Dark Summer in Bordeaux (20 page)

‘I don’t know how to begin,’ Jérôme said.

‘You might sit down anyway.’

The count drew on his cigar and smiled.

‘There’s a fraudulent novelist, name of Malraux – you of course may admire him, dear boy – whom I once heard start a conversation with the question, “So, what do you think of the Apocalypse?” That was not an enticing opening.’

‘I should think not,’ Jérôme said. ‘As for me, I don’t even know what the Apocalypse is. Something to do with four horsemen, isn’t it?’

‘Famine, pestilence, war and death, quite appropriate for our wretched times indeed.’

‘That’s what I want to ask you about,’ Jérôme said. ‘The times we live in.’

‘My dear boy,’ – the count removed his monocle and, taking a square of chamois leather from his waistcoat pocket, began to polish the glass – ‘why should you suppose that I have anything to say on the subject?’

Jérôme took a sip of claret to fortify himself, and found that his hand was shaking.

‘Because it’s intolerable,’ he said, ‘the times – the situation we’re in – they’re intolerable, for people of my age, that is . . . ’ ‘And so?’

‘That’s it, you see. Vichy, the Occupation . . . it’s intolerable . . . so, two friends and I’ – he gulped and found himself unable to look his godfather in the face – ‘we’ve decided, we want to get out, get to London, to join de Gaulle. There, I’ve said it. I wasn’t sure I would be able to, but I have.’

He raised his eyes. To his surprise the count was smiling.

‘And so you come to me?’ he said. ‘To share this confidence? I should be honoured.’

‘You don’t disapprove?’

‘My approval or disapproval matters nothing. But I shall say this: if I was your age, I might feel as you do. These friends, would I know who they are, or rather who their parents are?’

‘No, they’re not of our class’ – Jérôme felt himself blushing as he said this. ‘One is a school friend, his father’s a policeman. The other works in a bookshop. He’s a Jew.’

‘And I should care about that? If he’s a Jew he may have enough brains for the three of you. You won’t know this, Jérôme, but my father was a Dreyfusard. He was asked to resign from the Primrose Club, but refused, saying they might expel him if they chose but he wasn’t going to resign. He told them that anti-Semitism was a sentiment unworthy of France. He had a high idea of France, if not of the French, rather like that mad general you want to join in London.’

‘You think he’s mad, Godfather?’

‘He must be mad to suppose that any but a handful of the French retain a sense of honour. All they care about is their property. I speak of course as a man of property myself. I’m aware of the irony.’

The count replaced the monocle in his eye and picked up his glass.

‘Your health,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt your mother, but you know that. It’s the fate of mothers to be wounded by their sons. I take it you want my help. I’ll think about it. Ways and means.’

He got rather stiffly to his feet. It was clear to Jérôme that the conversation – discussion? – was at an end. The count crossed the room and opened a drawer in a Buhl cabinet. He took out a small blue leather-covered case, and held it out to Jérôme.

‘Open it,’ he said. ‘I was born in 1870, the year of our first German débâcle. I was forty-four when the last war broke out. I never saw service at the Front, but the English gave me that medal for the liaison work I did with them. That old fool Pétain distrusted the English even then, but they fought magnificently. We thought our war was the Apocalypse too. I had a good friend called Cameron, a colonel in a Scottish regiment. He was killed a week before the Armistice. He was a colonel but not yet thirty. I’ve never forgotten him. So I approve of your intention, Jérôme. I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, you will please bring your friends to see me. We’ll have lunch. A meal smooths over embarrassments. I’m proud of you. Your grandmother was the only woman I ever really loved. And lost, sadly lost, to my cousin who had been my closest friend.’

He moved forward to embrace Jérôme.

‘Let yourself out,’ he said. ‘Don’t trouble to disturb Jean-Pierre.’

Jérôme went dancing down the street. He wanted to sing at the top of his voice, but the dull stupor of the forbidding house-fronts deterred him.

XXXI

Lannes entered the apartment and heard his brother-in-law Albert holding forth. He could have done without that. The old woman, his mother-in-law, was bad enough, but Albert was intolerable. He had hoped he wouldn’t be there. It was worse when Albert got to his feet to shake his hand, saying, ‘I’ve been explaining to the boys why whole-hearted collaboration is in our national interest. And it’s working smoothly. I’m sure you have found yourself that relations between the Germans and our police are excellent. Isn’t that so?’

