Charlotte Gray (58 page)

And Julien, of course. For the rest of their lives, when each was mired in slack middle-age, they would make the inconvenient journey to the other's country, despite the protests of their respective children.

They would continue to laugh at one another and to indulge their love of what they had fought to protect. Their spouses would know nothing of the night they had spent together and they themselves would not refer to it, because it meant little compared to the joy of their companionship.

Her destiny was still with Peter Gregory. Nothing that had happened in her life had changed that conviction. For herself, she had no doubts: it depended only on him, on whether he had changed, on whether he still loved her and, most of all, she reluctantly conceded, on whether he was still alive.

She believed he was; or at least she would not let herself imagine otherwise. Perhaps, on reflection, it was not quite belief, it was more like faith. The difference, she explained to herself, as the train slowed for its arrival at Tours, was that belief was a logical conviction, while faith, because it admitted doubt, required emotional effort.

It was that effort that made her weary, that took so much of her strength, but the rewards of keeping the faith were high. She had seen the people of Limoges protesting their hatred of the English and the Jews, but she had refused to believe that they were typical, and that same night she had, at the time of the drop, been repaid by the sight of those men stumbling about their dangerous business in the fields. She had seen the eyes of Claude Benech that narrowed as he smirked over the long table in the Domaine, but she had also witnessed Sylvie Cariteau's unquestioning efficiency and Cesar's boyish rapture. It was almost as though it was her faith that kept them going; she could not bear to look away.

Charlotte glanced up as the train came into the station at Tours. She was surprised to find the four other people in the carriage looking at her. Had she been talking to herself out loud? An elderly man opposite with a white moustache and a grey Homburg was staring at her lap, in which lay a piece of waxed paper with the remains of her sandwich. She looked round the carriage and smiled. Now she came to think of it, the aroma of brandy and garlic that had come off the fresh pate was of a peace-time pungency.

"Excuse me," Charlotte said, and reached up to her suitcase in the luggage rack, where she took out the paper bag that contained the rest of the picnic Zozo had given her. She had had the best part herself, but there was some brawn, some slices of rye bread and a little jar of potted goose which she offered to her companions.

"My brother's a butcher," she lied happily, with what she hoped was a charming smile.

"Some people have all the luck."

Two women were getting off at Tours and declined her offer, but the old man in the hat and a small woman with a headscarf helped themselves with incredulous murmurs of appreciation. It was the fattiness of the goose that obviously appealed to people who had been so long deprived of oil or butter.

Julien had told her he knew a man in Lavaurette so desperate he had drunk half a litre of motor oil. To Charlotte's dismay, her two companions felt they should pay for their early supper by making conversation.

Having given herself a butcher as a brother. Charlotte felt a hysterical urge to fabricate more, and more bizarre, relations a family tree of jazz singers, rich industrialists or institutionalised lunatics. How tired my long, long caution has made me, she thought.

But she forced herself, for what she hoped would be the last time, to be reticent: my father ... my husband ... since 1940 ... She heard the words, bland and discouraging, then turned the questions on the others.

As the woman chattered on about her family. Charlotte allowed her mind to wander behind her fixed, indulgent smile. She thought of Gregory, of what her first words to him would be.

She was aware that it was now the man who was speaking, telling her of how regularly he took this train, but her reverie remained unbroken until she heard him say, "But after we've been through Chateaudun the SS always join the train before Paris. They drive up through Illiers and generally get on at Chartres. It's such a nuisance with all their inspections and ' " What?" said Charlotte. It was the word Illiers, taking her back to reading Proust's novel in Monsieur Loiseau's garden, that had snagged her daydream, but then she let the earlier words replay in her mind.

"The SS?"

"Yes, always. They're such brutes. They know me perfectly well by now, but still they take me into the corridor and search me."

"I see." Charlotte licked her lips, then resumed her lighter manner.

"Well, good luck with them. It won't affect me. I shall be getting off at Chateaudun."

It was dark and raining when Charlotte left the train and made her way into the centre of the town. In the shadow of the improbably grand castle, there were a dozen narrow streets that crossed at regular right angles. In other circumstances the atmosphere might have felt quaint or reassuring, but Charlotte wanted to be out of the rain. In a street called the rue Lambert-Licors she saw the welcome word

"Hotel' stuck halfway up a building and made her way through the glass front door to a cheap wooden desk beneath the stairs. She rang the bell, and a dark-eyed, unsmiling girl of about eighteen appeared from a door behind the desk. Her haughty manner.

Charlotte presumed, derived from her looks rather than the dignity of her office. She inspected Charlotte's damp, untidy figure with the disdain of a northern Irene Galliot.

She took Charlotte to a room on the second floor whose ceiling followed the pitched angle of the roof. Dinner would be served at eight, she said, shutting the door briskly behind her.

Charlotte took off her hat and bedraggled overcoat. From her suitcase she took out her washing things and the bottle of hair dye. It occurred to her that the girl had not told her where the bathroom was, and she went out on to the landing to investigate. All the doors she could find had numbers on them, so perhaps it was on a lower floor. In any case, there was only half an hour to wait till dinner; she would ask then.

Back in her room, she inspected the roots of her hair in the mirror on the dressing table. Rather than make a mess of it in the gloomy light of the bedroom, she would wear a scarf to dinner and do her hair properly in the bathroom later. She left the dye by the mirror, took off her skirt and sweater and lay down on the bed. Tomorrow she would think again about how to complete her journey to Paris. Presumably there were buses as well as trains; perhaps she could buy a bicycle and avoid the SS that way. It would probably take no more than two days to reach the outlying stations of the Metro. She would decide in the morning; in the meantime she would rest and see what Chateaudun could offer for dinner.

