The children dived again and again through the cloud-high breakers, the dolphin spouts of foam. The star bursts of water exploded over them before the three boys scrambled out and ran in the cold, starched wind, chasing each other shivering along the steeply shelving beach, the tan sand explored by tongues of foam.
Then back into the water once more. There were deep holes in the seabed along this part of the coast. Always they tried to reach the bottom of these holes but Charlie was the only one who could do it.
Again and again they did it until, tiring of the sea at last, they scrabbled in the wet sand, building monuments and boy-high parapets from which they flung defiance at each other and seaweed in shiny, slimy strands. Eventually, after the bloodthirsty battles, the bright explosions of water, the curving brackets of seaweed marking the limits of the charging sea, after the gulls in noisy clouds, the pink, pink of oystercatchers flapping their black wings over the breakers, the boys ran home — Emil and Jean to their parents’ shack built of timber and tar paper, black as a ship’s hold and redolent of fish and coarse tobacco; Charles to his thin and frowning mother in her thin and frowning house, where the salty air stood dank and still and voices tiptoed around the furniture.
On the wall of the parlour was a picture in an oval frame. It was the portrait of a man, dark-faced and serious, wearing army uniform and a hat with the brim turned up on one side. Charles did not know him, knew only that the stranger was his father who had died in the war and who, his mother said, watched out for them both from his place in heaven.
It was a house stiff with reverence and whispers, with legends and dreams. Legends of the hero who had died; dreams of the mighty deeds Charles would carry out in his name in a grey world in which his mother was one of many dark-clad widows who drifted like ghosts through the town.
As far as war dead were concerned, the town with its stone-girt harbour on the edge of the sea was luckier than most. Fishermen had been in a reserved occupation and few had gone to the trenches, but those whom the shells had spared remained vulnerable to the sea. Each year, along this coast of storms, boats put out under the pull of their bright sails never to come back, so Sanette was not alone in her widowhood. Yet somehow the way of a man’s dying seemed to change his status and the status of those left behind. To Sanette, death by drowning was different altogether from death in the trenches: a routine hazard for those who challenged the sea every day of their lives. Death was death, but she could not help feeling that her grief was more deserving than those whose sons and husbands had hazarded their lives against the waves and lost. There were no heroics in drowning, whereas her man, her Colin, her increasingly mythical hero, had died in defence of France.
She wanted her son to feel the same. She was apart from the town because of the nature of her bereavement and because she had not been born there. Her cousin had first given her a home and then, dying conveniently of influenza immediately after the war, the house itself. For the sake of the dead woman, the town was prepared to tolerate the cousin who claimed to be a widow but who in truth — rumour slicing, razor-sharp — had been no better than a two-franc whore who had been left up the spout by a foreign soldier who had been blown to bits or bayoneted or gassed in the closing stages of the war.
Not that it mattered how he’d died.
‘We are respectable folk in this town,’ said the town’s black-gowned harridans, dripping their venom. ‘She needn’t think she can get away with that sort of behaviour here.’ Although their avid eyes hoped she might try.
They were doomed to disappointment. Whatever the truth of the strange woman’s gaudy past, there was no sign of it now. A patch of darkness, she drifted through the salt-bright air of the little town, speaking when spoken to but making no friends among the locals, walled up in her rituals of grief in the house that she might occupy but that would never, in the eyes of the town, be hers.
She wanted to be apart, that much was plain, and the town was happy to oblige her.
‘Needn’t think she’s going to impress anyone here with her fancy big-town ways …’
Every night, lying in the bed in the sea-sounding bedroom, waiting to be stolen by sleep, she held out her pearl-white arms to draw Colin close. His heat warmed her loins and her heart. She slid into sleep amid flickering laughter, rampaging steps clattering up the cobbled street from the bar’s wine-scented cellar, figures that plunged, still laughing, into the bed and each other, living in a blaze of joy the life that, like Colin’s, had ended so soon afterwards under the gas.
Beneath her grey exterior, Sanette would not admit that anything had ended at all. The nightly visitations that moistened her, the man’s heat, above all the son whom he had left as fulfilment and reincarnation of himself, enfolded her with a recurrent joy.
‘I need no one else,’ she told herself, and believed it. ‘There is Colin, still. And Charles. And myself. We three, forever.’
