The Charmers (21 page)

 

40

The year 1939 was upon us. It seemed like any other, spring merging into a summer of such blue-skied perfection surely winter would never return. I basked on the narrow beach, cooling my feet in water that lapped over pebbles smoothed by centuries of waves, and where Scott Fitzgerald had played out his life and love with his wild-crazy wife, Zelda. It was they who had cleared the tiny beach of its masses of seaweed and detritus to make a sweet little spot, half-hidden from the crowds, for sunbathing, for drinking rosé wine at noon, for wearing daring bathing suits and where their friends, the rich Americans, Gerald and the beautiful Sara Murphy held picnics. Sara, with her long string of pearls thrown casually back over her shoulder instead of in front, created a new fashion fad that year.

They were gone, of course, as were many Americans, heeding the warning signs and hurrying to embassies and consulates to obtain the all-important visas to Spain or Portugal that could get them out to safety and eventually home.

I never wore my pearls to the beach, but I did wear a rather daring white bathing suit. It was a thin silken fabric, ruched here and there to emphasize my curves and my waist. And of course I always wore my long hair in a braid, sometimes entwined with white ribbons, sometimes with a flower, a daisy perhaps, tucked into it. It was my style, my own fashion. I never copied anyone. I was always me. If that sounds egotistical, pretentious even, I can only say I am sorry, but it's true, I was unique.

My Iron Man, of course, was with me, though he spent much more time in the water than I ever did. I was always worried about my hair, like most women, and I hated those rubber bathing caps. He would emerge, dripping, usually carrying a shell, a conch, spiraled and cream with a pink interior that he swore looked like me. Or intimate parts of me, anyway.

It was at the end of a calm, hot day, when I noticed a woman standing at the back of the beach. She was tall, her long dark hair drifted over her shoulders in the fresh breeze that had sprung up, the way it often did of an evening. In fact, I had seen her several times, always standing in the same place, always with dark glasses, always watching. She'd made me feel uncomfortable, but I'd dismissed it; she was just a woman, taking the air, looking at the sea, as we did, because it gave us never-failing pleasure. After all, is there anything more sybaritic, more sensual than a long day spent at the beach in the shade of an umbrella, lying on a towel, gathering the sun into your body, like wine for the soul?

Now I gathered up our scattered belongings: the towels, the wet bathing suits, the books and sun creams, the tired bunches of grapes and cast-off sandals and began to walk back to the lane fronting the beach, where the villa was located. She turned her head as I approached. I threw her a friendly smile, as one does when sharing a beach, but this woman did not smile back.

Surprised, but untroubled, it was so insignificant a thing, I continued on my way, followed by my Iron Man, carrying the heavy bags. Behind me, I heard her say something. Since I was sure she was not addressing me, I simply walked on. Of course, I was not unaware of my Iron Man's attraction for women, but I was sure of him and sure of myself. I reigned, I believed, supreme in his life.

I heard his bare feet clacking across the slatted wooden walkway laid over the hot sand, and turned to smile at him, to say what a lovely day and that I had champagne cooling in the refrigerator. I did not say I also had a great surprise, a secret I was going to tell him over that delicious chilled glass, both of us cool and fresh from the shower, which was where I intended to make love to him, or he to me, or both to each other. The end of a perfect day.

I saw the polite puzzled smile on his face as the dark-haired woman confronted him. She grasped his arm and held onto it, talking all the while. I couldn't hear what she said and alarmed by her behavior, I hurried back toward them. She turned to look at me. I shall never forget that look. It was what hatred means, though why, I did not know. But I knew it was also what evil looked like.

And then I saw the gun.

It all happened in an instant, on a beach still busy with late sunbathers, swimmers, and children. I could hear their shrill happy cries, even as she lifted that gun and aimed it at me. I felt sure my heart stopped beating even before she shot. But then she swung around, held the gun to my lover's chest.

For me, the world stopped. It fell silent. Yet everything was going on as normal around us, the three of us isolated in our drama of terror.

