Assignment in Brittany (26 page)

He bent his back lower as he climbed the steep cobbled street. It was only broad enough for four men to walk abreast. The shops and overhanging houses closed in on either side. Curios for sale, mementoes of St Michel, outmoded intimations of good things to eat, postcards, painted shells, religious relics, good-luck charms—all pathetic reminders of the Mont’s one-time summer trade. Behind him the tide had reached the walls, and the sea had become a cauldron of boiling water.

The child trotted ahead. Perhaps he knew he would get some scraps to eat in that genealogical restaurant. Hearne was content to follow. Up the street they went, then suddenly they turned to the left, along a twisting alley which led them to the back courtyard.

Hearne let the basket slide off his shoulders and straightened himself, painfully. Houses all around them, two- and three-storeyed houses, so that they seemed to be in a maze of man-built canyons. He hesitated. Which side was Pléhec’s back entrance? Last time he could walk in at the front, but that had been almost two years ago. An army of doors and windows faced him. He wondered again just how many people could be crowded into this half of the small island. Certainly the inhabitants of Mont Saint-Michel had tried their best.

“They seem empty,” he said, pointing to the windows.

“Many people have gone. Only a few remain.”

“To feed and entertain the Germans?”

“Yes, these were allowed to stay. Pléhec is there.” She pointed to a narrow door in a corner of the alley.

“Thank you.”

“It is I who should thank you.”

“It was nothing.”

She bowed and smiled gravely, with that dignity of the Celt which is so unexpected and yet so natural that you are surprised at your own surprise. She pulled the basket over the worn threshold, and smiled goodbye as she pulled. Michel was already inside.

Hearne turned towards Pléhec’s doorway. He entered quickly. Behind him the alley and the street outside were silent. The turbulent waves and jostling currents beyond the ramparts had suddenly eased into smooth noiselessness.

A man was sleeping beside the open hearth in the kitchen. At each side of the fireplace there was a stone oven with a heavy iron door. From either oven-wall an iron-rack stretched over the flames. Two brown earthenware pots had been placed in its centre to catch what heat there was in the low fire. Hearne advanced quietly over the stone-flagged floor, and passed the large white-scrubbed table with its few bowls of half-prepared vegetables. From here he could see through the half-open doorway into the front room. Checked tablecloths on small round tables, spindle-legged cane chairs. This was the place all right. He didn’t need to see the screened shop window with
crudely spaced on the glass. This was the same place.

The small, round man in the high-backed wooden chair stirred; and said, without opening his eyes, “Closed until six o’clock.”

Hearne suddenly realised by his relief that he had been more worried than he had been willing to admit. He still felt sick, though, but that was probably hunger, after all. He wondered if Pléhec’s skill with omelettes was still as unchanged as his slight lisp, and those two deep furrows between his heavy eyebrows. There was grey beginning to show now in the thick black hair growing in the peculiarly straight edge round the sallow face. Hearne remembered he used to wonder if Pléhec shaved that hair-line. Then he noticed that the man’s right hand was resting inside his loose shirt. Hearne said quickly and softly in English, “Even for friends?”

Pléhec raised one eyelid slowly. The eye, small in the heavy folds of his face, seemed reassured, for his right arm relaxed and the other eye flickered open, too. Hearne waited patiently while Pléhec identified him. Each minute was sixty hours. Either lack of food, or too little sleep, or the fact that he had been living in tension ever since he had left Saint-Déodat, was beginning to tell. I can’t have changed as much as all this, he thought dully, and pulled a wooden chair in front of him. He sat down heavily, straddling it, with his arms and chin resting on the high back.

“It just needed that,” Pléhec said as if to himself in his thin, light voice. When he was excited the lisp was more noticeable as he hurried his words. “It just needed that...the archæologist who told stories.”

“Not archæologist,” Hearne found himself saying. “Ethnologist.” But what the hell did that matter now? Stories... had he ever told stories? They seemed as dim a memory as the ethnologist.

Pléhec nodded his head with surprising energy. “Yes, you always made that distinction. July, wasn’t it?”

