by Peter Watson
“What’s he doing there?” The name rang a bell.
“The convent is also a hospital. Many people in the Resistance were injured—the convent is where they recovered. It was also the place where the Resistance kept records of collaborators. It is from there, now, that old scores are being settled, what we in France call—”
“Épuration—yes, I know.”
He looked at me and nodded. “Now that the war is nearly over, France is a strange country, n’est-ce pas?”
“What do you mean?”
“Philippe is a communist—we are all communists in Louzac, we are anti-Gaullists. Yet we have our home in a convent, in the church. There will be elections soon and we will fight the Gaullists for the future of the country. Philippe has a wide following here. He will be elected.”
We were leaving Louzac now, the country hilly and green, the cows chewing their way through lush fields, with no sign anywhere of the war: old buildings, lines of poplars, horse-drawn carts, men and women on bicycles, people carrying bread and fishing rods.
We headed north for about twenty-five minutes. The traffic was light, mainly rural—a few tractors with enormous rear wheels, cascading mud everywhere—and we had to wait at most bridges, which were too narrow for two-way traffic. We took our turn.
“Tell me about Philippe? He was injured—yes?”
He nodded. “He was shot in the leg and chest as he ran from a bridge he had blown up.”
“But he has recovered now?”
“Well, he walks with a limp, but I don’t think he’s in pain any more. I haven’t seen him for a few weeks.”
“Is he married?”
“No. There was a rumour that he had an English girlfriend once, but it didn’t work out. But I’m not the one to ask—I was injured myself and left the Resistance two years ago. I just acted as a messenger—a taxi driver can do that well, because he goes everywhere as part of his job.”
We turned off the main road on to a lane. The countryside here was thick with trees and the lane was so narrow that twice we had to back up when we met a truck and a tractor coming the other way.
Then I saw some roofs among the trees, slate roofs, and stone walls.
“This is St. Hilaire,” said the driver.
He drove off the lane into a gravel forecourt, and as he did so we nearly collided with a large black dog, which ran off at the last moment. The driver stopped the taxi in front of a stone-built porch with two huge wooden doors, into one of which was set a much smaller, human-scale door with a shiny brass knob. This was the door that was used most often.
“Shall I wait?” the driver said.
“I don’t know. Let me pay you for so far. How much?”
He told me and I gave him the money.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” I said. “I could be half an hour; I could be here for the rest of the day.”
He made a gesture with his head. “Go in and see what there is to see. Then, when you know what the story is, come out and tell me. It’s a slow day so I can wait here for a bit. Just don’t forget me.”
“Okay, good,” I replied. “Let’s do that. And don’t worry, I won’t forget.”
I got out of the taxi and approached the convent door.
As I did so, it opened and a nun appeared. She was dressed in a pale grey habit, with white edging all the way down to the ground, and a white cloth enveloping her head. She looked surprised to see me, but managed a smile.
“May I help you?” she said.
“Thank you. I am looking for Philippe Sompre.”
“When did you make the appointment?”
“I don’t have one, but I have come all the way from England,” I replied. “I only found out an hour ago where he is living.”
She looked at me, inspecting my clothes, the state of my beard, the neatness of my hair. How plausible was I?
“Come with me, please,” she said at length, turning and going back through the door-within-the-door.
I followed.
Inside was a cavernous hall, built of stone, with granite flags on the floor and two tall, narrow windows of stained glass, throwing a perpetual evening light over everything.
“Wait here, please,” she said. “I won’t be long.”
I looked about me. The convent, I could now see, was mediaeval, with a large stone superstructure and elaborate heads tenoned into the walls at varying heights—heads of saints, heads of grotesques, shields and rosettes, angels blowing trumpets, lions’ heads. A Christ on the cross but not one slumped in suffering, rather triumphant, radiant, his body arched in an act of bravado.
Ten minutes passed, twenty, twenty-five. She had said she wouldn’t be long but she was.
A bird, a shiny coal-black crow of some kind, was suddenly flapping in the hallway. It had got in somewhere and was now desperate to get out. I opened the door-within-the-door, hoping that the light that streamed in would attract its attention and help it to freedom.
It didn’t work. The bird continued to flap about in the higher reaches of the hall, far too high for me to be of any use.
More than half an hour had passed. The nun had disappeared through a solid-looking, brown wooden door and I thought it time I went after her.
But as I approached the door, it opened and a figure came through.
It wasn’t the nun.
Its was Victoria Dirac.
“Colonel Hammond,” she said softly. “So it is you. I thought as much.”
My throat constricted. I swallowed. “If you are here, Madeleine is here.” My heart seemed to swell and lighten all at the same time.
“Come,” she said. “Sit down over here. I need to talk to you.”
“No. I want to see Madeleine.”
“Please. Let’s sit. You’ll see Madeleine, but we need to talk first.”
So Madeleine was here; and alive. My heart had not been so spring-loaded in months.
“Why do we need to talk? I don’t understand.”
“Let’s sit. Please. I promise you that when I tell you what I’m going to tell you, you’ll understand.”
Reluctantly, I sat down. I’d lived with doubt for weeks. It was time to end it. I didn’t know what to think and I was in no mood to slow down.
