Charlotte Gray (52 page)

"Run!" screamed Julien, but Charlotte stood for a moment, her hair disarrayed, her clothes rucked and caught, unable quite to let go. As the German turned to look at her, Julien threw his arms round the man's neck and wrestled him towards the window.

"Go!" he screamed over his shoulder, and Charlotte turned, twisted the handle of the door and plunged out into the cold, dark corridor.

She ran past Levade's studio to the top of the stairs, caught the banister and, half-tripping, slithered down the wooden steps. In the hallway she thought of going for her coat, but the frantic urgency of Julien's voice was still in her ear. She heaved open the double doors of the Domaine and went down into the winter's night. She ran to the barn where her bicycle was kept.

Thinking it better to be in darkness, she did not attach the dynamo, but pedalled off beneath the arch of the pigeonnier, then, panting, swung the bike into the long drive, where she lowered her head against the freezing drizzle of the night and strained her eyes to see the potholes and the grassy verge beneath the rows of darkened plane trees.

Peter Gregory was in a deplorable state by the time Pascale had undressed him and put him to bed in her apartment above the harbour in Marseille. He had a high temperature as a result of the infection in his leg and he was exhausted by exertion and from lack of food.

Pascale called a doctor, who drained the wound and said there was nothing more he could do; the activities of the previous days had made things worse and he could only recommend rest.

At the height of his fever Gregory called out, and Pascale came to him. She sat by the bed and held his hand.

"Hold on to me," he breathily begged her.

When the delirium took him from her again, she ran from the room and soaked cloths to press on his forehead. At last, his face scarlet and dripping, his hair plastered to his head, he subsided into sleep.

Pascale, under her real name of Nancy Brogan, had been married to a French industrialist, for whom she had forsaken her Pennsylvania home and her job with a news magazine to move into a house in Lyon. He had died of a heart attack, leaving Nancy a widow at the age of thirty-nine, three years before.

She shuttled back and forth between her friends, most of whom were in New York, and her new home in Lyon.

Her old college classmates told her she was crazy not to come back; one of them even secured her an offer of a job with a publisher. Yet she felt drawn back to her husband's country, and when a visiting Englishman tentatively suggested she might be of help to him, the decision to stay was easy.

She liked washing and tending her passive patient. It brought back some childish satisfaction, a feeling of control. She felt that her own life was at a critical stage, and that caring for this man might help. She felt no older in herself than she had done on the day of her graduation from Vassar; she had discovered that ageing and what they called 'maturity' were myths, that all the years did was disqualify you from various pleasures, one by one.

As Gregory grew better, he began to talk to her about his life. Unable to look after himself, he depended on Nancy, and from such dependence a sense of trust grew naturally. Physically, he prospered. She gathered from his stories how active he had been in planes, in playing golf and other games; she saw an underlying health begin to reassert itself as the infection retreated from his leg and he felt the benefits of her care. Yet she sensed exhaustion in him too: a spiritual fatigue that was unrelated to anything the doctor diagnosed.

He told Nancy about a woman he loved. He told her he felt unworthy of her, so much so that he wouldn't even say her name. He was not sure that she would want to see him if he managed to get back. He had not appreciated her at first, had not seen how much he loved her until it was too late, and now he cursed himself for his stupidity.

For all his passion when he spoke of this absent person. Nancy found that she straightened her wavy brown hair before she went into his room; she wore a little red lipstick. After all, she was young.

She tried to make a place for him outside the cares of war and the fatal ties of human obligation. She brought him food she conjured with American dollars from the blackest market of the port; she brought him half bottles of Burgundy she had had dispatched from the replete cellars of her husband's old house; she brought luxury to her unreal world.

For his part, Gregory liked to pass the time by thinking about Charlotte. It comforted him to imagine that while he had fought his way through injury and fever to this temporary haven and that while he braced himself for the danger of his return, she would be quietly going about her routine in London.

He saw her in the narrow room at the end of the corridor, hurriedly dressing in the morning after one of her motionless sleeps. He could not quite remember what the fany uniform was like, but he was sure that Charlotte would not care for it. She would for some time have been safely back from whatever errand she had been assigned in France, unless, of course, her Lysander pilot had also crashed and therefore failed to pick her up. It seemed unlikely.

She would take a taxi (she would be too late for the bus) to some office, where she would pass a long day which to him would have been intolerably tedious but which to her would seem useful. Then in the evening she would busy herself in the flat, making dinner, listening to the problems of her ridiculous flat-mates. He imagined her curled up in bed, reading into the small hours, and the picture brought him a profound sense of peace.

Levade sat on the train to the concentration camp writing letters to his friends. Dear Annemarie, I'm afraid our sessions have come to an end. Please take the painting if you want it. It's no good, but you might like a souvenir of those long afternoons that you so bravely bore. Never lose the grace you have, however the years deprive you of your swift movements. Your arms, I remember so well from that lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, were so beautiful that they obsessed me. But I am a feeble painter who has not for many years been able to go behind these surfaces to what lies beyond.

Forget me now, but I will remember you in my prayers.

He was in a third-class compartment guarded by gendarmes in the corridor. They were unhappy in their work and averted their eyes from Levade and his five fellow-prisoners. Instead, as the train rattled north, they leaned against the window and carefully watched the weak afternoon sun decline on the foothills of the Limousin.

Levade sealed the letter to Anne-Marie and began another.