Hearne repressed a smile. The Frenchman knew quite well when he had last visited Mont, Saint-Michel.

“October,” Hearne said gently. “October 1938.”

“And are you to be with us for another week this time?”

“I leave tonight.”

“So?”

“So.”

“No archæology this time?”

“In a way... How is Duclos?”

The Frenchman looked at the large nickel watch tucked into a pocket at the waist of his tight black trousers. He had lost weight already, Hearne noticed: he could slip the watch out easily now. Once Hearne had been amazed that anyone so solidly constructed round the waist-line should choose to keep a watch just there. Pléhec was speaking. “It is now almost five o’clock. He will be sitting at the table in the corner, as usual, in just one hour and twenty minutes.”

“I must see him. You are sure he will be here?”

“Unless he has been arrested. And then it wouldn’t do you any good to see him.” Pléhec was laughing. He noticed the look on Hearne’s face and he became serious. “Yes, I know; it’s a bad joke. But we must laugh at something these days.”

“What I really need is something to eat,” Hearne said. “That always improves my sense of humour.”

“Of course. Of course. You must forgive my thoughtlessness.”

Pléhec rose, a short, round figure in tight black trousers and an open-necked white shirt. He picked up an apron from the chair, on which his black jacket and ready-made bow tie were neatly lying. “Once,” he said, “I should have thought it impossible to make an omelette with two eggs. Now I can even do it with one, and I can see the day coming very quickly when I won’t be able to make any omelette, because there will be
no eggs. You would think the hens knew that there’s no use in laying, for a Boche will be there to catch the egg as it falls.”

“One egg will be enough for me,” Hearne suggested politely; but he was relieved to see Pléhec shake his head at that and smile.

“And I can offer you some soup: thinner, to be sure, but still soup. And a slice of bread, and some cheese which I managed to hide in time. The coffee is unspeakable. I insult the word ‘coffee’ by using it to describe what we now drink. Our supplies here were requisitioned, and we have been most generously allowed to buy this.” He thumped the brown coffeepot so heavily down on the wooden table, that Hearne thought he had smashed it.
“Filtré,”
Pléhec added bitterly, and gave that short laugh of his. He suddenly halted, one hand holding the long twist of bread against his chest, the other’s thumb ready to drive the sharply pointed knife into the loaf. “How,” he said, suddenly halting and looking up at Hearne, “how did you get here?”

“Walked in.”

Pléhec sawed a slice off the loaf of bread and handed it over to Hearne on the point of the knife. “Begin with that,” he said. “Now when did you so calmly walk in?” There was a mixture of amusement and irony in his voice.

“About half-past four. When the two Jerries had to run from the tide.”

“Then the others would be crowding on to the wall at that side of the Mont, in order to see them. But the guards? They didn’t stop you?”

“I was carrying oysters. For a woman. She went next door, by the way.”

“Mathilde?”

“I don’t know. Her little boy was called Michel.”

“That was Mathilde.” Pléhec paused, and traced an imaginary line with the knife on the table. He suddenly went to a small door in a corner of the kitchen, and called abruptly, “Etienne!”

A boy’s voice answered him; there was the sound of a creaking bed; and then slow footsteps.

“Is it six already?” the boy asked as he came into the room. He smoothed back his dark hair and yawned audibly. He scarcely paused to look at Hearne. “Another?” he said.

But Pléhec had his own question to ask. “Mathilde usually leaves after five o’clock?”

“Mathilde? Oh, they try to get her away before supper begins.”

“See her... Say I want to know if she can bring some extra oysters when she comes next week.”

The boy nodded, and slipped out of the room as quietly as he had entered it. He had an infinite capacity for not being surprised, it seemed.

Pléhec was silent as he handed Hearne a bowl of soup. Hearne took his cue, and didn’t speak. But now he was worried about Mathilde, too: he must have endangered her; there must be some regulations about which he knew nothing. He had finished the soup, and the omelette was rising on the flat brown earthenware dish when he heard the footsteps on the stone-paved yard. Pléhec folded the omelette quickly and slipped it hurriedly on to a plate. He was still holding the brown cooking-dish and the fork in his hands as he reached the door. He moved with surprising lightness and speed.

