He cast a quick look back over his shoulder, expecting to see a sharply lowering sky to the west. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He slowed to a walk. What was that noise? He’d heard something like it once before, but he couldn’t remember where. He stopped and turned to face the direction from which it was coming. The hairs on the back of his neck stiffened atavistically.
‘Bordel!’
He sprinted towards Lucie, the hobnailed soles of his Sunday best boots striking sparks off the stones. ‘Lucie! Quickly!’ He windmilled his arms.
Lucie stopped in her tracks. What on earth was Hervé up to? She’d been aware of him for some little time, and knew that he was waiting for her. And now here he was, running towards her like an escaped inmate from Pierrefeu. She glanced swiftly backwards over her shoulder to see if something was happening behind her.
‘Get off the road. Quickly! Off the road!’
She hesitated, then stepped demurely onto the rocky verge. Perhaps he’d drunk a little too much at the bar? Or, more likely, he’d decided to play a joke on her, just as he used to do when they were young children. She remembered that time when he’d tied her dog’s tail to that of her grandfather’s milk cow, and the cat to the dog’s, with a squawking cockerel bringing up the rear – it hadn’t really been that funny, and it had taken them half the afternoon…
Hervé swept her off her feet without varying his pace. He aimed them both at a broken section of the nearby wall, and spanned it with a single jump, clutching Lucie to his chest.
‘Hervé, have you gone mad? Put me down immediately.’
He tripped once, nearly dropping her, but managed to right himself. He was making for the edge of an abandoned vineyard that had been left en friche, thanks to the manpower shortage, with the vine suckers floating higgledy-piggledy in every direction, creating a forest of fresh green shoots.
‘Quickly. Slide in underneath. Don’t ask questions.’
Lucie took one look at his face, then did as she was told. Hervé peered wildly back over his shoulder. The thunder was much closer now. He could feel the earth trembling beneath his feet. When he was satisfied that she was no longer visible from the roadside, he squeezed in beside her.
‘What is it, Hervé? What’s that noise?’
‘They’re Schleuh battle tanks. I’ve heard the sound before. When I was in the hospital. At first I thought it was thunder, but the sky is clear. Keep your head down. They’ll be checking around themselves all the time. I don’t want them to see us.’ He pulled a handful of vine leaves down in front of them as camouflage.
‘Why ever not? We’re no threat to them. What do you think they’re going to do? Machine-gun us?’ Lucie let her hands drift surreptitiously down the length of her dress, feeling for tears.
‘They might think we’re Maquis or something.’
Lucie snorted, unconvinced. She had begun to feel rather blasé about the Germans since her experiences at the restaurant; nonetheless, she could feel her heart thumping against the ground beneath her, echoing the thunder of the tanks. She glanced surreptitiously across at Hervé. They were lying, hip to hip, with the injured side of Hervé’s face towards her. Normally he never allowed her anywhere near that part of him. Instead, he would somehow contrive to turn at an angle to her, or otherwise keep her at a distance, and she had been content, until now, to let him do so. But she knew, for Hervé’s sake – and for her own – that things must one day change.
At first, just after they had let him back home from the hospital, he had persisted in staying indoors, never coming into town, never visiting her at the farm. She had walked over once or twice to see him, but Marguerite Najac had always found some excuse to prevent her from going in. Later, Grand Jean had taken her aside and explained to her how shy his son was, how embarrassed about letting others see his wounds, and Lucie had taken heart from this and had insisted, despite his mother’s protests, on seeing Hervé and on breaking his self-imposed purdah.
It had taken her three painfully foreshortened visits over a two week period, before he had finally agreed to come over and help them with the ploughing, just as he’d done every spring for the ten previous years – every spring since the day he’d grown burly enough and skilful enough to handle a team of oxen in tandem with her grandfather’s team and those of the three other farmers who formed the tacit ploughing cooperative of their locality.
