23

MONT SAINT-MICHEL

The Mont Saint-Michel is a rocky spur in the middle of the sea off the coast of Normandy, one kilometre from land, a pointy medieval stone fist thrust to the sky. It was once a monastery and its fortifications speak of a savage religion in which crusaders rampaged, in which monks baptised with swords at their belts, in which the Holy Land was a prize to be wrenched from heathens. Poum and Alexandre have the habit of tripping off there at the drop of a hat.

The Saturday after the episode of my cousin Niki’s sculpture, they pile Sylvia and me into the car and set off early. Even though she hates being separated from her bed and her books before 11am, my mother is smiling beatifically. Obviously, there is to be no country visit for Alexandre this Sunday. It’s even a public holiday. We will sleep there and return at an unknown date. My parents live by habit; each one is an institution. But when they shake the dust off their feet, their departures are always sudden.

Alexandre, driving with the sun on his face, has divested himself of his suit, his tie. His open-necked linen shirt, his grey trousers and even his tweed jacket, flung in the back with us, all speak of freedom. The air of the car is full of it. The jerks and bumps that shake us to and fro seem to have settled into a journey as Alexandre’s absent-minded driving navigates us through the flow of cars like a bobbing cork. When Sylvia asks him if he can please look at the road, my parents both laugh. ‘The English are so careful … but so brave,’ they whisper to each other. Sylvia’s eyes, raised to the car roof, suggest she has three kids to look after, not one.

Poum twists round to smile at her.

‘Do you know, Sylvia, that when Charles I was beheaded, he exclaimed: “Don’t touch the blade!” so it would stay sharp. He wanted the executioner to do a clean job of putting him to death. Sometimes it was very messy – they had to hack at people’s necks several times before successfully decapitating them.’

My father smiles affectionately at my mother and Sylvia shudders. Poum, who loves Sylvia as much as she delights in shocking her, turns round again. Something in me knows she is going to trot out her favourite story.

‘Ah, Sylvia, I must tell you a little Spanish story. It was during the Spanish Civil War. On a freezing dawn, two guardias civiles in their black patent-leather hats were taking a prisoner to be executed in a field outside the village. The prisoner was sitting between his two guards in the horse-drawn cart. Rubbing his hands together he commented: “Hace un frio de la gran puta!” – It’s a big whore of a cold day. Oh, oh … It’s too funny for words.’

Her muffled attempts to pursue her tale make the car swerve because Alexandre is chuckling too.

‘Oh, oh, I can’t continue. How Spanish, how very Spanish,’ moans Poum, who is particularly susceptible to her own brand of humour.

Sylvia is full of disapproving silence. But my parents are rocking in some kind of fateful joy.

‘Do you know how the two guardias civiles responded, Sylvia?’ Then before collapsing in another spasm of glee, she exhales: ‘“Yes, but think of us, who have to return afterwards!”’

The happiness in the two front seats is inversely proportionate to the horror in the back seat. My parents’ companionship settles into a cosy silence for a few kilometres, then Alexandre’s pangs of hunger bring the car screeching to a halt in front of a wisteria-covered half-timbered house on the side of the road.

‘This looks perfect!’

In a twinkling he is out of the car, striding in, calling for the waiter: ‘Garçon!’

A tall young man appears with a thoughtful step. His sweet smile seems to be waiting for us alone, as if he recognised every last one of us. My father runs towards him, oblivious.

‘Do you have a table? We’re terribly hungry.’

‘Of course, Monsieur, here by the window.’

Once seated with a large serviette on his lap, he relaxes and looks around him. His eyes narrow, a frown appears on his face as he takes stock of the place. Then he seems to interrupt his own thoughts and launches himself into questioning Sylvia about her childhood in Felpham, West Sussex. Sylvia, usually diffident, relents. She knows them well by now and sometimes hands over what they want as a treat.

‘An uncle of mine was run over by a car when I was a child.’

‘How terrible!’

‘Yes, I must have been about six. I was with my mother in the kitchen at home and a policeman knocked at the door.’

‘Madre de Dios!’

Spanish is resorted to as soon as there is any whiff of death.

‘And what did your mother say?’ exclaims Poum, hurrying along the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon narrative style.

‘Oh, nothing, the policeman was the one who said something.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said: “Sit down and prepare yourselves for a nasty shock.” And he told her that her brother had just died in a car accident.’

At that point, to my father’s horror, Poum collapses. He locks his eyes on her, but we all know it’s too late. She’s reduced to irreducible laughter. Alexandre shakes his head. There’s nothing to say – until the culprit lifts a tear-stained face out of her serviette.

‘Sy-lvia, please forgive me! I am so sorry, but this is all so un-Latin.’

