Sun in Splendour

by JH Fletcher

  Knew when to tell a lie, too. ‘That’s it, ma’am.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ the old woman said. ‘The army will sort things out, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’m sure they will, ma’am.’

  There were days when they weren’t so lucky, when the rain never stopped, when doors were slammed in their faces. Once a householder set his dogs on them; more than once they climbed through hedges into muddy fields to steal carrots, turnips, whatever they could find. Ate them raw, mud and all. At least the rain meant they were never short of water.

  Twice they saw columns of troops, once a small group of what looked like officers, well-mounted, travelling fast, but nobody bothered them. They grew berry-brown, hard, wild-looking. They survived. Towards the end, Eugénie even came to enjoy the loneliness. In the monotony of the desolate landscape, she found beauty: the fields divided by lines of poplars, the sky reflecting from the drainage dykes in tones of grey and blue and white, in gold and orange and red. The solitude, no longer frightening, offered freedom, a sense of space in which to come slowly to terms with what had passed, what was to come.

  At first she had thought of Alain constantly, his loss a blade working in her wounded flesh. His innocence. That, she discovered, had been the essence of Alain Desmoulins, and that was what stayed with her now.

  Others might remember his obsession with light and colour, all the tricks of the artist’s trade. He was the father of her children; she might have remembered that side of him, too, their lovemaking in the rackety old bed, the room smelling of turpentine and poverty, the warm pungency of sex. At first she had even tried to relive those moments, in their lonely roadside bivouacs, to bring back the gathering tensions, the scalding release of the flesh. She had not succeeded. They remained elusive, fragments of dreams visible only through a mist of sleep.

  No, it was his innocence that had bound her to him, that in the end had brought him to his death. Because he was dead; she had no doubt of that. If he had survived, he would have contacted her, somehow. Perhaps it would have been easier had she been able to see his corpse, to experience the certainty that lay behind the horror, yet even without that she had no feeling that he was still alive. He was the past within the present; there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on what might or might not have happened to him.

  ‘Alain?’ she said, during the long nights. ‘Alain?’

  He did not answer.

  No, he was gone; what remained was reality, the present and the future. For her own sake, the sake of her children, she had already decided what she was going to do about that.

  Nantes was as she had always remembered, a grey city, spiked with spires, set beside a grey river some miles upstream from a greyer sea.

  Her parents were like the town; that, too, she remembered. They did not know what to do with the daughter returned so unexpectedly into their lives. They stared at this wild creature and her gypsy children, come suddenly to disrupt the precious monotony of their existence. They wondered aloud what they had done to be subjected to this visitation.

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ she told them curtly. ‘We won’t be staying long.’

  They stared at their grandchildren, felt duty-bound to approach them but, flexible as bricks, could not get close. For which they blamed the children, and their mother.

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Dead.’

  They could not bring themselves to ask why or how. They had never met him, knew of his existence only from the sparse handful of letters she had sent them from time to time, letters to which they had responded with dutiful punctuality, conveying to her all the grey non-events of their existence. They had never mentioned her own life, her husband or children; the idea of an artist in the family had been as agreeable to them as a lunatic. Which, no doubt, he had closely resembled.

  They would not permit themselves to say or even think that it might be better that Alain were dead; the idea was there, nonetheless, and Eugénie knew it. She had expected nothing else; all the same, it made her angry. The anger reinforced her determination to go ahead with the plan she had dreamed up along the road.

  She went looking for a friend whom she remembered from the old days. Yvette had also married, but less adventurously; she had never thought of leaving the town of her birth, had married Jean Desgranges, her childhood sweetheart. Jean ran a livery stable on the outskirts of town, but it was not this, or even her old friendship, that interested Eugénie now.

  She remembered how, in the days before she left Nantes, Yvette’s father had owned a schooner, trading up and down the Biscay coast. He had gone as far as Brittany, sometimes even across the Channel to Falmouth or Penzance. If he still had the boat, she wanted a passage on it. She had made up her mind to leave France. She would try her luck, away from soldiers and firing squads, in England.

  ‘But you don’t speak the language.’ Fascinated by her daring, Yvette was frightened for her, as well. Paris had been bad enough, but England …

  ‘I shall learn.’

  Yvette shook her head, but said no more. Even in the old days, she had never been able to stop Eugénie doing the madcap things she had set her heart on doing; she was not about to try now.

  ‘We’ll speak to the old man. If you’ve made up your mind.’

  She did so but he wasn’t prepared to risk it; after the collapse of the Commune, lots of people were trying to get out of the country.

  ‘There are troops everywhere.’ He was decent enough, but a lifetime at sea had taught him the folly of taking unnecessary risks. ‘I take you on board and they catch me, I lose my boat.’ Possibly more than his boat; the idea was out of the question. ‘As it is, there’s already a new regulation.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Come into effect last week. Anyone turns up from the capital, you’re supposed to let the authorities know they’re here.’

  ‘No-one would tell them.’ Meaning, Surely you wouldn’t …

  ‘Maybe not. But the flics are keeping their eyes open, I can tell you that, and some folk don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.’

