A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  ‘The problem,’ she complained, ‘is that it gives the shape but not the colour. You’ll have to help me, because you’re much better at recognising them than me.’

  Suzie, too, was busy, planning her counter-coup. She could not believe that Sabine would carry out her idea, but she could not be sure. If Sabine really made a lethal stew of mushrooms, she, Suzie, would have to tell Micheline that she was afraid she had made a mistake with one of her ceps and then the whole lot would be thrown away. Or she would take Madame Ariane’s dish and drop it on the floor.

  Sabine slipped her hand loosely through Suzie’s arm and pinched the flesh on the inside of her elbow between her nails. Suzie felt no pain at the time, although afterwards matching crescents of deep blue bruises marked Sabine’s threat: her life or Madame Ariane’s.

  ‘And you won’t tell anyone. You won’t betray me. No one will believe you anyway. And if you do, I’ll tell them who you are. I’ll write to the police in Racines, a denunciation, written in green ink. All the best ones are in green ink, apparently.’

  Suzie felt the teeth of her trap. She had promised Maman and Madame Ariane not to tell anyone that she was Jewish; she could not go to Madame Ariane for help, out of shame for having betrayed her trust.

  Sabine reached for her chin and pulled her round to face her. ‘Say you’ll help me.’

  ‘All right,’ Suzie conceded reluctantly, not looking her enemy in the eye.

  ‘Promise not to tell.’

  ‘I promise not to tell.’

  Dropping a plate was not covered by such a promise, but she was still not sure if she would have the courage to do it.

  Sabine let go of her chin and as Suzie turned her face away, she lunged towards her and bit her ear. Suzie cried out at the sudden, sharp pain, putting her hand up to feel the blood on her fingers.

  ‘That’s so you don’t forget.’

  Woken early by Florence, the girls were sent mushrooming again the next day. Sabine was exceptionally diligent, gathering a large basketful of mushrooms. As they walked home, she said. ‘You’d better look at them to make sure they’re the kind we need.’

  Suzie took the container and examined its contents. Sabine appeared to have picked everything she had seen, without discrimination, for several genuine Boletus edulis lay in the basket. Yet she had not done badly for her purpose. She had found an enormous Boletus satanas, which Suzie knew you must not pick, and a greeny-white mushroom, which she thought must be a highly poisonous Amanita phalloides. She boldly picked these two out and threw them away.

  ‘They’re no good to you.’

  ‘I thought they looked really wicked.’

  ‘The problem is that some of the poisonous ones look really like the edible ones. It’s a problem even for me. You’d got the wrong ones. Those are edible, and these too.’ She chucked out four more. ‘Those aren’t very good to eat, that’s why we don’t pick them normally, but they don’t do any harm.’

  ‘There’ll be none left soon,’ Sabine said angrily.

  ‘I can’t help it if you don’t pick the right ones.’

  Sabine sulked, but not badly; she knew that she would get nowhere if she had to consult the book.

  ‘I’ve got some here for you.’ Suzie transferred several from her own basket. Sabine looked suspicious, but made no comment.

  They took the spoils of their walk into the kitchen. Sabine shouted to Micheline, ‘We’re going to make a ragout for lunch.’

  Suzie was not sure that she had really stripped Sabine’s basket of all its deadly contents. She had no opportunity to sort through them again, as she was set to wiping clean her own fungi and to cutting them up with the garlic. When Sabine left the scullery for a moment, she seized a handful of Sabine’s mushrooms, now sliced and prepared, and substituted a heap of her own before she heard Sabine returning.

  Her final effort to save Madame Ariane came at lunch. They were to eat the mushrooms as a first course, and the girls served them to Madame Ariane and the aunts. In the kitchen Sabine handed Suzie the Judas plate.

  ‘You can give it to her.’

  Suzie nodded and took it in her left hand. She let Sabine walk ahead of her to the dining room with the plates for Madam e Veryrines and Madame de Cazalle. Sabine put down a plate in front of each of her aunts and returned to the kitchen to fetch her own. Suzie carefully placed the dish in her right hand in front of Madame Ariane who smiled and said, ‘Thank you, Suzie.’ The other she put in her own place.

