The First of July (8 page)

Therzon made a face. “And how are we to tell the president, then? Knock on his door? Trample the carpets of the palace with our Seine mud?”

“We did more than that in the Revolution,” Pierre red-beard said.

“We did a great deal
less
than that forty years ago,” said Pierre Duval. “What a disaster.”

“Revenge,” mouthed Therzon, nudging young Pierre.

Pierre red-beard said: “Our armies were a disgrace then, and our generals.” He made a throat-cutting motion. “The Prussians ground us into the dirt. They took Alsace. They took Lorraine. They forced good Frenchmen to become Germans.” He shook his head as if denying it.

“Revenge,” said Therzon, looking pleased with himself, while rubbing his tender tattoo.

“Revenge?” Pierre Duval looked at Therzon as if he were a small child. “For what? The French brought the last war on themselves, and it was a catastrophe. As it will be if they do it again. Tonight,” he went on, “there’s a meeting. Informal. With Jaurès. He’s a Deputy, a powerful man. He’s
our
man. A strong, decent man. Now that Caillaux’s been out for three or four months, he’s our only hope: a man with a zeal for peace. Who speaks for ordinary men. Tonight he’ll speak
to
us. Jean Jaurès. He’s the only one trying to keep us all alive.”

Young Pierre looked puzzled. “My father says he’s an agitator,” he said.

Therzon muttered, “Politicking isn’t for working people. I don’t want to go and be lectured to by some gentleman in a tailcoat at the end of a hard day’s work. I want a drink.” He belched.

Pierre Duval ignored them both. He looked at Jean-Baptiste. “Jaurès is worth listening to—talks sense. He’s staking his reputation on peace.”

“There might be trouble,” said young Pierre. And then, looking awkward, “My father wouldn’t like it.”

Pierre red-beard’s eyes shone and he rubbed his scarred hands together. “Count me in, brother Pierre,” he said.

Jean-Baptiste was aware of Therzon’s foolish face caught in the beginnings of a sneer. “And me,” he said to Duval. “Could I come with you?”

He set off between Laval and red-beard Pierre: the three men, striding down the Boulevard de Montmartre. It was a warm July night and the cafés were busy. There were bright, noisy girls on street corners and beggars on church steps. A bicycle hurtled by, almost colliding with them, and Pierre red-beard shouted some Breton curse upon the cyclist. The thin notes of a fiddle competed with an accordion supported on the vast bust of a middle-aged woman. Her fat hands could hardly reach the keys, yet her fingers were nimble. Pierre Duval laughed, as he almost never did. “Bravo, Madame.”

Jean-Baptiste knew
this
was the Paris people dreamed of. Even people at the bottom, like him, were part of it. Yet whom could he tell? Who would be glad for him that he’d made it there at last?

On a street corner, a man was shouting out headlines and several people were trying to read the same paper. “War coming,” shouted the vendor. “Read all about it! Will the British fight for France? Will Italy stay neutral?”

Pierre Duval, who had been laughing just minutes ago, looked grim-faced. “Idiots,” he said.

Pierre red-beard snorted. “If we’re trusting the English to get us out of this, we’re really screwed.”

Suddenly, from up ahead, they heard some distant shouting, followed by screams. Several men came running down the street; one was carrying his cap and waving it, though at whom it was impossible to say.

“Dead. He’s dead. Shot. He’s dead. Blood everywhere. Just eating his dinner. Murder, bloody murder!” he shouted as he went on unsteadily down the street. The music wailed to a stop.

Some gendarmes, running, overtook the men. The two Pierres stopped and stood back in the doorway of a cobbler’s workshop, the older Pierre pressing Jean-Baptiste back with the flat of his hand. More men ran by, away from whatever catastrophe had befallen, while other men guided their wives from the street. A smartly dressed gentleman was pulling a reluctant priest toward the commotion.

Pierre Duval reached out and caught one of the escaping men by his jacket. “Who’s been murdered?” he asked. “What in the name of the Virgin is going on?”

“Shot in the café. By some ordinary young man. With a gun.”

“Who?”

“Jaurès.”

“He’s dead?” Pierre looked stricken, Pierre red-beard unbelieving. “What’s all this nonsense … this damn fool city and its rumors.”

“Go and take a look. Paddle in his blood. Get arrested. Get shot. The whole place is swarming with police. It was probably a German, if you ask me.”