The dining room had small windows with orange curtains that gave on to the narrow street at the front; with its cheap wooden light fittings and scarlet embroidered tablecloths, the room had a faintly Alpine feel, as though a man in leather shorts might at any moment emerge from the kitchen with a steaming dish of sauerkraut and glistening pink sausages.

Four other tables in the room were occupied by people who murmured greetings as Charlotte took a table by the window. Some complicated bartering of coupons seemed to be taking place with a grey-haired man she took to be the proprietor, and, when he approached her table, Charlotte offered him some tickets, letting him also see the corner of a banknote she had slipped into the ration book. There was little sense of Tyrolean plenty in the small beetroot salad that eventually materialised, wordlessly presented by the haughty girl from behind the desk, but there was a quarter carafe of thin red wine and a single slice of chalky bread with which to eke it out.

Charlotte took out a novel she had borrowed from Julien's shelves, a romance of the kind Dominique might like, and began to read. After a few pages it was clear that the heroine was in for a difficult time with the saturnine stranger she loved from afar. The character's struggles were completely uninteresting to Charlotte, and she remembered Levade's pointing out how absurd and irritating most people found the romantic travails of others. How different her own dilemma was, how much more serious ... She smiled and thought of Levade again, and how he had told her that everyone was convinced that their own plight had a particular poignancy, a special unfairness. She was just like all the other young women; her crisis was as perpetual and as comic as theirs. She pushed away the plate.

What did it matter how her anguish compared to that of other people? It was only its own intensity that was important-that, and the value she allowed it in the battle for an understanding of her life.

As the weeks had passed in Lavaurette, she had noticed a change in people's attitude towards her. In their manner, in the way they looked at her, there was a respect that was sometimes touched with awe. It made her laugh inside. I'm just a romantic girl who's come to find her lost lover, she thought, but they look at me as though I were a woman of fierce conviction, a person of unshakeable dedication in the fight for freedom.

And yet, she thought, as she picked through the food the waitress had brought, perhaps there was something in the attitude of Julien, Sylvie and Cesar. Perhaps there truly was something they had seen. A market is made at the price that someone will pay; to some extent you are what other people think you are. Why then did she feel in some way provisional, almost fraudulent, as though she had always to apologise for herself or justify her existence?

She looked up as the waitress took her plate, and saw the door from the hall being pushed open by the proprietor. On his face was an expression both obsequious and scared as he stood aside for a tall, broad-shouldered man of about forty-five dressed in the shining boots and grey uniform of the German army. There were further muttered greetings from the other diners as the distinguished visitor sat down, and the manager scurried across with a basket of bread and a full bottle of wine, from which he poured a genteel amount for the German to taste.

Charlotte's fearful inclination was to go up to her room at once, but she felt, since the dessert had not yet been brought, that it might look suspicious if she abandoned her dinner. There was no sign of dessert; service to all other tables came to a halt while the German was plied with the best the hotel had to offer. A smiling woman who was presumably the manager's wife fluttered in from the hall to pour him some more wine, and the waitress brought various dishes of hors d'oeuvre from the kitchen. Charlotte was delighted to see that the Irene Galliot of Chateaudun was completely unaffected by the presence of the German, but dumped down his food with wordless contempt.

Equality, thought Charlotte, liberty, fraternity. The Republic is not dead. Some of the other tables became restive as the German's banquet wore on, but when he had reached his dessert they were allowed to have theirs too. Finally, there was a general clearing of the room, and, in the pushing back of chairs, doors held politely open. Charlotte found herself addressed by the German. In French that was barely comprehensible he was offering her a drink in the small dark sitting room on the other side of the hall.

Charlotte's mouth felt dry, not only from the ersatz coffee she had drunk, as she forced herself across the floor. The proprietor switched on a light in the dingy room, placed a bottle of brandy and two glasses on the low table, then, with ostentatious tact, withdrew.

The German in his way was rather charming. Charlotte thought. He seemed diffident, almost shy in his courtship, hampered no doubt by his stumbling French, for which he several times apologised.

Charlotte concentrated on being Dominique, and her fear made her plausibly abashed. Even within the role of modest married woman, however, there were choices she could make in how to deal with her situation.

Dominique might well be so terrified that she would do anything the man suggested; Charlotte had to find a response that was both realistic and discouraging.

Initially, she kept bringing her husband into every answer, to stress her unavailable state, but then found the German politely inquiring more and more about the work and life of this ever-present man.

Charlotte eventually had to plead that it was too painful for her to talk about him. She asked the German about his home and what he was doing in Chateaudun. He did not understand the question about home, or perhaps affected not to, and only shrugged and muttered briefly about his orders.

The peculiar thing about him. Charlotte thought, was that he seemed to be quite unaware of the fact that he was the enemy, the armed occupant of her presumed country. The only word she could think of to describe his attitude was

'friendly', and from this she could only deduce that his motives were improper. After twenty minutes of laboured conversation. Charlotte began to yawn.

"Excuse me. I'm very tired." She held her hand over her glass as he made to pour more brandy.

"I think I must be off to bed. Thank you very much for the drink." The German stood up stiffly, and a trace of displeasure came into his heavy, handsome face. He stood back to let Charlotte pass into the hall, where the proprietor was waiting nervously at the desk. He opened the front door for the officer, but the German looked only briefly into the night, where it had begun to rain, and shook his head. He pointed upstairs.