  He wasn’t going to risk his neck for a woman he hardly knew; all the same, Eugénie decided she could trust him.

  ‘How do I do it, then?’

  He rubbed his chin. ‘Made up your mind, have you?’

  ‘What else can I do? Catch me, they’ll shoot me.’

  ‘They’ve got guards on every gangway in Nantes. Same at Saint Nazaire. Noirmoutier’s a possibility. Ships put in there sometimes — big ships, too, some of them. You might get a passage on one of them. You’ll need money, mind. They won’t do it for love.’

  ‘How much money?’

  ‘Depends how desperate you are. Those fellows, they charge what they think you can afford.’

  ‘Noirmoutier?’ Yvette said. ‘Been there, have you?’

  ‘I never went anywhere until I went to Paris.’ She knew it lay a few miles down the coast, but that was all. What she’d heard, there wasn’t much there, anyway.

  ‘Gimme the creeps, only time I was there,’ said Yvette.

  Noirmoutier was an island, a mass of jagged granite and basalt, lying some kilometres offshore. The gales were something to see: a ton of salt dropped on the island every day, or so the locals said. No wonder nothing much grew. A handful of houses, the inhabitants as hard as the rock itself. At the seaward end of the island, the small harbour was guarded by a wall of massive stone slabs. On the landward side, the island was connected to the mainland by a granite causeway, and it was this that had given Yvette the creeps.

  ‘It’s the tide, see?’

  The causeway was exposed for an hour on either side of low water; for the rest of the time, the sea covered it.

  ‘Comes in so fast. One minute the land’s dry, next thing the water’s up round your knees.’

  She said there had been many cases of people being swept away; not only visitors, either.

  Black rocks, surly people, dangerous tides … It certainly did
n’t sound much of a place, but ships put in there from time to time, there were few regulations and no soldiers. If Eugénie had really made up her mind to get out of France, Yvette’s father said, Noirmoutier was the place to do it.

  ‘Noirmoutier it is,’ she decided.

  Getting there would be another matter, but here Yvette’s husband, the owner of the livery stable, might be in a position to help.

  ‘Know how to ride, do you?’ Jean Desgranges asked.

  ‘Not properly.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Go with her, Jean,’ Yvette said. ‘Give her a hand, why don’t you?’

  It made sense; he had relations on the mainland near the island who might be persuaded to put them up until a ship arrived.

  ‘I heard there’s a boat next week,’ he said.

  It had been a hard decision. The blood, culture and customs of France ran in Eugénie’s veins; she had been nowhere else, spoke no word of any other language. It was all very well telling Yvette she would learn English; it would take time, even if she were capable, and what was she to live on in the meantime? How was she to pay for the lessons, come to that? The money she had saved would not last forever. There would be little room in her budget for language classes.

  Yet to stay was impossible. The authorities were determined to root out every vestige of the Commune. They would certainly catch up with her eventually. Even if they did not, what was she to live on? She could not scrounge on her parents forever; they would be the first to object to that. Indeed, her mother had spoken of it already.

  ‘Thinking of staying long?’ she had asked two days before. ‘Our budget don’t run to visitors, you know.’

  There would be no arguments from that quarter if she told them she was on her way. Might be other problems, though.

  ‘We’ve always kept on the right side of the law,’ her father said. ‘Taken a pride in it.’

  Eugénie gave him a look. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  As if she didn’t know.

  ‘We’re supposed to report you.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘What you got up to in Paris is your business,’ her father said. ‘But this is our town. We got a good name, don’t forget.’

  She was sick of it. Her husband, poor innocent, had been murdered for something he hadn’t done, she and her two children were destitute, yet all her parents could think about was their good name.

  ‘I told you already,’ she said. ‘We won’t be staying long.’ Even that didn’t satisfy them.

  ‘Try not to embarrass us,’ her father said.

  ‘It’s a poor lookout when you’re not happy in your own home,’ her mother said.

  The sooner she was out of the country, the better.

  Two days later she took the children for a walk. It was raining, yet Eugénie felt that if she stayed in the house, she would start smashing plates.

  They walked as far as the bridge. Aline threw sticks in the river and ran across to see them pop out on the other side. After a bit they strolled back up the hill. They rounded the corner. Stopped as though the earth had opened. On her parents’ doorstep, talking to her father, were two gendarmes.

  12

  Clutching Aline’s hand in her own, Eugénie ran. Mindlessly, heading nowhere, terror dogging her.

  Fifty metres down the street, she became aware of passers-by eyeing her curiously. At all costs she must remain inconspicuous; she forced herself to slow down. Head high, the very picture of decorum, she strolled ladylike through the prim Nantes streets, while the hammers of hell beat in her heart.

  How had they found her? How was she to avoid them?

  She had no faith in her parents. They would not deliberately betray her — however disillusioned with them she might be, she would never believe that — but disappointment in the daughter she had turned out to be had opened a chasm in their defences. The men who had murdered Alain, who had wrought such slaughter in the streets of Paris, would know only too well how to exploit that weakness, would drive a coach and four through their reticence.

  Escape, now, had become a necessity. She walked straight to Yvette’s house.

