by John Harris
5
To everyone’s surprise Urquhart was up within four days, his foot inside a rubber boot, and moving doggedly about the bedroom with the aid of a stick. ‘You must be potty,’ Neville said. ‘Getting up so soon.’
Urquhart was quite unmoved. ‘Never could lie in bed,’ he said.
‘You’ll probably do it permanent damage.’
Urquhart shrugged. ‘Either it or me. If I stay in bed I’ll do me permanent damage. I like to be on my feet and able to move - especially with the bloody Germans all round me.’
Neville gestured. ‘We’re all right here.’
Urquhart turned. ‘How do you know?’
‘Well, for God’s sake-!’
‘Because Marie-Claude’s pretty, and Father Pol’s a bit like Friar Tuck, and Reinach’s a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel? You want to grow up, son. Trust nobody. It’s safer.’
‘For Christ’s sake, they’ve already risked their lives more than once for us-’
‘You read too many romantic novels,’ Urquhart said cynically. The reason France went for a burton in 1940 was because everybody thought everybody else was a jolly decent type. Most of ‘em were, but there were a few who weren’t. I prefer to rely on me.’
The following day Neville found him hobbling round the farm.
‘How the hell did you get down the stairs?’ he asked.
‘Elbows and backside.’ Urquhart’s reply was laconic. ‘Not difficult’ He stared round him, sniffing the air. ‘Not a bad place,’ he said approvingly. ‘Must have been a good farm once.’
It was an old farm, built like a fortress, with tiled roofs marked with lichen, the kitchen table as solid-looking as if it had been made two centuries before. There was a hot water tank with a fat pipe going through the wall, a battery of ladles and cooking utensils under a picture cut from a calendar showing kittens and roses, and opposite, a yellowing photograph of three men in uniform bearing the words ‘Morts pour la Patrie’ and the dates ‘1914-1918.’ Outside was a stack of hutches containing stolidly-munching Belgian rabbits, and beyond, down a short winding road terminated by gateless stone pillars, the blunt spire of the church.
On Urquhart’s insistence, within days Marie-Claude produced papers for them.
‘Work permits,’ she said, handing them over. ‘Also identity cards and certificates from your employer, without which you can be taken to Germany for the Service de Travail Obligatoire. You’ve become Robert-Charles Neville and Jacques Urquaert Robert-Charles Neville is my cousin from Nice - because you’ve spent much time there, of course, and acquired a southern accent and could answer questions about it. Since my husband is dead you have come to help with the farm. Because you have a northern accent, Jacques Urquaert’s a Belgian worker. We’re allowed to have one because there’s no one else, but unfortunately, at the moment, he has an injured foot because he was kicked by one of the cows.’
She paused. ‘Because he is one of the family, the cousin must live in one of the bedrooms. Because you are a Belgian hired labourer, you must sleep in the attic. I have made it nice. You will understand, I hope.’
Urquhart grinned. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Naturally. Mustn’t let the hired help get too big for his boots.’
She gave him a quick, hurt look and turned away. Neville’s gaze followed her, frankly admiring. She seemed to sense it and stopped in the doorway.
‘There have been others,’ she said, ‘and we have sent them on their way. At the moment, though, it’s difficult because it costs three thousand francs for fares and bribes and, with the Germans expecting the invasion, they suspect everybody. I shall be sorry to see you go because it’s pleasant to have men about the place again.’ She indicated the old clothes she wore. ‘Normally, I would not work on the farm, you see. My husband had studied at agricultural college and we expected to be prosperous. But instead he is dead and I am alone. You will not understand the problems’
‘I might,’ Urquhart said quietly. ‘My father was a farmer too.’
She gave him a quick, calculating look. ‘You know about farming?’
‘English farming.’
‘Cattle are cattle and grain is grain. Broken fences are the same anywhere and cow dung doesn’t change its smell. If you understand farming in England, you will understand it here.’
