Give Them All My Love Read online

  ‘Oh Tom! What about next Tuesday?’

  ‘Well, what about it?’ I said, savouring the moment.

  ‘I mean – what arrangements for collecting us to take us to Châteauroux?’

  ‘If you think,’ I said, ‘I am taking you two anywhere, on Tuesday or any other day, you’ve got another thing coming.’

  ‘But – Châteauroux? How’ll we get there? How’ll we get away from here?’ She sounded frantic.

  ‘You got yourselves here. Get yourselves away again. And don’t come back.’

  I accelerated away, so that she had to jump aside. I half expected a volley of stones to pursue me, but nothing happened. Soon the peaceful, cricket-haunted night surrounded me once more, though it seemed to me to be blowing up for rain and I drove faster as if to escape from that as well. Perhaps I was a little drunk too.

  Simone was asleep in our room above the mill-chamber, with the light on and the sheet rucked around her. There were dark smudges under her eyes. I thought she had been crying. She looked drowned. Dead girl. Dead bird, broken thing … In a sudden, irrational panic I woke her. I wanted, selfishly, to tell her what had happened.

  ‘– And,’ I concluded, ‘I mean it. I’m not having him in the car again. I’m not having him anywhere near me.’

  Simone was quiet for a bit. Then she said miserably: ‘Of course you’re right, I see that. He – he’s awful, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Awful.’

  ‘But he can be so – nice.’

  ‘Quite.’

  We said nothing else for a while. She rolled onto her face, and presently I realized she was crying again.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Simone,’ I said. ‘He just isn’t worth it.’ I felt deathly tired now. A thin spatter of rain had come as I parked the car: now I heard it crepitating on the bare tiles above our heads. There was something in all this that was beyond me, and always had been.

  ‘I know it sounds silly,’ she said through her tears, ‘but I did try so hard to go on being friends with him and to be a good friend to Joyce. It – it seemed important. You see … Oh, I don’t want to talk about it, and probably I shouldn’t anyway. But he and I were quite close, once, just for a little while.’

  I stood still, arrested in the act of unbuttoning my shirt. ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said at last.

  ‘It was a sort of secret. He wanted it that way – said it was better for me. It was before – you understand … Over a year ago now. Quite over.’

  And that was all she ever said on the matter. I never asked her any questions. But in those few, bleak minutes while I mechanically went to wash and returned, stripped off my clothes and got onto the mattress beside her, I realized that she was telling me he had been her lover. (I knew there had been Someone before me.) She must have allowed herself to be seduced by him while Joyce was in England, during the period that she and I had first met. She had (of course, I realized now) gone on letting him come to her up to the time that Joyce returned, and perhaps even after that … Hence her problem about me, and its sudden, tearful resolution.

  What a fool I had been, I thought with conscious bitterness, not to see it before. I tried lying on my back, ostentatiously not touching her, thinking of Evan and hating him in an intimate, corporeal way. But by and by I began to feel rather silly. Simone had not wronged me, she had not been unfaithful to me. No other person’s life, when one walks into it, is a blank sheet, if the life is worth walking into. If she had wronged anybody it was Joyce, but no doubt Evan had pitched her some devious line about that – ‘wanted it secret’ did he? I could well imagine he did, the creep. What I could not now imagine, and it was like a black hole in my perception, a small acid burn on cloth, was why, with Evan she had ever – ever wanted … desired … fallen in love …

  Everyone has some dark side to them, I thought in pain. Even my Simone. Perhaps especially Simone. Because so much else was radiance.

  I lay there trying to think of my own darker side. Shirley Gilchrist and various other girls hardly seemed to qualify for such a dramatic category. Perhaps I didn’t even have a dark side – too ordinary a chap. Stuffy. I hadn’t even hit Evan.

  I drifted unhappily off to sleep.

