Charlotte Gray (45 page)

Charlotte, alone in the field, her hair whipped against her face, looked up and saw for a second in the black open cave of the bomb bay a g down on her. His silhouette was caught for a moment, lit from behind by a light in the fuselage. Then the plane was climbing as swiftly as its bulk would permit, the engine noise rising in pitch as it completed its turn and pointed north for home.

"They like to have a look at their clients sometimes. It's their way of saying hello." It was Julien.

"Come on. Let's see what they've brought us."

Charlotte followed him back to the wood. She was shaking.

In the clearing the men were transferring the contents of the metal containers into sacks. There were Bren guns, pistols, ammunition and hand grenades; there was also plastic explosive, which the men inspected doubtfully, and a huge number of cheap-looking Sten guns with magazines and loaders. Cesar let out a cry of delight as his canister disgorged bars of chocolate, butter, tins of food and prime Virginia cigarettes, a packet of which he opened at once and handed round.

"You've got to stop them taking the parachutes," said Julien.

"They'll try and make them into clothes and anyone can see from the stitching where they've come from."

Eventually they finished burying the stores and covered the place with leaves and loose branches.

"The horse and cart'll be here tomorrow night," Julien said, 'but it's too dangerous to take it all back to Lavaurette with the Germans there. We'll have to keep it at the farm. Is that all right?"

The farmer he had turned to shrugged as he pulled deeply on his English cigarette.

"We had a visit from the police two weeks ago when we had two calves and a pregnant sow in the cellar. They didn't see a thing."

"Come on, then." The men began to file back through the wood, with the poacher leading, then out on to the narrow track. Many of them stumbled and swore as they went. One of the men passed Charlotte a flask.

Although she had already drunk more than ever before in her life she felt the bonds of comradeship required her to accept. Here was service at last in the illdefined but urgent moral cause that had first sent her south to London; here was the reason she had decided to stay in France. She was not going to appear halfhearted at this late stage.

"Are you all right?" Julien asked her at the farm, as the men mounted their bicycles and rode off shakily towards their homes.

"I think so." It was hard to say precisely. She had been frightened by the dangerous proximity of the plane and by the noise it made, then felt tricked and wounded by the vision of the single airman looking down on her. She also felt a powerful bond with these absurd drunken men stumbling about in the darkness, a sense of gratitude to them for having understood what needed to be done. She was one of them, and wanted to be closer.

Her skin felt swollen with this odd mixture of emotion as she followed Julien back into Lavaurette, her bicycle wobbling dangerously as they turned the sharp corner out of the Place de 1'Eglise.

"Will you be all right to get home?" said Julien, leaning his machine against the wall.

Charlotte nodded.

Julien put his face close to hers; he seemed to be inspecting her in the darkness. She closed her eyes for a moment. She was aware of how strange and sleepy she must appear; it was as though she were anaesthetised by drink, yet beneath the painless surface she was turbulently conscious.

"Do you want to come in? We could have a nightcap. Or you can sleep here if you're too tired to go back to the Domaine. I don't mind the sofa." Charlotte nodded and Julien took her arm as they made their way across the hall and up the stairs. He turned on a lamp in the sitting room and handed her a glass. She put it down on the table and opened her arms.

Julien embraced her and she rested her head against his shoulder.

"It's all right, Dominique, it's all right." He kissed her hair. She pulled her head back and smiled at him.

"I'm so tired," she said.

"Of course you are. It's late. It's almost dawn. And tonight was ... different."

"Yes." Charlotte wanted to explain her conflicting passions to Julien, how strong they were, how important, but she was too tired to find the words, and too drunk.

"Kiss me," she said.

She had no wish to leave Julien's apartment; she had been so long alone, so long thrown back on the resources of her own mind and feelings that she wanted to take strength and comfort from someone else.

"I'd like to stay with you," she said.

Julien appeared once more to be earnestly, almost clinically examining her face.

