Max raised his pen from the paper. What on earth was he doing? They would never allow his letter to get through. In fact, when the censors read it, they would probably yank out his file and mark it GVH: fit only for garrison duty. Then he would be shunted off to Silesia, where doubtless he could find a cosy position beside old stationmaster Greiner, directing freight traffic. The two of them could reminisce about Bavaria before the war, and how they hoped that everything would magically revert to normal one day soon, when the authorities finally came to their senses and bent their ears to what the ‘little man’ was saying.
He stood up and began to tear the paper through. Then he thought better of it and placed the folded sheet inside his pocket. What if he were to use Bettina as his conscience? Write her letters that he never meant to post, but only give them to her after the war was over? In this way he could tell the truth without vanity (for she was a woman, after all, and would see right through his defences) and at the same time elucidate things in his own mind – things that were easier to write down than to think?
The conceit amused him, and he took out the folded letter and reread it. Yes. His thoughts flowed accurately, one into the other, as he wrote. It was easier having an audience, even if she was in the abstract. Max understood himself well enough by now to know that he was not the sort of man who found it easy to keep secrets, or even to keep his own witness.
He checked the time on his watch and started eagerly for the stairs. Lucie would be busy laying the table – preparing the bain-marie. But first, music. Today they were to try their hand at Un Amour Comme Le Notre. He had listened to Lucienne Boyer’s recording many times by now and had endeavoured to transcribe the orchestral accompaniment for the piano, and he thought he had finally caught it. He particularly liked to play before lunch, on an empty stomach, so that he could savour the moment in retrospect as he ate – he liked, too, to watch Lucie serve him, having already tasted her, as it were, in a more intimate setting.
Ever since the visit to Monsieur Phillibert’s, Lucie had shown a great deal more self-confidence in his presence. She had even taken it upon herself to bring him some of her father’s precious collection of 78 rpm discs. It had been but a small step from that to his initial suggestion that she might care to use him as her occasional accompanist during her father’s enforced absence. He had cemented his suggestion to her by demonstrating his powers of adaptation from a recorded source. It had been the piano introduction from Charles Trenet’s Douce France that had done the trick for him.
‘I love that song. It always makes me so happy. Just like Boum! Where did you find the notation?’
‘I didn’t. I transcribed it off the disc you lent me.’
‘Transcribed? What is that?’
‘It means copied.’
‘You copied it? You can do that?’
‘I studied musical composition and solfège for six years, Lucie, before I was forced by circumstances to enter the army.’
‘Oh.’
Now she would sometimes even walk around as she was singing, briefly seeming to lose her awareness that he was with her in the room at all. Max relished watching her at these moments, as she seemed at her most natural, and he was able to imagine – well, to fantasize, if the truth were known – that she had given herself to him and that they were indulging in an act of intimacy, one with the other, rather than the act of guarded cooperation which constituted their reality.
The piano, at such times, seemed assertively, percussively male, and its sound – eager, pressing, intrusive – wove in and out of Lucie’s voice like a debauchee’s silken finger in the palm of a neophyte. Sometimes, when they achieved their greatest harmony, Max felt himself wooing Lucie with his piano, and her voice answering him like a lover’s voice pressed, not entirely against its will, into intimacy. Then she was singing for him alone, and not for the imagined audience of their more prosaic moments.
He had even been able to convince himself that the innocent looks that she gave when swept up inside the text of her song were actually calculated glances meant to inflame him and apprise him of their progenitor’s true feelings.
Later, when their usual more mundane world had re-established itself during lunch, Max understood quite how far from the mark he really was, and that to Lucie he was merely a paying client who just happened to possess a skill that enticed her momentarily beyond the normal sphere of any appropriate relationship. After a particularly successful session, she seemed to serve him with a stonier face than usual, and to be more non-communicative, even, than when they and the music didn’t bond. Max felt this apparent perverseness deeply, but had no means whereby to rectify the perceived fault. Their intimacy was not yet such as would allow him to speak frankly to her on a personal level.
So it came down to this, then – Lucie and he connected, but only in the realms of music and of food. Beyond those strict parameters their worlds were as far apart, or farther, than when they had first met by chance on the road to St Gervais. Then, he had simply been an enemy officer who was importuning her. Now, he had contrived a different, more romantic role for himself: that of the honourable soldier perhaps – Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘parfit gentle knight’, sans peur et sans reproche – who possesses the key to a hidden part of the maiden’s soul, but who is bound by an unvoiced sense of duty to respect that boundary and not contravene it.
For all his noble talk of truth and honesty, Max sensed that, by playing down Lucie’s increasing importance in his life, he had fundamentally misled Bettina in his letter. Part of him desired Lucie, it was true, and desperately wanted to make her his own – her naturalness, her naïveté, the lost world of innocence she represented.
The other part, paradoxically, wished only to protect her from himself and from the reality he so unthinkingly, and at times so unpalatably, represented.
