Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Now, at the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Charlotte had walked along the brown paths with their light dusting of gravel, beside those stately railings, the Senate House was draped with an outsize Nazi flag. At the top of the rue de Tournon the Luftwaffe had its headquarters: blank-eyed Nazi sentries kept guard in front of white hoardings they had erected against hurled incendiaries or suicidal acts of civilian defiance. They need hardly have bothered. In Paris the worry was about food. The papers talked of the black market and something called the ‘grey’ market, which, from what Charlotte could gather, was no more than a morally acceptable version of the black.

  She was not interested in eating; she was thinking of the Jardin du Luxembourg and what it meant. In its shade, behind its small pavilions, she had imagined Gilberte and Madame Swann. Impressed by her progress in his language, Monsieur Loiseau had ceremoniously presented her with a copy of the first volume of Proust’s novel, and in the long, quiet afternoons she had read the whole sequence with incredulous pleasure. Some of it had become a little confused in her mind and, amid the shadow of the young girls among flowers, an amorous wrestle had been transported from the Champs Elysées to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Her teenage years were not so long ago, so there was no forcing of remembrance. She could still taste the red wine from the rue de Tournon, but what she felt about this country was connected to a low responding note that the book had sounded in her. It had fused ideas of love and national honour to the memory of a kind of earthly paradise – a bell ringing on the garden gate, a little phrase in a sonata – that had been betrayed from the inside. And this betrayal was bound to happen, always – in her own life and in the life of a country.

  Charlotte found she was close to tears. She gathered herself and tried to smile at her foolishness. The memory of happiness was never lost; the difficulty was to re-establish the connection when the thread appeared to have been broken. France was not quite given up to the destroyers; her own life, too, was not beyond redemption.

  5

  ‘WE’RE GOING TO Ralph’s house this evening. Would you like to come? Should be fun.’ It was Daisy’s early-evening forecast, telephoned in from St James’s just before she left for home.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like Ralph,’ Charlotte said when Daisy came home.

  ‘I can’t stand him,’ said Daisy, kicking off her shoes. ‘Have you got a sixpence for the gas?’

  Blue and orange flames crept up the cracked honeycomb of the fire. Daisy sat on the floor and put her feet up on the low brass fender.

  ‘But he does know some nice people. Painters and so on. They’re hideously dirty, some of them, but they’re quite fun.’

  ‘Is Ralph a painter?’

  ‘No, darling, he’s a poet. Didn’t you know? That’s how we got invited to that party. Ralph wangled it. He’s awfully clever like that.’

  At the mention of the Melrose party Charlotte was aware of a moment of acute anxiety.

  ‘I think Sally wants to come too. The ghastly Terence is having to do something naval and she’ll be all moony without him.’

  ‘Has he gone to sea?’

  Daisy laughed. ‘Terence? I doubt whether he’s ever set foot in a mackerel boat. He’s just got to be in Dartmouth for a week. I think he’s instructing some young recruits on the hardships of the North Atlantic.’

  ‘Poor Sally.’

  ‘What she really hates is that Terence then has to go and see his wife in the New Forest. What are you going to wear?’

  Charlotte thought. ‘Perhaps that skirt and jacket I had on at the party the other day when—’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t wear that,’ said Daisy quickly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There might be some of the same people from the other night. Anyway, tonight’s not at all smart. I’ll probably just stay as I am. Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Well, you know your tartan skirt . . .’

  ‘It’s at the cleaners.’

  ‘But you’ve only worn it once! My God, Charlotte, don’t you know there’s a war on? Ever heard of Make-do and Mend?’

  Sally was tearful when she came home and it took all Daisy’s persuasive force to make her go with them. Ralph lived in an attic flat in a house on the Fulham Road; the blacked-out ground floor was by day a flower shop, and a bare wooden staircase took them up three flights before they arrived at Ralph’s open door.

  ‘Hello, girls. All three of you. My God. What a little collection.’