The older Pierre was clearly fighting to keep his voice under control. “Jaurès was trying to keep peace with the Germans. Why would they shoot him?” A small spasm crossed his face. “Dead? Are you sure?”

The man tore his sleeve free. “If a man can live with his brains all over his dinner plate, then yes, perhaps he’s alive. I’m getting out of here—there may be more Berlin anarchists about.”

Pierre Duval looked up the street. A black official car, its horn hooting, trundled over the cobbles.

“Let’s take you back, young Jean-Baptiste,” he said, his voice flat. “If Jaurès is dead, we’ll hear soon enough.” He turned and moved off, Pierre red-beard a step behind him. Jean-Baptiste followed forlornly.

At the hostel, two tired-looking workmen were standing against the wall smoking.

“Jaurès has had it,” one said in a thick accent. “Some French lad did it. They’ve already caught him.”

“A patriot,” said the other.

Jean-Baptiste expected one of the two Pierres to react, but they hardly seemed to have heard and he was left standing on the steps feeling, suddenly, very alone. But as his companions reached the corner, Pierre Duval turned, looked at him, and walked back. He took him by the elbow, speaking low and urgently.

“You need to go home,” he said. “Don’t stay in Paris. Go back home. It won’t be safe here. Jaurès was a small voice, and now that’s silent. War is coming, and Paris is where it will come to first. You’ll be a soldier within weeks.”

Jean-Baptiste couldn’t tell him that there was no way he could ever go home again. That his mother was a whore, that the man he had looked up to was a spy, and that he was himself a thief. By now everybody in Corbie would know what he’d done, but only his mother and Vignon would know that he knew what
they’d
done, what
they
were.

A few days later, Therzon was late for work. Eventually he came haring along the embankment, waving a newspaper, which was odd because he couldn’t read.

“War! It’s war!” he cried, as if it were the best day of his life. “Revenge! Here!” He stabbed at the newspaper with his finger.

Young Pierre scrambled, goat-like, up the half-built steps from the waterside, his eyes sparkling in his muddy face. Red-beard Pierre just rested on his pickaxe, with an expression that was hard to read, while Pierre Duval’s was unequivocal. Grim-faced, he kept working. Yet Jean-Baptiste felt a thrill of something, even though he was ashamed of it: perhaps Therzon’s euphoria was contagious.

He was on the top of the bridge as Therzon ran off, shouting the news to anyone who would listen. The bells had started tolling. Who would have thought there were so many churches in Paris? Jean-Baptiste looked up and saw a couple, very elegant, very
rich
, he thought, walking arm in arm and talking to each other. She had a parasol and a pretty hat and, underneath it, hair so fair it was almost white. The man, who was older, was laughing at something she’d said. They came to a halt when they saw Therzon running across the road, shouting to women waiting outside the baker’s. A group of road-menders were all putting down their tools, and a trolley actually stopped while a passer-by spoke to the driver. A waiter crossed the street to join in, still carrying his tray.

The couple, clearly foreign, looked puzzled, even nervous. Were they perhaps Germans? Jean-Baptiste ran toward them, the bells and the shouts across the street creating a sort of urgency that made him run too fast and shout too loudly rather than tell them calmly what had happened. The man caught him by the arm and held him for a minute. He didn’t know what he actually said to the couple, but he was certain it was as bad as if it had been Therzon.

He expected Pierre Duval to be cross with him, but Pierre went on working until he’d finished what he was doing. Therzon and young Pierre had disappeared. Pierre red-beard had walked a short way down the river and was leaning back against the embankment wall, smoking and talking to two bargees. Marcel was propped against a tree, smoking his stinking pipe. Jean-Baptiste found himself sitting alone.

Pierre Duval reached the top of the steps and picked up the discarded newspaper.

“Therzon’s an idiot,” he said without malice. “Today’s paper only has yesterday’s news. He heard it in a bar when he should have been at work.”

“Will we be called up, do you think?”

“Go home,” said Pierre, much more insistently than he had on the evening the deputy had been murdered. “You’ll be a soldier in weeks. It’s a hard, filthy life. At least fight with the men you know, your friends, the boys you grew up with. Fight
for
your own and
with
your own. They’re the only ones worth risking your life for.”

