by Ian Mcewan
Part Four
St Maurice de Navacelles 1946
IN THE SPRING of 1946, taking advantage of a newly liberated Europe and favourable exchange rates, my parents-in-law, Bernard and June Tremaine, set off on a honeymoon tour of France and Italy. They had met in 1944 in Senate House, Bloomsbury, where they both worked. My wife’s father, a Cambridge science graduate, had a desk job peripherally connected with the intelligence services. It had something to do with the supply of special items. My mother-in-law was a linguist working in an office which liaised with or, as she used to put it, smoothed out the rumpled feelings of the Free French. She occasionally found herself in the same room as de Gaulle. It was translation work for a project involving the adaptation of treadle sewing machines to power generation that brought her to the office of her future husband. They were not given permission to leave their jobs until almost a year after the war ended. They were married in April. The idea was to spend the summer travelling before settling down to peace-time, married life and civilian work.
In the years when these things mattered more to me, I used to reflect a great deal on the different war work available to people of different classes, and on this lively assumption of choice, this youthful desire to experience new freedoms which, as far as I know, hardly touched my own parents’ lives. They also married soon after the war ended. My mother had been a Land Girl, which she hated, according to one of my aunts. In 1943 she transferred to work in a munitions factory near Colchester. My father was in the infantry. He survived intact the evacuation from Dunkirk, fought in North Africa and finally met his bullet during the Normandy landings. It passed clean through his right hand without harming a bone. My parents could have travelled after the war. Apparently they inherited a few hundred pounds from my grandfather just about the time my father was demobbed. Theoretically, they were free to go, but I doubt if it occurred to them, or to any of their friends. I used to think it one more aspect of the narrowness of my background that the money was used to buy the terraced house in which my sister and I were born, and to launch the hardware business which supported us after our parents’ sudden death.
Now I think I understand a little more. My father-in-law spent his working hours on problems like silent power generation for the operation of wireless transmitters in remote French farmhouses where there was no electricity supply. In the evenings he went back to his digs and dull wartime diet in Finchley, and at weekends visited his parents in Cobham. Later in the war there was his courtship, with cinema visits and Sunday hikes in the Chilterns. Set against this the life of an infantry sergeant: enforced travel abroad, boredom alternating with severe stress, the violent deaths and terrible injuries of close friends, no privacy, no women, irregular news from home. The prospect of a life of constrained and rhythmic ordinariness must have acquired, in the slow slog eastwards through Belgium with a throbbing hand, a glow quite unknown to my parents-in-law.
Understanding these differences does not make them any more attractive, and I have always known whose war I would rather have had. The honeymooning couple arrived in the Italian seaside town of Lerici in mid-June. The chaos and devastation of post-war Europe, especially in northern France and Italy, had shocked them. They offered themselves for six weeks’ voluntary work in a Red Cross packing station on the outskirts of the town. It was dull, arduous labour and the hours were long. People were exhausted, preoccupied with daily issues of survival, and no one seemed to care that this was a couple on honeymoon. Their immediate boss, ‘il capo’, took against them. He bore a grudge against the British he was too proud to discuss. They lodged with Signor and Signora Massucco, who were still grieving for their two sons, their only children, killed in the same week, fifty miles apart, just before the Italian surrender. Some nights the English couple were woken by the elderly parents downstairs weeping together over their loss.
The food ration, on paper at least, was adequate but local corruption kept it to a minimum. Bernard developed a skin complaint which spread from his hands to his throat and across his face. June was propositioned daily, despite the brass curtain ring she wore specially. Men were constantly standing too close, or rubbing against her as they passed in the gloom of the packing shed, or tweaking her behind or the bare skin of her forearm. The problem, the other women told her, was her fair hair.
