by Hilton, Lisa
‘Do you love the other one then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he love you?’
‘No.’
‘Then have a look at this.’
Claudia held the compact, identical to the others. Inside it, scratched in amateurish gothic letters, was ‘Oriane’. Fuck.
‘He didn’t love me either, not enough anyway. But I didn’t care.’
Claudia on her feet, backing away, murmuring I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Oriane said nothing to help her until she was almost at the door. She could not believe she had been so crass, so selfish, so involved with her own wretched, meagre story that she had failed to see that time was something more than a story of people’s activities that had been scrapped, that the world was not the sole property of the living. Ghosts had shares in the present. She was stupid and wicked and cruel and blind. How could she have exposed Oriane like that, how could she not have picked it up?
‘It’s all right,’ said Oriane, her voice so warm and gentle that it sounded young. ‘I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry for any of it, now.’
PART TWO
JUNE–JULY 1943
‘Try it, then.’
‘I can’t see. Bring the candle.’
It was night here. Karl held up the candle to the side of the little mirror and Oriane saw her mouth inside the gold rim. He rubbed a finger across her lips. Close up, the powder sat chalkily on her skin, pinker-toned, but if she held the mirror away, her face looked soft, warmer. The lipstick matched the compact, a twisting design around the tube, and when she rubbed it carefully across her lower lip it smelt of greasy flowers.
‘Don’t look yet. Close your eyes.’ She felt bold with her painted face. His boots were lying next to his folded clothes, they felt huge as she dragged them up her bare legs, over her knees where the leather chafed against her skin. Her dress and bodice and drawers were dropped untidily, her hair covered her breasts and she spread it out, imagining her white skin in the candlelight.
‘Not yet. Wait.’ He grabbed at her as she moved past him, she swung her hips neatly out of the way and lay down on the blanket, leaning back on bent arms, her throat exposed.
‘Now look.’
Karl saw Oriane naked except for his jackboots, her eyes on his face, her red mouth a little open. The skin of her thighs looked luminous, catching the polish of the black leather, she parted her knees, lolled them open, then stretched her legs wide, her eyes following his own, showing him everything. Down there her hair was black and thick, he could make out the gleam of the opening.
‘Huur,’ he whispered, and she smiled stupidly. He knelt between her legs and she reached forward to unfasten his trousers, pulling open the white drawers until his cock was released, holding his belt on one side.
‘Watch.’ Her hand was dipping between her legs, when she brought it up the fingers were shining. She reached to his mouth and smeared her wetness across his lips, beneath his nose. Taking more, she traced a finger across his straining cock. ‘See? See what you do?’ He rubbed the backs of his knuckles against her, held them above her face so she stretched her tongue to lick her own juice off the curved heel of his palm.
‘Well, I don’t care,’ Andrée had said defiantly, ‘it’s true.’
‘You shouldn’t say things like that, though. It’s wrong.’
‘Why? I think they’re the handsomest men I’ve ever seen. There.’
By June, there was a photograph in the window of the café, next to the picture of Maréchal Pétain. It showed Herr Hitler in a uniform, his arm raised straight out in the German salute. Underneath, Monsieur Dubois had written on a piece of cardboard: ‘We welcome our friends the Germans’. In the evenings, Betty served wine and cognac to the officers, she said they couldn’t get enough of her omelettes and duck rillettes. She recited the strange names to her friends, ‘Haupsturmführer’, ‘Standartenführer’, which Monsieur Dubois had asked them to write on a piece of paper. Only the officers were permitted to drink in the village, Betty said, and they put white cloths on the tables for them. The bench outside the door was usually empty now. Bernard and Yves no longer wheeled poor Jean-Marc there of an evening, though Betty said her father said that the others drank more and left quicker, so that was better. Camille Lesprats still sat in his corner every night, his nose splayed and bulbous, like a potato forgotten in the cellar for a whole winter. At first he had been alone, but as the weeks passed the men resumed their accustomed places and played pétanque outside in the dust.
