Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Inside the hotel they followed a carpeted corridor to the lounge bar, which was full of local people from the market as well as others in uniform or morning dress who were on their way to the wedding. The women sat at a table while Michael and Gregory pushed their way to the bar.

  The bell on the till was ringing in a continuous monotone as a barmaid from the public bar was summoned to help. A tray of drinks was held high above the throng, with tall mugs of beer, glasses of fizzy drinks with slices of cucumber and orange, smaller glasses with cherries on sticks and pink gin. Gregory arrived with an oval plate of sandwiches, hastily cut by the harassed barmaid, but full of fat ham and mustard that, Charlotte thought, would have caused a riot in Lavaurette.

  Charlotte found herself swept up in the air of slightly frantic joy. There was no point in resisting it, she thought, as she raised her glass and drank to Sally’s health for the third time that morning.

  She looked across at Gregory, who was in earnest conversation with Alison. In all the long months she had forgotten how much she enjoyed his company – the simple pleasure of being with him. And, as he put his head on one side, the better to listen to something Alison was saying, she thought how she had also forgotten how beautiful he was, how very beautiful.

  When they reached the churchyard at last, Charlotte saw Dick Cannerley and Robin Morris in anxious conversation. Morris went inside the church, while Cannerley stood for a moment with a pile of service sheets. He divided them between two other young men in morning dress, then followed Morris inside. Cannerley had aged, Charlotte thought.

  She stood by the lych gate where Michael had dropped them while he went off to find somewhere to park along the crowded verge. She inhaled the smell of cow parsley from the bank as she looked over the gently swelling tumuli of grassy graves that led up to the church.

  There was Peter Gregory, leaning on his stick half-way up the path, talking to Sally’s mother, who was looking nervous beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

  In Charlotte’s mind, Gregory belonged to the category of dreams and traumas. The possibility of happiness he had once held out, and that she had briefly tasted, was of an intensity so great that even at the time it had seemed already to belong to the past. The power of such feelings, it seemed to her, lay in their promise of transcendence. People followed them and believed in them because they offered not only a paradise of sensation but the promise of meaning, too; like the miracle of art, they held out an explanation of all the other faltering lights by which people were more momentarily guided.

  By their nature, however, these feelings were unreliable. Sometimes, they seemed to be remembered before they were even experienced, and they could leave in those who felt them a fear that only what had been forgotten, what stayed beyond the reach of recollection, was capable of truly transcending the limits of their sad incorporation in the flesh, and of their death.

  To believe otherwise remained an act of faith, but it was one that Charlotte felt prepared to make. She walked up the path of the churchyard and took Gregory lightly by the arm. They went between the grey, lichen-covered headstones, and turned for the final few yards towards the door of the Norman church. As they came near to it, Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory’s and found that it already contained something – the handle of his stick.

  She held on tight to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this is a work of fiction, I have tried to represent the historical background as it actually was. For this purpose I have relied only on books that were based on first-hand documentary evidence, or on such documents themselves. G Section is an invention, but its techniques are modelled on those of actual organisations. Pichon is a fictional character, but the Inquiry and Control Section and the Police for Jewish Affairs acted as described. The Milice oath and the quotation from the broadcast by the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs are verbatim.

  Drancy came under German command in July 1943. There are survivors’ accounts of both French and German regimes.

  I should like to thank the large number of people in England and France who helped me with aspects of the background of this novel.

  S.F. Toulouse–London 1995–1998.

  It must have been forty-eight hours after I’d written my letter of polite refusal to Pereira that I saw the corner of the envelope, still unposted, beneath some junk mail on the hall table. I pulled it out, dropped it in the wastepaper basket, sat down at my desk and began again. ‘Dear Dr Pereira, Thank you for your letter. I should be delighted . . .’

  A week later, I heard back from him; and ten days after that I was on the plane.

  Flights to Toulon were rare and expensive; I dog-legged via Marseille and a boxy hire car to the tip of the peninsula – what Pereira called the presqu’île, or ‘almost-island’ – to a small area where pleasure boats and water taxis berthed. Here I stood outside a scruffy place with a red awning, the Café des Pins, waiting to be collected.

  What reckoning with my past had made me change my mind? I conceded now that looking back over my youth in such detail was probably a way of preparing my defences. Recent research showed that your brain came to a decision more quickly than your mind could do so and fired the relevant systems before your plodding ‘judgement’ took the credit. Overlooking the implications for free will, or the illusion of it, I was happy to accept that that had been the case with me.

