The Untouchable (27 page)

Boulogne. There are people, I have no doubt, wine-bibbers and apple-tart-fanciers, not to mention dirty-weekenders, whose blood races at the name of that untidy little port, but when I hear it, what I recall, with a shudder, is the particular mixture of boredom, misery and intermittent rage in which I passed those five months there. Because of my proficiency in the language, it was natural that I should take on the unofficial role of liaison officer with the French authorities, military and civilian. What a wretched specimen your typical Frenchman is—how could Poussin have let himself be born into such a dull-witted, reactionary
race? And among the subspecies, none is more wretched than the small-town official. The military were all right—touchy, of course, and always on the lookout for slights to the nobility of their person and their calling—and I could manage even the four separate branches of the police I was compelled to deal with, but the burghers of Boulogne defeated me utterly. There is a particular attitude the French male strikes when he has decided to stand on his dignity and withdraw cooperation; it is a matter of the most minute inflections—the head tilted slightly to the left, the chin lifted a millimetre, the gaze directed carefully into the middle distance—but it is unmistakable, and the determination it silently expresses is adamantine.

Nick derived much amusement from my difficulties. It was in France that he first began to call me “Doc,” and address me in the facetious tones of a schoolboy ragging a hapless master. I suffered his jibes with forbearance; it is the price one pays for intellectual superiority. We both held the rank of captain, but by a mysterious hierarchical sleight-of-hand on his part, the trick of which still puzzles me, it was understood between us from the start that he was the superior officer. Ostensibly, of course, he was a regular soldier—our links with the Department were kept secret even from fellow officers in our area, although it quickly got about that I was one of the Bingley Boys, a breed held in contempt by the men of the Expeditionary Force, among whom we moved like—well, like spies. Nick had pulled strings and got us a billet together down a cobbled side street on the hill near the cathedral, in a crooked little house wedged between a butcher’s and a baker’s. The house was owned by the town mayor. The gossip was that he had used it before the war to keep a succession of mistresses in, and certainly there was something delicately lewd, something Petit Trianonish, about those narrow, high rooms with their many small-paned windows and doll’s-house furniture. Nick immediately added to the bijou atmosphere by taking a mistress, a Mme. Joliet, one of those bright, brittle, immaculately got-up women in their late thirties that France seems to generate fully developed, with all their sophistication and polish in place, as if they had never been young. Nick would smuggle her in at night through the little back garden that
gave on to a lilac-covered lane, and she would put on an apron and cook a meal for the three of us—
omelette aux fines herbes
was her speciality—while I sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table uneasily fingering a glass of sweet Sauterne, and Nick stood at the sink with his tunic unbuttoned and a hand in his pocket and his ankles crossed, smoking a cigarette and winking at me as poor Anne-Marie prattled on about London fashions, and the Duchess of Windsor, and the outing she had made to Ascot one mythologised perfect English summer afternoon an indeterminate number of years before. “This war,” she would cry, “this terrible, terrible war!,” throwing her eyes to the ceiling and making a comical square mouth, as if she were bemoaning some aberration of the weather. I felt sorry for her. Behind the fine glaze of her exterior there was detectable the lurking fear of the beautiful woman who already feels under her immaculately shod feet the first steepening incline of age. Nick’s name for her was Spoils-of-War. I do not care to speculate as to the precise nature of their liaison. There were nights when I had to cover my head with a pillow so as not to hear the noises coming from Nick’s room, and on more than one occasion Mme. Joliet displayed in the morning the bruised mouth and blackened eye that were the testaments to a slavish devotion, and which no amount of expertly applied
maquillage
could disguise.

