by Allan Massie
He had blacked out then, mercifully, Dominique thought, and when he came to, his ropes had been cut, he was lying face down on the ground, and his father was dead. ‘I couldn’t touch him,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t even touch him … ’
He fell off the chair and lay curled up on the floor. Once he lifted his head and howled.
‘Hospital,’ Dominique said. ‘We must take him to hospital now.’
‘Yes,’ the sub-prefect said, ‘and then organise a search for his father’s body. I don’t look forward to finding it.’
‘And for the assassins … ’
‘You think so?’
‘Surely.’
‘I’m not persuaded that would be sensible. Not now, not today, not for a long time, if ever. Oh la belle France.’
When they had left the boy in the hospital, Dominique said, ‘Why do you think they let him go? After all he’s a witness, he recognised the man he called Joseph and can testify against him.’
‘You think a trial’s likely, young man? And in any case the boy’s already half-demented. He may never recover. I’ll be surprised if he does.’
***
Alain lay, not sleeping, in the open air, under a big moon, his rifle by his side like a lover. Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow belongs to us. Paris would rise, to free itself by its own efforts – and theirs. The boy Vincent lay next to him, not sleeping either. ‘I’m trembling with excitement,’ he said, but Alain heard anxiety, even fear, in his voice. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it’s going to be marvellous. These are days we’ll never forget.’
XIV
‘Can one trust Fabien?’ Lannes said.
Bracal raised his left eyebrow. His fingers, still carefully manicured, despite everything, beat their reflective tattoo on his desk. The shutters were closed against the day and the street. It was cool in the judge’s office. The electricity was working again and a fan scythed the air. Outside the heat was still oppressive. Last night’s thunderstorm had failed to clear the atmosphere. There wasn’t even a breath of wind and the sun was hidden behind deep purple clouds.
‘That’s not a question I can answer,’ he said. ‘You’ve been reinstated, Jean. You’re a servant of the Republic, as Fabien is too.’
‘So we’re talking about the Republic again?’
‘It has never ceased to exist. We have served Vichy, but knowing always, or at least since November ’42 and the North African landings, that it was only – how shall I put it? – an expedient? Yes, that will do: an expedient. That’s been my position. Yours too, I believe.’
‘And Fabien’s?’
‘Why not? He extricated you from the hands of the Milice. Without his intervention, you would probably have been shot. You are in his debt. And yet you seem to distrust him. Why?’
Because, Lannes might have said, of a conversation with a disreputable rent-boy.
‘I don’t know,’ he said instead. ‘Perhaps because I find it so hard to trust anyone now, so hard to believe in any simple explanation. That’s what we have learned, isn’t it, in the last four years: that almost nothing is what it seems to be.’
‘We have to live with uncertainty,’ Bracal said. ‘We’ll have to do so for a long time to come, eyeing so many with suspicion. As for the other matter you have brought to me, unless you find that girl and can persuade her to testify, you have no evidence to justify the issuing of a warrant for the arrest of the advocate Labiche. Why not leave him to the Resistance?’
‘Because I don’t want him dead, I want him in the dock. You spoke of the Republic, which implies republican values. One of these is legality.’
‘It will be a long time, I fear, before legality is restored. Whether we like it or not, for months to come, it will be a question of revenge, not legality, and I suppose revenge is a form of savage justice.’
‘You can’t believe that, you’re a judge. You can’t wash your hands of legality.’
Bracal smiled, and held up his hands which smelled, even across the desk, of expensive soap – and where had he got that, Lannes thought.
‘I’ve never been an idealist,’ the judge said. ‘I take the world as I find it. For four years the prevailing wind has come from Vichy. Now the wind has shifted. It blows with the Resistance, and, believe me, Jean, for weeks and perhaps months to come, the Law will be whatever the Resistance says it is. Again, believe me, I don’t like that either, but if we are to survive we bend before the wind. Which is why I say: leave Labiche to them.’
‘One suggestion is that he has made plans to escape to Spain.’
