Charlotte Gray (28 page)

"It's not like that in Lavaurette, the place I first went to." Antoinette shrugged.

"It depends. Some places have more food. Some are better at working out a system that suits people. Anyway, if you'd like to, you can stay here above the shop. I'll make you some dinner, put some clean sheets on the bed and bring you breakfast in the morning. Would you like that?"

"I'd love to. Thank you." Charlotte felt absurdly touched by this offer; she even felt a momentary irritation in her eye. She blinked.

Antoinette was right: she must be very tired.

To regain her composure, she asked, "What drew you to become involved with ... wirelesses and so on?"

Antoinette sighed.

"Just a feeling. My brother and some friends of mine ... I don't imagine that we're supposed to talk too much about these things."

"Perhaps not." Charlotte, however, wanted to talk about them; she wanted to talk about almost anything: she had been too long with only voices in her head.

"What can you do here, halfway up the mountains, with no targets, no soldiers?"

"We wait. I think the time will come. There's a good deal of activity in the mountains just because they are the mountains because they're a good place to hide. The Massif Central will be the heart of the Resistance when it comes."

"And when will it come?"

Antoinette smiled.

"Do you want my honest opinion?"

"Of course."

"I think it will come when the majority of people change their minds about the likely outcome of the war. They'll want to back the winner."

Charlotte said nothing, but looked at the table, this odd pricking still behind her eyes. Antoinette seemed so weary, her opinion so devoid of idealism or belief, yet what she said had the unexciting contours of a probable truth. Charlotte stood up.

"I think perhaps I should give you the package now."

"All right." Antoinette nodded and Charlotte went to her suitcase, laid it on the floor and carefully extracted the black velvet bag from inside one of Dominique's rolled-up vests.

She watched in fascination as Antoinette's long, tapered fingers gently extracted the foam rubber casing from the bag. Inside were what looked to Charlotte like four porcelain cartridge-fuses, similar to those with which she had seen her father struggle, cursing, by candlelight. She picked one up and turned it over in her hand: a sheath with pronged terminals contained a piece of quartz whose calibration determined the wavelength of the transmission. They seemed to her extraordinarily small and insignificant to have been the object of such astonishing care and effort. She found that her lip was trembling. What possible effect on the freedom of a country could ever be exerted by this small piece of domestic hardware in her hand?

Antoinette reached out and gently took the crystal from Charlotte. She laid it carefully with the others in the foam rubber casing. Then she put her hand back on Charlotte's and squeezed it.

"Thank you," she said.

"You've done a wonderful job."

Charlotte felt the air suddenly driven from her lungs as all the conquered feelings of the last few days surged out. Antoinette went over and put her arms around her, and Charlotte stood up, the better to feel the comfort of the other woman's embrace.

They both changed before dinner. Charlotte into Dominique's slightly less dowdy skirt and jumper, Antoinette taking off her blue pinafore, tidying her hair and putting on some lipstick. They ate in a living room upstairs, and Charlotte eventually told Antoinette the reason for her visit to Clermont.

"Do you think I'm mad?" she said.

"Not at all."

"But is it dangerous?"

"A woman's allowed to go to a garage and ask a simple question. The problem, of course, is that there are so many different security forces, and you'll find more of them in a big town like Clermont.

There are a lot of unpleasant little men who have solved the problems of their personalities by putting on uniforms and telling tales. Some of them are criminals or Fascists who have seen an opportunity to have their sadistic impulses made legal. There are some very violent men.

Then there are just people who like sneaking. So I wouldn't say there is no danger at all, but with you I don't see what they could report. You arrive, you go to your garage and you leave. You don't have time to arouse anyone's suspicion. Nor do you have time to arouse anyone's dislike. Don't forget that a lot of people report their friends or neighbours to the authorities to get even over some domestic quarrel.

Weren't you told all these things before you came?"

"Yes, we were. But it's always hard to imagine. I didn't realise both how normal everything would be and yet how strange. It's so odd going into a baker or buying a ticket, and everything seems just as it was, yet you know that if you say the wrong thing you might find yourself being arrested. It's the normality of everything that seems so treacherous."

Antoinette smiled.

"This man, he must be very remarkable."

"He is." Charlotte smiled back.

"Very remarkable." She felt calm after her tears, and had focused the purpose of her journey with renewed clarity.

"Do you want to tell me about him?"

"Not really. I couldn't make you feel what I feel for him. I can only say that what I'm doing seems quite rational. The education I had was very formal, and although there was a belief that the family was important, and that it was initially held together by love between the parents, no one ever encouraged us to believe in romantic love or any such idea. In fact, most of the women who taught us would have been horrified by the thought. They taught us romantic poetry, but for the language and the metre. And I don't believe in the idea myself-not as an idea, at any rate. But I suppose at some stage you make decisions, you have to decide what seems important to you, what seems valuable. It may be for a practical reason as much as for an idealistic reason, like the people you describe who'll join the Resistance when they think it's going to win. It's a judgement. I don't believe in a general ideal, I just believe in one particular man. I believe in the purity of the feeling that I have for him and that I believe he has for me. I think its force is superior to that of any other guiding force and I can't organise my life until I know whether he's alive."

"You do love him, don't you?"

"Of course I do. And if that love reflects a susceptibility on my part, if he has somehow exploited a weakness or a wound in me, so be it.

There's nothing I can do about it; that's who I am. To behave or believe otherwise would be dishonest."

Charlotte was not concerned by the indulgent expression in the older woman's eyes. It was sceptical, but it was also compassionate; and, Charlotte guessed that, however objectively Antoinette might view her youthful passion, a part of her was likely to regret that the day when her own life might be guided by such certainty was unlikely to come again.

