The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you want what you came for?’

  To which Charlie, heart pounding, breath short in his throat, had no answer at all.

  ‘Let’s get inside.’

  He went, half eager, half dragged. This time Babette closed the door tight against the outside world. It was a small room. The plank walls, daubed with a single coat of paint, had probably been white once but were now yellow with age and dirt. They stood so close about them that at full stretch Charlie’s arms would have almost spanned the room. In that confined space, ripe Babette flowed more alarmingly than ever out of her jazz band dress.

  The air was dizzy with a combination of unfamiliar smells. Something warm and scented in which soap had little part, which he hoped might be the smell of Babette herself, was allied to the mingled odours of stale food, grease, unwashed dishes and sewage.

  ‘Now,’ Babette said. ‘What am I to do with you?’ And thump, thump, went her closed fists on the hips that threatened the tight material of her dress. ‘Let’s see … What might you have come here for, I wonder?’ A pause, while Charlie kept his mouth tight. Outside the shack a night bird squawked, the sound loud in the silence. ‘To steal my money perhaps?’

  Charlie shook his head vehemently. ‘No, mam’selle, it was nothing like that.’

  ‘To cut my throat?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then why?’ She had moved and now stood very close to him. ‘Why did you and your friends spy on Babette?’

  Her proximity, threatening and alluring, made his head spin; the warm scent of the big, blowsy woman filled his nostrils.

  ‘Tell me, Charles, how old are you?’

  ‘Thirteen last month.’ He spoke hesitantly, as though there might be something shameful in being only thirteen.

  ‘Old enough, I daresay.’ She looked at him seriously. ‘We have known each other all your life, have we not? You know what people call me, Charles?’

  He could not look at her. ‘No, mam’selle.’

  His scarlet cheeks betrayed him but Babette was merciful. ‘They say I am a woman who goes with men. They are right. Do you know what that means?’

  Even his eyes, watching a corner of the tight room, seemed on fire. Somehow he managed to nod.

  ‘Did you hope to see me with a man? Was that it?’

  He shook his head, although that might indeed have been part of it. The truth was that he did not know precisely why he — they — had come to spy. Perhaps the idea of the unknown, exciting and forbidden, exciting because it was forbidden, had stirred his blood and curiosity, but he had no words to talk about such things.

  ‘Perhaps you wanted to see what a woman looks like when she has no clothes on?’

  It was so; of course it was, but he was ashamed to admit it.

  ‘Can I trust you to keep a secret?’ Babette wondered.

  Something about her voice … Charlie risked a quick look, saw the frown line drawn deep between her pencilled eyebrows. He dared not answer, could not even tell whether it was a real question or not.

  ‘You must promise to say nothing,’ she cautioned him. ‘Otherwise I could get into serious trouble. You understand me? Grown men are one thing, but children … Serious trouble,’ she repeated.

  Somehow Charles found his tongue. ‘I promise.’

  ‘To tell no one? Not even your friends?’

  He nodded.

  ‘If they ask you, you must tell them that nothing happened. You hear me?’

  He waited, she waited, both of them staring at uncertainty. At last she sighed. ‘I always was a fool,’ she told him, or herself. Soft fingers took his chin and lifted his head so that he was staring at her. ‘Look, then.’

  She undid the line of buttons that held her dress together and opened it, pulling back first one side then the other. Beneath the dress she was naked. Charles had known in theory what to expect, yet to have it suddenly exposed to him like this was such a shock that for a minute he could not register what he was seeing.

  ‘There you are,’ said Babette, and her voice — soft and understanding, almost kind — was quite different now. ‘That is what you wanted to see, is it not?’

  Charlie stared, his eyes willing his brain, or perhaps the reverse, the brain instructing the eyes, to observe, remember. The hills and vales of flesh, translated from imagination into reality: the flecked skin, an occasional hair, a mole, all the imperfections making up the truth of what was, perhaps because of those very imperfections, more tantalising and seductive than the images of abstract beauty that had been all he had previously known.

  The scent of Babette’s flesh was like a blow.

  She took his hand, lifted it like a chalice and placed it upon her body.

  ‘You see?’ Speaking softly, as though in a holy place, the innocent brought before the altar.

  The sensation of touch, of the woman beneath his hand …

  The pressure in his groin, only recently familiar, mounted alarmingly, a torrent surging. His hand moved in agitation, to explore, to seize.

  ‘No …’ She stopped him, lifting his hand from her. ‘Enough.’ And smiled at him, fondly and a little sadly, before drawing her dress once again across her body.

  The moment was past, the glimpse of holiness over. She laughed and caressed the side of Charlie’s face with her hand. ‘That is enough to be going on with, yes?’ She leant forward and kissed him gently on the forehead. ‘Two years more, you may come and visit me again, if you wish. Perhaps I shall show you more things then. But not now. Now you must go.’

  She took him by the shoulders, gently but firmly, and walked him to the wood-slat door. In the doorway, looking out at the enigmatic darkness, she held him tight so that he felt her softness against his back. ‘You like me?’ she whispered.

  ‘Very much,’ said Charlie fervently.

