A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  She turned away. ‘Goodnight.’

  When she had gone, Theo leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes with an enormous sense of release. He observed the irony of receiving reassurance from an old lover about the fidelity of his wife. Florence’s word carried weight. She was devoted to Ariane; the whole household was, except, of course, his daughter. Surely the aunts, Micheline, Florence would not have remained so loyal to her if she really had been the lover of the SS officer, something that could not have been hidden inside the household. And, another irony: Sabine, who detested her stepmother, had added to the evidence to vindicate her, by revealing that Suzie, the child they had sheltered, was Jewish. This was the explanation he had been waiting for.

  Chapter Twelve

  The case against Ariane was closed. Theo had now convinced himself of her innocence and was determined to see her as soon as possible. The fact that she was reluctant to meet him filled him with urgency, afraid it would soon be too late to put right what had gone so hideously wrong. The unreality of exile had distorted his expectations. After seven months back in France he had come to understand something of the strange life of the Occupation. Ariane’s conduct in that grey world had been beyond reproach, he saw that now. The head-shaving had been an act of drunken violence in the aftermath of liberation by men who had known nothing of her Resistance activities. Their suspicion of someone, especially an outsider, who had quartered the SS for two months, had combined with peasant resentment to produce an unjust act. He had compounded the injustice by his instinctive recoil.

  His obsession with Ariane’s guilt had distracted him from the question of Henri. Were the hints of betrayal, which he had heard from Florence, from Madame Maniotte, justified? He regretted that he had not been able to contact the Russian, Mr Nikola, who had escaped from the ambush, to learn from him more of what had happened. He would ask Ariane; she would know. This was his task now, to meet Ariane, to be reconciled.

  After so long a silence, he found it difficult to approach his wife and he debated for several days how best to reach her. Finally, he took one of his visiting cards and wrote on the back, Would you agree to meet me? Thursday at seven in the Napoleon. On the day before the time set, she replied with equal terseness. One of her visiting cards was delivered to the Ministry, with the single word, Agreed, scribbled on it.

  He went to the meeting with guilt and unease. He had a high concept of honourable behaviour and was aware that his instinctive reaction that evening in September last year did not live up to what his better judgement called for; yet he did not know how to be humble, if that was what was necessary. He arrived early and sat watching the entrance. Parisian women still went to extraordinary lengths to achieve elegance in spite of the shortages, the rationing and all the physical difficulties of maintaining a high level of self-decoration. In London women had seemed to heave a sigh of relief that, amid all the other problems of war, they could not be expected to worry about being smart.

  In spite of his concentration, he missed her entrance and only saw her when she stood before him, drawing off her gloves. They shook hands and, in their common awkwardness, hesitated, then kissed one another coldly on the cheek. She looked pale and gaunt and older. He realised that he had expected her to remain as she had been, fixed at the moment of his departure in 1940.

  She had been making her own assessment. ‘You’ve changed a lot, Theo,’ she said, speaking his thought. ‘You’re much greyer. I suppose it’s not surprising after what you’ve been through. And it’s not unattractive.’ He began at once with his prepared apology, but she cut him short. ‘Don’t let’s mention it. I wasn’t ready to see you or anyone. So really I must thank you for giving me time. And your arriving like that, unannounced, meant I never had to ask myself whether or not to tell you.’

  The bar was unheated and she kept her coat on. Under her hat, an absurd turban of twisted red velvet with a cockade in front, her hair just appeared. He noticed that she had a habit of tipping her head and pulling gently at a lock on her neck, as if to encourage it to grow. If he had not made that impulsive, unannounced journey, he would never have known. Better not to have known.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘Some things I don’t know and others are so horrible it’s better for one’s sanity to forget them. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know everything, of course. I want to know about your Resistance work. I want to know what happened to Lucien Maniotte and to Henri.’

  She had been so calm until then that he was astonished when, at his mention of Henri, her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I want to know what happened to Henri, too.’ She set her mouth and the tears did not fall. ‘What did they tell you at Bonnemort?’

  ‘Micheline said he had been executed by the Germans. Then Florence told me there was more to it than that and that I would never find out. Someone else suggested that he had been betrayed.’ He did not mention Vernhes’ suggestions of cowardice and incompetence.

  ‘Ah, dear Florence is very clever.’ She stretched out her arms, as if pushing something away. ‘We lived in a world of half-knowledge, or false knowledge, propaganda which everyone accepted at first. And not knowing was a principle of safety. The less you knew, the less harm you could do if you were caught. I was only a very minor cog. Lucien and Henri were the important ones.’

  ‘How did you begin?’

  * * *

  How had it begun? Theo’s departure, without debate, to London, had been so shocking that it had called everything into question. Left to herself, she might have taken longer to reject the Marshal and the policies of Vichy. Theo had crystallised matters for her.