Walt raised his arms above his head, he spoke softly to her, told her not to worry, everything was going to be alright, he would take care of her, make sure she was safe. I stood, frozen, listening to him saying these words to a madwoman who at any moment could blast him into eternity. I thought of the child he did not know about, growing inside of me, of our love, our lives together, our perfect happiness. Terrified, I lunged for that woman, screaming my own hatred and fear at her.

She went down under me. I heard Walt yelling at me to watch out, felt his weight as he threw himself over me, heard the dull thud of the first bullet, then the second and a third. I grabbed the revolver from her, even noting as I did that it was feminine, pearl-handled, a swanky kind of gun that I might have chosen myself. In fact that Walt had chosen for me. It was my gun she held. My gun with which she had shot my man. My child she was now threatening.

She lay back, hands held out in front of her, a mocking look in her eyes as she looked at me. “Go on, then, do it, why don't you?” she said.

So I shot her.

 

41

It all happened so quickly. In moments everything that had been so right went wrong. I remember sinking to my knees in the sand, putting my hands under my man's head, trying to lift his face to mine with some misguided thought of breathing life back into his lifeless mouth.

A group rapidly surrounded us, silent, shocked. “She shot him,” I heard someone say. “She shot the woman, then she shot him And isn't she Jerusha? And isn't he Walter Matthews? Iron Man Matthews? Oh my God,” I heard them saying, the words sounding as though they were in capital letters. And then, “Call the gendarmes immediately,” they cried.

Police sirens wailed as half a dozen cars, blue lights flashing, screeched onto the beach. What seemed like a dozen uniformed men spilled out. Two of them pried me off my dead lover. Others checked the body of the woman I had shot.

“She shot him,” I heard people saying. “But she shot the woman first. He'd gone to help her.” Jerusha was jealous. He'd been having an affair; the woman was known in the local cafés and bars and she'd told everybody about her famous lover. Nobody believed her, until now. Because how could Jerusha's lover want another woman? They had mocked the girl, at first. But now they saw it was true, and I had taken my revenge, the way all betrayed women did. I was, they said, a classic case.

I heard it all through a haze of grief as the gendarmes took me, unhandcuffed as a tribute to my fame and for the benefit of the photographers that clamored around as they walked me from the beach to the police car, pushing my head down to get me into the backseat, a cop sitting to either side, both smiling for those same photographers. That photograph went around the world. It was my epitaph.

I told them I was three months pregnant and was afraid I'd lose my baby, so they took me back to the Villa Romantica and summoned a doctor. It was thought the hospital was too public a place and privacy was essential if the case was not to be tainted. For when I went to court, they meant. Accused of two murders.

I was healthy. I was famous. I wasn't even a widow because we had not been married, though I'd meant to propose to him when I told him about our happy event, that was no longer so happy. I had killed my baby's father. I had no right to that baby. Iron Man Matthews had given me his heart and I had taken his life.

How does one live with such a burden on one's soul? How do you come to terms with the death of the man you loved, when you were the cause of his death? Of course, there was no way.

It was Rex, my ex-lover, my honorable man, who came to my aid, who mapped out my defense and exactly why I would never have shot any man, especially one I loved. I was not just “any woman,” I remember him telling the courts. I was Jerusha. It would be impossible for any man to cheat on me. And, he added, he should know.

Stunned, the court took him at his word. They respected his courage in standing up in court, a man like him, with his background, for a woman like me, with my background. Jerusha was already a household word, and now he became one.

After it was over, I thanked him, of course, briefly, in private, in a small bleak room behind the court that smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes. The walls were institutional green, the overhead lighting harsh and unflattering, but still Rex told me I was beautiful.

“I'll never forget,” he said as he kissed me first on one cheek, then the other, and then a third time, as we did in the South of France.

“That one is for memory,” he said, smiling as he departed.

I shall always love him for that.

In a quick decision, a judge found me guilty of the murder of the unknown woman and of my lover. But, this was France and this was a
crime passionelle
, a “love crime,” where it is believed the balance of one's mind is disturbed. Add to that, not only was my lover said to have been cheating on me, I was also carrying his child.

