Overhead in a Balloon (24 page)

From behind a mask of splints and bandages I appraised her face, which was still childlike, rounded as if over a layer of cream. A beret kept slipping and sliding off her dark hair. “Oh, what a pity!” she remarked, pulling it back on. She was dressed in the least becoming clothes I had ever seen on a young woman – a worn and drooping tunic, thick black stockings, and a navy sweater frayed at the cuffs. She had spent five months in an English girls’ school, she told me, and this was the remains of a uniform. She had nothing else to wear, no thing that fitted. Her mother was too busy to shop.

“Can’t you shop for yourself?”

“It’s not done,” she said. “I mean, we don’t do things that way.”

“Who is we?” – for she still puzzled me.

“Besides, I’ve got no money.” This seemed a sensible explanation. I wondered why she had bothered to make another. “My mother teaches English to French recruits. Actually, she doesn’t know much, but she can make them read traffic signs.”

“You mean, ‘Stop’?”

“Well, there are other things – ‘No Entry.’ “ She looked troubled, as if she were not succeeding in the tranquil, sleepy conversation that is supposed to keep a victim’s mind off his wounds.

I had lost six front teeth in the accident. Through the gap, Juliette fed me the mess the English call custard. My right arm was fine, but I let her do it. She was grave, intent – a little girl playing. She might have been poking a spoon into a doll’s porcelain face. When I refused to swallow any more, she got a bottle of eau de cologne and a facecloth out of a satchel and carefully wiped my hands and wrists and around my neck – whatever
whatever was bare and visible. I wondered if she would offer to comb my hair and cut my nails, but the nursing part of the game was over. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands clasped, a good girl on a visit, and told me that her father, the colonel, was an outcast with a price on his head. From the care she took not to say where he was, I understood they had sent him to France, on a mission. Forgetting about secrets, she suddenly said she yearned to be smuggled into France, too, so that she could join him and they might blow up bridges together.

“I wanted to do that,” I said. “That’s why I came here. But I’m useless. I may come out of this with a scarred face, or a limp. I’d be at risk.”

“Oh, I know,” said Juliette. “The Germans would catch you and shoot you. They’d look for a secret agent all covered with scars. Oh, what a nuisance!”

Sweet Juliette. Her dark eyes held all the astonished eagerness of a child of twelve. I often think I should want to be back there, with a Juliette still virginal, untouched, saying encouraging things such as “all covered with scars,” but at the age I am now it would bore me.

She came to the hospital twice a week, then every day. Her mother was at work, and I felt the girl had time on her hands and was often lonely. She was with me when they took the last of the mask off. “Well?” I said. “Tell me the worst.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how you were before.” She held up a pocket mirror. My nose was broken, all right, and I had thick, bruised cheekbones, like a Cossack. For someone who had never been to war, I was amazingly the image of an old soldier.

I
left the hospital on crutches. There was no such thing as therapy – you got going or you did not. The organization found me a room on Baker Street, not far from where Juliette lived with her mother, as it turned out, and they gave me low-grade and harmless work to do. As my instructor had predicted, I was let nowhere near a typewriter, and once, I remember, someone even snatched a pencil sharpener away. Juliette used to come to the office, though she wasn’t supposed to, and sit by my desk as if it were a bed. She had got rid of the uniform, but her new clothes, chosen by her mother, were English and baggy, in the greys and mustards Englishwomen favoured. They seemed picked deliberately to make her creamy skin sallow, her slenderness gaunt. The mother was keeping her plain, I thought, perhaps to keep her out of trouble. Why didn’t Juliette rebel? She was eighteen by now, but forty years ago eighteen was young. I wondered why she hung around me, what she wanted. I thought I guessed, but I decided not to know. I didn’t want it said I had destroyed two items of French property – a motorcycle and a colonel’s child. It was here, in London, that I was starting to get the hang of French society. In our reduced world, everyone in it a symbol of native, inborn rank, Juliette stood higher than some random young man who had merely laid his life on the line. She had connections, simply by the nature of how things were ordered.

I asked her once if there was a way of getting a message to my mother, in Paris – just a word to say I was safe. She pretended not to hear but about a month later said, “No, it’s too dangerous. Besides, they don’t trust you.”

“Don’t trust me? Why not?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you?” I said.

“That’s different.”

Her mother was out most evenings. When Juliette was alone, I brought my rations around, and she cooked our supper. We drank – only because everybody did – replacing the whiskey in her mother’s precious Haig bottle with London tap water. Once, Juliette tried restoring the colour with cold tea, and there was hell to pay. When the news came from France that her father had been arrested and identified, she came straight to me.

“I’ll never see him again,” she said. “I haven’t even got a decent snapshot of him. My mother has them all. She’s got them in a suitcase. I feel sick. Feel my forehead. Feel my cheeks.” She took my hand. “Feel the back of my neck. Feel my throat,” she said, dragging my hand. We left the office and went to her flat and pulled the blackout curtain. The sun was shining on the other side of the street, where everything was bombed, but she didn’t want to see it.

“How do you know your mother’s not going to walk in?” I said. “She may want to be alone with you. She may want a quiet place to cry.”

Juliette shook her head. “We’re not like that. We don’t do those things.”

I think of the love and despair she sent out to me, the young shoots wild and blind, trusting me for support. She asked me to tell my most important secret, so that we would be bound. The most intimate thing I could say was that I was writing less poetry and had started a merciless novel about the French in London.

“I could tell you a lot,” said Juliette. “Heroes’ wives sleeping with other men.”

“It’s not that sort of novel,” I said. “In my novel, they’re all dead, but they don’t know it. Every character is in a special Hell, made to measure.”

