Léon and Louise (4 page)

Having eaten the last of the three cheese sandwiches Aunt Sophie had given him, Léon took off his shoes and massaged his aching feet. Now and then he peered along the deserted road in both directions. A gust of wind spattered him with drizzle, but it soon stopped. A midnight blue lorry drove past with ‘L'Espoir' on the side in gold lettering. Not long afterwards a dog came trotting across the fields. It suddenly dawned on Léon what an ass he was making of himself with his blade of grass and his ostentatious air of relaxation. If the girl passed by again, she would see through his act at a glance. He spat out the grass and put on his shoes again. Then he vaulted over the ditch on to the road and got back on his bicycle.

S
aint-Luc-sur-Marne station was situated amid wheat and potato fields half a kilometre outside the town, on a branch line of the Chemins de Fer du Nord. The station building was built of red brick, the goods shed of weather-worn spruce. Léon was given a black uniform that had sergeant's stripes on the arm and fitted him – surprisingly enough – like a glove. He was the sole subordinate of his sole superior, Antoine Barthélemy, the stationmaster. A thin, mild-mannered little man who smoked a pipe and sported a moustache
à la
Vercingetorix, Barthélemy performed his duties in a taciturn and conscientious manner. Day after day, he spent many hours drawing little geometrical patterns on his notepad as he patiently anticipated the moment when he could go back upstairs to his official residence above the booking hall. There he was wistfully awaited around the clock by Josianne, his wife of several decades, who had rosy cheeks and plump hips, laughed heartily at the drop of a hat, and was an excellent cook.

There wasn't a great deal to do at Saint-Luc-sur-Marne station. In accordance with the timetable, three local trains travelling in each direction stopped there every morning and afternoon. The expresses sped past at high speed, trailing a slipstream that took your breath away if you were standing on the platform. The Calais-Paris night train went by at 2.27 a.m., its darkened sleeping cars sometimes punctuated by an illuminated window because some wealthy passenger couldn't get to sleep in his nice, soft bunk.

To Léon Le Gall's own surprise, he proved more or less equal to his job as assistant Morse telegraphist from the first day on. His duties began at eight in the morning and ended at eight in the evening, with a one-hour break at lunchtime. He got Sundays off. One of his tasks was to go out on to the platform when a train came in and wave a little red flag at the driver. In the mornings he had to exchange the mailbag and the bag containing the Paris newspapers for the empty bags of the previous day. If a farmer handed in a crate of leeks or spring onions for delivery as freight, he had to weigh the goods and make out a waybill. And if the Morse machine was ticking he had to tear off the paper strip and transfer the messages to a telegram form. They were always official messages because the Morse machine was used exclusively by the railway.

Léon's assertion that he could Morse had, of course, been a brazen lie. He had passed the practical test on the mayor's desk because the mayor knew even less about the subject than he did himself. Fortunately, however, Saint-Luc-sur-Marne station was a remote place that received four or five telegrams a day at most; so Léon had all the time in the world to decipher them with the aid of
Le Petit Inventeur,
which he had been provident enough to pack.

It was somewhat more awkward when he himself had a message to send, which happened every two days or so. Before settling down at the Morse machine he would closet himself in the lavatory with paper and pencil and translate the Roman letters into dots and dashes. That was all right as long as the telegrams consisted of a few words only, but on his third Monday in the job his boss handed him the monthly report and told him to send it, verbatim and in full, to regional headquarters in Rheims.

‘By post?' asked Léon. leafing through the four quite closely-written pages.

‘No, telegraphically,' said Barthélemy. ‘It's regulations.'

‘Why?'

‘No idea, it's just regulations. Always has been.'

Léon nodded, debating what to do. On the dot of half-past nine, when his boss went upstairs to his Josianne to have some coffee as usual, he picked up the telephone, asked to be put through to regional headquarters in Rheims, and proceeded to dictate the report as if this had been customary for decades. When the telephonist complained about the unwonted extra work, he explained that the Morse machine had been struck by lightning last night and put out of action.

Léon's room was on the upper floor of the goods shed, far away from the stationmaster's flat. He had his own bed, a table and chair, a washstand with a mirror, and a window overlooking the platform. He was undisturbed there and could do as he pleased. Most of the time he didn't do much, just lay on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head and stared at the grain of the beams above him.