  And then woke later, in ravening anger, and replayed the whole programme over again: accusing bitterness, then conscious philosophizing, finally blank tormenting incomprehension. How could she … ? Why the hell did he … ? In that interminable and near-sleepless night this cycle was repeated. And repeated. Each time that I believed I had overcome black emotion with common sense, and drifted into insensibility, the emotion reasserted itself and I woke, in twitching horror, graphic images of her lithe body entwined with his, his hands and mouth at the vulnerable heart of her, searing my shut eyelids.

  Yet it was not really, even so, the idea of her sleeping with him that I could not bear. It was the sick, unvoiced knowledge that she had loved him. Whatever love means.

  As I say, I never asked her any questions, neither then nor later. It is not my way. I would have despised myself had I done that. You might say that, in the very long run, it would have been better had I exposed my distress to her, made a scene … But that is not my way.

  Of course I got over it all right. I do get over things. Or believed I did, then and for very many years. It was very many years later, decades I should say – indeed, only quite recently – that it occurred to me that something permanent may have been laid down in me in the course of that night. Something implanted, that lay dormant but would one day grow. Something dark, after all.

  In the morning Simone still looked exhausted. Her eyes were faintly swollen. She said:

  ‘Please don’t tell Papa about any of this. I feel so ashamed that I brought Evan and Joyce to this part.’

  For a wild moment I thought she meant ‘Don’t tell him about Evan and me’; I was about to say disgustedly that I would not dream of doing so, when I realized that what she meant was about the shop-lifting and the bird stolen from the café.

  I promised, but felt that something ought to be done about the bird, and I did not know what. I was still worrying about this the day after, when I was sitting in the kitchen concocting a cheerful letter to my parents and Joyce suddenly appeared at the open door.

  ‘Hallo Tom! Am I bothering you?’ A tremulous pink-and-white smile.

  I felt that the proper answer would be ‘Yes. Go away’, but I hesitated weakly about making it. After all – poor Joyce. None of it was really her fault. (Indeed I never did decide to what extent Joyce, already a ghost-designate in Evan’s variegated, busy life, was simply his dupe, or something more culpable.)

  With a frigid air, to show I was being kind, I made her a cup of coffee instead. She had, she told me, hitched over on a series of farm carts. ‘It took hours,’ she said gaily, without rancour, tucking into some bread and cheese I had also produced for her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ I said, with a heavy irony that was evidently lost on her. Two minutes later, busy munching, she said:

  ‘Tom – about Châteauroux –’

  Exasperated, and contemptuous now of her for her lack of pride, I said: ‘Joyce, I am not taking you to Châteauroux. Not you, not Evan – no one.’

  ‘Oh please –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re too critical, Tom, like Evan says –’

  ‘Right. I’m too critical. I’m not such a nice person as you thought at all. Let’s leave it at that.’

  She drooped.

  ‘Evan will be simply furious with me when I tell him I haven’t persuaded you,’ she said fearfully. Poor little cow, he probably would be, I thought.

  I was not going to be pushed. But, as a useless sop to her, I said I would drive her back now to the outer gate of the château, or near to it. She need not spend the rest of the day in farmers’ carts.

  We emerged into the mill-yard looking, no doubt, reasonably amicable with one another. So, at any rate, Evan must have thought, for he suddenly appeared from roun
d the side of the wood store.

  ‘All fixed up, are we?’ he said chirpily. ‘Thanks, Tom – I really mean it. You’re a good friend. And about the other night – I really am sorry. Shouldn’t drink so much. I get carried away. No harm meant. Let’s forget it, shall we?’

  I felt almost angrier than I ever have before or since. So angry that I heard myself stammering, something I never ordinarily do. But I believe I managed to convey to him nevertheless that, far from forgetting the other night, I was thinking of going to the police about it – yes, and about his shop-lifting. That he and Joyce had better take themselves off that very minute and that if Evan ever showed his face at the mill-house again it would be the worse for him.

  Somewhere over the last two days my conflict about him had evidently disappeared. Bourgeois upholder of right was firmly in the ascendant. Embryo magistrate was already alive within me.

  Not till afterwards did it occur to me that my fit of moral rectitude might be fuelled by something much stronger and less admirable, but by then I didn’t care.