  ‘Bon appetit,’ said Sabine, in her sprightliest tone, patently false to Suzie’s ears. She continued to prattle, about the beauty of the forest that morning, eating with relish and darting a glance at Madame Ariane who had speared one piece of mushroom on her fork and was about to eat it.

  Suzie pushed her food around her plate.

  ‘What’s the matter, Suzie?’ Madame de Cazalle asked. Suzie saw Sabine frowning at her.

  ‘Nothing, thank you,’ she replied.

  ‘Then eat properly.’

  She took a mushroom into her mouth, bit into the springily resistant flesh and forced herself to swallow it. Did it taste odd? Was she going to die? Then another, and another. She put down her fork. ‘I’m afraid I don’t think I can finish all of them,’ she said.

  Madame Ariane did not die. Nor did Suzie. Sabine did not appear to realise a trick had been played on her, insisting that it was a sign of Madame Ariane’s links with the devil that she was able to eat a whole plate of poisoned mushrooms and remain none the worse for it. She made no suggestion of repeating the attempt, as if her fury had been consumed in her plan which though unsuccessful, had been sufficient to staunch her rage.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  With a single-minded frenzy Sabine now dedicated herself, and Suzie, to the pursuit of the major and Madame Ariane. Suzie, whilst preferring reconnaissance to action, took part reluctantly. Sometimes she thought of what they were doing as the observation of wild animals. Sometimes she thought of it as spying on the enemy. Yet Madame Ariane was not the enemy and her identification with her was so great that she felt as if she was watching herself. She knew, although she did not tell Sabine, that Madame Ariane gave information to the major. It was obvious to Suzie that she was in the major’s power and did not do it willingly. The question that concerned her was whether Madame Ariane was being forced to give away real secrets, or whether what she told him was false and useless.

  Sabine’s interpretation of what was going on was entirely different.

  One afternoon they were playing on the shady side of the farmyard, when they had heard German voices at the gates. The soldiers on duty, two of the elderly ones, were confronted by a small girl and a large cow.

  ‘It’s Marie-Jeanne come for the bull,’ Sabine reported.

  The Bonnemort bull had a high reputation locally. Without fail his efforts impregnated the cows offered to him; the calves were invariably healthy, the bulls tender and white-fleshed, the heifers good milkers. For years Henri had allowed the smallholders of the neighbourhood, those who existed with no more than one or two cows to feed their families, to make use of the services of the bull without payment.

  Marie-Jeanne was younger than Suzie and Sabine, about nine years old. Her mother and her aunt worked the family farm, with Marie-Jeanne’s help, while her father had been held since the defeat as a prisoner of war, in a camp in Germany. She was standing in front of the sentries, barefoot, a stick in her hand to tap the cow’s bony rump when it lingered too long grazing on the verge. Even though she spoke French, she was explaining her errand to the soldiers in the local patois, as an act of defiance, although even if she had used French, they would have understood her no better. Her voice was becoming increasingly shrill as she repeated her explanation which she reinforced with descriptive gestures that astonished the guards. Finally, she thwacked her cow and the two of them walked in, ignoring attempts to stop them, through the courtyard and into the farmyard.

  ‘The idiots,’ she commented to Sabin
e and Suzie, before yelling, ‘Micheline,’ at the top of her lungs.

  Micheline emerged from her kitchen and kissed Marie-Jeanne four times, alternating from cheek to cheek. ‘Is it time for that cow of yours again, the most troublesome we ever have?’

  ‘It’s true,’ Marie-Jeanne agreed with complacency, as if her cow’s reluctance to accept insemination was a confirmation of her refinement and excellence.

  ‘Henri brought the bull in, but he’s away. He must have forgotten you were coming. Girls, you’ll have to lend us a hand.’

  Sabine and Suzie joined Micheline and Marie-Jeanne in driving the cow before them towards the pen in which Henri had put the bull the night before.

