Charlotte Gray

  It was thickly dark behind the closed shutters, and the clouds from the mountain rim obscured the sky. Charlotte held on to Antoinette as she lay down and crossed the borderlines from sleep to vague wakefulness and back again, unwilling quite to let go in case the same dream was waiting. She felt Antoinette’s hands gently stroke her hair, found herself calmed and once more drifting. Antoinette kissed her cheek and Charlotte felt her hands caress her shoulders with soothing movements till they both slept.

  5

  AT NINE O’CLOCK a bicycle turned up the long, stony track to the Domaine. The young woman who rode it was dressed in simple clothes and had no bag or luggage with her. It was as though she herself, her body, was all that she was bringing.

  In Lavaurette it was another bright day and the plane trees that lined the pot-holed path, with their pale leaves and peeling, eczemaic trunks, were noisy with the sound of birds.

  When she arrived at the front door the woman propped her bicycle against a pillar and mounted the broad stone steps; she did not sound the iron bell-pull, but pushed open one half of the arched front door with practised familiarity and let herself into the house. A light aroma of coffee from the remote kitchen was just discernible in a heavier atmosphere of old plaster, wood and unmoved air. She turned to the right and walked across the flagged hall to another double door, which led into a dining room. The sprung floor cushioned her swift pace as she crossed the huge, grey-panelled room with its twenty-seater table, at one end of which was a single candlestick, a plate and an empty wine glass. She gathered these on her way through to a pantry where she deposited them in the stone sink: washing up was not her job; that was for the maid, who, as usual, was late.

  In the vaulted kitchen she took a coffee pot from the range and filled two small white cups. She took them through a scullery and out to the narrow back staircase which gave her access to the first floor without having to return to the main hall. Up the steps, past the empty servants’ bedrooms she climbed, carefully watching the black liquid in her hands. There was a smell of lime from the old wood of the staircase. She breached the frontier into the main part of the house and walked along the sunlit corridor to the principal bedroom, where she paused, put the cups down on the landing windowsill, and knocked.

  Levade’s voice called her in.

  ‘Good morning, Anne-Marie.’

  The room was dominated by a huge bed with a canopy and drapes which had been rolled and pinned back. The rugs on the floor had also been pushed to one side. The floor was littered with canvases, tubes of paint, drawings on pieces of paper, messed palettes, books opened and weighted down at a particular illustration, books closed and piled, glass jars full of brushes, pots of cleaner, chisels, hammers, small boxes of nails brought by Julien from Madame Galliot’s top shelf and wooden stretchers in various stages of assembly. The numerous tables in the room were covered by cloths and by more books, candles and religious statues.

  Levade was shaved and dressed; he had combed his thick white hair and found a clean shirt which hung down outside his trousers almost to his knees. He stood in front of the window where the north light was clear.

  Anne-Marie crossed to a screen in a remote corner of the room, behind which was a paint-spattered chair with a long green silk skirt and a pair of thin-strapped sandals. She took off her own clothes and put on the skirt and sandals; then she emerged from behind the screen.

  She stood in the middle of the room, bare-breasted, unselfconscious. ‘Did you have a good night?’

  Levade shook his head. ‘No.’ His voice was melancholic but resigned. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Are we going to carry on from where we were yesterday?’ said Anne-Marie.

  ‘I think so.’ Levade put down his empty coffee cup and, as Anne-Marie sat down on a chair in front of the window, went over to arrange the fall of the green skirt. He looked at the half-finished canvas on the easel and compared the image of Anne-Marie with the actual woman. He went back and moved her arms a little, settled her hair and fussed over the folds of the skirt.

  Anne-Marie had picked up a book from the floor and skimmed through it as Levade arranged her.

  ‘What about you?’ said Levade. ‘Did you dream?’

  ‘Nothing I can remember. My dreams are so dull compared to the ones you’ve described, the ones you used to have.’