‘They were quite polite, you know,’ ventured Oriane, ‘when they came up to me.’
Betty and Andrée had heard before how Oriane had sent William to see if they were camped on the plain, and William had blundered right through the lorries and tent poles. Oriane guessed they had tried to question him and then become mocking, pushing and taunting him, making a sport of his bewilderment. Cathérine Nadl had been wrong though, William had not been taken away. The interest in the Aucordiers having been the first to see them had been swallowed by everything else that had happened in Castroux in the weeks since they had arrived. Since the night in the square when everyone had said that France was lost, little had changed as Oriane thought it might. It seemed so long since she had come down the avenue from the chateau that next day, expecting to find a different world, dangerous and terrible, and finding nothing altered, or at least it seemed so then.
There was a game they had played in the spring, l’esterbel. You took the stone of an apricot or a plum and rubbed at it with a pebble to make two holes in the husk, exposing the creamy almond at the centre, which could be sucked or teased out until the core was hollow. Then you passed a thread through each hole and wound it around the first finger of each hand, and then, if you pulled the strings tight in a certain way, the stone would spin, revolving so quickly that its motion blurred to the eye, and letting off a reedy, high-pitched hum. William had loved esterbels, she would bring hers home from the schoolhouse and make it turn for him, kneeling on the kitchen floor. Time had done that, Oriane thought, hollowed and chiselled slowly through the years so that only now, when the strings pulled taut and the spinning began, you could see that this was not sudden or surprising, but had been gathering there all along.
Oriane did not tell her friends how she had quarrelled with Laurent about going back to work up at the chateau. He had said she ought not, that it was wrong and besides there was no need. What would people think knowing that she was engaged to him? Oriane had been unable to explain, completely, how confined she felt by the farmhouse. The endless list of tasks woke her before dawn. She counted them in her head, but they never seemed finished, no matter how early she got up. Some days it seemed indulgent even to take the time to wash, and she trudged about the yard with a grubby face, conscious of the smell of her own body. Some days she did not even go beyond the perimeter of the yard. William continued to go down to Murblanc, but the burden of his presence, his messes, his clothes to be picked up and washed, his food to be prepared and cooked and the dishes to be rinsed, his bed to be aired and changed, made her angry with him, her poor overgrown child. The effort of concealing her anger exhausted her until there had come to be afternoons when she sat helplessly by the cold fireplace, watching flies hum over the squalor of crumbs on the table. She sensed a recalcitrance in the house, as though it resisted becoming bright and orderly like Madame Nadl’s kitchen, but slumped always towards despair and disarray, like her father sneaking endlessly back towards his bottle. She felt exhausted all day, dragging about the place, but when she fell gratefully into bed at last, sleep would not come.
Laurent had seemed to think that her wish to leave it just for a while, just for the morning, was a reproach to him, a protest against the postponement of their marriage. He had tried, in the end, to be kind to her, to permit her to go. Oriane took this as easier, accepted his explanation of her feelings and even added to them, saying that the money she could save would be useful when he started the workshop. She could not attemp
t to explain how much she wanted to recover the feeling of being between places, of walking alone through the woods in the early morning with the sense that for this time at least, she belonged to nobody.
Betty and Andrée were much more interested in the intimacy that her work gave her with the officers. Andrée was right, they were handsome, though when she had seen them that first day on the plain she had been too afraid to notice. Castroux men, by and large, were dark and squat, their broad shoulders matching the wide hips of their women. They had big hands and feet with thick, splayed fingers. Short-legged, powerful men with a certain brief freshness in their outdoor skins their only claim to looks. The officers were more like Monsieur d’Esceyrac, or like beautiful horses, long and fine limbed, their hair all the colours of wheat. Oriane touched their things, knew the shape of their shoulders and the line of their waists through the tunics with the plaited silver cord on the seam that she brushed, the grey shirts marked inside with what at first seemed indecipherable combinations of initials. They wore a heavy, dull silver badge on both lapels of their jacket, an ugly thing; though this was removed before cleaning, Oriane would have to unpin one occasionally before she rubbed in the alum.