  ‘Good. Good!’ Raucousness returned as Babette laughed. ‘Go then, petit. And in two years come back. Remember!’

  Behind him the door shut. He heard the bolt shoot home. Charlie stood in a confusion of darkness and blood-red images, of Babette’s words, everything that had happened. His memory tried to retain its hold upon the kaleidoscope of impressions, ice-slippery, that slid through his mind: the colours and textures, the unbelievable reality of the flesh; the shock of the unexpected; the heat and warmth; the soft voice promising; the touch of the heated skin, the spiralling tightness of his own body.

  He shook himself, dog-like, staring at the darkness and the knowledge that his world had now been changed, absolutely, by what had happened. The memory, and the promise, remained. To treasure and preserve.

  5

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Charlie remembered his promises, not only to Babette but also to the moment that remained precious in his mind. ‘Nothing happened!’

  ‘You must’ve done something!’

  ‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’

  It was asking for trouble. Emil and Jean would not be fobbed off. They badgered and badgered. When they discovered that he really was not going to tell them anything, they grew angry. In place of the lurid details they had expected and that their hearts and groins demanded, their imaginations created monsters and castles out of all the things that Charlie might have done, the impossibly acrobatic sexual rituals, dimly visualised, of which they felt they had been so unfairly deprived. Charlie’s continuing silence was all the proof they needed. They told others — whispers, sniggers — what they soon came to believe they had truly seen. Whispers became shouts; in no time, it was all around the town.

  ‘What is this I have been hearing?’ Sanette very much on her dignity.

  He would not tell her.

  She went on at him about the purity of the body and the soul. She demanded an explanation.

  He would not tell her.

  She became angry, threatening him with the church and the fire thereafter, the sinner consumed by the furnace of
God.

  ‘Tell me what happened! Tell me! I demand to know!’

  He would not tell her.

  Sanette’s lips drew tight. ‘Very well …’

  Day by day, she built her revenge. She had no real friends but was sure there would be no shortage of those who shared her views in this. She spoke to Jeannine first of all, but when Wally knew what it was about he wanted no part of it and Jeannine, docile for once, gave Sanette no encouragement. Next, she talked to like-minded ladies who gathered like crows at the corners of the cobblestoned streets. They went in delegation to the local priest, for whom Babette, raucous and earthy, had long been a crown of thorns.

  Sunday, and Babette summoned from the pulpit to account for herself to the congregation. And to the congregation’s black-suited God.

  She did not come.

  Was it not written, come unto me? And, if the sinner would not, was it not right that the church, in its humility, should go to her? For her soul’s salvation?

  Night. Flames from raised torches cast guttering shadows across the streets, the patch of open ground, the surface of the trickling stream, the shuttered shack. The priest led the righteous to the sinner’s door.

  The priest raised his voice. ‘Babette! Babette Fantine! Come out! Your Saviour commands you!’

  Silence.

  Now what?

  The priest grew angry. After the rhetoric, the parishioners come together on the Lord’s business, the procession, grim and purposeful, beneath the torches, it would not befit the church’s dignity that all should come to nothing.

  ‘Babette! Again I command you! Come out!’

  Silence, still, as though the house itself denied them.

  Voices now, suggesting this and that.

  ‘It is dark. She is not there.’

  ‘She is sitting in the dark, hoping to fool us.’

  ‘The darkness is a good place for her.’

  Only one thing for it. The priest stood back, more in sorrow than in anger at the sinner’s intransigence.

  ‘Break the door down!’

  A few men had come, some dragged by righteous wives, others who hoped for trouble. Two kicks, a blow with a maul that someone had thoughtfully brought, and the splintered door flew back.

  A surge of bodies towards the dark opening, arrested as the priest raised his hand. He took a torch from one of the group and stood in the entrance, black shadows flying, and looked inside the little house. He turned back to the others.

  ‘There is no one here,’ he told them. Then, in a ringing voice, he cried: ‘The devil has been driven out!’

  ‘Thanks be to God!’ The devout words surged exultantly.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ he repeated.

  ‘Father …’ In the darkness, a voice whispered like an assassin’s blade. ‘What if she comes back?’

  ‘She would not dare.’

  But might.

  They burnt the little house down: the house and all it contained. To keep the devil out.

  Charlie heard about it; everybody heard about it. Babette Fantine was gone and would not be coming back.

  It was an event that, to the priest’s outraged astonishment, divided the town.

  ‘Good riddance,’ said some, eager to wash their hands of the shameless woman who had been unwilling to hide her sins from the light.

  But others …

  ‘She is a woman, certainly. A daughter. And after all, she has to live.’

  The local gendarme rode to the presbytery on his bicycle and had a word with the priest behind his study’s closed door. Madame Desgranges, the priest’s helper, hovered but heard only the low murmur of voices. However, she observed the two men when they emerged: Gendarme Bayard grim-faced, Father Mouchon enraged, thin lips white, and in no time the word was all over town. Nothing of what had passed came out, which stopped no one guessing, or parading behind shuttered palms the knowledge they did not have.

  Not all the comments were favourable to the group of righteous souls who had burnt down Babette Fantine’s house. There were even those who recalled how Babette’s father, already several years a widower, had been killed in the war — a hero of France, they now said — leaving Babette without a sou.

