“I’m here to save your immortal soul,” he replied.
“Doesn’t seem to be much in your line. When did you get religion?”
“Oh, give them to us after the age of sixteen and we’ve got them for life,” Cronin answered. Dermot went back to his paper and left as soon as he had finished, not waiting for a coffee. As he crossed the street at the Place Saint Germain he saw and heard the fire engines turning out of the Rue du Vieux Colombier and tearing up the Rue de Rennes. Ambulances and police cars were taking the corner fast with screaming sirens. There seemed to be something going on higher up the street towards the Tour Montparnasse. He had a hollow feeling in his gut. Apprehension that made him almost breathless. At first they would not let him near the scene but he burst through and nothing would stop him. The first thing he saw was her portfolio with the wolf cutout on it. Then the remains of the camera. Attached to the mangled body. She was untouched above the waist, with her big eyes open and a questioning look on her face. Her left leg was gone below the knee and her right horribly torn. After that he remembered nothing until he woke up in the hospital. They said he went beserk and had to be dragged away from her when they carried her to the ambulance. She lived, but she would be a cripple. Fortunately, she died two months later. He insisted on being released immediately and a kindly policeman drove him home. He climbed the stairs and let himself in and the dog stayed in the corner, whimpering. He went up to the top apartment. Laure was lying on the bed and she waved him away violently. “Please,” she said hysterically, “go away. Leave me alone.” Apart from the grief for Penelope she was reliving the nightmare days of her childhood at La Fontanelle. She could not believe that similar consequences could arrive again. It was more than she could take. Even now they were apart. He was sick. Something worse than being inconsolable is not to be allowed to console. A desolate aloneness. Just nothingness. Except the pain that surged up and overflowed without warning and never stopped. He tried to write it out of his system. It didn’t work. All the joy had gone. The second loss was just too much to bear. The first? The body under the bridge. Well, it never faded.
France 3, Ireland 3, in the nightmare stakes.
12. Armand’s Priorities
Armand was telling Dermot about his war again.
“I was on my way to Grenoble on the train. I had a pass to go there because Oriane and the children were staying with René’s wife’s family. They had a big house at Montbonnot and a smaller one in the garden. He was a doctor and very well known. Immune from persecution, I thought. I thought it would be safer, expecially for the children. No one knew what would happen in Paris towards the end of the war. The train stopped in the little station of Saint-André-le-Gaz in the Department of Isère. We were taken from the train and lined up on the quai. They were French miliciens. They asked whether there were any Jews amongst us. We all said no. Then they made us expose ourselves.”
“What we used to call a ‘short-arm inspection’” Dermot had commented.
“Two were circumcised. They were taken away. They screamed that they were not Jews. It didn’t matter. The chef de gare advised me to leave. I started to walk to Grenoble. It was forty kilometers away. As I left I heard the volley as they executed the two. I was lucky. I escaped.”
“By the skin of your penis,” Dermot had murmured, in extremely bad taste. “What happened next?”
“I got a lift part of the way on a farm cart. The farmer made me open my pack to show that I had nothing incriminating, I remember. And I remember the date because the day after I caught my first ‘Baormir Glabraria’ on the pines.”
Dermot said, “That’s right. Only the important things deserve to be remembered.”
Laure said later to Dermot, “Don’t be silly. It’s all nonsense. He had a special identification card signed by de Brinon and countersigned by General Karl Oberg, Höherer SS und Polizeiführer. I found my mother’s demand for a laissez-passer. It has written in her own handwriting, ‘Je certifie que je suis de pure race aryenne et n’ai aucun antécédent juif.’ It, too, was stamped by his friend de Brinon. I still feel ashamed when I think of it.”
She never missed an opportunity to put him down. Then Dermot to defuse the situation, quietly mentioned his own experience at that time.
In Armand’s eyes, the English could do no right. Dermot was Irish but he wore a British uniform. Royal Marines. Combined Operations. Armand could never understand that. The sinking of the French fleet at Mers el Kebir had been the last act in the Anglo-French historical conflict. Pointless to say that the British couldn’t afford to let the French fleet join the Germans. Or that de Gaulle himself had said to Churchill he’d do the same under the circumstances.
13. Dermot: Butterflies and Bullets
Dermot said, “About that time, in October, 1944, I landed at Milos in the Cyclades in Greece. Trying to knock out a German gun battery.”
“The English stole the marbles from the Parthenon,” Armand had interjected with a sly smile. “Lord Elgin.”
Dermot said, “Yes, and you got the Venus from Milos. But you’re right, of course. We had no right to be in Greece shooting at your friends, the Germans.” And he raised his cup to his father-in-law.
The French. Fighting each other but seldom the enemy. Betraying their own and the agents of the Special Operations Executive. The D-Day troops thinking they’d rather be fighting the French instead of the Germans. No respect. Or trust.
