‘In fact I should very much like to meet the cook.’
The mayor sucked in his cheeks. ‘It is she who has been serving us. In the absence of her daughter, that is.’
Max raised his eyebrows. ‘I would still like to meet her.’
‘Of course. Of course. I shall arrange it immediately.’
The mayor, relieved to have something to do at last rather than simply to feel the burning gaze of his fellow countrymen on the back of his neck, bustled towards the kitchen. A crise de foie was threatening, and he knew, in consequence, that he would spend most of the rest of the afternoon prostrate on his bed with indigestion.
Damn these supercilious Germans, he muttered to himself as he threw open the kitchen door, damn them to hell. He hovered for a second on the threshold, marshalling his wits and sending up a fervent prayer that the Allies would hurry up and push on with their miserable invasion – for then, and only then, would he, and every other decent law-abiding servant of the people be able to get back to the age-old, legally enfranchised business of unobstructed free market peculation.
Jeanne Léré
The mayor’s impulsive entrance into the kitchen area coincided exactly with that of Lucie, via the back door, streaming wet, her face ashen beneath its sodden headscarf. Jeanne Léré threw up her hands in horror, ignoring the mayor completely.
‘There you are. I thought you’d never come. Where have you been all this time? And did you bring those radishes I asked for?’ Lucie’s mother began to unpin her hair, half aware, now, of the mayor, and fully aware of the effect her stretched unbundling of her hair would have on the outline of her bust. ‘The sales Boches have arrived in our town at last. I knew it would happen. I just knew they would never leave us alone. I’ve had to serve them myself. It was so humiliating. Quickly. Get changed and dry yourself off. Then you can at least help with the tidying up.’
The mayor cleared his throat apologetically. His stomach felt as if someone had packed it full of plaster of Paris, and then sluiced it through with stagnant marsh water. ‘Jeanne. He wants to see you.’
Jeanne Léré raised her chin. ‘Who does?’
The mayor’s face twitched. ‘Who do you think? The monster has taste at least. He admires your cooking. He probably wants you to explain where you got your chickens.’
‘My God!’
Lucie turned away. She had seen the familiar Kubelwagen parked outside her mother’s restaurant, and knew instinctively to whom the mayor was referring. She walked up and took a quick peek through the serving hatch, still vigorously towelling her hair. Yes. It was the same blonde officer. Talking to Jean Petrie and Hugues Limon, two of the mayor’s councillors. Both men were sitting bolt upright, with their backs to the room, as though cattle prods had been inserted through their waistcoats and up inside their shirts. In the remainder of the salle the conversation was, to say the least, subdued.
Lucie cocked her head to one side and scrutinized the German more closely. It was true: there was something curiously attractive about him, in spite of who he was and what he represented. She wondered if it had anything to do with the furtive movement he had made at the shrine when crossing himself? A soldier who still honoured the saints must have some redeeming characteristics, surely? There was no doubting he was handsome in his conventional Nordic way, with that long straight nose and that expressive mouth – different, in almost every particular, from the local men she knew and had grown up with. Perhaps he and the other soldier had been sincere after all when they had offered her a lift into town, and had not intended to rape her? She had to admit that both the man and his uniform appeared considerably less menacing in the domestic setting of her mother’s salle à manger than they had seemed in the teeth of an unexpected thunderstorm.
Jeanne Léré’s voice cut in on her thoughts. ‘I shan’t go through to see him. What would a German want with me? And we aren’t doing anything wrong. The locality provides us with all our produce. It’s not as if we’re stealing it. I pay the full black-market price, as you well know, André, on top of our legal allowance.’
‘Jeanne. For pity’s sake. Lower your voice.’ The mayor was fighting a losing battle with his crise de foie. ‘You have no choice but to go through and talk to him. As town commander he could close this place down with a snap of his bloodstained fingers.’ He bunched his handkerchief into a ball and began to mop at the back of his neck. ‘And please, please, never mention the black market again.’
