Charlotte Gray (65 page)

She stood up to go to the buffet car and caught sight of her reflection in the small, rectangular mirror with its bevelled edges above the seats opposite. The hairdresser to whom she went in Bond Street could see enough of her hair's natural colours to give him an idea of how he should re-dye the Ussel brown. The result was so close to how she had looked on the train coming down a year before that even Charlotte could barely see the difference.

Her face was perhaps a little thinner, though the change was not obvious. Were there black marks beneath her eyes? Not really: her skin was still so young that it was incapable of showing weariness in lines or shadows. The dozen dark brown freckles over the bridge of her nose and beneath her eyes remained the same, and she remembered how Gregory used to touch them with the tip of his tongue, claiming they had a taste of their own. Yet even if her skin denied it, she was not the same person who had gone down the swaying corridors with Cannerley and Morris.

After the second pub, after the night-club, when they had gone back to the flat and drunk coffee, Daisy, in a moment of extreme alcoholic candour, had said something like, "When you first arrived from Scotland, darling, I thought you were a bit of a shop-window mannequin, with all your clothes and your self-control. But you're not, are you?" Daisy had leaned forward and placed her hand on Charlotte's thigh.

"You're ... God, I don't know. You're a rum one, aren't you?" Charlotte pulled back the door of the compartment and stepped out. Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character.

Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

Amelia Gray was waiting at Waverley station. She signalled cheerily to Charlotte from the barrier and grappled with her briefly in a botched, powdery kiss. Charlotte abandoned herself to her mother's control. She sat in the passenger seat of the car and responded happily to Amelia Gray's anxious questions. However much Charlotte had been disappointed and irritated by her over the years, she had always been fond of her, and there was a self-indulgent pleasure in allowing herself to be mothered.

"Your father'!! be back at about seven. He's got a meeting at the hospital, but he's so much looking forward to seeing you."

"Good. I'm sorry I couldn't keep in touch more. It was impossible."

"Just so long as you're safe and well now, that's what matters." In her absence. Charlotte's parents had acquired a small terrier called Angus. For some reason this struck her as peculiar. Were they lonely?

Was it a substitute for their children? What future did they envisage for themselves and the dog?

Amelia Gray had kept bedrooms for both her children in the spacious house, even though neither of them had lived there for some time. On the bookshelves in Charlotte's room were various tales of witches and ponies she had had as a child; the bed was the same one she had had in their old house in the Highlands. She unpacked her case, in which she had put enough things to last four or five days. In the chest of drawers were old clothes of hers, wrapped in tissue paper and mothballs by her mother. They looked slightly less ravishing than she had imagined in the draper's shop in Limoges.

The disjunction between what had happened to her in France and the life, both past and present, suggested by her bedroom in her parents' home was very strange. She could not reconcile the different experiences at all, and trying to do so made her feel unreal, as though she was still drunk from her return party. She went downstairs to the sitting room where her mother poured her a glass of sherry. Half an hour later they heard the front door open.

William Gray was not sixty years old, but he had not worn well since his return from the Western Front. He seemed to move straight from youth to late middle age, without passing through the vigorous part of his life; then, in the twenty-five years that followed, he had rapidly aged. His mental curiosity and his wiry body gave him a certain energetic presence, but it was that of a springy old man who is fit for his years.

His hair was white, and his eyes were sunk deep in his head, with heavy pouches underneath. His skin felt dry and cracked where Charlotte kissed him on the cheek.

There was an awkwardness between them that never changed. As Gray tried to express his delight at seeing her again. Charlotte recoiled; when she gave him her most candid and affectionate look, he would make some dry remark. Amelia Gray watched, powerless to help, as she fluttered between them. Charlotte was aware of the way she reacted to her father, and knew that it was different from her behaviour with other people. One of the reasons she had so much valued the company of friends as a child was that, with them, she felt liberated and at ease, while at home she felt reduced. As the evening progressed, she was disappointed to find herself going down familiar paths, becoming evasive and discouraging in her answers to her parents' questions.

She was not like this with Julien, or Daisy, or Levade and, least of all, with Gregory. She did not like herself for it.

At dinner. Gray opened a bottle of wine he had long been saving and drank to his daughter's safe return. He was encouraged and amused by how much of it Charlotte drank, and went to fetch another from the cellar.

She told him of a man she had known in France, who could drink huge quantities with no apparent effect, and said it must have been from him she had learned. For a time they talked of French customs and habits, of Paris and the provinces, and everything went well. Amelia Gray served out plates of gooseberry tart, made with fruit she had bottled from the garden.

Afterwards, they sat round the fire in the sitting room, and Gray poured brandy from an old ship's decanter on the sideboard.

"And will you be going back to France?" he said.

"I doubt it. Things are changing rapidly. It's becoming more of an open war. They need men and guns more than interpreters and so on."

"I see," said Charlotte's mother.

"And the work you did, what ' " Don't tell us," said Gray forcefully.

"We don't need to know."

"All right," said Charlotte.

"I won't."

A silence descended. It seemed that their combined mental resources were unable to conjure a single conversational topic beyond the one that had been brought so abruptly to an end. Eventually, Amelia Gray managed to achieve utterance by addressing the dog and telling him it was time for bed. With the help of some business with the coffee cups she was able to restore some sense of geniality.