It was a strange little ménage, the atmosphere aquiver with unspoken intimacies and constantly fraught with the suspense of held-back tears. There was something pleasurably uncanny about this almost-life we were half leading. For me, it was a sketch, a cartoon version, of that idealised connubial domesticity I was never to experience in real life. Naturally, Mme. Joliet and I formed an alliance—in Nick we even had a child, of sorts. We felt, she and I, like a pair of innocent sibling-lovers out of a fairy-tale, happy at our tasks, she with her whisk and I with my blue pencil, there in our gingerbread house in the depths of the rue du Cloître. The town had battened itself down against winter and the war. The days were short, hardly days at all, more like drawn-out, brumous twilights. Great leaden sea-clouds came shouldering in from the north, and the wind sighed and whispered in the casements, making the flames of Mme. Joliet’s
candles stagger—she was a great one for the romantic touch, and a
bougie
burned at every repast. When I think back to then I recall the smell of beeswax and the needle-sharp sting of her perfume and, in the background, the flabby after-odour of domestic gas—so much of our time there was lived in the kitchen—and the muffled stink of drains, and the crushed-chrysanthemum staleness that rose from the tiled floors, always clammy with condensation, as if the house itself were permanently in a cold sweat.

Often Nick would leave the two of us together, going off after dinner on some supposed official errand, and coming back long after midnight, glazed and grinning, in a mood of dangerous gaiety, by which time Mme. Joliet and I, leaning on our elbows in a warm dome of candlelight and Gauloise smoke, would have got cosily tipsy on that pear liqueur she liked, and which I drank only to keep her company, for it tasted to me like nail varnish. In these nocturnal tête-à-têtes she and I hardly spoke about ourselves at all. A couple of tentative questions from me on the subject of M. Joliet were met with a tightening of the lips and that almost imperceptible but wholly contemptuous shrug with which French women dismiss the failings of their menfolk. I told her a little about Vivienne, and our son, and she returned frequently to the topic, not, I think, because they were my wife and child, but because they were Nick’s sister and nephew. For Nick was all that we talked about, really, even when the subject under discussion seemed to have nothing whatever to do with him. Mme. Joliet, I quickly realised, was far out of her depth. What had started as a manageable little
affaire
with the handsome and careless English captain had changed into something perilously like love, and love, for her, had the destructive force of a phenomenon of nature, like lightning, or a summer storm, something to shelter from lest life and all that made it tolerable be left a blasted, smoking ruin. When she spoke of him she gave off a sort of anguished radiance which she tried in vain to subdue; there in our miniature candlelit arena she struck her desperate poses, struggling not to show her terror, like a circus performer caught in a cage with a supposedly tame animal that had suddenly turned wild. And once or twice, after yet another glass of Poire William, the sad smell of Anne-Marie’s fear and longing
would turn into a pure whiff of the erotic, and then it would seem that I should dash into the cage and join her, so that in each other’s arms we might together face down the ravening beast. But nothing happened, the moment always passed, and we would lean away from each other, out of the candlelight, and sit gazing into our liqueur glasses, blank, motionless, at once regretful and relieved.

It would not have occurred to Nick to be jealous of us. He knew how firmly he had us in his grip; he had only to flex his claws and blood would spring from both our bosoms. I believe it amused him to leave us together at night like that, to see what we might do, what strategies of escape we might attempt.

Of the war we saw no sign. For days at a stretch I would forget the reason for our being in France. Encountering squads of soldiers on the roads, or earnestly at their exercises in the fields and among the fruited orchards, I would find myself admiring the orderliness, the homeliness of it all, this right and proper occupation of men, as if it were not a military venture they were engaged in at all, but some vast, philanthropic work detail. Once a fortnight I drove down with Corporal Haig to the Expeditionary Force HQ at Arras, supposedly to deliver a report on activity in our sector, but since there was no activity, there was nothing to report, and the night before each trip I would spend weary hours racking my brains to put together a few plausible but meaningless pages, which would disappear without trace into the innards of the military machine. I have always been fascinated by the hunger for documentation shared by all great institutions, especially those run by supposed men of action, such as the Army, or the Secret Service. I cannot count the times I was able to foil this or that inconvenient development at the Department, not by removing or suppressing documents, but by adding new ones to an already bulging file.