The boys, forewarned by Lucie, had ignored his burns and had treated Hervé with the same big brother puppy love they had always exhibited towards him. Her grandfather and grandmother, inured to flesh and to its frailty through decades of living close to the earth and all its products, didn’t need preparing. To them, Hervé was simply their neighbour, Lucie’s intended. That his face was different from other people’s was of small note, when measured against his skill as an agriculteur, his capacity for hard work, and his suitability as a husband for their beloved grandchild. After all, it might have been so much worse. He might have lost an arm, or a leg – something of real use.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the first Tiger tank as it breasted the corner of the road and hammered down the valley in front of them. Massive, twelve feet high from the base of its tracks to the top of its conning tower, with sharply inclined armour plating and corrugated anti-mine coating, it looked to Lucie like a blinded animal, its snout outstretched, searching for prey. Her eyes strayed to the man in the turret, but she didn’t recognise the blonde-haired officer. This man was dark and undistinguished looking, with a ferret face, highlighted by his skull-hugging cap.
‘Christ, look at them. Look at the size of it.’ Hervé was staring almost greedily at the first tank. ‘How do you fight against something like that?’
Now the second and third tanks had breasted the corner, and Lucie could clearly make out the man she had seen at the shrine and in the restaurant. He stood considerably taller than the other tank commanders, and wore a crumpled peaked hat with a death’s head on the front, as opposed to the flat clinging caps of his subordinates. His tunic had wide interleaved lapels with the twin runes of the SS logo on the right-hand side and four diamonds on the left. A gothic cross nestled at his throat, and more crosses and medals hung on the breast of his tunic, which was cinched at the waist with a broad-buckled black leather belt.
Hervé was busily counting off the tanks. ‘Six. They’ve got six. Three of the big ones, and three smaller.’ Behind the tanks came five trucks, and Hervé craned his neck to see inside them. ‘Look. They’re packed with soldiers. St Gervais won’t know what’s hit it. They’re going to eat us out of house and home. What do we do? They’ll come around to all the farms and plunder everything we’ve got.’
Lucie shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think so. The man said he’d pay. That anything they take will be paid for.’
‘What do you mean? What man?’ Hervé rolled marginally away from her, all at once conscious of his face and its vulnerability to her gaze.
‘The commander. The man who came to Maman’s restaurant the other day and talked to the mayor. He said that as long as we didn’t cause any trouble, they’d treat us fairly. But that if there was any… well I can’t remember the exact words he used, but he meant that if anyone fought them, then they would treat us harshly.’
‘How did you get to hear all this?’
‘I was there, Hervé. I heard everything. He speaks beautiful French – just like the châtelain. The sort of French they speak in Paris. Or at least I suppose.’ She wriggled herself into a more comfortable position. ‘Do you think we can climb out now? They’re well past. And I can’t see that it did any good, us scrambling in here like criminals.’ Without waiting for Hervé’s answer, she slithered out through the tangled vine leaves.
The residue of her animal scent lingered for a moment behind her – a mixture of warm wool, dough, cat’s fur and the faintest hint of liquorice. Hervé sniffed it in luxuriously as he watched the movements of her body. As she crawled, her dress rode briefly up to just below
her buttocks, revealing the embroidered hem of her pantalettes and a vigorous expanse of bare white thigh. Hervé felt himself stir as he watched her thrust her way out from beneath the final curtain of branches, and he was obliged to stretch a hand surreptitiously down to his groin to ease himself. For one brief guilt-ridden moment, he understood how even otherwise decent men might be tempted into criminality in troubled times, when long-established structures of law and order seemed under threat. What if he were simply to overwhelm her with his strength? Take her, there and then, on the ground? She would be forced to marry him, wouldn’t she?
Lucie dusted herself down, no longer even attempting to hide her anxious perusal of her dress. ‘Oh, thank God. I thought I’d torn it right through. But it was only caught up in this twig.’ She held out the cutting and let it drop. Then she watched, her head canted to one side, as Hervé manoeuvred himself out from underneath the vines.
He stood up beside her, his face turned away, as if he feared his thoughts would shine out and betray him.
