Charlotte Gray (37 page)

Only when Levade began to talk about his life in Paris, after the war, did the meaning of what he said begin to bite and register.

He appeared to be saying that he and his friends had indulged themselves because their faith in civilisation had been torn up and ploughed into the septic mud of the Western Front: they did what they liked because none of it amounted to anything. It seemed that what Levade was telling her, in his oblique way, was that he had become obsessed by women and been able to indulge himself without any practical or philosophical reserve.

"At the time of its peak it had become a compulsion. I remember in a butcher's queue in the rue des Acacias seeing a young woman standing behind me waiting to be served. She had a pinkness in the skin of her face I hadn't seen before. I couldn't drag my eyes from her. It was an area of such delicate colour that I had to have her, to touch her.

I followed her home."

"Did you sleep with her?"

"Yes. I can remember nothing else about her, whether she was tall or short, fat or thin, only that pink skin."

"Was it that easy to persuade her?"

"Yes. It always was. If you asked. If you could be bothered to try. It was these details of women that drew me to them. Sometimes it was a particular woman, sometimes I felt this passion for the entire sex. I would see a girl in a restaurant and the line of her thigh beneath her skirt would be enough. The fall of hair on a woman's forehead, the set of dark brown eyes."

There was something almost chaste in the fervour with which Levade spoke; his gaze was fixed on the far wall, over Charlotte's shoulder.

"Did you fall in love with all these different women?"

He looked back to her face.

"That's not a phrase I ever used. What I felt was more pressing, more urgent than what I take that expression to mean."

"But were none of these women different from the others? Didn't you form a lasting attachment to any of them?"

"The question of endurance wasn't important. What I had found was a kind of paradise, an attainable paradise. I had to see how it would end."

"Did it make you happy?" Charlotte found that curiosity kept any edge of surprise or disapproval from her voice.

"Yes. For a while." For the first time in their conversation Levade appeared to smile; at least his mouth expanded and rose at the corners before falling. He got off the bed and straightened his back a little stiffly.

"I understand your anguish, Madame. Everyone in your position thinks there is some uniquely unfair, tormenting aspect to her dilemma. For you it is the fact that in time of war so many men die. It seems selfish of you to worry about your Pierre and you can't tell people about him. But, secretly, you believe that you love him more than any other woman loves her missing lover.

Don't you?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"You're not allowed to say that, but that's what you think. If only this, if only that. If only the one you loved didn't live so far away.

The married man who has fallen in love with a young girl can't tell his wife, his greatest confidante, and he can't tell his friends because they might disapprove. It's so unfair, he thinks. But every one of these situations has its own particular unfairness."

"There's something else that troubles me," said Charlotte.

"It's the shortness of the time we had together only a few weeks. Can something valid have come from that?"

Levade shook his head.

"You worry that he won't want you if you meet again?"

"Some days I do. He had to learn French to come here. He had to go to lessons with some French woman in London, and he used to make me speak French to him, too, so he could practise."

"You think he used you just to learn the language so he could go on this new assignment?"

"Sometimes I think that. He wanted this assignment because he wanted danger.

I think he wanted to die."

Levade was strolling round the studio. He picked up a book from the table and began to flick through the pages.

"We did discuss it once," said Charlotte, 'the question of his learning French. But the terrible thing is I can't remember what he said. I've tried and tried but I just can't remember."

"I think perhaps you should try not to think about that." Charlotte thought Levade's voice had lost its priestly tone and regained a note of sympathy. She looked up to where he had taken his position in front of the easel; he had started to scrape a little area of paint with a palette knife. Charlotte found herself once more gazing at Anne-Marie's breasts.

"Would you like to pose for me one day, do you think?"

Despite her misgivings. Charlotte was flattered.

"Do you mean like that?" She pointed to Annemarie.

"I don't know. I hadn't thought about it. Probably not."

"Well, maybe. Let's see."