It was obvious to her that the child, whose name she had chosen to accommodate both his French and Australian heritage, would grow up to share her devotion to the past, to the father who had died. She told him stories of heroes, and the war; she tried to explain to him about sacrifice and glory; she took him each year to a vast meadow set about by laurels and sown with the teeth of graves, to stand in silence before the one that, she said, contained the man whose photograph, slant-hatted, hung on the parlour wall. She took it for granted that the past was as alive to Charles as it was to her.
In the way of things, that was impossible. The sea drew him. Whenever he could escape, it was to the sea that he went. He met other urchins on the tide flats. They rounded big eyes at each other, fought and yelled and chased and tumbled. They caught crabs and slink-shaped shrimps that darted backwards in a burst of sand but that, with stealth and patience and a glass jar armed with whelk meat, could be tempted to their deaths. After the small butchery of the beach, Charles returned in triumph, bearing the trophies that Sanette boiled for him upon the wood-burning stove in the galley kitchen where the blue coffee pot held pride of place. Until, one day, exuberant Charles carelessly sent it flying and earned himself a belt around the ear while he stared at the tears, unexpected, traumatic and inexplicable, which streamed down his mother’s face and affected him far more than the blow itself.
Later that day he surprised her, head bowed, cheeks wet, cradling in her lap blue shards of broken pottery. It troubled him more than ever, but the moment passed.
Charles was six, seven, ten. He was one with the other boys, the town, at home within the only world he had known. The future claimed him in the bright-sailed fishing boats snubbing and rocking in the harbour.
Always — always — there was the sea. The indigo summer blaze of the waves, the grey winter storms, sank their salt fingers into his heart. Sanette watched, greyer than ever, helpless against the urgent life that was pushing her, remorselessly and inevitably, aside.
Wally Bart, the foreign soldier who had brought Colin to her, had survived the war. As he had said he would, he had married his Jeannine. The little shop had been flattened in Ludendorff’s last advance so they, too, had come to the coast where Wally, a farrier by trade, had found work with the local blacksmith. Always adaptable, he had picked up the lingo quickly. As an out-and-out foreigner for which he could, in time, be excused, he was more acceptable to the locals than Sanette, the Frenchwoman whom they believed considered herself a cut above the rest of them.
Wally and Jeannine were her only friends in a life that had come, more and more, to resemble a shrine to a man who would not have recognised himself had he turned up on the doorstep. She liked to talk about Colin as she had invented him and of the glorious times the four of them had shared amid the concussion of the shells.
‘Glorious times?’ Wally rubbed his chin. ‘Dunno ’bout that.’
Sanette would have it no other way. ‘How can it have been anything but glorious? It was the war that brought my Colin to me.’
And took him away again. But Wally knew when to keep his trap shut, on that subject at least.
‘How’s young Charlie going?’ he asked, to divert attention.
‘His name is Charl …’ Sanette very much on her dignity.
Wally was not to be intimidated. ‘His dad was a mate of mine,’ he said. ‘I know how he’d have said it. How much English does the kid speak, eh? I’ll tell you: not a word. What would he have had to say about that?’
Which pulled a snooty response. ‘Why should he need to speak English? This is France, and he is French.’
‘Half Aussie,’ Wally corrected her.
‘France is his home. I, myself, do not speak English. I wish him brought up French.’
It was a sentiment with which Jeannine, good Frenchwoman that she was, fully agreed. As she was inclined to do, she gave Wally a glare, which Wally, as he was inclined to do, ignored.
‘What’s the point of all this then?’ Gesturing at Colin’s photograph and the way Sanette chose to live her life. ‘Col was an Aussie. He spoke English. That time you first met him, he couldn’t speak a word of anything else. How can Charlie take after his dad if he don’ even speak his language?’
Later, Jeannine got after her husband for saying such things, but Wally was unrepentant.
‘Sanette’s got to make up her mind. Either she wants Charlie to grow up like his old man or she doesn’t. Hell,’ he said with mounting indignation, ‘he might even want to visit Oz himself one of these days.’
Jeannine looked fondly but pityingly at this foreign husband with his bull-like sensitivities. ‘That is why she does not wish to do it. She is afraid she may lose him. If he speaks only French, there will be less danger.’
‘Maybe. But Col’s got rights, too.’
‘Colin is dead.’
‘Not while I’m around he’s not.’
Eyes screwed up against the leaping brilliance of the flames, Charlie stared at the orange-glowing object Wally was hammering, tap-a-tap, twisting it this way and that in the pincers’ heavy claws. ‘What is it?’
