The First of July (7 page)

At the hotel, the porter was in his office. Raised voices could be heard. He emerged almost immediately, apologizing with a curt nod of the head.

“I am sorry. The events of the day have unsettled the staff.”

They took their key. As the lift went up, with an older couple beside them, Marina whispered “What on earth do you think happened?”

He shrugged. The other man said, in an English accent, “Apparently the heir to the Austrian emperor has been assassinated in Sarajevo. Not a young man and it’s hardly likely to affect Italy, but I fear there this may well mean more trouble in the Balkans. However, I wouldn’t let it spoil your vacation.” After a short pause, he added: “Although I believe the waiter is from those parts and is all for taking up arms tonight. The
padrone
, not unreasonably, wishes him to serve dinner first.”

“Such hotheads,” said his wife, almost affectionately.

The next three weeks had been a leisurely exploration of tiny churches, Renaissance palaces, and bumpy excursions down white roads edged with cypresses. They dispensed with a driver and Harry took control.
“Mia moglie,”
he would say, introducing her,
“la mia adorata moglie.” Signor e Signora Henry Sydenham,
he would sign in the register.

In late July, they took an overnight train north to the border at Ventimiglia and onward to Nice, where they had arranged to spend a few days before taking the train to Paris. The French passengers were buzzing over their papers and the scandal and trial of Madame Caillaux, the finance minister’s wife.

“Her brief is claiming it was a
crime passionel
,” said Harry, picking up a discarded paper. “It looks as if she’ll be acquitted. But she did go to the office of the editor of
Le Figaro
and shoot him at point-blank range in the head.”

“Her lover?” said Marina.

“Oh, you worldly cynic. She shot him because his paper was attacking her husband. As any decent wife might do.”

“Can you imagine it at home?”

He didn’t answer, his eyes scanning the inside pages. While they had been preoccupied with each other, the European situation seemed to have been getting worse. Was it posturing? Knife-edge diplomacy? He tried not to show his anxiety.

Marina had a headache and was resting in their room with the shutters closed. Harry went out for a brief walk along the promenade. He knew she had hoped she was pregnant, but it was not to be. Briefly, a more subdued mood took ahold of him. In a matter of days, they would be in England. His London lawyers were expecting him. He would change his will, now that he was a married man, but he had yet to break the news of his marriage to his legal advisers or to those at Abbotsgate. How could he begin to explain himself?

He intended to buy some cigarettes but stopped to read the headlines in
Nice Soir
to see if there was further news on the stories in the paper he’d seen on the train. Even before he paid for it, he was returned abruptly to the world outside the drunken sensuousness of his insular life with Marina, and with that return came unease.
austria-hungary mobilizes
, the headline read. He handed over his centimes, took the paper, and read it while standing there. Serbia had been issued with an ultimatum, but imperial troops were already massed on her borders. A grainy photograph showed lines of men in uniform marching to an unknown destination along an unknown road. He wished he could lay his hands on a copy of
The Times
.

He asked at the hotel, and the porter said he would obtain a paper in the morning.

“Do you think it is bad, sir?” the man said. “For France? We have a rumor now that Austria has declared war on Serbia.”

Harry shook his head. He had no idea. He didn’t want to worry Marina. This was only the Balkans. Austria could suppress Serbia in a day. It seemed as if war was inevitable, but how far could it spread? How many treaties would be honored, how many evaded?

The next morning, he rose early and took into the bathroom the newspaper that had been left outside their room.
The Times
was relatively sanguine regarding British involvement but reported that Germany and Russia had now mobilized. He found he was reading every word, trying to understand the implications of all the commitments that might lure countries into an unwanted war. According to the
Times
leader, France would, inevitably, be attacked if Russia declared hostilities against Germany. While Marina slept and they enjoyed freedom and sunshine, they were thousands of miles from home, and the conflict was creeping outward from central Europe.

They needed to go to Paris, he thought, and, rather than linger there as they had planned, head straight on to England so he could complete his legal business and return to New York. He hoped he was not panicking; if he had been traveling alone he would have stayed, might even have found the situation interesting—there was a terrible inevitability in it all; but he needed to protect Marina. Should things quiet down and the belligerence recede, they could always change their minds once they’d reached the French capital.

He would wake her, explain the situation, and then wire his London lawyers, both to bring forward their August appointment and to ask them to wire more funds. It might be necessary to pay for a berth on a different ship.

