The Matchmaker of Kenmare (26 page)

All during these days, my mind was shouting at me. We’ve given too little thought to this journey; we’ve had no discussion; we didn’t assess what it might be like. And that, so often, was Miss Begley’s style. Did this woman, whom, as you know, I’ve already described as “relentlessly real”—have no fear?

I knew, for example, that I got to terror quicker than she did. In
bombed London her feelings went to victims, not her own safety or mine. All through the Seefeld incident, while I quivered, expecting death or worse—for him, for all of us—she never showed a tremor. Now, in France, she seemed as eager as a schoolgirl, impatient, pressing forward, and unaware of the magnitude, the difficulty of the task she had begun—and with no thought to what might lie ahead.

We returned to Le Crotoy at nine o’clock, ahead of nightfall. Two people waited for us, and they of necessity depended upon each other—Bawn Buckley, who wished to know if we would be returning to Ireland, and the woman whose presence would keep us in France, Madame Larbaud, our juggler boatwoman with the curly hair.

She thought she knew where to find Hugo; he was working his way down the coast to be with the Canadians, she said, at Rouen. The battles were moving across the country toward the German border—or so she hoped, how could anybody be sure? Étretat, she said, was likely—or one of the inland towns, Goderville or Fauville.

Bawn Buckley said that he could catch a tide if he hastened. He wished us luck, but behind Miss Begley’s back he shook his head in a worried fashion. With which I agreed.

We said our good-byes and made our arrangements. Madame Larbaud would pick us up in the morning and take us down the coast. An argument broke out, between Madame Larbaud and the owner of the little hotel, and despite the furious pace of their speech I gleaned enough to know that he too questioned the safety of our plan. The bombers, he said, still came over; the armies still faced each other at Dieppe, and all across northern France. In essence he was saying,
What do these two lunatics think they’re doing?

When I asked Miss Begley for a clearer version she said, “It didn’t sound important.”

I said, “But they seemed heated.”

She said, “The French are very passionate—
l’amour, l’amour.
” Which had nothing to do with anything.

Next morning, she sat in front beside Madame Larbaud, and I sprawled in the back, among the Indian clubs, colored balls, and trampolines of the
Cirque Larbaud
.

The women talked nonstop, and Madame Larbaud seemed so moved by Miss Begley’s words that I tried to listen closer and determine their content. It seemed that they discussed Captain Miller, and it soon became one of those conversations of an intimacy that men never achieve. Both wept, both waved their hands, both laughed, both giggled—and I rattled from side to side, jolting my shoulder against the edges of the van’s metal stanchions.

Trying to hug the coast, attempting to get around Dieppe unnoticed, we ran into many bomb damage detours. But we saw no military—Madame Larbaud had achieved her objective. After what seemed much too long a journey given the distance on her map, she pronounced us clear of Dieppe and, heading south, took us back onto the coast again.

Not for long. With roads impassable from barbed wire, craters, or destroyed bridges, we had to turn inland. As all the historians have since told us, France didn’t return to the Allies in a soft bundle. The German army fought like tigers, yielding no more than a square yard at a time. For the regiments who landed in Normandy on June’s great D-Day, Berlin in August 1944 still remained thousands and thousands of bodies away.

The van lurched through villages. We skirted the masonry from buildings in ruins, their walls charred and still smoking. The number of dead animals astounded me—horses, cattle, goats. Churches with lopsided spires, houses with holes ripped clean through from back to front—you’ve long been familiar with these photographs, newsreels, and films. Yet no matter how factual or realistic those images, I’ve never seen anything that conveyed the force, the devastation, the depressed gloom as those animal corpses—a white pony sprawled in the road, his stomach burst like a rotten fruit; a headless black and white cow; three sheepdogs lying dead side by side on the street, as though they’d had a suicide pact.

Madame Larbaud continued to negotiate deep holes, fallen gables,
splintered and leaning trees. She sometimes opened her window for a closer view of the road, and dreadful smells caught us.

In one last place, whose name I’ve never known because it had no signs or name posts, she halted the van and got out. She crossed the road—such as was left of it—and entered a lone house that no longer possessed a front door. When she came back, our jig was up, but we didn’t grasp it.

