‘He was trying to protect me.’
The ring finger of her left hand, the one which still bore her wedding band, and they could get no more out of her than screams.
It took less than fifteen minutes. By the time the Captain and his henchmen left, no wiser than when they arrived, Teresa Belleville was a rag upon the kitchen floor, blood seeping from her tortured hands and dry sobs shaking her body. Seated at her kitchen table, Jarvis wept. Jonas Bucher fumbled his way out of the house and threw up in the garden. Romy followed the Captain back to the jeep with the odd disjointed motions of a puppet.
This time when they passed through the village the windows of Samaroux were crowded with faces. Some people clenched their fists and made for their doors, but more people held them back, praying they would not be next. Father Julien slipped into his church and fell to his knees before the altar. Solange left her bedroom window, the one which looked straight into Teresa Belleville’s home, slipped out of her parents’ house and ran back to Arianne.
Afternoon
i
‘Who are they?’ demanded Elodie. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Soldiers,’ gasped Solange. ‘Everywhere! They came to Luc’s house, with the mayor and Romy.’
‘Romy?’
‘I saw them arrive from my bedroom window. You know I can see straight into their parlour. I was in my room, I was about to come back . . . They hit Monsieur Jarvis and then oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, Luc’s mother! I knew I shouldn’t have said anything!’
Solange burst into tears.
‘Said what?’ insisted Elodie. ‘To whom?’
‘Romy’s father! He asked me where Luc was, I said I didn’t know! But I didn’t! I didn’t know then!’
Arianne squared her shoulders.
‘I’m going to see her.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ snapped Elodie. ‘You’ll get out of this house this minute and hide. If they’re after Luc they’ll come looking for you next. We’ll get word to you somehow when it’s safe.’
‘But . . .’
‘Hurry up, child, for heaven’s sakes!’
Arianne reached for her rucksack. Elodie drew her into a brief and astonishing hug. ‘God keep you,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sure you’ll have words for Him if He doesn’t.’ Arianne tried to smile.
‘Absolutely right. Now run before I . . .’
Two storeys down, someone hammered on the front door.
Elodie stifled Solange’s scream with her hand. ‘Roof,’ she hissed at Arianne. She found time for another wry smile. ‘Oh yes, I know about the roof. Solange, lock the window after her, then get back here and follow me downstairs. And let me do the talking. I won’t have you spoiling everything with hysterics.’
Arianne shot out of the window. Solange twisted the handle shut after her and dashed for the stairs. She emerged into the kitchen with Elodie on her arm, every inch the concerned great-niece, just as the Captain’s henchmen burst into the room.
Arianne crawled to the edge of the roof and stopped. An armed sentry stood beneath the holm oak on the street side. On the garden side the fields were crawling with soldiers. She crept back to the chimney stacks. Curled into a ball, there was just room enough for her to hide.
ii
Paul stopped running as he came into Samaroux, slid out of the woods on to one of the minor roads, saw that it was blocked and slid right off it again. The long run had cleared his mind and he took his time thinking about what to do. If this road was blocked, it stood to reason that all the others would be too. So he would have to come in through the fields. He considered skirting around the village to come up through his own garden but it would take too long. The German convoy was well ahead of him but he didn’t know yet if they had got to Arianne. In fact – he frowned – he knew nothing other than the few words the traitor Romy had told him. The traitor Romy. He rolled the words around his mind, his imagination feeding on what Elodie referred to with a sniff as the wrong sort of comic, picturing Romy’s head on a spike, Romy hanging from a lamp post, Romy bound for the village stocks . . .