Marina seemed sober rather than alarmed. He went down to the desk and told the porter of their change of plans, asked for a maid to help her pack her bags, and had a wire sent to Lincoln’s Inn and to her father, announcing their change of plans.

“You are not alone in departing, m’sieur,” the porter said with a shrug. “But it may go well. Our troops have been pulled back from our borders; France does not want a war. Not the wise men.” He was shaking his head. “We had enough of that forty years ago. We have long memories. I did my military service ten years back. Now my wife she is about to have a child.”

And Harry, looking at him, realized that if France should become involved in a war, she would inevitably call on all her able-bodied men to fight.

It was at the station that the reality of the situation, the uncertainty and the tension, became inescapable and the boundaries of their comfortable private world were breached. A solid and noisy mass of would-be travelers, including, Harry noticed, a large contingent of French soldiers, forced their way toward the platforms or sweltered, resigned, in the heat. It took twenty minutes to find a porter, then they stood in line for forty minutes to get tickets on the late-afternoon train and reserve places on the boat train to London. Every seat was taken, even in first class. In third class, the conductor was having difficulty closing the door. They didn’t talk much, just exchanged small smiles from time to time. Eventually Marina fell asleep; despite her sea-blue hat, which she had told him was the height of fashion, her slightly open mouth made her look very young. For the first hour or so, they cut through rocky hillsides, pines, small hamlets, and woods of walnut and chestnut, strips of ripening sunflowers, and then, as the south was left behind them, cornfields and timbered farms, dark churches and wide rivers flowing between limestone cliffs.

Across from him, deep in quiet discussion, sat two formally dressed, hot-looking Frenchmen, civil servants possibly, one with a very distinguished air, the other, he guessed, a private secretary. He had to concentrate to follow their conversation while appearing to look out of the window, but the one sentence he caught clearly was the older man saying “The troops withdrew to make the statement that our war would be a defensive war. But a war there will be, and what difference does it make if we’re attacking or defending? Germany will be over the border and on us in no time at all, mark my words.” Then he had laughed, although without warmth. “Better go and sharpen your father’s saber. They won’t want me, but they’ll be knocking on your door.”

Would they? Harry wondered again. Would there be war? He remembered his father’s favorite poet, Housman. His father was a great man for recitation and had an infinite repertoire. Once he got over his youthful embarrassment, Harry had had to admit that his father was rather good at it.

On the idle hill of summer,

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

Drumming like a noise in dreams.

What war had that been, Harry had wondered, remembering his father’s gestures: the hand cupped to the ear, his voice rising on “far” and the sinister threat of the falling last line. As a small boy he’d been quite sickly, and in feverish nightmares had dreamed of the distant drummer, thudding. What far-off threat had overshadowed Housman? or was that war, like the half-seen country, just a poet’s romantic fantasy?

A chink of memory, against which he was usually so fortified, opened. His father. His strong, argumentative, loyal, fearless, and oh-so-charming father. Widowed young, he had been, Harry now realized, an admirable man, but frustrated, trapped on his estate, with an only son who was no great rider and no great sportsman and who looked very like the pretty wife with the fatally weak heart.

They came slowly into the outskirts of Paris. Harry noticed crowds outside the big banks they passed and felt a stab of anxiety.

The train had to wait for an hour outside the station, and they arrived at their hotel late. The female receptionist made it clear that they were lucky to still have a room, indicating a group of weary-looking travelers across the lobby. “They all want a bed, m’sieur. We could charge double the price.” As they were about to follow the bellboy pushing a trolley with their cases, she turned and took an envelope from a pigeonhole. “M’sieur. This came for you.”

It was a telegram. Harry thought it would be from his lawyers, so he didn’t bother to open it, but it reminded him of the need to draw out funds.

“I need to go to a bank,” he said. If there were to be any problems on their way home, he should be prepared.

The receptionist made a face. “It is difficult, m’sieur. Many banks have not opened since yesterday.” She leaned toward them, suddenly an intimate with drama to convey. “There are rumors, sir. Bad rumors.”

“You’ll have no joy, sir,” said a large American standing nearby. “They believe there’ll be war within hours. I have a letter of introduction from Senator Johnson himself, and I hammered on the doors until they let me in. ‘I’m an American,’ I said, but not a centime could I get out of them. It was all
‘je regrette’
this and that.”