  He was a fine beast and Suzie, with her anthropomorphic sympathy for the animals of the farm, had always admired him. His hair was a rich caramel colour, as soft as cashmere, like the coat Opa used to wear long ago in Düsseldorf in the wintertime. He had heavy shoulders and short sturdy legs. His head was broad, with creamy curls on his forehead between his widely separated dark eyes, which gave him, for Suzie, an air of wisdom. He looked commanding, paternal, as he stood in the field among his cows and calves, who gave him precedence at the feeding trough.

  Now he had lost some of his habitual calm, moving about the pen and bellowing at the sight of the cow. She had become increasingly skittish and at first refused to enter the pen, so that Micheline, Suzie and Sabine had to make a cordon to drive her in to meet the bull. Marie-Jeanne, who had been holding open the wire, promptly closed the picket on her, shutting herself and the cow inside for their encounter. Micheline climbed into the enclosure to join them.

  The bull was in a hurry, already clambering on the back of the cow, his hooves scoring her hide. Suzie hung back, wanting to leave, but Sabine had clambered onto the fence, hanging over the top rail, and she returned reluctantly to join her. She saw with amazement that the bull’s penis had emerged; its long creamy oval testicles jerked. The cow swung round, so that the bull slid off his target. Micheline and Marie-Jeanne were calling to one another in patois, trying to back the cow onto the bull. She was turning her head seductively to look over her shoulder, while sidling away from him around the pen, swishing her tail from side to side. The bull made a second attempt, which she sidestepped neatly, and again his front hooves came crashing to the ground.

  Suzie’s ears were full of the roar of breathing: the snorting of the bull, the nervous huffing of the cow, Micheline’s exasperated intake of air as the cow evaded her outspread arms once again, and the excited, rapid breathing of Sabine beside her, leaning eagerly forward to watch.

  Micheline and Marie-Jeanne exchanged instructions and set about forcing the cow back, holding her still to allow the bull to mount her. This time they were successful in synchronising their actions. The cow retreated in front of Micheline’s advance. Marie-Jeanne seized the cow’s tail and pulled it over her back. At the same time, when the bull reared up, its pizzle extending to an astonishing length and rigidity, the child took hold of the penis and guided it to its goal. Then she ducked out from beneath the momentarily united bodies and, seconds later, the bull had disconnected. The cow, as if nothing had happened, moved away, lowering her head to tug at the grass.

  In the few seconds that the conjunction lasted, Suzie heard Sabine speak. ‘That’s what they’re doing. I know it.’

  * * *

  Later they sat on the low chairs in the chapel, out of range of Micheline and Florence who might require them for chores.

  ‘You can’t believe that she’s working for the Germans,’ Suzie protested. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘She could work for both sides,’ Sabine argued. ‘Just because she goes to a Fourteenth of July parade doesn’t mean she isn’t also betraying them to the major.’

  ‘She might tell him things to mislead him,’ Suzie suggested.

  ‘She might,’ Sabine conceded. ‘But it hasn’t anything to do with that. It’s just sex, like the cow and the bull.’

  ‘It’s obvious she’s afraid. How can you think it is sex?’ Sabine crossed her arms and drew her hands down her torso. ‘I just know. You can’t yet.’

  It was true, Suzie thought; two fleshy cones, small but distinct and separate, were visible under Sabine’s dress. Suzie’s own chest was a flat as a child’s, the nipples the palest lilac blemishes on her white skin. She frowned. She could not understand how developing a bust would help you to see something that wasn’t there.

  Sabine was frowning too. The trouble with Suzie was that she was almost simple about some matters. She was a good companion. Life had improved enormously since her arrival. Sabine now liked Bonnemort better than either the convent or the village school. But Suzie refused to comprehend certain things, even when they were explained to her. Sabine knew what was happening, not because of anything they had seen, although they had seen enough: they had seen him take her hair, tugging it to pull her round to kiss her, for example. Suzie was right, he was violent and threatening, but Sabine couldn’t make Suzie understand that that was sex. Nor did Suzie have any sense of atmosphere. Sabine remembered at the convent that one of the nuns, Sister Cecile, who had wide blue eyes and a mole on her upper lip from which a single black hair grew, had a crush on Antoinette. Sabine had never known what, if anything, had ever taken place, for she had been too little and too despised to have been informed. Yet she remembered the tension that radiated from each of them. It had been so palpable that Sabine could smell it in the air. And it was the same now at Bonnemort. Suzie couldn’t see or smell or understand anything.