‘And so?’
‘He will never stand trial. I have the impression you think I’m obsessed with him. Perhaps I am. If so it’s with reason. Before the war, in ’38, he raped a young girl of eleven or twelve. A few weeks later she hanged herself. The advocate was morally responsible for her death. I want him to pay for it.’
‘Jean, Jean, morally responsible is not legally responsible. If what you say is true – and I don’t doubt it even though I say “if” – Labiche was guilty of abuse of a minor, perhaps of rape, not of her death. And since she is, you say, dead, she cannot testify against him, and I assume you have no witness, merely hearsay, that is, what you have been told. Is that correct? Yes? So you have no case, no case at all. And, by your own admission, your chance of finding the other girl you speak of – the one in the photograph you carry around with you – is slim. Leave Labiche to the Resistance.’
‘To mob law?’
‘To mob law, yes. To the horrors of mob law, even. Heaven knows there will be enough of its horrors.’
***
Lannes couldn’t say just what he had hoped for from Bracal, but more than he had got, certainly more. Encouragement at least, he had supposed. He had come to respect the judge, and now he felt his respect diminished. He was unfair perhaps; he recognised that. What Bracal had said was reasonable; he had no case against Labiche. The suggestion that he should leave him to the Resistance made sense. And yet it rankled. The world might be a cleaner place if Fernand and his friends put him up against a wall and shot him. He understood why Bracal thought that would be the simplest and neatest solution. There was no case. So close the book, no matter how.
But it wasn’t right.
It was intolerable to stay in the office, and in any case there was nothing for him to do there, except to brood. Remembering his conversation with Dr Solomons, he picked up his stick and headed for the rue des Remparts. At least he wouldn’t be met with the news that Miriam was dead. She might even agree to see him. But it was Henri he wanted to speak to.
He walked slowly. The heat was still oppressive and he was sweating heavily. Another thunderstorm was on the way and as he turned into the rue des Remparts, the first drops of rain began to fall and a flash of lightning stabbed through the gloom. The street was deserted. He imagined people all over Bordeaux closing their shutters against the world. All day he had been aware of a mood of expectation in the city, expectation shot through with anxiety. A black cat crossed his path and jumped on to a window ledge from which it eyed him warily.
Music sounded as Henri opened the door.
‘Wagner again?’
‘Tristan und Isolde, with Flagstadt. Somehow,’ Henri said, ‘it’s Wagner that suits my mood now.’
‘I saw Dr Solomons the day before yesterday. He gave me good news.’
‘Yes, indeed. Miriam’s asleep now, but if you can stay till she wakes, I know that this time she’ll be happy to see you. And I have news too, but that can wait.’
‘You look happy, Henri.’
‘Is that so strange? But you, Jean, look wretched.’
Upstairs Toto came and sniffed at Lannes’ trouser-legs, declared himself satisfied, and returned to curl up in his basket.
‘It’s almost over, isn’t it?’ Henri said. ‘Any day now, they’ll be gone, and, do you know, I believe I’ll have the heart to open the bookshop again. I never thought I would.’
He pulled the cork from
a bottle, and poured a glass which he handed to Lannes.
‘A dry Graves,’ he said. ‘You remember Gaston’s English joke: only sextons drink Graves.’
‘He had to explain it to me, that a sexton was a grave-digger. Was it a line of Shakespeare?’
‘No, Byron.’
He lifted the arm of the gramophone and stopped the whirring of the record.
‘So, Jean, what is it? What ails you?’
‘Yes, you’re right. You know me too well. I’ve come to unburden myself.’
‘As you always used to do. In the old days.’
It took Lannes a long time, beginning with the search for Marie-Adelaide, speaking then of the anonymous letters, of his going into hiding, of his imprisonment, of Fabien, Edmond de Grimaud, the wretched priest, and Labiche. Labiche most of all. Henri listened without interruption, smoking his pipe and not touching the glass of wine which sat on the occasional table by his armchair.
