Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘What do you want?’ said Benech.

  Julien held the rifle pointing at his chest. He looked at Benech’s face, the grey and floury skin, the features regular and almost handsome in their way, but made plain by his fear.

  ‘You said something to me the other night. I want you to explain. You said, “I’m a schoolmaster. It’s my business to know the whereabouts of children.” What did you mean?’

  Benech turned his back on Julien, walked over to a table and sat down. When he turned round he was smiling.

  ‘You know very well what I mean. I know about you and your father. I know about the English servant-girl, the mistress you share with him. I know about your little escapades at night. People like you can’t understand what’s in front of them.’ He gave a short, derisive laugh. ‘You’re like the children I teach. Time and again you explain some simple fact, but they’re incapable of understanding.’

  ‘Who else have you told about the boys? Did you tell that man Pichon?’

  ‘Never you mind. My organisation can have you arrested any time I like. I’m working for the Government.’ He put his hand into the drawer of the table and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘My membership of the Milice. Look.’

  As Julien moved over to the table to take the paper, Benech put his hand in the drawer again and pulled out his revolver. Julien threw himself to the floor.

  The noise of the shot was so loud that it took Julien a moment to realise he had not been hit. The sound and recoil of the gun seemed momentarily to have stunned Benech as well. He was staring at the thing in his hand as though it had somehow fired itself. Julien stood up and rammed the butt of his rifle into Benech’s mouth, knocking him backwards off the chair, then wrenched back the rifle and ran out of the apartment. The door of the ground-floor flat was opening in the hall as he went past, causing him to step aside. With his back to the wall he looked up to the landing above him, where Benech was standing, leaning on the banister rail, blood dripping from his mouth. Julien raised his rifle and shot him through the heart, causing the revolver to drop from Benech’s hand as his body folded at the waist and fell over the rail, a dead weight slamming down and shaking the insubstantial wooden staircase below.

  Charlotte reached the address Julien had given her late in the afternoon. It was a street in a medium-sized town, and the house appeared to be unoccupied. She returned at hourly intervals until, at about eight o’clock, a light came on.

  With the memory of Antoinette in the back of her mind, she had been expecting that ‘Zozo’ would be a woman. The door was in fact opened by a corpulent man in braces. They went through the formalities swiftly and Zozo ushered her into the hall.

  ‘I expect you’d like some dinner,’ he smiled.

  ‘What a wonderful idea.’

  ‘Bring your bicycle in.’

  There appeared to be no Madame Zozo, and after a dinner of soup and some noodles, Zozo said; ‘Do you want me to send a message? I have a scheduled transmission tomorrow.’

  ‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘Not yet. I want you to find me somewhere to stay.’

  Zozo nodded. ‘I can manage that. At your own risk, of course.’

  ‘Then I need to borrow your telephone.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  Zozo’s plump face split into a smile. ‘You’re very easy to accommodate, Madame. The telephone’s through there.’

  Sylvie’s voice answered almost at once. Charlotte was excited.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Sylvie? Can you talk? Have you heard from our friend? And he’s all right? I have a message. He must find out where his father is and leave the answer with you. Do you understand? It’s vital. Tell him it’s a matter of life and death. I’ll call again.’

  It would be difficult for Julien to make contact with people, but she knew that he had ways of finding things out: friends, contacts, even Communists. In the meantime, she would wait.

  Peter Gregory was sitting in a borrowed dressing gown, enjoying a cup of what tasted quite like coffee. He had his feet up on a stool in front of him and was looking down through the window to the narrow street below.

  On the other side of the room sat Nancy, her half-moon glasses stuck below the bridge of her nose, inspecting the newspaper with occasional murmurs of dismay.

  The telephone began to ring on a table in the corner and Nancy went over, paper in hand, to answer it.

  Gregory found French in Nancy’s Pennsylvanian accent considerably easier to understand than any of the other regional variants he had encountered, though on this occasion she said very little as she scribbled a note on the margin of her paper while the voice at the other end dictated.