They were lenient. I would not die for my crime. I would not even go to jail. I would be taken to some safe place in the country where I would bear my baby in secret. It would then be taken from me and given to the sorrowing members of the father's family, to raise, in England. I would never be allowed to see my child again.

It was the cruelest punishment they could ever have thought of. No woman could ever have done this to me. This was men's justice.

She was beautiful, my tiny baby. Well, at least I thought so, but then doesn't every woman on first seeing her newborn, exclaim how beautiful she is? I named her for her beauty. Jolie. French for pretty. She was always, forever after to be known as Jolly. And I never did see her again.

I remained in France while she was to live in England with the large Matthews clan that loved her and cared for her and saw she was happy. To her, her mother was dead. Rest in peace. I know they would have told her that and I feel sure she nodded sorrowfully. I think she would have liked to have had a mother. I hope she would have liked me. I know I would have liked her.

I left the Villa Romantica and went to live in the lower mountain regions of the Luberon, where I bought a small farm, nothing more than a homestead really, a few hectares, a few animals, goats that butted me and made me laugh; a cow splotched black and white that gave me milk that I sold at market, with so much cream it would make anyone gain weight. I found a little brown dog in the window of a store with beseeching eyes that told me he was as lonely as I was. I named him Enfant, child in French, which got me some stares when I called for the child and a dog answered. The joke made me laugh at least. The gray cat who had adopted us at the villa came with me and soon acclimated himself, the way cats can, to his new surroundings. His devotion was first to his home and second to me, but I settled for that.

The canary was part of a traveling circus troupe that came through the small town. He walked across a wire singing his song while people applauded. I swear that, like myself, that bird never got over his moment of fame. He loved an audience. But I could not bear his life of servitude so I paid a small fortune, as it seemed to the owner, and took him back to his new home, where he sang every day—and sometimes nights—for my enjoyment, as well as his own.

So there we were, me and my new little family, making the best of what we had, who we were, content, happy even, in each other's company. The past, with a great effort, was put behind us.

And then the war came and changed everything.

 

42

The real war, the hand-to-hand fighting, the tanks, the bombing, did not come immediately to the South of France. For a while, life seemed almost normal. The market opened every morning, the fishermen delivered their catch, though admittedly now smaller since they did not venture out as far; the purveyor of fresh eggs rode her bicycle, fragile bags dangling from the handlebars, then sat sipping her usual mug of cold coffee topped up with a slug of crème de menthe, “to keep out the morning chill,” as she told us, each and every morning.

At first, I kept to myself, as was my custom, but then I was sitting with my usual glass of red and a slab of St. André cheese, which I liked because of its semisoftness. It was not runny, but had just enough texture to get your knife through, to smear a little onto a piece of the excellent—baked at six
A.M.
—“baton,” which is the same as a baguette, only thinner, which gives more crust.

“Madame Matthews?”

I glanced up at the man who had, without my leave, taken the seat opposite. I knew he could not be French. No Frenchman would have been so impolite. I chose to ignore him.

“I wish to speak to you on a matter of importance for La France.” He leaned forward, gazing earnestly at me, as though making sure no one could overhear.

Now, when anyone speaks of La France, and not simply “France,” you understand immediately it is important.

“You speak of my country,” I said, arranging my cheese on a morsel of bread and taking a bite. “Though you are not French.”

“I am speaking of what you can do for your country, Madame. And you are correct, I am English. But it is your country that I, and others like me, wish to help. And you are in a position to help all of us.”

I listened carefully while he explained that he was a member of the British Intelligence Service, that they needed to connect with French people who had access to the Nazis because of who they were, and who they knew, or who they might meet at social events where gossip flowed as easily as the wine, and where many a detail of a planned raid or a troop movement or the whereabouts of important enemies might be overheard, and noted. And then passed on to the trusty intelligence officer, who recruited me right there and then, as a member.