Léon and Louise (6 page)

Many people revered Louise like a saint, but she didn't like this. In order to destroy the halo they tried to impose on her, she smoked her sugared cigarettes, bathed half-naked in the Channel on Sundays, and acquired an arsenal of coarse expletives that contrasted strangely with her slender figure, girlish voice and educated French.

The worst thing was, news of a soldier's death often got to Saint-Luc long before the ministerial notification – for instance when a comrade home on leave reported at the kitchen table that Jacquet, the schoolmaster, was lying at the bottom of a muddy shell-hole with his skull shattered, whereupon the news spread like wildfire from house to house until it reached every kitchen table in the town save the one to which Jacquet, the schoolmaster, would never return; for the spreading of rumours was a punishable offence and notification of a death had to be conveyed to the bereaved through official channels alone, to preclude any distressing errors and mix-ups. This was how it came about that Jacquet's widow, who still had no idea she was one, bought a big joint of beef at the market in joyful expectation of her husband's home leave. Meanwhile, the other women timidly and sympathetically watched her out of the corner of their eye, and then, so as not to arouse suspicion, greeted her as casually as they could manage.

Once Louise had taken over the job, however, this problem too was solved. ‘Go and tell little Louise right away,' any soldier coming home with bad news would be told from now on. When Louise's squeaking bicycle pulled up outside her front door, a previously unsuspecting widow knew at once that it would be a long time before she bought a joint of beef big enough for two.

Léon Le Gall walked home in a very pensive mood the night the landlord told him all this. It was not only the first warm night of the year but one of those nights on which you could see the sheet lightning generated by the front line beyond Saint-Quentin; and occasionally, when the wind was blowing from the north-west, you could also hear distant peals of thunder. Léon unbuttoned his jacket and took off his cap. He watched the vagaries of his own shadow, which lay at his feet, short and crisply defined, whenever he walked under a lamp-post, then gradually lengthened and was bleached by the intensifying glow of the next lamp-post until it lay at his feet and grew brighter and paler once more. He removed his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. It was far too warm for the time of year, and he now wondered why it had never occurred to him in the last five weeks and three days, when going for his evening stroll, to take off his official garb with its ludicrous sergeant's stripes.

The station building at the far end of the avenue of plane trees was in darkness. No light was on upstairs either. Léon pictured old Barthélemy, blissfully snuggled up against the comforting warmth of his Josianne, slumbering his way towards another working day beneath a thick duvet. He walked across the station yard to the goods shed, then climbed the creaking stairs. His silent room hummed with the echoes of his memories of the day just past.

He reflected that, next morning and on all the mornings that followed, he would be greeting incoming trains with his little red flag. He thought of his jiggery-pokery with the Morse transmitter, of his fear of the creaking beams, and of his taciturn evenings at the bar of the
Café du Commerce,
and he came to the conclusion that what he had hitherto done in life could not be called good. It wasn't bad either, because he hadn't so far done any damage worth mentioning and had never harmed anyone or done much that he would have been ashamed to admit to his parents; but it was also true that none of his daily doings was truly important, fine or good, and he certainly had no reason to be proud of anything.

Léon didn't know how long he'd been asleep when the sound of voices woke him. It was coming from outside the window, which he'd left open because the night was so warm, and it was accompanied by a peculiar stench – a mixture of disgusting smells whose source he couldn't identify. He got out of bed and looked down at the platform. There in the dim light of the gas lamps stood a long train made up of goods wagons and cattle wagons, and old Barthélemy and Madame Josianne were bustling along the platform from one to the next. Léon descended the stairs in his bare feet, stripped to the waist.

The train was so long, it seemed to have no beginning or end. Many of the wagons were closed and many open, but issuing from them all was that frightful stench of putrefaction and excrement, together with the voices of men groaning and screaming and begging for water.

‘What are you doing here, boy?' said Madame Josianne, who was doling out water to the soldiers in a big pitcher. They were sitting or lying on bare wooden planks strewn with straw, their faces glistening with sweat in the light of the gas lamps. Their uniforms were filthy, their bandages soaked in blood.

‘Madame Josianne...'

‘Go back to bed, my pet, this is nothing for you.'

‘But what's going on here?'