They could have left at any time, but the Tremaines stuck it out. This was their small atonement for their comfortable war. It was also an expression of their, idealism; it was ‘winning the peace’ and helping to ‘build a new Europe’. But their departure from Lerici was rather sad. No one noticed them go. The grieving Italians were ministering to a dying parent on the top floor and the house had filled with relatives. The Red Cross station was absorbed by an embezzlement scandal. Bernard and June slipped away before dawn one morning in early August to wait out on the main road for the bus that would take them north to Genoa. As they stood there in the half light, depressed and hardly speaking, they would surely have felt cheered about their contribution to a new Europe to have known that they had already conceived their first child, a daughter, my wife, who would one day put up a good fight for a seat in the European Parliament.
They travelled by bus and train, westwards through Provence, through flash floods and electrical storms. In Aries they met a French government official who drove them to Lodève in Languedoc. He told them mat if they presented themselves at his hotel in a week’s time he would take them on with him to Bordeaux. The skies had cleared, they were not due in England for another two weeks and so they set off on a short walking tour.
This is the region where the causses, high limestone plateaux, rise a thousand feet above the coastal plain. In places the cliffs drop spectacularly hundreds of feet. Lodève stands at the foot of one of the passes, then a narrow country road, now the busy RN 9. It is still a fine ascent, though with such traffic, hardly pleasant on foot. In those days you could pass a tranquil day climbing steadily between towering formations of rock, until you could see the Mediterranean shining behind you, thirty miles to the south. The Tremaines spent the night at the small town of Le Caylar where they bought broad-brimmed shepherds’ hats. The next morning they left the road and headed off north east across the Causse de Larzac, carrying two litres of water each.
These are some of the emptiest spaces in France. There are fewer people here now than there were a hundred years ago. Dusty tracks, unmarked on the best of maps, wind across expanses of heather, gorse and box. Deserted farms and hamlets sit in hollows of surprising greenness where small pastures are divided by ancient dry-stone walls and the paths between them, flanked by tall blackberry bushes, wild roses and oaks, have an English intimacy. But these soon give way to the emptiness again.
Towards the end of the day the Tremaines came across the Dolmen de la Prunarède, a prehistoric burial chamber. Then, only several yards further on, they found themselves standing above a deep gorge carved through the rock by the river Vis. They stopped here to finish off their provisions – huge tomatoes of a kind never seen in England, two-day-old bread as dry as biscuit and a saucisson which June sliced with Bernard’s penknife. They had been silent for hours, and now, sitting on the dolmen’s horizontal slab of stone, gazing north across the chasm to the Causse de Blandas, and beyond to where the Cévennes mountains rise, an excited discussion began in which their route the next day across this glorious alien countryside became one with their sense of their lives before them. Bernard and June were members of the Communist Party, and they were talking of the way ahead. For hours, intricate domestic details, distances between villages, choices of footpaths, the routing of fascism, class struggle, and the great engine of history whose direction was now known to science and which had granted to the Party its inalienable right to govern, all merged to one spectacular view, a beckoning avenue unrolling from the starting point of their love, out across the vast prospect of causse and mountains which reddened as they spoke, then darkened. And as the dusk gathered, so too did June’s
disquiet. Was she losing the faith already? An ageless silence was tempting her, drawing her in, but whenever she ceased her own optimistic prattle to attend to it, the void was filled with Bernard’s own sonorous platitudes, the militarised vacuities, the ‘front’ the ‘attack’ the ‘enemies’ of Marxist-Leninist thought.
June’s blasphemous uncertainties were only temporarily dispelled when the two lingered on their walk through the evening to the nearby village of St Maurice to conclude, or extend, their discussion of the future by making love, perhaps on the track itself where the ground was softest.
But the next day, and the day after, and on all the succeeding days, they never set foot in the metaphorical landscape of their future. The next day they turned back. They never descended the Gorge de Vis and walked by the mysterious raised canal that disappears into the rock, never crossed the river by the medieval bridge or climbed up to cross the Causse de Blandas and wander among the prehistoric menhirs, cromlechs and dolmens scattered in the wilderness, never began the long ascent of the Cévennes towards Florac. The next day they began their separate journeys.