Toulouse
The building hardly looked as though it housed an officer’s brothel. A nun’s seminary more likely, or perhaps a charitable foundation for the widows and orphans of prematurely deceased town planners. Max looked around himself guiltily. All it needed now was for a priest to see him and give him a dirty look, and Max would scuttle off, as innocently as he could contrive, towards the Musée Des Augustins.
No priest came, and Max started reluctantly up the steps of the house on the Rue de Labiche. He had made up his mind the day before during his lunch hour with Lucie that he must somehow defuse the smoking bomb of his libido. He was starting to behave in an absurd manner towards the girl, and he sensed that it would not be long before he permanently violated the bounds of her propriety and in consequence saw the last of her.
He had been scrupulously honest when he had asseverated to Bettina during his last leave that he had never visited a brothel. In all his time on the front line the thought had never even occurred to him. Now, with copious free time on his hands, he found himself thinking of little else. Food, music and sex. Well, at least all three things had the virtue of the commonplace.
Max was perfectly well aware, through Latrinenparole and the army grapevine, that more than 90,000 French women had so far registered with the German authorities for child payments. The same number again had probably visited a back-street abortionist – the so-called faiseuses d’anges – who faced the death penalty under Vichy if they were caught. As a direct result, the German authorities had virtually doubled the number of military brothels in a last-ditch effort to defuse a situation that showed all the hallmarks of getting seriously out of hand. Max had criticized the provision of the brothels – and the effect they had on his men’s morale – on a number of occasions in the past. Now here he was, visiting one himself. Ein Esel schimpft den anderen Langohr – the donkey is angered by another’s long ears.
He scribbled a false name into the visitors’ book, grateful that the clerk had not asked to see his Soldbuch.
‘Here’s your pack, Major.’
‘My pack?’
‘Disinfectant soap, two condoms and a fresh towel
.’
‘Disinfectant soap? Are these girls diseased?’
‘They are formally checked by the medical authorities every week. This is an officer’s establishment, Major, and under the most rigorous moral and hygienic strictures.’
‘Thank you for that. I’m very relieved.’
‘And here is your key. Go up to the room, undress, and the girl will come to you.’
‘Don’t I get to choose?’
‘Blonde, brunette or redhead?’
Max sighed. Had he really expected a Wehrmacht military brothel to be run on radically different lines to a Wehrmacht military canteen? ‘Brunette.’
‘Slim, normal or well-built?’
‘Slim.’
‘Any preferences concerning bust size?’
Max almost laughed at that point, but he succeeded in controlling any ironical riposte. ‘Small and well-shaped. And the girl must be French.’
‘French? All these girls are French, Major.’
‘Ah. Excellent. Excellent.’
‘You may have two if you so desire. Officers with the rank of colonel and above are accorded special privileges. Also those with the very highest battle honours.’ The man’s eyes were fixed on Max’s Knight’s Cross.
‘One will do very nicely, thank you.’
Max locked himself inside the one-man lift and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The mechanism juddered into action, then magically smoothed itself. Max glanced at himself in the mirror, then looked away.
Once in the room he didn’t undress but went to look out of the window. He heard the lift mechanism reconnect behind him, going upwards. What number will I be, he thought to himself? It is five o’clock in the afternoon. Whoever it is will probably have been on call since midday. One client an hour? Two? Call it number eight, then.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Enter.’
The girl was perhaps twenty-two years old. She was clad in a kimono. She looked nothing like Lucie. Max felt a bitter surge of disappointment.
‘Please undress, Major, so that I can wash you.’
‘Wash me?’
‘In the bidet. With the antiseptic soap.’
Max shook his head. He felt a sudden overwhelming disgust with himself and with his unanticipated moral weakness, with his manhood and with all the senseless things that it had driven him to do over the past five years. ‘I have made a mistake. I shan’t be requiring your services after all.’
The girl shrugged. ‘As you wish.’
Max picked up his hat. ‘Tell me something, though.’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you know of a shop around here? A shop where I can buy black market shoes and stockings?’
‘Ah. So you’ve got a sweetheart. I wondered why you didn’t want me.’
‘Yes, you’re right. I’ve got a sweetheart.’
She smiled, an element of humanity briefly flitting across the housebound pallor of her features. ‘Go left down Labiche. Then right down to the end of the Esplanade. You’ll see a shop with a green and white striped awning. Ask to see their private stock. All the officers know about it, so it’s no good threatening to hand me in.’
‘I asked you for a favour; I wouldn’t hand you in.’
‘Then you’re not like some of them. They get something on you and then ask for special favours. You know the sort of thing.’
‘I know the sort of thing.’ He threw some notes down on the bed. ‘Do you get to keep this?’
‘Ten percent.’
‘Why don’t you hide it in your stocking?’
‘The patron would simply beat it out of me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry?’ She laughed. ‘Sure you don’t fancy a quick one? I like the look of you.’
‘Thank you, no. I made a mistake in coming here, just as I said. Bonjour Mademoiselle. Et au revoir.’
