The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  Jocelyne Berlet lived no more than an hour from here. On the drive here I had told Gwen about her. Maybe we could pay her a visit tomorrow, I had said. But what if she told us that a one-armed man had been questioned at the time? I had never felt that I bore a grudge against Duncan Winterfinch, not even here. It was as though something exonerated him. I began to plan the onward trip, towards Le Crotoy, to the doctor’s office where I had been found.

  Gwen was still sleeping when I came back, and I thought about Shetland, the evening we got drunk in Captain Flint’s and checked in at the Solheim Guest House. The snickering, the groping on the stairs before we slipped inside our room, locked the door and undressed each other in the hazy light seeping through the curtains.

  The same light surrounded her now, this night, in room 8 in Hôtel de la Basilique, her skin tinted by a yellowish shimmer. I lay on the sofa, slept with the old excitement and the old separation from the first nights on Shetland. The hotel room had become Haaf Gruney and Quercus Hall, with the floor an unsteady sea between us.

  I woke to her sobbing. She sat in her bathrobe, holding the photographs I had hidden from her.

  “Why didn’t you show me these,” she said tonelessly, as though talking to the floorboards.

  My suitcase was empty. Shirts hung in the wardrobe, trousers were neatly folded on the shelves.

  “I photographed his war map in Quercus Hall,” I said. “At the time I wasn’t sure if . . . I didn’t know whether you had other plans.”

  But she was staring at the picture of me and the toy dog.

  “You’re the one with another plan,” she said. “I couldn’t care less that you took photographs without my knowing. But you’ve never shown me these.”

  “What about you? Can’t you just admit that you’ve been here before, that you have a summer house here?”

  She seemed not to hear, she couldn’t tear herself away from the photograph. “I don’t know what happened to your parents,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  “Please, just answer me,” I said. “Do you have a house here?”

  “A house?” she mumbled.

  “Einar wrote about it in one of his letters.”

  “Nonsense.” She shook her head. “There was no summer house.”

  I pulled on some clothes. She did not move. “What is it about that photograph?” I said, buckling my belt.

  She opened a drawer in the chest and rummaged amongst the cut-glass perfume bottles and eyeshadow, stuffing items into her Judith Leiber make-up bag. Slamming the drawer shut, she came towards me in a cloud of anger and Elizabeth Arden night cream, shoved me against the wall and slapped me.

  “Let me tell you one thing, Edward. Up there on the farm, going about in your grandmother’s old work clothes, that was the best time of my life. Our potato lefse with that strange brown cheese was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

  I crumbled, put my head in my hands. I cursed myself for not having told her everything. The weeks at Hirifjell had been real for me too. I went to stroke her hair. She shook me off, pulled out a cigarette. Ran her nail along the paper, pulled it slowly apart until the tobacco formed a pyramid in her hand. She opened the window and blew it all outside.

  “Promise me one thing,” she said, fixing me in the mirror. “That you never go into those woods.”

  I stared out of the window. Gwen kissed me on the forehead and said: “Go for a stroll, mon chéri. Go down to the Ancre and smoke a Gauloise. Do something dramatic. Summon the rain and the storm. And leave me alone.”

  *

  The questioning look of the receptionist. The yellow autumnal leaves which flew about in the wind and pressed at the windows.

  The bed was made, the sheets tight. On the desk were the photographs. An empty pack of Craven A. Over the back of the chair was Duncan Winterfinch’s suit jacket.

  She had left a letter.

  Edward, I’m going home to Unst. Don’t visit me. I’ve decided to put Haaf Gruney up for sale, to pay for the upkeep of Quercus Hall. Please spare us both any protest.

  Make sure you get home too. Keep Grandfather’s jacket, as a memento. Of the summer when we were forever young.

  Gwen

  I sat on the bed, expecting an emotion which did not come. I wanted heartbreak, sudden, wild heartbreak. The urge to race to the train station as fast as I could, look desperately for her there, shout her name so it echoed along the platforms.

  But it was like the longing for Mamma, when I wondered if I missed her as a son should. I witnessed my own sorrow for Gwen and asked myself if it was real. I sat alone in the hotel room and contemplated the emptiness; her suitcases had gone, her perfume still detectable in the air. But the urge was empty, the longing was false.

  Perhaps because I knew it was not over.

  She had left behind quite the gift, had Gwen: the question of why she had left.

  Could the hidden photographs really have tipped her over the edge? Or had she used my secretiveness as an excuse to turn the tables, so I would not follow her?

  I studied the pictures again, wondering if I had overlooked anything. Had something revealed to her where the walnut was? But there were no gloomy woods, no unfamiliar storage buildings. Just a family on a road trip, at lay-bys, on motorways. And that one picture, covered with Gwen’s fingerprints and handcream. Me and the toy dog in front of a brick wall.

  What was I not seeing?

  8

  BEHIND THE STEAMED-UP GLASS OF THE GREENHOUSE I glimpsed movement. A figure amongst the plants, stopping every now and then, doing something I could not see. Only for a moment, when a drop of water gathered and ran down the glass, could I see her clearly.

