She was standing in the open doorway of the kitchen, watching the dust settle on the cart track that led to the road. She walked to the sink and spat out the clove of garlic she had been chewing. He knew now that she always put garlic in her mouth when the Germans came. ‘They do not like,’ she had said the first time they had come. There had been three of them, an officer, his driver and another one whom she thought was SS – the only one who spoke any French. They had asked a lot of questions of the usual kind, who else lived at the farm? how did she manage, then, on her own? what did the farm produce? and so on. It had taken so much time, she said, because with Germans she always behaved stupidly. She did not understand what they said, and then she would give stupid answers. Then she turned on him and said it was his business to listen for people coming – she had enough to do. He (foolishly) said something about the car engine being quieter, and then she really went for him. However they came they could kill us, she said, he could not be such a fool as not to understand that. Germans in care could be more dangerous – officers, people who gave the orders. If he could not take the trouble to listen, he had the choice of spending all his time in the cellar where he would be utterly useless and nothing but trouble for her. For the rest of the day she neither spoke to nor looked at him, made loud noises with pans, set a bowl of soup on the table for him but did not eat herself, and muttered imprecations to the kid that he felt were meant for him. That was the blackest day since the morning he discovered that the destroyer had sailed without him. In the evening, when she called him down from his room, he saw a bottle of Calvados and two glasses on the table. She had washed herself and her hair was coiled neatly on top of her head (she had pulled it down when the Germans came so that it looked thoroughly unkempt). She asked if he would like a drink and he said, yes, very much. When it was poured and she had pushed the packet of Gauloises to him, having taken one herself, and he had lit them, he said that he had been thinking, and had decided that he should not stay. Where would he go? He should try to get a boat from Concarneau. He would not get a boat. It had been discovered that someone had left in that way and now all boats were checked by the Germans before leaving the harbour. He would not get a boat. There had been a short silence. Then he had said that boat or no boat, he ought to leave. Why? Because it simply was not fair on her. If he were not here she would be perfectly safe, would not have this constant anxiety. It was too much to ask of anyone, let alone a – he remembered floundering here – perfect stranger.
She had stared at him for a moment with an expression he could not fathom. A stranger, she had repeated eventually. You have lived here for four months – with a stranger! No, he hadn’t meant that exactly. Just that he did not feel that he had the right to jeopardize her safety.
She ignored that; she supposed it was because he was English that he felt her to be such a stranger. The cold English, people had always said, but she had not known any English person until now. They were facing each other across the table. She pulled her black woollen shawl more closely to her and folded her arms. In any case, she said, if he did leave, he would not get far. His French was not good enough for him to pass as a Frenchman, he had no papers and also it was known that he had some association with her – or would be very fast if he was caught. He did not understand this, but when he questioned her, she said that, although nobody spoke of it, something was known. Also, there was a record about her after Jean-Paul had been killed. The Germans kept excellent records of such things. So! she finished. So! She shrugged and poured more Calvados. He felt both challenged and at a loss – uncomfortably powerless. It occurred to him then that although he was deeply beholden to her, he did not like her. There was a bitterness, a smouldering resentment about her that was alienating. My bloody ankle, he thought. If that hadn’t happened, I’d have been away from here, might be home by now. And then something strange, that afterwards he could not in any way account for, happened. For a second – he became her: at least his own feelings, responses, needs, anxieties dissolved to be replaced by hers. Alone, having nursed her parents to their deaths, her man taken brutally from her and with him her future of marriage and children gone by a murder where justice had no power, she had been left to do a man’s as well as a woman’s job in this remote place. Lone women were raped by the enemy: it was common knowledge. Every single time they came, that possibility – likelihood – was there. Today she had been through the fear of that. She had got Pipette away, she had harboured himself: in neither case was there the smallest advantage to her. Her outburst about it being his business to listen for vehicles approaching the farm was perfectly reasonable. He had grown careless, and then to say that he must go, and call her a perfect stranger was both chilling and offensive.
‘I’m sorry I called you a stranger. I’m sorry you find that my French is so bad. I’m sorry I suggested going without thinking of the consequences for you –’
He had taken her hand and she now put it over his mouth. ‘Enough! You have said enough,’ she said. She was smiling – he could not remember seeing her smile before and her dark eyes had an expression that was both cynical and tender. They had become different people.
That night after supper – a stew of rabbit cooked with apple and onions – after they had bolted the doors and fed the kid they had gone upstairs and when they reached the door of her room she took his hand and drew him in. He had put his arms round her and kissed her small red mouth. ‘Much garlic,’ she had said and he had answered that he was not a bloody German, just a cold English. She had smiled again, ‘I will warm you,’ she said.
For months he had seen her in her voluminous black skirt – often with an apron added to it, her heavy fisherman’s jersey, her thick cotton blouses, her shawl – naked, she took his breath away. High, separated breasts, an unexpectedly slender waist, below which there was the generous curve of her hips, her limbs muscular and rounded, wrists and ankles delicately articulate – the revelation was a marvellous shock.
Even now, in the dusty train, he could feel his body responding to the memory of that initial sight of her.