Dermot meditates. Butterflies or bullets. Milos. That was a night. First they sent the battleship HMS King George V up from Alexandria to bombard the place with 14” guns. Just to tell them we were interested. To leave our card. All afternoon they fired ten-gun salvoes at the German 6” gun emplacement on top of the hill and commanding the sea around the island. A spotter plane kept reporting that all the shells were landing in the target area. So they turned to go home convinced that the gun position had been obliterated. As they left the Germans straddled them with their first and only salvo. They beat it out of there fast. But even a thick-headed German would know we’d be back. The captain of the battleship was mad. At night he stopped the ship and mustered the marine detachment on the quarterdeck, ready to land them with the ship’s boats. Someone in Alexandria or the Admiralty put a stop to that nonsense. The ship was going out to be flagship of the British Pacific Fleet. They might have lost a third of the main armament and half the close-range stuff. But there we were in transit for Ceylon and Burma after the D-Day show. The powers that be decided it would be good for us to go and practice on this totally unimportant target. So off we went with some Special Boat Squadron types in two coastal forces motor launches and they put us ashore in canoes. A half-assed operation. The krauts laid on a welcoming party for us. We didn’t even get up on the breakwater where we were supposed to land. Two sub-sections with nothing but Lanchester submachineguns and rifles and some 36 grenades and we were going to climb a steep hill and take a well-entrenched gun emplacement manned by Germans. Some hope! They waited until the SBS chaps got ’round the corner into the small harbor and then opened up with everything. They wiped out the lot. The fireworks lit up the harbor as we ducked below the wall. The lieutenant, Commando Craig, said, “Let’s get to hell out of here.” So we left with our tails between our legs and paddled like hell to the motor launch. Butterflies or bullets. All things considered, I’d rather face Baormir Glabraria butterflies any day but there was more honor in facing bullets. Later, in the jungle training camp in Ceylon, after a slight contretemps during an exercise with live ammo, when the tripod of a Vickers Medium Machinegun collapsed and nearly wrote off a sub-section, the Captain of Marines, whose joy was not unconfined, said “McManus, they’re calling for volunteers for more hazardous operations. Life expectancy, six weeks. I’ve volunteered you. Next of kin will be informed. Get packed.” So I was with the 42 Royal Marine Commando in Burma. February 1945. Kangaw in the Arakan. It was the ‘Chaung War,’ in the mangrove swamps. I was in an assault craft searching the chaungs. Chau
ngs are creeks, some wide and some narrow. There were crocodiles, mosquitoes, snakes and stakes with trip wires to detonate mines. There were booms festooned with grenades. It was stinking hot and the smell was foul. Even being in the chaung terrified me. There was black mud in the mangrove swamps and there were Japanese. They were not prepared to surrender. One morning there were three hundred corpses floating in an area of a hundred yards and crocodiles amongst them. A very unsettling sight after breakfast. I saw a bald-headed Japanese hanging on to the net on the side of the landing craft and thought he was trying to surrender. I bent down to help him aboard. The Jap pulled a knife out of the water and struck at me. So I shouted “Banzai, you bastard!” and pushed my revolver down into the man’s face and fired into his beady left eye. The Jap fell off and I pushed him away with a boathook. It was easy. I did it without thinking. I felt nothing but relief. I was eighteen, but I had met one of the five survivors of a merchant ship that had been torpedoed by a Jap submarine. They beat the crew insensible and then dumped the bodies into the shark-infested sea. Twenty others were roped together and towed behind the submarine when she submerged. I saw three survivors out of the three hundred villagers dumped on an island with no food or water and left there to die. Then I was wounded in the thigh, and sent back to Ceylon where I transferred to sea service on the staff of the Vice Admiral second in command of the British Pacific Fleet, and was attacked by kamikazes at the Sakishima Gunto during the Okinawa campaign and later bombardments on the coast of Japan. During this period in the flagship I became friendly with an American cypher officer and after the war wound up with him in an advertising agency in the Graybar Building in New York. They sent me to Europe where I floated around, putting out fires in the local offices, and that’s how I came to Paris—and Laure. It was not quite as exciting as shooting at Japs. What did the French know about crocodiles and snakes?
Now Dermot’s in Denmark. He spent the night in the yawl. He’s in his spaced-out poetic mode.
A white day. He thought: White as an altar boy’s surplice.
The sea mist an umbrella of brightness held over the flat water, with the sun a silver halo to the east. The glare was cut by a natural fog filter.
The fishing boats were up on the slips; the erect masts of yachts probed the fluffy whiteness above; the long line of wooden posts, with cross bars, like Shinto arches, staggered into the sea from the beach and disappeared under the deeper water offshore. An old private jetty. Seagulls standing on one leg or restlessly picking about.
He thought: A safe haven from the recent storms. He stood on the breakwater looking up the Sound. He was half-awake; disconnected by the wakeful night in the boat and the whole unfamiliar scene. Weightless, unbalanced, barely tethered to the earth. Remote from himself, an onlooker with the narcosis of the north. He felt he could walk on the water.
