Children of War (14 page)

By the time he returned in his swimming trunks, there were a good three centimetres of froth on the yeast liquid, but he
stirred it well anyway. Then he brought out the warm flour, put it into a mixing bowl and little by little he began adding the yeast liquid as he stirred and mixed the dough. Once it had become a smooth ball he scattered some more flour on a wooden board and began the final pounding of the dough with his hands. He stretched it and folded it back over itself and formed it into a rough cylindrical shape that would fit the baking tin. Once in the tin, the dough was pressed down to leave no air pockets. He scattered more flour over the top, covered the dish with a cloth of moist muslin and left it by the oven to rise.

Bruno’s summer soup was quickly made. He chopped two green peppers, peeled and sliced a cucumber and put them all into the blender with two cloves of garlic, two glasses of white wine and half a glass of olive oil. He poured boiling water over four tomatoes to loosen their skins, peeled them and squeezed out the pips and added the tomato flesh to the blender. Once liquidized, it went into a large tureen with some ice cubes and he put it into the fridge.

When he reached the pool, Pamela was wearing a filmy dressing gown of white linen that seemed to float around her. She laid a large soft rug on the grass and tossed onto it a couple of cushions from the chairs by the pool. She turned to look at him, poised to dive in.

‘I’m surprised at you, Bruno, wearing trunks. Why on earth should you think you’ll need them?’ Pamela slid off the gown, the only garment she wore, and dived neatly into the water.

*

Wearing a towel around his waist, Bruno lifted the baked loaf out of its tin and tapped its underside to be sure it was properly
done. He opened his nostrils to enjoy the heady scent of fresh bread. He left it on a wire rack to cool and began loading the tray with pâté and cheese, plates and glasses. He served his summer soup, now well chilled, in tall glasses, and opened a bottle of a new discovery, Château Briand, a charming Bergerac Sec white wine made by the daughter of the wine merchant Hubert de Montignac, whose
cave
was one of the treasures of St Denis. With the tray loaded, he carried it out to the small table at the side of the pool, poured out a glass and took it to Pamela. She was lying face-down on the rug, her chin propped in her hands, smiling lazily as she watched him approach.

‘I love it when you cook for me,’ she said. ‘And in the nicest possible way you’ve given me quite an appetite. I can smell the bread from here and it’s always best when it’s warm.’ She had draped the dressing gown around herself in a way that revealed almost as much as it concealed.

Bruno took her a glass of the white wine and kissed her shoulder, where the gown had slipped away. In the pool house, he plugged in the electric hotplate, washed and sliced the courgettes she had picked. He used his finger to coat them thinly with the walnut oil. By the time he returned from the kitchen with a bottle of mineral water and the bread they had started to sizzle and he turned them.

Pamela had taken the cushions from the sun chairs and piled them into a heap so they could lounge back as they enjoyed their picnic. She pulled the fresh loaf apart, plunged her nose close to catch the scent, then dipped a crust into the bowl of
aillou
and washed it down with a mouthful of the chilled soup.

‘It feels wonderfully decadent to feed so many appetites at
once; eating a picnic with my fingers, a glass of fine wine and making love in the open air,’ she said, and patted the cushions for Bruno to lie down beside her. ‘It reminds me of all the fantasies I had when I decided to move to France.’

‘I’m glad I could help you bring them to life,’ he said, smiling as he lay down.

‘A good thing you happened to be around,’ she replied, and kissed his chest. ‘For some reason I was feeling amazingly romantic this afternoon. If the postman had turned up, I might have leaped on him.’

‘I know your postman,’ he said. ‘He’s on the verge of retirement and he’s only got three teeth.’

‘That goes to show just how sexy I felt. But then Prince Charming arrived, just in the nick of time.’

He put down before her the plate of lightly charred courgettes and Pamela proceeded to feed him, putting a small dab of
aillou
on each slice and then holding it to his lips before taking one in her turn. She handed him his wine glass and said, ‘Now I’ve got your complete attention I want to talk about Fabiola.’

Bruno spluttered and some of his soup went down the wrong way. When he had recovered, he raised his eyebrows and prepared to listen, knowing there was no escape.