After that first night they were no longer Monsieur and Madame, no longer addressed each other as vous, although it was some months before either recognized what was happening to them.
Here he had to stop – some way beyond that was the beginning of pain, the knowledge that there could not be a future with her, that one day this amazing isolation with her would come to an end, and the closer that they became the more completely they would have to part. He had thought, at the beginning of their parting, on the boat and the first few difficult days after it, that he must, he should, banish all thoughts of her; now he knew just how difficult it was to do that for more than a few hours at a time. It was not made easier by his relationship with Zoë, which had, he thought now, all the anxious courtesy of two people trapped between two floors in a lift – a kind of wary limbo that neither seemed able to overcome.
Perhaps, he thought, he would feel better if he talked to someone about it: he would become clearer, more able to deal with the situation. And the obvious person to talk to would be Archie.
Two
THE GIRLS
August 1945
‘I really wish we hadn’t asked him. He’ll eat up all our food and keep on wanting to go to the cinema. And he’ll probably be no good at all at painting.’
‘We can give him the easy bits to do.’
‘He actually asked me if we were going to pay him for working. My own brother!’
‘Oh, Clary! He was only joking. Are the sausages done?’
‘They must be. They’ve been in the pan for ages.’
‘If you’ll have a go at the potatoes, I’ll test them.’ Her arms were aching and the potatoes were still lumpy.
‘Poll, I think you’re meant to put butter and milk into mashed potatoes.’
‘We can’t. We’ve finished the butter, and we’ll need the marge tomorrow for sandwiches for Neville as well as us. And there’s only half
a pint of milk left. We’ll have to stop having Grape Nuts for breakfast.’
‘And have black toast and bright yellow marge.’
‘It doesn’t have to be black if you watch the grill all the time.’
‘It seems to me,’ Clary said, when they’d doled out the sausages and lumpy mash and were sitting at the little kitchen table, ‘that cooking only works if it’s the only thing you do. Like Mrs Cripps.’
‘I expect we’ll get better at it as the years go by. And there’ll be more food to get good with.’
‘Not for ages. There are thousands of starving Germans.’
‘Noël says that masses of food that might have come to us has to go to them, and so rationing will get worse, not better. He says that bread will be rationed any minute.’
‘Oh dear.’ The pronouncements of Noël, Clary’s employer, relayed as gospel by Clary, were invariably gloomy. ‘Anyway, we have got our own house.’
‘Yes. Do you think it will stop smelling so queer, or shall we just get used to it?’
‘We’ll get rid of the smell. The whole place will be wonderful when we’ve finished with it.’
The ‘house’ was, in fact, six rooms, two on each floor, of a small eighteenth-century house off Baker Street. On the ground floor was a grocer’s shop and in the basement an unknown region where the Green Brothers, who owned the shop, plucked and cleaned poultry. The feathers drifted up to the first floor of their part of the building together with a smell of singeing that added a dimension to the general odour of the place, a damp, rotting sort of smell. It had been in an appalling state when they took it, with plaster crumbling and old paint blistering off the window bars. Someone had written wild messages in pencil on various bits of walls and doors. ‘Hole house rotting,’ said one, ‘Hopless place’ another. ‘Damp and durty’, and so on. All true in a way, but six rooms for a hundred and fifty pounds a year seemed a bargain and what they could afford. The family were helping. Polly’s father was giving them coconut matting for the three flights of stairs and the Duchy had donated a large quantity of old carpet from Chester Terrace that was to be cut and fitted for their rooms. Clary had the first floor to herself, Polly the second, and the top floor was to be the kitchen and dining room. There had been a lavatory in a kind of passage built out at the back, in which it had proved just possible to put a very small bath. This had been done, and a sink installed in the kitchen. They had bought a second-hand gas cooker, and three second-hand gas fires for their sitting rooms and the dining room. They had paid to have some replastering done and the most damaged walls relined. There remained the decoration. Polly, who now worked for a small, rather grand interior-decorating firm, said they must have wallpapers, and that she could get them slightly cheaper. Clary, who had no faith at all in her own taste, let Polly decide such things. But before the papering there was all the painting, and this they had to do for themselves. It was a warm August Friday evening, and they sat each side of the table with the crooked sash window open to let in the brown dusty air from the street.
‘Is there anything else to eat?’
‘Some sort of stewed apple. I peeled them and chopped them up and put them in the pan with quite a lot of water so they didn’t burn – like last time.’
Polly cleared the sausage plates and doled out the apple into their breakfast cereal bowls.
‘Is it all right?’
‘Okay. A bit sour.’ Clary didn’t mention what seemed like finger-nails, but Polly said she was sorry, getting the cores out and leaving any apple was much harder than you’d think. ‘Louise’s house had an apple corer,’ she said. ‘I suppose we should get one.’
‘We seem to have got worse at cooking.’
‘I don’t think so. I think it’s just that we have to do it all the time. And I don’t suppose we’ll ever have a cook. Noël says that the whole of society will never be the same.’
‘As before the war? In my job it looks as though it’s going to be exactly the same. I’m constantly being sent to enormous houses where people are putting their kitchens on to the ground floor so that it won’t be far for the servants to walk.’