‘Bit of iron.’
Tap. Tap.
‘Gunna be a boat, though. When it’s finished.’ Eyes fixed on the fire-red shape of the partially fashioned metal, Wally spoke in French, all flat vowels and kangaroos, then repeated it, deliberately, in English.
Charlie stared at him. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous dites?’
‘I said it’s gunna be a boat.’
‘I heard you. But afterwards?’
‘I said it again. In English.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re half Australian, and English is the language they speak in Australia.’
‘I am French.’ Challenging with Gallic force.
‘Only half.’ Tap, tap, tap, tap. ‘Course,’ casually, ‘maybe you’re not smart enough to learn.’ His brawny arm wiped sweat from his flame-shadowed face. ‘Is that the problem?’
Charlie was on his dignity at once. ‘There is no one to teach me.’
‘There’s me.’
Tap-a-tap. Tap-a-tap. Tap.
He soused it in a gush of hissing steam.
‘There you go …’
Charlie stared at the metal shape, black now, from which the heat still rippled. Wally’s words had made him uncomfortable and he was quick to criticise, if only to get his own back. ‘It doesn’t look much like a boat.’
‘But it will be.’
‘A real one?’
Wally laughed. ‘A model. But it’ll sail. Or should.’ And scuffed the boy’s head with his heavy hand.
‘Where will you sail it?’
‘Not me,’ Wally corrected him. ‘You.’
Charlie did not dare believe, although he wanted to. ‘You’re making this boat for me?’
‘Too right,’ Wally said in English. ‘You’d be doing me a favour,’ he added casually.
‘How?’
‘If you learnt English, we could speak it together, once you got the hang of it. There’s times I miss it. You could help me out.’
Charlie was tempted, but there was a problem. ‘I do not think my mother will like it.’
Exactly what Wally had hoped he would say. ‘Oh well, that’s it then. Mustn’t offend your mother, must we? Pity, though.’
Charlie was not just French, he was also a boy. ‘On the other hand —’
‘Leave it to you,’ Wally said.
That night Wally repeated the conversation to Jeannine, who was outraged.
‘How could you do such a thing? And behind Sanette’s back?’
‘You’d better warn her then.’ But grinned at her, knowing it was too late for warnings.
‘What are you up to?’
Wally was the picture of innocence. ‘Me?’
Jeannine did not believe him. To punish him, she went ahead and warned Sanette, as her wretched husband had suggested. Serve him right if Sanette pinned back his ears for him.
Predictably, Sanette was furious. She could not wait to get her son alone. ‘French is not good enough for you, is that it?’
Charlie was indignant. ‘I never said that!’
‘I forbid it! You hear? I forbid it!’
Which was all it took.
The next day, watching as the iron carcass of the model boat took shape in the forge, Charlie said, ‘This business of the English …’
Wally watched the boat and not the boy. ‘What about it?’
‘Will you really teach me?’
Wally finished the boat, planking the iron frame with strips of elm that he begged from a mate, fitting the mast and shrouds.
Knowing herself defeated, Sanette had already given up her opposition; as a reward, Wally asked her if she would help him by making the sails from his design.
‘God knows if it’ll work, though …’
It did. He taught himself to sail it first, then, after he’d got the hang of it, he taught Charlie. Saturday afternoons they went down to the harbour together, to sail their boat amid the fishing vessels. All the time they spoke English to each other, haltingly at first, then more easily, until, by the time Charlie reached his thirteenth birthday and the toy boat had become a thing of the past, his command of the language meant that conversations with Wally had long ceased to be conducted in anything else.
The instruction did not stop at English. As soon as Charlie was fluent enough, Wally started to talk to him about his father: the real man rather than the creature of his mother’s imagination that was all Charlie had known before. He talked to him about Australia. One day he introduced him to the Cloud Forest.
‘The Cloud Forest? What’s that?’
‘Tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure. It meant a lot to your dad, though.’
Charlie’s imagination was snared by the riddle of this unknown thing his father had brought with him all the way from Australia to the battlefields of France.
‘The Cloud Forest,’ he repeated with satisfaction. ‘It sounds well, but I do not understand what it means.’
‘It was a place he’d been to. But I reckon it was a lot more than that.’ Wally was floundering. ‘Reckon it was what kept him sane.’
Which was more perplexing than ever. ‘What do you mean, sane?’
