by JH Fletcher
When he finally went, leaving upon the air the imprint of perfume and his tingle-tangling voice, Charlie found it hard to believe that the extraordinary little man had existed at all.
‘Who is he? What is he?’
He might have saved his breath: his mother did not know and his stepfather wasn’t saying.
‘A guest,’ he said. ‘An important man.’
And departed to his room. That, his turned back seemed to imply, was all they needed to know.
Two days later, while Charlie was making his way back to the house from the harbour, Marcel Chantemps met him at the end of the wharf, apparently by chance. He simpered archly and attempted to run his hand over Charlie’s buttocks.
Charlie had long learnt to look after himself; nowadays, action came more readily to him than reason. He struck his hand away and, when Chantemps persisted, thumped him. It needed only one blow. Then he picked him up and threw him off the wall into the harbour.
Hell to pay. Chantemps dragged himself out of the harbour, the water swilling from clothes that had no doubt cost a packet. He’d swallowed a mouthful or two, which must have been fun: there was a lot more than water in the harbour, and Chantemps stank of diesel fuel and fish and other things best not mentioned.
Charlie watched, hands resting easily on his hips, and did nothing to help as the little man staggered out. Beside himself with fury and humiliation, Chantemps bared his teeth.
‘You’ll regret this …’
‘Next time I’ll smash your face in,’ Charlie said and turned away, leaving the half-drowned wreck to get on with it.
The next thing Charlie knew was Gaston beside himself, screaming about the police and jail. Charlie tried to explain how it had happened, but Gaston brushed his words aside.
‘Imbecile! Ruffian!’
‘What d’you expect me to do?’ Charlie demanded indignantly. ‘Let him?’
‘A man as important as that —’
‘That doesn’t mean he can touch me up when he feels like it!’
It seemed there were two opinions about that. ‘He is a director of the Banque de Calais. Everything we have — everything! — depends on the bank. If they call in our loans — and, after such an exhibition, who could blame them? — I shall be ruined.’ He shook frenzied fists in Charlie’s face. ‘Ruined, I tell you!’ He took a deep breath, making a determined effort to regain the impassivity that was his prized possession and that Charlie’s contretemps with the banker had shattered like pottery. ‘I only hope I can persuade him not to lay charges …’
That night Gaston Bayard returned to the house with an undertaker face. Sanette, whom terror had gnawed all day, came out of the kitchen as soon as she heard the door. Charlie was away somewhere with Heloise along the coast.
‘A sad day,’ Gaston Bayard proclaimed, sighing.
‘What happened?’
Gaston had never answered her directly in his life. ‘I had hoped, in time, that Charles would take over the operations of the whole fishing fleet. Under my eye, of course. But now …’ He shook his head. ‘A sad day,’ he repeated.
He removed his hat and topcoat, hung them on the hallstand in their customary place and walked into the parlour. Behind him, Sanette hovered in the doorway, dreading what she had nevertheless to hear. As though unaware of her presence, Gaston stood with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him, and stared through the lace curtains at the harbour, where a number of boats were discharging their fish amid a clamour of gulls. Eventually, when he had looked his fill at what he liked to think of as his empire, he turned back into the room, crossed to the chair that, for three years, he had claimed as his own, and sat down.
Meticulously, he steepled his fingers. ‘I spoke to Monsieur Chantemps. I tried to explain to him that it had been a misunderstanding. I promised that Charles would apologise to him, that there would be no repetition of what had happened. I told him I would arrange for Charles’s pay to be docked to pay for the ruined clothes and for the new glasses Monsieur Chantemps will unfortunately need. I appealed to him, as a colleague, as a man whom I am proud to consider a friend. None of it did any good. I have to tell you that he intends to record a complaint against your son with the police. He intends to say that Charles lay in wait for him, that he attacked him, utterly without provocation. That he tried to murder him.’
‘Murder!’ Appalled, Sanette lifted a hand to her mouth, but her husband had not finished.
‘He is also considering taking civil action: for injury to himself and his possessions, for any illness he may suffer as a result of the assault.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It means prison,’ Monsieur Bayard pronounced. ‘It means ruin. It means that I shall no longer be able to offer Charles the future I had hoped.’
Sanette began to protest but Gaston’s voice swept over her objections like a dry wind. ‘We shall have to distance ourselves from him. If we do not, we, too, may be implicated.’
And so, finally, to the moment of judgement, of cutting loose the unworthy. ‘It will be necessary to deny Charles entrance to this house.’
Sanette stared in disbelief. ‘Charles is my son.’
‘Who has betrayed you.’ A flicker of anger in the otherwise impassive face. ‘He has ruined himself by his folly and hot-headedness. You want us to be ruined with him?’ He leapt to his feet and went to the partially open window, where he stared out once again at the bustling harbour. Sight and sound came into the silent room together: a squirt of blue smoke from a donkey engine as fishing nets were hoisted to the yards of boats to dry in the salty sun, the racket of men’s voices against a backdrop of screeching gulls, the smell of fuel oil, fish and the sea.