He thought death should be like this; a white euphoria, immaculate, sea meeting sky and no horizon. Light, transparent, unreal. A veil of tranquility. A good day to die. Well, a small death. Make it soon. The pure white Baltic after the soiled black Pacific of Puerto Vallarta. Natural linen after slimy satin. Innocence after decadence? No, that’s too much. The slight moisture of the air deep-cleansed the pores of sweat and indolence. The grimy deposits of cities are flushed away. A bracing caress after a suffocating sauna.
“Le fond de l’air est frais,” as his concierge in Paris says. The bottom of the air is fresh. The French too have a way with words. Away with the French.
His senses were awake now, hungrily awake. Waiting. Anticipating. Scent offish, seaweed, ozone. Then a fragrant presence; the proximity of flesh with a faint note of Miss Dior. Beech woods and meadows and mossy caverns. Especially the last. Violins up and under.
She propped her bicycle against the wall and danced up the steps. He reached out behind and touched her hand, without looking. Building the tension. She moved close to him. Silence. A current flowing between. Soaring. They met on a mountain and each meeting is a peak. A Matterhorn, he says, but it’s too subtle. Alone on the glacier before they shatter the surface and start the inevitable avalanche. (Yes, there’s a certain problem of image-slippage here. From sea to mountain. But home is the sailor home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. The fog cleared, the metaphors will roll back up the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden.)
“Ethereal,” said Dermot McManus, finally. “No other word for it.”
“Yes,” said Nana. “Can we go to the boat? I don’t must be seen here.” In her excitement she used interesting English construction.
“Listen,” said Dermot.
And he turned and murmured in her ear as the sea surged up on the shallow beach under the wall. Chuckling, hissing, kissing the soft maidenhair at the water’s edge and covering it with a tongue of foam. And he moaned throatily with the fog-horn’s moan, it sighing, thrusting and fading, but never ending. Warning, supressing, yearning. A cello and piano sonata by Schubert. His lips brushed her neck.
She shivered. “Come on,” she pleaded. Urgently. “I don’t have much time.”
“Tagesignal: En tone hver 20s,” he said, holding her back and timing the fog-horn with his wrist-watch, quoting the Pilot Book and making the Danish retch sound almost French. “56ø07’,7N. 12øl8’,7E. Magnetic. Slight variation, increasing annually. A few degrees of deviation. That’s us. Our coordinates for the fix. Mark the positions on the chart one right on top of the other.
“Oh, prima!” she said, laughing. “One on top of the other. The missionary position! What are we waiting for?”
He turned. They came together in a sudden frenzy. Like always. They ate each other’s mouths. They stumbled as one over the iron footbridge. He stopped and made the sign of the cross over the structure. He’s superstitious about bridges. Well, later you may understand it. They clambered over the small boats to get to the yawl. They stopped every little while and touched each other. Lightly, lips and cheeks only. Climbing to new altitudes. They said nothing. The touch said everything.
He slid back the hatch cover and they went down into the cabin. Waft of wood resin and varnish, linseed oil, sail lockers, Stockholm Tar. Heady. He held her as she jumped down from the engine cover and his hands slid up her thighs. Skin love. Oblivion.
Later, in the reconsecrated cabin.
He said, “Some comedian said, ‘Sex is everything when the flesh is highly semiotized.’ Maybe you understand that. I don’t. Some other fool, probably in the University of East Anglia, or Aarhus, wherever that is, said, ‘Sex is by no means everything. It varies from only as high as 78 per cent of everything to as low as 3.10 per cent. The norm—listen to this, will you—in a sane, healthy person should be between 18 and 24 per cent.’ What do you think of that?”
“We’re 110 per cent. You’re the best lover I’ve ever had. A sex maniac.”
“Score out of ten?”
“Eleven. But it’s only because of the danger. Because we can’t do it all the time. If we were together the score might sink to zero.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No. I don’t know. I must go,” she said. “I came to get the bread. Sven will wonder where I got to. I saw your masthead light last night but I couldn’t get down. It was a long night.”
“Too long, always too long,” Dermot said. “And too hard. Crippling. As your man said, in the dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”
“What are you doing here anyway?”
“Dear God, Nana. Didn’t you notice?”
“Apart from that.”
“I broke ranks. I cut and ran. Again. For good.”
“Again. For good. Of course.”
She went around gathering up the things discarded in a frenzy. The gold bracelets, the lace, the denim skirt, peasant’s blouse, silk scarf, the ballerinas.
Dermot sat on the transom berth and grabbed her hips. He talked to the beauty mark on the curved V.
“This time for good. Nothing would induce me to go ba
ck to that place. I thought we’d take the yawl to the Med. Back to Greece. Civilization. Maybe the Turkish coast. Where was I? Oh, yes. This.” He kissed the spot. “The beauty mark. The starboard-hand marker just north east of the entrance to the totally-enclosed harbor. A compulsion. Revelation, compulsion, benediction.” He kissed the spot again. “Commercial suicide, nicht? Who cares?”
“You’re mad. What about money? Your wife, Laure? And Sven, my husband?”
He noted the order. Money, wife, husband.
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