Run and hide. If he slithered down this bank, he would come out by the cemetery. The place gave him the creeps, but he’d scaled the wall often enough for a dare and at least it brought him out on the right side of the village. It meant going past school, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
No time to stop at his mother’s grave, but he crossed himself as he ran past the end of her row. He ran out through the little gate on the other side, smoothing down his hair to look halfway respectable, using the palm of his hand and a bit of spit to clean the fresh grazes on his knee. To his left, a German jeep barred the road out of town two hundred metres away. Further on, two more stood on either side of the market square. There was no one about save the soldiers in the vehicles, who clocked him, he was sure of that, but did not react. He made himself as small as possible as he walked past school but no irate teacher hauled him in. He began to breathe again when he reached the church, but froze when he turned the corner towards home.
Another jeep blocked the street, level with his house, and a guard stood posted beneath the old holm oak.
iii
Inside the house, Elodie was putting on a splendid show.
‘Is this the girl?’ The Captain nodded at Solange as the women entered the kitchen. Romy shook his head. Solange looked at him with open loathing. Elodie announced that she was rather busy and could anyone please tell her what was going on?
‘Where is my niece? Where indeed?’ she cried in response to Jonas Bucher’s first question. ‘I’d be grateful if anyone could tell me that!’
‘She’s bluffing,’ said the Captain in German. ‘Press her harder. And Bucher, for Christ’s sake . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘Pull yourself together, man. You’re shaking like a girl.’
Jonas cleared his throat, but Elodie ignored his attempts to tell her everything would go better if she just told the truth, and pressed on with her rant.
‘Here am I, run off my feet, seventy-six years old and still struggling to support my nephew’s children, and they cannot even bother to come back for lunch! And I issued clear enough instructions, believe me. Go to the butcher’s, I said, then bake the sausage. But would madam listen? Oh no! It’s all I’ve got a day off school and I’m not your servant and Miss Flibbertigibbet flutters off to goodness knows where, and here is her poor cousin come looking for her as well, hoping to spend the afternoon with her so they can catch up on their schoolwork . . .’
‘If you could just tell us . . .’
‘A nice andouillette, I told her, because I knew the butcher would have some today, but I come home and what do I find? A knuckle of ham, which I’ve yet to put on myself, and no hope of eating it until tonight and even then the peas won’t have had long enough to soak!’
‘It is imperative . . .’
‘Christ!’ said the Captain. ‘What is it with these people and their food?’ He pushed Jonas out of the way and came to stand before Elodie.
‘Grandmother, we have to find your niece. She has been consorting with a known criminal. If you can’t tell us where she is, we are going to have to search your house. If I find you have been lying to me, I will shoot you.’
‘Shoot me anyway!’ Elodie burst into tears, calculated that the Captain would not be receptive to physical contact and threw herself into Jonas’s arms. ‘Shoot me anyway, and spare me from these ungrateful children!’
‘There, there.’ Jonas patted her back. ‘It’s not so bad.’
‘Known criminals!’ sobbed Elodie. ‘The andouillette! And her brother cutting school!’
She clutched at Solange, who led her away from Jonas Bucher to a seat at the kitchen table. Solange, feeling daring, allowed herself a reproachful look at the soldiers. The Captain grabbed her chin in his hand and forced her head back.
‘Do you know where she is?’ he demanded.
Sol
ange’s porcelain skin was flushed, her lower lip trembled with fear, but her wide blue eyes met his full on. He held them for a moment, and in the depths of his own eyes she read some unexpected light – not lust, not even contempt, something almost like regret. She shook her head. The light flickered and died.
‘Search the house,’ said the Captain.
They went up to her room, of course. Looked under her bed, ripped through her wardrobe, even emptied her chest of drawers. One of them rattled the window. Up above, Arianne stifled a moan.
‘Low roof. She could have got out through there.’
‘If she did, she’s long gone. And anyway, it’s locked.’
They tore through Paul’s room and took his stash of cigarettes, through Elodie’s wardrobe full of carefully mended dresses, through the untouched sanctum of her nephew’s study.
‘Nothing, sir.’
The Captain looked about him at the kitchen.
‘My grandparents lived in the country,’ he said. Again, the light in his eyes flickered and died.