‘Plenty of blokes went mad; all of us, maybe. It was the only way to survive: to cut loose from what was happening around you. If that’s what madness means,’ he offered, limp as old celery.
So that Charlie got onto that, too, and nothing would serve but that Wally should dredge up from their hiding place the memories he had wanted to bury forever, of the war and what it had been like for the men who had stood thigh deep in mud, in the endless-seeming trauma of bombardment, terror and death.
‘You weren’t ever clean,’ Wally said. It seemed a forlorn offering to set against the melodrama of shell and fire fights. ‘I remember that, most of all. You were covered in lice. There were huge rats. Bodies, everywhere. Stink. It got so you despised yourself for being alive.’
Charlie contemplated the incomprehensible, but was not to be distracted for long. ‘And the Cloud Forest?’
‘A place your dad discovered on top of some mountain in the north of Australia. It’s hot up there, tropical, but he told me this place was all ferns and streams and coolness, right up on top of this mountain. But, like I said, it wasn’t just the place, it was the idea of it that mattered to him.’
Charlie, struggling with thoughts that tangled him like ropes, could come up only with a question.
‘An idea of what?’
‘A place of magic, maybe. There were times when you needed a bit of magic.’
‘It sounds as though he found heaven.’
‘Dunno ’bout that.’ Wally shied nervously, uncomfortable with metaphysics. ‘But I know it was important to him.’
There Wally would have left it, but the mystery of the inexplicable had taken root in Charlie’s heart and was not to be dismissed. Again and again he returned to it, worrying it like a sore that would not heal, driving Wally half mad with his questions. There were times when a bloke wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
There was no one else in the small town to whom Charlie could talk about it. There was no library, not that Charlie was one for books. He tried the schoolmaster, who did not wish to discuss the absurdities that might exist — that very probably did exist — in a country so uncivilised and far away.
‘Cloud Forest?’ He spoke angrily, such ideas not permitted in Monsieur Gironde’s shuttered world. ‘How can you waste your time with such nonsense? When you are surrounded by the glories of France?’
Not that Monsieur Gironde was altogether surprised. What could you expect? A child with such a background? For which the mother, most emphatically, was to blame. Not that it stopped him taking it out on the boy. He set him to weed the cabbages in the schoolhouse’s vegetable garden, as a penance.
‘Perhaps that will keep your mind off such nonsense …’
Charlie, the hot sun burning the back of his neck, surreptitiously pulled out half a row of cabbage plants and decided he’d stumbled on something important. Monsieur Gironde had been so mad that there had to be something to Wally’s story. Not even the schoolmaster would have responded in such a way had the Cloud Forest not existed. For the first time he came to believe in its reality. He had believed before, but in the idea; it had excited him, providing a lead to the man whose sombre features stared from the parlour wall and who, until now, had been a nothing to whom reverence must nevertheless be paid. Now, he had knowledge. Monsieur Gironde had convinced him that the Cloud Forest was more than an idea: it really existed. It could be seen, and touched.
I can find my father there. I can go where he went. I too can stand amid the ferns and running water, in the silence of that far place.
How he would ever manage to do such a thing he had no idea, but the thought burnt like a flame in his mind, and did not go away.
In the meantime, however, he had a life to lead. Cloud Forests were all very well, but everyday concerns, inevitably, had priority.
There was retribution for the wilful destruction of the cabbage plants, for which Monsieur Gironde’s sister had had plans. ‘Such wickedness …’
There were the complications of growing up. His mother was no help. Sanette, so warm and earthy once, had dried and would not have talked to her son about such matters even if he’d had the courage to ask her about them. Instead, he explored the increasingly warm and exciting subject with Emil and Jean and a handful of other boys. With them he looked surreptitiously at girls. He enjoyed the consciousness of sin. They talked big to each other of what they had seen and knew, the dragons of their imagination leaping out of their eyes as they lied to each other about this, and this, and this …
There was a woman with a name, a well-earned name, some would have said. La Belle Babette was known in the fishing fleet. It was a name more flattering than deserved, Babette big rather than beautiful, with a body built to last. The gossips said it was just as well, the things she made it do.
Come evening, she patrolled the harbour — big woman, gaudy dress, yellow hair — laughing raucously with the fishermen as they brought ashore their baskets bright with fish. The younger men chatted her up, fancying their chances; the older ones spoke less, but with their sideways glances stripped the clothes from her pouting breasts.