  She dropped her hands into her lap and said, ‘I long to be grown up. I can’t wait. Eighteen is old enough. In five years’ time I shall be grown up.’

  Suzie could not imagine five years. Would the war still be going on? Or would it all be over and Maman and Papa back from wherever they had been taken? When she thought about her family it was always in the past, so that when she visualised the future, normal development reversed itself and she felt herself shrinking. She hoped that in five years’ time she would be a little girl again, living with Maman and Papa and Rahel in Paris.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, with real curiosity. ‘What’s so good about being grown up?’

  ‘You never understand anything,’ Sabine spoke venomously. ‘I want to be grown up so I can have power over other people. That’s what being adult means. When you are a child, people can do things to you, things you don’t want, things that hurt. When I grow up, it’ll be my turn.’

  Suzie made no comment, although she pondered what Sabine had said. It was true that people did things to you that you didn’t want, but they did them to Maman and Papa, too, and Madame Ariane, so having things done to you wasn’t a question of being a child. And Sabine had quite enough power already. How much more could she want?

  * * *

  Late one afternoon Sabine was at the sitting-room window watching Madame Ariane leave on horseback, leaning down and lifting the saddle flap to check the girth as she rode out of the farmyard. No sooner had she seen her go than she heard the motor of the major’s car start up in the courtyard. She ran over to the window on the other side of the room.

  ‘She’s going and now he’s going.’

  Suzie, who was reading The Misfortunes of Sophie with the book propped up against her raised knees, did not respond.

  ‘They’re going to meet somewhere.’

  ‘We can’t follow them if they’re on horseback and in a car,’ Suzie said thankfully.

  ‘If we were somewhere like the ridge above La Peyre, we could see the road from there almost all the way to the village.’

  ‘Suppose they don’t go that way.’

  ‘It’s worth going, just in case.’

  ‘Sabine, let me stay and read.’

  ‘No, you’re coming too.’

  Suzie was forced out and marched off into the forest. When after thirty minutes’ climb they reached their vantage point on the bare ridge they could see nobody in the whole expanse
spread out in front of them. The road, intermittently visible through the trees on the other side of the valley, was empty. The woods and the folds of the hills hid all life and all movement.

  They sat while Sabine raked the road with the binoculars. Eventually abandoning their fruitless wait, they made their way back down the hill into the forest. Suddenly, as they reached an open clearing cut through by a cart track, they saw the Hispano-Suiza. Suzie’s reactions were quicker than Sabine’s. She ducked into the bracken, dragging Sabine down to join her. No shout or movement. They had not been seen. Suzie thought at first that it was because there was no one to see them. Then a voice came to her ear.

  Standing on the track well clear of the car was the major, unmistakable in his black uniform and peaked cap, and beside him a smaller figure, a man. Not Madame Ariane. Suzie felt a wave of relief wash over her. The likelihood of coming across Madame Ariane and the major together had been remote, but she had feared it nonetheless, a scene so culpable that even she would not be able to defend her any longer.

  She listened to the voices floating faintly in incomprehensible snatches across the pasture. She could only just make out what they were saying, but it seemed to her that they were speaking German. Then, she thought, of course it would have to be: the major doesn’t speak French. So the other, a Frenchman, must speak German. The men had their backs to them, facing the view. They began to walk towards the car and Sabine grasped Suzie’s arm.

  ‘It’s Mr Vernhes,’ she said.

  Suzie in the same instant saw that the major’s pistol was in his hand, not aimed but pointing at the ground. He held it easily, as if it were a natural growth from his fist, a replacement for his lost hand. The stories she had overheard in Micheline’s kitchen came back to her. The major must have caught Mr Vernhes and any moment now he would lift his arm, place the gun at the schoolmaster’s head and fire.