‘Ring the church bells,’ he said. ‘It’s time to bring them in.’
iv
Alois led one of the parties to empty the neighbouring farms. He rode shotgun in an armoured jeep, rifle at the ready. His brow beneath the rim of his helmet was furrowed, his eyes half closed in apparent concentration, but his mind was somewhere else.
How different it was here from the east, he thought. These fields of green corn on which kernels of fruit were just beginning to ripen, these light woods of oak and elm and beech, these houses nestling in the landscape. Campion and buttercups blazed in the hedgerows. They passed an open meadow in which a herd of cows were grazing, and the smell of the farmyard hit him, the warmth of fresh milk, the tang of manure. He sucked it in and noticed that others in the jeep did the same. Nothing like the smell of cows, he smiled faintly, to stir memories of childhood. The beasts here had hides of caramel, soft hair which curled over their faces. They were different from the cows back home but their eyes were just as dumb. They turned their heads as the jeep bounced past. Some of the younger ones leaped away. One crapped. None of them stopped chewing. Such were the priorities of the animal kingdom, thought Alois. Perhaps this was why they made one think of childhood. They reminded one of a time when eating and crapping were all that mattered.
He could not remember when he last felt this peaceful. The villages in the eastern territories had been miserable affairs, their inhabitants even more so, the result of centuries of oppression, he supposed, the Communists taking over where the Tsars had left off. The weather couldn’t have helped, either. Nor the sight of an invading army . . . The thought of the Russian winter made him shiver, and he tilted his head again to the rays of the French sun. One day, he told himself, he would come back here to visit with Clara and Wolf. She would lie on a rug in a meadow while he taught the boy to fish, they would sunbathe and picnic and everything would be all right again.
The jeep juddered to a halt and its occupants leapt to the ground. They had arrived at a farmhouse. Even now, with the adrenaline pumping through his veins and the rush of blood in his head, Alois noticed how moss and lichen clung to the tiles of the roof, enhancing the illusion that it seemed to be growing out of the ground. He bellowed an order for the occupants of the farm to come out. He shouted in German, and so loud it was barely comprehensible to his own men, but it didn’t matter. His meaning was clear enough.
The farmers here were old and could not run. He shuffled out of his barn holding a spanner, she stepped out of the dairy with her head held high. A girl came out behind her, wiping her hands. Both wore scarves to tie back their hair and smelled of buttermilk and sweat.
‘How many more?’ demanded Alois in French.
The old farmer nodded towards a meadow adjoining the barn. An old farmhand walked towards them, leading a cow heavy with calf. He did not look at the soldiers.
‘Any more?’ asked Alois in French.
From inside the house, a baby began to wail. Alois tossed his head. The girl ran into the house and came back out with the child.
‘Where’s the father?’
‘Gone to town,’ spat the farmer. ‘He’ll not be back till evening.’
‘Search the house.’
They made a thorough job of it. Ripped open cupboards, overturned beds, smashed through the pantry. Searched everywhere a man could have hidden, and many places where he couldn’t. No sign of the son, of course. He’d probably made a run for it the minute he heard them coming. The soldiers spilled back out of the house. The farmer and his wife waited, resigned. The girl had turned away from them to nurse her baby, but she prised it off her breast when the men re-emerged, and buttoned up her dress. Bring them in, the Captain had said. Alois gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the child’s whimpers.
‘Village,’ he said, with a toss of his head. ‘Routine inspection.’
They stared back, as dumb as one of their cows. One of the men hit the farmhand with the flat of his gun, kneed him in the small of the back growling allez, go!
Allez! The word all French farmers use to get their cattle moving. They began to walk, the farmers very straight, the farmhand’s head bowed in shame, the daughter-in-law with her fretting baby, walked away from their home along the unpaved track lined with wild flowers, looking for all the world as if they were going for a family walk, except for the jeep which followed. They crossed others on their way, farmhands working in the fields, children walking back to afternoon school. As the procession grew, the soldiers jumped down from the car to walk alongside them, guns cocked, missing nothing.