‘Everything I have worked for,’ Gaston said through gritted teeth. Sanette was unsure whether he spoke to her, himself or the harbour. ‘You think I will allow him to ruin it now? My life’s work?’
His bony fingers clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed, clutching the outrageous situation — and Charles, too, perhaps — by the throat. He turned, white face glaring at her as though she were to blame for everything that had happened. ‘You will pack his things in a suitcase and hand them to him when he returns. You will not permit him to enter the house. You understand me? Not inside the house!’
He walked past her, the picture of cold and vindictive outrage, and walked to the stairs. Halfway to his room he paused, white hand gripping the mahogany banister. He spoke without looking back. ‘I ate with Monsieur Chantemps, so shall require no supper. But it is Tuesday. I shall visit you later.’
And continued up the stairs to his room. The door banged shut on the house, on the problem of Charles, on Sanette and the outrage that rose like a storm within her breast.
To be treated with such contempt …
She would have wept but her rage was too great for tears. Instead, her eyes were bright with fury. That this man should dare treat her in such a way … In a sense, however, it made her decision easier. Whether Charles was right or wrong, she would help him, the two of them uniting against the man who was determined to suck all decency and compassion, all feeling, out of life.
She took a succession of deep breaths, waiting until her heartbeat slowed. No matter, she told herself. Her husband — husband! — might have decided to throw Charles to the wolves, but she would not permit it. As Gaston had instructed, she packed a case with Charles’s clothes and put it on the floor just inside the front door. She knew exactly what had to be done to defend her son against this monstrous man whose every action was an outrage against them both, and she would do it.
4
The next day, while Gaston was out, Heloise returned to port. Frightened that Marcel Chantemps might already have laid a complaint with the police, Sanette was keeping lookout. As soon as she saw the vessel glide between the stone groynes guarding the harbour entrance, she put on her hat and coat and went down to the wharf.
Sunlight played in flickering patterns of silver-gold light upon the
uneasily shifting water inside the harbour, the moored boats with their multicoloured sails, the figures of the men as they brought the catch ashore. She stood and watched, keeping out of the way until, at last, the work was finished. Hatches open, sails furled, nets hoisted into the rigging, Heloise lay still. She watched as Charles came ashore, shouting and laughing with the other men as, striding silently in his sea boots, he came up the cobbled street towards her. Her son. Next birthday he would be eighteen. A man.
He saw her and his expression changed. He had to know that something was up: it was not the custom for the women to come and meet their men off the boats.
‘What is it?’
She fell in beside him. They walked back to the house together while she explained what had happened during his absence.
Predictably, he was outraged. ‘You know what that man tried to do to me?’
‘Shhh!’ Whatever Chantemps had done was irrelevant. Chantemps was a banker. Chantemps had money, power. His word would be believed. All that mattered was what they were going to do about it.
‘How can you let that man treat you as he does?’
Meaning her husband. And that, too, was irrelevant.
‘We shall go away,’ said masterful Charles. ‘The two of us together. Somewhere we don’t have to put up with this nonsense.’
She remembered how she had said much the same thing to Charles’s father, the last leave they had spent together. She had wanted him, too, to run away, for them to go somewhere, anywhere, to escape the catastrophe of the war. It had not happened, for all her wishes. Colin had gone back, Colin had been killed, the rest of her life and Charles’s life had unwound as they had, and she saw now that what had happened had been inevitable from the first, both of them helpless against the fate that had bound them, spider-tight. The truth was they’d had no choice, any more than she had any choice now. She could not go. Charles, however, could. Charles must.
She told him what was in her mind.
‘You can’t stay with him,’ he told her. ‘Not after this.’
She was not so much resigned as serene in the knowledge of what she knew must be. Gaston had indeed come to her the previous night, as he had said he would. He was a man devoid of feeling; she had never doubted that he would come. She had accepted him with subservient flesh but had withdrawn all thought and feelings, so that what happened had nothing at all to do with her. In no time it was over, with Gaston collapsed upon her, his skin sweat-clammy, his breath rattling in his throat. Soon recovered, he withdrew from her body and her bed and returned to his own room. While Sanette, alone once more, lay upon her back amid the shipwrecked linen and watched the dark corners of the ceiling, barely aware that he had been there at all.
Thinking back upon the past night and all the nights since her marriage, she knew that it was something she could live with. But Charles was a different matter and she would preserve him with her life if she had to.
‘I married him,’ she said. ‘I shall stay.’
He glared ferociously, her stalwart champion. ‘How can you? A man like that?’
‘He is my husband.’ Her voice was gentle but implacable, and Charles understood that she was not to be moved. ‘But you must go, or they will put you in prison.’
They; it was no longer clear to her whether Chantemps was to blame for the situation, or Gaston, or both of them, or whether it was simply a case of Gaston sacrificing her son in order to stay in Chantemps’s good books. Nor was that relevant, either. All that mattered was to get Charles away. Money was the problem but that, she thought, could be resolved.
‘Where shall I go? What shall I do?’