  In fact, had I taken my tale to the local Gendarmerie, I doubt if they would have been impressed. It might have sounded to them like a holiday quarrel between a couple of tiresome foreigners, and therefore not their business. But this did not seem to occur to Evan. The word ‘police’ had a startling effect on him. His cockiness all disappeared. He looked ill. His mouth literally sagged, so that I suddenly saw an ugly pattern of creases that would be there when he was fifty. When he pulled himself together, he still looked extremely nasty.

  ‘You bastard,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll get even with you. You wait.’

  Even to my emotion-wracked ear this sounded like a line from a B-film. Yet something beyond bravado was working in him, even as it was in me.

  Suiting my stance to his, I waited, hands on hips.

  ‘Come on, Joyce,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s go. We don’t want anything more to do with these shitty people.’ And they went.

  I was still standing there, breathing hard, when Jacquou emerged from Choufleur’s stable.

  ‘I heard all that,’ he said equably.

  I groaned, and abandoned my pose. ‘Oh Jacquou – Oh God, I’m sorry about it … Did you understand it?’

  ‘Most of it, I think.’

  ‘I owe you an explanation.’ I embarked heavily on the saga of the broken bird. He cut me short:

  ‘Don’t bother. I already know about that. These things get around a village in no time, you know.’

  ‘Yes of course, I should have realized … I thought of going to apologize to the café-owner myself. Should I?’ I couldn’t bear the idea of being associated for ever in his mind with Evan, without distinction.

  ‘No, it’s not necessary. I’ve seen him myself. And I’ll speak to Maryk about a replacement. No, one thing you can do, is – don’t let my daughter invite anyone else like that down here. If you have any influence with her.’

  I said it had been my fault as much as Simone’s – that I’d been fooled by Evan too. I apologized further. He cut me short again.

  ‘Don’t get in such a state about it, my boy. These things happen. You’ve been disgusted by – what’s his name? Evans? Heavens? – and think he’s exceptionally bad, but I’ve met lots of Heavens in my time.’

  ‘In the Resistance?’ I thought of our previous conversations.

  ‘And elsewhere, but particularly there. They make good soldiers, often, but bad citizens. You’ve met some too, I’m sure; it’s just that you haven’t recognized them because you haven’t been so involved with them.’

  I thought of National Service, and agreed that he was probably right. I felt young and stupid.

  ‘He is evil, though,’ I said, with a sudden conviction. I understood for the first time that an apparently trivial crime and a serious one may have the same ugly roots.

  ‘Yes. A lot of people are – or can readily become so. In stories, evil is presented as something exceptional, isn’t it? The Wicked Lord … The Bad Fairy … Ghengis Khan … People regard it as a perversion of normality. They even like to say now, ‘‘Of course Hitler was mad.’’ But he wasn’t mad, he was merely a bad man with unusual opportunities. So were the SS troops who burnt the people of Oradour alive in their church. So were the torturers of Jean Moulin. So were some of the best saboteurs … Evil can be commonplace, Tom. That is one of the terrible things about it.’

  I listened submissively. I had been instrumental in embarrassing Jacquou in the village and putting him to trouble and expense. I felt I deserved his homily even though I was not entirely convinced by his view, which was then more unusual than it would be today.

  Early the following Tuesday, Evan stole the Simca. The ability to start a car without the ignition key was evidently one of his many skills.

  I had no time to speculate on its disappearance, because I did not notice it had gone till a police van drove down the track to the mill-house and three Gendarmes tumbled out. Having established that I was the owner – they had found a book with Jacquou’s name on the back seat, and they were local men – they told me that the Simca was now in a ditch some miles away. A young Englishwoman had been found near it, in a state of distress, with various minor injuries. She had been taken to the hospital in a neighbouring small town, and said she did not know where the driver of the car was.

  ‘Well I certainly don’t,’ I said furiously.

  ‘Did you give him permission to take it?’

  ‘I did not.’

  Then did I want to deposit a complaint? (In my disorientated state that’s what it sounded like.)