Routine inspection, said Alois whenever anybody asked.
He knew that he would never come here again.
v
Picot had told Luc to keep a lookout while he rested in the armchair in the kitchen at Lascande, legs sprawled out before him, his rifle on his knees. Luc wasn’t sure exactly how he was to keep watch, since Picot had forbidden him to go outside and also to open windows. Stripped to the waist, a blanket around his shoulders, he paced from room to room, peering out where he could through cracks in the shutters, before settling in the living room, from where he could just glimpse a corner of the drive.
‘Who are you waiting for?’ asked Baptiste.
The injured man lay behind Luc on the sofa, also wrapped in a blanket, two of Madame Lascande’s once pristine tea-towels pressed against his stomach wound.
‘I bet it’s a girl,’ whispered Baptiste. ‘No one ever looked so hopefully for the Milice.’
Luc moved away from the window.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Great,’ croaked Baptiste. ‘For someone with a piece of train in his stomach.’
Luc scowled in the direction of the kitchen. ‘He should have let me go for a doctor.’
‘You know he couldn’t do that, not in broad daylight. We got here too late. You were covered in blood. People would have noticed.’
‘My shirt’s almost dry now.’
‘It’s too late.’ Baptiste tried to keep his eyes open but they fluttered shut. ‘They’ll be looking for you,’ he whispered.
‘I am going for a doctor,’ said Luc through gritted teeth. ‘And nobody is going to stop me.’
‘Actually, you’re coming with me.’ Picot appeared in the doorway, rifle at the ready. ‘Something’s going on,’ he said. ‘We need to find out what.’
*
Avoiding the main paths, Luc led Picot through the woods to the top of the hill above Lascande.
‘What are we listening for?’ he whispered.
‘Engines.’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Well I did.’ Picot held up his hand. ‘Shh!’
‘Now what?’
‘Bells. Can’t you hear them? Listen!’
They broke out of the trees’ cover and lay on the ground in the long grass.
‘Church bells,’ whispered Luc. ‘Coming from Samaroux.’
&
nbsp; Picot’s eyes were glued to his field-glasses. ‘Look down there.’
Luc looked, and saw a column of people walking before an army jeep, flanked by German soldiers. An old man stumbled. A young woman helped him up.
‘Over there.’
Picot took the field-glasses back and trained them on to an armoured vehicle parked across the road which led from Lascande to the village. ‘They’ve blocked it off. The whole countryside is crawling with them. Christ, that must have been close. We must be just outside their search radius.’
‘What are they looking for?’ asked Luc.
‘Us,’ said Picot.
In the silence which passed between the two men, everything was brought sharply into focus – the hum of insects, the sweet smell of the grass, the way it swayed in the wind high on the hill. The pealing bells calling the people of Samaroux home.
‘I have to go,’ said Luc.
‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘I have to.’
Luc began to run, scrambling down the hill in a half-crouch, but Picot was fast on his feet and tackled him to the ground.
‘If you go back there, they’ll kill you.’ Picot had one knee on Luc’s chest, his hands around his throat. ‘They’ll kill you, but not before they’ve tortured you into telling them where we are. Don’t think you’ll be able to resist them, because you won’t. And I am damned if I will let you and your misguided principles compromise the work that Baptiste and I are doing.’
‘If you were a real hero,’ gasped Luc, ‘you would give yourself up as well.’
‘Do you really think that would make a difference?’
Luc roared and elbowed Picot in the ribs. The older man grunted and twisted the boy round so that he lay on his front. He grabbed Luc by the hair and forced his head up until he gasped for breath.
‘You’re going nowhere,’ he hissed.
*
Back at Lascande, Picot kept his gun trained on Luc as he checked the living-room windows.
The Things We Did for Love Page 12
