Madame Barbara

by Helen Forrester

  Duval trusted Michel and had, for this reason, appointed him driver and caretaker of the taxi. As far as Michel was concerned, steady work for four months was too good to miss. He had lied when Duval had asked him if he could drive; he had never driven anything bigger than a small farm tractor.

  Immediately after the rental had been agreed upon, to commence at the beginning of the following week, a scared, but excited Michel had hurried round to see an old friend, an electrician employed by the Government.

  Paul drove a small van. Laughing heartily, he had, during that weekend, given Michel several quick driving lessons in his vehicle. It was, however, a fairly ignorant Michel who first took out the Americans.

  They had been annoyed at the snail’s pace which he had maintained. He assured them that he was nervous about mines buried under the roads; he must be careful.

  This nervousness, however, became less apparent as he gained practice on the almost empty roads, and he began to enjoy driving.

  Duval’s, and his, greatest and most valid fear had been that if he left the taxi for a minute, it would be stolen.

  ‘Jeeze! This isn’t Chicago!’ protested his clients.

  ‘Problems everywhere,’ responded Michel. ‘You let me watch it for you.’

  They had taken his advice. He remained glued to the vehicle.

  As a result of the increase in their income, Maman had decided that it was advisable for Anatole to have a room of his own, but they had searched without success for two rooms in overcrowded Bayeux. When, after close questioning by prospective landlords, Michel had had to admit that one of the tenants would be an invalid, doors had been firmly closed.

  Now, it was with deep depression that Michel opened the door at the top of the long staircase of the house in which he lived, to enter the single attic room.

  Gnawing at him was the worry that their small savings might, once again, be totally dissipated, while he searched for further work.

  At the same time, dancing at the back of his mind were thoughts of Barbara. Was she totally unobtainable? Could he be lucky and find work sufficiently lucrative that he could give her, at least, the same standard of living as his married sisters enjoyed? In theory, anything that his sisters’ husbands, Bertrand and Guy, had done, he could too. In practice, however, it did not seem very likely; he had Maman and Anatole to care for.

  He told himself sharply to stop thinking like an idiot.

  As the door swung open, he forced himself to smile and say cheerfully, ‘Hello, Maman – Anatole.’

  Madame Benion was seated at the end of the second-hand bedstead they had recently purchased for Anatole. Under it was a chamber pot, also for Anatole’s use, since he could no longer get up and down the long staircase in order to use the privy in the back yard of the house.

  Despite the window’s being open to the spring sunshine, the room smelled of sickness and of urine.

  Wrapped in the duvet originally given them by their kindly landlady, and elevated by the bed, Anatole could now see out of the dormer window. It was a great pleasure to him, a real improvement after lying on a mattress on the floor.

  The room was tidy. A washbasin was neatly tucked in a corner, beside a bucket of water, a saucepan and some dishes. Above these necessities hung a clothesline, which held one or two pieces of drying washing. Stacked against a wall were two straw palliasses, on which Michel and his mother slept. What little food they had in store was kept in a cupboard in the roof, where it sometimes fell prey to marauding mice. They had talked about getting a cat, but an attic with no easy access to outdoors made the idea impractical.

  Like Barbara and her mother, the family had suffered terribly from the cold of the previous winter, the worst winter on record. It had caused great suffering to the victims of the invasion, many of whom, like the Benions, had lost all they possessed.

  Fearing that his mother, as well as Anatole, would die because they had no heat in the room, Michel had gone in despair to Monsieur le Curé, Father Nicolas, for help and advice.

  The poor priest, himself very cold, had lent Michel a paraffin stove, a great help – provided one could find paraffin to burn in it.

  Fuel could be found, like everything else, if one had enough money. In this regard, Paul, Michel’s electrician friend, had again been helpful. He regularly bought petrol for his personal use ‘on the black’, and he managed to get some paraffin for Michel. During that dreadful winter practically all that the Benions had hitherto managed to save was expended on this precious fuel.