She sat alongside me. She was wearing a cream blouse, I remember, and a tartan skirt, but not a kilt. There was rouge on her cheeks but she wore no lipstick. Odd, the details one remembers.
She spoke softly, hesitantly.
“When you came to see me in Blakeney, neither of us knew what had happened to Madeleine. You were in the dark almost as much as I was. What happened is that Madeleine did her job, as you know, until D-Day, the invasion. But then—”
“She came looking for Philippe’s grave, but found him instead. Isn’t that what happened? I know now that he’s alive.”
She shook her head. “No, it isn’t, not at all, and you mustn’t think it.”
She fingered the pearls of her necklace. Her voice was weak.
“Shortly after D-Day, Madeleine made a mistake—she’ll tell you herself what happened. But, as a result of her mistake, she was captured at a place called Nallies, just outside La Rochelle. She was taken to a holding hospital-cum-prison there and interrogated.”
Victoria Dirac caught her breath.
“In fact, she was tortured—she won’t say what exactly was done to her. But she held out well and, while she did so, the invasion proceeded. As you almost certainly must know, three places in France—three coastal cities with U-boat fleets—fought hard and became isolated pockets of resistance. Those areas were Brest, St. Nazaire, and—”
“La Rochelle. Yes, I know. You mean—?”
She nodded. “As I have had it explained to me, the Gestapo’s original plan would have been to ship Madeleine—once she had been captured—to Paris, interrogate her further there, and then transfer her even further eastwards, into Germany itself, where she would have been…executed.”
“I don’t understand,” I
said. “La Rochelle has still not fallen. If she was interned there, how did she get out?”
Mrs. Dirac had been holding a pack of cigarettes in her hand, and a lighter. She took out two cigarettes—just as Madeleine once had—and offered one to me, lighting both with her lighter.
“All in good time.” She inhaled the smoke of her cigarette. “The Resistance in Paris intercepted Gestapo radio traffic, or they stole details at Gestapo headquarters in Paris—I’m not sure which. Among those details was the fact that a named British agent was being held in the Dompierre Secure Hospital in La Rochelle. These details were circulated to local Resistance groups in the area, in case they could help.
“Philippe saw those lists—”
I struck my fist on my knee and cried out, “I was right all along! But how can that be? Is that why—?”
“Hold on, Matt! Hold on! I’m telling you everything I know. I’ll get to Philippe in a minute. But Madeleine first.”
My insides were in turmoil, fighting one another. Where was all this going?
Victoria Dirac breathed out loudly, blowing cigarette smoke up into the air. “Now, as I know you know, Philippe is an expert on the caves in this region—”
“Yes,” I said. “I read a report of his great discovery. I presume it was his. That’s partly why I’m here, now.”
She nodded.
“Well, it turns out that one of the caves hereabouts leads into La Rochelle. There is one cave, one cave at least, which starts here in free France and ends up inside that part of La Rochelle still occupied by the Germans. It’s too small—and zigzags too much—to mount an assault through, but it has been used for intelligence purposes, or so I’m told.
“So Philippe mounted a rescue attempt—
“The rescue went well. The Resistance had people in the hospital, Madeleine was freed, and they reached the entrance of the cave inside La Rochelle…”
“But what…? I can tell from your voice that—”
“Hold on!”
She drew on her cigarette.
“They got into the cave, some way inside. In fact, they were nearly out the other side, in free France, when the Germans, who had found out what had happened, and gave chase…Well, they found the entrance to the cave and exploded a bomb inside it.”
I said nothing.
“The explosion sent a terrific blast of air, dust, and stones throughout the cave, collapsing part of it. Madeleine, as it happens, was half protected by a wall of rock but Philippe wasn’t. Having a limp, he was slower than the rest, and he was deafened, blown off his feet, and hit his head on the stony ground. Rocks and stones fell on him and he was badly hurt. The others carried him to safety, and brought both of them here.”
“Why not a proper hospital, now this part of France has been liberated?”
“This is a hospital. It has acted as a hospital, secretly, throughout the war. It has doctors—doctors everyone in the Resistance knows—and it has an operating theatre and a supply of medicines. The nuns are excellent nurses. It’s as good as any other hospital in the area in the aftermath of occupation and the locals trust it.”
I nodded.
“May I see her now? Where is Philippe now? Is he with her?”
“A few more details first. You’ll see why.”
She fingered her necklace again.
“That all happened about ten days ago.” She eyed me levelly. “What you don’t know, what she was frightened to tell you, in case you stopped her being flown to France, is that Madeleine was pregnant—”
“What?”
Mrs. Dirac nodded. “I didn’t know either, not until I got the call in Blakeney to come as soon as I could. And what you need to know is that, amid the excitement and danger of the escape, and the trauma of the explosion, Madeleine went into labour. Her daughter—your daughter—was born in a farmhouse between La Rochelle and here.”
I had a daughter.
She smiled a sad smile. “The baby is doing fine—”
“What do you mean by that? What about Madeleine?”
