Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  It was another hot day. The flashing pastures through which they travelled were radiant with a yellowish-green light; the darker shades of the knotted forests and the glimpsed browns of the trunks and branches of oak trees in the established lines that edged the hills made it possible to believe in a future as well in the past they brightly evoked.

  Charlotte took out Dominique’s detective story and began to read. A man’s body was found by his concierge in the hallway of his apartment of the seventh arrondissement; a silver dagger protruded from between his ribs. The concierge was helping a melancholic inspector with his inquiries; the detective would proceed to interview the occupants of all the other apartments in the block, and the author might or might not give some indication as to which one was the murderer. Charlotte found that the only thing that might have been interesting – the process of detection – had, by a convention of the genre, to be withheld from the story, or there could have been no surprise dénouement. After his first fruitless morning the detective went for lunch in a café in the Place St Sulpice, and Charlotte was horrified to hear her stomach roar its envy of his dish of the day: a sausage and lentil stew with green salad ‘anointed with thick oil’. The woman opposite her smiled her sympathy as Charlotte begged her pardon for the noise. The young man next to her, perhaps the woman’s son, opened a bag on his lap and offered Charlotte the end of a loaf from which extended the edge of a thick piece of ham. After her protestations and his insistence, she took it, and was drawn into conversation.

  Charlotte had provided Dominique with a sister in Clermont-Ferrand to cover her intended visit to Gregory’s garage mechanic, and the residual Calvinist in her was shocked by the facility with which she described this Germaine’s invented life. The young man looked interested, and Charlotte tried to curb her imagination. She touched on the sober subject of her father’s illness, then focused the conversation firmly on the others. Both mother and son, as they turned out to be, seemed friendly enough, but there were five other people in the compartment and two in the doorway who could overhear their conversation. Not all would be as sympathetic; and one thing her training had stressed was that the French far outnumbered the Germans in the number and diversity of their police and security services.

  It had been a mistake to accept the sandwich and to talk, but she had been hungry and she had been lonely: she wanted to be addressed by someone, even a stranger and even under a false identity. To extricate herself, she began to yawn, and, when a gap of suitable length occurred in the conversation, she feigned an improbable mid-morning sleep.

  Ussel in late afternoon, under light rain, was smaller and more pathetic than it had looked on the map. There were garages and squares and shops, but it had the feeling of a trading post, a village that had spread back off the strip of the main road that steeply bisected it. Charlotte sheltered with her suitcase in the bar of a hotel, waiting for the time to pass till she could go to her rendezvous with her hairdresser, Antoinette.

  She felt absurdly self-conscious; now that the moment had come for this furtive action her hands seemed heavy, her face a self-advertising confession of guilt. Ussel was much higher than the places she had so far visited; the air was thin, as well as damp, and she felt cut off from the rest of France. The prospect of pursuing her journey still further, to the volcano-ringed heights of Clermont, on a passionate gamble of her own devising, seemed a foolhardy plan that could have been conceived only by someone at sea level and slightly unbalanced.

  She ground the heel of Dominique’s ugly shoe into the floor of the bar and brought her lips together. She would proceed. At ten to seven she left the hotel and went out into the rain. She walked up the main street and forked left towards the church. She moved briskly, not wishing to catch the eye of anyone in this unvisited town. The streets revealed themselves like photographic prints emerging in solution from her acquired memory. On the Avenue Sémard, near the station, she came to the door of a hairdresser’s shop; ignoring the ‘Closed’ notice she pushed it open and went inside.

  The row of chairs was empty and the room had a sweet, steamy smell. At the far end was a bamboo curtain through which emerged a small white dog, barking feebly and wagging its tail. There was the sound of a wireless playing a facetious song by Charles Trenet. Charlotte held the handle of her suitcase tightly and stood her ground; a woman’s voice called to the dog to be quiet. Still no one came, and Charlotte had the feeling she was on the edge of a debacle. She had come a long way to this stuffy little room; and, now that she was here, was it all quite real?

  The bamboo curtain divided again and a tall, handsome woman in a blue pinafore came down the step into the salon.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re closed, Madame.’

  ‘I made a reservation for seven o’clock.’

  ‘What name, Madame?’ The woman went over to the appointments book on a table by the door.

  ‘Danièle.’

  The hairdresser ran her finger down the page, snapped the page over as though searching further forward in the book, then turned it back. ‘Danièle . . . Danièle.’

  Charlotte felt a line of sweat run down her spine.

  The woman turned and, for the first time, looked Charlotte deep and direct in the eye. ‘Bad weather for a wash and set.’

  Charlotte smiled broadly. ‘They said that whatever the weather I must insist on Antoinette.’

  ‘They were quite right. She’s the best.’

  Antoinette stepped forward and took Charlotte by the hand. ‘Let’s go through to the back,’ she said, leading the way through the curtain.

  They sat at a table in a gloomy kitchen, drinking wine that Antoinette poured from an unlabelled litre bottle.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Do I?’ Charlotte’s fingers went to her face and pressed the soft skin beneath her eyes. ‘Yes, I suppose I haven’t slept much for various reasons. A few days. I’m going back to England soon, as far as I know. I have to have confirmation by wireless.’