  Retired police officer Jocelyne Berlet.

  As I approached the greenhouse I saw her blurry movements pause and she pushed open the door. She had the tall, slender build of a long-distance runner and made no effort to conceal her age. Streaks of grey hair were pulled into a simple bun at the back. The wrinkles around her eyes were deep and well defined, but otherwise she looked almost the same as in the newspaper photograph.

  Jocelyne Berlet sized me up. The woman who had let me out of her arms and into life seemed to be asking herself if she could have done more for me.

  “For many years I wondered whether I would recognise you,” she said in French.

  “And do you?” I said.

  She studied me closely, not noticing that I had neglected to use the formal vous. Nodding briefly she said, “Yes. Your mouth and your nose. It’s so strange to see you again.”

  I felt uneasy.

  “How is your French?” she said. “Or should we speak English?”

  “Preferably English. Even though I know some French from when I was little.”

  I bit my lip. Perhaps I had chosen the wrong words, said them in a way that betrayed my errand.

  “Your French is still good,” she said, and her English was more broken than my French. The humid air of the greenhouse wafted out. She kept long rows of vegetables and several roses inside. Air vents in the roof were regulated by an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys, and when she opened them a little, she did not seem completely satisfied and closed two again. I sensed similar minute adjustments taking place inside Jocelyne Berlet, a calibration of how much fresh air she could allow to enter an old story without its most delicate shoots wilting away.

  “Let’s go up to the flat,” she said. She undid her apron and rinsed some rose shears in a water butt, pushed the steel into a bucket of sand and pulled them out again, shining and clean.

  I looked into the bucket curiously. She switched back to French.

  “Normal sand,” she said. “With used motor oil mixed in. The sand scrapes off the dirt, the oil keeps the steel from rusting.”

  In the narrow dark entrance to her flat she hung my tweed jacket on a clothes hanger and I wondered if she noticed the label. If her years as a police officer allowed her to spot that the jacket had been owned by someone else.

  “Let’
s sit in the kitchen,” she said. “This is not a story for comfortable furniture. In fact, I don’t own any comfortable furniture.”

  *

  “What I know for sure,” said Berlet, “is that your parents died at around six o’clock in the morning. The alarm was raised by a man who had been out carp fishing. He was on the far shore, a long way across, and there was thick shrubbery, but he was still a reliable witness. The best you could hope for.”

  I shook my head, perplexed.

  “Because carp fishing involves patience and observation. You sit in complete silence. At around 6 a.m. he heard someone shouting, and saw a figure in a red jacket running towards the water. At first he thought they were other fishermen, someone jumping in to help reel in a big fish, but then it all went strangely quiet. He thought to himself: What do you do when you have a fish in your net? Either you take it ashore, or you try to catch another one. But the fishermen on the other side had disappeared. As if they had become invisible. The witness stood up and thought he could make out something red floating in the water.”

  The fisherman had then cycled home and called the police. I was finding it painful to listen to. She retold the story calmly, broke into French now and again, but always returned to English.

  “And then . . .” I said in French, “you went into the woods?”

  “Not immediately. According to what he told me, I found the place on the map and was rather surprised. It was a fenced-off wood, full of unexploded shells. So another officer and I took the inflatable police raft down to the fishing spot and rowed across.”

  “Were there no barricades?” I said. “A barbed-wire fence?”

  “Here and there, but in poor condition. After the accident a new one was put up, much higher, but even today you would be amazed at how poorly secured the woods of the Somme are. We French are satisfied with a warning sign. But that’s no help if you can’t read it.”

  She scratched her arm.

  “Who was wearing the red jacket?” I said after an uncomfortable pause.

  “Your mother,” Berlet said quickly. “It was a kind of anorak. Your father was dressed in dark blue. He was a little more difficult to find.”

  She stared at me, assessed me as Bestefar had assessed frayed rope.

  “Eventually we got them back across on the raft. We thought they must have stepped on a shell and were surprised to see they had not been wounded. Not a scratch. Tracks in the grass led to the spot where they had been found, it was as though they had run into the water and forced themselves under, in order to drown.”

  “The gas,” I mumbled. “Le gaz.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Gas shells. Wasn’t it a gas shell . . .?”

  Her index finger traced an invisible pattern on the table. “Yes, but we didn’t discover that until much later, during the autopsy. There was a foreign substance in their lungs. Not mustard gas or phosphine, but a combination which the chemists had difficulty identifying.”

  “The fisherman didn’t see anyone else?” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. But the thicket was very dense. You’ve probably been wondering this your entire life, and it was the first thing I asked myself too: What were they doing in the woods? We weren’t given permission to go in. We had to wait for the military, who arrived a few hours later. By then I had raised the alarm. Obviously we had spent the intervening time searching the surrounding area, and we found a car which we thought might be of interest to the investigation.”

  “A Mercedes?”

  “Indeed. A black one. On a dirt track not far away. Norwegian number plates. The bonnet was cold, so either it had been there for some time or it had not driven far. I gave the order to break in.”