  Settling at Bonnemort in 1939 during the phoney war had not been easy. Although the aunts had behaved with immaculate politeness to her, there had been no one with whom she had anything in common. She spent hours every day, whatever the weather, riding around the countryside, sometimes in Henri’s company. He showed her the cross-country routes, the landmarks of pigeon towers, hilltops, stands of trees on the skyline, teaching her to recognise them from every direction. The knowledge had served her well later on. When they passed through remote hamlets with poetic names, where chained dogs barked savagely, men would regard them balefully, not responding to their greetings. She would shudder at the hostility she felt, age-old, its roots beyond the Revolution, in the Jacqueries of the medieval past. He had found her an ancient pair of field glasses, which weighed heavily on her chest when she slung them around her neck. They gave her endless pleasure in watching the bird life from the windows of her tower, or from the terrace in the garden.

  For the first week or so after Theo left for England in 1940 she had passionately hoped she was pregnant. If she had a child, she would have a purpose however long the war lasted and a permanent link with him. When that hope bled from her, she was lost for a time. Theo had instructed her during his nocturnal visit to bring his daughter from the convent in Touraine in the occupied zone, home to Bonnemort. Although her meeting with Sabine at the wedding had not been warm, she decided that Theo’s child would have to be a replacement for her own and that living together would be a new beginning for them both. Illusory hope. Sabine was implacably hostile and no effort to please or interest her met with a return of friendship. Sabine gave her the final impulse towards resistance.

  They were in the salon one afternoon that autumn of 1940, looking at the view over the valley. Micheline and Florence were walking towards the house, carrying up baskets filled with walnuts that had just been harvested.

  ‘Florence is very beautiful,’ Sabine remarked.

  Ariane looked out at Florence, then at Sabine, with curiosity. Nothing Sabine said to her was without motive.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in surprise. ‘You’re right. She is beautiful.’

  ‘My father always thought so, too. I saw him once kiss her neck.’

  Why she should accept this story, instantly, as truth, when it was patently told only to wound,
she did not know. Nor why it should matter. She had never thought that Theo had lived without women in the years since his wife had died. So why was this information important? Because she suddenly realised that she had no ties. She could resist because she was free.

  A week later the letter from Bertrand Gauthier, her Marxist teacher of philosophy, arrived. In cautious language, because of the censorship, he asked for her help in arranging a quiet place where he could recuperate from a recent ‘attack’. He had been dismissed from his post in the first months of the Marshal’s rule, she discovered later. She wrote back at once inviting him to stay for as long as was necessary.

  * * *

  Theo, watching her, listening to her, felt the strength and clarity of her personality, as he had the evening they first met, when she had expounded the evils of Munich. Talking about the war, she had relaxed. He wanted to say, Let’s forget all this; let’s talk about ourselves. Instead he asked, ‘What about Vernhes? Was he involved then?’

  ‘Vernhes? You know Vernhes?’ She looked alarmed.

  ‘I’ve met him, yes. I was at Bonnemort last month, you know. He’s the mayor of Lepech Perdrissou now.’

  ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ she asked.

  He offered her one and lit it for her.

  She inhaled deeply. ‘Thanks. I don’t smoke much now, because men resent seeing a woman consuming something that they feel they have first call on. But I need it just now.’ Smoke misted his view of her face, blurring her features. ‘Vernhes wasn’t active then. This was in the winter of forty to forty-one and he was a good communist. He wouldn’t do anything without the blessing of the Party.’

  * * *

  She had already met Vernhes, even before Gauthier’s arrival, when she had taken a mutely furious Sabine to register for the new school year at Lepech Perdrissou. Although he kept his party membership a secret, she had recognised him even then as a class antagonist. He had categorised her before she had opened her mouth: a rich bourgeoise, a Catholic, a devotee of the Marshal. The assumptions were implicit in the way he had spoken to her. She had made no attempt to correct him and only hoped he would not be so prejudiced against Sabine as to treat her unkindly. For her own part she had felt, then, an uneasy, distasteful fascination for him. She guessed that he came from a relatively unprivileged background, where a mother had lavished hopes for the fulfilment of her own ambitions on the upbringing of her only son, who was immensely clever, without social graces and with only one sensitivity towards others: the power to recognise a victim.

  Right at the beginning, when Gauthier arrived, she had had to confide in Henri and Micheline, for without them she was helpless. She told them of Gauthier’s political affiliations with some trepidation, for Henri was socialist, she knew, and there was little love lost between socialists and communists. She had talked to them sitting at Micheline’s kitchen table. Henri had folded his worn, brown hands in front of him on the oilcloth. Micheline sat with her hands in her pinafore pocket, looking at Henri for his reaction.

  ‘You can’t persecute someone for his opinion,’ Henri said. ‘Thought is free.’

  * * *

  Theo laughed. ‘Ironic that poor Henri should decide to resist in order to fight for freedom of opinion for a communist who would have shot him down without remorse for that very belief.’

  Silence fell. They remembered simultaneously how Henri had been shot down and taken prisoner, and the shadow of treachery that hung over his death. She was buttoning her coat up to her neck, preparing to leave. He wanted to hold her back, but nothing would keep her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Theo was left dissatisfied with this interview. Although he had not known what to expect, he now knew what he wanted: to be allowed to apologise and to be forgiven; to be told what had happened so that he could understand; to put the whole episode behind them and start again. However, it was clear that his wife was not yet ready for this. He telephoned her to suggest lunch or dinner. She refused both suggestions, but agreed to a walk in the Tuileries Gardens. They met at the main gates between the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie on a grey and bitterly cold afternoon. Ariane was hunched inside her coat, her hands deep in her pockets; they fell into step and walked towards the pond.

