Ignorance (6 page)

Maurice took to dropping in quite often. Papa liked him, because Maurice listened to him talk about politics, and treated him with respect as the head of the family. He would spread his hands: sir, I'm afraid I know nothing about war. Papa would say: so I'll tell you. Maurice's responsibilities at the town hall had kept him from being called up. Now, they meant that he could find things out, and stay ahead of the game.

One afternoon he arrived with a warning for my parents. The arrival of another detachment of troops meant more billets would be needed. We'd have a German soldier parked on us in the blink of an eye. Papa smacked his chair arm.
Merde
! Maurice said: don't worry, I know exactly what to do.

He came back later that same night, with Monsieur Fauchon and a couple of other neighbours. Together they demolished the wall between our sitting room and the back storeroom where Marc slept. A rough arch, edged with wood, now framed Marc's campbed in its newly prominent position near the dining table. The German officer, arriving to inspect the accommodation, admitted he'd been given faulty information about available space, apologised, and withdrew. My father wrung Maurice's hand.

Handsome is as handsome does, said my mother.

She said it to Maurice's face, challenging him. She'd given him, as her guest, her chair by the stove. She sat at the little dining table, patching one towel with remnants of another. All our towels were paper-thin, held together by my mother's tiny stitches. I sat opposite her, tearing a newspaper into squares to go in the lavatory. Maurice smiled at my mother, raised his coffee cup. Madame, I'm proposing a deal. She shrugged her shoulders, looked down at her work. Convince me. He said: you'll appreciate a bit more money coming in. Oh, I'm sure you were doing very well before the war, making a good living, you're both so capable, but who knows now what will happen?

Maman hesitated, then said: I don't want to be rude, but we know nothing about you.

Maurice spoke quietly. Unfortunately I have no parents. They were excellent people, of good family, who ensured I received a good education, but they died when I was very young. Papa interrupted. He addressed my mother: shut up! He's proved himself, hasn't he? He's a good lad. He wants to help us.

Maurice ferried goods in and my parents sold them on, under the counter. Maurice supplied anybody who needed what he could get for them, regardless of who they were. Everybody was desperate to obtain food. As shopkeepers we suffered alongside our customers. The peasants on the farms roundabout were grasping and selfish, reluctant to let go of too much produce. We had to shift for ourselves. Maurice simply had the wits to organise things. He knew how to bargain, what prices to pay. From the countryside he coaxed chickens, vegetables, butter, eggs, milk, which my parents discreetly passed on to customers.

Maurice didn't have time to organise sales; he needed my parents for that. Thanks to his capacious car he could ferry in not just food but also big bundles of firewood, bicycle tyres, laundry soap. He made daily domestic life possible for a lot of people.

Yes, we've all got to live, my mother said: we've just got to cope. My father added: the Germans aren't so bad once you get to know them. They understand fairness, discipline, they are polite, they are very clean.

Maurice would tramp upstairs, whistling, for his cup of ersatz coffee. After his first few visits, watching me hover near the door, he insisted I be allowed my own thimbleful. Tasting of dust. In my father's presence I didn't dare accept a drop of cognac. Maurice would catch my eye, shrug, open his palms.

He began to take me with him on his business trips to collect food. Throughout that spring of 1942 we worked together. Time began to exist for me again: no longer uncountable weeks of endless war but precise moments of intense life. I marked our outings in my exercise book; precious afternoons whose dates I wanted to encircle in gold. We were heroes, hoodwinking the Germans. A man and a girl in a car looked like an ordinary couple out for a spin in the countryside; less suspicious than a man on his own. Maurice knew all the back ways; how to avoid checkpoints. I asked him: how do you manage to get hold of petrol? He winked. Business contacts. I didn't ask for details. I trusted him to know what he was doing and to keep out of trouble.

Not just groceries and petrol. Information, too, if necessary. Papers. Documents. Whatever people needed. He provided cigarettes as well. My father had been reduced to smoking dried comfrey leaves, but Maurice snapped open fresh packets of tailor-mades. Once he brought a cedarwood box of cigars, the lid sealed with a paper stamp with frilly edges. He taught me to smoke. I smoked only in the car, with him, wanting smoking to stay secret. My mother had her locked cupboards; I had my packet of cigarettes. They helped kill hunger. Maurice feeding me cigarettes let me know he'd picked me out, that I was special.

