“Good heavens,” I said, “what a question. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I just wondered, you being Irish and all.”
I registered the familiar faint shock, like a soot-fall in a chimney.
“Do I seem very Irish to you, Haig?”
He looked at me askance, and chuckled.
“Oh, no, sir, no,” he said, and lowered his face over his soup plate. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
There flashed into my mind then a clear and detailed picture of him, sitting in the canteen at HQ with his fellow drivers, a mug in one hand and a fag in the other, putting on a snooty face and mimicking my accent: But my dear Haig, I’m hardly Oirish at all, at all.
I wonder if Boy did manage to seduce him? Such questions are troubling, to an old man. The boeuf en daube, I remember, was excellent.
Having forsworn the services on offer from the local women, Haig could be of little assistance to me in my most taxing problem, which was the need for the provision of a second brothel in Boulogne for the benefit of Expeditionary Force personnel. With the arrival of the Force, the town’s one such establishment—a warren of dingy rooms above a barber’s shop round the corner from where Nick and I were quartered, presided over by a mole-speckled madam who, in silk kimono and drooping henna-coloured wig, bore a marked resemblance to Oscar Wilde in his later years—had risen, or reclined, energetically to the great increase in demand, but within a short time Mme. Mouton’s gallant filles publiques were overwhelmed, and amateurs stepped in to absorb the overflow of business. Soon every other bar and bakery had a room upstairs with a girl in it. There were fights, and accusations of cheating and theft, and a wide-scale spread of disease. I cannot recollect how the matter came to be my responsibility. I spent fruitless weeks traipsing between police headquarters and the mairie. I tried to enlist the support of the town’s doctors. I even spoke to the parish priest, a foxy old boy with a game eye who proved to be suspiciously familiar with the workings of Mme. Mouton’s establishment. I felt like a character in a Feydeau comedy, revolving desperately through one set of misunderstandings after another, colliding everywhere with stock characters, all of them blandly knowing, openly contemptuous and wholly intransigent.
“War is hell, all right,” Nick said, and laughed. “Why don’t you get Anne-Marie to help you? I think she’d make quite a good madam.”
Mme. Joliet’s English was weak, and when she heard Nick speak her name in conversation with me, she had a way of smiling inquiringly, tilting her head and lifting up her fine little nose, in an unintended parody of a stage coquette.
“Nick thinks you might help me with Mme. Mouton and her girls,” I said to her in French. “I mean, he thinks you might be able to… that you…”
Her smile died, and she took off her apron, fumbling with the strings, and hurried from the kitchen.
“Oh, Doc, you are an ass,” Nick said, and smiled at me merrily.
I followed Anne-Marie. She was standing by the window in the little front parlour. Only a Frenchwoman can wring her hands convincingly. A shining tear trembled at the corner of each eye. She had swapped the soubrette role for that of Phèdre now.
“He cares nothing for me,” she said, in a voice that wobbled. “Nothing.”
It was mid-morning, and a shaft of thin, whitish spring sunlight was piercing the brown window of the épicerie on the other side of the street. I could hear the gulls down at the harbour shrieking, and suddenly, with heart-shaking vividness, I saw Nick and myself standing on the seafront at Carrickdrum not much more than a year ago, in another life.
“I don’t think he cares much for anyone,” I said. It was not what I had meant to say. She nodded, still with her face turned to the window. She sighed, and the sigh turned into a dry little sob.
“It is so difficult,” she murmured. “So difficult.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling helpless and miserable; I am never any good in the presence of others’ pain. After a moment of silence Mme. Joliet laughed, and turned her head and looked at me, her eyes glistening with sorrow, and said:
“Well, perhaps I shall have better luck when the Germans come. Except…” She faltered. “Except that I am Jewish.”