  Bestefar’s words echoed inside me. Someone wanted to get in once, he had told me many years earlier when I asked why the Star had rusted scratches around the lock on the boot.

  “What I found,” said Berlet, “sent a shock through me. Toys and children’s clothing. A small blue rain jacket. We found their names on some ferry tickets. Three passengers. We posted volunteers outside the woods, closed off the roads so the sound of passing cars wouldn’t drown out the cries of a child. But because of the situation our primary theory was – I hope you can forgive me – that you too had drowned. While waiting for the sappers we took out more boats and searched for you on the surrounding land. And we kept wondering what possible errand they could have been on.”

  “Did you find our footprints?” I said.

  “Yes, tracks from the car into the woods. I remember now that we partly contravened the order not to enter; we sent in a police Alsatian, which had your scent from your clothes. But the poor dog stepped onto the remains of a shell and had its hind legs blown off. It was put down immediately. We needed specially trained dogs, and until they arrived, there was absolutely nothing we could do. It was terrible, because we feared you too would step on a shell. The sappers wore gas masks when they went in.”

  “Did they find a toy dog in there?” I said, before realising how stupid it sounded.

  “A toy dog?”

  “Yes, a wooden one,” I said, and thought about the poor Alsatian. “I think I had it with me, but it’s gone.”

  She needed a few seconds to digest my surprising concern. “I imagine the search team would have found it,” she said. “That is, if it didn’t fall into the water. But only the carp can tell us that.”

  *

  For someone living alone, Jocelyne Berlet had a remarkable number of photograph albums. They were stored on two shelves above her small television, visible from where we sat at the kitchen table. On the telephone she had told me that she stopped working for the police in 1975. What she had not told me in our brief conversation was that she had worked at an adoption agency after that. The reasons were so obvious neither of us needed to mention them. But I assumed I was in her very first album, one she stored in her memory.

  Within me there was an album that was just as thick. The story of a master cabinetmaker and a one-armed timber merchant. I had a growing desire to tell her everything, but would she actually want to know? I did not want to be a key witness who arrived twenty years too late for a woman who had done the best she could. For her, peace had descended over the case, just as peace had descended for the adopted children in her albums. She followed their fates to a new home before turning away, for everyone’s sake.

  Because she never asked what else I knew. She told me what she knew, but with no renewed curiosity. Yet another person who let the past remain in the past. It has to be Einar’s drive, his determination that lives within me, I thought, this urge to complete a race even though everyone around you is dead.

  On the worktop there were fresh tulips in a glass vase, I recognised them from the top shelf of the greenhouse. She set them down between us. “I haven’t even offered you something to drink,” she said, opening a spartan kitchen cupboard. “Would you like some tea?”

  She filled a scratched-up kettle and continued: “We were able to track their movements. They stayed at Hôtel de la Basilique and ate lunch at the Auberge. The restaurant was quite busy; a busload of American military cadets were on an expedition. A table had been reserved for three adults and one child. But the fourth guest never arrived. The staff thought they had seen a man approach the table, he seemed to be upset about something, but the waiter had been too busy to give a decent description. Then they ordered their food, asked to reserve a table for the following day too, and the fourth place setting was cleared away. That same evening the hotel receptionist saw them come in. It was late, and your mother was apparently terse and ill-tempered. You had fallen asleep, and your father carried you upstairs. Everything suggested that they were going to settle in for the night. But then at some point the night staff, half-asleep, put a call through to your room.

  “Someone called in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes. This opened up a number of possibilities. Such as them agreeing to meet someone in the woods
.”

  “Did you find out who phoned?”

  “No, only that it was a man speaking French. It was a strange time to call. We even asked ourselves whether it could be someone from Quebec who had forgotten about the time difference, but we thought that unlikely. The night clerk hung up, but then a guest from a neighbouring room called to complain about a child crying. The clerk got dressed and went along the corridor. Everything was quiet. So either you had gone out in the interim, or you had fallen asleep again.”

  I pulled myself together and said: “Which room were we in? I’m staying at the same hotel.”

  Jocelyne Berlet studied me for a long time before slowly shaking her head. “I don’t remember. Unfortunately. But there are maybe only ten rooms there, so the chances are . . . well, in any case, we found their clothes and luggage inside. There was no indication of a hurried departure. The toothbrushes were in the glasses, the beds were tidy, the clothes neatly arranged. The room had been booked for four days, and the staff wondered why the three of you didn’t come down to breakfast.”

  *

  Back home at Hirifjell I had my preferred grounding points. The conservatory, where I would sit facing the spruce trees at the edge of the woods and the lone pine with the magpie nest. A good place to be when I needed to think. In the classroom it was a wall chart, one that was never rolled down but hung between the world map and the map of Norway, yellowed from the sun streaming through the windows during the summer holidays.

  Jocelyne Berlet had a similar point in the form of a junction in the water pipes on the kitchen wall. It was close to the floor, just above the skirting board. I got the sense that she was used to sitting here like this, her hands folded around her left knee, while her reasoning flowed freely. She thought for a long time before loosening her grip on her knee and her eyes wandered back from the pipes.