by Allan Massie
And it will come. These idiots of politicians talk of having achieved peace in our time, even peace with honour, but you and I know this cannot be true. We have talked often of the nature of the forces which move the world, and we can recognise when appetites are insatiable. Believe me, my dear, that all which has been achieved at Munich is a pause. It is one which, I fear, France will not know how to use. I have had conversations with the Marshal on this subject. He believes that we have let ourselves be lulled by material pleasures and desires. Though he has no more respect for the masters of your country than I have myself – or certain of my dearest friends whose names I shall not mention – he recognises nevertheless, as I do myself, and as any thinking man must – that the Führer has given Germany a sense of spiritual purpose, by which I mean that men in your country are now prepared to put national interests above their personal wishes. As the Marshal says, ‘The world is governed by ideas,’ and in Germany there is a ruling idea and in France none.
The source of that idea I will not mention. The Marshal attacks the lack of seriousness in French life which, he says, ‘causes all our divisions’. He is perhaps simple in that judgement because I recognise that true seriousness such as you possess yourself may well lead to even more bitter divisions. He believes that when the politicians have brought France to the brink of the abyss, then they will turn to him.
Pray God they do so before then.
But these grave matters are things to be discussed in that warm dialogue which we have been fortunate enough always to enjoy. So let me turn to a happier and more social note. Polly and I propose to take a winter-sport holiday in Switzerland at New Year. We would both like you to join us.
And send you love,
Lucien
(Note scribbled below)
Dearest Rup, Haven’t read all L has said because I can see it is dreary politics, and I leave that to my sister. But do come please. Too long since we have seen you. Love and kisses, Polly.
In those days winter sports were still the preserve of the few, and at Zermatt where Lucien and Polly had been several times they were sure to meet those whom they knew and only people of their own class. There was nothing remarkable that Rupert should join them there, though he himself told Lucien that he could have wished that the invitation had been less explicit.
‘What do you mean, my dear?’
They were sitting in the hotel foyer drinking brandy. Polly had retired to bed, announcing that she would be stiff the next day and she couldn’t bear it if she was short of sleep also.
‘This mountain air makes me yawn my head off. Heaven knows why these idiot doctors call it bracing.’
Rupert held up his glass to the light. He had aged in the two years since their last meeting. His youthful freshness had withered, his blond hair was receding from the temples, which gave him an unexpected craggy look, and lines had gathered under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. ‘He looks as old as I do,’ Lucien thought, and was pained by the realisation.
‘It’s a relief,’ Rupert said, ‘to be free, out of Germany. Isn’t it a terrible thing to say of your Fatherland?’
‘It is not how I could imagine feeling about France.’
He looked round the big belle époque hotel. A thin dragonfaced waiter flicked crumbs off a table with a corner of his napkin. Even the potted palms looked ready for sleep.
‘No,’ Rupert said, ‘but France is different, a mother or a mistress. Perhaps both, thus fulfilling what the good Dr Freud of Vienna would suggest is every man’s ideal: to make a mistress of his mother. But Germany at the moment is a rather heavy father, a tyrant, not the kind you can respect. It’s as if your father turned out to be a nasty small boy who pulls the wings off flies. What I meant when I said that I wished your invitation had been less explicit is that I am quite sure I am watched, sure my correspondence is opened.’
‘As bad as that?’
‘As bad as that.’
‘But why?’
Rupert sighed. He lit another American cigarette. He had been smoking one after another since they sat down. A little tic flickered at the corner of his mouth.
‘People employ these categories of Left and Right, which are meaningless. The true opposition is between decency and indecency. I’m on the decent side, and my closest colleagues are Generals whom the rest of Europe ignorantly stigmatises as warmongers. Do you know, Lucien, if that ass Chamberlain had not flown to Munich, my friends were ready to arrest Hitler?’
‘And now?’
