by John Tagholm
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Somewhere, in a distant room a long way away, a baby was crying and she listened to its demands, more articulate than words.
Did it take her by surprise that as she lay in the orange-washed room she, too, began to cry, not with the purpose of the child, but a gentle weeping that seemed to appear out of nowhere? She was unable to decide whether the tears were of joy or sadness, self-pity or relief, but they came and wouldn’t stop. Eventually, some time after two in the morning, they ceased and she experienced the curious relief that crying can bring and she knew at once that it had been her admission that had produced the tears. She had never before declared that a succession of often foolish men had wasted her time. She’d sensed it, yes, but never put voice to the observation and the very act of speaking the words to Troumeg had loosened her defences. Perhaps the process had begun earlier, when he had referred to her as flotsam, triggering the image of the fragile skull in her hand. Whilst Joseph Troumeg appeared master of his own history, had created a hinterland for himself and perpetuated his own myths, she was merely a victim of the tides, unable to control the direction of her life. It was with this thought that she fell into a deep and untroubled sleep that not even the brightest of Provençal mornings could disturb until almost eleven. When she woke, she laughed at this untypical indulgence.
Beatrice decided to see if Troumeg wanted a late breakfast but she sensed as she walked around the lip of the old port he wouldn’t be there. She rang his bell and then asked the thin man behind the bar if he’d seen him but he was almost as silent as the cherub above the door. In a way, she was happy that Troumeg had disappeared again further confirming that mysterious quality around which she would be able to build a film. She felt lighter this morning and his absence was a release for her to continue her search. She checked out of the hotel and caught the early afternoon train to Paris and in the three hours and twenty minutes it took to speed up the spine of France she was re-energized
Beatrice was a producer, paid to bring order out of chaos, to compress a story into exactly fifty two minutes, a television hour. Production periods were established, budgets created, crews hired and the story researched so that it had a beginning, a middle and an end. It was what she was good at, she knew. She was used to making things happen, giving shape to ideas, persuading and cajoling and not taking no for an answer. She knew, then, that it was not beyond her to find Joseph Troumeg’s father and to discover the truth about the rift with his mother.
Somewhere just south of Lyon, not far from the great cooling towers that spoiled the views of the Rhône valley and the dry hills through which the river flowed, she arranged her laptop in front of her and placed her mobile alongside, as though she was starting a day at the office. When the phone rang to disturb this temporary order, she jumped in surprise.
‘I’ve thought about a place we could meet in relative safety,’ Harry Wesley announced directly. ‘You sound as though you’re on a train.’
‘I am. Just south of Lyon. Doing about two hundred miles an hour.’
‘Are you coming back here, or stopping off at Paris?’
‘Paris.’
‘Ah, risky territory, then.’
‘I’m going to be there at least one, possibly two nights.’
‘Is that an invitation?’
She had to admit that it might have been construed as one, although she didn’t quite know how to respond to his question. A field of cows came and went before the train plunged into a tunnel and the connection was broken. She instinctively switched off the mobile but as soon as the train emerged into the bright day, felt guilty and pressed it back into action. She waited for it to ring again and then wondered if he might think that she’d deliberately cut him off so she called him back.
‘Tunnel.’
‘I thought you might have cut me off.’
‘I thought you might think that, but I didn’t.’
‘In that case, what about the British Museum?’
‘What about it?’ Below her she could see the autoroute run alongside the track, the train effortlessly leaving behind the glinting cars as it dashed northwards.
‘There’s something I want to show you.’
The autoroute began to peel away and a man stood by his car beating its roof in frustration at having broken down. She craned her neck to watch him but in a matter of seconds he was gone.
‘Hello. Are you still there?’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was distracted by something out of the window.’
‘Well, as I was saying, it seems a safe enough environment, lots of other people about. And I could show you some of the Anglo-Saxon stuff that Flotsam might have grown up with.’
‘So this is more like work, rather than a date?’ The train rushed through a station too fast for Beatrice to register its name.
‘As you wish,’ he said.
‘When were you thinking?’
‘What about Saturday morning?’
That would give her two clear days in Paris and Beatrice warmed to the idea of having a sort of deadline to limit her time in France. ‘Eleven at in the café under the new dome?’
‘See you then.’ And he rang off, part of a story that demanded further explanation, like the man on the motorway, but in a way just as out of reach, a single frame from a film.
By five o’clock Beatrice was back at the canal having reserved a room at the same hotel from the train. She wasted no time and with Harry’s voicemail observation in mind, walked over to the apartment block by the park to see if she could find out more from Marguerite Fourcas. Perhaps the old woman would be on her second whisky which might help her cause.