‘My poor Jean,’ he said at last. ‘You’re obsessed.’
‘Yes, that’s what I am. Obsessed and confused.’
‘And unhappy, I think.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Henri occupied himself scraping out the dottles from his pipe, re-filling it, pressing the tobacco down with his thumb, applying a match, and getting it going with short rapid puffs.
‘You take too much on yourself, Jean. You always have, ever since we met as students. Does it matter what becomes of the man Labiche? Whether he is shot or escapes to Spain? His day is over, done with. He’s a failure. You don’t really need to concern yourself with him. I’m a failure myself, Jean, I’ve known that for years, at least since Pilar found me an unsatisfactory husband and our life here in Bordeaux insufficient for her. But I’ve come to terms with my condition. You take too much on yourself, I say again. You should have said all this to Marguerite, not to me. But you’re too proud to do so, too proud to share your anxieties with her. It’s as if you wanted to watch your marriage disintegrate before your eyes, and seek consolation in work, in the consciousness that you are doing your duty. There: you may think I shouldn’t be saying this, but we’re old friends, you’re my only true friend and have been that since Gaston was killed, and I don’t like to see you destroying yourself by your insistence on taking the weight of the world on your shoulders. These girls you speak of. Well, first, this Marie-Adelaide seems to me from what you say to have acted as a free agent. So let her be. Then this other girl, the one in the photograph, you don’t believe you are ever going to find her; yet you gnaw at it like a dog with a bone. She may be dead. She may be married. You don’t know. You merely assume that she wants to be revenged on Labiche, because you think she should want that. But perhaps she doesn’t. Perhaps she has put it all behind her and got on with her life. And then there’s the other girl, Yvette. You feel in some way responsible for her. Yet from what you say, she seems quite capable of looking after herself. If you were in love with her, it might be different. But you’re not, are you? Desire, yes, no doubt you feel that. It’s natural that you should, but you won’t allow yourself to act on it – and quite right too. Yet you allow that desire to corrupt your relationship with Marguerite. It doesn’t make sense. And then you speak of what you call the sin of accidia – though you don’t recognise the concept of sin any more than I do. Jean, my old friend, you’re in grave danger – forgive my blunt speaking – of drowning in a sea of self-pity. I can say this because I recognise the same temptation in myself. We’re too conscious of responsibility, pride ourselves on it, and resent the consequences. We’re not like Gaston who went through life taking what he wanted, even if it damaged him. You know, I used to talk with Léon about Gaston, not at first of course, but as I came to know him and like him, and one day, he surprised me by saying, “But you forget, Monsieur Chambolley, or don’t perhaps realise, that Gaston was happy, he had a zest for life. He was a natural teacher, you know, I learned a lot from him and am grateful.” And I realised he was right. I’m a greater failure than Gaston was, because I have preferred to shut myself away, deny myself new experiences. And perhaps you have done so also, Jean, though in a different style. There: I’ve probably said too much, but if friends can’t speak frankly to each other, what is friendship for?’
Lannes fingered his glass, set it aside and lit a cigarette. He sat in silence while he smoked half of it. Henri bent down and scratched Toto behind the ear.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve said too much.’
‘No,’ Lannes said. ‘No, you haven’t. I don’t dispute any of it. But there’s more to it still. More and worse. I’m being eaten up with hatred, not only of Labiche. Indeed it’s quite possible that he is no more than a symbol of everything I detest. But what I feel is hatred of this war, hatred which has grown more intense even as the war seems to be coming to what we must think of as a happy end. We’ve lived through defeat and humiliation, and it appears that we are going to be included among the victors, even though we don’t deserve to be – we have lived with defeat and accustomed ourselves to its consequences. But that’s not it. It’s not even only the pervasive dishonesty that has been forced on us. It’s the damage it has done to the ordinary – the ordinary decencies of life. Clothilde is breaking her heart over a boy who chose the wrong side, chose it with a wild gallantry – and the man who influenced him will probably come through unscathed even though he is a criminal as well as a scoundrel. Dominique, your godson, did good work in Vichy. Will he be forgiven for that? And Alain went as you know with Léon and little Jérôme to join de Gaulle. We have heard nothing from him or of him for more than two years. He may be dead. If he isn’t, what will whatever he has experienced have done to him, two years, I repeat, in which he should have been studying, playing rugby and flirting with girls. All of them – and indeed all the youth of France – will have learned what they shouldn’t know at their age. And now we are going to be required to engage in a new round of dishonesty, in which we will be required to pretend that these last years haven’t been what they have been, but that instead all of us except a few guilty men and women have engaged in Resistance. For a generation at least France will live a new lie. Do you wonder I hate them all?’
