Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Let me see the rooms,’ he said. ‘For my men. To sleep.’

  His manner was now less charming; it was as though the memory of his military duty had made him cold. The manager fumbled with the room keys that hung on a little perforated board behind him; in the dim wattage of the overhead bulb Charlotte saw the bubbles of sweat on his upper lip. He began to climb the stairs, with the German officer behind him. Charlotte hesitated for a moment, then followed.

  On the first floor the manager began opening the flimsy doors of the rooms that were not occupied, allowing the German a brief glance inside.

  ‘Good night,’ said Charlotte loudly, as she began to climb towards her room on the second floor. ‘Goodbye.’

  Neither man answered.

  Charlotte closed the door of her room and listened. She heard more doors being opened and closed, then she heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There was a jangling and a thudding along the landing, though no sound of voices. The noise came closer to her room. She heard the German speak, briefly, something that sounded like an order, and there was the noise of one man’s footsteps departing down the stairs.

  Charlotte stood with her ear to the door. There was no sound. She was certain he was still there, so he must be standing in the corridor. He must have seen all he needed to see; surely now he would have to go.

  There came the reverberation of boots on floorboards and a violent knocking on her door. Charlotte sprang back into the room and tried to compose herself.

  She said nothing, but the knocking came again. She went over and opened the door a little. The space was filled with grey uniform. Charlotte met the German’s eyes and gave what she hoped was a smile of surprise, mixed with modesty. She tried to look friendly, but as though she did not wish to be disturbed.

  ‘May I come in?’ He had resumed his more diffident manner.

  ‘I was just going to bed.’

  ‘Just for a moment. It’s not that I . . .’ His French seemed to fail him.

  ‘It’s very late,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Just for a moment.’ His foot was in the door.

  Once inside the bedroom his manner became nervous. He walked round the room, his eyes constantly moving, as though he did not want to let them rest on some feminine intimacy.

  ‘I want to say that I am sorry if I am not proper.’ He had picked up Charlotte’s room key and was flipping it back and forth absently in his hand. ‘Many difficult things arrive in wars,’ he went on. ‘We do not do what we want.’

  ‘Of course.’ Charlotte had no idea what he was trying to say. She had kept the door open to increase the impression that this was no more than a final word.

  The German put down the key on the dressing table and picked up the bottle of hair dye. He tossed it from one hand to another as he walked round the room.

  ‘I have friends, I have brothers who are like me.’ He turned his eyes, now large with sincerity, on to Charlotte, but her appalled gaze was fixed on the bottle of hair dye. As it spun back and forth through the air she could plainly make out the label, which stated that it was dye and was decorated with a picture of a freshly coiffed female head. There were only the dregs of the dark fluid inside, but it was of a colour and consistency that the German could not possibly mistake for anything else.

  ‘I have my wife at home. It is difficult for all of us, and to be righteous is my last hope.’

  The bottle flew in its highest arc yet, from left hand to right, the brunette liquid slapping up the sides. Suddenly Charlotte thought: it is not his lack of French that is making him incoherent: he’s shy – he’s frightened of making a fool of himself.

  ‘I fully understand,’ she said. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked down at the bottle in his hand.

  ‘And one day soon the war will be over.’ Smiling brightly, Charlotte extended her hand, as though this was the honourable conclusion to an entirely successful piece of social intercourse. She stepped back a little as she did so, to reveal the beckoning escape of the half-open door.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The German held out his hand to Charlotte, switching the bottle to his left hand as he did so.

  ‘Good night,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Yes. Good night.’

  She had backed him into the doorway.

  He stood for a moment, unmoving.

  ‘Please.’ Charlotte held out her hand and pointed to the bottle.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Thank you.’ With the last remnants of Dominique’s determined propriety, Charlotte narrowed her eyes into an expression of polite but incontrovertible farewell. ‘Goodbye.’

  The German nodded, stepped out of the room and made off down the stairs. Charlotte held the bottle in both hands, close to her bosom. Her heart was thudding so hard that it was making her palms tingle. Good God, she thought, what have I become that even German officers are scared of me?

  She went out on to the landing and ran to a window that overlooked the rue Lambert-Licors. She saw the street splashed by a rectangle of light as the front door of the hotel opened, then heard the rumble of a military vehicle being started in the rain.

  4

  A SERIES OF country buses brought Charlotte to the outskirts of Paris. At the first sight of the fancy ironwork sign above the steps, she descended, bag in hand, into the Métro.

  Within moments she was assailed by a smell as familiar and as loaded with memory as a child’s first sensuous impression involuntarily recovered after decades of loss. She had forgotten this extraordinary atmosphere and how, as a teenage girl, it had struck her on her very first descent as something that was already deeply familiar and suggestive, as though she had been there before in a dream or in an earlier life. No one had been able to identify it for her; presumably it had some prosaic mechanical origin, but people talked of tarred hemp rope, of tobacco, garlic or sub-soil in vain attempts to explain this essence of the city.