‘She finally told me what happened when she went to Paris. She likes Gilles a lot, really a lot, and went up to see him quite determined to take him to bed. But at the last moment she couldn’t. He was very sweet and patient, she said, and they cuddled and slept together. But there was no consummation.’

‘How very sad for them both,’ said Bruno, trying to damp down the mental image her words evoked. ‘Did she say why?’

‘She just said that she had to work out something from her past. I asked if she meant she was still in love with someone else, but she shrugged in that way of hers and changed the subject. I always got the impression of a doomed love affair hanging over her, perhaps a married man who refused to leave his family.’

That could be it, thought Bruno. But Fabiola never talked about her private life, nor much about her past.

‘It could be something else,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘You know how much time Fabiola spends at that shelter for abused wives in Bergerac. Maybe she’d been badly treated or beaten up herself.’

Pamela shrugged. ‘Who knows? When I first got to know her I even wondered if she was gay. Anyway, you know Fabiola; she’s a very private woman. I asked if she had tried seeing somebody for counselling, or a good psychologist, but you know what doctors are like when it comes to treating themselves. She said she’d tried talking with her gynaecology professor, whom she admired, but it hadn’t done much good. Apparently she came from the Périgord and planned to return when she retired. That was one reason Fabiola came here.’

Bruno shook his head, feeling concerned for his friend but without enough knowledge to do anything. But this could not be allowed to rest there. Bruno knew his own nature; if there was a problem, he’d always try to resolve it. Fabiola had once told him he always assumed there was a solution to any problem, but as a doctor she knew that some cases were hopeless. Perhaps she’d been talking of herself? He’d have to think of a way to help. But he must start by finding out what had gone wrong. Whatever the ordeal, people could often recover. He knew that from his time in the Bosnian war.

‘You’re miles away,’ Pamela said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Sorry.’ He reached out to put his hand on hers. ‘I was wondering how we might persuade Fabiola to try again to find someone who might help her.’

‘No, you weren’t,’ she said gently. ‘You had that soft look on your face that you get when you’re remembering something.’

He smiled at her, thinking how well this woman knew him. ‘You’re right. I was recalling some women we knew in Bosnia who had been forced into being sex slaves for Serb troops. But some of them seemed pretty resilient, as if they were determined to recover. Knowing Fabiola, whatever happened to her I’d have thought she’d be the same.’

Pamela shook her head. ‘The problem is that we don’t really know what happened to her. At least she’s started to talk to me about it. And she’s not running away from Gilles. Fabiola still wants to make that relationship work, and I think we should do whatever we can to help. After all, Gilles is your friend. You brought him down here and introduced them. So in a way, you’re responsible. And we both love Fabiola so we have to help her.’

‘I agree,’ Bruno said. ‘If she lets us.’

Since it was one of Bruno’s varied duties to manage the traffic problems of St Denis, the Rue de la Libération was one of the few aspects of his job that caused him misery. Sometimes he thought it should never have been built. It led from the roundabout in the central square along a narrow street that finally opened out into the main road to Les Eyzies. It was listed as a two-lane road, but there wasn’t really enough room for a truck and a car to pass. The pavements were too cramped for safety, barely wide enough for one person, let alone two. On one side were tall, narrow houses built in the nineteenth century and shoehorned into the narrow space between the road and a steep hill that blocked any light from the rear windows. On the other side of the street slightly newer buildings were squeezed into the equally tight space between the road and the twelve-metre vertical drop down to the quayside and the river.

The result was a town planner’s nightmare. Without demolishing the houses on one side or the other, there was no way to widen the narrow road. St Denis could not afford to demolish the houses, which would mean paying compensation to the owners. And yet the Rue de la Libération, once a healthy commercial thoroughfare with shops and restaurants at street
level, was slowly dying as pedestrians shunned the narrow pavements and busy traffic. Shopfronts were empty or boarded up. The dry cleaner had gone, and so had the estate agent, once he realized there was too little room for the few passers-by to study the photos of houses for sale in his windows.