  Gregory now felt impatient to be on his way. It was as though his fatal weariness had been purged; the feeling that replaced it was a cold and energetic hope. When he thought about Charlotte he felt sure that what had held him back was fear. He was scared of her clarity of mind and the intensity of her feeling for him; it had taken him time to see that she could love him as he was – that the peculiar shapes and deformities of his personality were not just entrancing but necessary to her. Again he felt blessed by a prodigally generous fate that this should be the case. To be worthy of her he had needed to do just one thing: to want to live. And having accomplished that, he thought with a smile, I have one other small task: to get back.

  ‘That was an Italian friend on the telephone,’ said Nancy, sitting down in her chair and resettling her glasses. ‘Looks like there’s a chance of a little action at last.’ She spoke quietly, with her head slightly averted. She said, ‘Ever heard of a felucca?’

  ‘Is sounds like a blister on your feet.’

  ‘It’s like a Portuguese sardine boat. Kind of uncomfortable, I guess, but you won’t be going far.’

  ‘What’s this Italian friend got to do with it?’

  ‘East of the Rhône, France is occupied by the Italians. You knew that? Well, this guy, this friend of mine, Gianluca, he’s gonna help you. He’ll go with you. I’m not sure at this moment exactly what his plan is, but he’s never let us down before.’

  ‘But if we cross the Rhône, won’t we run into Italian soldiers?’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that, Peter.’ When she approached a topic of real urgency, Nancy sometimes had a way of becoming oblique, like a college professor who is still quietly thrilled by the complexity of something she is about to reveal to her students.

  ‘As I understand it, there’s some give and take with the Italians. Ask yourself what looks like the easy way out for them. I guess it’s been the same with the French, hasn’t it? We’re all scared of the Vichy police, but it’s not all like that, is it?’

  Gregory thought of his old couple in the farmyard. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You’re supposed to go on Thursday, but it’s a movable feast.’

  2

  LEVADE ARRIVED IN the concentration camp at Drancy at ten minutes past four on a Monday afternoon, and for a few moments he felt nothing but relief. To be in the open air was a benediction to his lungs, which were seething from the atmosphere of the closed railway truck. The brief bus journey from the station had offered no respite, and he sucked down the freezing air until he began to cough in long, rib-stretching spasms that made him double over.

  When he could stand up, he found himself among a crowd of bewildered, dirty people staring at the unfinished housing complex that lay in front of them. It was in the shape of a rectangle, more than a hundred yards long and about two thirds that distance in width, with buildings of four storeys on three sides. The fourth side was open, though fenced with barbed wire into which was cut a gate at the bottom right-hand corner. There were raised guard posts at either end of this open side, where gendarmes stood with machine guns pointed over the courtyard enclosed by the rectangle. Levade could see a tower to one side, the construction of which seemed to have been abandoned.

  His relief passed, as gendarmes pushed among them, shouting orders; it became,
as it had been throughout the journey, an effort of will to confront the fatigue that weighed him down.

  All round were surly, muttering voices, recalcitrant in different languages – German, Yiddish, Polish, or French spoken with a variety of foreign accents. The gendarmes worked them through the gate, funnelling them into the narrow opening, so they were once more forced into the bodily contact that repelled them. Levade half-walked and was half-carried among the slow tide of people being prodded and marshalled down the length of the rectangle. For a moment he raised his eyes and saw faces pressed against the windows all round the the yard, their gazes wide and expressionless as they swept over the figures of the latest convoy.

  At the far end was a wooden barracks, set in from the main buildings, outside which a queue was forming. Levade clutched the handle of his suitcase and leaned against a pillar which supported a shallow flat roof that ran round the three sides of the rectangle to provide shelter above the walkway beside the buildings.