‘We get along because we have to,’ Lannes said.

He turned away to give his mother-in-law the obligatory peck on the cheek, and told her she was looking very well, happy in the thought that this observation would displease her.

‘If you only knew how I suffer,’ she said. ‘But at least we have our Dominique safely home.’

‘I was happy to do what I could to make that possible,’ Albert said.

‘And we’re grateful to you,’ Marguerite said. ‘Aren’t we, Jean?’

He gave a nod in reply. It was pointless to say that Albert had had nothing to do with Dominique’s release from the prisoner-of-war camp. But he couldn’t trust himself to say anything. Certainly he wasn’t going to support the lie.

Madame Panard said, ‘If only these wretched English would see sense, then the Germans would go home and things could be again as they were.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Albert said, ‘Churchill is an obstinate drunkard blind to reality. And of course one must admit that the English have always been our enemies. Do you know why? It’s because they are jealous of our superior civilisation and culture. They’re a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon said, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. That’s why they ran away from Dunkirk and left us in the lurch. Fortunately we have the Marshal to protect us and give us this golden opportunity for national renewal.’

So it went on. Albert dominated the table when they went through to eat, talking with the authority he had assumed since the débâcle of the previous May.

‘For instance,’ he said, ‘we are at last in a position to solve the Jewish problem.’

Alain made to speak, caught his father’s eye, and, lowering his eyes, said nothing.

Lannes felt ashamed. Why should he tolerate this talk at his own table? Why should he feel obliged to urge his son to restrain himself? Undoubtedly Alain had been about to say, ‘What problem is that, uncle?,’ perhaps even to speak of his friendship with Léon and Miriam.

But what was the point of provoking an argument which would only distress Marguerite?

Madame Panard told them how she couldn’t sleep at night, how she suffered from headaches and how her liver troubled her, even as she stuffed food into her mouth, and complained about the poor quality of wartime bread and the shortage of butter and sugar, both of which she needed for her health.

Lannes abstracted himself. Sometime the evening would come to an end. He wondered what Yvette was doing, and whether Moncerre had picked up the Spaniard, given him a going-over, and lodged him in a cell. Had Yvette invited young René Martin to her room and had he refused with an embarrassed blush? Picturing the girl lying back on her bed and smiling to him, he lost the thread of the conversation. He slipped his hand into his inside breast pocket and fingered the envelope which he was now almost sure he wasn’t going to open. Not at least till he had heard what the Spaniard had to say, and perhaps not even then.

Alain’s voice broke into his reverie.

‘If the Marshal is our shield, uncle, who is our sword?’

‘Sword, boy? We have no need of a sword. Things will arrange themselves without such nonsense. The war is over, you must understand that. It is now a question of using the opportunity we have been granted – by Providence, I dare to say – yes, by Providence, for unhappy beginnings may have happy outcomes – the opportunity to rid ourselves of the Jewish incubus and to suppress the Communists.’

‘So you have no opinion of de Gaulle?’ Alain said.

‘But of course I have an opinion of de Gaulle, the same opinion that any man of sense and any patriotic Frenchman must have. He is a rebel and a traitor, properly condemned to death. That is my opinion of de Gaulle. Remember this, Alain: that in collusion with the English, he attacked the French Empire at Dakar where, I’m happy and proud to say, he was soundly defeated by loyal troops. Moreover he expressed his approval of the English destruction of our fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, where more than a thousand French sailors were killed.’

‘I see,’ Alain said. ‘You make it all very clear, uncle.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say so,’ Albert said, deaf to Alain’s irony.

It was a dreadful evening, but at last it was over. Albert and the old woman departed. Marguerite retired to bed. So, with some muttering, did the children. Lannes said he would sit up for a while; he had some thinking to do. He went through to the kitchen to smoke and drink marc. There were no good thoughts and even the marc offered little consolation. The ashtray was full and the bottle lowered by a couple of inches when the door opened and Dominique, wearing a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, joined him.

‘I couldn’t sleep either, Papa,’ he said. ‘Shall I make some coffee?’

‘Please.’

‘You don’t much like Uncle Albert, do you?’