One wet afternoon in late May, when we got stuck in nearby Ste-Madeleine, waiting for a delivery, a parcel of something or other, Maurice took me into the bar in the main square for a drink. We ran in out of the rain, into blessed warmth, acrid clouds of cigarette smoke, a shifting mass of grey-green greatcoats. German voices: a vigorous music of conversation. Maurice ordered us a brandy each: it's time you tried this. It burned its way down my throat. I kept my coat well pulled round me, to hide my shabby linen blouse, with pale yellow stains under the armpits, and my old blue serge skirt. The soldiers' green uniforms, well brushed, seemed new. How well fed they were. Pink, plump faces above their high, stiff collars. They called out teasingly to the young
patronne
, who responded with tight smiles. They nodded at us politely as we left. In my confusion, I nodded back.

Outside, the rain had turned to drizzle. As we walked to the car, I noticed a young woman hovering in the doorway of a closed shop on the far side of the street. Pale triangular face. Wavy dark hair. Vulgarly bright clothes: a little red hat with a black veil, a thin red dress that flapped above her knees, a little red cape hugging her shoulders. She jerked out of her shelter. Her high heels slipped her away down a side street.

That furtive air: it could only be Jeanne. Maurice, busy lighting another cigarette, hadn't noticed her. I didn't say anything to Jeanne's mother, next time I saw her. Poor woman: I didn't want to shame her.

Maurice and I were both silent as we drove back. I was thinking about having sat in a bar with Germans. Both normal and strange. Germans were our enemies, yet had accepted me in their presence. They showed me no hostility. As Maurice's companion I had entered the German world. The soldiers made the bar feel completely German, yet it was French. You could criss-cross from one world into another and back again. I was a smuggler, smuggling my self. Or perhaps the worlds existed in layers, like a cake, the German one overlaying the French one. No. More like two soups: the green one had mixed itself so thoroughly into the red, white and blue one that just one soup resulted. Khaki-coloured. Muddled soups, muddled thoughts. Too much brandy.

I said: I'm drunk. Maurice laughed and said: you need more practice.

My face felt warm. My limbs relaxed against the seat. Maurice put out his hand and touched my knee. The brandy glow spread all over me. A couple of kilometres outside town, he turned off the road on to a track leading towards the forest. We swerved in, deep under the chestnut trees, into green silence. Once we were well out of sight of the road, he stopped the car.

He handed me a twist of white waxed paper. Go on. I know you love them. Chocolate drops: I ate the lot, while he smoked. You want to smoke too? He lit my cigarette from his, handed it to me. He sighed, blowing out smoke. With his free hand he pulled off my beret, pulled off the ribbon confining my roll of hair, tossed out my hair so that it fell down all over the place. He put his arm around me and pulled my head down on to his shoulder. The soft nap of his overcoat caressed my cheek. Like the friendliest of animals. I wanted a coat like that. I wanted a fur cape like my mother's. I wanted a new dress. I wanted the war to end. The impossibility of all of this tasted, despite the brandy and the chocolates and the cigarette, like a fistful of filth scooped up from the gutter and pressed into my mouth. I wanted to cry. I wanted more chocolates, and more cigarettes, and more brandy, to stop me feeling so awful.

Maurice began to stroke my hair. He stroked its surface, over and over, smoothing it, going from the top of my head to my neck. Sweetness fizzed up inside me, all over my skin, coursed up and down my spine. Gently he spread out his fingers and plunged them in, picking up handfuls of hair, moving his fingers through them, around my scalp. He played with my hair for what seemed like a long time. We said nothing. When we'd finished our cigarettes he drove me home. He stopped outside the shop, came round to my side of the car, opened the door. In you go, little one.

The next time we sat together in the parked car, a week later, his fingers slid around the edge of my ear. He traced my cheek, my forehead, my chin. I liked the way his hands felt big, holding my head. I felt safe as well as excited. Something to do with the way the strong metal body of the car curved round us and smelled so expensive, its clean leather and petrol smell, the lemon verbena and damp cashmere smell of Maurice. The good tobacco smell that we shared.

