by Gary Newman
‘You weren’t to know Ramier was a fake,’ I said.
So that was how Ramier had got his hands on the postcard from Philippe Barre to Bernard Marti . . .
‘Who is this Ramier, then?’ the patron asked via his daughter. ‘Some sort of crook?’
I said that my best guess at the moment was that he was some sort of dodgy antique dealer.
‘Antique dealer? He’s wasting his time here, then . . .’
‘Barre’s the only antique around here!’ one of the noisy men in overalls, who’d obviously caught the drift of our conversation, remarked for the benefit of the house, and he and his friends left the bar amid uproarious laughter. They wished the patron good evening at the door, and went laughing into the night.
‘Did Ramier stay here?’ I asked Germain Barre, alluding to the hotel upstairs. ‘If so, you must’ve seen his ID?’
‘No, he just came in occasionally and drank at the bar – took a few snacks – and asked a lot of questions – a lot . . . If he mentioned his name, I don’t remember it – I suppose he might have. That’s the way it is in this business – you see so many people, and you’re all things to all men. He just sort of carried me along.’
‘He’s a plausible character,’ I confirmed.
‘And you, monsieur,’ the patron began, seeming to take my last remark as a sort of cue. ‘Are you in the, er . . . antiques business, too?’
Carefully watching the expression in his eyes – how would he take this? – I took out my business card, and handed it over to Monsieur Barre. He took it in blankly at first, then astonishment mixed with consternation spread all over his face.
‘But, it’s – this means you’re . . . The good priest Rolvenden in Jersey . . .’
‘His grandson!’ I said, laughing, and handed over my passport to back up my claim to be a Rolvenden. ‘And there’s more . . .’
As he glanced at my passport photo and details, I fished in my inside pocket, and pulled out the copy of my father’s birth certificate, which I handed to Liliane at my side. She gave a low whistle, and looked at me wonderingly with her dark, intelligent eyes.
‘Formidable . . .’ she murmured, then, to her father: ‘Papa, you’d better take a look at this . . .’
He did, with an inaudible whisper, then handed me back the papers and left the bar briefly to flip the Closed sign on the street door, and lock it, an operation followed immediately by the whirr of descending shutters outside.
‘You’ll be staying here, of course,’ the hotelier said as he took my bag with one hand and my elbow with the other and led me, Liliane following, behind the bar into their private quarters. Madame Barre, a stocky lady with bright black eyes and the Midi accent, was summoned from the kitchen, where she’d been watching a blaring television set, and we settled down in the Barres’ comfortable sitting room while we talked. And did we have a lot to talk about! By the time, in the unlikely early hours, Germain sat back, his stock of questions exhausted, and gave me a comprehensive look-over, all he could say was: ‘So that’s why the good pastor Rolvenden helped my great-grandmother Carrie in Jersey – she’d borne his son . . .’
‘And the lady you call Nanny,’ Madame Barre put in, referring to the one I’d always thought of as my grandmother, ‘she was a heroine, a really good woman, looking after your father like that, and bringing him up as her own son.’
‘To me, she’s still my grandmother.’
‘Voilà!’
‘Tell me,’ I addressed the hotelier. ‘Do you know where Carrie – your great-grandmother and my grandmother – is buried?’
Germain Barre winced slightly and shook his head.
‘She died in hospital in Arromanches, but we’ve never been able to find out where she was buried. A lot of the area was destroyed during the landings in 1944 – the war . . .’
‘Germain,’ the lady of the house said to her husband, ‘Monsieur Rolvenden looks absolutely done in – there’s always tomorrow . . .’
Barre jumped to his feet, and, pulling me up, shook both my hands.
‘Monsieur Rolvenden – mon cousin! – this has been an unforgettable meeting, and of course, we’ll be thrilled if you can stay for a while.’
‘I’ll certainly take up your offer in the future – thank you – but my next stop will be Niort, and in the meantime, I’d like to pay a call in Dieppe.’
‘Ah, yes! To see old Marti, my grandfather Philippe’s wartime comrade . . .’