Babette …
She lived in a rancid little shack by a stream, no more than a metre wide, that emptied over a brick weir into the harbour. It was a place of moisture and nettles, of rubbish chucked carelessly outside the door, of cool and fecund earth. To this place Babette returned, sometimes alone.
The boys spied on her. They didn’t see much: only the figure of this fisherman or that, blue-jerseyed arm about her waist. After the wooden door had banged shut, the boys crept close. They tried to peer through the keyhole but it had been stuffed up and all they got for their pains was the occasional sound of voices and laughter, and once what sounded like a quarrel.
They had barely time to hide before the door was flung open, projecting into the gathering darkness a flicker of candle flame, while Babette stood with hands on hips, figure black and ferocious against the light, and a scrawny man, older and smaller than her normal customers, scurried painfully on bare feet over the sharp-edged stones, his boots in his hand.
‘I told you I don’ do that.’ Babette’s voice followed him like a blare of trumpets.
She slammed the door, while in their hiding place the boys pretended to each other that they knew what she’d been talking about. The nudging elbows, the sniggers, fooled none of them; they all knew they’d have run a kilometre if she’d so much as looked at them.
One day she did.
Her latest visitor had left and Babette was alone. For some reason she had left the door ajar. Through the gap, the yellow light fell like a spear across the rubbish-strewn ground, the glint of water trickling over the slimed weir.
The boys looked at each other, round-eyed in the darkness. ‘Well?’
They nodded. They were scared but no one was going to admit it; now it had come to the point, they were more scared of not doing it, and of each other’s sneers.
‘Come on, then …’
They stole over the coarse grass towards the door. Each step took hours off their lives but they got there in the end. The shaft of light drew them closer. Again they looked at each other. All wanted to be the first to spy inside Babette’s shack; none of them wanted it. Charlie was the biggest, so it was his right and duty to go first. He eased forward and flipped an eyelash around the edge of the door.
‘Well?’ Emil’s whisper cut the darkness behind him.
‘Be quiet!’
‘See anything?’
‘No.’
Because he hadn’t dared look properly. All he had seen so far was the light and the door’s edge. No help for it; for the sake of his reputation, he couldn’t back off now. He took a deep breath and leant forward. The light fell across his face. He could see a chair, the corner of what looked like a bed, a dress hanging from a hook …
The door swung open. Babette, big and terrible, fists on hips as they had been when she had driven off the old man, stared down at him like a thousand ogres.
He would have run but fear paralysed him. Babette’s meaty arm lifted him upright as easily as picking an apple off a tree.
‘What do we have here?’ Babette asked the night.
Behind him Charlie heard a scuttle and rush of feet as the others fled.
‘Shoved off, have they?’ Babette’s voice matched her dreadful appearance. ‘Left you to face the music?’
‘I was just passing —’ Charlie said.
‘And thought you’d take a quick squint at me while you were doing it?’
Babette laughed, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the next moment had taken her hand from his collar. Charlie was free. His instinct was to run; his feet had already started moving when Babette grabbed him again, once more laughing her rich and fruity laugh.
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you want what you came for?’
To which Charlie, heart pounding, breath short in his throat, had no answer at all.
‘Let’s get inside.’
He went, half eager, half dragged. This time Babette closed the door tight against the outside world. It was a small room. The plank walls, daubed with a single coat of paint, had probably been white once but were now yellow with age and dirt. They stood so close about them that at full stretch Charlie’s arms would have almost spanned the room. In that confined space, ripe Babette flowed more alarmingly than ever out of her jazz band dress.
The air was dizzy with a combination of unfamiliar smells. Something warm and scented in which soap had little part, which he hoped might be the smell of Babette herself, was allied to the mingled odours of stale food, grease, unwashed dishes and sewage.
‘Now,’ Babette said. ‘What am I to do with you?’ And thump, thump, went her closed fists on the hips that threatened the tight material of her dress. ‘Let’s see … What might you have come here for, I wonder?’ A pause, while Charlie kept his mouth tight. Outside the shack a night bird squawked, the sound loud in the silence. ‘To steal my money perhaps?’
Charlie shook his head vehemently. ‘No, mam’selle, it was nothing like that.’
‘To cut my throat?’
‘No!’
‘Then why?’ She had moved and now stood very close to him. ‘Why did you and your friends spy on Babette?’
Her proximity, threatening and alluring, made his head spin; the warm scent of the big, blowsy woman filled his nostrils.
‘Tell me, Charles, how old are you?’