  Pushed by the baton of a gendarme, Levade stumbled into the gloom of the barracks where long trestle tables were set up in the bleary light of hurricane lamps. A German officer was sitting at one of these, with a French policeman to his right; but most of the work in the barracks was being done by local gendarmes, who were making the prisoners empty their luggage on to the tables while removing anything that was forbidden by their rules. They threw what was confiscated over their shoulders, where shabby creatures wearing white armbands collected it into piles.

  The gendarme opposite Levade unrolled the canvas Charlotte had packed, glanced at it briefly and hurled it behind him. He searched Levade all over, tearing off his jacket and shirt in his hurry to get done; he wrinkled up his nose as his fingers touched the purple scar on Levade’s shoulder. He emptied the suitcase on the table, chucked some of the contents over his shoulder, and thrust the rest into Levade’s arms. ‘Move,’ he said. At the doorway, Levade was given a piece of yellow cloth in the shape of a star.

  ‘Read this.’ The gendarme pressed a notice against Levade’s face. ‘Any internee seen within camp bounds not wearing the insignia of the star will be imprisoned and automatically included in the next transport.

  ‘The same sanction will be taken against any internee found on the women’s staircases. Only those issued with a white armband are allowed on those staircases.

  ‘The orderlies are responsible for seeing that these orders are carried out.’

  Beneath these words was another proclamation, signed by the Commissioner of Police, which detailed the imminent punishment of two people who had breached the rules; despite being married to ‘Aryans’, they were to be deported at once.

  Levade felt his wrist taken by a young man wearing a white armband. They walked along the side of the building among a small group of stumbling new arrivals, some of them weeping with fatigue and fear.

  Levade found himself climbing a stairway – with difficulty, as he was finding it hard to breathe, and people were jostling him from behind. Then he was in a large room, filled with panic and loud voices. He sat down on the floor, sweating into his shirt despite the cold, and leaned his back against the wall, clutching his few spared clothes to his chest.

  Eventually, a hand rested on his shoulder and he opened his eyes to see the face of a man of about forty, clean-shaven, looking earnestly at him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ The man spoke French in a native, educated accent.

  Levade smiled and nodded.

  ‘I’m the head of your staircase. I’ll try to help you, but it’s always chaos when people first arrive. Have you got a knife and fork, or a bowl? No? All right, I’ll see you get them.’

  Levade looked round. It had grown dark outside, and the room was lit by naked bulbs hung from the ceiling. He saw rows of makeshift wooden beds piled one on top of another to make bunks. From many of these hung coats, shirts, jackets, saucepans and bags that had escaped the search in the barracks.

  ‘My name’s Hartmann,’ said the man, still kneeling by Levade. ‘You can stay sitting here if you like. I’ll get the head of the room to find you a bed.’ He smiled for a moment. ‘We’re very bureaucratic here – head of this, head of that. There’ll be some soup later. Make sure you get some.’

  Levade nodded and tried to thank the man, but his mouth and throat were too dry for words to pass.

  He closed his eyes again and thought of the Domaine. He had struggled there with the limits of himself, pressing against the restrictions of what was left to him by age and temperament. He had considered himself unhappy. Yet he could see now that in the north light of that studio, disappointing though the results may have been, there had been a certain pleasure in his work. And the presence of the English woman – that too had been a comfort.

  In the time since he left the Domaine the smell of excrement and unwashed bodies had never left him. At the first camp, Beaune-la-Rolande, it was bad; but here, in this place, the air was almost as rank as in the train. It was hard to love your fellow man in these circumstances.

  ‘Do you want a bed? Come with me.’ Levade was addressed in French by a plump, grey-haired man with an accent that sounded Polish or Hungarian. He took Levade by the arm to the corner of the room.

  ‘You’ll have to climb up. Let me take the clothes.’

  He helped Levade up to a bed that was in the middle of a rack of three. ‘Sorry about the crush. The room’s only supposed to have fifty people and we’ve got over a hundred. By the way, you’re not allowed to smoke.’

