Madeleine's War (10 page)

Now, in the later part of the course, the recruits had one afternoon free each week. This was the second excursion Madeleine and I had been on; we had only just discovered the bicycles in a shed in the rear courtyard.

We stood for a moment, watching the cloud shadows move across the hillsides, as the smoke from the chimneys rose in lazy curls.

“Are you ready to go?” I asked Madeleine. “We can free-wheel down the hill, almost as far as Gleneyre.”

“Race you!” she squealed suddenly, remounting her bike and pedaling furiously. In no time she was twenty yards away.

I gave chase.

The clouds cleared, and although it wasn't a very warm day, the wind was slight, the view was magnificent—and the road was empty but for us. Sun glinted on the frame of Madeleine's bicycle.

The purple in the heather of Scotland always seemed to me an improbable colour for a plant and the great swathes of it on Benkillan, across the valley, were iridescent today. A pity there was none in the parts of France our recruits were going to. Heather is a spongy covering to parachute in on.

My bicycle was picking up speed and I was gaining on Madeleine. I was a good bit heavier than she was, so gravity was on my side.

As I closed in on her I could see that she had taken her feet off the pedals and was holding her legs forward, so that the wind generated by her speed blew straight up her body—she obviously liked that sensation. She
held her head back as the wind ran through her hair, redder than the rocks on Benkillan. Every so often she let out a
Whoop!
I have never seen anyone as happy as she was at that moment.

I braked and stayed behind. I liked the view exactly as it was. She was going away soon. It was a scene I wanted to savour—and remember.

Just as our walks on the beach were not just walks on the beach, so a bicycle ride in the mountains was not just a bike ride. She had agreed to come when I had suggested it, so it was a step forward. There is always a moment, a stage, in any relationship, when behaviour comes before words. I didn't dare ask about her relationship with Erich and she didn't volunteer anything. But she was here today and, so far as I could tell, she was loving it.

As was I.

There was a war on, somewhere, but we had that road, and those mountainsides, to ourselves and, for now, it was enough. She was absorbed in what she was doing, absorbed in living. Her ability to do that was a gift, a gift she was sharing with me.

I was as full with life on that bike ride as I have ever been.

At the bottom of the valley the road flattened out and Madeleine let her bike roll all by itself until it stopped. I came alongside and we both slipped off our saddles and stood with our legs astride the machines.

“I won!” she cried triumphantly.

“You could have gone faster, if you'd made yourself smaller. Less wind resistance.”

“What? And miss all that wind rushing past me—in my hair, making my eyes water? In my mouth, up and along my thighs? That's something you men never have, the pleasure of riding a bike in a skirt.” She grinned. “It's quite sexy.”

We leaned our bicycles against one another, in a precarious arrangement and turned to look at the site before us.

Madeleine twisted her head so her hair was off her neck. “I know what this is. It's a circle—a circle of standing stones. This is some ancient cult site, isn't it? From thousands of years ago.”

I nodded. “It's called a cromlech. It's possibly an ancient observatory, from a time when the heavens were more active than they are now, when comets and asteroids were more common, and when interpreting the action of the heavens was the religious leaders' main work. There are a few of these in Scotland—usually in remote locations, like this one.”

She looked around her. “Some of these stones are ten feet tall and more. Where do they come from, and how did they get them here?”

I leaned against one of the stones. Given their size they were quite solid.

“They come from about forty miles away. They must have been rolled here, on logs, I suspect, across the valleys. They could never have built carts strong enough to carry them, even after the wheel had been invented.”

Madeleine passed the palm of her hand over the surface of one of the stones. “Are they carved like this, or are they naturally occurring?”

“I'm not an expert but I'm told that some of the surfaces are so smooth and regular they must have been cut. But with what, no one knows—as I understand it, smelting hadn't been invented then, so there were no metal tools.”

Madeleine moved around, skipping now and then, like a child, in and out of the arrangement of stones, running her hands over them, feeling the smooth patches, fingering the sharp ridges.

“Are there any carvings here? Or ancient paintings?”

“Look over here,” I said, walking across to a large flat stone set into the ground. “See that?”

She followed me, and peered down.

I pointed. “A local historian showed these to me a year or so ago. Are these circles that have worn away, partly, or are they the letter ‘C,' repeated one inside the other? Or, since they vary in thickness, do they show the various waxing and waning phases of the moon? See? No one really knows what they are supposed to represent.”

Madeleine fell to her knees and, again, ran her fingers over the marks.

“Philippe would have loved this spot,” she said softly in English. “A-may-zing.”

“Philippe?” I said.

She looked up at me sharply, her eyes becoming larger and rounder. “What did you say? What did
I
say?”

“You said Philippe would have loved this spot.”

She bit her lip. As she did so, our bicycles fell over.

Madeleine ran across and bent down and began to disentangle them.

“Come on,” she said, holding the two sets of handlebars apart, “We've got that hill to climb. It will take all our breath. We can talk later.”

And, without waiting for me, she leaned my bicycle against one of the standing stones, mounted hers, and set off back along the road we had come by.

SOMETIMES THE MOST INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS
can take place in the most crowded places. That night was the snooker competition final and everyone turned up after dinner to watch the match. Besides the four players and the referee, all the kitchen staff were there, plus the recruits who would be dropped into other countries—Cyprus, Italy, Greece, and so on—and
their
instructors, even the drivers and the gardeners. There were getting on for forty people in that one room.

Madeleine and I sat on a settee near the fire. She had on her frock and had washed her hair. I couldn't be sure but I thought she had on more lipstick than usual.

“You don't want to watch the snooker?”

She shook her head. “Tell me, the people who worshipped at those standing stones—where did they live?”