Shadow-Play
The next day, despite all his doubts and his mental equivocations, Max took a particular, anticipatory relish in persuading Lucie to temporarily abandon her kitchen and the preparation of his lunch in favour of music. He had done his homework well and was proud of his new transcription. He felt relieved also that he had not unduly disgraced himself at the brothel in Toulouse. A venial rather than a mortal sin, surely, in the final analysis?
He followed Lucie eagerly up to the library, savouring anew the movement of her hips and buttocks beneath her dress, the flexing of her calves, the inevitable tensions inherent in the act of following a desirable woman up a flight of stairs so closely that one could, on occasion, even catch the release of her natural scent in the furling and unfurling of her dress – sexual undertones to which, he had managed to convince himself, Lucie herself must be entirely immune.
Feigning an indifference that he did not feel, Max sat briskly down at the piano, laid aside the Bach partition and, in the most workmanlike way possible, attached the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled his new transcription onto the easel with a wooden clothes peg. He looked up expectantly.
Lucie, as she always did before singing, stood very near to the piano, in her bare feet, her legs slightly apart, her hands at her sides, her face, to all intents and purposes, expressionless.
‘Are you ready?’
She nodded uncertainly.
‘Is there anything wrong?’
Lucie glanced fleetingly towards the window. ‘I’m still not sure I should be doing this. What if somebody found out?’
‘You are singing. I’m playing the piano. Where is the harm in that?’
‘You know where the harm is. It’s bad enough that I come here and cook your lunches. That’s already enough to brand me as a collaborator in some people’s eyes. Soon there will be talk.’
Max leaned forwards and pencilled in an unnecessary marking on his notation. ‘Nonsense. Your mother and I have an entirely above the board arrangement. I’m openly paying her for your time. Everyone knows that. It’s my own funeral if I choose to keep you here half an hour longer than normal, isn’t it? There are no boundaries in music. You’re not doing anything wrong.’
‘Do you truly believe that?’
‘Passionately.’
‘And do you really enjoy playing this sort of music? Accompanying me?’
‘I wouldn’t have suggested we do this if I didn’t enjoy it. I’m not a masochist.’
‘A what?’
‘I’m not someone who goes out of their way to do things that give them pain.’
‘Why should anyone do that?’
‘My point exactly.’
Lucie took a deep breath to cover her confusion. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you by my questions.’
‘On the contrary. I’m very pleased that you felt able to bring the matter up.’
Max pretended to straighten his notes. For a moment there, he had been certain that he was about to lose her. Curious, how intensely he felt her potential loss. It had never before occurred to him that he was lonely. And yet that’s exactly how he felt at the thought of being deprived of her company. He continued on more hurriedly than necessary. ‘Who are you singing to this time?’
Lucie tilted her head to one side, forcing her misgivings to the back of her mind. ‘I don’t know. A nightclub audience, perhaps? Somewhere in Paris?’
Max smiled and launched into the new impresario-like role that he had recently assigned himself within the intimacy of their shadow-play. ‘So. People are talking. There is the hum of conversation. Cigarette smoke filters through the air, swirls around the lights, is parted by the waiters as they carry trays of drinks to the clientele. A man sits alone at a table, watching you. As you emerge onto the stage, you instantly become aware of him. He is your lover. He has come to hear you. Tonight you will sing only for him. You will tell him that after the night which has just finished, your heart is full of him. That your music is a dream, fluttering beneath his fingers, those fingers whose caress heightens your desire, turning it into drun
kenness, which dies at the end of the chord.’
Lucie immediately recognised the song Max was translating from. It had been the first one they had ever attempted together. She smiled gratefully, then closed her eyes as Max began his musical introduction.
She took a small step away from him and turned to her right. Thanks to his words she was seeing the nightclub. She could feel her lover watching her. Smell the cigarette smoke and the heady perfume of the women. Hear the bustle of the waiters and the hubbub of the clientele.
She glanced quickly down at herself – in her imagination she was wearing a long silk dress, in turquoise blue, cut low across her breasts. Her hair was red like Lucienne Boyer’s, and her face was miraculously undamaged. She wore numerous rings on each hand – a necklace made of jade, or perhaps even emeralds. Her lips were heavily painted, as were her eyes. Her eyebrows were plucked and drawn in arches high over her lids, like Greta Garbo’s in Anna Karenina. Her nails were coloured a dark scarlet. Her toes were scarlet too, peeking through the straps of her high-heeled shoes, above which she wore a platinum anklet. Tentatively, she began to sing:
Why do you read so many books?
By Pierre Benoît or Paul Morand?
Do you expect them to recall
The romance of your nights and days
When you are even now inside
The sweetest story of them all?
Haven’t we struggled hard enough
To live together and share our love?
Shut your eyes, let yourself be
For you know, as well as me…
The love affair we’re living
There can never be a sequel
For other people’s loves
Are not its equal
Without a word
I know what you require
You look at me
And know what I desire…
Why ask other men to write
A better storyline?
The love affair we’re living
The Occupation Secret Page 16