She was relieved, but also a little affronted. What's wrong with my breasts? she found herself thinking. They could not be more beautiful than Anne-Marie's, it was true, but Gregory had always said that...

Levade suddenly turned and strode across the room to where a dozen paintings were leaning against the wall. He pulled one out and thrust it into Charlotte's hands.

"Look at that."

Following directions from Julien, Charlotte met Mirabel in an old white stone farmhouse, an hour's bicycle ride from Lavaurette. At the end of the track that led to it was a roadside calvary turned green with moss and lichen; along the rutted way were the mashed leaves and rotting fruit of an overhanging horse chestnut. The house was bare, with a vast white marble staircase rising from the hall to a straight single passageway above, off which opened half a dozen large rooms, each with bare boards and distempered plaster.

Mirabel showed Charlotte to the last room on the right, in which were two boat beds. As she walked in, her echoing footsteps told Charlotte that the floor was the ceiling of the room below.

In English, with a slight Midlands accent, Mirabel said, "Welcome, Daniele. It's nice to see a friendly face. Sit yourself down."

Charlotte perched with her knees together on the edge of the bed.

Mirabel walked round the room. He was a tall man with curly, light brown hair (almost a case for dyeing. Charlotte thought) and a worried expression. He was wearing corduroy trousers and a workman's blue canvas jacket. He had an enormously broad back, yet delicate fingers, she noticed, with which he made soft gestures as he spoke.

"Now I'm not sure exactly what your plans are, but I've been asked to pass on a request. I'm sorry I couldn't meet you before. I was unavoidably detained." Mirabel coughed.

"To put it more bluntly, it was bloody dangerous. I had to get out."

"If it's about going back, I--"

" Hang on. Listen to me."

There was something masterful about him, but he seemed preoccupied presumably with the cares of his position. He also seemed nervous.

"I think they're on to us again," he said.

"Who? The Germans?"

"No. Some crazed French group."

He looked out of the window for a moment, then seemed to collect himself.

"How good is your French?" he said.

"I can pass for French. For a while. Or on the telephone."

"It'd be all right for a brief message then?"

"Certainly."

Mirabel did not speak. He walked around a little more. Charlotte said conversationally, "What about you?"

"What?"

"Your French."

"I'm bilingual. Like most of us. My mother was French."

Mirabel was standing by the window, looking over a fallen tree in the garden. Eventually he said, "You're looking for someone, aren't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly that. You have another reason for being here."

Charlotte was sufficiently alarmed to remember her training. Minimum information.

"No," she said.

"I have no other purpose." It occurred to her that she had no way of knowing if this Mirabel was who he said he was: it was Julien who had told her where to come, and although she was sure of Julien, it was possible that this man was not the real Mirabel. After all, if he was bilingual, why might he not be French, a Vichy policeman, with one English parent from whom he had learned the language, right down to the slight Midlands accent?

Mirabel looked at her with a weary and slightly superior smile on his face.

"All right. Read this." He gave Charlotte a piece of paper on which was scribbled a single name and a street address; beneath them were a map reference, a date and a time.

Charlotte looked up. Mirabel said, "Can you memorise that?"

"I already have."

"The address is in Limoges. I want you to go there. Ask for the name. Then give him the other details. It's one of ours. It's details of a drop. You must say that you were sent by Frederic. Got that? It's very important. Otherwise they won't believe you. Frederic."

"That's it?"

"That's all."

"Well, that's easy enough."

Mirabel looked at Charlotte suspiciously.

"Don't you want anything..

I mean, can I help you at all?"

"No, it looks quite straightforward."

Charlotte thought for a moment.

"I thought you were going to order me home."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I didn't take my plane. I'm not supposed to be here any more."

"I don't know anything about that. In any case, we need all the people we can get."

"Will you tell them that? Tell the people in London that you need me?"

"I'll see. But in return I want you not to speak to anyone about what I've just asked you. Don't mention it to Octave."

