Charlotte Gray (36 page)

Presumably that would now change; she would have to see what Mirabel thought.

He had cancelled their first meeting some weeks earlier, but, according to Julien, was more insistent than ever that they meet this time.

Perhaps he would order her to return home, and she would plead with him that she could still be useful in France. Even if he insisted, it was still open to her to refuse: she could simply not turn up at the appointed time for the plane. It would mean that G Section would disown and dismiss her, but she had no longterm ambitions with them. It was not as if she would be in any more danger, because they could offer her no protection in France anyway.

What they would not like about it was the thought of what she knew and that the longer she was there the more possible it was that she would be caught and interrogated. The German presence in the Free Zone made it more likely, but the truth was that she had little to tell. G Section's tactic of minimum information had worked well: she did not know Mirabel's assumed name, his real name or where to find him. She thought she could convince him that for the time being, at least, she was more of an asset than a risk. What excited her about the rendezvous was her hope, amounting almost to a belief that Mirabel, with his superior connections, would know where Gregory was hiding.

When she had roughly dried her hair, she set about re-dyeing the roots, where the natural colours were starting to show through. She wore gloves to protect her hands and worked the dye in with a paint brush borrowed from Levade's studio. She was two thirds of the way through Antoinette's bottle; as she upended it into her gloved palm, she thought of the steamy shop and wondered how Antoinette was managing up in the rainy mountains with Gilberte and her fortnightly visitor from Clermont Ferrand.

Charlotte peered into the blue-framed mirror above the basin and saw the reflection of her anxious brown eyes. She smiled at herself, instinctively turning to a better angle beneath the harsh light.

There were days when she scarcely thought of Peter Gregory, days when she convinced herself that he did not exist and that her memory of him was false; yet she still believed that only she could give him back his life and that only he could plausibly join her future to her past. She had had time to inspect the feeling from every angle, to imagine, even wish for, its diminution, but while her mind offered many choices about emotions and their value-how much they should be honoured, how much resisted, how changeable they could be, how naturally mortal-her intellectual conviction remained stable. Now she was going to find him. As she stood, naked from the waist up, inspecting herself in the mirror, Charlotte was stirred from her reverie by the sudden conviction that someone was watching her. Covering herself with a towel, she grabbed the door of the little bathroom and pulled it open. The corridor was empty.

That afternoon, her dulled hair wrapped beneath a scarf, she was sweeping the long corridor of the first floor when the door to Levade's studio swung open.

"Madame Guilbert? Would you care to come in for a moment?" Charlotte followed him into the studio, broom in hand.

"What do you think of that?" said Levade, indicating the canvas on the easel. There was a picture of a woman in a green silk skirt whom Charlotte recognised as his model, Anne-Marie. He had caught her expression of slightly timid seriousness; he had made her look like an intellectual person, a teacher or philosopher, yet had depicted her bare-breasted in a green silk skirt and set her in an imagined room whose dimensions were surreal.

"It's wonderful," said Charlotte. She did not think it wonderful, though she recognised it as the work of someone who was good at what he did.

"What do you like about it?" Levade stood with his arms crossed. He was for once wearing shoes, and had a jacket over his habitual untucked shirt.

"I just like the girl. Anne-Marie. I like the way you've painted her."

"The likeness?" It was difficult to see how he managed to load the simple word with intense scorn.

"I'm afraid so. Look at her pale skin. And the way her eyes are almondshaped yet not narrow, the centre so large and open. It's beautiful. I've never seen that in a woman before."

Levade sighed.

"What about the skin?"

"It's lovely. The paleness. But not white or deathly - it still looks healthy." Levade gazed at the picture in silence.

"It's no good at all," he said. He went over to a small circular table and lit a cigarette.

"As a matter of fact, I don't care. Anne-Marie is merely an exercise for me. There's something of her I'm trying to get right. Do you know what it is?" Charlotte looked at the painting again. There was no doubt that the eye was drawn, willingly or otherwise, to Anne-Marie's breasts, whose exposure was the more obvious for the background against which the figure was set.

"It's her arms," said Levade.

"The skin on her arms. That's why I asked her to be my model. She was working in a cafe not far from here, and I stopped there one day last year. It was summer and her arms were bare. She leaned across me to put down a plate and I was transfixed by the colour and texture of them." He shook his head and flicked the ash of his cigarette on to the floor, then went and stood in front of a small table on which were some religious statues and a candle.

He gazed back at the painting with an expression of resigned distaste.

"The arms are very good," said Charlotte.

"But perhaps one's eye is drawn away from them too much."

"Does it worry you, the nudity? Even after so many statues and classical models? After Michelangelo and Ingres and ' " I don't really think it's that kind of picture."

"You think it's lascivious?"

"Not completely, because there are other things happening. But a little bit, yes."

"Put that broom down." Levade walked over to the window and gazed up at the thick woods that fringed the gardens to the north. His lined face looked older than his lean body in the mild, clear light of the afternoon.

"Sit down." He thrust his arm towards the bed, and Charlotte perched herself, trying to look relaxed. Levade stayed standing by the window.

She watched his half-turned face carefully: the thudding artery in the neck, the wizened Adam's apple dragging up between the flaps of skin on his throat as he spoke again.

"Have you heard any news of your husband?"

Charlotte felt repelled by Levade, but reluctant to admit that her repulsion was not absolute.

"No. Nothing."

"Do you love him? Do you miss him?"

"No. There's another man I love."

"What's his name?"

"Pierre."

Levade turned into the room.

"Tell me about him."