It was agreed, then, that next morning, Saturday, Liliane would take me to Dieppe to look up Bernard Marti, who’d spent VE Day in London with Carrie Bugle’s son Philippe, my present host’s grandfather. As well as helping out my French, Liliane – a friend of the Marti family – could help smooth down any feathers still ruffled by the visit of Barre-impersonator Ramier, who’d pinched the old man’s 1955 London postcard from Philippe Barre. After we’d made our visit in Dieppe, I could go on from there farther south to Niort.
Later on, after I’d slept off the edge of my weariness, and taken breakfast en famille, Liliane rang up Bernard Marti’s daughter in Dieppe to clear the way for our planned visit to the old man.
‘She said not to stay long,’ the bright girl told me, ‘since his health is not good, and he tires very easily. Otherwise, it should be OK.’
We bought flowers and a bottle of Rivesalte for Marti’s daughter before setting off for Dieppe in Liliane’s battered little car, and my sympathetic new kinswoman told me something of her own life. She was twenty-four and a graduate of one of the big Parisian écoles, who, like tens of thousands in her situation, was kicking around at home, helping in the bar and hotel, till some suitable job turned up. Among her achievements she included her having covered the length and breadth of the United States by Greyhound bus. I told her that, if she ever fancied trying her luck in England, and didn’t mind camping out in a disused lighthouse on a marsh, she’d be welcome to stay with me.
Once we’d arrived in Dieppe, Liliane led me to the upper flat of a narrow, shabby building off the rattling fish market on the Ile du Pollet in the port’s inner basin. Bernard Marti’s daughter was a stout lady, just on the wrong side of seventy, and came out on to the landing in response to Liliane’s ring at the doorbell. Before she showed any sign of inviting us in, she said that we had to understand that her father was ninety-six years old, and things had come to a pretty pass when people took advantage of a man of that age . . . She was obviously referring to the Tintin-quiffed conman Ramier’s visit, and the affair of the purloined VE Day postcard.
But Liliane’s reassurances, along with the flowers and the Rivesalte, at last mollified the lady to the extent of her inviting us in. On the strict understanding, she was careful to point out, that the visit was to last no more than five minutes, and that she was to be there in the room throughout.
We were ushered into a stuffy little bedroom, full of hideous modernique French furniture of the last-decade-but-five-or-six. Under the tall, single window was an armchair with a shrunken old man in a jacket and zipped-up pullover in it. His bare skull was blotched and yellow, and the middle ground of the waxen face was occupied boldly by a thick white moustache. The knot-veined, bluish right hand was tapping a Zagazig cigarette-paper carton incessantly on the wooden armrest of the chair. The old soldier turned dim, pale eyes on us, and looked blankly as, uninvited, we sat down on the edge of the bed nearest to him.
‘Five minutes!’ warned the stumpy female Cerberus in the doorway.
I said hello to Monsieur Marti, and he mumbled something that sounded like ‘Boujou – boujou . . .’ then, through Liliane, I said I believed he’d been in the army with a kinsman of mine, Philippe Barre.
‘Yes, yes, I was in the army – with de Gaulle,’ then, with a little smile, a brave stab at English: ‘You are from London Cité?’
I grinned and nodded encouragingly: did he remember their time in England during the war?
‘I’ve some postcards – Bernadette, where are the postcards from London
?’
The lady in the doorway shot us a meaningful look, before telling her father that they’d turn up somewhere later, no doubt . . .
‘There were three of us,’ the old man was saying, ‘like the Three Musketeers . . .’
Three wartime comrades, I thought: I hadn’t been prepared for that.
‘There was me and Philippe – the two Dieppois – and Duzko.’
‘Who was Duzko, Monsieur Marti?’
But my question just went over the old man’s head.
‘We got away in 1940,’ he went on. ‘We were a team, do you understand? Duzko had been in the Spanish War in ’36–7, and knew a network down near the Pyrenees. We got some civvy clothes and made for the border, and Duzko made his number with this guy in Tarbes. He passed us on to a guide – a Spanish Basque in Lannemezan – and we went over the mountains at dead of night. God! The cold . . . There were times when I was sure I was a goner, and the guide wouldn’t stop – they never stopped if you held back, you know, because if they were late over the mountains the Fascists would have spotted them in daylight and shot them. Me and Philippe got over, but Duzko . . .’