Miss Vandeleur has got hold of some silly story about my bravery under fire. I have tried to explain to her that the concept of bravery is entirely spurious. We are what we are, we do what we do. At school, when I first read Homer, what struck me about Achilles was his bone-headed stupidity. I was not stupid, and I was afraid, but I had sufficient self-control not to show it, except once (twice, actually, but the second time there was no one to see, so it doesn’t count). I performed no daring acts, did not throw myself on the grenade, or run out into no man’s land to rescue Haig from the Huns. Simply, I was there, and I kept my head. It was nothing to boast about. Anyway, the shameful scramble for home that was Dunkirk had too strong an overtone of slapstick to allow one at the time seriously to consider the possibility of violent death. If bravery means the ability to laugh in the face of danger, then you may call me brave, but only because that face always seemed to me to have a clownish cast.
We knew the Germans were coming. Even before they launched their assault and the French Army collapsed, it had been obvious that nothing would stop the German armour except the Channel, and by now even that seemed not much wider than a castle moat. I was asleep on the morning when the Panzers arrived at the outskirts of the town. The noise of Haig stamping up the stairs to my room was louder than that of the German guns. He was in uniform, but a piece of his pyjamas was visible above the collar of his tunic. He hung on to the doorframe, wild-eyed and gasping; I had not noticed before how much like a fish he looked, with those pop-eyes and protuberant mouth and fin-like ears.
“It’s the Jerries, sir—they’re bloody here!”
I sat up, primly pulling the blanket to my chin.
“You’re improperly dressed, Haig,” I said, indicating the telltale edge of striped cotton at his neck. He gave a sort of desperate grin and shook himself like a trout on a hook.
“Oh, sir, they’ll be here in an hour,” he said, in an imploring whine, like a schoolboy urging on a laggardly gamesmaster.
“Then we had better look sharp, hadn’t we. Or do you feel we should stop and make a stand against the tanks? I rather think I have misplaced my pistol.”
It was a bracingly beautiful May morning, all glitter and flash in the foreground, the smoke-grey distances cool and still. Haig was waiting in the Austin with the motor running. I am always strangely moved by the smell of exhaust fumes on the morning air. The little car was shuddering like a calf, as if it knew what its fate was shortly to be. Nick was lounging in the front passenger seat with his cap rakishly tilted and his collar unbuttoned. I climbed into the back seat and we shot off down the hill towards the harbour. When we slowed to take a corner an old man leaning on a crutch shouted something, and spat at us.
“Grand day for a rout,” I said.
Nick laughed.
“You took your time,” he said. “What were you doing-praying?”
“I needed to shave.”
He looked to Haig and nodded grimly. “The German army is about to descend on us, and he has to have a shave.” He swivelled toward me again, pointing. “And what’s that?”
“A swagger stick.”
“I rather thought that’s what it was.”
We came upon a squad of our men marching raggedly down the hill. They looked at us with sullen resentment as we passed by.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“Most of the men went up to Dunkirk,” Haig said. “They’ve sent a liner from Dover. The Queen Mary, they say. Lucky blighters.”
Nick was peering through the back window at the stragglers.
“Perhaps we should have spoken to them,” he said. “They seemed quite demoralised.”
“One of them was carrying what looked like a ham,” I said.
“Oh dear, I do hope they haven’t been looting. P
eople tend to mind that sort of thing, especially the French.”
There was a thud nearby, we felt it through the throbbing of the engine, and a moment later a hail of fine debris tinkled on the roof of the car. Haig drew his neck down between his shoulders like a tortoise.
“Why are they firing at us?” Nick said. “Don’t they realise we’ve turned tail?”
“It’s just exuberance,” I said. “You know what the Germans are like.”
The harbour had a wonderfully festive look, with crowds of men milling about the quayside and craft of all kinds bobbing and jostling on the sea. The water was a stylised shade of cobalt blue and the sky was stuck all over with scraps of cottony cloud.
“You managed to say your goodbyes to Mme. Joliet?” I said.
Nick shrugged, and kept the back of his head turned toward me.
“Couldn’t seem to find her,” he said.
By now we were nosing our way through the crowds on the quay, Haig leaning on the horn and cursing to himself in a low mutter. I spotted a fellow I had been to school with, and made Haig stop.
“Hello, Sloper,” I said.
