‘But he didn’t?’ I said at last.
‘No. He didn’t. He ran away from me across the meadow, away from the mill-house, towards that big elm at the far end, and I ran as fast as I could after him and when I was within three or four metres of him I shot him in the back. And that was all.’
There was indeed no more to be said. And when Jacquou spoke again it was of something else. But later that same day or the next, when I had digested the story, I found an opportunity to ask him if he had ever felt ‘guilty’ about the business, later, after the Liberation. But I was uncomfortably aware, as I spoke, that there is no overall word for ‘guilty’ in French that does not carry either legal or religious overtones, which was not what I had intended. Jacquou was, rightly, rather irritated with me.
‘Guilty – no, why? I told you, the decision was, on balance, justified. Oh, I regretted that it had to be so, of course – but that is not the same. If you are after guilt, my boy, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, I can offer you much more fruitful subjects for guilt than that. How, for instance’ (belligerently) ‘do you think the maquisards got their food?’
‘Well – from friendly farmers …’
‘Yes, but from less friendly ones, too. From peasants who were just bloody terrified that, if they didn’t give the boys what they wanted, they’d be denounced to the other side as black marketeers. Between two fires, you see.’
‘Yes, I see … But presumably some of them were black marketeers?’
‘Some, yes. Others not, just understandably anxious to hang onto their own provisions. But the notion that they were illicit profiteers was a very convenient pretext for certain elements in the Resistance to mount raids. I told you, Resistance movements attract crooks as well as heroes. Didn’t I?’
‘Yes. Yes, you did.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t involved personally in any of this. But I knew it went on, at times. How could it not? We had to eat … People don’t want to talk about this now – yet – probably won’t for another generation, but it’s all there and more, your material for guilt. Do you want to hear some more?’
‘If you want to tell me.’
‘Then look at this.’ He crossed to the chest painted with Maryk’s water birds and flipped up the lid. On top of a mass of papers and files lay a bulging folder which he took out and slapped on the table.
‘Look. All this – and another stack of papers besides that are sitting in a lawyer’s office in Poitiers – relates to an inquiry that has been trailing on for months now, ever since last year. The remains of a British SOE man were found in the forest to the south of here. He was identified by his watch. As you probably know, there was a showdown there in June ’44 between our lot and the Germans, who were getting very rattled about events in Normandy.’
‘The battle at l’Etang des Loups?’ I felt glad to be able to supply the name.
‘Just so. A number of people were killed on both sides – including my young cousin Philippe: there’s a street named after him now in Boussac … Well: it had been assumed, as the SOE man had been parachuted into our area just before and had been with our boys, that he was one of the ones who fell. I believed that myself. The hidden camp had been burnt down, some of the dead were never properly identified. And there the matter rested for seven years. But when his body was discovered, it was not in the right place. And there was another thing – he’d died by strangulation. The cord was still round his neck.’
I felt that touch of sick disgust that the phrase ‘cord round his neck’ has always produced in me. Dead is dead, but some forms of killing seemed designed to degrade the victim as well as destroying him and thereby degrade the executioner.
‘Could a German patrol have caught up with him as he was trying to escape after the battle, and hanged him?’ I proffered diffidently, after some thought.
‘Yes, quite, that makes you feel better doesn’t it? And that, indeed, is what I have been suggesting to the enquiry. But I know it’s nonsense, and so, I should think, do they. Because if the Germans had caught anyone, especially a Britisher, even at that late stage in the war, they wouldn’t have made away with him quietly in the forest, they’d have strung him up in front of the Town Hall in Limoges for everyone to see. No, I’m afraid it points to one of our own men – one of my men – whose job it was to see this British contact safely out of our own zone.’
‘Have you asked anyone about it?’
‘I have. He was quite hard to find; he’d moved to the Nantes area. And then at first he lied to me that as far as he knew the Britisher had got away … By the way, Simone knows nothing of all this, and that’s the way it’s to be for the moment. If I think she needs to know in the end I’ll tell her myself. But you’re not to. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ Jacques Mongeux, in this mood, inspired dread.
