‘We feed like animals; we have to eat swedes.’
‘Swedes?’ said Micheline doubtfully suspecting a joke. ‘How can anyone eat swedes? Eating chestnuts is bad enough. It’s what they used to eat here in the famine years. But even then they never ate swedes. How are they served?’
‘They’re cut into delicate slices, fried in a mixture of oil and butter, only the best unsalted butter, and served with a spoonful of caviar as a garnish.’
‘Well, now I know you’re joking.’
‘I’m not, I assure you. They’re pureed like potatoes.’
‘Do you remember all that food Madame Ariane took to give to the police chief in Racines?’ Sabine said suddenly. She had picked all the black shreds out of her omelette and was dividing her food into two piles, egg and truffle.
Theo put down his fork. Florence was laughing.
‘She wore her best suit and it didn’t fit. We had to work very hard at her decollete.’ She saw Theo’s face and stopped. ‘Even if we eat badly, the Germans are eating worse.’
‘How do you know that, Sabine?’
‘Madame Ariane told us. She learned it from the officers when they ate dinner together.’
‘She used to dine with the German officers?’ Theo asked. There was a silence, as if they had not intended him to have this piece of information.
‘The stories from the eastern front were unbelievable, according to what she heard,’ Madame de Cazalle said, not answering him directly. ‘One couldn’t understand how they could endure such hardships.’
‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ said Theo. The women looked startled, as if sympathy was due to anyone, whatever their nationality, who was forced to eat badly.
‘Ariane heard a lot, as she sat there,’ Aunt Odette remarked. ‘But she refused to eat with them.’
After dinner, Theo once again sat with the aunts in the library. Sabine came in to receive a goodnight kiss from each of them.
‘So Sabine.’ Theo would not normally have thought of letting the child decide her own future, especially after her outburst yesterday, but he could see no other way out of the impasse. ‘What do you think of going to study with Mr Vernhes?’
She didn’t look at him. ‘Whatever you think is best, Papa.’
Theo frowned. It had begun to dawn on him that his daughter was clever, subtle, manipulative.
Aunt Marguerite, less devious, said, ‘Don’t do it, Theo. She can stay with us.’
He sighed. ‘I’ll think about it. I wanted to relieve you of the burden of teaching.’
Wrapping themselves in their shawls against the cold of the corridors, the aunts set off to their rooms. Theo poured himself a brandy and wandered round peering at the book shelves. He had learned some facts today: about how Henri died, how Ariane’s head was shaved, but beyond this outline nothing was clear. Each account contradicted the previous one. Was Henri betrayed, afraid, or incompetent? Ariane, resistant or collaborator? And the SS major, her putative lover, and his murder were as indistinct as ever.
Suddenly he recognised a box wedged onto one of the bookshelves, one of the family treasures. He took it down and the casket revealed a parcel swathed in worn blue velvet. Unwrapping it, he was ten years old again, standing in that same room with his father, on leave from Algeria. His father’s brown fingers with dark silky hair on the back of his hands were sliding back the clasp and opening wide the pages.
‘It’s a Book of Hours,’ he was explaining. ‘The calendar of prayers is illustrated. Look.’
Theo was already searching for the atlas where the aunts kept the magnifying glass that his father had handed to him.
He placed the glass in position under the lamp; the tiny pictures sprang out as they had done for him as a child.
In winter a little town with its church and castle on a hill lay under light snow. Smoke rose into the cerulean blue. Hunters’ footsteps marked their track and birds flew up from the bare trees. It was Lepech Perdrissou. In autumn peasants and pigs rootled under the golden trees. From a tower a lady was setting out on horseback, dogs running behind. It was Bonnemort. The detail and realism were extraordinary. The courtly elegance of the painting, depicting an ideal world, contrasted with the factual illustration of the pigs’ hairy backs, the dog scratching its ear.
