Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Charlotte looked about the kitchen, with its huge, blackened range, its pitted oak table and traces of the Cariteaus’ frugal meals.

  Now that the time had come, she could not bring herself to leave. In this raw, square room something valuable had taken place. With Sylvie and her mother she had formed an understanding that went far beyond their differences. Something elemental and loving in her had found an answering spirit in these two French women, and parting from them now, before they knew how it would end, would be like leaving behind some vulnerable element of herself.

  She felt Sylvie Cariteau’s eyes on her. ‘You must go, Madame. It’s almost light.’

  Charlotte went to the door, then hesitated. She turned and saw that Sylvie’s eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Oh, Sylvie,’ she said, going back and throwing her arms round her.

  They clung to each other for a few moments. Charlotte struggled to find words, but then gave up. She knew that they were thinking the same things.

  ‘I will come back,’ she said.

  ‘Do you promise?’ Sylvie Cariteau was smiling now, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her large, red hands.

  ‘I promise.’ Charlotte kissed her on the cheek and ran from the house.

  Then, in the early morning light, she pedalled hard out of Lavaurette, Julien’s fearful warning still loud in her ears. She reckoned it would take her a day to reach the small town where the wireless operator lived and she knew she should not delay. The further she went, however, the more tormented she felt by the thought of Levade being held in some detention camp and Julien, exiled in the chilly countryside, unable to reach him to explain what he had done. Her business was not finished, and, until it was, she could not go home.

  Late in the morning she stopped to rest at the edge of a field. There was a small stone-built hut, presumably a store or shelter of some kind, but now dilapidated. She pushed the bicycle inside and lay down to rest, but it was very cold. She thought longingly of Dominique’s woollen vests.

  Somehow she dozed in the sunless afternoon, and when she awoke, stiff and hungry, she knew that she had to return to Lavaurette. She would give it a day for the alarm to subside, then go back to the Domaine. The reason she gave herself was that she needed her identity card and some money, which were still in her bedroom. She did not listen to an inner voice that told her the wireless operator could in due course supply her with both.

  She bicycled into the nearest village, but the food shops were closed and there was no café. At least there were still some tins in the store cupboards of the Domaine, she told herself, as she went back to her stone shelter.

  She passed a long night without sleeping. She spent the first part of the next day walking up and down to keep warm, then began to bicycle slowly back. She timed her return to Lavaurette for eight o’clock in the evening, well after dark, but before the curfew. She went on a long circuitous route that avoided the village and brought her through the woods at the side of the house.

  She found the front door of the Domaine ajar, as though someone had left in a hurry. There were no lights burning. She paused in the hall and looked round: something was not right; she noticed that the door to the cellar was open and that the bunch of keys was in the lock. She took a torch from the desk and went down the steps into the cold gloom. The beam of light travelled over the dusty wine bins, some of which had empty bottles spanned by cobwebs in whose sticky grip were long-dead flies and globs of thicker dust.

  Charlotte walked carefully over the uneven floor of beaten earth, hosing the walls with her torchlight. It was intensely silent, aromatic with the passage of damp centuries.

  There was no one there. She climbed back to the hall behind her, replacing the keys in the desk, in their proper place, some housekeeperly instinct prompting her. Still using only the torch, she went into the kitchen, where she opened a tin of ham that she had been saving for some special occasion. She sliced it hurriedly and consumed it all, with a crust of bread, some walnuts and a glass of stale wine from an open bottle on the sideboard.

  Then she crept for the last time over the sprung floor of the dining room and went to the top of the house, where she once more packed the possessions of Dominique Guilbert in their tattered leather case and cast a farewell look at the little bedroom in which such extraordinary days of her life had passed: the toile with its figures of eighteenth-century gaiety, faded and worn; the servant’s bed, the threadbare rug and the view down towards the lake.