I blurted out: have you got a girlfriend? He frowned. He pitched his cigarette out of the window and drove me home in silence. He made me wait another ten days. All these moments I stored away in my memory. First meeting. First touch. First kiss on the cheek.

Mid-June, in one way, was just like midsummer in other years. In the countryside all round town the peasants got on with the haymaking, the cuckoo called from the woods. In another way, everything had changed: I had grown up. Maurice and I drove into Ste-Madeleine on business. We drank brandy in the bar in Ste-Madeleine again, and I'd had nothing to eat, and felt tipsy. I spotted Jeanne in the bar, sitting in the far corner, with a German. This time all got up in a dark blue crêpe de Chine frock with a tiny lawn collar, and a little blue velvet hat, and high heels with cork wedges. She'd painted her mouth dark red and rouged her cheeks. She shot us one anxious look then swivelled her eyes away. Maurice looked back in her direction for a second, then moved his chair so that he had his back to her.

I pretended not to see her. My stomach burned with brandy but also with scorn. The make-up made her look so common. That day I was wearing a skimpy dress made from two old ones of my mother's cut up and stitched together. Marks on my skirt showed where the hem had been turned down twice. I still wore my school coat, and my school shoes. Maurice had noticed me looking at Jeanne. He lifted an eyebrow. Just someone I thought I recognised, I said. Maurice said: my dear Marie-Angèle, you don't know girls like that. They're nothing to do with you.

In the car I shrank inside my coat collar and stared through the windscreen. My bare legs felt itchy and hot, my ankle socks damp with sweat. I forbade myself to scratch; stuffed my hands into my pockets and pressed my knees together. When Maurice turned off the road and stopped the car on the track through the woods I willed him to lunge at me, grab me, do anything: just kiss me. I wanted to snarl, to burst into tears. Just get on with it! I stared at him in silence. He had to make the first move. Then it wouldn't be my fault.

His mouth tasted of brandy and tobacco. His skin smelled of lemon verbena. Sunlight and green branches surrounded the car. We got into the back seat, leaving the door open. Maurice said: you're so beautiful, so sweet, I need you so much. He stroked my hair. He whispered: let me, please let me, you know I love you. The forest closed round us and Maurice's arms closed round me and I gave him what he wanted. It hurt a lot. He said I've got to, I've got to. He held me in his arms while I cried and kept on doing it and I knew he loved me.

Next day he brought me a ribbed silk scarf: blue, with a yellow stripe at the ends. The most sumptuous thing I'd ever owned. In return I gave him my photograph. The only one I had was the one posed with Jeanne, both of us aged nine, standing outside our shop. My mother had two prints of it; I persuaded her to part with one of them. I tore the picture in half, so that it showed just myself. Maurice burst out laughing. Darling, ridiculous little girl. I adore this. He stowed the photo in his inside pocket. Sweetheart! I didn't return the torn-off image of Jeanne to the box in the cupboard. She no longer belonged in a respectable house. I threw her half of the photograph into the waste-paper basket. I prayed for her. God might help her, but I couldn't. At school she'd had a chip on her shoulder about being poor, not having a father. She didn't accept help gracefully. I didn't suppose she'd changed.

Maurice held me, kissed me, caressed me. After the first time the pace increased. He'd seize me: now! The car became our little house: crammed together in it we were runaways, rebels, newlyweds. Afterwards we'd smoke. I copied his way of holding a cigarette, nipped between finger and thumb. I liked the way he wanted me so much, pulling me into the back seat, his hands unfastening my coat so confidently. When he'd writhed and cried out the first time I'd felt surprised, but then I got used to it. After our expeditions, he would give me gifts. A pair of kid gloves with jet buttons, a powder compact lidded in mother-of-pearl, a lipstick in a chased-gilt swivel case, a tiny pot of rouge. A bar of lemon verbena soap. I went out with him smelling as sharp and citrony as he did. My mother's powder compact, old and cracked, was empty, and her lipstick worn right down. I didn't put on my new make-up in front of her. I did my face once I'd got into the car.