Then she puts out her hand and touches Sylvia’s arm. Poum rarely touches people; when she does it changes situations in an instant. Her hand knows how to care when she appears not to, making us all belong together as if this were some happy wake.

‘It was many years ago.’ Sylvia smiles. ‘I can hardly remember him.’

Alexandre heaves a sigh of relief and starts eating again. He pours wine for the three of them and smiles his satisfaction.

‘Sylvia, wait till you see the Mont Saint-Michel. Wait till you eat the omelettes at La Mère Poulard.’

Both my parents like to show Sylvia things. When they look at her blue eyes, her stern smile, her fair skin, her shimmer of golden hair and her enormous body that seems to jeer at diets, they see the cliffs of Dover, William the Conqueror, the Magna Carta – a freedom and pugnacity they admire, as if any French courage were pusillanimous by comparison. By showing her things, they hope she will be amused and fortified in her exile.

As we’re going, Alexandre looks all around the restaurant with a worried look on his face, then abruptly leaves. Back in the car, he drives in silence and suddenly Mont Saint-Michel appears, etched against the sky, boldly sculpted against the clouds. He parks the car and we walk to the island at low tide – all the while, Sylvia is told about the quicksands and how the sea comes in at the speed of a galloping horse. My mother, her nose in the air, secure in her unfailing faith in my father, trots on happily, but Sylvia, holding my hand tightly, has no such sustaining belief.

Soon we are walking up the tightly cobbled streets with nary a space between each medieval house or building. The winding progress, the eagle’s nest feeling at the top, the dizzying views of sea and strand with their large invisible patches of moving sands are as attractive to pilgrims as to children. This is Poum and Alexandre’s lair. They love it here and have come, I soon realise by their exclamations, many times in the past.

Because it’s impossible to get rooms otherwise, Alexandre has reserved the hotel beforehand, contrary to his usual habits. As soon as we set foot in it, his hunger rises as fast as the tide and he’s all for setting off to La Mère Poulard on the spot. But Sylvia has walked too much in the sun and needs to go to bed with slight sunstroke. Poum and Alexandre are frantic.

‘To bed! We must call a doctor!’

‘A specialist!’

No, she insists on just sleeping it off. My mother walks her to the door of our bedroom. Then I am left alone with my parents. I must not bother her and will only be allowed near her when I am very sleepy. Putting Sylvia’s absence to good use, they pour me a small glass of wine.

‘Sunstroke in Normandy! It could only happen to an Englishwoman!’ they exclaim, giggling.

We are dining at the hotel restaurant instead of at La Mère Poulard as planned. They want to take Sylvia there tomorrow when she feels better. The table is near the window. You can see the waves, roaring like angry wolves, quite clearly in the twilight. Alexandre is strangely silent. Poum appears unaware, but I can feel her waiting all the same. Suddenly, my father erupts.

‘Do you know, Poum, I think I knew that waiter in the restaurant where we had lunch … He was in the Resistance with me … He was younger then … I knew he reminded me of someone …’

She nods slowly. The Resistance is hardly ever alluded to, nor the war. As if the dead, still close, still breathing for them, cannot be mentioned so soon.

‘He’s the kid who brought me Rolf Nordling’s message to come and meet von Choltitz. I never saw him again until today … And to think I didn’t say a word to him! He looks older and I was so hungry … But now I’m sure it was him!’

His face falls, cliff-like into a darker sea. Poum sips her wine tentatively. She has no feeling for good wine and prefers the workman’s litron, which she’ll drink with much more gusto than the old Bourgogne filling her glass right now. Something has happened to our table as if the night outside had climbed in through the window. The waiters are moving more slowly, conversations have dimmed and nearly gone. My father sighs and, to my surprise, looks straight at me.

‘That man who served our lunch, Catherine, was my contact in the Resistance. I remember his younger face so well. I have only just realised it was him. I thought he’d been killed in the last flourishes of the Liberation of Paris. But he’s alive and well.’

I sip my small glass of wine too.

‘Do you know, Catherine, in 1945 Hitler was sending orders to General von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris, to burn the city. Once lit, fire moves from street to street at the speed of a galloping horse.’

I can’t help looking down at the waves, which have indeed surrounded the Mont Saint-Michel very quickly. Poum has her eyes wide open as if the war were happening inside them.

‘But von Choltitz had seen Hitler recently and, finding him foaming at the mouth, had thought to himself: We are in the hands of a madman. He had also realised that the war was lost. A soldier more than a Nazi, a cultured man from an old family with a remnant of decency, he didn’t want to burn Paris, which he saw as a work of art, a place of beauty.’