  Levade took up his brush and pushed back his hair. ‘I think the last dream I had was about a month ago. Do you know what I dreamed? That I had woken up, that it was morning, that I had got up, washed, come to this room to paint, that you arrived . . . It wasn’t really a dream at all. It was more prosaic than being awake.’

  Levade shook his head and smiled. Anne-Marie crossed her arms.

  The telephone was ringing in Julien’s office.

  ‘I’m putting you through now,’ said Pauline Bobotte.

  It was a Communist from Limoges, whom Julien, against his better judgement, had approached for information. He did not want to associate with Communists, but in times of war you sometimes had to be expedient. Even as he explained this to himself he realised that this was exactly the argument employed by Pétain and Laval. The difference was that his position was not merely expedient, it had moral backing; also, his judgement, unlike theirs, was sound. So he hoped.

  ‘There was an enormous round-up in Paris last month. Tens of thousands of Jews, French as well as refugees. Apparently the police took them to a winter sports stadium. But that business a few days ago, that was the first time they’ve done it in the Free Zone. I’m told they’ll take them to Paris and eventually they’ll deport them. No one seems to know where to.’

  Julien nodded. ‘Thank you. Will you telephone again if you hear anything?’

  ‘That depends. We may need some help from you.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The line went dead, and Pauline Bobotte removed the plug from her switchboard.

  Julien sighed. Tonight he would have to go and see Sylvie Cariteau and her mother. Between them they would decide what to tell André and Jacob, and also what to do with them. It was difficult to make out from the newspapers exactly what was happening; but, from what he had read and what he had seen, it was clear to Julien that there would be no let-up in the persecution of Jews. Whatever the Vichy government believed, the Germans were beginning to lose the war. In Julien’s simple analysis this meant that their behaviour in the countries they occupied would become more exacting: they would require more money, more food and more labour. If their armies abroad met with reverses, that was all the more reason why they would be rigorous in pursuing whatever ends they could achieve in Europe. And since, for reasons no one outside Germany could fully understand, the collection of Jews into various camps seemed central to a particular strand of Nazi planning, then life for André and Jacob would in the future become more, not less, hazardous.

  It was partly to do with his generally optimistic temperament and partly to do with his ingrained trust in his country that Julien did not pause to consider his own position. Although his father Levade was three-quarters Jewish, wholly on his mother’s side and half on his father Rutkowski’s, Julien, because Levade married a Catholic, had only one wholly Jewish grandparent, Max Rutkowski’s wife, though that could be computed as one and a half if Rutkowski’s half-Jewishness were included. The other mathematical way of expressing it would be to say that Julien was three-eighths Jewish. Since this ridiculous fraction had never seemed of the slightest importance to him, he could not imagine that it would be of interest to anyone else in France.

  Tonight he would go down to the Café du Centre and take the temperature of Lavaurette. He presumed its dismal chorus was at least vaguely representative of what the small towns of France were thinking, if only in the degree of its ignorance.

  He was also expecting to hear soon from the English girl who had dropped by parachute. She was surprisingly dark for what he had expected from an English person, but the hazel-husk intensity of her eyes in the lamp-lit farm kitc
hen was something he could not forget.

  In the lavatory of the train that was crawling towards Clermont-Ferrand Charlotte read the scribbled feelings of previous travellers. ‘War has been declared by the City of London,’ was one view, accompanied by a caricature of a Fagin-like face with wispy beard. This had drawn agreement from another writer: ‘Saxon + Jew + Tartar = the Beast’.

  Did these statements, scored in the bold capitals of anonymity, express the true feelings of the French people? Was this what they would really say if they were free to speak? Charlotte chose to think not. Although the passion of anti-British feeling (anti-English as they mistakenly called it) continued to shock her, she did not believe, and could not allow herself to believe, that it was universal. She had only to think, after all, of her reception on the night of her arrival.