This, he realised, was what he had carried around in his mind for four years of exile. His pleasure at the memory of his father, at the beauty of the object, was also the moment of recognition of his own folly. He had carried Bonnemort wrapped in his imagination, believing it to be sealed away, like the book in its velvet-lined box.
He turned a page. The anonymous painter was a more ruthless realist than he was. He remembered his father’s finger pointing to the troop of armed men marching out of the castle in the spring. He was indicating the minutely exact weapons: lances, halberds, crossbows. An injured soldier lying on the brilliant grass was trying to contain a writhing snakes’ nest of intestines spilling from his belly. And the chatelaine, if he turned another page, would she be welcoming the enemy into the surrendered castle? It was easy to transpose the excitement of his and Ariane’s time together before the war to his nightmares of her passion for the German officer.
One memory came back so intensely that he groaned as he imagined the scene replayed here at Bonnemort, his own role taken by the invader.
He could no longer recall where the original drama had taken place, because the central incident was so vivid. Whether at her father’s house, at the opera, at a dinner, it was somewhere public, dangerous. He had just returned to Paris from his unit.
In some small antechamber or corridor they had embraced passionately. Through the layers of his evening clothes, he had felt her hands pressing on the small of his back, then, with dexterity, manoeuvring between them, opening his buttons. He gasped as he felt her cool fingers on his flesh, pulling him out. When she dropped to the floor, he reached down to her.
‘Ariane, this is madness, Ariane …’
The thought of what would happen in a Paris salon in the aftermath of being discovered being fellated by a woman whose long silk skirts were spread in a pool around his feet occurred to him only briefly before he reached the point of no return. It must have been at a dinner, rather a grand one. He recalled that later in the evening he had met her eye across the table, an exchange of glances full of complicity and amusement. A feeling he had never before experienced overcame him then, compounded of desire, admiration, attachment; he did not know what to call it. At that moment he thought that her strong face, with its heavily marked eyebrows, was the most beautiful he had ever known.
He folded the Book of Hours back into its velvet-lined box. He might one day take it out to show to Sabine.
Chapter Ten
The next day, his last, began with a visit to the Gendarmerie in Lepech Perdrissou. He was looking for Officer Paul Petignat, who had been sent up to Bonnemort to break the news of Henri’s death. He turned out to be a young man, in his late twenties, with a strong country accent. He must have been recruited before the war, a local boy who achieved the peasant dream of a government job. He was wary, but eager to please when Theo explained who he was. He was obviously glad that the questioning turned not on his own actions during the Occupation, but on the murdered German at Bonnemort. He was still defensive, thinking he had to answer the charge that proper procedures had not been followed.
No, he said, there had been no enquiry, no examining magistrate had opened a file. He had simply written his report and that had been that. There had been too much going on at the time to worry about a dead German. Usually they looked after their own dead, but this time no Germans were left. And it was a war death, a Resistance killing, so all that was required was a note of the name and number of the victim, time and place; nothing more could be done in the circumstances.
Nothing, Theo agreed. The question was, was it really a Resistance killing? The victim’s throat had been cut, he had been stripped of his clothes. Was that the sort of
thing they did, the Resistance?
Petignat looked uneasy. His eyes were fixed on his boots, although he darted frequent, nervous glances at Theo.
‘Strange things happened then. I don’t want to say anything against the Resistance, of course, but … Well, it was war. Not like your war, maybe, but it was still war. And once the Germans had gone, it was time for settling scores. There were Resistance tribunals that shot people or tortured them, raped the women, cut their hair off, terrible things. Thank God, it’s calmed down now, but if you were in the Gendarmerie or the Police, you were at risk. If anyone denounced you … It wasn’t as if we were the Milice. Here in Lepech we came to an understanding with the Resistance early on, in spite of the mayor who had no time for the Maquis at all. Henri Menesplier was a good bloke. He didn’t want confrontation, so he used to let us know what was happening and in return we closed an eye, let him have a few litres of petrol when he needed it. But a mate of mine was taken to a chateau near Racines and tortured, beaten, by fellow Frenchmen from the Resistance, just because he transferred into the Milice to see some action. He still can’t walk, both legs broken.’ He stopped, breathing rapidly. Theo could see a dew of sweat on his forehead.