“That’s not how it is,” she said. “We’re not dead or in Hell. We’re just here, waiting. We don’t know what Hell will be like. Nobody knows. And some of us are going to be together in Heaven.” She put her face against mine, saying this. It never occurred to me that she meant it, literally. I thought her Calvinism was just an organized form of disbelief. “Haven’t you got some better secret?” she said. I supposed that schoolgirls talked this way, pledging friendship, and I wondered what she was taking me for. “Well,” she said presently, “will you marry me anyway, even without a secret?”

Nobody coerced me into a life with Juliette. There were no tears, no threats, and I was not afraid of her mother. All I had to say was “I don’t know yet” or “We’ll see.” I think I wanted to get her out of her loneliness. When for all her shyness she asked if I loved her, I said I would never leave her, and I am sure we both thought it meant the same thing. A few days later she told her mother that we were engaged and that nothing would keep her from marrying me after the war, and, for the first time since she could remember, she saw her mother cry.

Instead of a ring I gave Juliette some of the Algerian soil. She thanked me but confessed she had no idea what to do with it. Should it be displayed in a saucer, on a low table? Should she seal it up in a labelled, dated envelope? Tactful from infancy, she offered the gift to her mother, her rival in grief.

Now that we were “engaged,” I began to see what the word covered for Juliette, and I had no qualms about smuggling her
into my room – though never, of course, late at night. We took the mattress off the sagging daybed and put it on the floor, in front of the gas fire. Juliette would take her clothes off and tell me about her early years, though I didn’t always listen. Sometimes she talked about the life waiting for us in Paris, and the number of children we would have, and the names we would give them. I remember a Thomas and a Claire.

“How many children should we have?” she said. “I’d say about ten. Well, seven. At least five.”

Her clothes were scattered all over the floor, and the room was cold, in spite of the fire, but she didn’t seem to feel it. “I hate children,” I said. I was amazed that I could say something so definite and so cruel, and that sounded so true. When had I stopped liking them? Perhaps when I adopted the colonel’s child, believing she would never grow up. I could have said, “I don’t like
other
children,” but nothing about this conversation was thought out.

“You will love them,” she said happily. “You’ll see.” She held her spread fingers against the gas flame, counting off their names. Each finger stood for a greedy, willful personality, as tough as a fist. An only child, she invented playmates and named them, and I was supposed to bring them to life.

“I know it sounds stupid,” she said, “but I kept my dolls until I was fifteen. My mother finally gave them away.”

“Brothers and sisters,” I said.

“No, just dolls. But they did have names.”

“Is that one of your secrets?” “Secrets” had become charged with erotic meaning, when we were alone.

“You’ve got a special secret,” she said.

“Yes. I’ve torn up my novel.”

“Oh, how lovely for you! Or is that sad?”

“I’m just giving it up. I’ll never start another.”

“You’ve got another secret,” she said. “You’re married to someone.” As she said this, she seemed to become aware that the room was cold. She shivered and reached for her dress, and drew it around her like a shawl. “A person went to see your mother. She – your mother – said to tell you your wife was all right. Your
wife,”
said Juliette, trying to control her voice, “is in the South of France. She has managed to send your mother a pound of onions. To eat,” said Juliette, as I went on staring. “Onions, to eat.”

“I did get married,” I said. “But she’s not my wife. I did it to save her. I’ve got her yellow star somewhere.”

“I’d like to see it,” said Juliette, politely.

“It is made of cheap, ugly material,” I said, as if that were the only thing wrong.

“I think you should put some clothes on,” said Juliette. “If you’re going to tell about your wife.”

“She isn’t my wife,” I said. “The marriage was just something legal. Apart from being legal, it doesn’t count.”

“She may not be your wife,” said Juliette, “but she is your mother’s daughter-in-law.” She drew up her knees and bent her head on them, as if it were disgraceful to watch me dressing. “You mean,” she said, after a time, “that it doesn’t count as a secret?” I gathered up the rest of her clothes and put them beside her on the mattress. “Does it count as anything?”

“I’ll walk you home,” I said.

“You don’t need to.”

“It’s late. I can’t have you wandering around in the blackout.”

She dressed, slowly, sitting and kneeling. “I am glad she is safe and well,” she said. “It would be too bad if you had done all that for nothing. She must be very grateful to you.”

I had never thought about gratitude. It seemed to me that, yes, she was probably grateful. I suddenly felt impatient for the war to end, so that I could approach her, hand in hand with Juliette, and ask for a divorce and a blessing.

Juliette, kneeling, fastened the buttons of the latest flour sack her mother had chosen. “Why did you tear up your novel?” she said.

Because I can’t wrench life around to make it fit some fantasy. Because I don’t know how to make life sound worse or better, or how to make it sound true. Instead of saying this, I said, “How do you expect me to support ten children?” The colonel’s wife didn’t like me much, but she had said that after the war there were a few people she could introduce me to. She had mentioned something about radio broadcasting, and I liked the idea. Juliette was still kneeling, with only part of the hideous dress buttoned up. I looked down at her bent head. She must have been thinking that she had tied herself to a man with no money, no prospects, and no connections. Who wasn’t entirely single. Who might be put on a charge for making a false declaration. Who had a broken nose and a permanent limp. Who, so far, had never finished anything he’d started. Perhaps she was forgetting one thing: I had got to London.

“I could stay all night,” she said. “If you want me to.”

“Your mother would have the police out,” I said.

“She’d never dare,” said Juliette. “I’ve never called the police because
she
didn’t come home.”

“It would be …” I tried to think of what it could be for us. “It would be radical.”

Her hands began to move again, the other way, unbuttoning. She was the colonel’s child, she had already held her breath and jumped, and that was the start and the end of it.

“We may be in big trouble over this,” I said.

“Oh, what a pity,” she said. “We’ll always be together. We will always be happy. How lovely! What a shame!”

I think she still trusted me at that moment; I hope so.