  Charlotte was for a moment so moved by it, and by its persistence, that she did not notice how much other things had changed. There were many more people than usual, queuing in the tunnels to get down to the pneumatic scarlet gates at the end of the platform. Among the austere clothes of the Parisians were flashes of grey uniform, though the Germans democratically awaited their turn among the French. Charlotte noticed that her clothes and her suitcase were not out of place among the Parisians, most of whom seemed to have abandoned their habitual chic.

  She squeezed through the barriers as they were closing and clambered on to the last carriage of the train. She put down her case and looked round. Something was strange. All the people were staring at her with dark, distrustful eyes. All of them were wearing a star of yellow cloth pinned to their lapels. The man standing next to Charlotte muttered, ‘Jews only’, and pushed her out on to the platform.

  In the next carriage, Charlotte was offered a seat by a young Parisian as the train clanked off into the tunnel. This was not her normal experience of the Métro, where people had to be reminded by statutory notices to give up their seats to the war-wounded or to pregnant women. There seemed to be a contest of politeness between the French and the Germans, as the soldiers in their pressed uniforms and shining belts made way for shabby matrons, and young Frenchmen, not to be outdone by Wehrmacht charm, mounted a counteroffensive of Gallic courtesy.

  Charlotte wanted to have one look at Paris before boarding the suburban train, and she left the Métro at Odéon with the idea of walking up past the restaurant in the rue de Tournon where Monsieur Loiseau had taken her as a girl. On the Boulevard St Germain the green and white municipal buses moved with unchallenged ease, the only other traffic being licensed bicycles, many ridden by wobbling citizens long past their cycling peak.

  The Métro might have kept its pungency, but the streets of the sixth arrondissement had become odourless and pale, with no sudden gust of coffee or fresh bread from open doorways, no morning freshness from the water-sprinkled pavements. It w
as quiet and anaemic in the rue de Tournon, as though proper circulation had been strangled by the Nazi flag that draped the Senate House. The restaurant had shut down.

  In the Jardin du Luxembourg Charlotte walked the dusty paths she so acutely remembered and stopped before the statues that had puzzled or entranced her: Watteau being adored by a décolletée creature from one of his own paintings, the Comtesse de Ségur, née Rostopchino (1799–1874), and a bearded man of bronzed self-importance called José Maria de Heredia, whose claim to a plinth in this moody garden was his membership of the Académie Française. By the wooden summer-houses, beneath the scabby plane trees, there were a handful of children, mufflered and wrapped against the winds from the Boulevard St Michel, but their games seemed, to Charlotte’s searching eye, inhibited, and their voices thin and scratchy in the winter air.

  She took herself off to make what she assumed would be almost her final rail journey before her return to England. On the suburban train she thought of Levade, picturing him in some tidy, if ascetic, little room, surrounded by his few possessions, with his painting hung above the bed.

  At Le Bourget-Drancy station she asked the way to Drancy in a glass-fronted café by the road, and the proprietor directed her across the large bridge that spanned the tracks. Beneath her in a siding as she crossed was an idle express, the wooden destination board slid into the side of the carriage proclaiming PARIS NORD and, upside down, AMIENS.

  She remembered her father talking of Amiens as a place where British soldiers went on leave during the Great War. Its great cathedral was sandbagged to the level of the stained-glass windows – a big cold barn, he had called it, a frightening place, and an unforgiving town despite its inhabitants’ claims for the dazzling cathedral and charming water-gardens.

  The long, broad road that led Charlotte down to Drancy had streets of all the usual names: those of Alsace-Lorraine, always among the first places to be claimed by any French municipality, and of Jean Jaurès, the martyred president. There was a spacious, unkempt park on the left, though the town seemed hardly inhabited enough to need such recreational space. The houses were in a variety of urban styles, one of the most popular of which was stone and cement with wooden gables, like the holiday villas just back from the front at Deauville.

  Nothing was strange about Drancy, Charlotte thought, nothing was less than typical. Quite what she expected to see, she could not say, but surely if she was so close to a place of such despair there should be some sign of stress or concealment.

  The camp itself was visible enough. Its abandoned towers were several storeys higher than any building in the area, and an elderly woman Charlotte stopped to ask the way pointed to it with an exhalation of distaste. The road went past the southern, open side of the rectangle of the camp, and an area of broken ground lay between the street and the barbed-wire fence.

  Charlotte stopped. In the raised observation posts were gendarmes with what appeared to be machine guns. While the housing complex looked civilian, even hospitable in a bleak way, there was something wrong about the barbed wire and the guns. She could see the wooden gate that had been set into the wire fencing, but at the thought of simply going up and asking to see her friend, she faltered.

  On the other side of the road, looking across at the camp, was a café, and Charlotte went inside to ask advice.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the proprietress, ‘I have a friend in this place here and I wondered how—’

  ‘You want a room?’ said the woman quickly. ‘We’ve got one spare at the moment. Binoculars are extra.’

  Charlotte was taken aback by the speed of the response. ‘You have people staying here in order to look, to—’

  ‘You’d better hurry if you want the room. There’s more coming every day.’

  ‘I really just wanted to see this friend, to pay a visit.’