Such stories were not new and Theo did not want to go into them now. ‘The German officer …’ he said gently. ‘How does all this fit in with what happened to him?’
‘What I’m trying to say is that there were all sorts in the Resistance. There were stories of captured Germans with their balls cut off and stuffed in their mouths, or their tongues cut out. It’s my theory the major was caught by a Resistance group who had suffered under him. Maybe Group Rainbow. After all, that guy had shot Henri and hanged six others that evening. Mr Nikola, the Russian at Pechagrier, was Henri’s lieutenant. If he was willing, he might be able to tell you a thing or two about what went on.’
‘Was he there?’
‘When Henri was taken prisoner? I couldn’t say. He was in Lepech in the afternoon when the Germans attacked. His voice is unmistakable; I heard him shouting to his men in the streets.’
‘And had the German been tortured?’
‘No,’ Petignat said. ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that such terrible things did happen that this wasn’t such a big deal. So they cut his throat. Perhaps they’d run out of ammunition, who knows? They’d hit him a blow.
‘They’d hit on his forehead, plumb in the middle. You wonder how they got him like that, why he didn’t see it coming. His ankles had been strapped together to drag him along. There were score marks all down his back.’
‘And why was he left where he was, do you think? Had they been disturbed and abandoned him?’
‘Oh, no. It was deliberate. He was … arranged.’
‘So, why there?’
‘It was defiance, I think. You know, that place was the German HQ. They were saying, nowhere’s safe for you.’
‘But the Germans had gone.’
‘But no one knew that until that morning.’
‘And what would have happened if the Germans had still been there?’
‘Oh, God, reprisals. It would have been a bloodbath.’
‘Talking of bloodbaths, where was he killed? There would have been a hell of a lot of blood after a throat-cutting.’
‘I don’t know. It could have been anywhere in the forests. They must have caught him on the road and killed him. Then they could have taken him there in a lorry. Who knows?’
‘You didn’t search the house and grounds to find the place of death?’
Petignat looked surprised. ‘No, I didn’t. I thought that if they had found a sea of blood somewhere, they would have told me, Micheline and Madame de Cazalle. That’s why I thought it must have been done elsewhere and that he was taken there.’
* * *
It was hard to describe what it was like to someone who wasn’t there. And the colonel hadn’t been in France during the Occupation, he couldn’t understand anything. The first thing to realise was how what was right and wrong changed. In 1940 there was no question; to follow the Marshal was the right thing to do, no one doubted it, so a gendarme’s job was clear. But bit by bit, in ways you didn’t notice at the time, things went downhill so that by ’44 the Germans were demanding things that a good Frenchman couldn’t support, like sending the forced labourers to Germany, for example. People started acting against the government, until at the final stage in June, July, it was outright anarchy, and what was a loyal man to do? The only thing was to try to keep order.
That night, the one the colonel wanted to talk about, 17 August, it was. It was impossible to describe what they’d all been through in the village. In the afternoon the Resistance had entered Lepech. Henri had told the gendarmes what to expect and they had been lying low, pretending not to see or hear what was going on. So when the Germans turned up unexpectedly, they’d treated the gendarmes as enemies, like the rest of the town. He’d often thanked God since then that the Germans hadn’t called on them, the gendarmes, to help. That had saved them the next day, the Saturday, when the Germans had gone and the maquis took over and went mad in Montfefoul. They’d left Lepech alone, even though Gargaud, the mayor, was Petainist, because of the terrible things that had happened there.
At first light the next morning they had crept out of their houses to find the Germans gone and the corpses of the seven dead Resistance fighters to be dealt with. Henri was lying in the square where he had been shot; Pierre and the others, their feet dangling only half a metre from the ground, hanging from the oak tree. The villagers had left them there the night before when they had finished burying the German dead in the cemetery, thankfully accepting a curfew as the worst that was to happen for the time being. Many of them, wakeful in their beds, had heard the sounds of vehicles moving in the darkness and when day came their hopes were confirmed. The German troops and the French Milice had gone.