  Ralph was a pale young man with a nose like a fox terrier, reddish hair and a wheedling, ironic voice. Charlotte stepped into what was effectively a one-room flat, with a double mattress on the floor in one corner, a kitchen area with sink and gas ring in another, and in the middle of the room a long maroon-covered sofa. Sitting on it, drink in hand, was a man she recognised, with an appalled pang as she struggled to regain the composure lost to Ralph’s greeting, as Peter Gregory.

  He unfolded himself from his low seat and rose to greet them. He appeared to have no difficulty in remembering Charlotte and seemed pleased to see her again. Charlotte gained time by elaborately re-introducing Sally and Daisy, despite Gregory’s protests that he remembered them quite well.

  A third man emerged through a door in the corner, followed by the sound of a flushing lavatory, and was introduced as Miles. He gave a general wave to the room and sat down heavily on the sofa. He leaned over the arm, apparently studying Ralph’s unremarkable rug.

  ‘Beer all right for you?’ said Ralph, handing Charlotte a glass with the word Worthington stamped on the side and pouring light ale from a bottle.

  An air-raid siren was whining in the distance. ‘Bugger that,’ said Ralph. ‘I’m not going down into Mrs Porter’s cellar. I thought I might try and cook some dinner. Anyone like to help me?’

  ‘Sally’s the best cook,’ said Daisy firmly. ‘She’ll help.’

  ‘What have you got in your larder, Ralph?’ said Sally, whose temporary bereavement made her sound more than usually like a lost child.

  ‘Why aren’t you up in the sky shooting down Germans?’ Daisy asked Gregory.

  ‘I’m on leave. We have a rota. They think it’s bad for you to be on stand-by for more than a certain number of days.’ He made to resume his seat at the end of the sofa, but gestured that one of the women should sit down first. There was room for both of them between him, at one end, and the threateningly silent Miles at the other. Charlotte felt Daisy’s hand in the small of her back, while Daisy herself turned towards the kitchen area.

  When Charlotte had settled herself, Gregory crossed his legs and turned inwards to face her. He was wearing civilian clothes, an open-necked viyella shirt, a battered jacket. He asked her about her work and how she was enjoying living in London.

  She wanted him to tell her about his life on the station. Was he afraid? Did they sleep in barracks or in houses? Was it true they were sometimes drunk when they went up? Which was his favourite of the planes he had flown?

  His answers, even though these were questions he must have been asked many times before, were detailed and humorous enough; but the more he talked, the more Charlotte saw in him a sense of absence: at some level he was not willing to engage either with her or with his own experience. With a trickle of fear that grew almost to alarm, Charlotte detected that at the centre of him, where there might have been hope, bravado, even fear, there was a void.

  The first form her passion for Gregory took was a desire to feed him and encourage him, to trace out the elements of his deep fatigue and restore him to fitness. It was almost pity that she felt as she spoke to him on the sofa in Ralph’s unheated, chattering room, but she did not see how pity could coexist with the sense of vulnerability he induced in her. If she was to mother and heal him she would need to be the controlling and superior force, yet his slow, deep speech made her sense submissive danger. She felt disconcerted by her inability to find a word that expressed the nature of her response to him. Compassion, longing, gentle
ness, a wish to lose herself in him, to purge the conflicts of her life in the solution of his troubled weariness . . . These seemed to be aspects of what she felt, though she experienced them not as separate factors but as a single, precipitous anguish.

  A young man, perhaps a year or so younger even than Charlotte, sat on one of the hard chairs in Dr Wolf’s waiting room, clutching a magazine in his clawed hand. With the good fingers of the other hand he turned the pages, searching for something to detain his interest. Charlotte was behind the desk, filing patients’ notes, preparing to type a letter from Dr Wolf to a station medical officer. She consulted the scribbled notes she had taken in dictation; Dr Wolf spoke too fast for her aching fingers. She worried that she would make a crucial error – left leg for right, grams instead of grains – and begged Dr Wolf to read the typed letters carefully before signing them.

  When Charlotte rose from the desk to reach up for a file the young man’s gaze ran over the swell of her hip in its navy-blue skirt. When she sat and crossed her legs he let a sideways glance still linger in the hope of some momentary glimpse of hem or shadow. He was unrewarded, and ploughed his eyes back down the columns of Horizon.