  Antoinette had a deep voice and a quiet, sympathetic manner; she had large dark brown eyes and thick, slightly tousled hair, cut just above the shoulder. Watching her as she spoke, Charlotte put her age at about thirty-eight; she had a ruby ring on her right hand but nothing on her left. It was impossible to resist the impression that she was too cultivated to be a hairdresser; something in her manner suggested education and experience beyond trimming and drying.

  ‘They’ve done a good job on your hair,’ Antoinette said, taking a cigarette from a packet on the table.

  ‘My God, is it so obvious?’

  Antoinette smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Only to the expert. And your French. It’s almost perfect.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘I was educated in Belgium. Would that account for it?’

  ‘I think I could believe that.’

  The scratchy wireless, the windows steamed by rain and the odd towel hanging up to dry reminded Charlotte of the Monday afternoons of her childhood, when her mother would begin to iron the wash; there was a starchy torpor that was seductively depressing. Relaxed by the wine, she felt oddly emotional.

  ‘Are you taking a train back tonight?’ said Antoinette.

  ‘There is one I can take tonight. But I’m not going back. I’m going on to Clermont.’

  ‘I see. Another errand.’

  Looking at this woman’s quizzical but kind expression, Charlotte had to fight hard to repress her desire to confide.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  ‘You can stay here tonight if you like. There are two trains in the morning.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  Antoinette laughed. ‘It’s completely safe. It’s like being in another country. The war and the occupation have passed us by. People are a little irritated to think that there are a lot of Germans tramping round the coast, but that’s about all. France is a big country. Our life has barely changed.’

  ‘But
what about rationing?’

  ‘We’re very self-sufficient. There’s a bit less to eat, I suppose, but we manage pretty well. When the garage man mends the farmer’s car he gives him a chicken as well as some cash. If I cut someone’s hair I sometimes ask for eggs or ham. It’s all very friendly.’

  ‘It’s not like that in Lavaurette, the place I first went to.’

  Antoinette shrugged. ‘It depends. Some places have more food. Some are better at working out a system that suits people. Anyway, if you’d like to, you can stay here above the shop. I’ll make you some dinner, put some clean sheets on the bed and bring you breakfast in the morning. Would you like that?’

  ‘I’d love to. Thank you.’ Charlotte felt absurdly touched by this offer; she even felt a momentary irritation in her eye. She blinked. Antoinette was right: she must be very tired.

  To regain her composure, she asked, ‘What drew you to become involved with . . . wirelesses and so on?’

  Antoinette sighed. ‘Just a feeling. My brother and some friends of mine . . . I don’t imagine that we’re supposed to talk too much about these things.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ Charlotte, however, wanted to talk about them; she wanted to talk about almost anything: she had been too long with only voices in her head. ‘What can you do here, half-way up the mountains, with no targets, no soldiers?’

  ‘We wait. I think the time will come. There’s a good deal of activity in the mountains just because they are the mountains – because they’re a good place to hide. The Massif Central will be the heart of the Resistance when it comes.’

  ‘And when will it come?’

  Antoinette smiled. ‘Do you want my honest opinion?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I think it will come when the majority of people change their minds about the likely outcome of the war. They’ll want to back the winner.’

  Charlotte said nothing, but looked at the table, this odd pricking still behind her eyes. Antoinette seemed so weary, her opinion so devoid of idealism or belief, yet what she said had the unexciting contours of a probable truth.

  Charlotte stood up. ‘I think perhaps I should give you the package now.’

  ‘All right.’ Antoinette nodded and Charlotte went to her suitcase, laid it on the floor and carefully extracted the black velvet bag from inside one of Dominique’s rolled-up vests.

  She watched in fascination as Antoinette’s long, tapered fingers gently extracted the foam rubber casing from the bag. Inside were what looked to Charlotte like four porcelain cartridge-fuses, similar to those with which she had seen her father struggle, cursing, by candlelight. She picked one up and turned it over in her hand: a sheath with pronged terminals contained a piece of quartz whose calibration determined the wavelength of the transmission. They seemed to her extraordinarily small and insignificant to have been the object of such astonishing care and effort. She found that her lip was trembling. What possible effect on the freedom of a country could ever be exerted by this small piece of domestic hardware in her hand?

  Antoinette reached out and gently took the crystal from Charlotte. She laid it carefully with the others in the foam rubber casing. Then she put her hand back on Charlotte’s and squeezed it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve done a wonderful job.’

  Charlotte felt the air suddenly driven from her lungs as all the conquered feelings of the last few days surged out. Antoinette went over and put her arms around her, and Charlotte stood up, the better to feel the comfort of the other woman’s embrace.

  They both changed before dinner, Charlotte into Dominique’s slightly less dowdy skirt and jumper, Antoinette taking off her blue pinafore, tidying her hair and putting on some lipstick. They ate in a living room upstairs, and Charlotte eventually told Antoinette the reason for her visit to Clermont. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ she said.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘But is it dangerous?’