“Oh, hello, Maskell.”
We had not seen each other since we were seventeen. He put an elbow on the door and leaned his big pale head down at the window. I introduced Nick, and they shook hands awkwardly across the back of Nick’s seat.
“I should be saluting, of course,” Nick said. It was only then that I noticed the major’s insignia on Sloper’s shoulder.
“Sorry, sir,” I said, and sketched a salute. He had been my senior at school, too.
With a shriek a shell landed in the harbour, sending up a tremendous waterspout and making the stones of the quayside shudder.
“Any chance of our getting off today, sir, do you think?” Nick said.
Sloper looked down, and bit his lip.
“There’s only one old tub left,” he said, “and no one’s taking that because—”
A soldier with a picturesquely bandaged forehead came trotting up, clutching a signals sheet, and yelled:
“Message from Dover, sir. We’re to evacuate at once.”
“Is that so, Watkins?” Sloper said, taking the signal and frowning at it. “Well well.”
“Where can we find this boat, sir?” Nick said.
Sloper gestured vaguely and went back to his reading. I told Haig to drive on.
“Sloppy Sloper a major,” I said. “Well I never.”
The boat was a Breton trawler with a wreath of roses painted on the bow. It wallowed languidly on its tethers; there was no one on board. The squad we had passed on the hill had arrived, and stood dejectedly on the quay, their kit at their feet, gazing mournfully in the direction of England.
“Here, you, Grimes,” I said to one of them. “Weren’t you a fisherman?” He was a squat young man, keg-shaped and bandy, with a red face and a lick of blond hair plastered across the top of his skull. “Can you drive this thing?”
He could, and presently we were puttering our way out of the harbour toward the open sea. The boat wallowed and swayed like an old cow slopping her way across a field of mud. In the wheelhouse Grimes stood braced on his bowed legs, whistling happily. By now there were two or three shells coming every minute. Haig was crouched in the stern, cupping a cigarette and shivering.
“Cheer up, Haig,” I said. “She had to go, you know that.” We had ditched the Austin in the harbour. He had watched in sad disbelief as the little car tipped over the harbour wall and plunged nose-first into the oily water and sank with a great gulp. “You wouldn’t have wanted Jerry to get hold of her, would you?”
He gave me a kicked-dog look and said nothing and went back to his ashen brooding. I edged my way sidewise along the crowded walkway to the front of the boat, where Nick was sitting on the deck with his back against the gunwale, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced together, squinting thoughtfully at the sky. A shell landed thirty yards off to the left of us with a curiously understated plop.
“I’ve been doing a calculation,” Nick said. “Taking into account the frequency of firing, and the distance we have to go before we’re out of range, I’d put our chances at two to one against.”
I sat down by his side.
“These shells seem rather tame to me,” I said. “Do you think one of them would sink us?”
He glanced at me sidelong and chuckled.
“Well, considering the stuff that’s stored below-decks, I think it’s a fair assumption.”
Why is it, I wonder, that the sea smells of tar? Or is it just that boats smell that way, and we imagine it is the sea? Life is full of mysteries.
“What,” I said, “is down there?” He shrugged.
“Four tons of high explosives, actually. This is a demolitions ship. Didn’t you know?”