  ‘Miss Gray? One moment, please.’ Dr Wolf’s head came round the door.

  Charlotte followed him in. It was a cold and cavernous room with old leather furniture; it smelled of gas, which the fire emitted in greater quantities than heat. Brown leather screens surrounded a couch covered with a sterilised white sheet; this was the only touch of the medical in the room. Dr Wolf in his heavy grey suit, a thin-linked watch chain roping one side of his belly to the other, looked like a doubtful financier. He had abundant woolly grey hair and dense eyebrows over gold-rimmed glasses; he characteristically held one hand in his jacket pocket while he carved words with the other in what seemed to Charlotte an exaggeratedly un-English way.

  His patient, a man whose leg had been amputated below the knee, sat in one of the big armchairs, his crutches on the faded Wilton carpet beside him. He and Dr Wolf looked very small in the empty room, Charlotte thought, like two figures from de Chirico lost in a giant piazza.

  ‘We need to arrange an operation for Lieutenant Dawson,’ Dr Wolf said. ‘Would you be kind enough to confer with my diary and see which day suits the Lieutenant. He will need to be in hospital for two days.’ He pronounced it Lootenant, the American way. Charlotte suspected his pronunciations were sometimes less a matter of accent than of predilection.

  ‘Lieutenant Dawson was wounded in France. A matter of sabotage which unfortunately . . . misfired.’

  ‘’Fraid so.’ Dawson gave a schoolboy grin. ‘One of our very own devices.’

  ‘What were you doing in France?’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Oh, terribly hush-hush, I’m afraid. There are quite a few of us over there. I was hiding out in a little village in the Loire valley and the first person I bumped into in the local café was a fellow from Manchester!’

  Charlotte helped Dawson to his feet and held his crutches till he balanced himself and made his way to the waiting room. Dr Wolf had put one of his two weekly operating sessions at the disposal of the Ministry of Defence; the reduced payment was to be deferred until the end of the War. Wolf had been a refugee from earlier displacements in Eastern Europe and viewed the new disasters in a fatalistic way.

  At lunchtime Charlotte walked up to Regent’s Park. There was a coffee stall near the Outer Circle where they had sugarless bath buns of a lumpen consistency that nevertheless did a job of kinds by occupying the stomach for two or three hours. The coffee itself was best avoided. Charlotte walked briskly in the park, threw the end of the bun to some pigeons, and tried to clear her mind.

  Ten days had passed since the evening in Ralph’s flat. She saw this interval in retrospect as confused and incomprehensible. She viewed life as narrative, because that was how she experienced it. There was the time before an event, and then, the world changed, there was the time after it. When someone died suddenly or young she always thought: who could have known, who could have foreseen this, on the day of her wedding or when we last met, when no one even knew she was ill; yet the cells were already silently about their fatal work? This violent unknowability of life was central to her experience of it, and it was pointless to pretend that it was ‘mere chance’ or that subtler philosophies were not concerned with anything so vulgar as incident or ‘story’: any interpretation that was not concerned with random changes had, in her view, begged the biggest question.

  This was what made the days of uncertainty in retrospect so baffling. Once her feelings for Peter Gregory had crystallised, she found it hard to picture herself in a previous epoch, while the days of transition themselves seemed lacking in self-awareness, almost comically confused. She loved him. How could she once not have loved him?

  The night before she had lain in bed and wept. She could not stop crying. She wrapped a pillow over her head so the noise could not be heard outside her room. She dreaded Daisy coming in and offering some salacious, short advice. In her confusion she heard the word ‘inconsolable’ and knew that it was apt because she did not wish to be consoled: it was more important to have him than to save herself. Was that ‘love’? Was that what it meant? She struggled with the question because she needed to find a word for the feeling that had overpowered her. In identifying it, by whatever surprising word, she might bring it within bounds. Love had never felt like this to her before: not in the tough little loyalty with her brother, not in the resentful affection for her mother, not in the liberating fondness of friends.