‘Which was the one you saw? In your mother’s restaurant?’
The injured part of Hervé’s face felt tight, as though someone had painted it over with diluted chalk and then let it dry. He swallowed furtively, using the movement to relieve the tension in his jaw muscles. He couldn’t understand why he felt so upset. So betrayed. So inflamed.
‘Which one was the commander? Tell me.’
Lucie ran her fingers down the ridge of her broken nose, as if she were unconsciously picking up on Hervé’s thoughts. She had never known him to look at her like this before – as if she were a stranger to him. An enemy, almost.
‘It was obvious. He was the one with the peaked hat. In the second tank from the front. All the rest had those clingy black caps on. He was the tall one, with all the medals.’
‘Medals?’ Hervé put on an aggrieved face. ‘God. He’s probably one of those fanatical Nazis. He probably awarded them to himself.’ He could feel the undirected bitterness gnawing away at his gut. ‘I should have had a medal. Probably still will, when the war’s over.’
Lucie touched him on the arm. ‘Of course you will. And they’ll give you a pension, too, one day. For your…’ She hesitated, aware of his burgeoning rage, but not understanding the reason for it.
‘Merde!’ Hervé poked at his thigh. ‘I don’t believe it!’ He inserted a fatalistic hand inside his trouser pocket and brought out the now shattered wax mask. ‘Look at this. Look at what they’ve made me do, the bastards.’ He held the smashed mask at arm’s length, as if it were a rapidly putrescent animal he had happened on at the roadside. He hurled the mask away into the vines.
‘But Hervé. It’s only…’
He glanced away from her. ‘I’m going to leave you here. You always walk far too slowly. Maman will be waiting on me for lunch, and I must hurry home and tell her about this. The breaking of it. She’ll have to make me another one.’ He could feel the tears of frustration building behind his eyes – without realising it, his voice had reverted to the tenor and accent of his teenager years. ‘I was going to talk to you. To ask you something. But we’d better leave it for now. Those Boche have left a bad taste in my mouth, and I don’t want it spoiling what I have to say.’ He strode off without further ado, abandoning Lucie at the corner of the vineyard.
She called after him, shocked by his sudden departure. ‘Let me walk home with you, Hervé. I could hurry. I’m not that slow.’ Watching his retreating back, she felt unexpectedly bereft – as if he were leaving her for good. As if he were taking something that was rightfully hers away with him.
But he was already out of earshot, his boots striking angry sparks off the freshly displaced stones at the roadside.
La Bastide De Marmont
‘So this is it. Home from home.’ Max let the cleated front door of the Bastide de Marmont swing slowly open in front of him.
‘Doesn’t look so bad to me.’ Paul Meyer craned his head upwards, taking in the short French eaves and the shuttered windows of the façade. ‘When you compare it to what we had in Khodorov, that is. Those eaves are useless for snow, though. Stuff’ll just build and build, then end up pitching on the back of your neck when you least expect it.’ He bent forwards and began to clean the underside of his boots on the metal scraper.
‘It’s springtime, Paul. There will be no more snow this year.’
Meyer straightened up. ‘Christ. I keep forgetting that we’re in France.’ He launched a gob of spittle, with well-practised accuracy, onto the tip of each boot, and then rubbed the toecaps vigorously against the back of his trousers. ‘I’ll tell your orderly to get a woman in from the town to do some spring cleaning for you, then, and to get rid of all the dustsheets. She can arrange for your meals and your laundry at the same time.’
‘You’ve no need to worry about my meals. They’re already taken care of.’ Max made an issue out of clearing his throat. ‘Berger will be preparing my breakfast when he arrives in the morning. My lunches are to be sent over from the local restaurant. You remember – the one where we met the mayor? And I’ll take my evening meal with the junior officers at company headquarters, as per usual.’