"Are you sure? You won't regret it?"

Charlotte smiled. She would not regret anything that brought her closer to the companionship of the men with whom she had spent the evening.

They had understood their past and they had made some effort to keep a thread intact, a link that would enable their country to survive because the connection to better days, before the Fall, though tenuous, would be unbroken.

"And Monsieur Guilbert?" said Julien.

"What would he say?"

"I don't care." She opened her hands in shrugging dismissal.

"You can kiss me again. Monsieur Levade, if you like." She saw in Julien's eyes the look of furtive schoolboy pleasure she had seen when she first kissed him in Lavaurette, as though he could not quite believe his luck. It made her start to laugh, so she had to pull her mouth away from his.

"Your face," she said.

"What's wrong with it?"

Charlotte looked at its expression, now agitated and serious.

"Nothing," she said, 'it's a beautiful face."

"Madame Guilbert, you're a very teasing, wicked woman."

"Shall we go into the bedroom?"

Charlotte sat on the end of Julien's bed; she remembered how she had slept in it the first day she had arrived in Lavaurette with her detective story, her identity fiercely subdued in that of Dominique.

Now it would be wonderful to do something spontaneously affectionate, free from the weight of anguish and uncertainty.

"My husband has a mistress, anyway," she said, as she pushed off the ugly shoes.

"It serves him right." She reached up and undid the buttons on the back of her dress; she stood to let it fall to the floor. She was not quite too drunk to calculate that, unless the cycle of her body had played an unprecedented trick, there was no danger of her becoming pregnant.

"Oh, Dominique," said Julien, running his hands down the small of her bare back, then slipping a finger inside the waistband of her new silk underwear.

"I've always wanted to make love to a stranger, someone whose name I don't even know."

Charlotte felt him slide away her remaining clothes and tightly shut her eyes, some modest hope persisting that she might thus herself become invisible. Julien pushed her gently back on to the bed and she felt the mattress shake as he tore at his own clothes.

"Quickly," she said, aware that her churning emotions might move into a new pattern that would make her want to stop, or that the serene sense of not caring might desert her.

She felt Julien's lips kissing the skin of her inner thigh and for a moment thought of what he might be seeing, and wondered whether it was yet light enough in the seepage of the grey winter dawn through the shutters for him, like Pauline Benoit, to be puzzled. She lifted him by the shoulders and felt his body loom over hers as he kissed her mouth.

Between her legs she felt the touch of his hand while he whispered in her ear.

"Madame Guilbert, you are a remarkable woman. If you were not married I might think myself in love with you."

"Please, Octave. Please."

Charlotte heard her own voice as she begged him to begin, but he kept her waiting, whispering, "Dominique, you're so beautiful," while his hand caressed her until she could take no more but reached out and pulled him into her. She felt Julien clench his body in desperate self-control. He moved slowly back and forth for a few minutes, then briefly stopped.

"Dominique," he breathed, 'this is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments."

She pushed against him, reclaimed him, and he began to move more vigorously, then sigh with sad rapture as though he recognised his time was limited. Though she sensed how he tried to hold himself back. Charlotte felt buffeted by the urgency of his desire, too much so to venture off into her own imagining, and so she merely went with him, in a willing indulgence.

At the last moment she did feel a rise of feeling in herself as he groaned out her presumed name for the final time; but what name she called out in return she could not have said, as her mind was full of the picture of Julien being annihilated, as he slumped down gasping on top of her, breaking into tiny dying fragments. VI

4

For more than twenty-four hours Peter Gregory had waited and watched. He left the busy port area during the day and looked for somewhere to sleep where he would not draw attention to himself. Although he had cash in his pocket, he was wary of trying to buy food without tickets. In order to look less suspicious, he also needed to shave, but having previously borrowed equipment from Jacques (it was seldom used by the old man himself), he was not sure whether razors and blades were also rationed.