  She walked along the corridor of the first floor. In the room where she and Julien had been held, she straightened the bedclothes, still rumpled by their simulated passion. She noticed that a chair had been turned over, presumably in the struggle that followed her leaving. She had no doubt that Julien would have prevailed: in the last picture she had of him, he already had the German by the neck.

  The door to Levade’s studio was open. Inside, the chaos of his work was undisturbed, except where she had wrenched the painting from its stretcher; some shreds of canvas, mostly white but some that he had painted on, still clung to the nails in the beam of her torchlight. She smiled at the portrait of Anne-Marie in her green skirt. Her unreadable, almond-shaped eyes smiled back, unembarrassed by the strangeness of her situation. All around was the evidence of Levade’s furious and fruitless effort: the stacked canvases, the open books, the palettes, tubes and exhausted brushes; and none of it, according to him, of any use at all.

  She went, tidying and straightening, through all the other rooms of the Domaine. It had been many years since a family, rooted in the events of the day, had lived there. Levade was an outsider, presiding over something that was already moribund; and she, the last inhabitant, was an impostor, a foreigner who had come to run her hands across the surfaces of these draughty, uninhabited spaces, everywhere fastening and closing, like a pallid lawyer come to seal the house and the failure of its contract with history.

  She paused finally in the hall, looking back at the broad staircase and the smoky ancestral oils that ran up the wall beside it. Then she went out, pulled the door closed behind her, and hurried down the stone steps where a few days earlier the master of the house had been prodded by a bewildered gendarme.

  At the end of the drive, she was moved by some final tidying instinct to open the letter-box. Inside were half a dozen letters, one of them addressed to her. Her feet on the ground either side of the bicycle, she tore it open. In the light of the torch she saw Levade’s handwriting. ‘Dear Madame . . .’

  She set off with stinging eyes. She would have to find him and tell him what Julien had done. If she could resolve the misunderstanding between Julien and Levade, she might come to see in a purer light the presumed betrayal that had fallen between her and her own father.

  This, it was suddenly clear to Charlotte, was her hope of salvation. She would endure the agony of having to abandon her search for Gregory if she could heal these harsh familial wounds. This, in fact, was the way she would make herself worthy of her lover.

  Julien was in a solitary cell inside the monastery. At the back of the building, beneath the kitchens, it was the space in which the boilers would shortly be installed. He paced up and down on the new cement floor, admiring the solid, level finish the builders had achieved in readiness for the giant cylinders, which stood outside in wooden crates.

  I should be praying, he thought, in this dank space hallowed by the prayers of so many devout, unhappy men. I am about to kill a man and I should be praying for my soul, and his.

  Against the wall he had leaned the German soldier’s rifle. A dozen times now he had cleaned it, pulling an oily rag through the barrel; he had laid the butt against his shoulder, balanced the cool mass in the palm of his left hand, squinted down the sights; he had done all but fire the gun in his desire to be prepared.

  He shivered in the cell. Days had passed already, and although he was sure that Dominique would have moved the boys from Sylvie Cariteau’s house, he should act before Benech, so
well informed about the welfare of the young, discovered their new home.

  He stamped up and down the floor, looking at his watch. It was almost dark. In just four hours’ time he would risk going into Lavaurette to find Benech; he thought he knew where to look. He wore the battered leather jacket that had accompanied him on so many night-time errands, but still the cold was sinking into him. He had made a bed from the lagging that would be used to insulate the boilers and now he took a strip of it from the floor to wrap round his shoulders.

  Outside he could hear the builders packing up for the day. At least that meant he could go above ground and have a change of scene. He had let himself into the fenced-off site with his own key, then made a deal with the foreman, who agreed to say nothing provided Julien stayed out of the view of the other workmen.

  He heard the shovels being thrown into metal barrows, the weary calls of farewell, and at last the padlock rebounding off the metal gatepost and rattling briefly against the chain-link fence. Julien opened the door of the cell and climbed the stairs. Outside, he watched as the lorry’s tail lights vanished and the red glow from the last bicycle lamp shrank into the January mist. He wandered down the cloister to the abbot’s office, which had its own bathroom attached.