Magalie Contier was working, along with Cécile Chauvignat from the pig farm, whose husband Emile had volunteered for the work service in Germany. Shirts and underclothes were boiled together in the copper, though the women turned away their eyes when they sorted the underpants. Oriane was glad of Magalie, though she missed Cathérine, and it was strange after a while how little the chateau seemed to have changed, the noise of their work and the scent of the steam from the irons remained the same, the pine smell of oil soap mingling with the potato hiss of starch on a collar.
Betty fancied Officer Hummel, she thought he looked sad with his high cheekbones and pale moustache. Oriane knew all their names from the hieroglyphs of their laundry marks. The piano had been moved from the salon to the Marquise’s sitting room to make way for desks, and Oriane could tell Betty that she had heard Officer Hummel playing it sometimes, not really a whole tune because that probably wasn’t allowed in the daytime, but you could definitely tell he knew how to do it. They liked to sing, the officers, Betty said. Oriane was glad in the end that she hadn’t said anything about Karl Sternbach, though Andrée had picked him out as the best-looking of the lot, like a picture of a film star in a magazine, she said.
Betty was mad for those magazines, though Oriane couldn’t see the point, if films were like the one Père Guillaume had got up in the schoolhouse the winter before they came. It was about the work of the Poor Clares, the convent in Landi for which they collected every year. Everyone in Castroux had gone, squashed together on the benches, with the men and the big boys at the back, pretending not to be interested. Looking rather dusty, the Sisters held up a selection of little black babies to the camera, smiling encouragingly. A voice told of how many new Catholics were being born every year on the Ivory Coast. ‘Look at the state of them,’ Andrée whispered, ‘no wonder they got sent to Africa. Too ugly even for the convent!’ Père Guillaume said loudly in the smelly dimness that he would cancel the projection if certain people didn’t stop their ignorant comments. It was true, Oriane remembered, that several of the nuns had particularly bad teeth, but compared to the officers, most of the people in Castroux looked like gargoyles when they opened their mouths. Karl Sternbach’s teeth were white and straight, and his lips were full, often slightly parted so that you could see the gleam of them. At the back of his neck his cropped hair was as tender as the new feathers of a duckling.
Betty said it was a shame they couldn’t ask the officers to the dances, it was rotten having to have girls for partners. Andrée said was she stupid, that even if they knew about the dances, which they didn’t, and even if they were allowed to come, which they weren’t, what made Betty think that officers would want to be dancing with the likes of them? Officers would be used to dancing with ladies, not hobbledehoys like Betty. Betty said if that was what Andrée thought then she could hobble back to her flour bin and not hear what she had heard her father telling her mother about a woman in Landi who was doing business above her café, and with officers too, so there. Oriane was happy the conversation could continue without her, she could allow herself to think about the hollow place at the back of Karl’s neck, and how it felt when she put her mouth there.
She had known as soon as she went back to work at the chateau that he liked her, the beautiful soldier in the cap who had protected William. The long dormitory above the stables was in use again, and she saw him watching her as she crossed the yard to the wash house. The women were not allowed in to collect the wash, but she knew he slept there. One morning she was struggling with a big basket of kindling for the copper and he came forward and took it from her hands, swinging it up so easily. He called her Mademoiselle.
‘Let me help you with that, Mademoiselle Aucordier.’ He had remembered her name. She was terribly conscious of the damp rag barely covering her escaped hair and the freckles on her arms where she had pushed up the sleeves of her overall to try to keep a little cool. When she looked up into his face her heart stopped beating, truly skipped and churned in her chest. She wished she could tell Betty about it, who would know what she meant. The next day he was waiting for her at the top of the track with a little fistful of marguerites. Apart from Monsieur Boissière, Oriane didn’t know anybody who picked flowers, just like that, for no reason. She thought of Laurent and his apricots. You could eat apricots. She kept the posy in the pocket of her skirt until it shrivelled and dried, and when she went home that day she saw as if for the first time that the meadow at Murblanc was filled with marguerites, as though someone had thrown a huge lace tablecloth across the grass.