  Oh God. Simone had now joined me. She looked extremely apprehensive. I hesitated. I remembered the effect the very word ‘police’ had had on Evan.

  ‘No,’ I said wearily at last. ‘He is – or was – a friend. I don’t want to bring proceedings against him.’ It would have seemed tempting fate to do so. I would rather settle for this as the simple result of his melodramatic, cheap threat ‘You wait, you bastard’.

  ‘What about the car?’ said Simone. ‘Can it be repaired?’

  The gendarmes looked dubious but wouldn’t say. It wasn’t their place to, they indicated. A garage had been called out to tow the vehicle away.

  Just so long, I said to Simone, as I never had to see him again as long as I lived. B-film had clearly taken me over also.

  Joyce, however, we did have to see. As Simone said, we could hardly leave her injured, friendless and nearly French-less, unvisited in a country hospital. On the Thursday, we nerved ourselves to go over there. Jacquou lent us his Citreön.

  The place was a shock to me. It made me realize after all how deep my Englishness went. The word ‘hospital’ had suggested to me some more or less efficient institution, bleak perhaps but clean, with bossy staff. Even the nineteenth-century maternity ward in which we had last visited Joyce had fallen within this category. But this small rural institution was a throwback to a much older use of the word, the hôpital of medieval Europe where the lame, the halt and the blind, lepers and the destitute, were gathered into a minimal shelter by religious orders. The buildings, charmingly set by the river, were several centuries old. The standards of organization and hygiene seemed hardly more modern. Joyce was lying in dirty sheets, wearing her petticoat which was still stained with blood. Her other clothes were piled on the bed-end. Various grubby bandages decorated parts of her. Her hair had not been washed or brushed. Around her, between the stone pillars of the ward, the other female patients, many of them extremely aged, lay, sat, wandered, ate things, gibbered, moaned, squatted in corners, wet themselves and otherwise pursued their own individual devices. At the sight of us, Joyce burst into tears.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ she said after a while, when she could speak. ‘I know it’s all my fault.’

  I thought she was talking nonsense, but seeing her so pathetically alone shifted her again in my perception. In the past weeks she had become for me Evan’s faintly repellent accomplice, an example o
f evil-through-mere-weakness, like (I thought) the women who had a good time with Nazi officers during the Occupation. Now, as at the time of the baby’s birth, I saw her again as a victim, a sufferer.

  Simone stroked and patted her, while I wandered around the ward scowling at senile old ladies and at a girl with an abnormally small head who sat masturbating on a commode. When I came back, Joyce was saying to Simone:

  ‘I tried – I did try to be what he wanted me to be. And to do what he wanted –’

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘But he’s so changeable, gets in such moods. I suppose that’s his creative temperament? He says it is … Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have given in to him so much. It seems to make him worse. He can’t bear to be grateful to anyone. You know: the more people do what he wants, the naughtier he gets. It’s as if he’s testing you out all the time.’

  Simone just nodded and went on patting her hand. I lolled at the bedhead, interested that Joyce seemed to have perceived something fundamental about Evan that I had not. She must be quite bright after all.

  ‘Tested to destruction,’ I remarked conversationally. Joyce stared at me, then burst into tears again. Simone gave me a reproachful look.

  ‘Oh where is he now?’ wept Joyce. ‘When I came round after the accident he simply wasn’t there. On his own, with so little money and maybe concussed as well … Maybe he’s lost his memory? Oh Evan –’

  ‘I expect he’s hitchhiked back to Paris by now,’ I said promptly, and Simone, meaning the same thing, said: ‘Oh, I’m sure Evan’s OK. You’ll probably hear from him soon.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know I’m here –’

  None of us heard from Evan, not to my surprise. The following week an ill-shaven hospital ‘doctor’, smelling of wine and garlic, pronounced Joyce fit to leave. We saw her onto the train – she finally achieved her desire to be taken to Châteauroux. Jacquou gave her some money. She was bent on going to Paris to look for Evan: she rejected suggestions, reluctantly made by all three of us, that she should stay at the mill-house for a few days to convalesce. We were all relieved.