‘Is it so obvious?’

‘It’s strange,’ Dominique said, ‘I agree with a lot of what he says, we do need a national renewal, I’m sure of that, but when he speaks of what I believe in, he makes it sound repulsive. Does that make sense, Papa?’

‘Oh yes, it makes sense. Your uncle is a fool. You’re not.’

‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.’

And you think this is it? Lannes didn’t speak the words that came to mind. I’m not going to like it, he thought, and I’m too tired.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘I’ve had a letter from my friend Maurice. Maurice de Grimaud. He asks to be remembered to you, by the way. He says you were very kind and helpful to him last year when his grandfather died. And in other ways too, he says, though he doesn’t elaborate on them, whatever they were. Anyhow he has suggested I should come to Vichy where he says he can find me a position as a leader in the League of French Youth. That’s where he is working himself. It’s a great opportunity, he says, and rewarding work. What do you think, Papa?’

‘Have you spoken of this to your mother?’

‘Yes, naturally.’

Yes naturally, he would have spoken to Marguerite first. He was her boy. Lannes loved him, loved him dearly, but knew himself to be closer to the twins than to his eldest child. He couldn’t say why. It wasn’t because they thought differently about so much – the war itself, Vichy, religion. It was perhaps simply that both were aware that the connection between them was loose. In certain respects Dominique was the best of the three: the gentlest, a boy who had always shrunk from giving pain, from saying things which would distress those he was with. He was their eldest who sometimes seemed younger, because more trusting and innocent, than the twins.

‘And what did she say?’

‘She wasn’t immediately happy, I have to admit that. But she said I must do what I thought was right. You must always do what you think right, she said.’

‘So you’ve decided?’

‘Not absolutely. I wanted your opinion too.’

Lannes lit a cigarette and picked up the bottle.

‘Have a drink,’ he said, ‘get yourself a glass.’

‘I won’t, thank you. I don’t really like alcohol, only the occasional glass of wine, and I had one at supper.’

‘As you like,’ Lannes said, and poured himself one. He held his glass in both hands, with the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

‘The war’s not over,’ he said, ‘I’m sure of that. Suppose Hitler attacks the Soviet Union, which I think he may, what then? Will Vichy last? As for the national revolution they speak of, I agree that there was much that was rotten in France, which is perhaps why we lost last year. But are the men in Vichy the people to put it right? I don’t know. I’m an old Radical, remember, inasmuch as I am anything, and I believe in tolerance and the principles of the Revolution, our real revolution, especially equality and fraternity. There’s much in Vichy that I detest – the persecution, which is not too strong a word, of the Jews, which your Uncle Albert approves of, for instance. So I don’t know. You must make up your own mind.’

‘I have really.’

‘I thought so. You’re an idealist, Dominique, as I’m not. Perhaps that’s because I’m a policeman. It’s not a trade that encourages one to think well of our fellow men.’

He drank his marc.

‘But your mother’s right, as she usually is. You must do what you think right. We must always try to do that.’

‘There’s so much that needs to be done,’ Dominique said. ‘For the Youth of France, and the future of the country. Maurice is enthusiastic about the work. You liked him, didn’t you, Papa?’

‘Yes, I liked him. He reminded me of you.’

‘So you see.’

‘I see. Wait a few days, that’s all I ask. Turn it over in your mind, take account of my warning, and then do what you think is right.’

‘I’ve been thinking, Papa. I really have, and I’ve decided.’

‘Very well.’

He fingered the envelope in his pocket. He too had almost come to a decision.

‘I may have to go to Vichy myself,’ he said. ‘To see Maurice’s father. We might travel together.’

Marguerite was asleep when he joined her in bed. He laid his hand on her leg, but she didn’t stir. He lay on his back, his mind racing. He should have spoken more firmly to Dominique, spelled out the fear with which the boy Maurice’s invitation filled him. He should have said, bluntly, things are going to get worse in France before they get better . . . if they ever get better – and some day there may be a reckoning. It was that ‘if’, as much as his own weakness which had held him back. You don’t want to find yourself on the wrong side. For there was indeed the other ‘if’: if Vichy survived, then Dominique might be right in choosing to engage in this enterprise. If good people held back, didn’t that leave everything to people like Albert?