‘Oh no, dear,’ said Bérangère Lamotte, the schoolteacher. ‘I heard a quite different story. She wanted to get married – to a policeman!’
It was a few days after the Bellevilles’ return from the south, and Solange’s parents had invited a group of neighbours for drinks to welcome the Bellevilles home. The guests of honour were late, and speculation was rife.
‘You are quite absurd,’ cried Madame Jarvis, who was the mayor’s wife, and not above using her status to win an argument. ‘It was the grandfather, all right, but it had nothing to do with the boy. What I heard was . . .’
The room fell quiet as Luc and his mother appeared.
‘The door was open.’ Teresa Belleville looked nervous but held her head high. ‘We came straight in.’
‘Say something,’ muttered Solange to Arianne where they stood at the back of the room. She put her hand in the small of her cousin’s back. ‘Go on!’
‘Why me?’
‘Because I can’t think of anything.’
‘But . . .’
‘Never mind, you’re too late.’
Father Julien, the village priest, had broken out of the crowd and was walking towards Teresa and Luc with outstretched hands.
‘My dear friends!’ he cried. ‘Welcome!’
‘What I want to know,’ whispered Solange, ‘is how that man is able to stay so fat.’
‘Don’t be mean,’ snorted Arianne.
‘Excuse me, your Holiness. Well, will you look at that!’
Father Julien – who was fat, and jolly with it – was holding both Luc’s hands in his, talking with him in a low voice.
‘God,’ breathed Solange. ‘Luc looks like he’s going to cry.’
‘Shut up, Sol,’ hissed Arianne.
‘What’s your problem? Oh right, they’re coming over . . .’
‘Do you know this splendid fellow?’ Father Julien beamed as he reached the girls.
‘Hello, Luc!’ trilled Solange.
Luc nodded an acknowledgement.
‘How was Aix?’
‘Hot.’
He wore canvas trousers and a tight navy jersey. In the days when Arianne had pummelled him with her fists, his chest had been wiry and thin, no different from hers really, whereas now . . . His eyes were bright, a blaze of grey and gold. He asked her a question which she didn’t hear. She managed a gasped excuse me and blushed.
‘I said, have you had any good fights lately? Only, the last time we met . . .’
‘Oh, that!’ Her laughter sounded shrill and false. ‘That was so silly.’
He looked disappointed. ‘Not really silly,’ she started to explain, but he had already moved on to the alcove at the end of the room where Paul, bored with the grown-ups, had taken refuge with Marie Dupont and her little sister to practise newly learned knots.
It was raining again. Arianne’s face was still flushed. She slipped into the garden and raised her face to the sky.
iv
A long way east, on the edge of a forest in Belorussia, it had started to snow.
In a stable on the outskirts of an empty village a bay gelding, once handsome but now too thin, pulled what hay it could out of its net. In a corner of his box, a man cowered, a greatcoat pulled over his massive frame. Night had fallen and so had the air temperature. The man shivered, pulled a bottle from the folds of his coat and drank.
‘Alois?’ Another man entered the stable, his frame slight in a captain’s uniform swamped by a heavy wool coat, wisps of fair hair straying from beneath a bearskin hat. ‘Alois, what the hell are you doing?’
‘I didn’t think it would be like that today,’ whispered Alois.
‘Well, no. Nobody ever does.’
Five hundred men jammed into open trucks. An abandoned quarry, a line of guns, a gramophone record. Snow, always snow.
‘Why did you play the music?’
The Captain shrugged. ‘It helps. And opera seems the most appropriate.’
‘It was awful.’
A cameraman waiting. The tailgate lowered. The order to jump and line up on the edge of the pit. The order to shoot.
‘Did you see the first one?’ whispered Alois. ‘Little fat fellow with glasses who might have been your dentist?’
‘I never look at their faces.’
‘Captain Drechsler . . .’
‘I’ll tell you what, Alois, if your dentist really looks like that, you need to get a new dentist.’
‘Are you married, Captain, sir?’
‘Never found the right girl, Alois. You?’
‘Yes sir. Married, with a little boy.’
‘What are their names?’
‘Clara, sir, and Wolf. I don’t think they’d have liked what we did today.’
‘It wasn’t really you out there today, Alois. That’s what you have to remember. We are no longer ourselves.So best not tell them, eh?’
‘Are your parents alive, sir?’
‘Pass me the vodka, soldier.’
‘Are they?’
The Captain drank, wiped his mouth and drank some more.
‘Yes they are,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to tell them either.’
March 1944
i
‘Do you think we should go and see him?’
‘And say what?’
‘No, but do you?’
‘God, Ari, you’re getting boring . . .’
Tuesday afternoon, three weeks after the drinks party at Solange’s parents. A geometry test to prepare for the following day, textbooks spread over the kitchen table and no revision being done at all.
‘He’s been back almost a month,’ said Arianne. ‘And I don’t think I’ve heard him say more than a few sentences to anyone.’
‘So he broods,’ said Solange. ‘It’s part of his charm.’
Paul crawled out from under the table, making them both jump. ‘He just thinks you’re all stupid.’