‘Thirteen last month.’ He spoke hesitantly, as though there might be something shameful in being only thirteen.
‘Old enough, I daresay.’ She looked at him seriously. ‘We have known each other all your life, have we not? You know what people call me, Charles?’
He could not look at her. ‘No, mam’selle.’
His scarlet cheeks betrayed him but Babette was merciful. ‘They say I am a woman who goes with men. They are right. Do you know what that means?’
Even his eyes, watching a corner of the tight room, seemed on fire. Somehow he managed to nod.
‘Did you hope to see me with a man? Was that it?’
He shook his head, although that might indeed have been part of it. The truth was that he did not know precisely why he — they — had come to spy. Perhaps the idea of the unknown, exciting and forbidden, exciting because it was forbidden, had stirred his blood and curiosity, but he had no words to talk about such things.
‘Perhaps you wanted to see what a woman looks like when she has no clothes on?’
It was so; of course it was, but he was ashamed to admit it.
‘Can I trust you to keep a secret?’ Babette wondered.
Something about her voice … Charlie risked a quick look, saw the frown line drawn deep between her pencilled eyebrows. He dared not answer, could not even tell whether it was a real question or not.
‘You must promise to say nothing,’ she cautioned him. ‘Otherwise I could get into serious trouble. You understand me? Grown men are one thing, but children … Serious trouble,’ she repeated.
Somehow Charles found his tongue. ‘I promise.’
‘To tell no one? Not even your friends?’
He nodded.
‘If they ask you, you must tell them that nothing happened. You hear me?’
He waited, she waited, both of them staring at uncertainty. At last she sighed. ‘I always was a fool,’ she told him, or herself. Soft fingers took his chin and lifted his head so that he was staring at her. ‘Look, then.’
She undid the line of buttons that held her dress together and opened it, pulling back first one side then the other. Beneath the dress she was naked. Charles had known in theory what to expect, yet to have it suddenly exposed to him like this was such a shock that for a minute he could not register what he was seeing.
‘There you are,’ said Babette, and her voice — soft and understanding, almost kind — was quite different now. ‘That is what you wanted to see, is it not?’
Charlie stared, his eyes willing his brain, or perhaps the reverse, the brain instructing the eyes, to observe, remember. The hills and vales of flesh, translated from imagination into reality: the flecked skin, an occasional hair, a mole, all the imperfections making up the truth of what was, perhaps because of those very imperfections, more tantalising and seductive than the images of abstract beauty that had been all he had previously known.
The scent of Babette’s flesh was like a blow.
She took his hand, lifted it like a chalice and placed it upon her body.
‘You see?’ Speaking softly, as though in a holy place, the innocent brought before the altar.
The sensation of touch, of the woman beneath his hand …
The pressure in his groin, only recently familiar, mounted alarmingly, a torrent surging. His hand moved in agitation, to explore, to seize.
‘No …’ She stopped him, lifting his hand from her. ‘Enough.’ And smiled at him, fondly and a little sadly, before drawing her dress once again across her body.
The moment was past, the glimpse of holiness over. She laughed and caressed the side of Charlie’s face with her hand. ‘That is enough to be going on with, yes?’ She leant forward and kissed him gently on the forehead. ‘Two years more, you may come and visit me again, if you wish. Perhaps I shall show you more things then. But not now. Now you must go.’
She took him by the shoulders, gently but firmly, and walked him to the wood-slat door. In the doorway, looking out at the enigmatic darkness, she held him tight so that he felt her softness against his back. ‘You like me?’ she whispered.
‘Very much,’ said Charlie fervently.
‘Good. Good!’ Raucousness returned as Babette laughed. ‘Go then, petit. And in two years come back. Remember!’
Behind him the door shut. He heard the bolt shoot home. Charlie stood in a confusion of darkness and blood-red images, of Babette’s words, everything that had happened. His memory tried to retain its hold upon the kaleidoscope of impressions, ice-slippery, that slid through his mind: the colours and textures, the unbelievable reality of the flesh; the shock of the unexpected; the heat and warmth; the soft voice promising; the touch of the heated skin, the spiralling tightness of his own body.
He shook himself, dog-like, staring at the darkness and the knowledge that his world had now been changed, absolutely, by what had happened. The memory, and the promise, remained. To treasure and preserve.
‘What happened?’
‘What did you see?’
‘What did you do?’
Charlie remembered his promises, not only to Babette but also to the moment that remained precious in his mind. ‘Nothing happened!’