‘Lucie, you go through and see what he wants. I can’t bear the thought of talking to one of those men.’ Jeanne’s mother had adopted the wheedling tone she traditionally used when a man was present. ‘I’m sure I shall lose my temper or else do something I’ll regret. You’re much better at dealing with awkward people than I am.’
‘Maman, I can’t.’
‘And why not, pray? You’ve abandoned me here to manage all by myself through lunch, force-feeding these Germans with our good French food. Why can’t you do something for me for a change, instead of spending your whole time slaving at that useless farm of your grandfather’s? Do you enjoy knifing me in the back?’
‘Jeanne, it’s you he wants to see. Not Lucie. He specifically mentioned the cook.’ The mayor, uncomfortable for the first time in his life with his position as town spokesman, also found himself in private vying with a number of other happily married men for the occasional non-culinary favours of Jeanne Léré, and this inevitably coloured the tone of voice he was able to use with her.
‘Well, Lucie cooks too. She can make anything I can. Maybe not quite as well, but nevertheless. Go on, Lucie. Do what your mother asks. Talk to him.’
Lucie threw down the towel she was using to dry her hair. ‘Very well then, I will.’
Both the mayor and her mother watched in stunned disbelief as Lucie pushed her way through the swing doors and out into the main dining room.
Max watched Lucie over the rim of his coffee cup. An elusive smile hovered across his features. For some unaccountable reason he had felt certain that he was going to see the girl again. A rationalist might have suggested that it was the fleeting mention of the cook’s daughter by the mayor which had triggered his foreknowledge, or the fact that the girl had been heading in the direction of the village when he had first encountered her, and that there were only so many places that she could have been making for. And then there was the resemblance that he had fancied he had detected between her and the woman in the kitchen. But to Max, the thing had a fated quality – an inevitability, almost – which appealed to his soldier’s innately superstitious nature. There was something about the girl which attracted him and demanded his attention.
He sprawled back in his seat and appraised Lucie as she negotiated her way through the densely packed chairs. He found himself admiring the small neat steps that she took, and the instinctively elegant way that she carried herself – the way she balanced through her waist and hips, rather than through her shoulders, as a man would. Her hair was in disarray, as though she had just finished towelling it but had not yet taken the time to brush it out and, alongside her broken nose and her youth, it gave her a feral look, as of some creature who has just come in from the wild but is still a little out of place in the new environment in which it finds herself. Her thin cotton skirt was damp from the rain and clung to the flatness of her pelvic girdle, briefly – or was he imagining it? – outlining the mound of her pubic bone as she walked.
Saliva jetted involuntarily into Max’s mouth. He forced himself to swallow, so that his voice, when he spoke, would not betray his disconcertion. ‘Ah. The cook.’
Lucie stopped in front of his table, her hand instinctively moving to shade her nose from view. After a moment’s hesitation, she self-consciously let it fall. ‘No, Monsieur. My mother is the cook. But she is feeling unwell. She has asked me to come through in her place to talk to you.’
Max knew immediately what lay behind the patronne’s recalcitrance. He felt briefly tempted to laugh, but contro
lled himself, aware that the entire room was watching his interaction with the girl with ill-concealed rapacity. There had to be some way to secure the girl’s continued presence in his life, without alerting the entire locality to his intentions.
‘Good. Good. You will do just as well as your mother for what I have in mind. I simply wish to arrange for my lunches. I shall be taking over the Bastide de Marmont as my new headquarters. You doubtless know it? It is situated just above and beyond the church. I shall be requiring lunch there every day, and would like this provided from your mother’s restaurant. Can such a thing be arranged? I shall pay whatever the going price is, of course. Occasionally, too, I will be having guests. But I shall give you good notice of this.’
Lucie swallowed. Her voice seemed to boom at her from a very long way off. She was acutely aware that the restaurant’s captive audience was hanging on her every word. ‘Will this affect our basic allowances? We cater for a set number of diners every day, and it will strain our resources beyond their limits having to feed an occupying force.’
There was a satisfied murmuring from around the salle. Max couldn’t resist smiling. She was brave, this slip of a girl, talking back to a senior German officer in front of her community. The girl’s initial indifference appeared to have dissipated, and this pleased him hugely.