Lately I have developed a very faint, generalised tremor. It is a strange and, I am surprised to note, not entirely unpleasant sensation. In bed at night when I cannot sleep I am most keenly aware of it, a kind of undulant, underwater shimmer that seems to originate somewhere low down in my breast, around the area of the diaphragm, and flow outwards to the very tips of my fingers and my poor cold toes. I think of a low-voltage electric current running through a vat of some thick, warm, purplish liquid. Perhaps it is the first, shivery sign of the onset of Parkinson’s disease? The bleak comedy of this possibility is not lost on me: nature being conservative, two major ailments simultaneously attacking a single organism would seem prodigal, to say the least. One would have thought cancer quite enough to be going on with. But even if it is the advance announcement of one of these newfangled maladies (does Alzheimer’s disease give you the shakes?), I am convinced that somehow this quaver had its origins in that moment on the retreat from Boulogne when I realised that I was sitting on a floating bomb. That is when the tuning fork of terror was first struck, I believe, and the vibrations have only now descended to a pitch detectable to my merely human receptors. You think I am being fanciful? Profound effects are always well under way, surely, before we register them, with our puny powers of feeling and recognition. I am thinking of my father’s amused wonderment when, in his sixties, after he had suffered his first coronary attack, the doctors told him that his condition was the result of damage caused to the ventricles of his heart by a bout of rheumatic fever he had suffered in early childhood. So it is entirely possible that this tremor that has afflicted me now, at the age of seventy-two, is the manifestation, after a forty-year lapse, of the fear that came over me but which I could not show that day in Boulogne harbour as we heaved our way homeward in gay spring sunshine with the tank shells and the seagulls shrieking around us.
I have paused for a long time between the last paragraph and this one. I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really do occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant. Yet I cannot shake the belief that something happened to me that day which changed me, as love, or illness, or great loss are said to change us, shifting us a vital degree or two, so that we view the world from a new perspective. I took on fear, as one takes on knowledge. Indeed, it did seem a form of sudden, incontrovertible knowing. My immediate sensations, when Nick gaily told me about the dynamite in the hold, were, first, an intense pressure in my chest which was, I realised, the urge to burst into laughter; if I had laughed, I should probably very soon have been screaming. Next, there flashed into my mind a fantastically clear and vivid image of The Death of Seneca, complete with its frame—English, late eighteenth-century, but good—and a patch of the north-lit wall in the Gloucester Terrace flat where it used to hang, and even the little lacquered table that always stood beneath it. I should have thought of wife and child, of father and brother, death, judgement and resurrection, but I did not; I thought, God forgive me, of what I truly loved. Things, for me, have always been of more import than people.
That kind of s
weaty, bladder-tightening terror is not like, for instance, the dull dread that I feel nowadays when I contemplate the painful and extremely messy death that I know awaits me, sooner rather than later. What made it different was the element of chance. I have never been a gambler, but I can understand how it must feel when at the end of its counter-clockwise run the little wooden ball, making a rattle that is distractingly reminiscent of the nursery, jumps tantalisingly in and out of the slots of the roulette wheel, first the red and then the black and then the red again, with everything hanging on its whim, money, the wife’s pearl necklace, the children’s education, the deeds to the chateau in the hills, not to mention that little pied-à-terre behind the tabac on the sea front that no one is supposed to know about. The suspense, the anguish of it, the almost sexual expectancy— now? is it going to be now? is it now?—and all the time that fevered, horror-stricken sense of everything being about to change, completely, unrecognisably, for ever. That is what it is to be truly, horribly, jubilantly alive, in the magnesium glare of intensest terror.
Nick of course was not afraid. Or if he was, the effect on him was even more remarkable than it was on me. He was exultant. A kind of radiance came off him, as if he were inwardly on fire. I could smell him; above the smell of the sea and the salt reek of the deck-boards where we sat, I could smell him, and I sucked it in, the raw stink of him, sweat and leather and wet wool and the rank afterburn of the flask of coffee he had drunk in the jeep an hour ago outside the house in rue du Cloître while he and Haig waited for me and the German tanks began firing on the town. I wanted to take his hands in mine, I wanted to clasp him to me, to immolate myself in that fire. I cannot tell you how embarrassed I feel now, warbling this queasy Liebestod, but it is not often in life that one finds oneself so quakingly close to violent death. I hoped my terror was not visible. I smiled at him, and shrugged, trying to seem ironical and insouciant, as an officer should be, though for all the stiffness of my upper lip, I had to bite the lower one to keep it from trembling. When at last we had pulled beyond the range of the guns, and the men were cheering and dancing about the deck, Nick’s eyes went dead, and he turned away from me and watched the sea, frowning, silent, spent, and I thanked God for his obliviousness to the feelings of anyone save himself.
The Untouchable Page 22