‘You must’ve done something!’
‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’
It was asking for trouble. Emil and Jean would not be fobbed off. They badgered and badgered. When they discovered that he really was not going to tell them anything, they grew angry. In place of the lurid details they had expected and that their hearts and groins demanded, their imaginations created monsters and castles out of all the things that Charlie might have done, the impossibly acrobatic sexual rituals, dimly visualised, of which they felt they had been so unfairly deprived. Charlie’s continuing silence was all the proof they needed. They told others — whispers, sniggers — what they soon came to believe they had truly seen. Whispers became shouts; in no time, it was all around the town.
‘What is this I have been hearing?’ Sanette very much on her dignity.
He would not tell her.
She went on at him about the purity of the body and the soul. She demanded an explanation.
He would not tell her.
She became angry, threatening him with the church and the fire thereafter, the sinner consumed by the furnace of God.
‘Tell me what happened! Tell me! I demand to know!’
He would not tell her.
Sanette’s lips drew tight. ‘Very well …’
Day by day, she built her revenge. She had no real friends but was sure there would be no shortage of those who shared her views in this. She spoke to Jeannine first of all, but when Wally knew what it was about he wanted no part of it and Jeannine, docile for once, gave Sanette no encouragement. Next, she talked to like-minded ladies who gathered like crows at the corners of the cobblestoned streets. They went in delegation to the local priest, for whom Babette, raucous and earthy, had long been a crown of thorns.
Sunday, and Babette summoned from the pulpit to account for herself to the congregation. And to the congregation’s black-suited God.
She did not come.
Was it not written, come unto me? And, if the sinner would not, was it not right that the church, in its humility, should go to her? For her soul’s salvation?
Night. Flames from raised torches cast guttering shadows across the streets, the patch of open ground, the surface of the trickling stream, the shuttered shack. The priest led the righteous to the sinner’s door.
The priest raised his voice. ‘Babette! Babette Fantine! Come out! Your Saviour commands you!’
Silence.
Now what?
The priest grew angry. After the rhetoric, the parishioners come together on the Lord’s business, the procession, grim and purposeful, beneath the torches, it would not befit the church’s dignity that all should come to nothing.
‘Babette! Again I command you! Come out!’
Silence, still, as though the house itself denied them.
Voices now, suggesting this and that.
‘It is dark. She is not there.’
‘She is sitting in the dark, hoping to fool us.’
‘The darkness is a good place for her.’
Only one thing for it. The priest stood back, more in sorrow than in anger at the sinner’s intransigence.
‘Break the door down!’
A few men had come, some dragged by righteous wives, others who hoped for trouble. Two kicks, a blow with a maul that someone had thoughtfully brought, and the splintered door flew back.
A surge of bodies towards the dark opening, arrested as the priest raised his hand. He took a torch from one of the group and stood in the entrance, black shadows flying, and looked inside the little house. He turned back to the others.
‘There is no one here,’ he told them. Then, in a ringing voice, he cried: ‘The devil has been driven out!’
‘Thanks be to God!’ The devout words surged exultantly.
‘Thanks be to God,’ he repeated.
‘Father …’ In the darkness, a voice whispered like an assassin’s blade. ‘What if she comes back?’
‘She would not dare.’
But might.
They burnt the little house down: the house and all it contained. To keep the devil out.
Charlie heard about it; everybody heard about it. Babette Fantine was gone and would not be coming back.
It was an event that, to the priest’s outraged astonishment, divided the town.
‘Good riddance,’ said some, eager to wash their hands of the shameless woman who had been unwilling to hide her sins from the light.
But others …
‘She is a woman, certainly. A daughter. And after all, she has to live.’
The local gendarme rode to the presbytery on his bicycle and had a word with the priest behind his study’s closed door. Madame Desgranges, the priest’s helper, hovered but heard only the low murmur of voices. However, she observed the two men when they emerged: Gendarme Bayard grim-faced, Father Mouchon enraged, thin lips white, and in no time the word was all over town. Nothing of what had passed came out, which stopped no one guessing, or parading behind shuttered palms the knowledge they did not have.
Not all the comments were favourable to the group of righteous souls who had burnt down Babette Fantine’s house. There were even those who recalled how Babette’s father, already several years a widower, had been killed in the war — a hero of France, they now said — leaving Babette without a sou.
What was a young woman, alone, to do?