In the square the mayor was busy with the removal of the bodies to the church. In the Gendarmerie, when the phone rang and Petignat heard the voice of Henri’s daughter, it came to him that, out there at Bonnemort, they didn’t know what had happened. So he didn’t wait to discover what she wanted, half-hysterical as she sounded. He rushed out to find the mayor to tell him he had to go up there and break the news. But Gargaud rubbed his neck and said in that tentative way which meant that his mind was completely made up, ‘You know, we’ve never got on, them and me. Why don’t you go and see what’s up. You can tell them about Henri while you’re about it.’
Even before he arrived at Bonnemort he’d found seven men dead, lying bizarrely neatly arranged beside the track. They were men from Henri’s group, he reckoned, and this must have been where the firelight took place, where the five Germans had been killed, which had made the SS major so mad with rage that he’d executed his prisoners. Who had laid the bodies out like that, he wondered. Their companions from group Rainbow who had escaped and then returned to the scene of battle? The major had probably turned straight round with Henri and his other captives, taking them back to Lepech Perdrissou to hang them in front of the whole population as a warning.
A little further on he came across a German staff car, all shot up, and recognised Philippe Boysse from St Saud lying dead, handcuffed to the steering wheel. The SS must have taken him prisoner in Lepech during the afternoon clash and had been bringing him back to Bonnemort to question him. Perhaps Henri was making a rescue attempt when he himself was captured. This made sense, but why was Philippe driving the German car? He couldn’t make that out.
He counted up the deaths: five resistants had been killed in the afternoon in the village, then seven from group Rainbow here and Boysse too, then Henri and six others executed in the square last night, not to mention the five German soldiers that they’d had to bury. What more was to come?
He found that out soon enough when he reached Bonnemort.
First there was this guy, naked as the day he was born, lying face down on the flagstones of the courtyard. Then women everywher
e, Micheline and Florence, weeping in terror, Madame de Cazalle, with a face as calm as stone, two kids, the two old ladies, one on sticks, standing in a doorway inside the house. They were terrified. Understandable; so was he, after what had happened last night.
Micheline kept repeating hysterically, ‘They’ll come to shoot us, they’ll line us up and shoot us.’
Florence said, ‘We wanted to hide it, but we didn’t … We couldn’t … You must protect us. Where can we go?’
‘When did you find him?’ They were all standing well back from the body, as if it might be mined.
‘Just now, this morning, two hours ago, when we got up.’
‘Who is it?’
He began to move forward and he could feel Micheline and Florence following immediately behind him. When he bent down and turned the body over, he understood their terror.
The cutting of the throat had drained a huge quantity of blood out of the carcass, which was glacially white. The face was a darker colour, tanned by the weather, and was no longer in normal relation to the body. It flipped back like a lid on a hinge, exposing the severed carotid artery, out of which life had flowed. The cut, although long, had not been deep; the trachea was only partially severed. He had been hit on the forehead, which must have stunned him. The cropped dark hair was stiff with congealed blood. None of this could disguise the victim’s identity. Petignat had watched him the previous afternoon pinning a white piece of cloth to Henri Menesplier’s chest, as if awarding him a medal, and then stepping back to say so quietly that it was barely audible, ‘Fire.’
He looked carefully at the body. A fine man. The skin which had always been hidden by his uniform had a silky sheen. His chest was hairless, muscular, and a scar, puckered and cartilaginous, ploughed across his abdomen on the right side. His left hand was missing and the stump was reddish, gathered inward like pursed lips. Black body hair like a diamond-shaped shield covered his lower torso from genitals to navel. He was uncircumcised. Petignat took in all these details and then, with the toe of his boot, tipped him back on his face. For decency’s sake, with so many women about.
A Good Death Page 8