  Levade lay down and turned his face to the wall. There were thick electric cables that had not been plastered over but hung loosely from the grey cement; further down the wall was a cavity in which he could see a number of unconnected pipes and other signs of aborted plumbing. On the other side of the room, a long sheet of zinc had been attached to the wall to act as a wash basin, fed by half a dozen tapless pipes.

  The window, a foot or so from Levade’s face, had for some reason been painted blue – perhaps to stop them looking on to the world outside, he thought. It was of the type that slides along metal runners, and although it had been nailed shut, it did not fit flush with the frame. Levade was grateful for the slim icy draught because it helped against the smell of people in the room. He pulled the pile of his clothes on top of him and huddled down to sleep.

  Later, a voice tried to interest him in soup, but Levade shook his head and pulled the clothes higher up over his shoulders. He heard the sound of a whistle and sensed the lights being extinguished.

  Then, at last, for the first time for many years, Levade dreamed – rich, sensuous narratives expanded at beguiling length; visual revelations of remembered places; a total habitation of other fully realised worlds.

  When he awoke in the morning, he found it impossible to believe that he was back in the room at Drancy. Surely the more powerful existence in which his dreams had so ravishingly placed him should have prevailed over this reduced reality.

  It was seven o’clock and one of the orderlies with white armbands had brought a pail of coffee into the room. People crowded round him with their mugs outstretched while the head of the room tried in vain to make them form a line.

  Levade stirred beneath the pile of clothes. He could feel an intense irritation in the skin of his chest and legs. It was a familiar sensation that for a moment he struggled to place. Then it came back to him: lice. He had not felt this tormenting itch since he burned his service shirt in Paris after being demobilised in 1918.

  He struggled from the bed and asked the head of the room where the lavatory was.

  ‘You have to wait. Our turn in the Red Castle is in five minutes. Wait here.’

  Men were washing in the cold water that gushed from the pipes above the zinc trough. Some stood naked and performed their intimate ablutions with unhurried care; some furtively splashed and dabbed, revealing as little of themselves as they could. A father, a religious man, agonisingly hid his nakedness from his son. Levade found that Charlotte had put a
toothbrush and some paste in the pocket of his jacket and he waited his turn to use them.

  The Red Castle was a block of latrines made from a temporary barracks set near the main gates. When his room was detailed to use them, Levade went down with his fellow men, herded by the orderly. In the courtyard, they had to keep to the edge of the buildings; they were not allowed to step into the open space, but had to huddle back like shadows on the wall. The latrines were inadequate for the numbers; the paper in the cubicles had been used by previous rooms, and when Levade pulled his plug there was no water in the cistern. The smell and the filth were not new to him; everything reminded him of the earlier war, when he had lived in such conditions. In those days, they had been told there was a reason: the glory and the honour of the country were at stake, and their sacrifices would be honoured when they returned from the front. This time, Levade did not think he would be going home.

  The inhabitants of all the staircases in due course assembled in the cinder-covered courtyard for the roll call. Levade marvelled at the variety of his fellow prisoners. There were sleek and shaven men in heavy overcoats who might have stepped out of an important business meeting for a quiet cigar; there were vagrant people in whose faces the grime was long ingrained; there were bare-legged women fussing over families, trying to keep threads of order; and there were children, large numbers of dark-eyed, lethargic infants, some barely able to stand from fatigue, some with their mothers but most of them isolated and stunned, beyond speech.

  The roll call of the thousands gathered there took an hour and a half. Levade leaned on his young neighbour for support and, when it was over, went trembling back to his bed where he coughed until he thought his ribs would crack. A noisy argument was taking place between a group of Frenchmen and some Poles. The French were blaming the Poles for their own plight in being rounded up by the police, while the Poles complained that the French were given privileges by the police who ran the camp. After all, they argued, are we not all Jews?