‘Well, I scarcely, in myself alone, constitute an occupying force. I’m not asking that you feed my entire battle group. But some accommodation, some adjustments, may be made. Get in touch with my adjutant when the time comes and he will see to all the details. Are we agreed?’
‘We can hardly say no, can we?’ Lucie felt a rush of humiliated resentment overwhelm her, and it was only with difficulty that she prevented herself from covering her face and bursting into outraged sobs.
Max stared hard at her, a quizzical, almost bemused expression on his face. Maybe he should let her off the hook? Wash his hands of her? ‘Just this once, you can. No prejudice, I can assure you, will attach to your refusal.’
Lucie stared back at him. She was overwhelmingly aware that, thanks to her own impetuousness and for the very first time in her life, she now found herself called upon to make an individual decision that might colour everything that happened from then onwards. If she said no, that would be the end of it. She was sure of that. The German was making this clear with his whole expression.
In well-disguised panic she thought of her mother and her grandmother, and the advantages that would accrue to both the restaurant and the farm from a benign connection with the commander of the occupying forces. Then she thought of Hervé, and the disgust that he would feel at her having anything whatsoever to do with the hated Boche, who had massacred both his grandfather and her great-uncle, at Verdun, and who, when taken as a whole, were the people directly responsible for his disfigurement. Lucie’s family interests, somewhat inevitably, won.
‘If the mayor doesn’t object, then we will be glad to supply you with your lunches.’
‘The mayor doesn’t object.’
There was something about the German’s self-confidence which repelled Lucie, but which paradoxically attracted her at the same time. She had never experienced anything quite like this unsettling mixture of repulsion and attraction. She allowed her gaze to wander over the officer’s face. He had a thin, pale scar on one temple. His left hand was lightly folded around his wine glass, and she took in the heavy SS Death’s Head Ring with its ornate carving and indecipherable runes, and the immaculately trimmed fingernails. This was no peasant’s hand. Nor even the hand that she would have imagined a soldier to have. She felt a strange compulsion to reach out and touch it to see if it was real.
‘I will go through and tell my mother, then. When will you be moving in?’
The German’s face creased into another of his startling smiles – sudden flashes of humanity inside a frame of black.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you information of that sort, Mademoiselle.’ His amused gaze took in the salle and its bank of silent diners. Then he shrugged. ‘But I believe it will be obvious when it happens.’
Hervé Najac
Hervé Najac wobbled precariously on his perch, one hand feeling blindly above his head for the roof overhang, the other shooting out to steady himself against a nearby buttress. At the edges of his mind he could sense rather than hear the distant sound of the St Gervais church bells summoning the local community to Sunday Mass – almost smell the waves of incense oozing over the fields towards him.
Cursing priests, monks, nuns, the Pope, his cardinals and the entire Roman Catholic Church, Hervé shuffled his feet up another two rungs on the triangular ladder. He twisted the thick metal wire through the lip of the last earthenware jar, then threaded the ends deftly beneath the roof eave so that the mouth of the jar was set against the top edge of the wall, with only a small hole through the base of the jar still showing.
‘Right. That’s ten of the bastards. We should catch a good few nesters with these. If we strike early enough, we’ll maybe even get a second sitting.’ He wiped his weeping right eye with the shoulder of his jacket – a permanent stain testified to the frequency with which he was forced to mop at himself while working. ‘Then you’ll have your songbird stew.’
‘Every little bit counts.’ Grand Jean rubbed his hands together in glee, then belatedly remembered that he was meant to be steadying the ladder for his son. ‘Come on down then.’
Hervé squinted into the early morning sunshine. In the far distance he could just make out Lucie’s brighter figure against the duller black of her brothers and grandfather, shovelling manure onto their fields from a horse-drawn cart. ‘It’s all right. I’ll climb in through the bedroom window.’
‘What have you seen?’
‘Nothing, Papa. My eye is bothering me, that’s all. I need to bathe it. I’ll return the ladder to the barn later.’
‘All right then. But you may as well dress for church while you’re about it. You are coming, aren’t you? You know how much it means to your mother.’