It was only when they were, finally, in bed and had exhausted themselves speculating on what was happening in Europe, that he remembered the telegram. There had been talk in the hotel in Nice that it had become impossible to find boats returning to New York from Italy or France, but he felt confident that his lawyers would find him a ship either from Southampton or Liverpool. He got out of bed, fetched the envelope, and opened it, but not before he had looked at the name on the outside properly and had a first premonition of dread.

Sir Henry Sydenham, Bt., it said in clear black copperplate. He had not even noticed.

Jean-Baptiste, Paris,
May–June 1914

J
EAN-BAPTISTE HAD NEVER REALLY BEEN
alone in his whole life. Now the thought of it was exciting and daunting. Alone, he would become a different person. But there were things he had not considered. In all the tales of the river, it was not just the banks and the weeds that were slippery, the fish and the water creatures, but also the spirit of the river itself; once a river had flowed with blood, it might develop an appetite for it. Most of all, he should have realized that if you leave such a place, you cannot reasonably expect it to wait for you unchanged.

He had made Amiens by nightfall. He had his small savings, and Parisians were puny and often drunk, so he had heard, so he should find work. But still, he could count on nothing. He wheeled the bicycle to a tiny repair shop. He’d once been there with Godet. The owner was a dour man and certainly didn’t remember him, but he offered Jean-Baptiste a fair sum for the bicycle.

“I have a job starting in Paris,” Jean-Baptiste lied.

“Oh, yes.” The man couldn’t have been less interested or less convinced.

Paris had been everything he’d expected in that nothing was as he’d imagined. He had spent the first night sleeping in a park. It was a warm night, but he was damp and aching when he woke up. He washed his face in a fountain and set out to find work and somewhere to live. By the afternoon, having failed in both, he was hungry. He stopped at bar after bar, asking for any job, but the young men already working there, neat in their aprons and white shirts, looked at him disdainfully. One even imitated his accent, he thought, although he gave him half a stale loaf.

He had walked and walked, and his feet, in Vignon’s new boots, were tender and blistered. When he sat on the curb and took them off, the fine leather lining was bloodstained. He ended up by the same bushes in the same park, and at dawn he was woken roughly by a park attendant telling him to move on.

He drank bitter chicory coffee from a street stall, then headed toward the great steeple he had seen from the park. He passed a factory that had a notice saying they required hands, but the watchman wouldn’t let him past the door. “Skilled men only,” he said, hardly bothering to take his cigarette out his mouth.

He emerged from a narrow lane onto a grand boulevard running along the broadest river he had ever seen. You didn’t have to be a man of the world to know this was the mighty Seine. It was wider and busier than
his
river, with barges and skiffs, pleasure boats and pontoons, but it was one sheet of choppy gray rather than the Somme’s many shades and depths of seemingly slow-moving green.

From everything Vignon had said, he had expected something different of the Seine. But he knew now that the doctor was a deceiver. Back home, his river had cut its way through the landscape, and the villages and towns had had to grow where they could and their inhabitants had to learn its ways. This famous river of Paris seemed to exist only at the service of men: to be allotted a space, no more, in the stone city. It was wide, but it was walled in. Perhaps some waterways were better imagined than seen.

At the near side of the bridge, men were bustling about repairing a stretch of embankment. For a moment his spirits brightened; here he was in Paris, at the center of the world, and surely there were possibilities for a strong young man. He walked on to the bridge and could see the city: its domes and its gray and bright green roofs—and he wondered, fleetingly, what his mother would think if she could see him in this new life. Two of the workmen were struggling with a long piece of timber. The older set his end down and wiped his brow. Jean-Baptiste climbed down the riverside steps and, moving to the center, took some of the weight. The other man, a sturdy fellow with a red beard, indicated the direction with his head. He walked along the shingle river edge and helped maneuver the plank into position. Below him, three men were shoring up the sides of a muddy trench.

The red-haired man grunted his thanks and on the spur of the moment Jean-Baptiste asked: “Do they need men? I’m strong and a good worker.”

The man looked impassive, shrugged, but then pointed at two men standing under a tree, studying plans. One was coatless, neat, in a straw hat, the other a worker in a blue cap. Jean-Baptiste walked over to them, trying to look confident but not assuming anything. When the two men looked up, he was about to speak when a voice behind him said “He helped us. He seems like a good lad. We could do with a replacement for Loiret.” It was the owner of the fine red beard.