  ‘A woman’s allowed to go to a garage and ask a simple question. The problem, of course, is that there are so many different security forces, and you’ll find more of them in a big town like Clermont. There are a lot of unpleasant little men who have solved the problems of their personalities by putting on uniforms and telling tales. Some of them are criminals or Fascists who have seen an opportunity to have their sadistic impulses made legal. There are some very violent men. Then there are just people who like sneaking. So I wouldn’t say there is no danger at all, but with you I don’t see what they could report. You arrive, you go to your garage and you leave. You don’t have time to arouse anyone’s suspicion. Nor do you have time to arouse anyone’s dislike. Don’t forget that a lot of people report their friends or neighbours to the authorities to get even over some domestic quarrel. Weren’t you told all these things before you came?’

  ‘Yes, we were. But it’s always hard to imagine. I didn’t realise both how normal everything would be and yet how strange. It’s so odd going into a baker or buying a ticket, and everything seems just as it was, yet you know that if you say the wrong thing you might find yourself being arrested. It’s the normality of everything that seems so treacherous.’

  Antoinette smiled. ‘This man, he must be very remarkable.’

  ‘He is.’ Charlotte smiled back. ‘Very remarkable.’ She felt calm after her tears, and had focused the purpose of her journey with renewed clarity.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about him?’

  ‘Not really. I couldn’t make you feel what I feel for him. I can only say that what I’m doing seems quite rational. The education I had was very formal, and although there was a belief that the family was important, and that it was initially held together by love between the parents, no one ever encouraged us to believe in romantic love or any such idea. In fact, most of the women who taught us would have been horrified by the thought. They taught us romantic poetry, but for the language and the metre. And I don’t believe in the idea myself – not as an idea, at any rate. But I suppose at some stage you make decisions, you have to decide what seems important to you, what seems valuable. It may be for a practical reason as much as for an idealistic reason, like the people you describe who’ll join the Resistance when they think it’s going to win. It’s a judgement. I don’t believe in a general ideal, I just believe in one particular man. I believe in the purity of the feeling that I have for him and that I believe he has for me. I think its force is superior to that of any other guiding force and I can’t organise my life until I know whether he’s alive.’

  ‘You do love him, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. And if that love reflects a susceptibility on my part, if he has somehow exploited a weakness or a wound in me, so be it. There’s nothing I can do about it; that’s who I am. To behave or believe otherwise would be dishonest.’

  Charlotte was not concerned by the indulgent expression in the older woman’s eyes. It was sceptical, but it was also compassionate; and, Charlotte guessed that, however objectively Antoinette might view her youthful passion, a part of her was likely to regret that the day when her own life might be guided by such certainty was unlikely to come again.

  Under Charlotte’s questioning, Antoinette revealed that she had once been married, but that her husband had deceived her so often that even the flexible limits of bourgeois marriage had been violated. He had gone to live with a young girl in Normandy and she had not regretted his leaving, particularly as there were no children who might miss him. She had had lovers, she told Charlotte, but preferred to live alone. Her best friend was her brother, a doctor in a nearby town, who had helped to finance her shop.

  ‘I like it here,’ she said. ‘The countryside is beautiful, the girl who works for me, Gilberte, is charming. We eat well, we drink well, even now. About once a fortnight there’s a man who visits me from Clermont to spend the night.’ She smiled and pulled another cigarette from the packet among the empty plates. ‘It’s enough. I’m fond of him. Then about six months ago my brother asked me if I would help him in a little
network of people he was putting together with an Englishman who had dropped out of the sky one day. It didn’t take him long to convince me. I love doing it. I love the excitement of the transmissions. I’m a very happy woman.’ She blew out smoke through her smiling, lipsticked mouth.

  Antoinette insisted Charlotte sleep in her bed while she made up the sofa for herself with a pillow and a rug. There were clean sheets, as she had promised, and Charlotte felt their smooth freshness on her skin. It was a warm night, and since G Section had omitted to provide Dominique with a nightdress she slept naked. Dominique’s underclothes she had washed and hung out to dry in the bathroom, bringing back memories of Daisy’s flat in London, a place which seemed not just distant but to belong to a different existence.

  Antoinette’s bedroom was the only room in the apartment over which she had taken much trouble. The rugs and antique furniture had been chosen with care; the bed itself was of the three-quarter size Charlotte had encountered in the hotel with Yves, but fresh and deeply comfortable. Within minutes she was asleep, lying on her back, dragging in deep draughts of even breath.

  It was almost three o’clock when she awoke, crying and protesting. She sat up and felt her hair damp around the edges of her forehead. In her dream she had been trapped and tortured; the moment of betrayal was similar to the half-buried memory of her father’s sinister misprision, but the violence was done not by him but by Gregory.

  For all this time she had lost sight of Gregory’s face in her mind, and its absence was like a confirmation of his death. Then suddenly in her dream it had been cruelly restored.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Antoinette’s voice came from the doorway.

  ‘Yes, I . . . I was dreaming.’

  Antoinette came and sat on the edge of the bed. She put her arms round Charlotte to comfort her, and Charlotte laid her face against the broderie anglaise of her nightdress. Antoinette murmured comforting words to her and eventually Charlotte found she was drifting back to sleep.