  What was a young woman, alone, to do?

  Everywhere heads were wagging, and not all at the wickednesses of La Belle Babette. Some thought that the woman who had started it all, the outsider who called herself Sanette Mandale, was the last person with any right to criticise Babette.

  The priest had not expected the ambiguous response and it troubled him. It seemed to imply criticism of the church’s authority, and himself. He preached against it, most fervently, with one eye on a bishop who might not understand the righteous indignation that had caused the arson.

  Because that was the word the gendarme had used, in the privacy of the presbytery.

  ‘The law does not tolerate arson, mon pere. I must have your assurance there will be no repetition of these events.’

  Father Mouchon had raised outraged shoulders as high as they would go, summoning to his aid the formidable battalions of church and God, but the gendarme had been unmoved.

  ‘No more, father. I must have your assurance.’

  Which eventually, Father Mouchon speaking in a voice choked and black with fury, he obtained.

  In the parlour of the narrow house frowning through its blank windows at the unforgiving sea, Charlie sat. He, the whole town, knew what had happened: the naming and blackening of the girl; the procession with flaming torches to hunt her out, to punish; the flames tearing with savage teeth at the little room where Babette, out of kindness and compassion, had introduced him, innocently, to the separate but interlocking worlds of man and woman, of tolerance and desire.

  A sudden squall threw its fistful of rain like gravel against the window glass. Beyond the harbour wall, parallel lines of breakers ran landwards, baring their teeth of foam.

  Behind him, Sanette came silently into the room.

  ‘I will not have you sulking,’ she said. ‘I will not have it!’

  Far out, beyond a tumult of gulls, the grey clouds frayed in the wind, revealing behind them a sky of the palest blue. A ray of sunlight set fire to the waves.

  ‘It was your fault,’ Sanette told him. ‘You and your filthy habits! Let it be a lesson to you.’

  She waited but Charlie said nothing. He would not speak of his fears for Babette, who had been kind to him, and what would happen to her now because of her kindness. Perhaps it was as his mother said: that he was to blame.

  ‘It is of no consequence,’ Sanette said. ‘I have asked Father Mouchon to come and instruct you, bring you back to the right path. As for that woman … The town will smell sweeter without her.’

  And swept away, nose high. Another burst of rain splattered against the window. From the parlour wall, the face of the uniformed man looked down in silence.

  6

  A man came to stay in the town. Gaston Bayard was the gendarme’s cousin. He was about forty-five, and rumour said he was a bachelor. He dealt in fish and told the fishermen that he had plans to improve the sales of their catch.

  The Depression had hit them hard and they were eager to hear what he had to offer. This was at once simple and revolutionary. Until now, each boat had sold its catch on the jetty to buyers who came from nearby towns. Whatever price they could get, the men had accepted: the fish wouldn’t keep. Now Gaston Bayard had two proposals. He would build refrigerated sheds in the harbour, to store the catch as soon as it came ashore. The fishermen would form a cooperative to present a united front — and a united price — to buyers who until now had been able to play one fisherman against another, to the ultimate disadvantage of them all.

  It was a plausible plan; too plausible, some thought. Each night there were arguments in the whitewashed bar. Some of the arguments grew heated.

  ‘What’s wrong with how we’ve done things in the past?’ Pierre Gros leant one elbow on the long counter and stared aggressively
around the smoke-blue room. ‘I say to hell with the new ways.’

  Alfred Didoux was younger than Pierre but equally aggressive. ‘And starve?’

  Pierre gulped his jar of wine and slammed it down on the counter. ‘You’re not starving.’

  ‘Heading that way. Down Dunkerque market, I hear prime mackerel’s fetching no more than fifteen sous a kilo. A kilo, mind! How can a man hope to make a living like that?’

  ‘You think this new man will change that? A stranger we never saw before in our lives?’ Pierre laughed scornfully and slurped from his wine jar. ‘Go ahead, my friend, if that’s what you want. But leave me out of it. I’ll take care of my own catch, and don’t come crying to me if he takes your fish and runs off with it in the night!’

  Gaston Bayard had told them that all the fishermen had to agree or the new system wouldn’t work. Pierre Gros, tough and inflexible as the oaken stem of his own fishing boat, could not be budged, so there, for the moment, they left it.

  Prices fell further. Dunkerque market, the biggest along the coast, was no longer offering the fifteen sous that Alfred Didoux had complained about. Now prices were down to eight for first-grade fish; one terrible day, it fell lower still.

  ‘Five sous! Five!’ Now there was fear as well as outrage in the fishermen’s voices. ‘All right for you,’ they told Pierre. ‘There’s no one but you and your missus. We’ve got families to think about.’

  Still Pierre would not be shifted. ‘Times’ll get better soon. You’ll see.’

  In the meantime, Gaston Bayard, who had caused all the fuss, twiddled his thumbs and directed his attention to other things.

  7

  The first time Charlie knew that something was on the go between the stranger and his mother was when she told him that Monsieur Bayard was coming to supper the following evening.

  ‘I expect you to be on your best behaviour …’