In the morning they set out from the Hôtel des Tilleuls in St Maurice. As they crossed the pretty stretch of pasture and gorseland that separates the village from the edge of the gorge they were silent again. It was barely nine o’clock and already too hot. For a quarter of an hour they lost the path and had to cut across a field. The din of cicadas, the aromatic dry grasses crushed underfoot, the ferocious sun in its sky of innocent pale blue, all that had seemed so exotically southern the day before was troubling to June today. It bothered her that she was walking further away from their luggage in Lodève. In the sharp light of morning the arid horizon, the dry mountains ahead, the miles they would have to cover that day to reach the town of Le Vigan were weighing on her. The days of walking ahead of them seemed a pointless detour from her uncertainty.
She was thirty feet or so behind Bernard, whose shambling stride was as confident as his opinions. She took refuge in guilty, bourgeois thoughts of the house they would buy in England, a scrubbed kitchen table, the simple blue-and-white china her mother had given her, the baby. Ahead they could see the dreadful sheer cliff of the gorge’s northern edge. The land was already dropping slightly, the vegetation was changing. Instead of carefree joy she felt a sourceless fear, too faint to be complained of aloud. It was an agoraphobia, mediated, perhaps, by the tiny growth, the rapidly dividing cells driving Jenny into existence.
Turning back on the basis of a slight, nameless anxiety was out of the question. The day before they had agreed that here at last was the fulfilment of their months abroad. The weeks in the Red Cross packing shed behind them, the English winter ahead, why was she not rejoicing in this sunlit freedom, what was wrong with her?
Where the path began its steep descent, they stopped to marvel at the prospect. On the far side, facing them across half a mile of bright, empty space was a vertical wall of baking rock dropping three hundred feet. Here and there hardy scrub oaks had found purchase and a little soil in fissures and on ledges. This mad vigour which forced life to cling in the harshest of places wearied June. She experienced a deep nausea. A thousand feet down was the river, lost among the trees. The empty air, suffused with sunlight, seemed to contain a darkness just beyond the reach of vision.
She was standing on the path exchanging murmurs of appreciation. The earth nearby had been trodden flat by other walkers stopping to do the same. Mere pieties. The proper response was fear. She half remembered reading the accounts of eighteenth-century travellers in the Lake District and the Swiss Alps. Mountain peaks were terrifying, plummeting gorges were horrible, untamed nature was a chaos, a post-lapsarian rebuke, a dread reminder.
Her hand was resting lightly on Bernard’s shoulder, her rucksack was on the ground between her feet, and she was talking to persuade herself, listening to be persuaded, that what lay before them was exhilarating, was somehow in its very naturalness an embodiment, a reflection of their human goodness. But of course by its dryness alone, this place was their enemy. Everything that grew was tough, scrubby, prickly, hostile to die touch, preserving its fluids in the bitter cause of survival. She took her hand off Bernard’s shoulder and reached down for her water bottle. She could not speak her fear because it seemed so unreasonable. Every definition of herself she groped for in her discomfort urged her to enjoy the view and get on with the walk: a young mother-to-be in love with her husband, a socialist and optimist, compassionately rational, free of superstitions, on a walking tour in the country of her specialism, redeeming the long years of the duration and dull months in Italy, seizing the last days of carefree holiday before England, responsibility, winter.
She pushed aside her fear and began to talk with enthusiasm. And yet she knew from the map that the river crossing at Navacelles was miles upstream and that the descent would take two or three hours. They would be making the shorter, steeper climb out of the gorge in the midday heat. All afternoon they would be crossing the Causse de Blandas which she could see on the other side, basking in its heat warp. She needed all her strength, and she summoned it by talking. She heard herself compare favourably the Gorge de Vis with the Golfe de Verdon in Provence. As she talked she redoubled her jolliness, though she hated every gorge, ravine and rift in the world and she wanted to go home.