By midday the pain in his leg was so severe that he decided to risk a hotel he had seen a short walk back from the waterfront. Despite the harsh light overhead, the lino-covered vestibule had a dim, crepuscular feeling, unmitigated by the sweet smell of some recent disinfectant.

Behind the high front desk sat a woman in her sixties with greying hair piled up in a bun and thick glasses that rendered her suspicious eyes unnaturally large. Gregory stuck an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth to make his speech less distinct.

"Room?" he barked, laying down his identity card on the counter. In the course of the afternoon he had rubbed it on the ground and scuffed the edges to make it look less new.

The woman turned to a board behind her and took a key from its hook. She said something Gregory did not understand, in answer to which he smiled as charmingly as he could manage and yawned melodramatically. She spoke again and he thought he made out the word for money. He rapidly calculated that even if he was mistaken she was unlikely to be displeased by being offered cash at this stage, and put his hand to his pocket; perhaps it was not the sort of hotel where people actually spent the night. The exchange of money lightened the atmosphere, and it occurred to Gregory that the woman was as frightened as he was. They had told him in London that there were no fewer than fifteen police and security organisations working in France and doubtless the landlady like everyone else had something she did not wish them to find out. He climbed the stairs and went along the passage to room number 14. The grimy little window overlooked an interior courtyard in which the cooker outlet from the kitchen emitted a grey, unwholesome vapour.

Gregory lay down on the bed and, despite his best intentions of only resting, fell asleep.

It was dark when he awoke. He made his way back to the street by the harbour. There was still the same bustle of German troops unloading stores, standing behind lorries, smoking; there were still French police strutting about in pairs.

It was past midnight when he decided he could wait no longer; if he did not move soon he would faint with hunger and fatigue. When the door of the house he was watching opened at last, he went across the street and stopped the middleaged man who was leaving.

"Pascale?"

"First floor." The man jerked his head backwards and hurried off. Gregory went up the bare stairs and knocked at a green-painted door on the landing.

It opened a few inches and he found himself looking at a woman with stern, grey eyes.

"What do you want?"

"Pascale. I ... Gregory's French deserted him. He closed his eyes and felt the floor begin to buckle underneath him.

"I'm English," he said in his own language.

"For God's sake help me."

The door opened and he stepped inside.

"Take it easy," said the woman, also in English.

"My God, you're American."

He fell forward against her, and she dragged his bony weight across the room to a divan by the window.

Charlotte became particular in her work at the Domaine, as though it were something that interested her. She forced herself to take pride in the cleanliness of the floors and furniture and to make dinner, even if it was barely edible, at least a punctuation of Levade's undifferentiated hours.

She began to think more and more about home. The sight of the black bellied Halifax above her, the curious pilot making one more sweep above the benighted land before heading north for England, had made her think of those laconic men, their flying suits, their beer, their shoulder-shrugging that concealed an inglorious belief in what they did.

She thought more and more of her parents and of her brother; if he was now abroad, as he had so long hoped, they would be worried for his safety. Roderick had a way of being at the centre of improbable storms; he was always on the train that broke down, invariably in the foyer of the cinema that caught fire.

The combination of fatigue, exhilaration and the after-effects of drink made her able to postpone thinking about her night with Julien.

Then, as her mind became rested and clear, she found her first response was a self-righteous sense of loyalty to herself Why not?" she caught herself saying to her reflection when she combed her hair in the morning: it's my life, I'm responsible to no one but myself. She rather admired her own daring, and felt protective of the vulnerable being that was still there in the centre of her child, woman, it made no difference and to whom she owed her greatest allegiance. I will stick by my own decisions, she valiantly thought, as she laboured in the icy rooms of the Domaine. Yet her bravado was slowly deflated by feelings of shame and insecurity. She loved the idea of Dominique had used her without compunction for her own advantage, and regretted having descended to invoking her as an alibi for her own idle lust, betrayal or selfish need for reassurance.