To our dismay, Marti started to cry – the facile tears of the very old.
‘That’s it!’ his daughter rapped from the door. ‘That’s enough!’
‘Dead in the snow,’ the old man snuffled as we made an apologetic exit. ‘Dead in the snow . . .’
Liliane and I discussed the visit to the Martis as she drove me and my bag to the car-hire depot which was attached to the train-and-bus station at the far end of town.
‘We’d always thought that my great-grandfather Philippe and Bernard Marti had escaped from France through Dunkirk in 1940,’ she said. ‘And now this story about escaping over the Pyrenees . . .’
‘They’d have made for the British Consulate in Barcelona,’ I said, ‘and been smuggled out via Gibraltar. It was a recognized route for Allied personnel cut off from the northern French ports by the German advance. And who was this Third Musketeer, Duzko?’
‘It’s a Slav name, I think: there were lots of East European immigrants and refugees in France in those days. No member of my family has ever mentioned such a name to me before, though, and Papa’s always talking about Carrie and his grandfather – it’s like an, er . . . mania with him . . .’
‘Like me and my Grandfather Rolvenden,’ I said.
The young girl laughed.
‘It’s so interesting, though,’ she remarked. ‘Everybody wants to know where they come from.’
But where exactly had this Duzko come from, I asked myself; or rather, where did he fit in? Why had Philippe Barre apparently never mentioned this charismatic ex-comrade to his family? And why had he let them understand that he’d been taken off at Dunkirk in 1940, when, if old Marti was to be believed, they’d got away – minus poor Duzko – across the Pyrenees?
‘Here we are at the station,’ Liliane said, stopping the car.
She helped me with my bag, then we shook hands warmly amid vows to meet again soon, and she got back into the car. With a last wave, I was about to turn away, when she beckoned from the car, and I went over and leant towards the side window. There was a mischievous smile on the attractive, olive-skinned face, as Liliane delivered her parting shot.
‘I think maybe I can help you with the real identity of this Monsieur Ramier you’re investigating,’ she said almost apologetically.
‘Oh, can you – do tell me, then . . .’
‘You know, ramier in French is a type of pigeon.’
Chapter Nineteen
As I drove south in my hire-car, I mulled over Liliane Barre’s conjecture as to Ramier’s real name. If she’d been on the right track, it suggested that the man with the Tintin quiff was as arrogant as he was plausible, underestimating the intelligence of people in seeing through his pseudonym. I had to concede, though, that he’d had me fooled: at no time had it occurred to me to look up ramier in a French-English dictionary.
So now it was looking as if a modern French descendant of Laurence Victor Pidgeon – the Vickybird of the Rawbeck Legend – had pinched the identity of the latest representative of Carrie Bugle’s French family – the Barres – in order to ferret out information about paintings. The painting, I was now convinced: The Ruffian on the Stair . . . It struck me, too, how like his forebear the modern Pidgeon was, with the same conning and stealing from his unwitting marks. But did the modern Vickybird run to murder, too? I’d have to watch my step.
And now there was a new factor in this Duzko, the old comrade of Philippe Barre and Bernard Marti, who’d met his death in the snows of the Pyrenees, and who, for some reason, had been left out of the late Philippe Barre’s account of his adventures. ‘Duzko’ – I wasn’t even sure whether it was a first name or a surname, since Frenchmen of Marti’s generation habitually referred to their most intimate friends by their surnames. I’d have to await further developments on this one.
I drove on steadily south through the tame countryside, past Rouen, Dreux and Chartres to Blois, where I stopped for a belated lunch and a browse in the local Grande Poste among the racks of French District telephone books, to find no Pidgeons listed – with or without the ‘d’ – in the directory that covered Niort and its environs. Once I’d got there, I’d have to think laterally.