  She made her way back down the corridor and resumed her seat, which the obliging woman next to her had agreed to keep reserved. Charlotte smiled at her, then looked fixedly out of the window. It had taken her only a few minutes with the Michelin Guide to work out which of the two Citroën garages must be the one she wanted. Gregory had definitely said ‘In the middle of Clermont’; the telephone directory confirmed that the owner was ‘A. Chollet’. She calculated that she could be back on the train by seven o’clock.

  To her right she saw a branch line that wound up through the thermal station of la Bourboule to le Mont-Dore. Clouds were drifting down off the mountain and the summer sun of Lavaurette seemed far away; it was beginning to feel cold in the unheated carriage.

  Antoinette had woken her at nine o’clock with a tray on which was bread and jam and something that tasted reasonably like coffee. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched while Charlotte ate; she was wearing her blue pinafore, and Gilberte was already dealing with the first customer downstairs. Charlotte hurried through her farewells and promised to write to Antoinette from England when the war was over. As she was leaving Antoinette pressed a bottle into her hand: it was hair dye. ‘Just in case,’ said Antoinette as she kissed her goodbye.

  Half an hour from Clermont Charlotte began to feel a tightening of fear. A police inspection of identity cards passed with its usual swift indifference, but it reminded her of how alone and uncovered she was, without even the stories prepared for her in London. While she carried out the elementary task for Mr Jackson and lived within the limited identity of Dominique Guilbert, she had felt a degree of protection and attachment: it had been like the moment in the Whitley when the sergeant showed her the firm connection of the static line that would ensure her safety. Now she was in free fall.

  The train slunk in beneath the vaulted ironwork, snorting steam. Charlotte gripped her suitcase and fought her way down on to the platform. In the forecourt of the station she studied a map which showed the tram routes. She crossed the street to what she hoped was the appropriate stop. There was the usual confusion of pushing people: respectable men in felt hats with clipped moustaches, small widows with jabbing elbows. Squeezed upright between two people near the entrance to the tramcar, Charlotte lodged her case between her feet and grasped at a hanging strap as the tram jolted off towards the middle of town.

  She found her way to the street at the end of the rue Blatin and looked down the broad and cloudy thoroughfare. In this weather it had a faded, monochromatic look, compounded by the fact that there were so few cars; it felt like looking back to before the war, even to before the last war. At the top of a five-storey building on one side was the painted name of Franck Gorce, Tailor. At ground-floor level, behind curved railings, was a bar called the Faisan Doré with a few unoccupied chairs on the pavement. Opposite was the curved facade of the Crédit Lyonnais, its name cut in deep italics in the stone above the towering doors.

  Charlotte looked down the unhindered vista of the street to the distant bulk of the Massif Central, many miles beyond but framed and set in perspective by the straight lines of the rue Blatin. It seemed typical of how the civilisation had imposed itself on the country and of how it had grown in a harmony that seemed both inevitable and impossible to disturb. The sight released in Charlotte the memory of another such street, one she had seen as a child on her first excursion across the Channel with her father. It was the view that always came to mind when anyone mentioned France to her.

  She made her way along the pavement, calculating the likely distance to her destination. It took her ten minutes to see the street name, high up on a corner, and five more to reach the garage itself, which was at the run-down end of the road, where it became commercial and unkempt.

  Charlotte went through the double wooden doors into the oily gloom. She was trembling. A woman in widow’s black, bespectacled, with a tight, narrow mouth emerged from a partitioned area on the right. Charlotte had somehow not expected a woman. It was very dark.

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘I’m looking for Monsieur Chollet.’

  ‘He’s working on a car. He’s down at the end there.’

  ‘Can I go and see him?’

  The old woman looked Charlotte up and down. Her mouth declined at the corners. ‘He’s busy.’

  ‘I won’t keep him.’

  The widow shrugged, and Charlotte took it as permission. She made her way over the concrete floor, stained black by countless drained sumps, towards where she could hear some activity in the gloom. A bulky figure was bending over the engine of a large, black, front-wheel-drive Citroën of the kind favoured both by Vichy ministers and the Gestapo.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  The man lifted his face from the engine.

