Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I don’t think someone could invent those, Madame Guilbert. Shall I continue to call you that?’

  Charlotte sighed. ‘You may as well call me Dominique.’

  ‘But why? Why another false name? It’s no better than Madame Guilbert.’

  ‘But even Julien only calls me Dominique.’

  ‘It would be our secret, the sign of our confidence. If you wish.’ He turned his back to her again and looked out of the window.

  There was a long silence, which Charlotte was surprised to hear broken at last by the sound of her own voice. ‘Charlotte.’

  ‘Charlotte.’

  She nodded. It was the first time she had heard her name for many weeks, and its intimacy was tender.

  ‘And this Pierre,’ said Levade, clearing papers from an armchair so he could sit in it. ‘Did you make love many times? Did it surprise you?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t realise it was like that. There didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. When I thought it was finished, even when he was saying goodbye it would begin again. He couldn’t leave the flat, he would sink to his knees and start to pull at my clothes, and I was desperate, as though we hadn’t been doing it all day, as though we’d never done it before. It was terrible. I didn’t know if other people also . . . whether . . .’

  Levade said nothing. Charlotte had a sudden fear that instead of sympathising with her anguish he was, in a voyeuristic way, enjoying the thought of her making love to Gregory.

  She looked down at her lap, then up at him again. It was too late to withdraw her trust. ‘I was frightened. I was really frightened. I wanted to devour him in some way. Yet my feeling for him was so gentle. I so much wanted to help him, to bring him back to health and life, to undo all the harm that had been done to him. What we did was awful, wonderful – I don’t know what you’d call it. But that wasn’t why I came here to find him. I came because I loved him, because the feeling was . . . transcendent.’

  ‘And he spoke to some weakness in you.’

  ‘Of course he did. Why should I be ashamed of that? Not every woman would have felt what I felt. I’m sure it was my weaknesses and faults, my own wounds he touched. That’s why I so passionately loved him. That’s why I can’t let go, because I believe there’s no one else who could do that.’

  Levade breathed out a long, quiet sigh, which gave no indication of what he thought. He watched Charlotte as she struggled to control her agitation. She looked up, red-eyed and resentful at his detachment.

  ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me how you thought it would end. What did you imagine your lives would become? Did you think you would stay together until one of you died? That he would never be able to leave the house until you had made love one more time? That your passion would dwindle into some companionable friendship?’

  ‘None of these things. It was enough to be with him, to have his company. It was almost enough that he was alive, even if I was not with him.’

  ‘And you truly never thought about a future?’

  ‘I never did. Though I admit that may have been because I wouldn’t let myself. A wise woman doesn’t indulge such fantasies about a fighter pilot in a war.’

  ‘And you’re a wise woman.’

  She did not hear if there was a question in his voice.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

  ‘Are you wise enough to know that the problems of lovers seem to everyone else in the world, especially to their friends, like comic self-indulgence, like the antics of fretful children?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do know that.’ Charlotte’s voice was grudging. ‘But listen. If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand – and you say, No, maybe not, it’s just a bore to my friends. What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die?’ Charlotte was flushed and excited. ‘Do you substitute for that an interest in what – eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?’

  Levade smiled as he stood up and crossed to the table where he had left his cigarettes. ‘The lifelong love that young romantic Frenchwomen dream about – and perhaps most English girls as well, though maybe not you – that ideal they think so unattainable is in fact rather commonplace. I know hundreds of men and women who loved each other all their lives and died in that same condition. The feelings you describe are more unusual.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The passion, that thing people call “merely physical”, is perhaps rarer than what they refer to as lasting love. Rarer, and therefore perhaps more valuable.’

  ‘But it wasn’t just that, it was more, it was—’

  ‘Of course it was. That’s the difficulty.’

  Charlotte felt Levade was on her side, but still she resented it.

  ‘I suppose you have a long experience of all these things,’ she said.

  ‘Long and sinful,’ he said, pushing his hand through his hair. ‘I came here to escape from it.’

  He had moved across to the bed, where he sat down, at the other end from Charlotte. He turned to face her. ‘I lived in Paris. Most of my life I lived there. I suppose we were all trying to forget what we had seen.’

  ‘Seen where?’

  ‘In the War.’

  The features of her own father came up brightly in Charlotte’s mind, and she turned her eyes away from Levade’s old, knowing face. She did not want to hear him, and the word that had stopped her ears was ‘War’.

  There was something that revolted her. She would not confront it. She watched Levade’s lips moving, heard his thin voice, weighted with grotesque experience and the awful compromises that he must have made, but she did not take in what he said. Words like Verdun, generation of my friends, slid off her mind like mercury running over polished glass. Only when Levade began to talk about his life in Paris, after the war, did the meaning of what he said begin to bite and register.

  He appeared to be saying that he and his friends had indulged themselves because their faith in civilisation had been torn up and ploughed into the septic mud of the Western Front: they did what they liked because none of it amounted to anything. It seemed that what Levade was telling her, in his oblique way, was that he had become obsessed by women and been able to indulge himself without any practical or philosophical reserve.