Solange crowed with laughter.
‘That was rude,’ said Arianne.
‘But it's true.’ Paul rummaged through the bread bin, found an old crust and sank his teeth into it. ‘He talks to me, but then I’ve got interesting things to talk about.’
‘Like knots?’ suggested Solange.
‘He asked me about fighting,’ said Arianne.
‘Girls fighting!’ scoffed Paul, and wandered from the room.
‘That child is getting above himself,’ said Solange.
‘No, but do you think we should go?’ asked Arianne.
Solange howled. Elodie, working in the vegetable garden, frowned. Paul, pulling on gumboots in the cloakroom, snorted. In the kitchen, Arianne cowered before her advancing cousin.
‘You,’ ordered Solange. ‘Luc’s house. Now.’
‘But . . .’
‘No buts. You’re driving me crazy.’
‘Come with me!’
‘No way. I don’t do mercy missions.’
‘But I look . . .’
‘Mad,’ said Solange. ‘Wild. You need a haircut and a whole new wardrobe, but I guess that’s all to my advantage in the long run.’
‘Please . . .’
‘You’re on your own, kid.’
Arianne’s hand shook as she knocked at Luc’s front door. She fought the urge to run away and pushed it open, then froze as it closed behind her. Luc and his mother were shouting at each other in the kitchen.
‘You can’t stop me!’ she heard him yell.
‘I’m your mother!’ Teresa Belleville began to cry. Arianne turned to go, but the door handle was stiffer on the inside than out and the sound of her fumbling echoed in the empty hall. The voices in the kitchen stopped. The door at the end of the passage flew open and Luc stormed out.
‘You!’ He looked furious. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
*
‘I wasn’t eavesdropping,’ stammered Arianne.
‘You could have fooled me.’
The parlour into which Luc had dragged her was cold and dark. Arianne s
tood with her back against the wall. Luc paced up and down.
‘I came to see if you were all right,’ mumbled Arianne.
‘Why the hell wouldn’t I be all right?’
‘Just, since you’ve been back . . .’
‘What? What are people saying about me?’
‘Nothing! It’s just, you were nice to me when Maman was . . . when Maman was ill.’
‘Oh, so you’ve remembered that now? It doesn’t seem silly?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Forget it.’
Luc moved away from the door and threw himself into an armchair. ‘This place is unbelievable. No one seems to understand what it’s like out there. There’s a bloody war still going on and nobody seems to get it. All that gossip!’
Arianne thought about Elodie’s daily battle to get food on the table, about Mayor Jarvis’s grandson who never came back from fighting, about the farmer from the next village who had been shot for helping his three boys escape to England. We understand, she wanted to say. We understand more than you think. She opened her mouth to speak and found that her throat was choked with tears.
‘Papa,’ she whispered.
‘Oh, give me a break.’
‘What?’
‘I’d rather my dad was in a prison camp than have . . .’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Get out. I don’t want to talk about it.’
*
‘How did it go?’ asked Solange when she came round later that evening.
‘Awful.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I hate him!’Arianne pounded the counterpane on her bed. ‘I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!’
Solange took her in her arms. Arianne burst into tears and told her what had happened.
‘He’s an idiot,’ said Solange when Arianne had finished.
‘I thought you liked him.’
‘Not if he hurts you.’
‘I never want to see him again.’
‘That’ll be easy,’ said Solange. ‘In a place this size.’
Little by little, Arianne’s sobs subsided. ‘I’m fine,’ she mumbled at last. ‘Really, I’m fine.’
ii
Fine. A word Arianne learned to use early. After her mother’s death, to stop her father falling apart. When the news came that he had been taken prisoner and would not be coming home. Fine. Once, when Solange’s mother had tried to make her talk, she had conceded sad, though it had seemed a poor little word to describe what she felt. Like screaming would have been better. Dead. Terrified. Desperate. On balance, sad had felt safer. And over the years, as all the bigger emotions had fallen away, sad was all she had left. Until that afternoon at Solange’s window. And at the party, standing in the gold and grey blaze of Luc Belleville’s eyes.
It was a week after her fight with Luc, and spring was returning to the woods around Samaroux. A pair of red squirrels flung themselves from branch to branch above her. Somewhere, hidden from view, she heard the warble of a thrush. This had been her mother’s favourite time of year. The uncurling of hazel leaves, the footprints of a newborn fawn, the tender yellow of primroses. It had been impossible to walk in the woods with Marielle in spring because she was forever stopping to point things out. What had she called Luc? A hopeless daydreamer. She shook her head to expel the memory.
Arianne had walked fast, with little thought of where she was going. It wasn’t until she reached a fork in the path that she realised she was almost at the old Lascande place. Her heart leaped. She had not been here for years, but a faded signpost confirmed that she was right. Le Bos de Lascande, 0.5 km. She closed her eyes.
Pigeons calling. A light breeze rustling the trees, and the rich smell of woodland humus. It could have been any time, but it was now. Arianne opened her eyes. She knew that she and her mother had been here once together. Old Madame Lascande had been a rich and fearsome woman, but she had liked Marielle. She invited her to tea sometimes, with instructions to bring all the novels she had most recently read, and she kept her there for hours discussing literature and philosophy. Once, she had ordered her to bring Arianne.