‘Jean, Jean, the world is as it is, and everyone must find a means of accommodating themselves to its reality.’
Lannes drank his wine.
‘You’re right. I suppose you’re right, and I’m a mess of, as you say, self-pity, resentment and hatred. Enough of that. You said you have some good news.’
‘Yes,’ Henri said, ‘Miriam and I are going to get married, whether she recovers her health or not, and I am now ready to believe that she will indeed do so.’
Lannes got to his feet, embraced Henri and said, ‘That’s wonderful. It’s more than wonderful. It’s an expression of faith in the future.’
He could only wish that he shared that faith.
XV
As news came of the Allied advance in the North, and rumours of the imminent Liberation of Paris circulated, there was no insurrection in Bordeaux. Someday soon, it was clear, the Germans must leave if they weren’t to be trapped in a city they had occupied and pillaged for four years, but which their garrison, considerably reduced in numbers, could not reasonably be expected to hold much longer. The choice for the German command was between withdrawal and surrender. This was clear. Lannes suspected that many of the rank-and-file would have opted happily for the latter. Better surely to be prisoners-of-war, safe in captivity, than to continue fighting a war that was evidently being lost; he couldn’t believe that the private soldiers had any stomach for battle now. It might be different, probably was different, on the Eastern Front where nobody would choose to be transported to a Russian camp, and where in any case they would soon be defending their homeland against an enemy whose revenge for their own atrocities they must fear. But here in Bordeaux the troops of the Wehrmacht were no longer the swaggering self-confident blond warriors of 1940, but reservists, many of them middle-aged and veterans of
the First War, or beardless boys, to all of whom surrender surely made good sense. Nevertheless he feared that the commanders were still in thrall to their Führer, and that they would obey any order, no matter how demented, to hold their ground here in Bordeaux, or – worse still perhaps – to destroy public buildings and block the river to prevent the much-needed import of provisions to the miserably malnourished citizens. If only, he thought, the Allies hadn’t demanded unconditional surrender …
Meanwhile he found himself in limbo. In these days in which anxiety mingled with exultation, the PJ was for the moment redundant. As Moncerre put it, downing a glass of wine, ‘Even the criminals are on holiday or posing as Heroes of the Resistance; it makes me sick.’ But the truth was that ordinary crime itself was indeed taking a holiday; murders were being committed only in the name of France.
Nevertheless Lannes went to the office every day where he sat for hours at an empty desk; it was an escape from home if nothing else, an escape from Marguerite’s cold silence and Clothilde’s anxiety, her longing for news from Michel which might never come. Maurice visited twice, was asked if he had had word from Dominique, shook his head, and tried to divert Clothilde. Lannes wished he could do so; he was so evidently attracted to her and so much more suitable than Michel.
Old Joseph, the office messenger, knocked at his door, and said, ‘There’s a young lady wishes to speak to you.’
For a moment he hoped it would be Yvette.
‘Has she been here before? Did she give a name?’
‘The answer’s “no” to both questions,’ Joseph said. ‘Unless my memory’s failing with regard to the first, I’ve never seen her before, and even at my age I’ve a good eye for young ladies, and as to the second, she declined to say who she was but insists it’s important.’