Suddenly my father stops and looks older, quieter. A small smile hovers sadly at the corner of his mouth, as if he were too tired to continue. The war is still there. It doesn’t just go, like when you get off a plane and still feel a part of yourself in the place you left behind. In the Mont Saint-Michel, Alexandre can hear the German boots on the cobblestones, those same boots that woke him up at dawn in 1940 and had him jump out of bed to rush and join the first Resistance cell he could find.

‘Von Choltitz didn’t want to do it, but he couldn’t delay obeying for very much longer. The orders from Hitler were coming thick and fast. He related the situation to the brother of the Swedish consul, Rolf Nordling, who was from a neutral country, and asked him if he knew anyone in the Resistance who could be used to talk to the American army on his behalf. Rolf Nordling answered immediately: “Yes, there’s Alexandre de Saint Phalle, an old friend of mine.” We were friends long before the war and were often in secret contact during the Occupation.’

Of course Poum hadn’t been there with him then, but she was in Paris at that time. She had hidden Jewish friends, been hungry and seen her father die. She had breathed that air of war, the war that brought them together. Her castaway expression has vanished; her listening face, more present than usual, sees each word as it steps exactly in past footsteps.

‘So I was brought by Rolf Nordling to the German Kommandantur and given a free pass to leave Paris and drive towards the Americans. In fear of endangering the population, General Bradley was holding his troops back. In one pocket, I had von Choltitz’s free pass to get through the German checkpoint, and in the other, I had von Choltitz’s letter to Bradley, asking him to move in as fast as possible so he could hand over his surrender. This was high treason for the Germans.’

‘Before Hitler could burn Paris?’

‘Exactly, Catherine.’

I want to know what happens next. But, strangely, it’s not exciting. My father speaks in a precise, dull, deadpan voice. A voice that says the minimum it can, a voice without its usual enthusiasms and flourishes, a frowning voice weighed down with too many lives, too many other people’s memories. Yet it never loses its momentum – driving off now towards the German checkpoint.

‘So, I left with three other men, Poch Pastor, Arnould and Laurent. I don’t know what Laurent was doing there, he jumped in at the last moment, insisting on coming.’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘There was something wrong about him. I was worried he’d jinx the whole operation.’

‘Why did you let him come?’

He shrugs again and I see that hidden gentleness in his strength, something that lets go, that slips and shrugs – something that is not grown-up at all. Then he sips his wine without looking sadly at his empty plate or casting a roving eye at ours.

‘We were given a car. Twenty minutes later, we were at the German checkpoint. A German soldier walked up to the car window and saluted. I got out and handed over von Choltitz’s free pass. He stood looking at it and motioned me to follow him into the outbuilding. There he disappeared behind a door and I sat in that room with von Choltitz’s other letter to Bradley crinkling in my back pocket.’

He smiles blindingly at us.

‘I never sweated as much in my whole life. If they had searched me, we were all dead. I recited the popes, I recited the Roman emperors, I recited the American presidents to myself and he still didn’t come back. When he finally returned, he walked me to the car without a word. I slowly got behind the wheel again and he handed me back my free pass. Then, taking a map from his pocket, he said, ‘Landminen!’ and guided us through a tortuous route to avoid the landmines on the road for about half a kilometre. Returning to the car window, he bent towards me and, pointing his arm straight ahead, said: ‘Amerikaner, zehn Kilometer.’ And we drove off.’

He smiles at me.

‘Suddenly, there I was, cruising in the French countryside. The sun was shining, there was a peasant ploughing his field with a horse-drawn plough, unconscious of the fact he was between the two most powerful armies in the world.’

I can hear the German voice in my ear, see the German soldier standing on the road in the glaring sunshine, smell the countryside. I don’t notice someone has stopped at our table. When I do, for a moment, I think they are Germans. Before I can ask what happened with General Bradley, my father has thrown his arms in the air: ‘Niki!’

A woman surrounded by a phalanx of people stops in front of my father. From within her tight little group, she has a withdrawn, secure smile, as if by holding it back from the throng makes her shine all the more. My father hugs her. Is this the same Niki? Poum has become marmoreal, so it must be. We both stare at Alexandre. His face, as clear as the French countryside on a sunny day in 1945, has forgotten everything about the sculpture of the banker clutching his gold.

Even Niki seems slightly bemused as she’s swallowed into my father’s warm, forgetful embrace. He presents her to my mother, who nods. He turns to me: ‘And have you met my youngest daughter? Do you want your cousin Niki to make a sculpture of you, Catherine?’

I slump in my chair, slip and land on the floor under the table. My mother chuckles helplessly. Soon Niki is gone and her departure becomes a strange anticlimax.

Poum sighs.

‘My sweetheart, why were you so welcoming to her?’

Suddenly Alexandre’s eyes focus and he shakes his head.

‘I forgot. All I saw was my brother André’s daughter.’