The man in the cap, who Jean-Baptiste thought must be the foreman, scrutinized him. “Any experience?”

“I was a blacksmith. Well, an apprentice,” he said in a burst of honesty. “Near Amiens.”

“Come to seek your fortune?” said the man with the map, whose Parisian accent was tinged with authority. “And willing to find it in a ditch.” He jerked his head toward the diggings. “I gather we’ve got a man with a broken leg, so his misfortune might be your good luck. What do you reckon, Duval?”

Blue Cap nodded. “Start tomorrow. No drinking, no scrapping, and you show up on time. No second chances. And you’ll need decent boots, it’s wet down there… .”

The man with the smart accent looked up from his plan again as if recalling something, then down at Jean-Baptiste’s feet. He leaned forward, pushing his spectacles up his nose as if unsure of what he was seeing.

“Where in the name of St. Joseph did you get those? You look like a pimp.”

“He can have Loiret’s,” said the man called Duval. “Loiret won’t be needing them.”

And so began his second river life. It was to be a short one, but he didn’t know that then and was grateful simply to have work. The men he was working with seemed all right.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Duval, when the other man, who was clearly a boss, had left.

“Pierre,” he said. “No sirs here. We’re working men, as good as any. Unfortunately, the redhead over there is also Pierre and so is the boy. You’re not Pierre, I suppose? No? That’s a relief. Can you write your name?”

“Yes. I mean, I can read and write.”

“Ah, an intellectual. Well, we only need your name. In case the police come asking.”

For a second Jean-Baptiste was tempted to give a made-up name, but he didn’t want to start this new life with a lie and hoped Paris gendarmes, with real crimes, bloody, violent ones, to solve, would have little interest in a provincial bicycle and boot thief.

“Jean-Baptiste Mallet,” he said.

“Where do you come from, Monsieur Mallet?”

“A village near Amiens,” he said. It was true enough.

“And where are you staying in this great city of ours?”

Jean-Baptiste’s head dropped.

“Ah, no work, no boots, no lodgings,” said Pierre, shaking his head. He picked up a stub of pencil. “I’ve known several lads lodge here. It’s simple and you’ll have to behave, and it’s a bit of a walk, but it’s cheap and if you take this note, they’ll do their best for you.”

“I don’t have—”

“You can work over there for a couple of hours. Stacking timber. When it’s time to leave, you’ll have earned enough for a bed. Young Therzon can take you.” He pointed to a moon-faced lad. “He boards there.”

A couple of hours had exhausted him. The red-haired Breton, one of the three Pierres, could lift four times the quantity that he could and talk at the same time. Jean-Baptiste thought that just a week ago, the strength he had gained in Godet’s forge would have left him equal to the task, but the last few days had weakened him. He was glad to follow Therzon to the lodgings, have a bowl of fibrous horsemeat stew, and, exhausted, slump onto a narrow box bed in a dormitory full of other men. The smell of them, tobacco and sweat, reassured him; at least he could smell no worse. A notice exhorted the residents to wash, not to sleep in their boots, warned them that alcohol and women were strictly forbidden on the premises, and advised that holy mass would be held at the church of Ste. Clothilde.

He was awake when Therzon materialized at six the next morning and handed him a brown-paper parcel. Inside were well-worn work clothes, clean and adequate.

“From Pierre,” Therzon said, his teeth clamped around an unlit pipe.

“Pierre?”

“Duval. Pierre the old.” Therzon took out the pipe and grinned. He had very few teeth for such a young man.

“He seems kind.”

“Not bad on a good day. His son’s our age. In the Army, serving in Africa with the blackamoors. But Pierre’s a man of peace.” Therzon grinned again; his face was loose and his speech slow. “Any talk of fighting or generals and he’ll fly into a rage.”

The days went by, then the weeks. He had enough to eat, he slept well enough, he became fit again. He mostly succeeded in not thinking about home.

The men were decent enough. Young Pierre was only fifteen; his sister was married to a bargee who passed by, waving, his boat heaped with coal, once a week. Pierre Duval with the soldier son had a wife and daughter in Valence-en-Brie. Flame-haired Pierre was from Britanny and provided the muscle. The oldest worker was Marcel, an ill-tempered Parisian. As far as possible, Jean-Baptiste tried to keep out of his way. Therzon was an idiot; it hadn’t taken Jean-Baptiste long to figure that out. When it got really hot, Therzon took off his shirt to work and revealed “vengeance” tattooed on his arm. Or rather “v-e-n-g-e-n-a-c-e,” although the letters were clumsy and the tattoo was inflamed and hard to read at all. Therzon kept picking at it. When old Pierre Duval, though he was not very old, asked Jean-Baptiste about his family one day, he had simply said his mother was a widow.