Then Bernard was talking as they picked up their rucksacks and got ready to set off again. His big, stubbly, good-natured face and protruding ears were sunburnt. His dried skin gave him a dusty appearance. How could she let him down? He was talking of a ravine in Crete. He had heard there was a magnificent spring walk to be made among the wildflowers. Perhaps they should try to go next year. She was walking on a few paces ahead of him, nodding ostentatiously.
She thought that she was experiencing no more than a passing mood, a difficulty in getting started, and that the rhythm of walking would settle her. By the evening, in the hotel at Le Vigan her anxieties would have shrunk to an anecdote; over a glass of wine, they would appear as one element in a varied day. The path was making leisurely zigzags across a broad shoulder of sloping land. Its surface was easy underfoot. She angled her broad-brimmed hat jauntily against the sun and swung her arms as she loped on down. She heard Bernard call after her and chose to ignore him. Perhaps she even thought that by striding on ahead she could somehow dishearten him, so that he would be the one to suggest turning back.
She came to a hairpin bend in the track and turned it. A hundred yards ahead, by the next bend, were two donkeys. The path was broader here, fringed by shrubs of box that looked planted out, they were so regularly spaced. She caught a glimpse of something interesting further down, and she leaned over the edge of the path to look. It was an old irrigation canal built of stone, and set into the side of the gorge. She could see the path alongside it. In half an hour they would be able to splash their faces and cool their wrists. As she came away from the edge she looked ahead again and realised that the donkeys were dogs, black dogs of an unnatural size.
She did not stop immediately. The coldness spreading from her stomach down through her legs numbed any immediate response. Instead, she slowed falteringly, taking half a dozen steps before she stood motionless and unbalanced in the centre of the path. They had not seen her yet. She knew little about dogs and she had no great fear of them. Even the frantic animals around the remote farmsteads on the Causse had worried her only a little. But the creatures that blocked the path seventy yards ahead were only dogs in outline. In size they resembled mythical beasts. The suddenness of them, the anomaly, prompted the thought of a message in dumbshow, an allegory for her decipherment alone. She had a confusing thought of something medieval, of a tableau both formal and terrifying. At this distance the animals appeared to be grazing quietly. They emanated meaning. She felt weak and sick in her fear. She was waiting for the sound of Bernard’s footsteps. Surely she had not been so far ahead of him.
In this landscape, where the working animals were small and wiry, th
ere was no use for dogs the size of donkeys. These creatures – giant mastiffs perhaps – were sniffing around a patch of grass by the side of the path. They were without collars, without an owner. They moved slowly. They seemed to be working together to some purpose. Their blackness, that they should both be black, that they belonged together and were without an owner made her think of apparitions. June did not believe in such things. She was drawn to the idea now because the creatures were familiar. They were emblems of the menace she had felt, they were the embodiment of the nameless, unreasonable, unmentionable disquiet she had experienced that morning. She did not believe in ghosts. But she did believe in madness. What she feared more than the presence of the dogs was the possibility of their absence, of their not existing at all. One of the dogs, slightly smaller than its mate, looked up and saw her.
That the animals could behave independently of one another seemed to confirm their existence in the real world. This was no comfort. While the larger dog continued to nose in the grass, the other stood quite still, one front paw raised, and looked at her, or breathed her scent in the warm air. June had grown up on the edge of the countryside, but she was a city girl really. She knew enough not to run, but she was an office, library, cinema sort of girl. In twenty-six years she had had an average share of danger. A V-bomb had once exploded three hundred yards from where she was sheltering; during the early days of the blackout she had been a passenger on a bus that had collided with a motorbike; when she was nine she had fallen in a weedy pond with all her clothes on, in mid-winter. The memory of these adventures, or the flavour of all three distilled into one metallic essence, came to her now. The dog advanced a few yards and stopped. Its tail was low, the front feet were planted firmly. June stepped backwards, one step, then another two. Her left leg was trembling in the knee joint. The right was better. She imagined the creature’s visual field: a colourless wash and one blurred hovering perpendicular, unmistakably human, edible.