  Relieved but still shivering, he lit a candle and looked down the bookshelves, whose contents had still not been packed up. He pulled out a copy of Pascal’s Pensées and began to flick through it, hoping for some consolation. Much of it seemed to be about Abraham or the Jews or to concern Pascal’s own reactions to Montaigne. ‘Sound opinions of the people,’ Julien read. ‘The greatest of evils is civil war . . .’

  He moved on through the pages. He lifted the book to his face and sniffed the yellow dusty paper. ‘Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are clearly murdered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.’ He remembered this melodramatic passage from his school days.

  He carried the volume over to the desk. What he wanted was some sort of confirmation that a greater good could excuse an apparent evil. In war, presumably, killing was permitted, if it was a just or holy war, as when priests had come to bless his father at Verdun. What if the war was not declared, what if the war was internal? All Pascal seemed to offer was that ‘the greatest of evils is civil war.’ Perhaps the words ‘Sound opinions of the people’ were in italics to show that the view expressed was second-hand or null, like an entry in Bouvard and Pécuchet’s Dictionary of Received Ideas.

  Thought 526 read: ‘Evil is easy; it has countless forms, while good is almost unique. But a certain sort of evil is as hard to find as what is called good, and this particular evil is often on that account passed off as good. Indeed, it takes as much extraordinary greatness of soul to attain such evil, as to attain good.’

  Was that ‘greatness of soul’ his or Benech’s? Neither, he suddenly saw. It was Pétain’s.

  When it was time to go, Julien walked back down the icy cloister, obliquely admired the new stone fountain they had installed in the middle of the quadrangle, and went down to the cell to retrieve the rifle and his bicycle. He tore off some lagging and stuffed it down inside his jacket to keep out the wind, slung the rifle across his chest by its webbing, then wheeled the bicycle to the gate, let himself out, relocked the site and set off for Lavaurette.

  It took twenty minutes before he arrived at the silent factory on the outskirts of the village, where he turned down a narrow side road and left his bicycle. He felt absurdly conspicuous with the rifle, even in the unlit streets. Luckily, the cold was serious enough to deter people from leaving their houses. Julien hoped it would not have been too much for Benech.

  As well as the aching in his face and hands he was aware of the pain of hunger in his stomach. It was almost two days since he had eaten, buying eggs and some ham from a remote smallholder who supplied wood for the fires in his apartment building. As he approached the square which held the Café du Centre, he went down a path to the back, where an untidy yard, full of boxes, dustbins and bits of defunct agricultural machinery, was faintly illuminated by a light from the steamy kitchen. He laid his rifle down against a wall, crept across the open space and peered into the wooden crates. From one of them he pulled out a tin, and, looking furtively round, slipped it into his pocket. Just next to the back door was a crate of lumpy objects he thought could be vegetables. The mud of the courtyard was frozen hard beneath his feet as he edged forward; a thin piece of ice on a puddle cracked beneath his step. He could make out the sound of a wireless playing inside as he inched up to the building. With his eyes fixed on the glass of the back door, he lowered his hand into the crate and pulled out what felt like a potato, then made his way quietly back across the yard to his rifle and went out into the dark path that led back to the street.

  He squatted on the ground and stuck his torch between his teeth to examine his stolen dinner. It was a potato, with diamonds of frost in its muddy skin; the tin had no label on it. When he had peeled the potato with his pocket knife, he sat on the grass verge and, by hammering the knife with a stone, was able to open the tin far enough to pull out part of the contents. He stuck a piece in his mouth. It was a sliced pear. The starch on the surface of the peeled potato stung the soft inside of his lips and he pushed another piece of pear into his mouth to counteract it. In this way he crunched through the freezing potato and the sleepy grey pear.