‘But only rich and grand people have interior decorators. Thousands of people are going to be living in pre-fabs because of all the bombing.’
‘Oh, well,’ Polly said peaceably. ‘Perhaps Noël is right about most of society. Perhaps it will be the same for my little lot – a minority, I do agree – and better for everybody else.’
‘He doesn’t say anything is going to be better. He never thinks that anything is going to be that!’
There was a pause while Polly, who found Noël’s opinions and Clary’s preoccupation with them irritating, tried to think of some way of deflecting her.
‘Let’s not do any more painting tonight. Let’s choose our wallpapers. I’ve brought back some lovely books of Cole’s who are easily the best.’
They did the washing-up first, but anything they did in the kitchen depressed them. There were no shelves or cupboards; nearly everything had to be kept on the floor. The sink did not yet have even a draining board, and their two drying-up cloths seemed always to be damp. They kept a list nailed to the wall on which they wrote their needs. It was already hopelessly long. The room was always hot because the window, as all windows in the narrow little house, faced south, and the boiler, a secondhand Potterton, was installed in it.
‘Let’s go to your room,’ Clary said. ‘It’s far the nicest.’ This was not only because Polly had already painted and lined its walls, but, Clary felt, because she had a knack of making places feel comfortable and lived in. It wasn’t just the patchwork quilt on the bed, the fern in a pot on the mantelpiece, the gleaming white paint and the thick brown paper she had taped to the floor; there was the feeling that it was already neat and clean, that the odours of damp and singeing feathers would not dare to penetrate such a place. A door connected this room with the other, small one. This also was clean and painted, with Polly’s clothes hanging neatly on a dress rail.
‘Are you going to make this your bedroom?’
‘No. I’m going to keep my clothes in it and work things, and I’m going to see if I can have a basin put in there. Then I’ll just have this room with the divan and chairs and things. What about you?’
‘I don’t know. I thought, as I’m not nearly as tidy as you, that I’d better make the small room a bedroom and have my desk and things in the big room.’ And never, she thought, let anyone into my bedroom because it will always be such a mess.
‘It’s important to decide before we choose the papers.’
‘I don’t think it matters what I choose.’
‘Oh, Clary! Don’t be so humble. It’s what you want that matters.’
They sat on Polly’s bed, side by side with their backs to the wall and the enormous wallpaper book on both their laps.
‘I like red,’ Clary said after a bit. ‘But I don’t want people on horses and harps and things all over it as well.’
‘Our rooms aren’t big enough for that sort of thing.’
After a bit, the harps gave way to stripes of various dimensions, and Clary seized upon a narrow one in two reds. ‘That’s what I want! Just like the Opera House at Covent Garden. All the passages are covered with it.’
‘I didn’t know you liked opera.’
‘I don’t especially – well, I don’t know whether I do, but Noël is taking me to it as part of my education. He says opera is nothing like it used to be, but, still, I ought to know the obvious ones. They nearly always make me cry – they’re so full of doom.’
‘Red is a bit hot for a room that faces south.’
‘You told me to choose. Red is what I like.’
‘And stripes will be difficult on these walls – they’re so bulgy.’
‘What’s the point of telling me to choose if you’re going against whatever it is?’
‘I was only trying to guide you.’
‘Either tell me, or let me choose for myself. I hate b
eing guided.’
In the end she chose the red stripes for her smaller room and let Polly advise a pale yellow paper covered with small gold stars for the larger one.
But, she thought, as she lay in bed later, I’m always being guided by someone. Then she thought again, and knew that she meant the Formans – mostly Noël, but Fenella a bit as well, though not nearly as much. This was partly because everything about them was so completely different from anything she knew about other people that when she was with them she kept having to have things explained to her. Fenella had explained quite a lot about Noël to her. He was, or had been, an only child (his parents were dead and when alive they had not been in the least interested in him). He had been brought up in a small house in Barnet, but from the age of three he had been expected to fend for himself. He had learned to read The Times when he was four and subsequently all the books in the house, had got his own meals (how on earth had he managed that?), had been sent to a day school in Highgate but had never made any friends since his parents would not let him have them home. In any case, he did not really like then much, Fenella said, only women; he adored the company of women. He had gone to the theatre, the cinema and to concerts by himself from the age of eight (how did he get the money, she had wondered, but she had not liked to ask). He had grown up without any love or care, had been treated as a not particularly desirable third adult in the household. His father had been an unsuccessful architect who had lived largely on a small inheritance, the remains of which had gone to Noël when he died. His mother had made periodic forays into various societies and sects, the Oxford Movement, Gurdjieff, and an Indian with a Japanese wife who gave talks in a house in Bayswater, but none of them lasted, and in between she lay on the sofa reading novels and eating cakes. Then one day she left – simply disappeared, so far as Noël was concerned. His father informed him of this at breakfast one morning, adding that he did not wish to pursue the subject. Her departure did not seem to make much difference to the solitary and separate lives of her husband and son. Somebody who cleaned the house twice a week did some shopping. Noël lived on school lunches and bread and butter and lamb chops in the evenings. A dreadful childhood, Fenella said. One could not treat Noël as one might treat anyone else.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 151