Rather to Neville’s surprise, the Resistance he’d heard so much about in England seemed to be almost non-existent and certainly didn’t keep up the running battle British propaganda suggested. Most of those engaged in it were mere boys who’d fled to the woods to avoid being sent to Germany to work. They lived for months in camps hidden in the trees, depressed, lacking arms, food, equipment, sanitation, even clothing, their morale at rock bottom, their weapons rusty fire-arms from farmhouse walls, dynamite stolen from quarries, and a few old Mills bombs too dangerous to handle, sometimes even none at all.
‘South of Dijon it’s different,’ Marie-Claude explained. The Germans erected frontier barriers down there in 1940 and to cross from Occupied France into Vichy France you had to show a passport. But until France was totally occupied, you could also see British films and read Swiss newspapers down there and it was always easier to organize a resistance against the future. In the north we decided it would be wiser for the time being to do as we were told and, before we knew where we were, many found themselves trapped into collaboration.’
She frowned. ‘It was a little like roulette. You were allowed to win at first to encourage you to lose your fortune later. We discovered that we didn’t know what God’s grace was until evil took its place.’
Neville frowned. He’d had no idea what the French had been enduring. The only thing they’d had to hold on to, it seemed, was the knowledge that de Gaulle was in London planning their liberation.
‘But what about your ex-soldiers?’ he asked. The survivors of 1940?’
Marie-Claude’s shoulders moved. There’s one here -Commandant Verdy de Clary. Like all the others, his goals were “correct”. He always lived and died by “honneur et patrie”, “le devoir” and “la tradition”, and to fall on the field of honour was the most important thing of all. Unfortunately he can’t understand that the field of honour can be the woods and the hills, because those who’ve fled there aren’t always very presentable and are often Communists.’
Within three weeks Urquhart was limping easily about the fields behind the house and, because he was bored, he started to do small jobs, mending fences and walls, and insisted on Neville helping, Neville was none too keen. Unlike Urquhart, he’d never done the work before and he was clumsy and soon bored.
‘You’re supposed to be helping run the place,’ Urquhart growled when he protested. ‘So you’d better. In case the Germans ask.’
For another two weeks, watched by the delighted Marie-Claude, they worked about the boundaries of her land and in the stackyard until Urquhart’s limp had almost gone. So far, they’d kept well away from the village, moving about only behind the farm and in the fields where there were no Germans, and the most they saw of them were occasional figures in grey and lorries moving past the end of the muddy road to the street. Whatever had to be done in the village was done by Marie-Claude, dressed lumpishly in the heavy men’s clothes and hat to hide her figure so that the Germans wouldn’t molest her as she tramped alongside the old horse which pulled the rubber-tyred platform cart they used.
‘It’s as bad as being in jail,’ Neville complained.
‘And listening to you moaning all the time’s like sharing a cell,’ Urquhart said. ‘We’re not at Eton now.’
‘I didn’t go to Eton.’
‘Well, wherever you did go. We’re not at university either, punting on the Cam or taking tea with the dean. We’re not even in the bloody officers’ mess. We’re here. In France. Pretending to be Frenchmen.’
‘You don’t like me much, Urquhart, do you?’ Neville said.
Urquhart stared at him, a half-smile on his face, and Neville had the impression that he didn’t
give a damn either way. ‘I’ve met worse,’ he said. ‘Chiefly, I wish to Christ you’d stop thinking about what you were, and remember what you are now.’ He slammed a mawl into Neville’s hands and picked up a heavy axe.
‘We’re farm labourers,’ he said. He grinned. ‘At least, I am. I’m Jacques Urquhart who sleeps in the attic. You. of course, are the cousin from Nice who has the spare bedroom, so perhaps you have the right to grumble.’ The smile disappeared and an icy look came into his eyes. ‘But not to me. Come on. We have stakes to cut and a fence to repair.’
They moved up through the woods behind the farm, Urquhart’s face expressionless again, as though he’d already forgotten the quarrel. He seemed quite content to work, as if he felt it was a way of paying for his keep, a sort of pride in not being dependent.