Meyer let out a demonstrative sniff. He stepped briefly outside the front door and glared around the courtyard as if he were conducting a stores’ inventory. ‘That’s a good strong wall you’ve got there. Railings all the way around. Easily defensible. They’d have a hard job hitting the house with anything less than a rifle grenade. The church tower overlooks us unfortunately, but short of tearing it down, there’s not much we can do about that. We can station a man there if the situation makes it necessary.’ He turned towards Max, puffing out his cheeks. ‘Infiltrators from the town will be our only real problem, then.’ He grunted, fixing Max with the raised sergeant-major’s eye he usually kept for underperforming recruits. ‘I’ll arrange for two guards to be posted here at all times. The regulations say four, but we can’t spare the men until we’ve got everything else in order. I hope that’s satisfactory?’
‘Perfectly satisfactory, thank you. Two will do very well.’ Max hesitated, as if he were about to change the subject. Then he gave a defeated sigh. ‘Paul, I hardly think the Maquis are going to venture into a town defended by infantry and tanks, dress themselves up as young women, and come calling with explosives concealed inside their egg baskets.’ Pointedly ignoring Meyer’s cynical shrug, he strode down the hallway towards the rear kitchen. The house was scented with a mixture of dust, beeswax, turpentine and old wood, and Max found its antique aura strangely comforting after the grim modernity of his Montauban billet. ‘It seems like a bit of a barracks for just one man,’ he called out, in a more placatory tone.
‘Ah well, that’s the bitter price of leadership, Herr Major.’ Meyer cocked his head to one side, then raised his voice so that it would echo down the corridor. ‘Don’t tell me that with your background you’re not used to living in big places like this? You’ve probably got your own castle back home. With turrets and deer forests and so forth.’ He continued opening, and then slamming, all the doors.
Max gave an embarrassed laugh – he had become unused to these sorts of conversations on the Russian front, where background mattered little, and non-military titles less. What on earth was Meyer getting at all of a sudden? ‘I’m the youngest son of a not very wealthy country landowner, Paul. Our castle is merely a large house with failed pretensions. And we certainly don’t possess a deer forest.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Major. Very sorry indeed. You should see what we poor peasants have been forced to allocate to ourselves as a billet. Talk about failed pretensions. The place used to be a Dance Hall. Very disreputable. But people stopped going there when they built a cinema next door to it. And guess who runs the cinema? And chooses every film? The village priest. Now there’s a man who understands how to keep the people happy and still get his own way.’ Meyer caught Max’s frown and coughed apologetically. ‘Ah. But I forget. You’re also a Catholic
. Not cynical, like us fallen Lutherans.’ Meyer’s nose twitched like a scent hound’s. ‘What’s this, then? My phantom kidney is throbbing. Have I detected the presence of a wine cellar? I’d better investigate. There may be terrorists lurking down there.’
Max started upstairs, shaking his head. Bloody Meyer. The bastard knew him too well. Understood just how to catch him on a raw nerve. You’d think the man was his father, to hear him talk.
In private, of course, Max was enchanted with the house. It felt just right. As if an extended, haute classe family should be living there – an entire Proustian social hierarchy, connected to the village but not of it. It was a feeling he was profoundly familiar with, and he derived a curious almost guilty comfort from it, as if, despite the multiform upheavals of the war, things might nonetheless return to normal one day.
He stopped for a moment outside what instinct told him ought to be the library. Through a crack in the part-opened door, floor-to-ceiling books were visible, and a segment of a white marble bust. He stepped inside. In one corner, next to a shuttered window, was the silhouette of a grand piano. Max moved down the line of shutters, opening them and bathing the room with sunlight. When he was satisfied with the effect, he walked back to the piano, threw off the dustsheet and ran the tips of his fingers across the polished surface of the case. It was a Pleyel. Late nineteenth century. Marvellous workmanship.
He lifted the cover and gazed in contented admiration at the wooden frame and parallel stringing, so different from the metal-framed cross-strung pianos he was used to. Trust the French to go their own way. He could almost feel its forgotten cadences riffling along the back-hairs of his hand.
The Occupation Secret Page 10