Hugo, she said, was in a house at the far end of the village that lay just ahead. The Germans had barely gone, they were being pushed back, back all the time; they were shooting the dogs as they left. Madame Larbaud kissed us good-bye and turned her van back the way we’d come. I thought,
There goes our last chance of common sense
.

I took Miss Begley’s valise, and we began to walk through the debris of war. At our feet, a series of craters on the roadway became deeper and wider, as though successive shells had exploded while the gunners found their range. How incongruous did we look—a couple of foreign tourists, one with her handbag, one carrying his luggage, walking in a war zone? My mind snarled:
ludicrous, ludicrous, ludicrous, LUDICROUS!

Of the buildings up ahead, we could see little in detail. The nearest houses of the village stood a hundred yards away, with nothing behind us except the dusty winding road, the departing circus van, the autumn fields—and the safety we’d left.

Miss Begley said, “I suppose we’d better walk on,” and I said, “Yes, I suppose so”—it was as banal as that. Fear began to pound through me like a regimental drummer; I couldn’t breathe.

When we reached the first house in the village, a man stood at his ajar front door. We nodded friendly greetings, and he shouted. Miss Begley waved and we walked on. He made a contemptuous gesture with his hand.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“He called us crazy people.”

“Why?”

She said, “That’s all he said—‘crazy people, crazy people.’ He said it twice.”

I said, “What does he know that we don’t?”

Miss Begley shrugged and kept walking.

“Kate—do you truly believe you’ll find Charles here? In this town?”

“We have to start somewhere.”

“In God’s name, Kate, think about this.”

She said, “Ben, I know I’m going to be with Captain Charles Miller very soon. I’m going to be with my husband.”

“I doubt if armies like wives turning up during combat.”

She said, “He needs me.”

Such a triangle
, I thought.
She’s doomed to him. He’s doomed to this war. I’m doomed to them both
.

Now we began to hear the noise—far distant from us, on the other side of the town, but mighty. At first sound the word
thunder
crossed my mind, but soon the pattern told us that thunder never echoed like this—these rumbles were shorter and at once softer and harder.

“We might be walking into a battle,” I said.

At the beginning of a street, the first building, an agricultural feed store, had all its windows boarded and showed no sign of life.

“Can we get some directions?” I said, and tried to open the door. It didn’t open and nobody answered my knocking. In a wide yard beside the feed store stood a truck, and something about it seemed so bizarre that I went to look. From its tail to its headlights, a necklace of holes ran through it. And the same row of holes started far behind it in the ground and continued far beyond it. The truck had been machine-gunned from the air. I climbed up to look in at the driver’s door; nobody inside.

Next, we reached empty houses. One had part of its roof drilled with the same pattern of holes as the truck. When I followed the perforations I could trace the path of the aircraft’s gun, across the street, into the gardens and open spaces behind the house.

I thought not to draw Miss Begley’s attention to this crazy sight, but she had watched me, and she picked up the line of holes too. Once you saw them, they became obvious.

“Which side did it, do you think?” she said.

I answered, “Does it matter?”

We walked on. I’ve seen towns empty because everybody is at Mass, at a local fair, or at a show of some kind. This wasn’t that kind of emptiness. Though clothes hung on backyard washing lines here, this had the deadly, empty pain of evacuation.

In the teeth of that loud, unfriendly silence, the crackle of war called us forward like fools. I would like to say that we felt as staunch as adventurers, but I had begun to look for shelter. Yet—what kind of shelter? And for what reason? And for how long? The premises on both sides of the street looked closed to the world. What excuse should we give to a person whom we asked for hospitality? That there was a war up ahead? But that was why we had come here.
And for how long will you be staying, sir?
Until the war is over.

A shock of memory made me shudder. I recognized this desperate mood. For some years after Venetia disappeared I’d had this feeling almost every day—acute emotional isolation while living in, and surrounded by, “normal” conditions. Time after time I snapped myself out of it by allowing anger to invade me, and I could feel it rise now.