‘You wore a red dress,’ she told Arianne at Marielle’s funeral. ‘Only it was torn, because you tripped and fell. You were quite out of breath, and crying. I gave you English Earl Grey tea on my terrace in rose-patterned tea cups, and some delicious biscuits.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Well you ought to, you ate enough of them.’
Did she remember? The path joined a small road which wound its way through the trees to green-painted gates of elaborately worked iron. She gasped when she saw them. Was this a tug of remembrance or just the effect of the gates themselves, floating in the gloom of the woods, at once a barrier and an invitation? She pushed them. To her surprise, they swung open and she stepped on to a stone drive.
Yes, she had been here before. This was not just imagination or storytelling. The house, simple and low, built of local stone and yet somehow possessed of more elegance than any of the constructions at Samaroux – no one had ever described it to her but she recognised it, she was sure she did. There were shutters of faded blue, flower beds choked with weeds, a sweep as the drive opened into a courtyard, French windows giving on to a terrace, a front door shaped in a Norman arch. What had once been a lawn but was now more of a meadow, overgrown roses coming into bud . . . She knew it. Didn’t she? She remembered it.
Arianne began to run. Halfway across the lawn she stretched her arms out at her sides and swooped like an aeroplane before spinning in circles. She reached the terrace, out of breath but still laughing, and threw herself to the ground by a wooden gazebo overgrown with vines. This was where they had taken their tea, she was sure of it. Madame Lascande and Mother had sat on this bench while she, quite recovered, played on the lawn. Arianne threw her arms around one of the gazebo’s supporting pillars and pressed her cheek against it. Then froze.
Less than twenty feet away, standing in the late afternoon shadows on the edge of the lawn, was Luc.
iii
‘Hands up, I admit it,’ he said, when he had finally crossed the terrace to join her. ‘I followed you.’
‘But why?’
‘You looked so purposeful. I wondered where you were going.’ He frowned. ‘What on earth were you doing just now?’
‘I just came for a walk.’
‘You were dancing. And laughing. And you just kissed that post.’
‘I did not kiss it!’
‘It was a little crazy.’ He grinned. ‘But also sweet.’
‘I’m not crazy.’ And I am not sweet, she wanted to add, except that the words wouldn’t quite come out. ‘I was just . . .’
‘Dancing, and laughing, and kissing wooden posts?’
‘Exactly! That is what I was doing, because . . . because that is just what I wanted to do.’
‘I get the feeling you always do exactly what you want.’
‘Me?’
He looked embarrassed and she thought, well, good!
‘So.’ He sat on the wall which bordered the terrace and stretched out his legs. ‘Do you come here a lot?’
‘What is this, an interrogation?’
‘More of an apology,’ he admitted. ‘For my behaviour the other day. Would you believe me if I said you were the only person I was looking forward to seeing when we came back?’
‘Not from the way you behaved,’ said Arianne.
‘Fair enough.’
They sat for a while in silence. A bird sang out from the laurel hedge which bordered the garden. For a fleeting moment Arianne fancied it was calling to her.
‘I usually walk the other way,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t know why I came here today.’ What should she say next? And how did one go from not talking at all to discussing such things? ‘I was thinking about my mother,’ she said. ‘I came here once before, with her. It was like I was looking for her, like she was calling me, you know? And I was trying to find her.’
‘I think I do know, yes,’ said Luc. ‘I feel the same sometimes about my dad.’
The light was behind him and Arianne could just make out her own reflection in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ he said. ‘We heard, in Aix. I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to say.’
‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘You weren’t the only one.’
‘I heard you didn’t talk to anyone for a year after he was taken prisoner. Is that true?’
Arianne shrugged.
‘Literally nobody?’
‘Except Paul.’
‘What about school?’
‘I wrote notes. It worked for a while, until they got annoyed and threatened to throw me out. I still don’t talk much. Sol’s always trying to make me.’
‘Do you want to talk about him now? Your dad, I mean.’
‘Not really.’
‘Ah, go on. It’s good to talk.’
‘Coming from the champion of chat . . .’
He laughed. She relented.
‘He’s in a POW camp in the Jura, by the German border. He was interned just after the Armistice. We get postcards sometimes, and I write every Sunday but I don’t think he gets all my letters. It’s harder for Paul, he doesn’t remember him so well. He’s not been well. Papa, I mean. He had typhus but he’s better now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Her nose was tingling.
‘He was meant to come home,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘And then he didn’t.’ She sniffed. He nudged her and she turned away.
‘The stupid thing is that he didn’t have to fight,’ she said at last. ‘He was too old, but then he volunteered. He said he had to. He said he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t.’
‘Sometimes you just have to do things,’ said Luc. ‘He’ll come back.’
‘You think?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It’s just because you asked. Really, most of the time, I’m fine.’
‘Ah,’ said Luc. ‘Fine.’
She let out a sob of laughter and sniffed again before looking up. His mouth twisted into a half-smile.
The Things We Did for Love Page 2