  ‘At the time of its peak it had become a compulsion. I remember in a butcher’s queue in the rue des Acacias seeing a young woman standing behind me waiting to be served. She had a pinkness in the skin of her face I hadn’t seen before. I couldn’t drag my eyes from her. It was an area of such delicate colour that I had to have her, to touch her. I followed her home.’

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  ‘Yes. I can remember nothing else about her, whether she was tall or short, fat or thin, only that pink skin.’

  ‘Was it that easy to persuade her?’

  ‘Yes. It always was. If you asked. If you could be bothered to try. It was these details of women that drew me to them. Sometimes it was a particular woman, sometimes I felt this passion for the entire sex. I would see a girl in a restaurant and the line of her thigh beneath her skirt would be enough. The fall of hair on a woman’s forehead, the set of dark brown eyes.’

  There was something almost chaste in the fervour with which Levade spoke; his gaze was fixed on the far wall, over Charlotte’s shoulder.

  ‘Did you fall in love with all these different women?’

  He looked back to her face. ‘That’s not a phrase I ever used. What I felt was more pressing, more urgent than what I take that expression to mean.’

  ‘But were none of these women different from the others? Didn’t you form a lasting attachment to any of them?’

  ‘The question of endurance wasn’t important. What I had found was a kind of paradise, an attainable paradise. I had to see how i
t would end.’

  ‘Did it make you happy?’ Charlotte found that curiosity kept any edge of surprise or disapproval from her voice.

  ‘Yes. For a while.’ For the first time in their conversation Levade appeared to smile; at least his mouth expanded and rose at the corners before falling. He got off the bed and straightened his back a little stiffly.

  ‘I understand your anguish, Madame. Everyone in your position thinks there is some uniquely unfair, tormenting aspect to her dilemma. For you it is the fact that in time of war so many men die. It seems selfish of you to worry about your Pierre – and you can’t tell people about him. But, secretly, you believe that you love him more than any other woman loves her missing lover. Don’t you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to say that, but that’s what you think. If only this, if only that. If only the one you loved didn’t live so far away. The married man who has fallen in love with a young girl can’t tell his wife, his greatest confidante, and he can’t tell his friends because they might disapprove. It’s so unfair, he thinks. But every one of these situations has its own particular unfairness.’

  ‘There’s something else that troubles me,’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s the shortness of the time we had together – only a few weeks. Can something valid have come from that?’

  Levade shook his head. ‘You worry that he won’t want you if you meet again?’

  ‘Some days I do. He had to learn French to come here. He had to go to lessons with some French woman in London, and he used to make me speak French to him, too, so he could practise.’

  ‘You think he used you just to learn the language so he could go on this new assignment?’

  ‘Sometimes I think that. He wanted this assignment because he wanted danger. I think he wanted to die.’

  Levade was strolling round the studio. He picked up a book from the table and began to flick through the pages.

  ‘We did discuss it once,’ said Charlotte, ‘the question of his learning French. But the terrible thing is I can’t remember what he said. I’ve tried and tried but I just can’t remember.’

  ‘I think perhaps you should try not to think about that.’

  Charlotte thought Levade’s voice had lost its priestly tone and regained a note of sympathy. She looked up to where he had taken his position in front of the easel; he had started to scrape a little area of paint with a palette knife.

  Charlotte found herself once more gazing at Anne-Marie’s breasts.

  ‘Would you like to pose for me one day, do you think?’

  Despite her misgivings, Charlotte was flattered. ‘Do you mean like that?’ She pointed to Anne-Marie.

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. Probably not.’

  ‘Well, maybe. Let’s see.’

  She was relieved, but also a little affronted. What’s wrong with my breasts? she found herself thinking. They could not be more beautiful than Anne-Marie’s, it was true, but Gregory had always said that . . .

  Levade suddenly turned and strode across the room to where a dozen paintings were leaning against the wall. He pulled one out and thrust it into Charlotte’s hands. ‘Look at that.’

  Following directions from Julien, Charlotte met Mirabel in an old white stone farmhouse, an hour’s bicycle ride from Lavaurette. At the end of the track that led to it was a roadside calvary turned green with moss and lichen; along the rutted way were the mashed leaves and rotting fruit of an overhanging horse chestnut.

  The house was bare, with a vast white marble staircase rising from the hall to a straight single passageway above, off which opened half a dozen large rooms, each with bare boards and distempered plaster.

  Mirabel showed Charlotte to the last room on the right, in which were two boat beds. As she walked in, her echoing footsteps told Charlotte that the floor was the ceiling of the room below.

  In English, with a slight Midlands accent, Mirabel said, ‘Welcome, Danièle. It’s nice to see a friendly face. Sit yourself down.’

  Charlotte perched with her knees together on the edge of the bed. Mirabel walked round the room. He was a tall man with curly, light brown hair (almost a case for dyeing, Charlotte thought) and a worried expression. He was wearing corduroy trousers and a workman’s blue canvas jacket. He had an enormously broad back, yet delicate fingers, she noticed, with which he made soft gestures as he spoke.