A week later he was in a long, long queue with red-beard Pierre, Marcel, Marcel’s brother, a great ape of a man, and young Pierre. Therzon was nowhere to be seen. Pierre Duval had said gruffly that the authorities could come and find him; he wasn’t queuing in the sun for the Army’s convenience. Nor was he leaving a job uncompleted. He and Loiret, who was back at work though lame now, worked at the bridge the same as ever, and for a week so they all did, but Duval rarely spoke to them. Even with red-beard Pierre, who had always seemed his closest ally, he was merely polite. But when he found out young Pierre was going with them to enlist, he had lost his temper for the first and last time in the many weeks Jean-Baptiste had known him.

“You’re under age,” he said. “You’re a child. You’re not even fully grown—one of us always has to cover for you with the heavy work.”

Young Pierre looked hurt. He bit his lip and his chin trembled slightly.

“You’re no good to the Army and they’re no good for you,” Pierre Duval snapped. “If you want to be killed, then I’m sure you’ll find plenty of opportunities locally.” Then he said “Get out of my sight. I’m sick of all of you.”

The next time Jean-Baptiste saw him was at Douaumont eighteen months later. He was Sergeant Duval of the Grenadiers by then, an old man with a long, ridged scar across his face. Jean-Baptiste didn’t speak to him. He had heard weeks ago that Duval’s son was dead and he didn’t know what to say.

Frank, London,
August 1914

W
AR!

The Reverend Mr. Williams was a prophet, but then it was not hard to see what was coming.

We were all a bit mad with it—excited, frightened; entertained, even. Take your pick.

Isaac didn’t hang around waiting for it to be official. He left his books and the Institute and the piecework in the sweatshop, had a blowup with his brother about it, or so I heard, and went to join up. He was a skinny chap, but with the hours he worked he had to be stronger than he looked. I asked him how he felt about killing Germans, given that we were both in the Young Men’s International League. He didn’t look happy.

“They’ve gone against the spirit of it, that’s the thing,” he said. “I expect there are good working men there who don’t like it any more than I do: German internationalists. I expect there are plenty of them.” He seemed anxious. “Men and women fighting for workers’ justice. Mr. Marx himself was a German.”

He was shaking his head in disbelief, but whether at his hero Mr. Marx being, in the end, a German, or at the Germans betraying their greatest son, I couldn’t tell.

“But then what about poor little Belgium, Frank? Terrible things are happening. I can’t turn my back, although I am thinking that I shall act more in the spirit of defense than attack.”

But he didn’t look very convinced. “And my family—the Army’s good pay and regular. Anyway, we weren’t the ones who started it.” Now he was staring down at his toecap as he rubbed it on the back of his trousers.

Perhaps I’d offended him, because he didn’t come to the Institute again, but I missed his company even though I’d never known him well.

At Debenhams, they gathered us together after work for Mr. Richmond to give us another speech.

“As the great Lord Nelson said” (said Mr. R), “‘England expects every man to do his duty,’ and so do I.” His face was lit with fierce joy. “That is the code of Debenhams. God save the King!”

“God save the King,” we said, a bit awkwardly. When Mr. R had gone, Mr. Hardy told us all to calm down because for the time being we were still taking the Board’s shilling, not the King’s.

Some might prosper in all this, but I wouldn’t be one of them. It was clear that if I did not volunteer, I could not stay at Debenhams. If I joined up, I would gain five guineas and thus a bicycle I could not ride until we had sorted the war out, and Connie would, I knew for sure, never speak to me again if I went into khaki. I thought about driving an ambulance or being a stretcher-bearer, but I’d still be in khaki, against which Connie had taken her pledge; and Mr. Richmond wouldn’t see that as proper soldiering anyway, I was sure.

As we left the room, I heard Reg Singleton say, to Percy from accounts, “I’m going to ask my girl to marry me straight off. She’s nice enough and doesn’t talk too much. That way I can stay out of this fight. They don’t want married men.”

“Blimey, mate.” Percy looked genuinely shocked. “How’ll you feel come Christmas when we’ve had our fiver, seen off the Germans like heroes, and are back in our beds—and you’re stuck married for the rest of your life? Probably have her in the family way by then?” Reg winked. I never did like him.

Ladies came and went; the excitement seemed to loosen their purses. The apprentices were up and down bringing out yellow, camel, and fawn gloves and even shades we carried as a novelty for foreign ladies: green and mauve and eau-de-nil with fringes or cuffs or cut leatherwork delicate as a cobweb. But spread out on one of my oak counters (for I had made the very substance of the counter itself, although I never said as much, obviously), the rainbow fans of fingers looked very fine.