He stared about him, confused and uncertain, trying to discover his new place in the world. She wanted to tell him that these things were not important, any more than who was to blame for the situation. Let him get away, she thought. That was all that mattered. Let him not be gobbled up, as she and Colin had been, by fate.
‘You can go anywhere. Anywhere in the world! There is nothing to hold you. As to what you can do … There is always something for someone who is truly a man. Above all, live your life. Do not sacrifice living for existence.’
As I have done. But that she would not say.
Charlie clutched her hands in his. ‘But, if I go …’
I may never see you again.
Only a few days before, the thought would not have troubled him. At times, when she had seemed allied with her husband against him, he had come close to hating her. No longer. Now he saw her for what she was: a woman whose life, like so many others, had been maimed by the war. She had done the best she could in a world with little time for the weak or helpless. In pursuit of survival, both his and her own, she had even been willing to enter into a marriage that might have destroyed her spirit even as it had preserved her flesh. Yet it had not. Despite everything, her spirit had survived. That was what she was doing now: celebrating the triumph of the spirit by making a stand against the betrayal of her son by a husband whose actions were governed by expediency. She despised him for it but would not abandon him. Her determination ensured her ultimate triumph over him and the arid, self-seeking world he represented.
All this Charlie discerned, dimly. Perhaps it had been necessary for him to reach this moment of parting before he could comprehend what now seemed so clear. Even his mother’s role in the shaming of Babette now appeared in a different light: a despairing effort to hold her son and so retain at least something of a life that would otherwise have offered her nothing. She had failed and now, by sending him away for his own good, she was making what she had tried so hard to prevent: the ultimate sacrifice of herself to her son. Once he had gone, she would have no one in her life but Gaston Bayard, a terrible prospect. Yet he would go because, ultimately, her will in this was greater than his own.
‘I can’t just walk off down the road,’ he said. ‘I need to go somewhere, but I don’t know anywhere but here.’
‘Speak to Wally. Hasn’t he always been telling you what you should do with your life?’
It was true that Wally had often spoken to him of Australia and how, far more than Europe, it was the country of the future.
‘Just the place for a young man,’ Wally had said. ‘Remember what I told you about that place your dad discovered? It was important to him. Maybe he’d have wanted it to be important to you, too.’
‘The Cloud Forest? Didn’t do him much good in the end, did it?’
‘It kept him going a long time. If he’d lived, he’d have gone back, taken you and your mum with him. Maybe you should give it a go, do what he wanted for you.’
Charlie thought now of the future his father had wanted for them all, very different from what they had in fact had. If I go there, he thought, perhaps it will be like saying to Dad that he got what he wanted from life after all.
No way was he going to jail for what had been Chantemps’s own fault. Yet he knew there was a good chance he would, unless he got away while he could.
If he had to go anywhere, Australia was as good a place as any, when he knew nowhere in the world outside this town. At least he spoke the language, after a fashion.
There came into his mind, unbidden, images of the mysterious forest, far away on top of a tropical mountain, where even the air was green, and of the young boy, climbing up the steep slopes into the mist. There would be silence, enhanced by the fluting of birds, the rustle of waterfalls; there would be the watchful eyes of animals.
I shall go there, he thought. I shall go to that place my father found. I shall do what he wanted me to do.
‘Reckon I’ll head for Australia,’ he told his mother. ‘Maybe I can get a berth on a liner?’
He spoke dubiously; in 1934 there were few jobs to be had, on liners or anywhere else.
‘You will never get such a job,’ Sanette told him. ‘You have to go as a passenger.’
‘What am I supposed to use for money?’
‘I may have the answer to that.’
&nbs
p; She led the way to her husband’s room. They stood side by side and inspected the locked chest.
‘How d’you know it’s got money in it?’
‘I don’t. But he has to keep it somewhere, and there’s nowhere else.’
‘You know where he keeps the key?’
Sanette didn’t know that, either. They searched every drawer, the cupboard where Monsieur Bayard hung his clothes, the pockets of his suits; they checked under the bed and in a cheap vase on a side table. They found nothing.
‘Now what?’
Sanette’s mouth was dagger thin. ‘We break it open.’
‘Do that and he’ll have the flics after me, for sure.’
‘You won’t be here.’
‘What about you? Won’t you get into trouble?’
‘I shall know nothing about it. I shall tell him I was out.’
‘Will he believe you?’
She shrugged, tossing the problem out of the window. ‘What can he do?’
When you are already treated like dirt, there are limits to what can be done to you, short of violence, and Monsieur Bayard had never been a physical man. She fetched a crowbar her husband had brought up once from the harbour and had never returned. She pushed it into Charlie’s reluctant hands, but still he hesitated. Smashing into his stepfather’s locked chest and stealing his money would be a step far more desperate than chucking Marcel Chantemps into the harbour.
Sanette had no patience with second thoughts. Seeing him hesitate, she snatched the crowbar out of his hands and jammed the blade under the lock’s brass tongue.
‘If you will not do it yourself, I shall do it for you.’
Her energy flared in defiance of the man who for too long had used her as he did. She levered the crowbar back, there was a splintering sound and the screws securing the lock to the side of the chest were ripped out of the wood.