  In the morning she saw that whatever name she gave the feeling, it had, in any case, become a given of her life: an incident, a narrative development that changed everything. The relief of recognising a new fixed point was qualified by her knowledge of how inconvenient it was. The last thing she needed was some uncontrolled romance. She wanted to be helpful, she wanted to lead a serious life, not to lie sobbing in her bed for a disembodied yearning. Still less did she wish to see it embodied, with the complication and the fear that all that would entail.

  As she walked through Regent’s Park she looked at the old people, children, women, non-combatants, but felt no sense of kinship with their cold walks, their individual ties and errands. She felt as though she had stepped outside the normal scope of daily life. Perhaps drug addicts felt this separation from reality, this powerful dissociation that made them both superior and helpless. She wanted to return, to reinhabit a life in which normal forces mediated, yet was unable to quieten in any way the volume of her ecstasy.

  When Dr Wolf returned to his consulting rooms after lunch he failed to offer his usual greeting. Charlotte looked up anxiously from her desk.

  ‘Did you have a good lunch?’ she said.

  ‘Perfectly acceptable, thank you, though alas not in the place of my choosing.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Because, Miss Gray, you failed to book my table.’

  ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry. It completely slipped my mind.’

  ‘In the normal way I could have eaten at the long table with the other members, but since I had a guest to whom I wanted to talk in private, we were obliged to go elsewhere.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Dr Wolf. I just forgot.’

  ‘Is there something on your mind, Miss Gray?’

  ‘No, not particularly.’

  ‘You’ve appeared somewhat distracted over the last two or three days. I wondered if something was troubling you.’

  ‘No, no, I . . . don’t think so. I was thinking about the situation in France. It’s very sad, isn’t it? I used to go there a good deal. I’m worried about some people I know. A family I used to stay with.’

  ‘Are they in the Occupied Zone?’

  ‘Yes, they live near Chartres.’

  ‘Then I share your concern. Are they Jewish?’

  ‘No. Not that I’m aware of. I suppose it’s possible that they have Jewish blood somewhere in the past. But they’re ordinary Catholics now.’r />
  ‘I daresay they’ve made what accommodation they feel is necessary with the occupying power.’ Wolf’s tone was ambiguous.

  Charlotte said, ‘I suppose so. They’re quite elderly. I doubt whether they can have much choice.’

  ‘At least in the Occupied Zone they can comfort themselves with that knowledge. One can’t help feeling that in the Free Zone one would feel more uneasy.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Even by doing nothing you would be making a pact with the devil. I think one would feel compelled to take action against the Government.’

  ‘One?’

  Dr Wolf smiled. ‘I am probably as old as your friends. But you are a young woman of spirit, Miss Gray.’

  Charlotte said, ‘Perhaps you’re right. I think maybe I would try to do something. It’s hard to know what, because it isn’t easy to discover what’s going on.’

  ‘They have sold the honour of the country.’ Wolf’s doubtful tone resolved itself into tetchy certainty. ‘That exquisite civilisation that took so long to bring to flower. They’re not just Nazis, they’re worse than the Nazis, because they’re French.’

  Charlotte looked down at the desk. ‘Perhaps.’

  Wolf had gone half-way through the door to his room when he stopped. ‘I almost forgot. After you had gone out to lunch there was a telephone call for you. A gentleman. I’ve written his name down somewhere.’

  Charlotte watched him disappear into the gloom, then return with a piece of paper. ‘A Mr Cannerley. He says he’ll telephone again later.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Charlotte. Her mouth felt dusty. ‘I’m sorry about the table.’

  Cannerley, thought Charlotte, as the bus jolted along the Bayswater Road. What do I want with Cannerley? Among other things, she resented the way that someone like him who knew ‘people’ had been able to discover her telephone number. She looked down on to the railings of the park. Across the road the big hotels looked bulky and deserted, their glimmering windows darkened.

  She was numb and cold when she reached the flat and squeezed past the walnut dresser in the hall. Her plan was to have a bath, then retire to her room with a book. Cannerley. For heaven’s sake.