‘Where is she anyway? Still out cosseting that goat?’
‘Yes. I think she may be back soon. So please tell me the rest quickly.’
‘Right. Well this man, this ex-maquisard – let’s call him Luc – spun me a tale at first, but then broke down when I threatened to put the inquiry-judge onto him. He told me that he had strangled the Britisher, but only because he had a bullet wound anyway and couldn’t walk properly. They were a party of six, escaping, and in those circumstances one incapacitated man can bring death to all the rest. So, Luc says, he let the others go on ahead, pretended to lag behind himself to help the injured man, and strangled him quickly before he knew what was happening. For the general good. Better than leaving him to die in the forest on his own of starvation and septicaemia.’
‘An extension of rough justice, I suppose,’ I said at last. I found I wanted to comfort him.
‘Quite – if you believe Luc’s story.’
‘And don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure. Oh, it’s plausible in a way … But, though the skeleton was still wearing the rags of clothes, with the usual money-belt underneath the shirt, no money was found. You see? And I never entirely trusted Luc anyway. He was only on the fringe of the network – a paid agent, a local poacher who knew the forest well.’
I looked at the dossier lying on the table. This sort of material would have enhanced and extended my dissertation immeasurably. But I was young, still attached to my dreams, I suppose. I found I did not much want to study it.
‘Shall you tell the inquiry about him?’ I said at last.
‘That’s what I can’t make up my mind about.’
I was surprised. I had innocently thought that Jacquou had made up his mind about everything.
‘But if they believe his story … Mightn’t it be better that way? For him to come out into the open and clear himself? Well – sort of clear himself.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I have been inclined to think too. I’ve even told him so. Better, in any case, he should appear now than that he should just wait in fear for the hounds to catch up with him. And I think they will, one way or another … Ah, but you still don’t see the crux of the problem. Rough justice is all very well in war, my boy, it’s all we can aspire to – but it doesn’t go down that well in a Court of Law in peacetime. And all sorts of rough justice was perpetrated, particularly in the days after the Liberation, some of it very rough indeed, some of it vindictive and questionable … For half a dozen years after the war ended everyone went quiet about this. France just licked her wounds in peace. But now the wounds are appearing again – opening – the questions are being asked. And, because the ‘‘justice’’ of that time was so summary, so hasty and brutal, now, in contrast, a fit of moral scruple is upon us. We have to be seen to be applying the standards of today, of calm reflection, not those of 1944. Everyone is keen to claim he was a ‘‘hero of the Resistance’’ but God knows how much will eventually be dragged out and questioned – well, look at this, for instance.’
He rooted around in the chest, glanced through several folders, and finally took something from one of them and held it out to me on the palm of his hand. I foun
d myself looking at a photograph of what I realized after a moment was an execution. In the foreground, a group of men and one young woman, close together, watching. A few paces away another man, in the act of raising a revolver. It was pointed at a boy who stood tied to a fence, his hands behind his back. His thin profile was raised proudly to the sky, mouth clamped shut. He did not look at his killer. His dark eyes seemed fixed on another horizon.
I would have taken this for a German archive picture of a young Resister dying for his country, a village Jean Moulin – except that his uniform jacket, that of the Nazi-organized local Militia, told another story. It was his executioner and others in the group who wore the berets and armbands of the FFI, the Resistance.
‘A collaborator?’ I said to Jacquou.
‘Just so. One of the many who were dealt with like this at the Liberation.’
I said: ‘He looks very young.’
‘A boy of eighteen.’
‘You knew him?’ But of course. He had taken the photo.
‘I knew the family. His mother still runs a tobacconist in Argenton. Poor kid. Poor bloody little fool.’