"Why not?"

"Just don't." Mirabel's voice was loud in the bare room. He controlled himself.

"Then I might have news for you. About the person you're looking for. We should keep in touch."

Charlotte breathed in deeply to still the hammering in her chest. She said quietly, "I don't know how to reach you."

"Don't worry about that," said Mirabel.

"You deliver the message safe and sound and I'll be back in touch with you." Charlotte knew she should say nothing, but could not stop herself. In a quiet voice she said, "Do you really know where he is?"

Mirabel looked her in the eye.

"Yes, love," he said.

"I know where he is."

Good morning. Mademoiselle Bobotte. You're looking very well.

Getting some early nights for a change, I dare say." Julien Levade moved briskly across the hallway, inhaling the familiar smell of tobacco and wood polish which today had a new element, possibly of lavender, though less a woman's scent than the kind of vigorous alcohol a man might rub into his flayed pores after shaving.

"Coffee, Monsieur Levade?"

"Is that what you call it? If you insist." Julien was safely round the bend in the stairs.

He sat at his desk and looked over the cobbled courtyard to the street door. Some fat Nazi squatted like a brooding toad in the best house in Lavaurette, requisitioned for the purpose; his country was in ruins, invaded from without, betrayed from within; his work was temporarily stalled for lack of funds; yet he felt an optimistic tremor as he looked across to where the low winter sun struck into the windows of the apartment building opposite.

He opened the half-dozen letters waiting on his desk, hung up his jacket behind the door and went over to his drawing board. He was satisfied that his conversion would work, though who would stay in this hotel, what nationality they would be and when it would open for business he had no idea.

It was not like the numberless hotels du Pare, du Lion d'or or des voyageurs, with their gold letters on black marble nameplates, their fusty dining rooms, swirling cress soup and long damp corridors of failed plumbing and doubtful assignations: it would be bold and simple; it would glory in the stripped-down elements of which it was made, and there would be no attempt to smother the stone flags with hectares of hatched parquet, to box in the beams and cover the ceiling with flowered paper. The walls would be whitewashed, the furniture plain, though he hoped the richness of the textiles and the efficiency of the heating system he had planned, the great boiler sunk into a former solitary cell below ground, would take away any lingering air of the penitential.

It would open, perhaps, in 1946. The mayor of Lavaurette would come, and there would be a party from Paris as well, the senior men in the parent company and their wives. On the first evening there would be speeches; the builders would be thanked and there would be a toast to the former abbot, driven up for the day from the old people's home. Julien would be in his dinner jacket, moving among the guests, modestly declining their congratulations; he would now be living back in Paris, with Weil, his old boss, reinstated at the head of the company. Weil's French citizenship, which had been revoked by Vichy, would naturally have been restored by the righteous and democratic government that followed.

Julien gazed at the floor plan of the bedrooms. Drawing was the part he liked best. The finished building was not worse, necessarily, than the plan, but it was always different; between the idea and the achieved reality the process of construction made a contribution of its own, so that what emerged invariably lacked the magnificent, beguiling, complex purity of the idea.

Poor Weil, Julien thought: how he had loved his work and his life in the city. He could picture him vividly, with his fair hair, and his quick eyes lighting up a fraction before his companion's at some irony, some gossip he had picked up at lunch in one of the restaurants he patronised on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. How proud he was though silently: he would have thought it trite to say so of being French; how much he valued strolling through the sumptuous capital and its self-advertising landmarks of enlightenment the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevard de la Republique. Now he was stripped of his job and his assets, forced to report daily to some surly prefect in the sixth arrondissement, and to wear on the lapel of his prized camel overcoat a cloth yellow star decorated with the word "Jew'. Julien was sure it would eventually be all right for men such as Weil. How could it not be? They must be patient; they must wait for the English and the Americans and for people such as himself who would clear a path for the friendly invaders.