  The priest spoke to one of his parishioners, and this lady sent them a pair of blankets left behind by the retreating enemy. They were of excellent quality, though rather smelly. But beggars can’t be choosers, and Michel thankfully wrapped one round his mother and the other one round Anatole. He himself slept in all the clothes he possessed, and covered himself with an old overcoat, which Anatole had worn during his long walk home across Europe.

  Now, on his return from his visit to Caen with Barbara, Michel asked himself what she would think if he showed her his poverty-stricken attic.

  She would recoil in disgust, he decided. He knew that both his sisters would; it was as well that they had never seen it. Now that the railway to Bayeux and Cherbourg had been restored, Michel felt that they really should visit, if only for an afternoon but though they wrote to their mother, they refused to come for fear of carrying the tuberculosis germ back to their children. This was very hard on Madame Benion, who badly needed their affection and support, and Michel smouldered with resentment at their unhelpful attitude. Anatole tried not even to think of them.

  Neither Government nor family really cared a damn about the dispossessed, Michel thought bitterly.

  He knew that he himself was running out of endurance. The fearful experience of the actual invasion was still very fresh in both his and his mother’s minds; the loss of all certitudes in their hard lives, the loss of friends, family and, not the least, the daily suffering of Anatole, with his constant broken nights, all weighed heavily on both mother and younger son. In addition, Michel was still smarting from Suzanne’s desertion of him and the public humiliation of her conduct, which had seared his soul. Even the death of her parents, old and trusted friends of his family, had left an emptiness impossible to fill.

  He had increasingly feared lately that his mind would split, that he would go insane, and that one morning he would simply not be able to get up to go to work. Yet, he must. He must.

  And on top of this was laid something he had never dreamed of: he simply could not get Barbara out of his mind. Just thinking about her brought on such a surge of desire that he did not know how to control himself. It was wonderful – and yet it was too much to bear.

  Fool that he was, he upbraided himself, he had arranged to meet her again tomorrow. He knew he was behaving like a moth which courts the flames that will burn it to death, but he was certain that he would keep the tryst.

  He approached Anatole’s bed with a determination to show nothing of his inward apprehensions. He took off his beret and its removal revealed black, wavy hair in need of a barber. As he unflinchingly bent to kiss Anatole on each cheek, his mother noticed, with a pang, the beginning of a bald patch on the top of his head.

  As she rose to get him some soup, she thought sadly, our men age young.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Michel asked his brother.

  The bones that were Anatole’s shoulders moved in a slight shrug. He realised that Michel’s kiss was not necessarily meant as a greeting but rather as an affirmation that he was still a close part of the family, not to be feared as a disease carrier. As he did every evening, he struggled to raise himself to return the caress, and, as always, Michel told him, ‘Don’t disturb yourself,’ and sat down on the edge of the bed very carefully, so as not to shake the invalid.

  Anatole put out a long thin hand and laid it on his brother’s.

  He was twelve years older than Michel. To Michel, when he was a little boy, he had appea
red to be a third parent, who ordered him around and smacked him when he was disobedient. Michel had naturally resented this and had regarded him as a bully. So they had never, in their younger days, been particularly close. Also, their experiences during the later years of the war had been sharply different. It had been some time before they had been able to talk to one another about these awful times. Anatole’s helplessness had, however, changed the relationship markedly; the elder brother was now dependent upon the younger one, and during the last winter they had finally learned to communicate much better.

  Despite their youthful disagreements, they had stood together as one when, after their father died, the Germans marched in. From the very beginning of the occupation, they had been united in protecting their small poultry farm and in aiding the Resistance whenever the chance arose.

