by Nevil Shute
Their meal finished, the children became restless. It was still not nine o’clock, and it was necessary to spin out time. Ronnie said, wriggling in his chair, “May we get down and go and look at the sea?”
It was better to have them out of the way than calling fresh attention to the party in the estaminet. Howard said, “Go on. You can go just outside the door and lean over the harbour wall. Don’t go any further than that.”
Sheila went with him; the other children stayed quiet in their seats. Howard ordered another bottle of the thin red wine.
At ten minutes past nine a big, broad-shouldered young man in fisherman’s red poncho and sea boots rolled into the estaminet. One would have said that he had visited competitive establishments on the way, because he reeled a little at the bar. He took in all the occupants of the estaminet in one swift, revolving glance like a lighthouse.
“Ha!” he said. “Give me a Pernod des Anges, and to hell with the sale Boche.”
The men at the bar said, “Quietly. There are Germans outside.”
The girl behind the bar wrinkled her brows. “Pernod des Anges? It is a pleasantry, no doubt? Ordinary Pernod for M’sieur.”
The man said, “You have no Pernod des Anges?”
“No, m’sieur. I have never heard of it.”
The man remained silent, holding to the bar with one hand, swaying a little.
Howard got up and went to him. “If you would like to join us in a glass of the rouge,” he said.
“Assuredly.” The young man left the bar, and crossed with him to the table.
Howard said quietly, “Let me introduce you. This is my daughter-in-law, Mademoiselle Nicole Rougeron.”
The young man stared at him. “You must be more careful of your French idiom,” he said softly out of the corner of his mouth. “Keep your mouth shut, and leave the talking to me.”
He slumped down into a seat beside them. Howard poured him out a glass of the red wine; the young man added water to it, and drank. He said quietly, “Here is the matter. My boat lies at the quay, but I cannot take you on board here, because of the Germans. You must wait here till it is dark, and then take the footpath to the Phare des Vaches — that is an automatic light on the rocks, half a mile towards the sea, that is not now in use. I will meet you there with the boat.”
Howard said, “That is clear enough. How do we get on to the footpath from here?”
Focquet proceeded to tell him. Howard was sitting with his back to the estaminet door, facing Nicole. As he sat listening to the directions his eye fell on the girl’s face, strained and anxious.
“Monsieur . . .” she said, and stopped.
There was a heavy step behind him, and a few words spoken in German. He swung round in his chair; the young Frenchman by his side did the same. There was a German soldier there, with a rifle. Beside him was one of the engineers from the E boat by the quay, in stained blue dungarees.
The moment remained etched upon the old man’s memory. In the background the fishermen around the bar stood tense and motionless; the girl had paused, cloth in hand, in the act of wiping a glass.
It was the man in dungarees who spoke. He spoke in English with a German-American accent.
“Say,” he said. “How many of you guys are Britishers?”
There was no answer from the group.
He said, “Well, we’ll all just get along to the guardroom and have a lil’ talk with the Feldwebel. And don’t let any of you start getting fresh, because that ain’t going to do you any good.”
He repeated himself in very elementary French.
10
THERE WAS A torrent of words from Focquet, rather cleverly poured out with well-simulated alcoholic indignation. He knew nothing, he said, of these others; he was just taking a glass of wine with them — there was no harm in that. He was about to sail, to catch the tide. If he went with them to the guardroom there would be no fish for déjeuner to-morrow, and how would they like that? Landsmen could never see further than their own noses. What about his boat, moored at the quay? Who would look after that?
The sentry prodded him roughly in the back with the butt of his rifle, and Focquet became suddenly silent.
Two more Germans, a private and a Gefreiter, came hurrying in; the party were hustled to their feet and herded out of the door. Resistance was obviously useless. The man in dungarees went out ahead of them, but he reappeared in a few minutes, bringing with him Ronnie and Sheila. Both were very much alarmed, Sheila in tears.
“Say,” he said to Howard, “I guess these belong to you. They talk English pretty fine, finer’n any one could learn it.”
Howard took one of them hand in hand with him on each side, but said nothing. The man in dungarees stared oddly at him for a minute, and remained standing staring after them as they were shepherded towards the guardroom, in the gathering dusk.
Ronnie said, frightened, “Where are we going to now, Mr. Howard? Have the Germans got us?”
Howard said, “We’re just going with them for a little business. Don’t be afraid; they won’t do anything to hurt us.”
The little boy said, “I told Sheila you would be angry if she talked English, but she would do it.”
Nicole said, “Did she talk English to the man in the overall?”
Ronnie nodded. Then he glanced up timorously at the old man. “Are you angry, Mr. Howard?” he ventured.
There was no point in making more trouble for the children than they had already coming to them. “No,” he said. “It would have been better if she hadn’t, but we won’t say any more about it.”
Sheila was still crying bitterly. “I like talking English,” she wailed.
Howard stooped and wiped her eyes; the guards, considerately enough, paused for a moment while he did so. “Never mind,” he said. “You can talk as much English as you like now.”
