Give Them All My Love Page 6

  My conscience was quiet. By the time he told me that we must have talked much more. Of course I sought Simone out as soon as I got back to Paris. I was lucky that Jacques’ letter to her, recommending me, had already arrived: I had barely given it time to. But that was only the beginning of my luck, that summer, the first summer of my real life.

  In August I went reluctantly on a camping holiday in the Lake District with Oxford friends. It had been arranged the previous autumn, in a spirit of let’s-keep-in-touch, and I now regretted committing myself to it. By September I was back in France. Simone had been with relatives near Biarritz, cousins with whom she had spent part of her childhood during her parents’ wartime activities. She and I met at the railway station in Clermont-Ferrand, I coming from the north and she from the south, and travelled on together by branch line and bus to the green depths of the Creuse. Jacquou was waiting for us at the last bus stop in his old black Citroën, together with the week’s shopping.

  Later that evening, while Simone was washing up after the substantial meal, Jacquou asked me to come and help him ‘put the chickens to bed’. He always had several chickens, tame, affectionate creatures who pecked around the mill by day laying eggs in odd corners, and normally roosted for the night in a conveniently sagging mulberry tree. But he said that the present lot were too trusting for their own good; there was a fox about, and he’d taken to putting them in with Choufleur for the night.

  Guessing that this might be a pretext to speak to me alone, I followed him self-consciously into the yard in the pink evening light. ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of things,’ he said, and I braced myself, but the first question suggested his mind was still running on the fox.

  ‘The shooting season opens this Sunday,’ he said. ‘Are you interested? There’s quite a lot of game up the hill and wood pigeons needing to be kept down as usual – they’ve been a pest this year. I’ve only the one shotgun, but I could borrow another for you if you like.’

  Feeling English, urban and a little silly, I explained that I’d no experience of shooting. ‘It’s rather an upper-class activity in England, you know. Pétainist – in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Yes, one of the Englishmen I knew in the war told me that,’ said Jacquou, looking vaguely sceptical all the same.

  ‘I did rifle practice in the Army of course. But that was with bullets and a fixed mark.’

  ‘A shotgun’s much the same principle, except it doesn’t have sights. But you’d better have a practice, I daresay, before joining a party. We’ll take my gun out first on our own, perhaps?’

  ‘Thanks. I’d like to.’

  We succeeded in picking up the soft, silly chickens, and tossed them fluttering into Choufleur’s acrid boudoir, where they settled fussily on the rafters. Then, partly wanting to defuse any further tension for my own sake, and partly feeling I owed this to him, I said:

  ‘You wanted to ask me something else?’

  ‘Yes I did, didn’t I? … Just tell me, are you sleeping with my daughter?’

  He was scratching Choufleur’s head as he asked, not looking at me. It cost him something – in my youth and ignorance I could not measure how much – to ask. Was I sleeping with his daughter? No father, at the deepest level, wants to hear the answer to that. I had wanted to sleep with her the whole summer; she assured me passionately that she was not bothered by morality or prudence ‘or any of that old stuff’, yet she would not. She had told me a number of times that she did want us to be together and that we would be later, but that she could not – really could not – sleep with me for the time being, for a reason she did not think it right to explain. In my frustration and urgency I pretended at times to think she was playing ‘the usual female game’ with me; I even, to my lasting secret shame, jeered at her once, but I knew even as I did so that it was I who was trying emotional blackmail, not she. Her distress whenever I broached the subject was so apparent that after that occasion I did not have the face to press her further: I had resigned myself, like many young men of our generation, to a long wait. And then, the very evening before I was due to set off for England and my unwanted holiday, she appeared unexpectedly at the door of my garret and began weeping inconsolably, and we ended up in the bed and in each other’s arms and in each other.