  It was a more worldly-wise Anatole who, at that time reminded Michel and his friend Henri that the Resistance was actually a motley crew. It included deserters from the French Army; some known criminals; men who had gone underground rather than be deported to Germany to work; well-organised Communist cells; and plain, ordinary citizens who helped out of conviction. Any of these groups, he warned, could have been infiltrated by the Germans – or bribed by them; ‘So, for God’s sake, you and Henri be careful what you do.’

  None of them had felt very brave, but they shared what food they had, when rationless remnants of the French Army in need of refuge, slid silently up to their back door.

  Moved by sudden compassion for a despised minority, they had hidden a panic-stricken Jewish woman trying to flee French authorities rounding up Jews on behalf of the Germans.

  It was Henri who knew the escape route for Jewish persons. Much later, he paid for his compassionate help of them by being tortured and then buried alive by the SS. He died rather than pass to them his knowledge of the pipeline out of Occupied France. He also managed not to betray the Benions’ succour of the Royal Air Force men.

  Michel had been heart-broken at the loss of his friend, particularly in such an inhuman fashion. Even now, he cringed at the thought of Henri’s terrible end.

  Madame Benion had, with the aid of an old retired doctor, once nursed a badly wounded French soldier. She hid him in the cave, the old outhouse which had later sheltered her and her son during the invasion battle. The boy lived to fight again.

  The common threat of the German occupation had definitely brought the terrified family closer together at that time. Suddenly, however, Anatole, a bachelor, had been whisked away to work in Germany. Because he was physically big and very fit, he had been chosen in preference to Michel.

  Scared to death of what might happen to him, mother and younger son clung to each other, trusting neither friend nor neighbour. Without Anatole, the work of the farm was almost impossible to keep up. While they themselves went hungry, they worked harder than they had ever worked before, as the Germans enforced their demands for eggs, chickens and apples, to be sent to Germany.

  Now, his health broken by the treatment he had received in Germany, Anatole was completely dependent upon them.

  After Michel had drunk his tepid soup with bread soaked into it, the three of them discussed, rather fruitlessly, the need for Michel to find fresh employment, how nice it would be to have a room with a fireplace where they could burn anything they could find to keep them warm, and how their sisters in Rouen were getting on.

  Anne-Marie was the worst placed, they agreed. She and Guy had lost their younger child, Philippe, in the raid that had destroyed not only their home, but also Guy’s petrol station with its adjoining workshop. Though, as a motor mechanic, he had a marketable skill, without at least a new set of tools, he could not follow his old occupation, so he had thankfully taken a job as a lorry driver. The lorry was a ramshackle affair and he risked an accident every time he took it out but, without spare parts, his employer could not do much about its repair. At Michel’s request, Guy had promised to look out for a lorry-driving job for him, though he had pointed out the acute shortage of trucks of any kind.

  Guy, Anne-Marie and their little daughter all lived in one room in shattered Rouen. Whenever he had a load for Bayeux, Guy came to see Maman, though he never came into the attic. Despite their own problems, he sometimes brought small gifts for the invalid, such as a shirt or a clean sheet or, once, a very useful pile of rags for cleaning.

  One day, he brought from Claudette, Madame Benion’s other daughter, some black market loaves of bread, baked by her husband, Bertrand, in their bakery. Madame Benion had been immensely grateful, but she still longed to see her daughters.

  Anatole’s only visitor remained Monsieur le Curé, Father Nicolas. Michel wondered what Anatole would think if Barbara came to visit him. For her part, would she be, as he feared, shocked at the whole situation of his family?

  As they gossiped, Michel mentioned Guy’s promise to watch for a driver’s job for him, and he said, ‘Driving the taxi doesn’t bother my shoulder and I don’t think driving a lorry would either. Working on the farm was hell sometimes, and being a deckie in Uncle Léon’s boat was sheer murder.’ He squeezed Anatole’s clawlike hand. ‘It would be nice to have a job which wasn’t painful.’

  ‘Tush, you never complained during the war,’ exclaimed his mother. ‘After all, you only fell out of an apple tree when you were little – and the bruise healed well. Boys are always doing things like that.’