  ‘I’ll find out what’s going on.’

  ‘I don’t want you dragged into this.’

  ‘I’ve every right to call on your parents if I want to.’

  Eugénie laughed bitterly. ‘What rights do any of us have?’

  Timid by nature, Yvette was innocent of the world’s iron brutalities and went to see Eugénie’s parents, daring harm to come upon her.

  She doesn’t know what she’s doing …

  Hopefully, innocence would be her shield; surely not even the authorities could suspect such a woman? Yet Eugénie remained frightened for her, knowing how innocence was rated by the world.

  Perhaps, after all, her fears had been groundless. Yvette returned without trouble. She reported that no-one had spoken to her, she had seen nothing suspicious. Yet was infuriated by what Eugénie’s father had told her.

  ‘One of the neighbours must have tipped them off. They told your dad he could be up in court for not reporting your arrival.’

  ‘He’ll hate me for that.’

  Apparently not. The way the gendarmes had spoken had turned him into an ally. He had told Yvette he would do all he could to protect his daughter from such ruffians.

  ‘He said they were unforgivably discourteous,’ Yvette explained.

  Now there was a word. What happened to your husband? Eugénie thought. The authorities murdered him. How discourteous of them. ‘They’ll be locking him up, next.’

  ‘He says they wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Those brutes would shoot him as soon as look at him. I’ve seen them do it. Why do you think I’m leaving? Because I can’t fight them and don’t want them to finish me off. Or my kids.’ She rested her hand on her friend’s arm. ‘I don’t want them to finish you off, either.’

  Yvette, secure in her ignorance, was impervious to Eugénie’s terrors. Never mind what had happened in the capital. Paris was another world. People were civilised here; Nantes would never tolerate such behaviour.

  ‘Then why are they still looking for us? I’ve done nothing. Aline and Marie have done nothing.’

  ‘They only want to ask you a few questions. When they know you had nothing to do with the Commune, that’ll be the end of it.’

  Alain’s blood prevented her believing it. ‘I won’t risk it. Stick you up against a wall, it’s a bit late to change your mind about what nice guys they are.’

  ‘Do you really want to go to England?’

  ‘Wanting’s got nothing to do with it. I’ve no choice.’

  ‘I don’t know how you dare,’ Yvette said. She thought to disarm murder with a smile, yet the idea of her friend sailing to England filled her with alarm. ‘But Jean will fix it up for you, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘That’s what I want.’

  * * *

  Within two days everything was organised. The rumour was confirmed; a ship was expected in Noirmoutier at the end of the week. Jean would take them on horseback. They would stay with his relatives. When the boat arrived Jean would guide them over the causeway to the island and see them on board. They would be safe.

  ‘It is hard to imagine,’ Eugénie said. ‘To be safe …’

  ‘The question of money …’ Jean looked apologetic.

  Not for himself; for the passage. And perhaps a franc or two for the relatives, who would be sticking their necks out for someone they didn’t know.

  ‘There is money.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He did not say Show me. He trusted her. It was a good feeling.

  Yvette must have been under observation, after all. The police came that night.

  The first thing anyone knew was a hammering on the door, voices ordering them to open up.

  Eugénie running here and there, visualising herself, the children, before the firing squad.<
br />
  Yvette, who had told her how nice the Nantes police were, who feared so much for Eugénie in England, was suddenly, unimaginably, brave. She radiated a huge and stalwart calm that throttled Eugénie’s terror.

  ‘Out the back,’ she said. ‘With the children. Quick!’

  While Jean delayed things as much as he could, calling to the raiders through the cottage door, making a meal out of opening the locks, pulling back the wrought-iron bolts.

  ‘Coming. Coming. What’s your rush?’

  The night was dark. In the stables, a clop of hooves on cobbles as the disturbed animals shifted uneasily.

  Eugénie thought they were going to hide in the stables amid the warm horses, the ammoniacal scent of dung, but Yvette, the innocent, said no, they were bound to search for them there, and led her into a pasture that lay grey and silent beneath the stars.

  On the far side of the pasture, a stone hedge. In the hedge, where some of the stones had slipped, a tumbled space like a tiny cave.

  ‘In there …’

  It seemed that the nightmare would never end. Eugénie waited in darkness, cold, frightened, hating. What they were doing to her, to the children … We shall never recover from this, she thought. Neither I nor Aline nor Marie, who is too young to remember — yet who, I am certain, will remember. We have done nothing, yet what they have done to us will damage us as surely as the firing squad. We shall never recover.

  Once again Aline was grey and silent, as for so many weeks she had been grey and silent. She lives her life in terror, Eugénie thought. I do what I can, but how can I protect her from all this? I cannot. So they punish me again because of my helplessness, punish her simply for being alive, this three-year-old child who has done nothing, nothing, but will be scarred forever because of it.

  Defiant and angry, she thought, I am glad I do not believe in God. In the forgiveness of sin. I shall never forgive them for what they have done to us. My spirit will haunt them forever. I shall pray to the God in whom I do not believe that they will be made to suffer as I and my children have suffered. Eternally, in fire.