The south-western autoroute took me to Poitiers, and so on to Route 68 to the pleasant little town of Niort, on its gentle slope on the left bank of the Sèvre. I found a parking space, then sat down at a pavement table of a bistro on the broad, sunlit main square. By then it was after seven, and, tired though I was, I decided to use the remaining daylight to make a quick recce of the address at the head of Odette Pidgeon’s 1927 begging letter to my grandfather.
I drank my coffee quietly for a few minutes, admiring the light-coloured buildings round the square, with their round-tiled roofs, then signalled the waiter, so that I might pay and ask directions to the village of Balmes, where Odette Pidgeon had nursed the ailing Vickybird all those years ago. The waiter knew the village, and told me that it was in a district several kilometres west of the town, in a marshy flatland called Le Palud, on the outskirts of the Marais Poitevin nature reserve. The way, he said with a smile, would be complicated . . .
And so it proved to be, as, half an hour later, I found myself threading my way through a maze of minor roads, paths and ruts in a canalled landscape reminiscent of Holland. The low, whitewashed villages and farms of the Maraichins were built on top of ridges, rock-plugs, dykes and other eminences – anything to keep them above sea-flood level – and the squares and rectangles of water-meadows and bean and sunflower fields marked out by the canals and dykes looked fat and prosperous.
I tried to imagine the region in winter, buffeted by the raw westerlies that must roar in unchecked across the flat landscape from the nearby Bay of Biscay. I thought of Laurence Victor Pidgeon with his ‘affected lungs’, and reflected that it surely couldn’t have taken many such winters to see off an undernourished man with war-damaged lungs.
It was all pleasant enough now, though, in the douce Maytime, with the handsome cattle in the willow-hung meadows, the burgeoning crops in the arable fields and the flutter and twitter of birdlife everywhere from the adjoining nature reserve. No signs of the rural distress Odette Pidgeon had hinted at in her pre-war letter, either, in the narrow, single street of low, rendered white cottages that made up the village of Balmes-le-Vidame. Instead, there were neat new cars in front of the trim, crouching dwellings, and blue-rinsed and summer-dressed old ladies at the front doors in place of the pinched figures in shawls and sabots that must have been the order of the day back in the 1920s, when Odette was struggling to keep her ‘Laurent’ alive. In those days, I reflected, the notion of the EU and its farm subsidies would have seemed like science fiction.
I parked the car just outside the village on a sort of hard shoulder at the side of the blunt dyke along which Balmes’s buildings were strung out, and approached a friendly-loo
king local who was sitting placidly on a bench in front of the second cottage in. I handed him my pre-scribbled note of the address on Odette Pidgeon’s letter, and with a brown root of a hand he pushed up the peak of his tartan cloth cap.
‘Oustalet Grau,’ he quoted from my note the name of what must have been the Pidgeons’ farmhouse, then, with an apologetic three- or four-toothed grin: ‘Connais pas . . .’
I thanked him for his time, and made my way farther up the street. Of course the house-names of the place must have changed over the years with the tenants, but surely there’d be at least one person left in the village who’d know. I’d an idea, and turned back to the man on the bench, whom I asked where the village postman lived. With the comment that, if I’d asked him in the first place, he’d have been able to tell me straight away, the man directed me to the house.
The postman turned out to be a thin, sandy-haired man in middle age, and I found him as he was tinkering with a car at the side of his house. He took my interruption in good part, but as to the house-name I was after, he too was reduced to head-scratching. Hang on, though, he’d pop indoors and ask Maman –she was over eighty, and a Balmaise born and bred: she’d know if anyone did . . .
The postman re-emerged from the house a minute later, with a little stout old lady with prominent brown eyes. She looked me up and down, then smiled and gave me good day, and I repeated my piece to her. She paused awhile, then explained that she’d heard something years ago about an Englishman who’d lived near the village – you didn’t see many of them in the marais – but of course she’d only been a very little girl at the time, and naturally didn’t know his name. The house-name did, however, seem to ring a bell with her. She turned to her son, the postman – wasn’t there an oustalet owned by the nice retired Dutch couple half a kilometre or so down the road?