She walked on with him soberly, in sniffing, moist silence.
A couple of hundred yards up the road to Lannilis they were wheeled to the right, and marched in to the house that was the guardroom. In a bare room the Feldwebel was hastily buttoning his tunic as they came in. He sat down behind a bare trestle table; their guards ranged them in front of him.
He glanced them up and down scornfully. “So,” he said at last. “Legitimations-papiere.”
Howard could understand only a few words of German, the others nothing at all. They stared at him uncertainly. “Cartes d’identité!” he said sharply.
Focquet and Nicole produced their French identity cards; the man studied them in silence. Then he looked up. Howard put down his British passport on the bare table, in the manner of a man who plays the last card of a losing hand.
The Feldwebel smiled faintly, took it up, and studied it with interest. “So!” he said. “Engländer. Winston Churchill.”
He raised his eyes and studied the children. In difficult French he asked if they had any papers, and appeared satisfied when told that they had not.
Then he gave a few orders in German. The party were searched for weapons, and all they had was taken from them and placed on the table — papers, money, watches, and personal articles of every sort, even their handkerchiefs. Then they were taken to another room with a few palliasses laid out upon the floor, given a blanket each, and left. The window was barred over roughly with wooden beams; outside it in the road a sentry stood on guard.
Howard turned to Focquet. “I am very sorry this has happened,” he said. He felt that the Frenchman had not even had a run for his money.
The young man shrugged his shoulders philosophically. “It was a chance to travel and to see the world, with de Gaulle,” he said. “Another chance will come.” He threw himself down on one of the palliasses, pulled the blanket round him, and composed himself to sleep.
Howard and Nicole arranged the palliasses in two pairs to make beds for the little boys and the little girls and got them settled down to sleep. There remained one mattress over.
“You take that,” he said. �
��I shall not sleep to-night.”
She shook her head. “Nor I either.”
Half an hour later they were sitting side by side leaning against the wall, staring out of the barred window ahead of them. It was practically dark within the room; outside the harbour showed faintly in the starlight and the last glow of evening. It was still quite warm.
She said, “They will examine us in the morning. What shall we say?”
“There’s only one thing we can say. Tell them the exact truth.”
She considered this for a moment. “We must not bring in Arvers, nor Loudeac or Quintin if we can avoid it.”
He agreed. “They will ask where I got these clothes. Can you say that you gave them to me?”
She nodded. “That will do. Also, I will say that I knew Focquet and arranged with him, myself.”
She crossed to the young man, now half asleep, and spoke earnestly to him for a few moments. He grunted in agreement; the girl came back to Howard and sat down again.
“One more thing,” he said. “There is Marjan. Shall I say that I picked him up upon the road?”
She nodded. “On the road, before you came to Chartres. I will see that he understands that.”
He said doubtfully, “That should be all right so long as they don’t crossexamine the children.”
They sat in silence for a long time after that. Presently she stirred a little by him, shifting to a more comfortable position.
“Go and lie down, Nicole,” he said. “You must get some sleep.”
“I do not want to sleep, monsieur,” she said. “Truly I am better sitting here like this.”
“I’ve been thinking about things,” he said.
“I also have been thinking.”
He turned to her in the darkness. “I am so very sorry to have brought you in to all this trouble,” he said quietly. “I did want to avoid that, and I thought that we were going to.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It does not matter.” She hesitated. “I have been thinking about different things to that.”
“What things?” he asked.
“When you introduced Focquet — you said I was your daughter-in-law.”
“I had to say something,” he remarked. “And that’s very nearly true.”
In the dim light he looked in to her eyes, smiling a little. “Isn’t it?”
“Is that how you think of me?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
There was a long silence in the prison. One of the children, probably Willem, stirred and whimpered uneasily in his sleep; outside the guard paced on the dusty road.
At last she said, “What we did was wrong — very wrong.” She turned towards him. “Truly, I did not mean to do wrong when I went to Paris, neither did John. We did not go with that in mind at all. I do not want that you should think it was his fault. It was nobody’s fault, neither of us. Also, it did not seem wrong at the time.”
His mind drifted back fifty years. “I know,” he said. “That’s how these things happen. But you aren’t sorry, are you?”
She did not answer that, but she went on more easily. “He was very, very naughty, monsieur. The understanding was that I was to show him Paris, and it was for that that I went to Paris to meet him. But when the time came, he was not interested in the churches or in the museums, or the picture galleries at all.” There was a touch of laughter in her voice. “He was only interested in me.”
“Very natural,” he said. It seemed the only thing to say.
“It was very embarrassing, I assure you; I did not know what I should do.”
He laughed. “Well, you made your mind up in the end.”
She said reproachfully, “Monsieur — it is not a matter to laugh over. You are just like John. He also used to laugh at things like that.”
He said, “Tell me one thing, Nicole. Did he ask you if you would marry him?”