Charlotte hesitated for a second, but the temptation was too great. It occurred to her as she spoke how long she had carried the unshared weight of her feeling for Gregory; her waking and many of her sleeping hours had been filled with this sullen, secret ache. As she started to find words, the feelings formed themselves and rushed in through her abandoned discretion.

She felt the emotions surge up and animate her movements; her hands were clawing at the air, rotating, and there was a flush rising in her neck, creeping over her jaw. In the most emotional moments of the story she still watched Levade's eyes, to see if he was listening, and she saw that his head did not move, that his eyes did not leave her, and she felt the radiance of his interest. She was shocked when he said, "I don't believe you."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I believe the pain and the passion, but I don't believe this Pierre is a what was it, airman from Rennes. I think he's English, as are you, Madame." Charlotte swallowed and looked down to her hands, now stilled and resting in her lap.

"Does it matter?" she said.

Levade pursed his lips and shook his head.

"Not in the least. The rest of the story is true, I imagine."

"I came to France to find him. Everything I told you about how much I miss him, how I fear for his life all the feelings of love I described, all those are true."

"I don't think someone could invent those, Madame Guilbert. Shall I continue to call you that?"

Charlotte sighed.

"You may as well call me Dominique."

"But why? Why another false name? It's no better than Madame Guilbert."

"But even Julien only calls me Dominique."

"It would be our secret, the sign of our confidence. If you wish." He turned his back to her again and looked out of the window.

There was a long silence, which Charlotte was surprised to hear broken at last by the sound of her own voice.

"Charlotte."

"Charlotte."

She nodded. It was the first time she had heard her name for many weeks, and its intimacy was tender.

"And this Pierre," said Levade, clearing papers from an armchair so he could sit in it.

"Did you make love many times? Did it surprise you?"

"Yes. I didn't realise it was like that. There didn't seem to be enough hours in the day. When I thought it was finished, even when he was saying goodbye it would begin again. He couldn't leave the flat, he would sink to his knees and start to pull at my clothes, and I was desperate, as though we hadn't been doing it all day, as though we'd -never done it before. It was terrible. I didn't know if other people also

... whether ..." Levade said nothing. Charlotte had a sudden fear that instead of sympathising with her anguish he was, in a voyeuristic way, enjoying the thought of her making love to Gregory.

She looked down at her lap, then up at him again. It was too late to withdraw her trust.

"I was frightened. I was really frightened. I wanted to devour him in some way. Yet my feeling for him was so gentle. I so much wanted to help him, to bring him back to health and life, to undo all the harm that had been done to him. What we did was awful, wonderful I don't know what you'd call it. But that wasn't why I came here to find him. I came because I loved him, because the feeling was ... transcendent."

"And he spoke to some weakness in you."

"Of course he did. Why should I be ashamed of that? Not every woman would have felt what I felt. I'm sure it was my weaknesses and faults, my own wounds he touched. That's why I so passionately loved him.

That's why I can't let go, because I believe there's no one else who could do that."

Levade breathed out a long, quiet sigh, which gave no indication of what he thought. He watched Charlotte as she struggled to control her agitation. She looked up, red-eyed and resentful at his detachment.

"Don't you have anything to say?"

"Yes. Tell me how you thought it would end. What did you imagine your lives would become? Did you think you would stay together until one of you died? That he would never be able to leave the house until you had made love one more time? That your passion would dwindle into some companionable friendship?"

"None of these things. It was enough to be with him, to have his company. It was almost enough that he was alive, even if I was not with him."

"And you truly never thought about a future?"

"I never did. Though I admit that may have been because I wouldn't let myself. A wise woman doesn't indulge such fantasies about a fighter pilot in a war."

"And you're a wise woman."

She did not hear if there was a question in his voice.

"I doubt it," she said.

"Are you wise enough to know that the problems of lovers seem to everyone else in the world, especially to their friends, like comic self-indulgence, like the antics of fretful children?"

"Yes, I suppose I do know that." Charlotte's voice was grudging.

"But listen. If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand and you say. No, maybe not, it's just a bore to my friends. What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die?"

Charlotte was flushed and excited.

"Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?" Levade smiled as he stood up and crossed to the table where he had left his cigarettes.

"The lifelong love that young romantic Frenchwomen dream about and perhaps most English girls as well, though maybe not you that ideal they think so unattainable is in fact rather commonplace. I know hundreds of men and women who loved each other all their lives and died in that same condition. The feelings you describe are more unusual."

"What do you mean?"

"The passion, that thing people call " merely physical", is perhaps rarer than what they refer to as lasting love. Rarer, and therefore perhaps more valuable."

"But it wasn't just that, it was more, it was--"

" Of course it was. That's the difficulty."

Charlotte felt Levade was on her side, but still she resented it.

"I suppose you have a long experience of all these things," she said.

"Long and sinful," he said, pushing his hand through his hair.

"I came here to escape from it."

He had moved across to the bed, where he sat down, at the other end from Charlotte. He turned to face her.

"I lived in Paris. Most of my life I lived there. I suppose we were all trying to forget what we had seen."

"Seen where?"

"In the War."

The features of her own father came up brightly in Charlotte's mind, and she turned her eyes away from Levade's old, knowing face. She did not want to hear him, and the word that had stopped her ears was "War'.

There was something that revolted her. She would not confront it. She watched Levade's lips moving, heard his thin voice, weighted with grotesque experience and the awful compromises that he must have made, but she did not take in what he said. Words like Verdun, generation of my friends, slid off her mind like mercury running over polished glass.