  ‘Tell me what happened to you, Theo,’ she said quickly. ‘Did you have a good war?’

  ‘Good? I don’t know. The only thing I can say is that I’m glad I left for England when I did. I have no regrets there.’

  ‘I wish I could say I had no regrets.’

  ‘What do you regret?’

  ‘Everything, everything. The whole thing has been horrible, a nightmare.’ She spoke angrily. ‘Suzie, the child who was at Bonnemort, for example. I’m trying to find her family, but I am so afraid it is going to end badly.’

  ‘Can I help?’ He knew he couldn’t, but he seized the opportunity to offer to do something for her.

  ‘Could you?’

  ‘I can try. I could make some enquiries. I have to warn you there are some bad rumours about what has been happening to the Jews. How did the child survive with the SS living with you last summer?’ Theo asked. ‘Did you have to keep her in a cupboard?’

  ‘Oh no, thank God. She was legal, with false papers. And when you see her, you’ll know why she was safe. She has blue eyes and a fair complexion, so that she looks more Aryan than most French children.’ She laughed. ‘In fact, I had more problems on that score than she did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sometime in the summer of forty-two, I was called upon to prove my Aryan credentials. It was after Suzie had come to us, but before the Germans occupied the free zone. I can laugh about it now. They were grotesque, these Vichy people, but it wasn’t funny then.’

  * * *

  The letter from the Prefecture appeared at first glance to be no more than irritating. Just another of the interminable checks on the documents that permitted them to exist. She had left it on her desk without any sense of urgency. Only later when she came to read it carefully did she see, with a lurch of her heart, that it was signed by a Monsieur Cayre of the General Commission for Jewish Questions. Instantly, her imagination created a scene of Suzie wrenched from her, screaming with loneliness, to be deported to the East, while she was imprisoned for her crime of harbouring the racially impure.

  During the journey to Racines, by bike, by bus, by train, she rehearsed how she would meet the unknown threat. Suzie’s papers would withstand examination, so she would deny that the child was Jewish, but she must do it without arousing antagonism. She must suppress the personal authority that she had always assumed from her birth, her wealth, her education.

  None of those advantages counted now, least of all with this sinister and irrational offshoot of the bureaucracy. To protect Suzie she would be humble, ingratiating, feminine, flattering, servile, whatever was needed.

  The figure behind the desk was almost hidden by the barrier of card index boxes which he had erected between him and the public whom he summoned for interview. He wore round, horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie.

  ‘Madame de Cazalle, I called you here today …’ He avoided her eyes, studying a paper, as if reading a text. ‘Because the law of 2 June 1941 requires every person of the Jewish race in France, in the non-occupied as well as the occupied zone, to register his or her name and place of abode at the Prefecture, in the Jewish index. And you have not done so.’

  ‘I have not done so?’ She could not prevent herself from stressing the personal pronoun. She had been thinking of Suzie. ‘Why should I do so?’

  He took off his spectacles, and revealed his prominent, pale blue eyes. ‘Because, as I understand it, you are Jewish.’

  She was impassive, in spite of the rage that welled up within her at being trapped in a position where she could only behave badly. To deny with indignation that she was Jewish implied that she was rejecting a calumny, accepting the idea that to be Jewish was a crime. To ask for the evidence against her seemed to acknowledge the
truth of the accusation. To refuse to answer would deny the authority of the horrible little man whom she had to placate.

  ‘I am not Jewish,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Ah, many people say that to me at first, but I often find that it is a little matter that they have – somehow – forgotten.’

  ‘I can’t see how one can forget. I am not of the Jewish faith.’

  ‘And some people find they are of the Jewish race, without ever having known it, even if they are not of the Jewish faith. It comes as quite a shock to them, I can tell you. The laws of 3 October 1940 and 2 June 1941, drawing on the juridical experience of the Nuremberg Laws, state clearly who is of the Jewish race. You are a Jew if you adhere to the Jewish faith, evidently. But even if you are a Christian, and your parents were Christian, you are a Jew if, for example, you have three Jewish grandparents. You are a Jew, even if you are a Christian, if you have two Jewish grandparents and you are married to a Jew or a half-Jew. Moreover, a half-Jew is a Jew, even if he is a second-generation Christian, if he is married to a half-Jew, even if she is Christian.’ His face with suffused with triumph. ‘Can you now say that you know you’re not Jewish?’

  ‘I am not Jewish, and I still don’t understand what it means to be of the Jewish race.’

  He frowned at her stubbornness. ‘If you persist in your denial, I shall delay your registration and hand your case over to the Office of Personal Status.’ He flipped her papers into a tray, to indicate he had done all he could for her. ‘You will have time to produce a proper attestation of your ancestry, so that your case can be judged accurately.’

  ‘One moment.’ She forced an ingratiating tone into her voice. ‘Can I ask, how is it that you decided to ask for my Aryan credentials? I can’t believe that everyone in the region is being subjected to such meticulous scrutiny.’