  All those blank weeks with my Oxford friends, while she was so far away with unknown people near the Spanish border, I wondered – for she had given me no explanations – if this benison would be repeated. I nerved myself for the possibility that, when we met again, the mysterious problem would once again lie between us. But my fears turned out groundless: our encounter on Clermont-Ferrand station was followed by a joyful night in the railway hotel. And now her father asked me if we were sleeping together. God, were we not: I could think of little else. I felt myself beginning to blush, and was thankful the dark was gathering, as I tried to frame an answer that might be at the same time modest, enthusiastic, inoffensive and more or less true. Jacquou said brusquely:

  ‘That must have sounded like an Inquisition question: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to. How you and she arrange your private life is your own affair – she’s twenty-one now. No, I simply meant, will Simone sleep in her old room and you on one of the camp beds in the room above the mill-chamber – or do you want to be offered beds together? – or will that make you shy? Would you rather matters remained private and I did not ask? I’m just seeking information.’

  It is easy to forget, now, how few fathers in the early 1950s adopted such an attitude, whether it was real or assumed. It was hard for me then, with my mind and body full of his daughter, to convey my heartfelt gratitude to him. I hope he knew. I think he did.

  Once, another time, he said to me:

  ‘Am I a bad father? My sisters think I am. They think I should ‘‘control Simone more for her own good’’.’

  ‘You must know that’s ridiculous. You have your own standards. Anyway Simone isn’t the sort of person one controls. She makes up her own mind. I can’t tell her what to do either.’

  ‘Yes. Quite … But I know what my sisters mean. There are a lot of things I don’t care enough about any more.’

  ‘Simone isn’t one of them, however.’

  ‘No … but they say I am ‘‘cold’’. And I know what they mean.’

  Did he? Do I? For much of the last ten years I have believed myself to be cold. I’m sure that Ann, if she dared to be honest with herself, would say that of me. And yet look. See. To what has all this come – On the Sunday morning, it must have been, Maryk the Pole called. I had heard about him but had not met him before. Simone had told me that, because her father had originally bought Maryk his materials and helped to set him up in his barn, Maryk seemed to feel a lasting indebtedness to Jacquou which the gift of the two painted chests had not assuaged. In consequence, a small but steady stream of offerings were brought to the mill: sketches, carvings, mushrooms, blackberries, once a baby owl whom Simone tried unsuccessfully to rear. That morning it was a bottle of home-made plum brandy. Simone made a face at me: ‘That’ll mean he’ll be here half the morning talking and drinking the stuff himself ‘‘just to try it’’. Papa’s so soft with people like that. I’m going to see old Madame Bernardet up at the cross. She used to mind me sometimes when I was little, and she’s knitting me a jersey – or was last April. Papa! Can I take Madame Bernardet some eggs? We’ve got lots this week, for a change. I think Mistinguett’s started laying again.’

  ‘You’re like Red Riding Hood,’ I said, rather proud of knowing the French title of the story. She had tied on a spotted headscarf and put the eggs in a small round basket.

  ‘Aren’t I just? Dear me, I hope Madame Bernardet hasn’t turned into a wolf.’

  ‘Been eaten by one, you mean.’

  ‘No, I mean turned. That’s the original story, according to Papa. The nursery story’s a watered down version. Really, it’s a werewolf story. Grandma is the wolf.’

  The French term, loup-garou, was unfamiliar to me. S
he explained it, adding, with one of those flights of fantasy which occasionally overtook her determinedly matter-of-fact view of life: ‘Actually I think these stories are allegories, no I mean metaphors really I suppose, for the dark side of everybody. We each have a little bit of werewolf in us.’

  I wasn’t interested in that at that moment.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ I said hopefully.

  ‘No, don’t, we’ll have the whole village talking if I take you to meet Madame Bernardet. Anyway –’ she lowered her voice – ‘you stay and help Papa with Monsieur Maryk. Remind him loudly that you and he are going to go out with the gun. Then perhaps that old ruffian won’t stay all the morning.’