Despite everything, young gentlemen were in for boater ribbons, it being Cowes regatta week. The first two wanted the colors of the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, and they were larking about but saying soon they would join the Navy and sail for free.

Then in came two quieter types. Gentlemen, but not the loud sort. They paused at the parasols, were charmed by young Ethel, but moved on swiftly to our matinée gloves. The more talkative of the two seemed to want them for a lady friend, and he looked very pleased indeed when I showed him pairs from our middling range, having judged that they were not young men with money to spare, but even so when he heard the price he went very quiet.

I turned to the drawer of cheaper gloves for ordinary wear. But when I pulled them out, they looked a little mean compared to the promise on display. The pigskin ones were too coarse, the fabric gloves looked limp and short in the wrist, the satin ones were really not appropriate for a young lady, and although there were lace ones, they were too white and stiff.

“I could get gloves like these in Gloucester,” said the one who had been so keen. His face was all disappointment. I didn’t like to say that some of our cheaper gloves, for lady’s maids and the like, came from not ten miles from Gloucester.

The two men left, and by now the department looked more like a market in the Orient than London’s finest store; and although a very small part of me enjoyed seeing the good cheer of everything we had to offer in bright disarray, I knew there would be trouble if every boater wasn’t lined up straight in groups of sennit braid, split braid, panama, and rustic and every glove wasn’t back in the hierarchy of glass-fronted drawers.

But as soon as I looked at the glove counter, I knew something was wrong. And two seconds later, I knew what. A pair of delicate cream opera gloves with tiny rosebuds was gone. I lifted up the other discarded gloves, but I already knew I wouldn’t find them. What better gift for a young lady than such beautiful gloves? For a second, I think I even felt pride; there were no such gloves anywhere else in London. But then I reflected that there were no such gloves here either now. The gloves, I was almost certain, were on their way to Gloucester. Of course, even in a shop like this and a department like ours, things went missing from time to time, but I had not thought these two were the thieving sort. Still, I was d
*****
d if I would have my best gloves taken from under my very nose and find myself in Mr. Hardy’s bad books. I would be docked pay for sure, when I had only recently been forced to give two shillings to Mr. Williams’s Christian peace. The light-fingered customers might as well have stolen my future bicycle.

Pausing only to tell the assistant to put the gloves away and not pausing long enough for her to ask me exactly what she should do, so that I would end up nearly doing it myself but slower, I left the floor. I walked in a dignified way behind Mr. Hardy, whose attention was entirely taken by his favorite customer (though he thinks it a breach of his dignity to admit this), Lady Lostwithiel. But once on the stairs I ran like the wind. I was out on Regent Street, looking up and down; it was a warm day and the street was a dangerous sea of parasols. But just across the road I thought I saw two gentlemen and on the chance they were my thieves I gave chase. Not that I ran now; I sauntered with purpose, thinking if only I had a bicycle, I could have foiled their attempts to get away. As I drew level with them, I started to cross.

It was indeed the culprits, and they appeared to have anticipated no pursuit and were chatting as easy, or as hardened, as you please. Drinking lemonade! I saw two policemen coming slowly along the pavement and for one second I faltered. I was in two minds whether to return to the shop. Was it possible that in my anxiety and haste, I had simply overlooked the gloves? At exactly that moment, the friend of the would-be glove buyer looked up and saw me. He looked puzzled as if he couldn’t place me, but not in any way guilty, and as I approached he slowed and said something to his companion in a perfectly relaxed way. I reflected on my position. I could not demand that I search them. I had left the floor without permission and on an impulse. The way I was going, I had put myself in a situation where I stood to lose my job, not just the cost of a pair of gloves from my wages.

I paused as the more talkative of the two men followed his friend’s gaze and saw me; and although for a few seconds his face looked blank (people do not, in the main, recognize those who assist them in shops), I knew I had my man. He blushed, his head tipped down so his face was obscured by the brim of his hat, then he turned toward the crowd and would have walked off, I think, had his friend not stayed still. The current of humanity passed to either side of the pair.