Neville was frowning. He knew he was being churlish but Urquhart’s very stoicism made everything seem worse. Even the trousers he wore, a gift from Reinach, were too loose so that he felt oafish in them, and he much preferred to remain where he could talk to Marie-Claude, making her laugh with mock gallantry and witticisms in French.
He was trudging behind Urquhart, indulging a little in self-pity and deep in thought, when he realized there was a German standing by the edge of the trees. He had a machine pistol slung from his shoulder and was studying them suspiciously, so that Neville found himself tensing and growing pale under the scrutiny. Urquhart seemed unmoved.
The German pushed his gun round the back of his shoulder and gestured. ‘Who’re you?’ he asked in French.
Neville couldn’t have answered to save his life. His throat seemed to have closed up and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth in fear. Urquhart looked puzzled.
‘Hein?’
‘Vos papiers!’ It sounded like ‘vos babiers.’
‘Ach!’ Urquhart’s expression changed to one of understanding and he fished into the old blue smock Marie-Claude had found for him. He turned to Neville. ‘Papiers’ he said. ‘He wants our papers.’
The German seemed as unsure as Neville felt, and it dawned on him that he’d been looking for game to augment his rations, and was putting on a show of authority to explain his presence to them. As he bent his head, making a performance of studying the documents, Neville saw that Urquhart’s hand had tightened on the haft of the axe and knew that if necessary he was prepared to chop the German down with it.
Glancing round, he saw they were entirely alone, away from the village with no other Germans in sight, and hidden from view by a line of bushes. His throat worked because he knew that if the German started being difficult he hadn’t the nerve himself to do anything about it. But then the German’s head lifted and he handed back the papers with a smile.
‘Belgian?’ he asked. His voice was not unpleasant and Neville realized that he was approaching middle age and even had a friendly face.
‘Yes,’ Urquhart said.
‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Doesn’t worry me. It’s warmer here than Belgium, and there’s more food and no wife, and the work’s easy.’
The German’s smile widened to a grin and he looked at Neville. ‘You’re a long way from home, too,’ he said. ‘And for you it’s colder, I think. Colder than Nice, anyway.’
Neville found he couldn’t answer and Urquhart’s elbow jabbed at him so that he woke up.
‘Oh, yes,’ he managed. ‘But I don’t like the work. I’m not used to it.’
‘Who is?’
The German waved them on and they stuffed away the papers, shouldered the tools and began to move up the hill again. For a while they didn’t speak then Neville looked at Urquhart.
‘Would you have hit him with the axe?’ he asked. ‘If he’d found something wrong with the papers?’
Urquhart didn’t turn his head. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Think we got away with it?’
‘Yes.’
The knowledge that they had got away with it, that the papers they’d been provided with could pass muster and carry them through all but the closest check, cheered them and gave them confidence. Within another week, they were moving freely about the village and even knew which houses would offer a slice of cherry tart or a glass of wine, that Father Pol was obsessed by the absence of fats, and which woman would take advantage of her husband’s absence to make eyes at them; who slept with whom, and who was to be trusted, and all the gossip of the village and the villages around. Neither of them ever mentioned the men who’d been in Crombie’s crew with them. It was almost as if they’d decided by mutual agreement that they’d never lived. Nobody questioned them. No one was curious and no one blamed them for the bombs that had been dropped on France,
Occasionally, one of the German orderlies from the chateau, a Westphalian called Hössenfelder, came to the farm. He was a grave little man in his early forties and, after at first simply watching, he shyly picked up a fork and started to help Urquhart with the straw and dung from the cow byre. ‘At home I am a farmer also,’ he said in his bad French.
Marie-Claude was delighted by the sudden influx of help. ‘Next year,’ she announced, ‘we shall set down the south meadow to corn.’
‘Next year,’ Urquhart reminded her, ‘we shan’t be here.’
She gave him a shrewd smile. ‘Perhaps the war will go on for a long time,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ll have to stay longer than you think.’