The stationmaster's wife, whom he was privileged to call Madame Josianne, brought him his meals at midday and in the evening. She showered him with maternal solicitude and verbal endearments, called him her sweetheart, cherub, duckling and treasure, enquired after the state of his digestion, the quality of his sleep and his mental welfare, offered to cut his hair, knit him some woollen socks, hear his confession and wash his underclothes.

Apart from that no one troubled him, and this he much appreciated. When a train went by he would go to the window, count the carriages, goods wagons and cattle wagons, and try to guess what they were carrying. On one occasion he went back to his room with a newspaper a passenger had left behind on a bench, but after a few minutes he tired of the reports about Clemenceau's latest cabinet reshuffle, butter rationing, troop movements on the Chemin des Dames and the Banque de France's bullion sales. He couldn't muster any real interest in the national war economy either, now that Cherbourg beach was so far away, and he gradually admitted to himself that, strictly speaking, the only thing in the world that really interested him was the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse.

Although he hadn't seen her again since the day he arrived, he couldn't help thinking of her the whole time. What might her name be? Jeanne? Marianne? Dominique? Françoise? Sophie? He softly and experimentally said each name aloud and wrote it with his finger on the floral rug beside his bed.

Léon felt happy in his new abode. He didn't miss his old life. Why should he have felt homesick? He could get on his bike and pedal back to Cherbourg any time he wanted. His parents would always, to the end of their days, welcome him with open arms in their eternally unchanging little house in the Rue des Fossées, and Cherbourg beach would still be there when he got back, exactly the same as when he left it, and he would put to sea in the sailing dinghy with Patrice and Joël as if no time had intervened, and after three days everyone in Cherbourg would have forgotten that he'd been away at all. And so, although he sometimes felt lonely, he was in no rush to go home. For the moment, he might just as well remain in Saint-Luc and try out his new, self-determined existence.

The only unpleasant feature of his room was the way the goods shed's beams and timber walls creaked and groaned. It was enough to give one the creeps. They whimpered by day when the sun warmed them up; they moaned at night when they cooled down again; they snapped and crackled at dawn when the air was at its coldest; and they creaked at sunrise when they warmed up again. At times it sounded as if someone were climbing the stairs to Léon's room; at others as if someone were creeping across the roof space or scratching the wall of the adjoining room with a screwdriver. Although he knew perfectly well that there was no one there, he couldn't help listening and never got to sleep before midnight.

So he took to going for long bicycle rides through the surrounding countryside after supper and not returning until long after nightfall, when he was good and tired. But because the sea was far away and there was nothing to see for kilometres around but pancake-flat wheat and potato fields threaded with impenetrable hazel hedges and brackish drainage channels, his excursions became steadily shorter and ended ever sooner in the little town.

In the early summer of 1918, Saint-Luc-sur-Marne comprised a couple of hundred buildings arranged in concentric rings around the Place de la République. In the innermost ring stood a pretentiously classicistic town hall, a primary school in the same architectural style, and one or two middle-class residences. There were also a covered market, the
Brasserie des Artistes,
the
Café du Commerce,
and a Romanesque church outside which, despite the priest's fierce opposition, a public urinal had been built by order of the maliciously anticlerical mayor. In the central ring were the post office, two bakeries, a hairdressing salon and a grocer's, as well as a butcher's, an ironmonger's and a clothes shop entitled
Aux Galeries Place Vendôme
from which the little town's female citizens and the local farmers' wives bought what they considered to be Parisian chic. Located among the humbler homes in the outermost ring were the smiths and joiners and the retail outlets of the agricultural association, also a saddlery, the memorial to the dead of 1870, the undertaker's, a machine shop, and the fire station.

So far, Saint-Luc-sur-Marne had survived the hostilities unscathed. The front had come unpleasantly close during the first year of the war and again in the third, and almost within eyeshot there were expanses of ruins that had once been thriving villages, but Saint-Luc itself had been spared the horrors of war. The worst the town had had to endure was the requisitioning of its fire engine by a battalion commander in transit, as well as occasional incursions by hordes of soldiers on leave from the front and doggedly determined to spend all their pay in a single night.