She reached out gently, took my chin in her fingers, exactly as Madeleine used to do, and turned my head until it faced her. “First, you should know that I was sent for because no one knew how to contact you. Obviously, Madeleine’s radio transmitter was confiscated when she was arrested. Like Madeleine, I had the number of Hamilton Place in London, but there was never any reply when I phoned. Since the organisation you work for is secret, no one knew how to contact you. Philippe had been told by his Resistance colleagues in Paris that SC2 had showed up there and he was about to try to contact your organisation when…”
“When what?”
She looked at me. “Philippe died of his wounds the day before yesterday.”
I didn’t know what to say. The taxi driver who had brought me obviously hadn’t heard the latest news.
It was a long time before either Victoria Dirac or I said anything.
Then, still speaking softly, she murmured, “One other thing.”
I shifted on the bench.
She pulled hard on her cigarette. “While Madeleine was imprisoned she was badly treated, and she caught typhus, either from the lice or the rats. Or…it’s possible that the Nazi doctors experimented on her, gave her typhus deliberately to see if they could manipulate it. We don’t know, but there are all sorts of rumours floating around.”
She sniffed. “The important thing for you to know is that complications set in—kidney failure and pneumonia.”
She looked up at me.
“The baby is doing well, Matt, but…Madeleine is not so good. Her kidney failure is quite advanced and the pneumonia…It’s…it’s not good.”
Mrs. Dirac touched my knee. “Madeleine doesn’t know it—but she hasn’t got long to live.”
I stopped breathing. My chest tightened.
“I’m sorry. We are all…it’s terrible. It’s a matter of days, hours even—she may not last the night. I brought some photographs for her to have near her bed, for comfort.”
Stunned, I said nothing. I couldn’t speak.
Then I tried. “How…how weak is she?”
“Even talking is an effort.”
“Then let me put my questions to you.”
“I’ll do my best to answer.”
“Why was Philippe reported dead when he wasn’t?”
“Ah, yes. I know the answer, now. You speak very good French, Matthew, you have an accent, but your French is first-rate. But you are not French and so, perhaps, you can’t understand.
“It was his mother. Philippe’s mother always hated the fact that Madeleine was a Protestant, when her son was a Catholic. When Philippe was seriously injured and captured at the beginning of the war, and before he escaped, his mother got word to Madeleine that he was dead. She thought that would kill whatever there was between them. As it did. Without that, Matt, Madeleine would not have turned to you.”
I swallowed.
“There’s something else.”
She picked up my hand and held it. “When Philippe rescued Madeleine, he knew she was pregnant. It was part of the intelligence he got from his Resistance colleagues in Paris.” She squeezed my hand. “He went ahead anyway.”
She squeezed my hand again. “And of course, he was present, at the farm, when Madeleine gave birth.”
A farm, I registered, thinking back to that other farm, where it had all started.
“I talked to Philippe before he died. He was delighted for Madeleine that she has a daughter. His own mother is dead now, but he still blamed her for her deception. Had she not interfered, maybe Madeleine and he could have picked up where they left off when the war ended. But he went through a war like the rest of us, and he told me he’d seen enough to know that all manner of…that things like this happen. And, since he knew Madeleine was dying, he was happy for her that she has a child. It is the one thing that comforts her in her last days.”
The cigarette she held in her fingers was shaking. A tear fell quickly
down her cheek to her chin. She dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed it with her shoe.
She wiped her face with the ball of her hand. “Now you know everything.”
We sat, side by side, for a while, neither of us talking.
Then she whispered, “Let’s go in.”
—
I LET THE TAXI DRIVER GO. Through the brown wooden door, the corridor seemed endless. It seemed at the time like the longest walk I had ever made. We passed several niches, in each of which there was a marble bust, as I recall, and some landscape paintings of Mediterranean scenes. I have no idea why I registered these details. My mind felt numb.
At length, Victoria Dirac stopped and lightly touched my arm.
“She’s very thin. Try not to look too shocked, when you see her.”
We went through a door, where two nuns were sitting. They both stood up.
That room gave on to another, with windows high up in the wall, but covered with blinds.
This inner room was shady rather than dark. There was a bed in the corner with a figure in it.
Victoria Dirac was right. Madeleine was shockingly thin, her slight frame made her unruly hair seem more untamed than ever.
But it was her. Not quite the Madeleine of The Farm, or the beach at Ardlossan. Not the Madeleine of the Southwater meadow, that May night, in a blue cotton dress.
But nearly. The eyes, brown like whisky. The cleft in her chin. Her ballerina’s neck.
Victoria left us.
Madeleine and I were alone.
“Hello,” I said, bending down and kissing her cheek. My stomach was chopping and churning again. Tears did their best to break out over my cheeks but I wouldn’t let them.
I kissed her again. “That’s from Zola.”
She closed her eyes and smiled. I could see that even that was an effort.
Then she opened them and, for a moment, they were bigger than ever.
Then she closed them again.
The truth was, she was weaker than I had expected.
I sat on the bed and held her hand.
“So…how are you feeling?”
“Weak,” she said. “But I’ll get stronger now you are here.”
“We’ll both get stronger, now.”
“You have a daughter.”