  Michel refrained from telling her that he had cried about it enough until his father told him that other boys put up with small hurts; he must stop being a namby-pamby and get on with his work unless he wanted a whipping.

  So he had endured. He remembered other children jeering at him because he did not want to play games which involved throwing a ball. He was, at times, bullied unmercifully.

  Then, Jacques, an elderly great-uncle, had seen the child’s predicament and had taught him a few of the finer points of kick-boxing, real, old-fashioned savate, fighting while wearing heavy farm boots. Naturally quite agile and fast-moving, and with a long reach, Michel found he could endure an occasional sharp jolt as he kicked. It was a long-forgotten skill not familiar to the other boys, and he had had the supreme satisfaction of inflicting enough damage on his tormenters to deter further bullying. Anatole had been amused, on his return from Germany, to learn that Michel still did daily exercises to keep up his skill.

  After Madame Benion’s impatient remarks about his shoulder, the conversation lapsed.

  In pain, facing death, Anatole had learned to appreciate the patience and endurance of this dumb little brother of his. That his brother’s silent endurance was wearing very thin had not yet occurred either to him or to their harassed mother.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It felt to Barbara almost unseemly to be meeting a foreigner, a stranger, so soon after having wept her heart out for George. She had not yet managed to admit to herself her intense loneliness, her torment at unsatisfied sexual needs, her fear of a future which threatened to become increasingly lonely and unpredictable.

  Even her wartime marriage had been lonely; when George had married her, he had been a serving soldier based in Yorkshire. But both she and George always hoped that the war would not last for long and, she had once said wistfully to Phyllis, there were lovely leaves to look forward to, even if they lasted only forty-eight hours.

  To add to the loneliness of those days, the one or two girl friends Barbara had made when she had first come to West Kirby had been scattered by the call-up to military service or war work. When she went to a local dance, she met more strangers than local people.

  Only one other woman had been employed by Barbara’s wartime employer. Bound together by the need to maintain their dignity in a very rough male community, the two had got along quite well. But the friendship had not continued once the war ended; Mavis had gone thankfully back to her home in Glasgow.

  Soon after the war, whole shiploads of young women, who had become the war brides of foreign soldiers based in n
earby camps, had gone abroad to join their husbands. Barbara noticed the loss of familiar faces from her own village.

  Now that peace had come, the bed-and-breakfast needed endless work and ingenuity to regain its prewar clientele. She had begun to wonder if it would ever flourish again. She had certainly not had much spare time since the war ended to go out and make new friends.

  As she walked up the road to meet Michel, it was, however, with a fair amount of instinctive wariness that she observed him waiting for her.

  In a quiet way, he’s endearing, she decided. She had imagined that a peasant would be solidly built, clumsy in movement, but he was thin, and when he moved, it was with the swift economy of movement of a dancer, not the steady plod of a countryman who had spent his life in muddy fields.

  A cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, he was loitering outside the flowerseller’s tiny shop. He looked extremely neat and clean, though still shabby. Instead of blue jeans, today he wore black trousers with his black pullover. He had evidently done his utmost to achieve a good shave.

  He greeted her shyly with a little salute. He did not doff his beret, and she had a whimsical thought that French baby boys were probably born with such caps on their heads, never to be removed.

  She responded with a smile and a quick, ‘Hello’. Then she could not think of anything else to say.

  As Michel straightened and moved eagerly towards her, it was obvious that, though glad to see her, he, also, was tongue-tied. His smile was cheerful, however, the eyes narrowed as if he were enjoying a secret joke. In fact, he was finding his own lunacy in meeting her an ironic joke.

  While traversing the narrow, cobbled street, she had been surprised that the flower shop, by which he was waiting, had metal drums of cut flowers sitting outside its door and was, therefore, presumably open – on a Sunday? She now seized on this to provide a possible line of conversation.