‘And now of course he is a hero. The German people worship him, and believe it is on account of his genius that we have avoided war. Do not be deceived by the press. Few in Germany desire war. That is true even of those of us who, like myself, have personal reasons for believing we might benefit from war in the east.’
Lucien thought, as he often did, of those winter plains stretching to nowhere and of the wild geese flying across the evening sky.
He said: ‘Have you considered emigration?’
‘Naturally, and rejected it. I am a German. I must remain in Germany. When there is a war I shall fight, but I shall fight on two fronts, against Hitler and for Germany.’
He laid his hand on Lucien’s arm.
‘There is no one except those who think like me to whom I could say that but you.’
The waiter opened the great double doors to clear the air. A breeze stirred the fans. Looking through the doorway and into the night, Lucien saw only a deep and intense blackness. Then a sleigh passed with a jingle of harness.
‘The question is no longer,’ he said, ‘where to be happy, but how to remain oneself.’
‘The question,’ Rupert said, ‘is whether decency is possible.’ He drank his brandy.
‘That waiter wants to go to bed. I think we should let him.’
‘One thing I haven’t mentioned. Polly’s sister Aurora is joining us here. Does that distress you?’
‘Little Adolf’s friend? No, on the contrary, it intrigues me.’
The first attraction of a ski resort is that the world stops there; Zermatt itself is a cul-de-sac. The day after Aurora arrived there was a heavy fall of snow. The railway line was blocked, the telephone wires brought down. Only the radio, to which they did not choose to listen, would have connected them with the outer world. They ignored it however, preferring for a few days in that winter of ’3°–’39 to pretend that they had no lives beyond the valley. In the evenings after an early dinner they went to the town cinema. The programme changed every third night. They showed mostly American films. Some were dubbed rather badly, others played in American English, for there were of course many English speakers among the holidaymakers. They would see the same film in both versions, and return to the hotel humming Irving Berlin tunes. Fred Astaire was popular and Rupert would do a soft-shoe shuffle along the snowy pavements. Then he would stop, point to the sky, link his arms with Polly and croon a ballad to the moon. Back in the hotel they would drink coffee and kirsch, and eat Sachertorte. The night they saw Top Hat was the last time Lucien and Polly made love.
They were all highly keyed. Even Polly, for whom the whole of life was normality, experienced a sense that these few days were, in some way which she couldn’t understand, special; they were like the little hush that can come over a forest before the wind rises. For the rest of his life Lucien remembered them as the last time he felt safe.
He knew of course that the safety was illusory. Nothing they felt now could obliterate what was going to happen. They were behaving indeed like the man who on the point of disgrace or bankruptcy or arrest on some vile criminal charge, nevertheless goes out and gets drunk, picks up a woman, or just laughs with friends, as if by such simple and normal actions he can arrest the future; yet who knows of course that he is not even postponing it; that it is all pretence.
Polly and Rupert sat on the terrace of a bar and let the morning sun warm their faces and watched Lucien and Aurora on the slopes.
‘It’s a shame yo
u can’t ski now,’ she said.
‘Dicky knee …’
‘Not my thing ever. Skating, now, I used to love to skate. D’you know I could have been a champion, they wanted me to train for the Olympics, but Mummy said “No, school first.” So here I am, no skating champion and absolutely uneducated. Lucien’s good, though. He goes at it the way he used to ride a horse, when I fell in love with him.’
‘So’s Aurora. She’s very good.’
They watched her swoop down the slopes, blonde hair flying behind her, for in those days of course no one bothered with protective headgear.
‘No wonder the Führer dotes on her. Is “dote” the right word?’
‘Last year’s word, Rup, no one would use it now.’
‘Ah well, like me.’
‘Not like you.’
‘Like the Führer’s taste then. He thinks of himself as the modern man, but really you know he’s something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. That’s what’s so frightening.’
‘Maybe Aurora is too.’
‘The enchanted princess.’
‘Sort of thing.’
She looked up the valley. The pine-needles shone golden in the sun, like a false future.
