulle itself never came under attack? No raid, no evacuation, nothing?’

‘No.’

Had I misunderstood? It was possible, certainly. Was it also possible that I had blurred Fabrissa’s story with my own? Again, I supposed it was. I closed my eyes. Was I a man who could tell true from false? That’s what Fabrissa asked me last evening. Then, I had been sure. But now? Now I was no longer certain the question had even been asked.

‘But it is such a sad place,’ I heard myself saying. ‘When I arrived, I felt there was something, some shadow hanging over the village.’

Madame Galy stopped her housekeeping.

‘It was different in the Ostal last night,’ I continued. ‘There - at least, until the trouble started - everyone seemed in good spirits.’

As if a switch had been flicked, she resumed her fussing. Still she said nothing. She replaced the chair in its position at the table and hung my trousers over the clothes horse.

‘Is there anything else you need, monsieur?’

There was nothing I could think of. But I realised I wished she would stay. Her presence was comforting.

‘I’m sorry to be such a bother . . .’

‘I am happy to do it, monsieur.’ She picked up the empty liqueur bottle and glass and put them on the tray. ‘I will look in on you in an hour or so,’ she said. ‘Now you should sleep.’

I was tired, so very tired. Perhaps the sleeping draught she had given me was beginning to take effect.

‘When you feel strong enough, Michel Breillac, who knows something of motor cars, is at your disposal. He will help.’

‘Thank you,’ I murmured, but she had already gone, leaving the door ajar. I listened to the clump of her
sabots
retreating along the passageway and down the stairs. The sound was strangely comforting, ordinary. I lay back against the pillows.

Except for George, the idea of love to me always before seemed a question of submission. Of giving in to some powerful emotion, of losing control. Now love seemed a natural thing, something one did not even need to remark upon, like breathing or raising one’s face to the sun on a summer’s day.

Fabrissa . . . Like a children’s nursery rhyme, her name going round and round in my head. Fabrissa. The word spinning and spiralling and winding my nerves tighter and tighter.

‘Where are you?’

I realised I’d spoken it out loud, though it did not matter. There was no one there to hear me.

‘I will find you,’ I murmured, slipping into sleep with her name still on my lips.

I slept all of that day and into the evening. Or rather, I drifted in and out of a twilight state. I was aware of comings and goings, shapes, blurred faces, the sound of kindling and a striking match, the maid laying a fire.

I woke fully only twice. First, when Madame Galy placed a bowl of soup and bread beside the bed and waited until I had eaten it all. The second time, when she returned to administer a second draught of the bitter white medicine. Some kind of traditional remedy? I never knew and hardly cared.

‘What time is it?’

‘Late,’ she replied, placing a cool hand on my forehead. Why she should take so much trouble over a stranger, I did not think to ask. She felt some kind of responsibility to me, I could see, as a guest in her establishment. Even so, this was over and above the call of duty.

But Madame Galy’s maternal ministrations were not enough to stop the fever from taking hold. Some time in the evening, my temperature began to rise dangerously. Every muscle, every sinew flexed and tried to fight it, but my natural defences were too weak and I was powerless to do anything other than hope to ride the fever out.

My skin was alternately burning and clammy with sweat. I tossed and turned in the bed, like flotsam on a storm-wracked sea, plagued by dreams and delusions. Angels and gargoyles, ghostly apparitions, long-since deserted friends waltzed in and out of my head, to the sounds of a fairground carousel, then
Für Elise
, then a ragtime step.

For hours, so Madame Galy later told me, things hung in the balance as my temperature climbed higher and higher. Certainly, I oscillated between beauty and horror. A skeletal hand pushing up from beneath freshly turned earth, blossom dying on the bough. The backs of my parents’ heads, impassive and deaf to my need for them to love me. George smiling at me, in the orchard and by the stream, but then stepping just out of reach and turning away when I called out to him. Barbed wire and mud and blood, chlorine gas, a world of unimaginable pain.

The fever broke at about three o’clock in the morning. I felt it slink away like a mongrel with its tail between its legs. My temperature dropped. I stopped shaking and my skin, sticky with fever, returned to normal. For the first time in hours, I found myself surrounded by the reassuringly mundane features of the everyday world. A chair, my trousers draped over a clothes horse, a table, the last lick of flames in the grate and Madame Galy snoring quietly on the chair beside me. Wisps of grey hair had worked their way loose from her severe plait, and I caught a glimpse of the pretty girl she once had been. I could think of no occasion when my own mother had taken such care of me. Without waking her, I reached out my hand and laid it briefly over hers.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

Then a kind of peace fell over the room. In the still and sleeping house, I could hear the whirring and chiming of the clock in the hall downstairs. I placed my arms above the counterpane, a stone knight on a tomb, and turned to the window. I wondered if Fabrissa looked out into the same night. I wondered if she might have come to enquire after me. I had set at her feet what little of myself I had to give, ragged fragments, and yet hoped that she might love me. Had it scared her off? Was she lying awake now in the dark, thinking of me as I thought of her?

A ribbon of moonlight made its way between the shutters and painted a line across the floor. I watched the moonbeams dance, slowly shift, as the hours passed and the world continued to turn. I thought of what I would say to her when I found her. Of the beauty of small things. Of the way a bird takes flight, its wings beating on the air. Of the blue flowers of the flax blossom in summer and a parish church decorated by plough and corn at harvest time. Of notes climbing a chromatic scale. Of the possibility of love.

Later, I fell asleep. And this time, when I slept, I did so without dreaming.