We heard Simone’s rapid footsteps approaching the open yard door. Jacquou withdrew his hand and very quickly stuffed the photo back into its file, returning all the papers to the chest. But the boy’s face remained with me. In the night, beside my sleeping love, I saw it again in my mind: young, rapt, fearless, ennobled to himself by dying for the cause in which he had chosen to believe.
Come to that, although I think Jacquou destroyed that photo later, along with much else – I did not find it in the chest after his death – that boy’s face has remained with me all my life.
If you feel passionately that you are doing right, then your conscience is at rest, and ‘guilt’ can be dismissed contemptuously, as Jacquou dismissed it. Conversely, to act only within the Law can be to take the guilt-ridden coward’s way out. This, I discovered for myself, long after.
I kept my word to Jacquou, I did not tell Simone either about the man Luc or about the boy-collaborator – and when, years later, I spoke to her of the double agent her father had shot in the river meadow, she already knew about that, had known all along. But in these days of our life together I could not stop myself talking to her, in a general way, about her father’s war and whether she thought it had changed him.
‘He thinks so,’ she said.
‘Do you?’
‘Um – it’s hard for me to say. I was ten when France fell, and getting on for twelve, I suppose, when Papa and Maman got so involved in the Resistance. I mean, that’s just the sort of age at which your relationship with your father does change, doesn’t it? He stops bouncing you around on his knee and so on. And presently I was sent south to the cousins to be kept safe out of the way. And when I came back again we only had about a year all together again before Maman died.’
‘He thinks he’s ‘‘cold’’ and doesn’t care enough about things any more.’
‘Yes, I know he does.’ She sounded faintly distressed.
‘But I think he’s one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. And he seemed to care about – and for – a lot of people.’
‘Yes. But perhaps more ‘‘people’’, you know, than anyone special.’ Simone’s voice had gone thin and toneless. After a long pause, she added: ‘I think, perhaps, it’s not just the war and having to kill people, or whatever it is he’s told you. I think it’s losing Maman really, just as much. But he never talks to me about that. He never lets on he really minds at all. And when people say ‘‘How sad – she was so young to die’’ he says things like ‘‘Well, she lived a lot longer and had a lot more in her life than many people’’ – he does, Tom, I’ve heard him. Of course he’s quite right, I see that, but it sounds so odd somehow. And he doesn’t even have her photo around. Yet I’d always thought, you know, seeing them together when I was a little girl, that he was very – fond of her …’
She was crying now, and so I comforted her and made much of her, and after that I did not refer to it again. I did, however, get her to explain to me who Jacquou le Croquant had been; and the following winter, back in Paris, I read for myself that inspiring, consoling, bourgeois folk-novel of an abandoned boy, orphaned by the acts of the Wicked Lord, who makes the forest his home, passes through lengthy trials and dangers, and at last avenges his family’s misfortunes. Not only that, but he becomes a rural pillar of reformed, post-Revolutionary society and the father of numerous children.
I enjoyed the documentary, rustic detail of the book; I could see how it had inspired generations of left-wing Frenchmen, culminating (as Jacques Mongeux had said) in those who had made the dream reality again by taking to the forests themselves during the Occupation. But I suppose that the novel carried no particular emotional charge for me, and when I came to re-read it years later I found I had forgotten great tracts of it. That was in the early 1970s, when Marigold and I were having holidays in the mill-house on our own, and the area had developed not only camp sites and boats on the Creuse but summer entertainments of the son et lumiére kind. ‘Jacquou le Croquant’ was being staged in a convenient nearby ruin; the head of the district high school, with a fine rolling delivery of his own, led and directed a large cast of people from the villages around, supplemented by horses, sheep, geese, superannuated carts and the firemen’s band. I re-read the book in order to recount the story beforehand to Marigold and to another teenager staying with us, the nephew of friends. To my surprise, the part of the novel which now impressed and moved me the most was one I had overlooked in memory. It was the chapter where Jacquou’s childhood love, believing him to be dead in the dungeons of the Wicked Lord, drowns herself in a deep limestone pit. He himself is rescued in the nick of time through the offices of the Good Squire, only to find that she is gone:
‘Maintenant, tout était fini; elle était au fond de l’abîme, couchéee dans quelque recoin de ces grottes aux eaux souterraines, et ce corps charmant, perdant toute forme humaine, tombait en décomposition …’
I passed some of that interminable summer evening on the wooden seats, in the scent of crushed grass and beer, blinded by tears. Luckily I don’t think the children noticed. They were patient with the hours and hours of homespun French declamation and enthusiastic about the real live creatures galloped or herded about the scene. Marigold was also much taken with the Wicked Lord, a portly local garage proprietor in a frogged coat, though the boy Jeffrey, suddenly astute beyond his lumpy years, pointed out that the only real evidence for this character’s wickedness was that he never said anything at all, just ‘Ho, ho, ho’.