  The front windows of the Café du Centre gave on to the square, but the side of the bar overlooked a narrow street that led up to the main part of Lavaurette. It was here that Julien made his way. He laid his rifle on the ground by the outside wall of the bar and looked cautiously in.

  How strange his peering, unshaven face would look to anyone inside, he thought. He could make out the bar and could see Gayral himself polishing a glass, his mournful moustaches bent to the repetitive task. There were two figures at the bar, one of whom, he was fairly sure from the back view, was Benech. He wondered what he could be drinking, now that alcohol was almost impossible to obtain. It was so quiet in the bar that Julien could make out some of the words of the wireless broadcast. The announcer introduced a government minister, Monsieur Darquier de Pellepoix, the head of the General Council of Jewish Questions, whose ranting voice was quickly subdued by Gayral’s hand. Julien could still make out the phrases: ‘Killed by London, Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem . . . England, the hereditary enemy . . . the ideological war desired by Israel . . . Allied Victory would mean more of what we have already seen in North Africa: the return to power of the Jews and Freemasons . . . who for half a century lived on the backs of the settlers and natives until the Marshal cleared them away.’

  The Marshal’s name always made Julien think first not of Vichy but of Verdun, the glorious context in which, when he was a child, it seemed to have been for ever fixed. He remembered the soft awe of his father when he spoke the name, then thought again with a shiver of Pascal’s words: ‘. . . It takes as much extraordinary greatness of soul to achieve such evil.’

  Then he saw Benech. He turned to offer his cup to Gayral to refill – a cup, not a glass, Julien noticed, as Benech’s features came for a moment into his view: perhaps, for lack of wine, he was drinking Viandox or some meat-drink substitute. He must value the social aspect of his visits to the bar very highly to think it worth the cold walk from wherever it was he lived.

  Julien had to move quickly into the shadows, down the side of the building, when he heard footsteps on the street coming from the village, but he was back at his place by the window in time to see Benech put on his coat and hat and make his way towards the front door of the café. Julien pulled back into the darkness and waited. It was almost certain that Benech would come past him to go up to the centre of Lavaurette. His only concern was that he would be on a bicycle, but he had seen none left outside the front of the café. After
a few moments, he heard footsteps and saw Benech’s figure, his shoulders hunched against the cold, his hands thrust down inside his coat, go swiftly past him up the hill. Julien picked up the rifle and followed. If he went too close, Benech might hear him; but if he hung too far back, Benech might vanish down an unlit street. He tried to conceal the rifle from anyone who might be looking from their window by holding it upright between his side and his arm.

  The shutters of Lavaurette were all closed. His and Benech’s were the only footsteps on the street. Julien walked as soundlessly as he could manage, once pulling back into a doorway when he thought Benech was about to stop. When he peered out, it was to see Benech turning off the main street, and he had to run to the junction. Benech was a short way down the road and was feeling in his pocket, presumably for a key. Julien moved as swiftly as he could along the walls of the houses until he was only a few paces away. Benech pushed the door open and reached inside for the light. Julien ran the short distance to the door, where Benech turned in alarm at the sound of footsteps. In the light of the electric bulb in the hallway he looked into Julien’s face with a terrified recognition.

  He tried to slam the door, but Julien had stuck his foot in the way. The door rebounded, shuddering on its hinges.

  Julien raised his finger to his lips, then showed Benech the rifle. He mouthed the words, ‘Where’s your apartment?’

  Benech breathed in, as though to shout for help, but Julien stuck the muzzle of the gun beneath his jaw and once more raised his finger to his lips. Benech turned to lead the way through the hall.

  It was a house divided into rooms rather than an apartment block. Julien noticed a light beneath the door on his right on the ground floor. There could be four or five separate flats, he thought.

  On the bare-boarded landing Benech took another key and let them into his apartment. The sitting room was large and tidy, the comfortable home of a professional man, but seemed to be unheated.