  I was going to meet a man who could open a door on to my past: it made me vulnerable to think a stranger might know more about myself than I did; I needed to make sure my own version of my life was in good order. At the same time, the wretched Annalisa business (such a mess of lust and fear and blocked feeling) had made me admit there were aspects of my character – or behaviour, at least – that not only were self-defeating but also inflicted pain on others. Even in my early sixties, I felt young and vigorous enough to change – to confront whatever I had yet to face; and perhaps a medical man of my father’s generation whose special interest was in memory could be the very one to help.

  I was into my second cigarette when an old woman in black stopped and looked me up and down.

  ‘Vous êtes Dr Hendricks?’ Her accent was strongly of the Midi.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Venez.’ She gestured me to follow. Despite her bowed legs she moved at speed. We went down a stone jetty, past the public ferry that had tied up for the night, over a gangway and on to a boat with a white canopy. It was big enough for a dozen people, though there were only three of us on it. The third was a man in the wheelhouse, who opened the throttle and began to edge the boat out into the waters of the bay.

  My French was good enough to ask how far we were going and how long it would take, but I couldn’t make out the old woman’s answers over the noise of the engine, and it seemed to me she preferred it that way. Eventually, I gave up trying to talk and instead looked back over the churning white wake to the port. Twenty minutes later, the mainland was no longer visible; we had left behind the croissant shape of Porquerolles island as we headed away from the setting sun.

  At some point, despite the heave of the sea, I must have nodded off. I was woken by the thump of the side of the boat against a rock. It was dark.

  There was an urgent exchange between the pilot and the old woman. We had arrived at a rocky inlet, or calanque as the man called it. He shone a torch on an iron hoop hammered into the reef; through this he secured the painter. The sea was calm enough to allow him to jump out and extend his hand, first to the woman, then to me.

  It was an awkward scramble by torchlight before we reached a path. Here the man left us and returned to his boat; I followed the old woman in the dark on an uphill wooded path. I caught the smell of pines and could feel their need
les under my feet. Eventually we came to some steps, which after a considerable time – there were perhaps a hundred of them – led to a flat area on what must have been the cliff top. A large rectangular house was now visible, lit only by the moon; I could make out numerous tropical shrubs and trees along its shuttered verandah.

  We went in through a side door, into a dark passageway. The old woman told me to wait, while she vanished into the gloom, returning shortly afterwards with a gas lamp. With this, she led the way up a bare staircase and into a long corridor. At the end, we turned at right angles, towards the back of the house, and went up a half-flight of stairs to a door.

  ‘Isn’t Dr Pereira here?’ I asked in my rough but serviceable French.

  ‘No. He was called away to the mainland. He’ll be back tomorrow. There’s a bathroom down there. Breakfast will be at eight o’clock.’

  I lit a candle and said goodnight as I looked round my room. The bedstead was iron; the mattress was thin, but yielded when I sat down on it. There were clean sheets and a single blanket; the night was warm. Above the bed was a crucifix, a carved figure in soft wood with convincing thorns and drops of gore; on the opposite wall was a painting of a pious-looking man in a robe with a faraway look.

  The shutters gave way to a hefty push and opened on to the chatter of cicadas. The moon was obscured by loose clouds, but I could make out the shapes of umbrella pines; I thought that over the din of the insects I could hear the distant gasp and slap of sea in the calanque. The shouting of the women in my London flat seemed remote.

  Pereira’s island appeared on none of the maps I had flicked through at the airport – being too small, probably, for their tourist scale; yet the size of this house alone argued the presence of running water, labour, human habitation. As if to confirm my guess, a distant church bell struck the hour.

  I tried to read by candlelight, but even with two flames the print was hard to make out. I was lucky to suffer few of the indignities of middle age – beer belly, stiff knee or hair loss – but a bright light had become indispensable for reading.

  It didn’t matter. When you’ve slept in as many spare rooms and lodgings as I have, there is a comfort in strangeness; the new is always familiar.

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  Epub ISBN: 9781407052595

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  Vintage

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  Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 1998

  Extract from Where My Heart Used to Beat © Sebastian Faulks, 2015

  Sebastian Faulks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Hutchinson in 1998

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099394310