Cloudless May (78 page)

“A little before dark last night,” Bergeot said. He frowned, dragging each word into its place with mistrust. “She was driving. She turned too sharply to avoid a lorry coming the other way. The only thing we met. It might have been sent on purpose. . . . I took her out. . . she was dead.”

He was pitiably tired. Lucien looked away from him, with a feeling of constraint and boredom. His affection for this broken man belonged to a self he had forgotten completely—in two days. To avoid having to answer, he walked to the road and tried to stop a military ambulance crawling past. The driver shouted that he had a full load. It was the same with the next, and the next. He went back into the field.

When he looked at Marguerite, a feeling of grief seized him. For the first time he realised that she would never laugh or stretch her arms again. His throat hardened. How terrible death is, he thought, as though he had made a discovery. He looked fixedly at the long grass, and was struck by the colours sparkling in it—blue, violet, orange. It was the first level rays of the sun arriving.

“We must do something,” he said, speaking with a clumsy authority. “You can't go on waiting here.”

Bergeot was looking at the road. “What can I do?” He glanced at the young man with indifference. “I've nothing left. I'm done for.” He frowned. “I did for myself,” he said.

Lucien did not answer. He was embarrassed by the older man's grief and collapse. He did not understand it, and besides, there was nothing he could say.

The rain had stopped. The sky moved further off suddenly, and the column of lorries shrank. It was full daylight. With an angry impatience he reflected that if he waited a little longer the German army would catch up with him. But he did not know how to go away. Bergeot asked abruptly,

“Where are you making for?”

“La Rochelle.”

“You must go. They're across the Loire by now. They must be. . . . Here. . . .” He took out a handful of folded notes from his pocket. “You'd better take some of this. I'm sure you haven't any money—or not enough.”

Lucien felt an impulse of relief and joy—he had less than a hundred francs—but he was ashamed.

“I don't need it,” he said awkwardly.

“Nonsense,” Bergeot said, with sudden energy. “Take it, take it. Do you think I stole it?”

The young man mumbled a phrase which did not make sense even in his own ears, and turned to go. He had never felt more insignificant or younger. . . . Just as he reached the road a lorry stopped. The driver, starting-handle in hand, was getting down. Except for a few cases, his lorry was empty. Lucien seized his arm.

“You can take two people—a man and a woman? You must. She's dead.”

The man laughed at him. “And you think I look like an undertaker? Thanks. Yesterday I was taken for a midwife. All right, where is she?”

The drivers of cars and lorries he was holding up began to shout at him to get on. He took no notice, except to thumb his nose, and helped Lucien to lift Marguerite and lay her on the floor of the lorry. The last thing you'll want me to do for you, Lucien thought, but without any feeling. He was surprised
when a tear ran down his cheek. . . . I could certainly have been more polite the other evening. . . . Bergeot was climbing, stiffly, like an old man, into the lorry.

“What will you do—after?” Lucien asked him, embarrassed.

Bergeot made a vague gesture and did not answer. . . .

Late that night Lucien reached Chantonnay, and turned off along a bad road, almost a track—the parish was not lucky with its roads-—to La Croisée.

He could not leave France without warning his mother. She had made too many sacrifices to give him the chance which had come to nothing. Or to this flight. She will be heartbroken, he thought: I must think of something I can say to give her courage.

The village, when he reached it, was in full darkness. If he had not known it better than anything else, he would have fallen a dozen times in the narrow street: there was always a barrel outside the Trichets', and the gutters running across the road were deep enough to drown a cat. Pushing his machine—not to rouse the village—he plunged into this silence full of tiny sounds, the creak of Jean-Marie Yvet's neglected shutters, the stream murmuring behind the old houses like a child; full, too, of smells faithful to their places in La Croisée: any ghost choosing to return would be able to find his way by that one of his senses as clearly as if he could see.

Lucien turned right at the cross, skirting the great buttresses of the church without seeing them, watching, profiled on the dark sky, the darker roofs, not two of a height, nor even two pitched alike, stepping over the invisible roots of the beech La Croisée had defended against eight generations of road inspectors—short generations, very easily defeated by the least docile peasants, true chouans, in France. . . . He tried to imagine this sober poor village in German hands—“It's not possible,” he muttered—his heart quickened with rage and grief. Surely its poverty would save it? What could the invader want here, unless vengeance on the already ruined and never defeated? La Croisée was too small for vengeance.

The Sugny farm was as silent as the others. He rapped on a shutter. The door opened almost at once, and his mother standing there said calmly, “Lucien. I was hoping you would come.” She bolted the door again and lit a lamp.