‘Madame Fourcas? This is Beatrice Palmenter. I came to see you the other day about Monsieur Troumeg.’
She could hear the woman absorb the information and reorientate herself around the surprise visit before the buzzer clicked open the door.
‘You must excuse me for coming unannounced,’ Beatrice said in her most precise French.
‘Any visit is a treat for me, madame.’
Beatrice accepted the drink that Marguerite must have poured for her in the time it took to climb the stairs to the first floor. It was the old woman who started proceedings.
‘You want to know more from me.’
Beatrice smiled. ‘Yes. Please.’
‘I wondered if you would come back.’
She sounded almost pleased and the thought occurred to Beatrice that she might have something to get off her chest, so she came straight to the point.
‘I suppose I thought it was unlikely that you could have a friendship over such a long period without knowing more.’
The old woman laughed, a laugh which was much younger than her years. ‘Of course. But I’m not such a lonely old woman as to tell a complete stranger the story of my life, or that of Odile Leval for that matter.’ Although she got up slowly she walked easily over to the corner of the room where, unseen by Beatrice at first, she had a small lap top computer.
‘I looked you up,’ she said. ‘I like your work.’ She moved the screen around so that Beatrice could see an image of herself from her own website. ‘What made you interested in Joseph?’
Beatrice smiled at the woman. ‘I met him a couple of years ago and he seemed an interesting and amusing man so I began to read up on him but the stories were all the same. I just decided to find out if there was a reason for this and if I could find out more. Which, in a round about way, brings me here.’
‘The internet is not merely the province of the young,’ the old woman said, perhaps in response to Beatrice’s smile.
‘It is to both our advantage,’ Beatrice said, with a small bow of her head.
Marguerite returned to her seat and picked up her whisky. ‘It is true what I told you. Odile spoke very little about the war. When I met her, you must understand, we were still coming to terms with what had happened, what we, the French, had done during the war. Sometimes it takes a long time to gain
perspective.’ She paused and took a sip of whisky, holding it in her mouth before she swallowed. ‘She told me that her son had never seen his father, that he had left her as soon as she became pregnant, sometime in the winter of 1934. She told me only that he was an American journalist.’
Beatrice slowly absorbed this information, replaying in her mind the number of times she had read Troumeg’s repeated account of his father, the romantic spin put on this absent man, the glamorous war correspondent.
‘Troumeg says he was in Europe covering the Spanish Civil War, but the dates don’t match. Did she say any more?’
‘She was very philosophical about it. I think she liked the man, but what do I know, really.’
‘But I don’t think I would find a Donald Troumeg if I looked for ever, would I? This is a name that Joseph made up.’
‘She never told me his name. Maybe she wanted to preserve a myth, like you say her son has done. Perhaps that’s where he gets it from.’
‘But something did go wrong and he stopped seeing his mother, although he’s never spoken publicly about it and has given us the typical airbrushed version, another fantasy.’ She couldn’t think of the French for airbrush, but Marguerite understood what she was trying to say and offered the word herself: aèrograph.
‘But I don’t understand how she could talk so little of her son and his growing fame, let alone respond to the stories he was making up about his childhood.’
‘But perhaps, when he was young, it was perfect. Certainly she spoke to me about how they would cook together and how he often used to help the maid, I can’t remember her name…’
‘Monique.’
‘That’s right, I remember now. Monique was the housekeeper and Odile would tell me how she would leave them together and return to sumptuous meals that they had prepared between them.’
‘So at least that part is true. I wonder if Monique is still alive?’ Beatrice frowned and tried hard to remember if she’d ever seen a surname mentioned in the hundreds of on-line clippings she’d read. It was a long shot since she would probably be in her nineties.
‘The boy was only five when the war started and the Germans came to the city. Can you imagine how frightened Odile must have been, a single parent in a place where even the French hated the Jews? I don’t know how she – they – survived.’ She shook the ice in the bottom of her glass and it rang like an alarm in the small room, the echo filling the silence that followed her statement.
‘But you must have asked her?’
‘Of course. You must remember I didn’t know her during those years. I had my own battles to fight elsewhere.’ She pushed her glass towards Beatrice who added a splash of whisky to the melting ice. Marguerite nodded and looked at the other glass and Beatrice poured a measure into her own. ‘Until you have a child you simply can’t understand how far you would go to protect it. My son died from the flu before the war started and sometimes I saw this as a blessing, that I didn’t have to fear for him during those dark years.’
Beatrice was about to offer her sympathies but the women held up a hand to stop her. ‘It was a long time ago and I have many memories of him. I mention it to show you how much I understood what Odile had to live through.’