‘Are you still in love with me, Rup?’
‘Oh,’ he said, looking at her soft mouth and the blue eyes that glistened in the mountain air, ‘I wish I was, Polly. But no, I can’t lie to you.’
‘That proves you’re not, if you can’t lie.’
‘I’m sorry. But the way things are now, the way they are going to be …’
‘You haven’t turned pansy, have you? Maybe you have. Most Germans are pansies, aren’t they, especially the tough ones?’
He placed his hands on hers.
‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? The English sense of humour.’
‘That’s right, I’m laughing at you. The English sense of humour, God help us. I didn’t really mean it, Rup.’
‘Well, I am not offended in any case. But no, I have not turned homosexual. It doesn’t attract me. No, Polly, it is simply that there is no place for love in my life now. I don’t dare. I have only so much courage and that must be directed elsewhere. Do you know what is really wicked about the Nazis? It is that they deny the reality of private life, of individual life. Everything for the Fatherland – monstrous. Even those who are against them must be totalitarian. So, no, Polly, I’m not in love with you now. I love you of course, always, but at a distance.’
‘Ah well, too bad, old thing. Now was your chance.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m leaving Lucien, you see.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and took out his cigar-case, cut the end off a cigar with a pen-knife, and lit it. He puffed out smoke, thick, blue-grey, aromatic.
‘It’s because,’ she said, and sighed, ‘because … we’ve come to the end. I suppose he’s like you, I hadn’t thought of that, he has no time for me now. I used to love his seriousness and now I can’t stand it, simple as that. Shall we have some champagne?’
‘Have you told him?’
‘Not yet …’
‘I think he suspects,’ he said, and summoned the waiter. ‘I’m sure he knows, in fact.’
Rupert was right. Lucien had seen it coming. He was surprised only to discover that it hurt him. He had found himself so often exasperated by Polly in recent years that he had often looked forward to the moment when she would tell him it was all over. When she interrupted a serious dialogue with some piece of whimsy, or when she showed herself bored, ‘fed-up to the back teeth’, with matters that he knew to be of the first importance, he had even wished for it. He had found himself rehearsing the conversation in which they would annul their marriage, and in these rehearsals he always managed to be judicious, kind and superior. He had so frequently told himself that he had made a mistake in marrying her, that they weren’t fundamentally suited, that it was irritating to find now, when he was on the point of regaining his freedom, that the line which thumped in his brain was Colette’s: ‘Your pretty wife is much wiser than you. She knows that the correct way of making an omelette is much more important than a theory of economics.’ ‘But it’s not a matter of a theory of economics,’ he wanted to cry, ‘it’s a question of whether civilisation survives, of whether France survives, of whether, in short, there will be any omelettes.’ But it would be absurd to put it to her like that. It was better to let things go. If only, however, she would admit that he was in the right. But he knew she could never do that, and after all wasn’t that innocent certainty that she could not be wrong, that therefore she was always justified, one of the things which he had loved in her? All the same, he wrote in his journal: ‘If I ever love again it will be a woman with whom it is possible to hold a conversation. It has been my misfortune to adore a woman who is not my type. But how could she have ever thought me hers? Well, we shall both be better off apart. The boy too will be better for the time being out of France, for I cannot share the certainty that the Maginot Line will protect us. After all, my own personal Maginot Line has been breached.’
‘Has Polly spoken to you?’ he asked Rupert.
Rupert didn’t pretend not to understand, merely nodded his head.
‘If things in the world had been different …’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it has been wrong from the start. We are not, when you come to think of it, each other’s type.’
‘So what will you do?’ Aurora asked.
‘Go home to Mummy and Daddy, I suppose. Collect little Etienne on the way, of course.’
‘How does Lucien feel about that?’
‘Do you know, darling, I’ve only just realised that I don’t know what Lucien has ever felt about anything. I’ve been an absolutely blind bat.’