“Kate, I’m asking you again. Why are we here?”

She didn’t look at me, but she did reply.

“If you knew how tender this man is. If you knew his gifts of loving.”

“Well, I don’t and how could I?” I rapped back.

To this she said, without breaking step, “I’d be a fool not to come and look for him.”

I said, “He’s a soldier. Do you think he’ll come with us if you find him?”

“I’ll make him safe. I know how. And he knows that.”

“This is madness.”

“Ben, he can’t survive. He lives by the sword. You mightn’t believe it but a woman knows these things.”

“Are you sure,” I said, “that you have enough experience to judge?”

She continued to look straight ahead, her jaw as dogged as her steady footsteps. “I’m not the simple creature you think I am.”

My mind said,
Stop. This debate has no future. You’ll not change her view of herself. So just be kind
.

At that moment, I saw something so bizarre that it took up permanent residence in my mind.

I expect you have images that recur. I often see myself swinging like a monkey through the trees, and that leads to trapeze fantasies; I soar back and forth through the air, very high up, in a wonderful rhythm of freedom and blue sky. I also contemplate being a tumbler, an acrobat, turning a procession of cartwheels.

These are daydreams. I understand them. If alone at a table, I play the piano, even though I’ve never mastered an instrument. I play with both hands. My fingers describe arpeggios. I play powerful, cunning riffs.

Or I manage wild things that come at me. A bull charges, a great, black beast, with drool hanging from the red cave of his mouth; I grab his horns and wrestle him to the ground. Or a lion, all mane and open jaws, attacks. I run at him and he turns aside. Or a runaway horse tears down a street, and I grab the swinging reins and haul down his head.

This new sight, though, had never been in my mind’s gallery before. How could it, when I didn’t even know it existed?

It was a shell, an artillery shell, behind us, glinting in the air high, high above. Instinctively I knew that if I could see it as clearly as this, it must be coming to the end of its flying time. In seconds it will crash to earth and bring havoc.

My first thought was,
What’s the point in flinging ourselves down if this thing’s going to hit the same ground?

I grabbed Miss Begley’s hand. “Drop your bag and run like hell.”

I led the way. Through a gap, into a field. The farms ran up to the backs of the houses. This field had a haystack. We call it a “pike,” a dome of packed hay about seven feet at its tallest. As we rounded the haystack, the shell hit the street. We heard the tearing, cracking sound. Twenty yards or so behind where we’d been. Then we heard the secondary explosion. The collateral damage. The gas tank of the feed store blew up. Then we heard the new silence. Different from the general, weird stillness. And then we heard the cries.

Miss Begley looked in no direction. She leaned back into the hay, exhaling and repeating, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!”

I watched her—for signs of collapse, distress, unhinging. Who could blame her if she caved? Instead, she merely sagged, pressing harder back on the hay.

“We’d better go and help,” she said.

“We won’t move. If there’s been one shell on that trajectory, there may be others.”

She closed her eyes.

We sat, recovering, yet I was dipping further into terror. A violent
headache crashed across my forehead and died as quickly as it came—the effect of compressed air. She must have felt the same because she pressed her hands to her eyes.

The second shell came whining over. And the third. And the fourth and fifth and sixth. We saw them. We shuddered to them. We felt them in our bones. They all seemed to hit the same target, because the cries from the houses ended with no fading. As I began to understand that the gunners had overcalculated and thus overshot the town center, the words came rolling through my head,
I am in the war, I am in the war, I am in the war
.

When many minutes had passed in which no shells burst, we rose and looked out at the world again. A roof had folded. Some chimneys along the other houses had toppled sideways like little drunken people. I reckoned that the barrage had ended. Or at least had moved closer to the gunners’ targets. We might be safe for the time being.

In no hurry we moved out of the field, hay wisps festooning us. Two tiny people in a huge war. Our bags stood in the middle of the roadway where we’d left them. They seemed unharmed—until Miss Begley saw leakages from her valise. A bottle of toilet water had exploded—had, in fact, been atomized: Not a shard of glass could be found; the air compression had left only the cork.