Under Charlotte's questioning, Antoinette revealed that she had once been married, but that her husband had deceived her so often that even the flexible limits of bourgeois marriage had been violated. He had gone to live with a young girl in Normandy and she had not regretted his leaving, particularly as there were no children who might miss him. She had had lovers, she told Charlotte, but preferred to live alone. Her best friend was her brother, a doctor in a nearby town, who had helped to finance her shop.

"I like it here," she said.

"The countryside is beautiful, the girl who works for me, Gilberte, is charming. We eat well, we drink well, even now. About once a fortnight there's a man who visits me from Clermont to spend the night." She smiled and pulled another cigarette from the packet among the empty plates.

"It's enough. I'm fond of him. Then about six months ago my brother asked me if I would help him in a little network of people he was putting together with an Englishman who had dropped out of the sky one day. It didn't take him long to convince me. I love doing it. I love the excitement of the transmissions. I'm a very happy woman." She blew out smoke through her smiling, lipsticked mouth. Antoinette insisted Charlotte sleep in her bed while she made up the sofa for herself with a pillow and a rug. There were clean sheets, as she had promised, and Charlotte felt their smooth freshness on her skin.

It was a warm night, and since G Section had omitted to provide Dominique with a nightdress she slept naked. Dominique's underclothes she had washed and hung out to dry in the bathroom, bringing back memories of Daisy's flat in London, a place which seemed not just distant but to belong to a different existence. Antoinette's bedroom was the only room in the apartment over which she had taken much trouble. The rugs and antique furniture had been chosen with care; the bed itself was of the three-quarter size Charlotte had encountered in the hotel with Yves, but fresh and deeply comfortable.

Within minutes she was asleep, lying on her back, dragging in deep draughts of even breath.

It was almost three o'clock when she awoke, crying and protesting. She sat up and felt her hair damp around the edges of her forehead. In her dream she had been trapped and tortured; the moment of betrayal was similar to the half-buried memory of her father's sinister misprision, but the violence was done not by him but by Gregory.

For all this time she had lost sight of Gregory's face in her mind, and its absence was like a confirmation of his death. Then suddenly in her dream it had been cruelly restored.

"Are you all right?" Antoinette's voice came from the doorway.

"Yes, I ... I was dreaming."

Antoinette came and sat on the edge of the bed. She put her arms round Charlotte to comfort her, and Charlotte laid her face against the broderie anglaise of her nightdress. Antoinette murmured comforting words to her and eventually Charlotte found she was drifting back to sleep.

It was thickly dark behind the closed shutters, and the clouds from the mountain rim obscured the sky. Charlotte held on to Antoinette as she lay down and crossed the borderlines from sleep to vague wakefulness and back again, unwilling quite to let go in case the same dream was waiting. She felt Antoinette's hands gently stroke her hair, found herself calmed and once more drifting. Antoinette kissed her cheek and Charlotte felt her hands caress her shoulders with soothing movements till they both slept.

At nine o'clock a bicycle turned up the long, stony track to the Domaine. The young woman who rode it was dressed in simple clothes and had no bag or luggage with her. It was as though she herself, her body, was all that she was bringing.

In Lavaurette it was another bright day and the plane trees that lined the potholed path, with their pale leaves and peeling, eczemaic trunks, were noisy with the sound of birds.

When she arrived at the front door the woman propped her bicycle against a pillar and mounted the broad stone steps; she did not sound the iron bell-pull, but pushed open one half of the arched front door with practised familiarity and let herself into the house. A light aroma of coffee from the remote kitchen was just discernible in a heavier atmosphere of old plaster, wood and unmoved air. She turned to the right and walked across the flagged hall to another double door, which led into a dining room. The sprung floor cushioned her swift pace as she crossed the huge, grey-panelled room with its twenty-seater table, at one end of which was a single candlestick, a plate and an empty wine glass. She gathered these on her way through to a pantry where she deposited them in the stone sink: washing up was not her job; that was for the maid, who, as usual, was late.

In the vaulted kitchen she took a coffee pot from the range and filled two small white cups. She took them through a scullery and out to the narrow back staircase which gave her access to the first floor without having to return to the main hall. Up the steps, past the empty servants' bedrooms she climbed, carefully watching the black liquid in her hands. There was a smell of lime from the old wood of the staircase.

She breached the frontier into the main part of the house and walked along the sunlit corridor to the principal bedroom, where she paused, put the cups down on the landing window-sill, and knocked.

Levade's voice called her in.

"Good morning, Annemarie."

The room was dominated by a huge bed with a canopy and drapes which had been rolled and pinned back. The rugs on the floor had also been pushed to one side. The floor was littered with canvases, tubes of paint, drawings on pieces of paper, messed palettes, books opened and weighted down at a particular illustration, books closed and piled, glass jars full of brushes, pots of cleaner, chisels, hammers, small boxes of nails brought by Julien from Madame Galliot's top shelf and wooden stretchers in various stages of assembly. The numerous tables in the room were covered by cloths and by more books, candles and religious statues. Levade was shaved and dressed; he had combed his thick white hair and found a clean shirt which hung down outside his trousers almost to his knees. He stood in front of the window where the north light was clear.

Anne-Marie crossed to a screen in a remote corner of the room, behind which was a paint-spattered chair with a long green silk skirt and a pair of thin-strapped sandals. She took off her own clothes and put on the skirt and sandals; then she emerged from behind the screen.

She stood in the middle of the room, bare-breasted, unselfconscious.

"Did you have a good night?"

Levade shook his head.