She said, “He wanted that we should marry in Paris, before he went back to England. He said that under English law that would be possible.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked curiously.
She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “I was afraid of you, monsieur.”
“Of me?”
She nodded. “I was terrified. It now sounds very silly, but — it was so.”
He struggled to understand. “What were you frightened of?” he asked.
She said, “Figure it to yourself. Your son would have brought home a foreign girl, that he had married very suddenly in Paris. You would have thought that he had been foolish in a foreign city, as young men sometimes are. That he had been trapped by a bad woman in to an unhappy marriage. I do not see how you could have thought otherwise.”
“If I had thought that at first,” he said, “I shouldn’t have thought it for long.”
“I know that now. That is what John told me at the time. But I did not think that it was right to take the risk. I told John, it would be better for everybody that we should be a little more discreet, you understand.”
“I see. You wanted to wait a bit.”
She said, “Not longer than could be helped. But I wanted very much that everything should be correct, that we should start off right. Because, to be married, it is for all one’s life, and one marries not only to the man but to the relations also. And in a mixed marriage things are certain to be difficult, in any case. And so, I said that I would come to England for his next leave, in September or October, and we would meet in London, and he could then take me to see you in your country home. And then you would write to my father, and everything would be quite in order and correct.”
“And then the war came,” he said quietly.
She repeated, “Yes, monsieur, then the war came. It was not then possible for me to visit England. It would almost have been easier for John to visit Paris again, but he could get no leave. And so I went on struggling to get my permis and the visa month after month.”
“And then,” she said, “they wrote to tell me what had happened.”
They sat there for a long time, practically in silence. The air grew colder as the night went on. Presently the old man heard the girl’s breathing grow more regular and knew she was asleep, still sitting up upon the bare wooden floor.
After a time she stirred, and fell half over. He got up stiffly and led her, still practically asleep, to the palliasse, made her lie down, and put a blanket over her. In a short time she was asleep again.
For a long time he stood by the window, looking out over the harbour mouth. The moon had risen; the white plumes of surf upon the rocks showed clearly on the blackness of the sea. He wondered what was going to happen to them all. It might very well be that he would be taken from the children and sent to a concentration camp; that for him would be the end, before so very long. The thought of what might happen to the children distressed him terribly. At all costs, he must do his best to stay at liberty. If he could manage that it might be possible for him to make a home for them, to look after them till the war was over. A home in Chartres, perhaps, not far from Nicole and her mother. It would take little money to live simply with them, in one room or in two rooms at the most. The thought of penury did not distress him very much. His old life seemed very, very far away.
Presently the blackness of the night began to pale towards the east, and it grew colder still. He moved back to the wall and, wrapped in a blanket, sat down in a corner. Presently he fell into an uneasy sleep.
At six o’clock the clumping of the soldiers’ boots in the corridor outside woke him from a doze. He stirred and sat upright; Nicole was awake and sitting up, running her fingers through her hair in an endeavour to put it into order without a comb. A German Oberschütze came in and made signs to them to get up, indicating the way to the toilet.
Presently a private brought them china bowls, some hunks of bread, and a large jug of bitter coffee. They breakfasted, and waited for something to happen. They were silent and depressed; even the children caught the atmosphere and sat about in g
loomy inactivity.
Presently the door was flung open, and the Feldwebel was there with a couple of privates. “Marchez,” he said. “Allez, vite.”
They were herded out, and into a grey, camouflaged motor lorry with a closed, van-like body. The two German privates got into this with them and the doors were shut and locked upon them. The Feldwebel got into the seat beside the driver, turned and inspected them through a little hatchway to the driver’s compartment. The lorry started.
They were taken to Lannilis, and unloaded at the big house opposite the church, from the window of which floated the swastika flag. Here they were herded into a corridor between their guards. The Feldwebel went into a door, and closed it behind him.
They waited thus for over half an hour. The children, apprehensive and docile at the first, became bored and restless. Pierre said, in his small voice, “Please, monsieur, may I go out and play in the square?”
Sheila and Ronnie said in unison, and very quickly, “May I go too?”
Howard said, “Not just now. You’ll have to stay here for a little while.”
Sheila said mutinously, “I don’t want to stay here. I want to go out in the sun and play.”
Nicole stooped to her and said, “Do you remember Babar the Elephant?”
The little girl nodded.
“And Jacko the Monkey? What did he do?”
Laughter, as at a huge, secret joke. “He climbed up Babar’s tail, right up on to his back!”
“Whatever did he do that for?”
The stolid, grey-faced Germans looked on mirthlessly, uncomprehending. For the first time in their lives they were seeing foreigners, displaying the crushing might and power of their mighty land. It confused them and perplexed them that their prisoners should be so flippant as to play games with their children in the corridor outside the very office of the Gestapo. It found the soft spot in the armour of their pride; they felt an insult which could not be properly defined. This was not what they had understood when their Führer last had spoken from the Sport-Palast. This victory was not as they had thought that it would be.