Dear Julien, I'm sorry we didn't have time to say goodbye. There are many things I would like to have told you. I feel ashamed to have been absent for so much of your life, not having been there to help you. It is a passionate regret to me. The love of a man for his son is a terrible and wonderful thing, one of the greatest that God has given to us. It is comparable to the love of God for man. Think of Abraham, prepared to kill his long-awaited son Isaac, to plunge his knife into the living boy. God chose that test because it was the hardest. And to save the world he gave his own Son. In what a father feels for his son there is much stern hope, but so much tenderness that I cannot describe it to you now. If you have sons of your own you must hold them when they're young.

But you will never keep them in that embrace. They are separate from you, however much you love them, and all you have done, in a moment's passion, is create the circumstances for their existence.

As for the manner of my leaving ... Here, Levade put down the pen because he hadn't the heart to examine what had happened, or to think what Julien's motives might have been.

He had thought himself into an elevated state of mind in which he was able to accept that what had taken place was in some way ineluctable.

The truth had been told: he was a Jew; and he was prepared to live in the consequences of that truth with a providential hope. He became momentarily aware of a selfish desire: he wanted to die; but he was able to deny this wish, or at least subsume it into a more general sense of tranquillity in which his own desires had no active part.

Not my will, he repeated to himself, but Thy will be done.

He would return to the question of Julien. Meanwhile he began another letter, to Charlotte.

Dear Madame, I am addressing this to you at the Domaine, though I don't know whether you will still be there. I shall give it to the young gendarme in the corridor who manically avoids my eye. Perhaps it will make him feel better. Is it too late to thank you for your company in my house? I was a bad friend and landlord to you, but to have you there was a comfort to me in many long days and nights. I wish very much that you did not so much love another man, as I believe you could have loved my son. One wishes for things to be content and permanent in a way that one has failed to achieve oneself. But you are a fine person, Madame, you have such courage in your heart, and if not with Julien, then so be it, with someone else.

Did I tease you too much? I wanted to make you strong. The happiness of young people becomes almost the only source of delight to someone of my age. I remember when you told me about your father, and I was pleased that you confided in me. I told you that we can live with mystery, with unresolved conflicts. Now I'm not sure if that's true.

In art, perhaps, these things are good. In your life-I think you should try to remember, though whether you can do this by an act of will, I doubt. Memory works at its best unasked.

I wish you very well. For the sake of those who are old and those about to die you must make something glorious of your life. That would mean something to those less free to choose.

When he had signed the letter, placed it an envelope and addressed it, Levade returned to the piece of paper on which he was writing to Julien. For a long time he stared at the abbreviated paragraph, but still he remained unwilling to break the tranquillity of his mental state. So lost was he in thought that he did not notice the train slowing down as it neared its destination. Eventually, he continued: There was an English mystic who came back from her most joyful communion with God saying, "All will be well; all manner of things will be well."

So, Julien, I believe ... But, at this moment, the train stopped at the station with a heavy jolt, and the gendarmes pulled back the doors of Levade's compartment.

He had barely the time to write, "I love you' at the bottom of the letter, to seal and hastily address it before he and his fellow-passengers were hurried down on to the platform.

The station was at a town in the flat pastures of the Bourbonnais. The travellers on the platform looked with sheepish interest at the small group of men and women under guard. A senior gendarme took the papers offered to him by a young man who had been guarding them on the train.

He told them to arrange themselves in a line and follow him.

Levade picked up the suitcase Charlotte had packed and felt inside the pocket of his jacket for the three letters. As he passed the youngest of the gendarmes, he held them out to him.

"Would you post these for me? They're just letters to my son and a couple of friends."

The young man looked down at his feet, then glanced to see if anyone had seen. He stuffed the letters into his pocket and grunted.

The senior gendarme led his half-dozen charges down the platform, over a metal passenger bridge and down to a goods' siding where half a dozen wagons had been coupled.

The men and women waited, looking round for their train and wondering whether the officer had made a mistake.

Then the gendarme went to the side of one of the wagons, unbolted it and pulled it open. It was full of people standing. The gendarme motioned towards the wagon with his hand.

Levade recognised this kind of wooden truck. When he had been released from duties as soup-man at Verdun he had spent a pleasantly undangerous period working in stores at the railhead. Such transport had arrived almost daily, bearing horses.

Perhaps this wagon had once carried the very horse he had tried to eat.

Andre Duguay ran down the stairs when he heard Mlle Cariteau's urgent call. It was six in the morning. In the kitchen was the nice young woman who sometimes came to visit them and read stories. Andre smiled briefly at her, then turned his eyes to the floor. Mlle Cariteau attacked his face with a cloth from the sink while he grimaced and tried to wrench his head away.

"We're going to say goodbye," said Mlle Cariteau.

"For a few days you're going to another house, just for a holiday."

"It'll be nice," said Charlotte.

"You're going to be on a farm with animals, you and Jacob. Would you like that?"

"No," said Andre.

"I don't want to."

The two women set about trying to persuade him, by painting pictures of outdoor life with dogs and chickens and games in old barns. Andre felt suspicious of both.

"I don't want to leave, I like it here."

"And Jacob's coming too," said Charlotte.

"You'll have wonderful games together. Then you can come back later and visit."

Andre, who had seemed to be on the point of acquiescing, suddenly shook his head.

"I want my mother. I want to know where she is." Charlotte said gently,

"Andre, there really isn't any choice. Soon this war will be over. Things are beginning to happen. And soon, when it's finished, you will see your parents again. I'm sure you will.

But just for the time being it would be better if you do what we ask. Trust me."

Andre was beyond the reach of reason; he felt he had been trusting enough already, and still his parents were not there. His small, muscular body set itself in resistance to all these adult plans; he grasped the edge of the chair next to him and began to wail his defiance.