‘They’ll be pleased anyway.’
‘No they won’t. Daddy thinks Lucien’s the tops. It’s stopped him from making a fool of himself.’
‘I do wish Daddy would see the point about the Führer. He’s a terrific friend of England, you know.’
‘What you don’t understand,’ Aurora lifted her glass of champagne, ‘is that the Reichsmarschall is an utter kitten.’
Then, for the first time in three days, they heard the telephone ring at the hotel desk.
‘We’re back in the world,’ Rupert said.
Lucien escorted us – Polly and Mrs Thompson, my governess – to the Gare du Nord. We rode there in silence. There were grey skies and the people in the street all kept their eyes to the ground. The station was not very busy and we had a long wait standing on the platform till the train was ready to depart. He must have had a last message for me, something significant, but I don’t remember. His moustache tickled my cheek as he kissed me. I think he told me to look after my mother. I remember I told him that she was going to get me a spaniel puppy. ‘That will be nice,’ he said, ‘treat it kindly.’ Then they talked so that I couldn’t hear. A whistle blew. Mrs Thompson hustled me into the train. They embraced, as people might who expected to see each other in a few weeks. He stood on the platform till the train was out of sight. Mrs Thompson pulled me back in. ‘You don’t want your head taken off, do you?’
It rained in the Channel, but the crossing was calm, though Mrs Thompson was sick despite the pills she had taken.
Lucien walked back to his empty apartment. He felt flat. He wondered what Rupert was doing in Berlin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LUCIEN LAY ON his back just beyond the parapet and watched larks swoop and soar above him. He turned on his side and the country rolled towards the German lines; there were poppies and other blue and pink flowers, which he could not name, among the grasses. He knew that if he stood up and looked back he would see peasants ploughing the stubble fields behind their heavy chestnut horses which the Army had not commandeered. A reconnaissance plane flew over, its engine throbbing. He stood up and waved to the pilot. Then there was silence. He lay down again and waited. His mouth felt sour and dry from the single g
lass of wine he had drunk at lunch. In the mess two or three of his brother officers would have finished off the bottle and would now be downing nips of cognac or armagnac as they played their interminable games of cards. What else was there for them to do?
He pulled a volume of verse from his pocket and began to read, mouthing the lines to himself:
Mon coeur, lasse de tout, même de I’espêrance,
N’ira plus de mes voeux importuner le sort;
Prêtez-moi seulement, vallon de mon enfance,
Un asile d’un jour pour attendre la mort …
Of course, he thought, it is always tempting to suppose that other times were simpler than our own, to dismiss such murmurings as self-indulgent affectation, even while they continue to appeal powerfully to our own modern sensibility.
The afternoon sky was pale, trees touched with gold. The smell of wet grass and heavy earth seemed good. He shifted on the groundsheet again, and pressed his nose to the clay.
Voici l’étroit sentier de l’obscure vallée …
The path was always narrow, the valley dark; naturally enough, for we each trod a lonely and frightening measure. When he watched the private soldiers, many of them only boys, he could not escape the feeling that they should rather be lying in hedgerows cradling their girls. But, across Europe, Poland was dying. ‘Poland is the test,’ the English poet Belloc, who talked so much of his French ancestry, had once said to him at a London dinner table. He remembered the cigars and brandy, and Belloc, a thickset man, dressed in black, with a curiously high thin voice, leaning over him, fuming, jabbing him in the ribs with two stubby fingers as he said again: ‘Poland is the test.’ Well, Poland itself was being tested now, cruelly tested, but that was not what the man had meant. Poland is the test for Europe, by which Belloc signified in an old-fashioned manner which appealed to Lucien, Christendom. He himself had never doubted the fact of Christendom; it was denied in those lines opposite.
Yet, for all that, it was a civil war too. All European wars were civil wars. Had he not learned in those Prussian marshes how the Teutonic Knights had carried Christendom to the East on the point of a lance?