  ‘Are you Monsieur Chollet?’

  ‘Yes. That’s me.’ Chollet was a fat man with a purple face and shiny skin; he looked too old to be the son of the widow at the doorway, but it was possible that red wine and large meals had aged him prematurely. The stub of an unlit yellow cigarette was wedged in the corner of his mouth.

  Charlotte breathed in tightly and spoke again. ‘A friend of mine asked me to come and see you if I should need news. He was to contact you if he was in trouble. He said you would answer to the name Hercule.’ It was a difficult word to say in French; Charlotte tried to concentrate on its swallowed ‘r’ and whistling ‘u’.

  Chollet grunted, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  In the dim light it was hard to make out his expression, but Charlotte could see just enough to think she had noticed fear in his eyes.

  ‘It’s very important,’ she said. ‘I just need to know if you’ve heard anything from him. He was due a little time ago and we’ve heard nothing from him.’

  Chollet said nothing, but shook his head slowly from side to side, his whole plump body a refusal to engage.

  Charlotte had not foreseen this: so preoccupied had she been by her own safety that it had not occurred to her that Gregory’s contact might be suspicious of her. She could not think how she might persuade him that she was not an agent of some oppressive organisation. In fact, she admitted Chollet was probably right not to trust her: he was doing the safe and proper thing.

  ‘Monsieur, I understand your reluctance. I can’t offer you the identification I should have because you are not my contact. But I beg you to believe me.’

  Chollet bent back over the engine and began to resume his work. Even to herself Charlotte had sounded like the worst kind of informer. The more the conversation went on the more she admired Chollet’s response. Yet for her the situation was desperate. She had travelled many miles to find this man, and now it was going to be useless. Gregory might be alive and in need of help. She could get him out, just as she had got Yves to his destination, but without her Gregory could never make it.

  ‘I’m British,’ she said. ‘I’m not an informer, I’m not with any Vichy organisation. I can prove it to you. I’m going to speak English.’ She said in English: ‘Please believe me, Monsieur Chollet, I desperately need your help. I can’t say the whole war hinges on it, but my life certainly does. Please take your head out of that
car and listen to me. All I want to do is to give you a telephone number. I’ll speak more English if you like. Once upon a time there was a girl called Cinderella who had two ugly sisters who went to a ball and poor Cinderella didn’t have a dress . . . God, I can’t even remember the story. I was never keen on fairy tales.’

  She leaned forwards and tapped Chollet on the back. He stood up and turned round to face her again. Charlotte tried to make herself cry, to evoke pity that way, but tears were far away, and in any case some police sneak could presumably fake them as well as she could.

  She took his oil-grimed, fleshy hand in hers and said in French: ‘Now do you believe me?’ She smiled at him, summoning up as she did so every last particle of charm, candour and shameless sexual invitation.

  Chollet’s eyelids slid down over his protuberant eyes like a reluctant toad and his mouth pursed a minimal affirmative.

  ‘And have you heard?’

  His head moved half an inch either way.

  Rain was falling on the streets outside, which seemed nevertheless bright after the interior of the garage. Charlotte walked a few yards, then leaned against a lamp-post. The fear of discovery and the exhilaration of penetrating Chollet’s defences now gave way to despair. She had come to find her lover, all the way to the volcanoes, in the darkness, and he was not there. She had come and she had failed, and Gregory was dead.

  6

  MADAME CARITEAU WAS slightly loosening the bonds she had set on André and Jacob Duguay. To begin with, she never left them; now, she was prepared to shuffle up to the shops for half an hour if she had impressed on André with sufficient urgency that he and Jacob were not to leave the house or answer the door.

  In the front room was an old piano that her husband had occasionally played. On the one occasion André and Jacob had been allowed into the room they had opened the lid and begun to pick at the keys. While Jacob could only hit them with his fist, André could make melodic runs of single notes and, so far as the width of his hands would allow, play simple chords. There was a piano at school, he told Madame Cariteau, and he had been encouraged by the mistress.