She was earthy and full of good humour - the sort who could never be defeated - and it was quite obvious that the young men of the village had noticed her, too, because they were always calling on the flimsiest of excuses. Usually, she sent them packing. ‘It’s not an unwritten law that the backsides of women are free pasturage for the wandering hands of young men,’ she said. ‘They have no education and not much sense. They’d keep me pregnant, and all I’d do would be keep them in food and drink and warm in bed. They’re after the farm.’
Only Lionel Dring, the son of Theodore Dring, the gardechasse, seemed to be welcome. He was a tall, blond young man who’d studied forestry. Because he was not allowed to practise it - except for the Germans who were denuding the countryside of its trees - he worked for a farmer called Gaudin who lived with his wife, two sons and a daughter on the west side of the village. He was a shy, tongue-tied young giant and his excuses to see Marie-Claude were patently false.
‘He’s a good man, of course,’ she told Urquhart soberly. ‘He’d make a good husband. But he knows nothing about farming.’
‘What are you looking for?’ Urquhart asked. ‘A husband to love or just a man to work the farm?’
She stared straight at him. ‘Both,’ she said.
That afternoon, as Urquhart hacked away with a billhook at an overgrown hedge on the other side of the hill where the stream ran down to the river, the sun came out - the first real warmth they’d had since their arrival. In the valley was a small dam Marie-Claude’s father had built years before. It was hot down there and loud with insects and, since he was sweating, he stripped off his clothes and waded in. As he splashed about he became aware of Marie-Claude sitting on the bank watching him.
‘I’m coming out now,’ he said.
‘Then come. I know what you look like. I’ve been married. I’ve seen a man before.’
Urquhart shrugged and climbed out to dry himself with his shirt. As he dressed, she handed him a slab of bread and a bottle of coarse wine she’d brought, and waited while he ate, her feet in the heavy boots she wore about the farm, her strong body relaxed but taut and pliant.
The first busy bees of the spring had begun to appear, droning among the bottoms where the first flowers were showing. A thrush in the top of an elm lifted its voice in song and the young grass, new and bright green, thrust upwards among the tufty brown stalks of the previous year’s growth. But Marie-Claude seemed indifferent to the waking world around her and was studying Urquhart carefully - almost as if he were a prize steer, he thought - her eyes on his big frame, thick forearms and strong neck, and the p
lanes and angles of his face.
She caught his gaze on her and turned her eyes away quickly. Then she looked back at him and smiled, boldly, defiantly, as though she had nothing to hide. ‘You’re a big man, Urk’t,’ she said. ‘Strong. Well-made. Neville is slow and he isn’t good with his hands like you.’
‘I grew up on a farm,’ Urquhart pointed out,
‘Then why did you become a soldier?’
Urquhart shrugged. ‘It was a small farm and I had four brothers. There wasn’t room for all of us.’
‘And after the war ? You’ll go back?’
He shook his head. ‘When it’s over there’ll be trouble between them. I’m keeping out of it.’
She looked worried. ‘If you’re once a farmer, you’re always a farmer. You can’t push it aside like that.’
‘I can leave it for the time being.’
‘You’re different from Neville.’
‘Yes,’ Urquhart grinned. ‘He’s young, virginal and idealistic, and he’s read too many books. None of those things applies to me.’
She frowned. ‘I didn’t mean that I meant that he’s not of the soil.’
‘He never had to be. His family have money.’
‘A great deal?’
‘More than was good for Neville, I suspect,’
‘You are envious of him? ‘
‘God, no! I’m envious of no man. I’m one of God’s chosen few.’
She stared. ’Why?’
‘Because I’m alive when I ought to have been dead a dozen times. Because I’m not worried about whether things are right and whether things are wrong. And because, unlike Neville, I can live anywhere I’m dropped. I don’t need the trimmings he needs.’
‘You cannot have many friends.’
Urquhart smiled. ‘I don’t need friends. I get along all right with me. Neville wants the things he’s been used to. Friends. Background. Money. People with money.’
She sniffed. ‘We have money, too.’ She looked at him under a lock of dark hair that had fallen over her eyes. ‘Before the war, this was a good farm. Even now there is no shortage of money. Just a shortage of men.’