How ridiculous to have supposed she would need comfort. The obstinacy which saw beyond poverty to the future of her children saw as calmly beyond defeat. She held the lamp up to look at him; its light stroked her face, haggard, dark, smiling. Her body was strong, and, only because of its bones, broad: she was very thin. Squeezed between her endless work and her one passion, she had become an image, as angular as any above the door of the church, and not less enduring because, for her centuries of existence, she had to rely on passing her habits to a child, a little rigid but in good order, as she had had them from her own mother.

Lucien told her at once that he was on his way to La Rochelle, to get to England.

“Why?”

“To fight.”

“Yes, of course. The English are lucky, they live on an island.” She moved towards the stairs. “I have some money in the bedroom——”

“No, no,” Lucien said, smiling. “I have a thousand francs with me.”

“Oh? Where did you get them?”

“From the Prefect.”

His mother came back to him. For the first time, she was troubled. “What he must think of you, my little son! . . . I was always proud of you. Too much so, your aunt Victorine Sugny said. But I know she always hoped I should die when you were children, so that she could bring you up herself. She's a benevolent woman, and it gives her sinful ideas. . . . You're dropping with sleep.”

“I must go all the same,” Lucien said. He had passed, in these few minutes, from the anxieties and responsibility of a young man to a feeling of childish security, and back again to anxiety. Only in the village is time so faithful. “I don't like leaving you. They'll be here tomorrow.”

“The Germans?” his mother said drily. “We can manage the Germans in La Croisée, I hope. Father Hurel was saying yesterday that what with Romans, Goths, Arabs, and the English, we haven't had a minute's peace here since there were seasons. And I suppose there were always seasons. . . . Hailstorms or Goths—or Germans—what difference does it make?
. . . My little Lucien, when you come back, the Germans won't be here, but I shall be. Waiting. Only, you must promise me to come back. . . .”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Nothing could be less like La Rochelle than Plymouth. Nothing of the grandeur and the shabbiness, or the warmth and the poverty, nothing of the space, the narrow cloisters, the arms open to the Atlantic. Only an oppressive self-confidence, shops and houses which had the air of being bald, sunlight with a cold streak in it, stolid unnoticing crowds.

He had nothing to complain of; he had been questioned—in French; fed. He was not even going to be here long; in less than an hour he would be on his way to London. He felt certain that London would be an even more hideous disappointment. Looking back on them, the eleven days of his purgatory in a fishing-boat were so many fatal mistakes: he could feel them quarrelling with him in his stomach.

He ventured again into the street. You could only think of these people in negatives; they were not enemies, not rough, not rude. Equally they were not friends, their eyes had neither warmth nor curiosity, and they had no manners. Not one who reminded him of his family—apart from just that woman in black who resembled, nearly enough to give him a fright, his detested Aunt Victorine: she was even wearing his aunt's brooch.

He never wanted to know any of these people. Let them keep the secrets of their smugly neat houses—adulteries, sudden death, the frightened child left in alone at night. Folding his arms, he thought: Wherever you go, pretend that the village is round the corner, step out to avoid Trichet's barrel, smell pine, acid rot, warmth. . . . He looked at Catherine's letter in his pocket-book and wondered where in this cold tidy country Dorking, Surrey, was. Did it even matter? Even Catherine must have changed. She must be less simple, less beautiful; no doubt she had learned by now to talk without moving her lips. . . .

He made it a point of honour to sleep all the way to London, only opening his eyes once on a countryside of appalling neatness, coloured a sharp green and fastened down everywhere by hedges and blotches of brick. Roused by his companions
when they were nearing London, he watched it run against the train from every inch of the horizon: he had difficulty in keeping alive his exasperation and indifference. A thread, a single thread, of excitement floated before his eyes and was the Thames. . . . With the others, he tumbled, a little nervous, on to the platform. . . . Injustice and loneliness do not always triumph in this world, or not at once. The first person he saw was Colonel Rienne, who greeted him casually, as if London were Seuilly, who knew where he was being sent, and answered his timid question, “What's going to happen?” with a brusque gaiety, mocking him.

“It depends on you.”

The young man burst out laughing. This was a detestable country, but he had never felt happier or more confident. He was sorry he had come, but he was very glad, he was thankful, it would have been a pity to miss anything; obviously, he had made a fool of himself, a ridiculous fool, and done the right thing. Colonel Rienne had changed—for the better. He was younger and easier; a little malice had sharpened his smile, which was just as attentive, and with less patience. Lucien preferred an impatient Rienne; he preferred the malice, the new roughness—or had it only. been stifled?—the hint of arrogance. Was it possible that Rienne was a little ruthless, even a little vain? . . . Lucien smiled. Dorking, Surrey—what names! Ah, he thought, we shall have a son with eyes like a hawk.

THE END

For

GUY CHAPMAN

for the years and the kindness

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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ISBN: 9781448200399
eISBN: 9781448201716

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