‘Just a hospital train, my angel, just a hospital train. It's taking the poor fellows south to hospitals in Dax, Bordeaux, Lourdes and Pau, so they soon get better.'

‘Can I help?'

‘That's kind of you, my treasure, but now go. Go on!'

‘I could fetch some water.'

‘No need. We're used to it, your chief and I. You young people shouldn't see such sights.'

‘But Madame Josianne...'

‘Go to your room at once, my pet. At once! And shut the window, you hear?'

Léon tried to protest and looked round for Barthélemy in search of support, but as soon as the stationmaster heard his Josianne raise her voice he came hurrying up. He eyed Léon sternly and pursed his lips so that the bristles of his moustache stood out horizontal, then pointed to the goods shed and hissed:

‘Do as madame says! Dismissed!'

So Léon gave up and went back to his room, but he left the window open in defiance of Josianne's instructions. Stationing himself in the shadows behind the curtain, he watched what was happening on the platform. When the train pulled out he flopped down on his bed and, because the whole incident had tired him out, fell asleep even before the nocturnal breeze had carried the last remnants of the stench away.

It so happened that just before work began the next morning, as Léon was on his way from the goods shed to the station building, little Louise came riding along the avenue with her bike squeaking urgently. Reaching the station, she applied the back-pedal brake so hard that gravel crunched beneath her wheels and a cloud of dust went drifting across the forecourt. She left her bicycle in the bike shelter and ran up the three steps to the booking hall. Léon would have liked to follow her, but it was his unpostponable duty to get his red flag from the office and be standing on the platform by the time the 8.07 a.m. passenger train arrived.

When the train pulled in, Louise was the only passenger to emerge from the booking hall. Léon was relieved to note that she was holding a ticket in her hand but carrying no luggage, so she couldn't be going away for long. All that annoyed him was that she waved to him just as he, for his part, had to wave his red flag at the incoming locomotive.

‘
Salut,
Léon!' she called as she trotted along beside the train and opened the door of a third-class carriage. Oh, he thought, so she knows my first name. Had he introduced himself last night at the
Café du Commerce
? No, he hadn't. He ought to have, of course. It would have been only polite, but he hadn't, so she must have learned his name some other way – possibly even have made a point of finding it out? Oh-oh. And she hadn't forgotten his name overnight; on the contrary, she had memorized it. And now she had uttered his name with her mouth, lips and little white teeth – with the breath of her body. Oh-oh-oh.

‘
Salut,
Louise!' he called when he'd recovered his composure and she was about to jump aboard the still moving train. He stood enshrouded in the locomotive's hissing spurts of steam and waited the regulation minute after which, pursuant to the timetable, he had to signal the driver to continue on his way. The train moved off and Léon, craning his neck, ran to the door behind which Louise had disappeared. But because the platform was too low and the windows were too high, he couldn't see the passengers sitting on the far side of the compartment. Then the train pulled out and Louise was gone.

Léon stared after the red rear light until it was out of sight beyond the brick works, and he kept a lingering eye on the locomotive's plume of smoke. Then he repaired with his red flag to the office, where Madame Josianne had left him some coffee and two
tartines.

When he went out into the forecourt at lunchtime his eye lighted on Louise's bicycle in the shelter. Looking around to make sure he was unobserved, he went over and examined it. An ordinary old gentleman's bike that had once been black, it had rusty gear sprockets, a worn-out chain and solid tyres with no tread left on them. The gear change was broken and the chain guard bent. Gingerly, he rested his hands on the cracked, bleached leather grips on the handlebars, squeezed them hard and then held both palms to his nose to catch a whiff of Louise's scent, but all he could smell was leather and his own hands.

Crouching down, he examined the chain guard and discovered that it really was the cause of the squeak. He tried to straighten the bent section with both thumbs, but failed because of the sprocket behind it. He fetched two screwdrivers and a hammer from the workshop, removed the metal guard, and hammered it flat against the goods shed's timber wall. Then he oiled the rusty chain, screwed the guard on again, and made one experimental circuit of the station yard.

When Léon embarked on his usual after-supper bike ride into town, he was wearing his slacks, his white shirt, and the grey cardigan his mother had knitted him during her sleepless nights before his departure. Having ridden across the station yard in the afterglow of the sunny day, he set off up the avenue – and saw someone standing beside the fifth plane tree along on the right-hand side of the road.