“Mathilde,” he greeted the woman standing outside, “can you bring a few extra oysters for me when you come next time? What is the price now?”

Mathilde talked volubly and practically. The boy who was called Etienne had come back into the kitchen. He nodded to Hearne pleasantly, took an apron from a hook in the wall, and tied it round his waist. He picked up a bowl of green peas from a side table and began shelling them. Hearne began the omelette: Pléhec would never forgive him if he let the two eggs spoil.

There was only a murmur of voices now from the doorway. Then suddenly Pléhec’s voice was normal once more as he stipulated the price. The door closed. Mathilde’s footsteps faded.

“Well, how did you like it?” Pléhec asked. He was smiling again as he looked at Hearne’s empty plate. “Once I should have thought it impossible to cook an omelette without one of my copper pans.” He pointed to the row of empty hooks above the fire-place. “But of course you saw that?”

Hearne nodded. He hadn’t, but he now remembered that the omelette had looked strange cooking slowly in the earthenware dish, and that its texture had been drier and spongier. “It was excellent,” he said, and he meant it.

Pléhec said, “I’m afraid you must lose your jacket. Would you take it off?” He handed it to Etienne. “Wear this, and go with Mathilde as far as La Caserne. There you will go on towards Pontorson, while she will take her usual path home. Get rid of the jacket when it’s safe, and come back here. We’ll need you later.”

Etienne grinned and took off his apron. The jacket fitted him loosely, but convincingly enough.

“Mathilde?” Hearne asked quickly.

Pléhec spoke without turning from the small curtained window looking out into the courtyard. It was so high that he was standing on tiptoe to bring his eyes above the level of the sill. “She realises that the son of my late wife’s cousin wants to stay longer with me, that it would be dangerous for him to stay without permission—and so Etienne will wear his jacket and carry the basket, and the guards will notice that a man who came in has gone out again. That’s all we have to worry about.”

“And little Michel?”

“He doesn’t know Etienne. He will remember the strange jacket as much as the face.” Pléhec was suddenly silent. His eyes were on the courtyard. Hearne thought he heard voices, and then footsteps.

Pléhec turned back into the room. “Front door, Etienne. She’s just gone. Quick.”

Etienne moved quickly and silently. They didn’t even hear the door close.

“Well, that’s that. He’ll catch up with her on the Grande-Rue, and if Madame of the long tongue from next door was watching to see anything she could see—for her eyes are as sharp as her tongue is long—she will be disappointed.” Pléhec rubbed his hands with the pleasure of frustrating Madame, the cousin of Mathilde’s godson’s uncle. “Well, that’s that,” he said again, and picked up the apron which Etienne had thrown on the table. He handed it and the bowl of peas to Hearne. “Something useful for you to do. Very useful, if anyone should come in.”

Hearne smiled and rolled up his sleeves: first oyster-gatherer, now pea-sheller and potato-peeler. It was all in the day’s work.

Pléhec carried two pails over to a small side table. “You’ll
find it tasty enough,” he said consolingly. “Our catering has become very simple. Just so many customers, just so much to eat for each customer, just so little to cook.” He picked up a fish out of one of the pails, and slapped it on to the small table. Slitting it carefully up its belly, he raked out its inside. There was a grim smile on his face. “Do you know who I like to think this is?” he asked suddenly, one hand ripping out the last piece of gut.

Hearne nodded. “I can guess.”

“And there were those among us who would say, ‘What are we fighting for?’ The rich said ‘War means revolution: we will lose our possessions!’ The workers said ‘Patriotism is for the rich: war means we will lose our new privileges!’ Well, they know now: they got their peace, and they’ve lost everything. ‘What are we fighting for?’ Bah!” He chose another fish, and beheaded it neatly with one blow of the knife. “That,” he said; “for all traitors who think of their own private interests first. And this”—he selected another fish—“this for the politicians who play with their country’s enemies for the sake of power; and—” He halted as he saw Hearne’s expression.