  ‘Now I’m not sure exactly what your plans are, but I’ve been asked to pass on a request. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you before. I was unavoidably detained.’ Mirabel coughed. ‘To put it more bluntly, it was bloody dangerous. I had to get out.’

  ‘If it’s about going back, I—’

  ‘Hang on. Listen to me.’

  There was something masterful about him, but he seemed preoccupied – presumably with the cares of his position. He also seemed nervous.

  ‘I think they’re on to us again,’ he said.

  ‘Who? The Germans?’

  ‘No. Some crazed French group.’

  He looked out of the window for a moment, then seemed to collect himself.

  ‘How good is your French?’ he said.

  ‘I can pass for French. For a while. Or on the telephone.’

  ‘It’d be all right for a brief message, then?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Mirabel did not speak. He walked around a little more. Charlotte said conversationally, ‘What about you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your French.’

  ‘I’m bilingual. Like most of us. My mother was French.’

  Mirabel was standing by the window, looking over a fallen tree in the garden. Eventually he said, ‘You’re looking for someone, aren’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly that. You have another reason for being here.’

  Charlotte was sufficiently alarmed to remember her training. Minimum information. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have no other purpose.’ It occurred to her that she had no way of knowing if this Mirabel was who he said he was: it was Julien who had told her where to come, and although she was sure of Julien, it was possible that this man was not the real Mirabel. After all, if he was bilingual, why might he not be French, a Vichy policeman, with one English parent from whom he had learned the language, right down to the slight Midlands accent?

  Mirabel looked at her with a weary and slightly superior smile on his face. ‘All right. Read this.’ He gave Charlotte a piece of paper on which was scribbled a single name and a street address; beneath them were a map reference, a date and a time.

  Charlotte looked up. Mirabel said, ‘Can you memorise that?’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘The address is in Limoges. I want you to go there. Ask for the name. Then give him the other details. It’s one of ours. It’s details of a drop. You must say that you were sent by Frédéric. Got that? It’s very important. Otherwise they won’t believe you. Frédéric.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Well, that’s easy enough.’

  Mirabel looked at Charlotte suspiciously. ‘Don’t you want anything . . . I mean, can I help you at all?’

  ‘No, it looks quite straightforward.’

  Charlotte thought for a moment. ‘I thought you were going to order me home.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because I didn’t take my plane. I’m not supposed to be here any more.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that. In any case, we need all the people we can get.’

  ‘Will you tell them that? Tell the people in London that you need me?’

  ‘I’ll see. But in return I want you not to speak to anyone about what I’ve just asked you. Don’t mention it to Octave.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just don’t.’ Mirabel’s voice was loud in the bare room. He controlled himself. ‘Then I might have news for you. About the person you’re looking for. We should keep in touch.’

&n
bsp; Charlotte breathed in deeply to still the hammering in her chest. She said quietly, ‘I don’t know how to reach you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Mirabel. ‘You deliver the message safe and sound and I’ll be back in touch with you.’

  Charlotte knew she should say nothing, but could not stop herself. In a quiet voice she said, ‘Do you really know where he is?’

  Mirabel looked her in the eye. ‘Yes, love,’ he said. ‘I know where he is.’

  3

  ‘GOOD MORNING, MADEMOISELLE Bobotte. You’re looking very well. Getting some early nights for a change, I dare say.’ Julien Levade moved briskly across the hallway, inhaling the familiar smell of tobacco and wood polish which today had a new element, possibly of lavender, though less a woman’s scent than the kind of vigorous alcohol a man might rub into his flayed pores after shaving.

  ‘Coffee, Monsieur Levade?’

  ‘Is that what you call it? If you insist.’ Julien was safely round the bend in the stairs.

  He sat at his desk and looked over the cobbled courtyard to the street door. Some fat Nazi squatted like a brooding toad in the best house in Lavaurette, requisitioned for the purpose; his country was in ruins, invaded from without, betrayed from within; his work was temporarily stalled for lack of funds; yet he felt an optimistic tremor as he looked across to where the low winter sun struck into the windows of the apartment building opposite.

  He opened the half-dozen letters waiting on his desk, hung up his jacket behind the door and went over to his drawing board. He was satisfied that his conversion would work, though who would stay in this hotel, what nationality they would be and when it would open for business he had no idea. It was not like the numberless hôtels du Parc, du Lion d’Or or des Voyageurs, with their gold letters on black marble nameplates, their fusty dining rooms, swirling cress soup and long damp corridors of failed plumbing and doubtful assignations: it would be bold and simple; it would glory in the stripped-down elements of which it was made, and there would be no attempt to smother the stone flags with hectares of hatched parquet, to box in the beams and cover the ceiling with flowered paper. The walls would be whitewashed, the furniture plain, though he hoped the richness of the textiles and the efficiency of the heating system he had planned, the great boiler sunk into a former solitary cell below ground, would take away any lingering air of the penitential.