Other than that, the people of Saint-Luc had grown accustomed to the curious fact that the war raged only where it was actually being waged, while only just around the corner buttercups bloomed, market women offered their wares for sale, and mothers plaited coloured ribbons into their daughters' hair.

As a new arrival Léon had assumed that the
Café du Commerce
was the tradesmen's regular haunt, whereas the
Brasserie des Artistes
was the rendezvous of the local artists and intellectuals. Needless to say, it was the other way round. In Saint-Luc, as elsewhere in the world, the most successful lawyers, shopkeepers and craftsmen felt that their lives suffered from a certain lack of aesthetic and intellectual stimulation in the evenings, when they had counted their day's takings and locked them up securely in the safe, so they liked to spend their meagre leisure hours in the
Brasserie des Artistes,
which they held to be an artists' rendezvous because of the nicotine-stained Toulouse-Lautrec prints on its walls. It was in fact a long time since this supposed artists' rendezvous had been frequented by any artists because, outnumbered by their culturally aspiring fellow citizens, they had fled across the square and into the
Café du Commerce
. There Saint-Luc's bohemians now sat night after night at a safe distance from the bourgeoisie, just as bored as the latter and afflicted by the undeniable fact that an artist's life, too, is nowhere near as amusing and eventful as it ought to be by rights.

The bohemians of Saint-Luc consisted of two schoolmasters with literary pretensions, each of whom thought himself by far the other's artistic superior, the church organist, who suffered from chronic melancholia, a bachelor watercolourist, the lisping stonemason, and a handful of old-established drunks, windbags and pensioners. Defiantly cheerful, they all sat together at their regular table near the cylindrical stove whose flue ran straight across the taproom and disappeared through the kitchen wall, drinking Pernod and exhaling garlic fumes, while barely a hundred kilometres away complete age-groups of young men were being shot, gassed and blown to pieces.

To be fair to the windbags, it wasn't their fault that they were doing so well out of the war. The streets were paved with gold now that the government was keeping soldiers and their families sweet with generous pay, allowances and pensions. It was true that money couldn't always buy everything you had a fancy for, but there was plenty of bread, bacon and cheese. The wine at the
Commerce
might be slightly watered down on occasion, but it was cheap and not too sour and didn't give you a headache.

It had naturally come to the ears of the regulars long ago that old Barthélemy at the station had acquired someone to assist him in his far from onerous duties, so Léon didn't have to introduce himself the first time he came through the glass door in his railwayman's uniform. ‘
A vos ordres, mon général!
' the senior windbag had called, giving him a sedentary salute, and one of the schoolmasters, having joined Léon at the counter, questioned him closely, on behalf of the local community, about his previous existence, present circumstances and future plans.

The regulars were relieved to note in the course of the ensuing evenings that Léon didn't shoot his mouth off or pick fights, but stood quietly at the counter, drank a glass or two of Bordeaux, and – as befitted a youth of his age – politely withdrew after half an hour.

Léon was in the
Commerce
every night. He exchanged a few words, sometimes with the landlord and sometimes with his daughter, who stood behind the counter every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. She was a tall, serious girl who looked rather dreamy but kept an eagle eye on every customer's tab, no matter how big the drinking session. Léon, who was aware that she sometimes threw him sidelong, searching glances, tried to conceal from her that his own focus of attention was the door.

Because he wasn't there for the sake of the red wine, of course, but mainly in the hope that the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse would sooner or later walk in. She'd had no luggage on the rack of her bike, so she had to be living in the locality – if not in Saint-Luc itself, then in one of the surrounding villages. The town was small. After a few days, hardly a face was unfamiliar to him. He knew the priest and the three gendarmes and the sacristan and the street urchins and the flower girls by sight, but he never rediscovered the pretty cyclist, neither in the churchyard nor the laundry nor the flower shop, nor on the benches in the Place de la République, nor under the plane trees flanking the canal, nor at the entrance to the brick works on the other side of the railway line. He had once sprinted after a female cyclist until she dismounted and turned out to be the wife of the baker in the Rue des Moines. On another occasion he had heard some rhythmical squeaks but failed to locate their source before they grew fainter and died away altogether.