Cécile Chauvignat had sharp eyes and a nasty way with her. Oriane knew that Magalie didn’t like her either. She was worried that Cécile would notice how often Unterscharführer Sternbach seemed to have a few moments to help with a bulging sack of bedding, or soothe the valve on the copper when it started to blow out menacing clouds of steam. Then he kissed her in the woods, and it was nothing like kissing Laurent, she dropped her basket and didn’t even pretend to push him away. She imagined Cécile staring horrified from behind a tree, and the words were out of her mouth before she thought what she was saying.
‘I know somewhere we could go. To be private.’
He stepped back from her as though he could feel the heat of the blood in her face.
‘Do you, then?’ he asked, as if something was funny.
Since her mother’s death, Oriane had taken what she saw as a practical view of sin. Sin seemed to be connected to shame, which was usually something people couldn’t help and yet which made others think badly of them. People couldn’t help being what they were, look at William. It was wrong to hurt others, but she did not see anything shameful or wicked in going to have a look in the little hidden room under the bridge. Her mother had been eaten up by the idea of sin, until the shame of it had gobbled her insides and she died of it. If Oriane had told Père Guillaume about her visits to the chateau wood he would have said she was a natural Jesuit. She knew she should feel shame for what they had done. Shame for Laurent and for something even worse than that. All she felt was Karl’s eyes and hands and mouth on her, the taste of his skin and his voice telling her she was beautiful. This was what she was then. She was flesh under his body and the sound that caught in the back of his throat when he stopped moving inside her, she was his spit and his sweat and the blood between her legs. You couldn’t blame anyone for being what they were.
‘I’ll go first.’
‘Yes, it’s better.’
‘I’d better hide these.’
‘You could leave them here.’
‘No, if someone did find them?’
‘Shall you come tomorrow?’
‘Wait on the bridge if you can. I’ll come back this way after work.’
When the candles were out Oriane opened the door, closi
ng her eyes first so as not to be blinded by the light. The lipstick and compact were in her basket, beneath the same torn pillowcase she had been carrying up and down the hill for a week now. There was no reason she should not be in the grounds at this time, she worked here after all, but it seemed more plausible to her if she had something to show if she were stopped, a prop of some kind. It was important not to hurry, nor to look up towards the house. There was a faint footpath through the woods to the Murblanc track, but now, in July, it was almost overgrown and the thorns were vicious. Before she joined the track, she pulled her hat further over her brow and rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. Karl’s handkerchief had got most of the make-up off, but she had to fetch William. With the remains of the water in her bottle she rinsed her mouth and spat. The compact was in the pocket of her apron, she rubbed it, a talisman, over and over.
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1943
Karl dressed himself with professional swiftness, slipping the key into the pocket of his tunic. He looked about quickly before locking the little door and moved out from beneath the bridge, the heat already gathering around him as he came into the thinning shade. Soldiering, it seemed to him, was mostly a matter of being too bloody hot or too bloody cold. He had time to get to his billet in the long room above the stables before he had to report. He was lucky to be here, as one of the division translators, most of the lads were sweating their arses off in the tents on the plain. He replaced the key in his tin box under the cot. There were three of the gold compacts left. They had been a good buy, those, quality stuff, though best not to ask where they came from. Lifted from one of the big department stores in Lyons, no doubt. Fashionable. The lipstick had its name written on a label at the base, which made him smile, ‘Histoire d’Amour’. And that had been a nice touch of Willi’s, scratching the names with a pin on the inside, making it more personal. He smiled as he said them to himself – Heike, Elodie, Marie-Cathérine, Ursula, Aurélie, Jeanne. Poor old Ursula. Then Oriane. She’d got to him for sure, this one. Dirtiest of the lot with those big eyes and all that black hair. Wearing his boots like that. At least he had boots still.