In the business of selling apparel, one learns to be an observer. To know when to speak and when to stay silent; to know what a lady may afford or not afford or what she dreams in her heart of having, rather than knowing she needs. In the business of coffins there are dreams too, not just a matter of a good or bad job, of corners cut or corners embellished. It was observation that revealed to me that one man was guilty, his face now displaying every sign of panic, while the other had no idea that his friend had left our store with anything other than disappointment.

He had already gotten them out by the time I reached him. The gloves hung limply from his hand. “Theo?” said his friend, uncomprehending, and then “Theo” again as he caught on. Then, very quickly, he said “It was a mistake” just as he clearly realized that it was not. His look was one of pure mortification. His tone was almost pleading, as much to this Theo as to me, I thought. “We can pay. I can pay,” he said, or something like it, looking hot and feeling in his blazer pocket.

I hadn’t touched the gloves.

“I’d rather just have them back,” I said. Hoping they weren’t soiled.

“Well, take a guinea for yourself,” said the friend. He was like a man who has had a dreadful shock and although I shouldn’t have, I almost felt sorry for the two of them. And then I thought
a guinea!
I could have my bicycle now! Have it without joining up.

I said “The gloves will do.” Knowing that Mr. Hardy was a stickler for theft. We had a special code for alerting each other should any pilfering take place on the floor. Mr. Frederick Richmond, if notified, would call the police. “Theft is theft,” he would say, “whether a loaf for a starving man or Raffles stealing a duchess’s emeralds or a young lady helping herself to a lawn handkerchief.” Knowing all this, I simply put my hand out, and he laid the gloves in it. I looked down, folded them, and placed them in my own pocket.

“There’s this young lady,” the one who was not the thief began, still holding out the guinea.

And I thought there was always a young lady, or a bicycle, or both, but it didn’t have to turn us into thieves. If I took the guinea, I would in effect be stealing from Debenhams, because they had their rules and I would be looking away. To look away for no reason other than my own inclination was another thing.

“No, thank you, sir,” I said and turned away, already hoping I could get back to the floor and thinking what excuse I might make. That the potted tongue I’d had for tea the day before had disagreed with me, perhaps. But when I arrived breathless on the floor, it was like a fairytale in which time doesn’t change, for there was Lady Lostwithiel in a mauve hat now, and her daughter and Mr. Hardy and the entourage and items being carried out and borne away. And there was the assistant looking confused and there was the pile of gloves, hardly smaller in size than when I’d left the counter. And within a minute or two, there were the cream opera gloves, back where they should be.

After the day was finished, I walked down through Piccadilly Circus. Men on boxes were shouting the odds about this and that, and there were people milling around in the early evening sunshine. There were men with their sweethearts and a chap spinning past on an Italian Bianchi, of all things. I walked on toward Trafalgar Square, because I wanted to take a stroll before going back to my room. I went on down Whitehall, under the trees, and looked to the right and left as I came into Horse Guards Parade. There was the Admiralty and the War Office where, no doubt, grave men in frock coats and admirals in gold braid were causing office boys to scurry around, and messages and telegrams were going hither and thither and letters were being written by men of state. Mr. Asquith and Lord Kitchener and Sir John French and the King in his palace, all thinking who knows what. It seemed to me that war must be a very busy undertaking. There were soldiers on parade, looking hot with drums and bearskins, all in bright colors, just the same as they had been when war was only an idea; and there, just across from them, the dark green of St. James’s Park, where the young couples and the nursemaids and the white ducks on the lake wouldn’t know a German if they saw one. Nor what to do with him.

I thought two things. One was that the code of Debenhams was a fine thing, but it was different from my own. I could not join up and go and fight in foreign lands just because Mr. Richmond wanted me to. I would look for another position, although I could not hope for the status I had at present owing to my irregular beginnings. I considered briefly going back to Devon. War should mean that business would be brisk, and I might do my duty by my country
and
my father. But to go home was to go back to being the son of the family, and he would never accept that my return was other than the failure in my present occupation that he half feared, half hoped for.

The second was the day on which my path had crossed with the gentleman who had stolen my gloves, and for a moment I’d had his fate in my hands, and I’d had to make a choice. It was not the choice Mr. Hardy or Mr. Richmond would have made. Now I would choose for myself what to do regarding the war.

I had reached Westminster Bridge and, not for the first or even the hundredth time, I stood looking back at the houses of our great parliament and the glowing new statue of Boadicea, looking fierce on her plinth. How fine the bronze queen and her chariot looked in the golden London sunlight!