It was into one of these vacant shopfronts that Bruno and the Mayor now entered after taking their early coffee and croissants at Fauquet’s café. The two men began to climb the narrow stairs that led to small rental apartments on the upper floors. Cheaply modernized a generation ago, the apartments contained one small bedroom, a living room with a kitchen corner and a tiny shower room with a toilet. They were now used for unemployed families or single parents whose rents were subsidized.

Bruno led the way to the empty attic on the top floor which had neither shower room nor kitchen, and forced open the reluctant door. The bulb did not work when he flicked the switch and the skylight was too small and grimy to help. He turned on his torch and shone the beam around the dirty floor to pick out two broken chairs and a rusted pot-belly stove. A dusty wooden box held ancient crockery, most of it cracked.

‘I’m pretty sure this must be the place,’ said the Mayor, breathing heavily after the steep stairs. Tax records had shown that Madame Poldereau, the widowed mother of Sylvie Desbordes, lived here until her death in 1944. Once Bruno had supplied the name of Desbordes for the owner of the farm, the Mayor himself had tracked down a wedding certificate for the Desbordes, with Madame Poldereau listed as witness and mother of the bride.

‘We don’t know why she didn’t move into the farm with her
daughter; there’ll be a story behind that, maybe she didn’t get on with her son-in-law,’ the Mayor said.

‘Halévy’s partner told me the children had stayed in a small town for a while before moving to the farm,’ Bruno said. ‘And he specified St Denis.’

‘She was one of the few Protestants in town, so if you’re right about the Protestant connection this is where they probably stayed. But I don’t know how we could prove it.’

‘What did they do for water?’ Bruno asked, curious.

Even the apartments below had no kitchens in those days and no bathrooms, the Mayor explained. There had been a standpipe in that tiny yard at the back and a communal latrine. At night they would use chamber pots and take them down to empty every day.

Bruno went out to the hallway, unscrewed the light bulb on the landing and used it to replace the broken one in the attic, but the extra light revealed little more. He pushed open the door that led to the second room but it seemed empty except for dust and mouse droppings. On the walls were remnants of old wallpaper, a floral pattern of faded roses against a grey background. Some strips of it hung down like ribbons. Maybe a good forensic crew could pick up some fingerprints, Bruno thought, but he had none of Halévy’s prints for comparison.

He played the torch around the room at waist height and below, wondering if there might be some childish scrawls, but saw nothing until by the door frame he stopped and bent down to peer more closely. Lifting one of the hanging strips of wallpaper he brought the torch closer and a childhood memory came back of his cousins’ house in Bergerac, a small mob of
kids being lined up against the door frame while a grown-up stood there with a ruler and pencil.

‘What’s that?’ the Mayor asked, coming across the room to join him.

‘Not sure, but I think this could be where they stayed.’ Bruno pointed to the two short parallel lines drawn on the paper. One was about twenty centimetres higher than the other. ‘Remember when you were a kid and you tried to measure your height against the wall?’

Under the glare of Bruno’s torch, some faded letters could almost be made out. Beside the higher line the wallpaper had been torn, but something remained that might have been the letter D and beside the lower was written Mar and perhaps an i.

‘Marie,’ said the Mayor, squinting through his spectacles. ‘It’s the wrong place.’

‘The lawyer told me she used the name Marie. It was close to her real name, Maya,’ said Bruno. ‘I think this must be the place.’

He tried to visualize the scene; two Parisian children and an old woman, a stranger who probably spoke patois rather than the classic French the children could understand. All three of them cooped up here together for however long it took to arrange their move to the Desbordes farm. The children must have been frightened, hardly understanding what was happening to them or who was this stranger trying to help them and give them shelter. In Paris, they would have known kitchens, bathrooms, tucked into bed each night by a loving mother. Bruno shook his head at the thought of the Halévy children, who must have felt like fragile leaves tossed here and there by the great storm of war. The old grandmother, trying
to divert them while keeping them hidden away indoors, had thought of measuring them and comparing their heights.

‘We have the place, both places,’ Bruno said. ‘What we need now is a plan to turn this into something the Halévy executors will support.’