  In fact the old ruffian seemed rather gentler than I had expected. His French was barbaric, learnt very imperfectly by ear, but that was hardly his fault. His innocent eyes, in his ill-shaven, craggy face, were an astonishing dark blue. It was not hard to believe, in spite of his smelly clothes and bombastic manner, that he created beautiful things. Happy to find a new audience, he settled down to tell me something – at any rate one version – of his wartime experiences. It was not clear to me then, or ever, how he had eventually come to rest in the Creuse. In 1945 Europe was full of displaced, shattered people, fleeing or driven, but Maryk must have travelled farther and more effectively than many of them. ‘I had no papers – no money – no one of my own left to me – nothing,’ he declared. It was, I came to learn, one of his standard refrains. ‘But when you have nothing and have to start your life over again everything is simple. You can do anything, on the far side of despair.’

  This truth did not mean much to me, then. In any case I wanted to get out into the sunlit fields, newly bare in September, and try Jacquou’s shotgun. With creaking tact I worked the conversation round to the subject.

  ‘But you’ll need a gun each,’ Maryk exclaimed. ‘You’d better borrow mine.’

  ‘If you mean that old blunderbuss you bought off a tinker, I wouldn’t care to put it in the boy’s hands!’ said Jacquou amiably.

  ‘Old blunderbuss indeed!’ Maryk sounded really hurt. ‘It’s a very good gun, I keep my pot filled by it. Anyway yours is hardly much if it’s that antique object I see up there.’

  ‘1860s. My grandfather’s.’ Jacquou lifted down the double-barrelled twelve-bore. ‘You wouldn’t get that pretty silver chasing on a modern version and you might get a refinement like a choke in one barrel, but the basic design hasn’t changed. Look –’ he broke it open: ‘Breech-loading, double-pin action – safety catch – just what you’d have on a gun made today. Yours has to be front-loaded with a ram-rod, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Well what if it does? Cartridges are still cartridges wherever you shove ’ em.’ Maryk made a vaguely obscene gesture and, as if cheered by having done so, forgot his injury and grinned at us. ‘Anyway, where are your cartridges? Don’t you even keep the thing loaded?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t, Maryk. Dear God!’

  By and by Maryk took himself off, assuring us with what seemed a mixture of generosity and aggression that he’d be back with his own gun to lend to us later that day or the next.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be back for several weeks,’ said Jacquou meditatively. ‘He has his own ways, does Maryk.’

  ‘Do you think he really keeps his gun loaded?’

  ‘I’m sure he does. And, at that, not up on hooks like this one but just standing in the corner where anyone might grab it. Silly bugger. And yet, for all that, you couldn’t really find a sweeter-natured or more harmless man.’

  I took up the gun, felt its weight and length. It was nicely balanced. Jacquou, watching me, said: ‘A shotgun may seem harmless enough compared with a service rifle but, as you probably know, lead shot can be lethal to a human being at close range. Even without resorting to choking devices. We certainly made good use of shotguns like this in the Resistance.’

  ‘Including this one?’ I asked, admiring the silver round the breech. Jacquou paused a moment, then said:

  ‘Yes. Including this one.’ He took it from me, handled it a moment, then laid it on the table between us.

  As if offering an explanation which was not really relevant to the question his last remark had put into my mind, he said after a minute: ‘Shotguns are not ideal weapons of execution, of course. Revolvers were much better and easier to conceal, but it was difficult for us to get our hands on enough of those. The whole time we were chronically short of weapons and ammunition. Shotguns and cartridges were ordinary objects in the countryside before 1940, as they are again now, so they were easier to get than anything else.’

  I looked at the gun, thinking that it had taken the life of Germans. By and by I voiced this trite thought.

  ‘Oh – Germans …’ Jacquou was dismissive. ‘Yes, the odd sentry. But they won’t have left any – any moral traces, so to speak. Taking German life was simple, under the Occupation that posed no problem in itself. It was what tended to come after that cast its moral burden on us. I mean –’ (for I suppose I looked witlessly puzzled) ‘that for every German the Resistance enthusiastically killed, dozens of hostages were apt to be taken and hanged. Just any people that were to hand, usually male – fathers, husbands, young sons … I must say, the taking and killing of hostages has always seemed to me a filthy crime. But perhaps I have an exaggerated concept of fairness –’ (he actually said ‘le fair-play’, as Frenchmen do when they are both mocking and admiring the English). ‘Some of my fellow conspirators used to say that I had.’