So, year after year, Marigold and I continued to come to the mill-house that was now ours alone. Since she was still at school and I was still a headmaster our holidays coincided. Usually, in the spring, we came on our own, and Marigold would renew shy acquaintance with the French families she had known since babyhood. Her French was very good, and naturally, now Simone and Jacquou were gone, I nagged at her to maintain this advantage. In the summer, friends from England visited us, filling the house for the first time with English voices and jokes. I half wanted them there, for Marigold’s sake, feeling that this was the right sort of holiday for her, and half did not: myself, I was most completely happy when we had the house to ourselves.
Of course we were ‘alone’ together in London, but so much else intervened: her school timetables, mine, and a jigsaw of other preoccupations. Marigold had grown up seeing her mother run work with one hand and the house with the other: now, from her early teens, she set herself to do the same. I, in love and gratitude for her efforts, made sure that she did not go short of school trips, theatres, concerts, music lessons and everything else appropriate for her age: between our two determined selves we led a life that may even have been – I came to think wretchedly in the great, echoing void of Afterwards – too full, too tiring for her. Yet how could I regret a day of it, when it turned out that was all, or almost all, there was ever to be?
Sh
e never acted the difficult teenager. She did not need to.
If those brief, packed years were to be documented now – as, say, Jacquou’s war years were documented – it would be in the notes we scribbled to each other. At intervals they still crowd my mind, those notes, sometimes overwhelming it. ‘Daddy, the rest of the stew is for you, I’ve had some. Please DON’T feed Woozcat again, she may pretend I haven’t fed her but she is lying’ … ‘Lewis G. ’phoned. V. chatty.’ … ‘A Dr Baines ’ phoned.’ … ‘Humphrey ’phoned and Jeffrey may be coming to stay in France. Oh good.’ Or, from me: ‘I think I forgot to tell you this morning that your favourite, Humphrey, will be in London on Friday and is coming to supper. If you decide, Bosscat, what delicious meal you’d like to cook for us, I’ll buy all the stuff tomorrow. And are we out of orange juice? I can’t find any.’ Or – she was, after all, not really grown up yet, for all her competent airs – ‘Marigold! How many more times must I tell you DO NOT open the yard door and then just go out leaving it unlocked? It will be your things that get stolen, stupid, as well as mine.’
Innumerable messages, nearly all written on the kitchen memo board, and wiped as soon as they had been conveyed. They are nothing and nowhere now, like the joint life they embodied. But even had they been written on paper I doubt if I would have kept any. No one has ever accused me of sentimentality.
At the mill-house, those years, we both drew breath and rested. We did not need notes. Time ran differently there.
I think I can recall now, with yearning, transfiguring intensity, a few long walks we took, a memorable ‘treat’ meal or two in the best local restaurant (Marigold very much the lady being taken out, I in a tie doing my best to rise to the occasion with an odd self-consciousness I would feel with no one else), and a handful of conversations between us on love or child-bearing or death: such subjects as adolescents introduce readily, almost nonchalantly, in that precious, brief time before adult perceptions and reticences set in.
Give Them All My Love Page 7