Charlotte expected that her mother would return to say good night, and that she herself would take the opportunity to go up to bed at the same time. After ten minutes or so, it became clear that Amelia Gray was not coming back, and that Charlotte would have to negotiate her own departure. She could not pretend to be tired when she felt so alert; and, although she found the conversation with her father awkward, she was aware of an urge, perhaps inspired by the wine, to communicate in some way. She felt the weight of many unassimilated experiences pressing her for some expression.

With an effort, she said, "I met another interesting man in France, a painter. We had lots of long talks together. I was a lodger in his house for a time."

"Oh yes. What sort of painter?" Gray was lighting a pipe.

"One of those daub and splash merchants, or the real thing?"

"Oh, the real thing. I think he was famous once, but he says he lost his way. He lost his inspiration."

"I suppose that can happen."

"He said it was because he had stopped dreaming."

Gray laughed.

"Sounds a wee bit like an excuse to me."

"Perhaps." Charlotte did not know why she wanted to talk about Levade, but was reluctant to let the subject go.

"He was in the war, you know.

Your war. He told me some terrible stories."

"Aye, well, they were terrible times. Best forgotten."

Charlotte felt she was close to something. It was vital to keep the conversation going. With a greater effort this time, she said, "Don't you think you ought to talk about it? To get it out? Isn't that what you tell your patients?" Gray laughed drily.

"Well, you never forget. It's always with you.

Just now, when I told you not to tell us what you'd been doing, I know you thought I was being rude and uninterested. No, wait.

Charlotte, let me finish. It wasn't that."

"I'm sorry."

"No, no. It's just that when you've commanded a battalion for three years you understand about war. Security, intelligence and so on. You have people's lives in your hands, so you do understand."

"Of course you do. I'm sorry if I seemed ..."

Gray suddenly stood up and went to the fireplace. With his back to Charlotte, he said, "My dear girl, I'm very proud of you."

Charlotte could say nothing.

Gray turned round.

"So very proud of you. Now, will we be friends?"

"Friends ... friends?"

"Please, Charlotte. I know I've failed you as a father. But it was difficult, after the war. It was very difficult. I tried to keep a balance, but I was troubled by memories. And dreams."

Charlotte still said nothing, too frightened to confront what Gray seemed to be suggesting. Was he asking her forgiveness for what had once happened between them? If so, could she trust her memory of what had taken place?

Gray said, "Do you remember, I told you once of how some men in another company took some German prisoners and then, instead of handing them over, took them into a wood and shot them?"

"Yes, I remember."

"We were very tired," said Gray.

"We'd been under shellfire for days, and the men were not themselves. There'd been a hit in our part of the trench, and terrible casualties. It was raining and we were supposed to walk for almost five miles with these Boches. I couldn't get my men to do it. I couldn't make them. I think they might have shot me if I'd pushed them any harder."

"So it was your company?"

"You can't possibly understand what it was like. Three years of this. They'd seen all their friends slaughtered. We stopped at a little copse and I said, "I'm going to speak to the officer in the village.

I leave the prisoners to your disposal." I knew perfectly well what they'd do. And they knew I knew."

Gray's voice was flat and without remorse.

"Is that what you dreamed of?"

"No. The dreams were of my men's faces. The look of incomprehension, the look of terror when I told them we were ordered to attack at dawn. On the Somme. In daylight. At walking pace. Night after night I saw those young men's faces. Boys younger than you are now. They looked at me and they knew. We all knew what was coming."

Somehow Gray had remained calm. Charlotte murmured some soothing words.

"Now, Charlotte, you must try to forgive my shortcomings. Or at least describe them to me, so perhaps I can explain or understand."

"I ... I don't think I can."

There was a silence for a moment; then they heard rain beginning against the windows.

In a voice of desperation. Gray said, "What did I do wrong?" When his selfcontrol gave way, it went completely. A great sob rose up in his chest and made him double over.

"For God's sake. Charlotte, please tell me what I did wrong." Gray held out his hand to her, but Charlotte would not take it.

"My dear girl," he sobbed, 'whatever it was, can you not forgive me?" Confronted at last with the outline of the thing that had lain for so long unrealised in her mind, Charlotte was too terrified to look.

"No," she said.

"No, I can't."

In the days that followed, Charlotte tried never to be alone -with her father. When he returned from work at six o'clock, she made sure she went upstairs for her bath, then helped her mother in the kitchen until it was time for dinner. In the afternoons, she went for long walks in the hills and tried to understand herself. She could not but be impressed by her father's anguish.

If he had done something terrible to her, how would he have been able to beg her to explain it to him? He had always been an honest man; he would not only have thought dissimulation to have been immoral in such circumstances, but would also have been incapable of acting.

Yet, if he truly had no idea of what had passed between them, it must mean that she had imagined it, or somehow misremembered This she could not accept, or force herself to believe. In some physical and cruel way, he had destroyed her innocence; and while the fallible functions of memory would not tell her exactly how, she was as certain of that simple fact as she could be, with an instinctive conviction that had never before let her down.

Still it seemed vital to her to establish what had really happened, and she felt agonisingly close to doing so. She thought of what her father had told her about the war, about his dreams and subsequent sufferings.

For some reason, she remembered, too, the letter from father to daughter she had found at Le Bourget-Drancy station. She strained at the memory of her own childhood, at the sense of some rapture lost. Yet it all remained like some frozen sea: great blocks of ice, submerged, but static, and beyond the melting capacity of her conscious will.

As she strode over the damp hills and turned for home, she felt torn between guilt that her father stood in some way wrongly accused by her and an absolute knowledge that her memory had, if not in detail, then at least in essence recorded what had happened.