Have I mentioned Corporal Haig before, I wonder? He was my batman, a music-hall version of an East Ender, all grins and winks and rollings of the eyes. At times he played the part so exaggeratedly well that I suspected he had studied it up, for behind the cheeky-chappie facade there was something uneasy about him, something lost, and fearful. Haig—his first name, unlikely though it sounds, was Roland—was short and compact,
with big shoulders and tiny feet, like a boxer, and a gap in his front teeth and ears that stuck out. He seemed to have been in the army since childhood. Boy, who came down for a visit at Christmas from Dunkirk, where he was posted in some propagandist capacity, took a great shine to him. He called him The Field Marshal, and spent the holiday trying to seduce him. Perhaps he succeeded?—that might explain the evasive, guilty side of Haig’s performance. I wonder what became of him, and if he survived the war. I have the feeling he did not. He was the kind of minor character that the gods test their blades on, before proceeding to deal with the Hectors and the Agamemnons.

Like the majority of the men in the Force, Haig regarded the war as a ludicrous but not entirely unenjoyable waste of time, another of those tremendous mad schemes which the Powers That Be choose to dream up, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to disrupt the otherwise placid lives of the lower ranks. The French expedition he considered particularly daft, even by Their standards. He was like a marooned day tripper, half indignant at the pointlessness of it all, and half amused by the atmosphere of unending, if dull, holiday. And of course, he was glad of the opportunity to grumble. As we sped in our little black Austin (it always reminded me of a bustling and very determined, shiny black beetle) along those narrow roads between swishing colonnades of plane trees, he would indulge in a kind of sustained aria of complaint: mucky food, stinking lavs that were no more than holes in the ground, bints who didn’t speak a word of English and seemed to be laughing at him all the time, and who were probably poxed, anyway, the half of them (“I tell you, sir, I wouldn’t touch the quim over here if they paid me”).

On one of those jaunts to Arras we stopped at a village, I think it was Hesdin, and I took him to a restaurant on the river that Boy had recommended. The day was icy. We were the only customers. The dining room was small, low-ceilinged and somewhat dirty, and the fat old biddy who ran the place had the look of a slattern, but there was a nice wood fire, and we could hear the river clattering over stones below the rimed window, and the menu was a masterpiece. Haig was uneasy; I could see he was not at all sure that he approved of this informal mingling of the ranks. With his cap off he looked somehow shorn and vulnerable,
and his ears seemed to stick out even more than usual. He kept smoothing his brilliantined hair and sniffing nervously. I had an urge to pat the back of one of his surprisingly delicate, almost girlish hands (how on earth did it take me so long to realise I was queer?). He engaged in a brief snow-fight with his napkin, then sat for a long time glaring helplessly at the menu. I suggested we start with oysters and he gulped in dismay, his adam’s apple bouncing like a ball on a bat.

“What, Haig,” I said, “never eaten an oyster? We shall have to remedy that.”

I spent a pleasant five minutes in conference with
madame la patronne,
who with much theatrical shrugging and kissing of bunched fingers persuaded me to take the sorrel soup and the
boeuf en daube.
“All right with you, Haig?” I said, and Haig nodded, and gulped again. He wanted beer, but I would not allow it, and ordered us both a glass of the rather good local white to wash down the oysters. I pretended not to notice him waiting to see which pieces of cutlery I would pick up first. He fumbled with the oyster shells, making them clack like false teeth, and had trouble forking up the frilled, glandular morsels.

“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

He managed a sickly smile.

“It reminds me of…” He blushed, displaying an unaccustomed prudery. “Well, I don’t like to say, sir. Only it’s cold.”

We ate in silence for a while, but I could feel him laboriously working himself up to something. We were finishing our soup before he finally got there.

“Mind my enquiring, sir, but were you called up or did you join?”

“Good heavens,” I said, “what a question. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I just wondered, you being Irish and all.”

I registered the familiar faint shock, like a soot-fall in a chimney.

“Do I seem very Irish to you, Haig?”

He looked at me askance, and chuckled.

“Oh, no, sir, no,” he said, and lowered his face over his soup plate. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

There flashed into my mind then a clear and detailed picture of him, sitting in the canteen at HQ with his fellow drivers, a mug
in one hand and a fag in the other, putting on a snooty face and mimicking my accent:
But my dear Haig, I’m hardly Oirish at all, at all.