Hervé squinted back across the fields. He shaded his face with his hand. Yes. Lucie had already changed into her grande toilette du Dimanche. And her brothers were in their Sunday best too. Shovelling manure in their Sunday best. If Marie Léré saw them, they’d get the knife. She’d hang them up by their feet, whack them on the head and then slit their throats, just as she did her rabbits. ‘Yes. I’ll come to church with you. It’s a waste of time, but I’ll come.’
‘We can have a drink together at the Bar des Amis afterwards. That’s never a waste of time, is it?’
It was a rhetorical question, and Hervé didn’t even bother to answer. He slithered through the bedroom window and allowed himself to fall onto his parent’s hugely bolstered bed. He lay there for a moment, absurdly comfortable, thinking of Lucie.
He and Lucie would have a bed like this themselves one day when they were married. He imagined her waiting for him on their wedding night, the coarse linen sheets drawn tightly to her chin. He could picture her face in the light of the oil lamp, gazing up at him. Her hands clutching the covers. How shy she would be as he climbed into bed. How skilfully he would woo her. Perhaps, now she too was afflicted, she wouldn’t find his burns so repellent in the dim light of the bedroom?
He lunged to his feet and threaded his way down the well-worn oak stairs to his own room. Bracing himself against the table, he craned forward and gazed at his face in the sliver of mirror he had attached above the ceramic bowl and jug he used for washing. How he loathed attending church and having to listen to all that Pétainiste claptrap about families and the State and the responsibility of every French citizen to toe the damned line – to fight the good fight. Except not against the Germans.
And then there was the wax mask. His mother insisted that he wear it whenever he ventured into town. It covered one side of his face completely, with a slit for his eye, and a hole for what remained of his right ear. A thin leather strap passed across the top of his head and c
onnected to the chin piece, with an opening where his good left ear passed through. It made him look like a freak. In fact its shape reminded him of the nesting traps he’d just been setting, the only difference being that it was designed to confine an entire human being, and not simply a bird, inside it.
He puffed out his cheeks ruminatively. He had tried to make do without the mask on one disastrous occasion, but his mother had become so distressed by its absence that she had vowed never to attend church again unless he swore to her – swore to her on the Black Virgin of Rocamadour – that he would always wear the mask whenever he was in a public place.
The Virgin. What did he care about Virgins, black or otherwise? He had lost his faith at exactly 11:17 am on the 19th June 1940 at Tours, when the Germans had shelled the city. It had been his one and only time in combat. He and his unit had been given the task of defending the municipal library, just a few minutes before a phosphorous bomb had struck the building. They told him later, in the hospital, that pages from the burning books had floated to as far away as Chinon and Azay-le-Rideau. The ensuing fires had raged for three days. A hundred killed. Nine thousand homeless. For weeks afterwards he had woken screaming from morphine-induced nightmares.
Still, as his father religiously insisted on explaining to him, if they hadn’t fought, and if he hadn’t been injured, he would probably be a prisoner-of-war in Germany by now, alongside Lucie’s father, and not luxuriating here on the farm, trapping nestlings and producing underpriced food for Vichy. Frankly, given the choice, he’d rather have been hauled off to camp with the other men and his face still intact, instead of being a lifelong object of morbid curiosity on the streets.
Hervé reached down and unbuttoned his work trousers with their patched knees and darned seams, and replaced them with a thick pair of worn but as yet un-patched corduroys. In a familiar movement, he sniffed both his armpits, grunted, and decided to leave his old shirt on. Grimacing with discomfort, he slipped his arms inside his grandfather’s tight Sunday jacket, then gave a superstitious shudder. Verdun 1916. The bloody Boche had got him as well. It was becoming something of a family tradition. His grandfather and two of his maternal great uncles – twins, both killed on the same day. He could still remember, as a child, the preponderance of black-clothed women in the church, the men on one side of the aisle, the women on the other. The men’s side had been almost empty, until those who were left over from the slaughter had contrived to stock it once again with a fresh supply of butcher’s meat.
The Occupation Secret Page 8