“She must miss you.”

Jean-Baptiste shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“Well, at least you’re not too far away, eh?” Pierre patted him on the back, his attention already taken by a cart delivering stone.

Usually Jean-Baptiste put up scaffolding on a central pier, alongside young Pierre, on the basis that they were the only two who could swim. Pierre would secure the boat to an iron ring and Jean-Baptiste would climb onto the thick stone base, holding a line. He looked down: the water was drawn into the thick pillar and swallowed, and from time to time it made a great gulping noise. When rivercraft passed by, the water was first hurled upward and then sucked back, exposing the slippery bright-green stone of the footings. He was regularly soaked. Under the arch it was cool, but it stank. There was a marker on the bridge to indicate that beneath the opaque surface, the Seine went down another fifteen meters. What was on the bottom was something he didn’t like to think about. If he went into the water, his ability to swim would have little to do with his fate.

Jean-Baptiste tried to forget Marcel’s words and not think of his mother, because when he did, he could see only her curved back and Vignon clutching her breasts as if they were handles keeping him steady on a bucking fairground ride. With time, what he hated most was what he had called her as he rode. Vignon the liar, the philanderer. Vignon the German. Now this foreign duke had been murdered and there was talk, among the men and on the headlines of the newspapers he stopped and looked at, that the Germans were wanting war and plenty of good Frenchmen wanted it too. And what if his mother had married the doctor and he, Jean-Baptiste, would have had a German father without even knowing it? What if Vignon had become his patriotic enemy as well as his personal one?

After a few weeks Jean-Baptiste learned to ignore Therzon’s crude jokes and Marcel’s malign view of his fellow man. But he did take in the discussions about the murder of the duke, who turned out to be a sort of Austrian prince. Pierre Duval had said it was a disaster while Marcel thought he had it coming. He also stopped and listened when Therzon told young Pierre not long afterward that German spies had been arrested in Paris.

“They’ll be for the guillotine,” said Marcel as he came within earshot. “Or the firing squad.”

“But we’re not at war,” Jean-Baptiste said. “We didn’t kill the Austrian.”

“Those Germans and Austrians are as thick as thieves, and they hate us French and they’ll be laying their plans.” Marcel dropped his voice, came close. His fingers holding the pipe were dark yellow.

“They’ll be watching and listening. Finding our weak points.” His eyes opened wide.

Therzon, who’d been inexpertly rolling tobacco, looked up. “I heard police are doing checks on men working on the river. Rivers being like roads, they say—for armies and spies.”

Red-beard Pierre snorted.

“You’re the one who likes to know everything. You’d
like
a bit of spying.”

Therzon licked the edge of the cigarette paper. “And you’re looking a bit pale, red-beard—you not fancying a visit from the gendarmes?”

“I did time,” red-beard Pierre mumbled. He had a way of stroking his beard when he was anxious, not to show it off, but rather as if he was checking that someone hadn’t taken it. “Way back. A fight. Over a woman. I’m no friend of the law.”

Jean-Baptiste thought that was probably why Vignon had appeared among them when their old doctor had died. There he was suddenly, in his pale linen and his neat beard, with his watch chain, his singing, and his laughing contempt for the remedies the old women set so much store by. Learning the river’s secrets. Bastard. Worming his way into their trust. Into his mother’s trust.

Therzon said “Do you think we’ll have a war?”

“He can’t wait to get into his red trousers,” young Pierre said, but was quelled by a look from the older man.

“Being a soldier is no joke.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“And if there
is
a war, you’ll all be in red trousers. I’ll be in red trousers myself.”

Pierre Duval looked around, but his eyes fixed on Jean-Baptiste.

“Our leaders need to stand firm. They need to know that the country has no appetite for other nations’ wars,” he said. “Not us working men, who’ll have to face the guns.” Now there was unmistakable anger in his voice. “We might not follow where they lead. They have to know that.”

There was a very long silence. Nobody ever mentioned Pierre’s son, Corporal Duval, Jean-Baptiste thought, but he was there: a ghost of the living if you could have such a thing.