‘Do you think she had something to hide?’
‘Once upon a time, many years ago, you lived under an invader, first the Romans, then the Danes and finally the French, but it was so long ago that you’ve turned it to your advantage. The English have no idea what it was like to be humiliated by the Germans. So close and yet so far away.’
Beatrice acted as she would have done if a camera had been recording this interview and remained quiet. Somewhere the traffic flowed up and down the rue Manin and the ambient hum of time passing filled the moment and if it had been on tape she would have let this telling atmospheric silence continue, the old woman’s eyes staring ahead as the years peeled away.
‘She didn’t speak, but I heard stories. After the war the French tore themselves apart. We hated each other even more than we hated the Germans, if that is possible. Can you imagine, I saw a woman running naked down the boulevard St Michel. Her head was shaved.’ The old woman held her glass but she was not drinking. ‘Her body was shaved and between her breasts she was tattooed with a swastika. They were beating her like an animal. Seventy years ago. It’s not long. I still walk by the spot, in front of the cafés where people now sit and chat, and I can see her, the red marks across her buttocks, the terror on her face. The shame.’
Beatrice waited again, perhaps five seconds, or was it five minutes?
‘But this was not Odile Leval?’
The old woman shook her head. ‘No, but it might have been. It is what they said, but I think I understood differently. There was another quality in Odile, a dignity beyond this.’ The old woman refocused and looked directly at Beatrice. ‘Who knows? What was the truth and what were lies flowed into each other. What Odile did, I don’t know. But she survived when many, many Jews did not. I miss her.’ She pushed her whisky glass forward again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The baby’s head is so soft it frightens her. She looks down on the tufted crown and feels the heat of her small face pressing against her breast. Her hand traces the warm outline and her fingers spread across the dome in protection. On the baby’s tiny wrist is a bracelet of thin silver wire through which has been threaded three amber beads. Her mother said the beads represented the three generations of women who now remain silently together in the room, grandmother at her bench under the window, the child asleep in her arms. She sees her mother differently again, understands the fierce animal qualities that had made her survive and which binds them together. Now it is her duty to do the same for the life that lies across her lap. Everything has changed and her body is alert in a way that it has never been before. It frightens her to think of the horsemen who had attacked them in the market and she shuts her eyes and feels even more keenly the helplessness of the baby on her knee. The long hot summer is over and dull grey clouds have taken the colour from the landscape. A fire burns and gives off the sweet smell of wood and the very perfection of the scene causes her to worry, to hug the baby closer, to realise how easily this could be taken from her.
And so it was.
The sailor is killed on a day of thick snow which lies on the town like a cold glove to transform their lives. The rigging that collapses and brings his life to a sudden end starts a succession of events which merely confirmed her sense of dread. Her mother takes the blow with the stoicism she has come to expect but she is regarded as cursed, with three husbands and two children dead. She observes that people become more formal with her, unable to place this thrice-widowed woman within the pattern of life. For the first time, during that strange winter, the southern port appears alien. Perhaps it is the birth of her child which provokes the sensation of being separated from her natural environment, the realisation that this is not their true home. And she weighs the dilemma in her mind, the wish for the child to see the grey town and the old river, with the fear of the long and dangerous journey back. Her mother is troubled with the same impossible equation and from time to time she sees her staring out over the port, lines creasing her forehead. She never stops supporting her daughter and grandchild and declares that the answer will come in the fullness of time. She ministers to her mother, to return what she herself has been given. When the summer comes around again and the hills appear too hot to touch, she raises with her husband the prospect of making the long voyage back to the grey town, of changing the colours of his life. The baby is now just taking her first steps and soon she would be speaking the language of the south, her father’s own tongue. The girl knows the mantle of responsibility is passing to her and she tells her husband. He picks up the child, who has the same brown skin as him, both made for the sun. When life offers so many dangers why would they impose a treacherous voyage on themselves and the child? And she knows he is right and she accepts the decision. But her apprehensions
persist, her body constantly tense for a blow which she expects to come at any minute, so much so that she can barely let her child out of her sight. Never before has the future so preoccupied her, seemed so uncertain, so hard to peer into.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Beatrice took the Metro to the junction of the boulevard St Germain and boulevard St Michel and stood at the busy crossroads before ordering a coffee at one of the cafés that Marguerite had described, sitting with the tourists, watching the flow of people, smartly dressed, comfortable, intent on their lives, pass in front of her and she imagined the naked woman running between them, unseen, a ghost from the past but indelibly present and deliberately ignored.