“Nearby, I suppose. I told you—I'm not an expert.”

“In what?”

“Flimsy houses that didn't last as well as their temples. It was a time when people were more interested in their religious beliefs than in life on earth.”

“You think so?”

“That's what the local historian told me.”

She nodded. “What will happen to this house, once the war is over?”

I handed her some whisky. “It will eventually be sold, I should imagine.”

She sipped some of the liquid and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “But will all go well? What if the invasion is a disaster?”

“That doesn't bear thinking about, but if it happens Ardlossan will continue to be used. I will continue giving courses. Continue taking people to see the standing stones.”

A shout went up as someone made a good shot.

I glanced towards the noise. I noticed Erich looking our way.

“What time is it?” Madeleine asked. Her voice was especially loamy tonight.

I turned back to her. “Eleven forty-five.”

“Too late for a walk—?”

“Philippe, Madeleine. Who is—or was—Philippe?”

I sipped my whisky, and waited.

“Okay. ‘Aye,' as Duncan would say. Here goes.” She spoke as if to the fire. “As you know, my mother and I moved from France to Britain in November 1938. In March of the following year, when Hitler occupied
Czechoslovakia, and when the French prime minister was given emergency powers for France to rearm, my mother decided on one last trip to Louzac, where we had been living before we moved. For a last look, she said, before the war, which she was certain would come. She didn't know when—or if—she would ever see Louzac again. She wanted to say goodbye to old friends. I went with her.”

She held out her hand so she could feel the warmth of the flames.

“While I was in Louzac, I met Philippe Sompre. He was a geologist, though he also had an interest in archaeology. He was very good-looking, very funny, very charming—all the local girls thought the world of him. Some of them even sent
him
flowers, can you imagine that?”

She cleared her throat.

“But…
but
he had poor eyesight, very poor, so he had been turned down by the army. That had made him angry, and restless. Anyway, while my mother did her rounds, visiting all her old friends, Philippe and I went on long walks. There are a lot of little rivers and hills and caves near Louzac. The weather was unusually mild that March. I don't know whether it was because I was new, because I didn't live in Louzac, so I wasn't familiar to Philippe, but we seemed to get on. He confided in me.”

More noise from the vicinity of the snooker table. She looked across. Was she looking for Erich?

“Being a geologist, in his spare time Philippe was making a map of all the caves in the area. He explained that France is very special when it comes to caves, that the rock formations favour them, and that ancient people lived there, often decorating them with art. Pictures of horses, cattle, foxes, and bears. It was his plan to map all the caves and then explore them, in the hope that he would discover a lot of ancient art and make his name.”

She picked up the poker in the hearth and rearranged the logs in the fire.

“I was enchanted by all this. I loved it. He was so caught up in his own ideas, he was so convinced that he would one day make sensational discoveries, that it was hard not to be swept away. And I
was
swept away.”

She set down the poker again.

“You may guess some of what happened, but not everything.” She breathed out softly. “Visiting so many caves, just the two of us…it wasn't long before…Well, one day it stormed heavily; we were trapped in a cave for over an hour. You can guess that bit.”

She pulled at the hem of her frock.

“So there I was, in France for just a few days, but I had met the most exciting man I had ever known until then—and I was in love. Oh yes, it was a real
coup de foudre
, an emotional thunderbolt to go with the storm outside the cave that day. And it was two-way. Philippe was as much in love with me as I was with him.”

She frowned.

“Now we get to the difficult bit. I was, of course, in France for just a week, one over-all-too-quickly week, before my mother and I returned to London. With war looming, there was no chance we could stay. It was dangerous to remain in France if you had somewhere else to go, though I would have stayed and risked it, given what I felt for Philippe.”

She fiddled with her necklace.

“So, one day, we spent a while in another cave, making love, and, after it was over, we talked. We decided that, if we were in love—and we
were
in love—we should get married. It wasn't absolutely certain then that there would be a war, but if there was to be, we wanted…we decided that, by being married, that would be the best way to cement what we felt for each other. It would help us hold up through the separation that a war, if it happened, would inevitably bring about.”

She ran a finger reflectively round the rim of her glass.

“So that's what we did. The very next day, the day before my mother and I returned to London, Philippe and I took the train to Cognac, the nearest large town, and visited the
mairie
, the town hall, where we were married. Marriages in France, as I'm sure you know, are civil affairs, not religious ones, so you don't have to arrange things with a priest—which was just as well in our case because I am a Protestant and Philippe is a Catholic. We celebrated in a bar, with some champagne, he took some photographs, and then we went back to Louzac. The next day my mother and I returned to London.”

“So—?”

“Hold on. I haven't finished—nowhere near. I never told my mother that Philippe and I were married, not then, but of course we did write to each other and were always hoping we could meet each other again. But then war was declared in September, and travel got very difficult, almost impossible for civilians. Philippe was smuggled to Britain in the summer of 1940, for a conference of Resistance leaders—he was one by then—and we met in Dover, where he was able to stay for two nights. Two glorious nights before he had to go back. He told me then that he had made
a number of discoveries of ancient art in ‘his' caves as he called them, and hoped to publish his results after the war. Things got even worse, of course, after the Germans established the coastal exclusion zone. Then we couldn't communicate at all.”

“And have you heard—?”

“Hold on! Let me tell you everything now, and then we don't have to come back to it.”

She leaned forward so she could feel the warmth of the fire on her face this time.

“The Free French, in London, under de Gaulle, had set up some underground channels of communication, and my mother, though English by birth, had also registered as being French living in London, because she'd been married to my father. So we were on the Free French books, so to speak. Anyway, one day in early 1941—March or April, I think it was—a man arrived at our flat with two letters for me. One was from Philippe and one was from his mother.”