  ‘Hostages. Yes I see. Of course, it’s obvious now I come to think about it.’

  ‘Yes. But one yearns for simple moral issues. Some people believed, when they were joining the Resistance, they had found just that. Huh! What a delusion. Of course the anti-German sentiment meshed with the old tradition of proletarian and peasant sentiment – that the poor, who sweated and suffered to feed the Wicked Lords, should rise against them. The French Revolution and all the subsequent risings – ’30, ’48, the Commune and so on – were being re-enacted once again under the Occupation, for people like Serge Gombach. The Wicked Lords were foreign this time, but that was no real change. Jacquou le Croquant with his firebrands walked the woods again. Huh! No, I am not sneering. I felt it too, at times. How could I not?’

  Because he seemed to need some response from me, I nodded, though I did not yet know who Jacquou’s name-sake had been.

  ‘You should understand,’ he said, beginning to walk about the crowded kitchen; ‘You should understand, if you are trying to write your dissertation on this period, that the real drama and tragedy of the Occupation lay not in the struggle between us and les Boches but in the struggle between one Frenchman and another. And not just between collaborator and Resister but between people within our own organization – amongst ourselves. Here in this house, even.’

  ‘I didn’t realize …’ I felt young and ignorant, assailed by the unaccustomed force of Jacquou’s emotion.

  ‘Look,’ he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and speaking now with deliberate flatness, ‘there was this man. I lived closely with him at one time, before I was running the network myself. Shared beds and water flasks with him – that sort of thing. I rather liked him. Cheerful, heavy drinking kind of fellow. But – the time came when I and several others in the command decided that he must be disposed of. Why? Why, because we weren’t sure of him, of course. That was the way it was.’

  ‘You found out he was a double agent?’

  ‘Yes, but not ‘‘found out’’: that would be putting it too strongly. We had a pretty strong suspicion. Various things, over a period of time, did not add up as they should. We had no means of verifying. We were fairly sure – even very sure. But that was as far as we could get. As far as we were going to get.’

  ‘So – you killed him?’

  ‘So I killed him. Yes.’

  Into the silence, I said:

  ‘Was it hard?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, I knew all the ut
ilitarian arguments – that to leave one man alive who might have it in his power to bring death to the whole company would be a worse evil than to kill one innocent man. But still … There was something about it which stuck in my gullet. The decision had not been mine alone of course, but the responsibility was ultimately mine, you see, I was in command. I sat for ages down by the river – yes, here, not far from this house, with my gun – this gun – hidden under the lea of the bank, chewing it over in my mind. I had hours. I had asked the others to send him down to me when he appeared, and he was much later than I had expected. At last I managed – well, not exactly to still my conscience, but to quiet and comfort it with the notion of ‘‘rough justice” (“justice en gros”). It wasn’t justice by the highest standards, I had to admit that to myself, but it was the best justice that could be managed in those desperate times. I knew my own life to be very cheap, and the lives of other people dear to me including Simone’s mother. Many people inevitably knew of my activities, had penetrated my alias. I might be killed myself any time. So.’

  ‘And so – he came in the end?’

  ‘He came. The others at the mill-house had told him some cock-and-bull story we’d invented about why I wanted to see him alone: I forget what it was now. And he came down across the meadow, walking quite slowly towards me, with the sun setting at his back. But as soon as he was near and I stood up he seemed to smell a rat. Perhaps there was something in my posture, perhaps without meaning to I glanced towards my gun, hidden under the bank, and he guessed, knew … Anyway, he turned tail and began to run.’

  ‘That looks like confirmation that you were right about him.’

  ‘Yes! Yes, I thought that afterwards too. It consoled me. But at the time I didn’t think at all, I was just bent on action. I believe it would have made no difference what he had done, even if he had gone down on his knees before me …’