  The woman laughed. ‘Are you out of your mind? They’re not allowed to see anyone. They’re only allowed out for the roll call. That’s when you need the binoculars, to see if they’re still there.’

  Charlotte looked at the woman’s rapacious eyes. Inside her skirt pocket her hand closed on the last of her francs.

  ‘Do you ever manage to get word to people? Can you ever get messages in?’

  The woman ran her eyes up and down Charlotte’s cheap clothes. ‘There’s a gendarme who comes over for a drink, but I don’t think someone like you could—’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘You take the room and I’ll have a word this evening.’

  The room was little more than a cubicle, recently partitioned from a larger space to increase the guest capacity, but it had a bed and it overlooked the camp. For the room and the binoculars Charlotte was asked to pay three times what she had been charged in Châteaudun. In the afternoon she drafted a message that would as briefly as possible tell Levade what had happened. Several times in the course of the evening she went down to see if the pliable gendarme had called, but each time she was disappointed. She had fallen asleep over her romantic story when she was woken by a sharp knocking.

  The proprietress put her head round the door. ‘He’s here. Come now if you want to see him.’

  Charlotte slid off the bed, straightened her skirt and pressed her feet back into her shoes. She followed the woman down a narrow passage to a small sitting room, where a uniformed gendarme was standing with his back to the door.

  ‘Here she is,’ said the woman, and left the room.

  When the gendarme turned round, Charlotte saw a pale man, probably not more than thirty, but heavily jowled and unathletic with a moustache in which grey hairs were already sprouting.

  He said nothing, and Charlotte guessed he would prefer her to take the initiative.

  ‘I have a friend. I need to get a message to him. Can you help me?’

  The gendarme wordlessly inclined his head.

  ‘His name is Auguste Levade. He’s French. He’s been here only a few days. And I need to hear a message back. I need to know he’s understood.’

  The gendarme nodded again.

  ‘How much?’ said Charlotte.

  The man took a piece of paper from his pocket on which he had already scribbled a figure.

  It was slightly less than Charlotte had expected: presumably most people who required this service were refugees, or French whose businesses had been closed down by the Government.

  She handed him the note she had written to Levade.

  The gendarme spoke for the first time. ‘I can’t take that.’ His voice was unexpectedly high and nervy. ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Charlotte.

  The gendarme shrugged.

  ‘All right, let me try. My name’s Dominique. Can you remember that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell him . . . Julien was acting, to save two children. Say “at the Domaine” as well. “At the Domaine Julien was acting to save two children.” From Dominique. Can you remember? Say it to me.’

  Like an overweight schoolboy, he repeated the words.

  Charlotte produced the banknotes from her pocket. ‘And I’ll see you back here tomorrow night?’

  The gendarme nodded once more as he left the room, and Charlotte felt the rising of elation. She was almost there.

  In the morning, the young Rumanian and his friend carried Levade down to the infirmary, a series of five rooms in the north-west corner of the rectangle with seventy-five sheetless beds.

  Some of the patients had been ill on their arrival at Drancy. There were old men who had been transferred from Jewish hospices in Paris, and lifetime inhabitants of psychiatric wards removed from their hospitals by gendarmes to make up the numbers demanded by the deportation programme. There were also those who had grown sick since arriving at the camp, women giving birth to babies conceived at liberty and many young children whose soft skin was covered with scabs and sores caused by malnutrition and the bites of vermin. From the lips of these children there rose a permanent, bewildered wailing again
st which the other inmates tried to stop their ears.

  Levade was given a bed with two others stacked on top of it. A Jewish nurse brought him a glass of water, but his hand was trembling too much to hold it. His whole body had begun to shiver. He tried to calm the quivering muscles of his arms and legs, but even his neck and head were shaking with the spasms of cold.

  The nurse brought him the only spare blanket she could find, but his rage for warmth could not have been satisfied by all the coverings of his lifetime piled on top of him. ‘Cold . . . cold,’ he muttered to the nurse, the words broken up by the rattling of his teeth.

  She took him in her arms and tried to warm him, but she could not contain the jerking movements of his body. A young Jewish doctor came and cast an eye on the violently trembling figure. He wiped some blood from Levade where his teeth had pierced his lip, then passed on to other patients.

  After an hour or so, the temperature of Levade’s body began to rise. The shivering died down and for a moment his body was relaxed. He looked about him and saw the bare cement walls, the Red Cross nurses and their co-opted Jewish sisters, the frightened gaze of the powerless Jewish doctors. A crisis, he remembered the other doctor, Levi, saying: a crisis through which you may or may not pass . . .

  By this time he was starting to sweat, so he pushed back the blanket. Soon, the skin of his face was flushed purple with heat and he had to keep licking his lips. Everything seemed to be moving very quickly; his thoughts started to become disarrayed: it was like being carried on some machine of colossal momentum over which he had no control. He tried with his conscious mind to calm his thoughts, but he had no sense of time any more; it had collapsed on him.

  A gendarme was leaning over his bed and speaking. For a moment Levade re-established contact with the world. The man was giving him a message. Julien . . . two children . . . But what did it matter? Julien, the dear boy, his only son, how much he loved him . . . How dearly, dearly . . .