Everywhere heads were wagging, and not all at the wickednesses of La Belle Babette. Some thought that the woman who had started it all, the outsider who called herself Sanette Mandale, was the last person with any right to criticise Babette.
The priest had not expected the ambiguous response and it troubled him. It seemed to imply criticism of the church’s authority, and himself. He preached against it, most fervently, with one eye on a bishop who might not understand the righteous indignation that had caused the arson.
Because that was the word the gendarme had used, in the privacy of the presbytery.
‘The law does not tolerate arson, mon pere. I must have your assurance there will be no repetition of these events.’
Father Mouchon had raised outraged shoulders as high as they would go, summoning to his aid the formidable battalions of church and God, but the gendarme had been unmoved.
‘No more, father. I must have your assurance.’
Which eventually, Father Mouchon speaking in a voice choked and black with fury, he obtained.
In the parlour of the narrow house frowning through its blank windows at the unforgiving sea, Charlie sat. He, the whole town, knew what had happened: the naming and blackening of the girl; the procession with flaming torches to hunt her out, to punish; the flames tearing with savage teeth at the little room where Babette, out of kindness and compassion, had introduced him, innocently, to the separate but interlocking worlds of man and woman, of tolerance and desire.
A sudden squall threw its fistful of rain like gravel against the window glass. Beyond the harbour wall, parallel lines of breakers ran landwards, baring their teeth of foam.
Behind him, Sanette came silently into the room.
‘I will not have you sulking,’ she said. ‘I will not have it!’
Far out, beyond a tumult of gulls, the grey clouds frayed in the wind, revealing behind them a sky of the palest blue. A ray of sunlight set fire to the waves.
‘It was your fault,’ Sanette told him. ‘You and your filthy habits! Let it be a lesson to you.’
She waited but Charlie said nothing. He would not speak of his fears for Babette, who had been kind to him, and what would happen to her now because of her kindness. Perhaps it was as his mother said: that he was to blame.
‘It is of no consequence,’ Sanette said. ‘I have asked Father Mouchon to come and instruct you, bring you back to the right path. As for that woman … The town will smell sweeter without her.’
And swept away, nose high. Another burst of rain splattered against the window. From the parlour wall, the face of the uniformed man looked down in silence.
A man came to stay in the town. Gaston Bayard was the gendarme’s cousin. He was about forty-five, and rumour said he was a bachelor. He dealt in fish and told the fishermen that he had plans to improve the sales of their catch.
The Depression had hit them hard and they were eager to hear what he had to offer. This was at once simple and revolutionary. Until now, each boat had sold its catch on the jetty to buyers who came from nearby towns. Whatever price they could get, the men had accepted: the fish wouldn’t keep. Now Gaston Bayard had two proposals. He would build refrigerated sheds in the harbour, to store the catch as soon as it came ashore. The fishermen would form a cooperative to present a united front — and a united price — to buyers who until now had been able to play one fisherman against another, to the ultimate disadvantage of them all.
It was a plausible plan; too plausible, some thought. Each night there were arguments in the whitewashed bar. Some of the arguments grew heated.
‘What’s wrong with how we’ve done things in the past?’ Pierre Gros leant one elbow on the long counter and stared aggressively around the smoke-blue room. ‘I say to hell with the new ways.’
Alfred Didoux was younger than Pierre but equally aggressive. ‘And starve?’
Pierre gulped his jar of wine and slammed it down on the counter. ‘You’re not starving.’
‘Heading that way. Down Dunkerque market, I hear prime mackerel’s fetching no more than fifteen sous a kilo. A kilo, mind! How can a man hope to make a living like that?’
‘You think this new man will change that? A stranger we never saw before in our lives?’ Pierre laughed scornfully and slurped from his wine jar. ‘Go ahead, my friend, if that’s what you want. But leave me out of it. I’ll take care of my own catch, and don’t come crying to me if he takes your fish and runs off with it in the night!’
Gaston Bayard had told them that all the fishermen had to agree or the new system wouldn’t work. Pierre Gros, tough and inflexible as the oaken stem of his own fishing boat, could not be budged, so there, for the moment, they left it.
Prices fell further. Dunkerque market, the biggest along the coast, was no longer offering the fifteen sous that Alfred Didoux had complained about. Now prices were down to eight for first-grade fish; one terrible day, it fell lower still.
‘Five sous! Five!’ Now there was fear as well as outrage in the fishermen’s voices. ‘All right for you,’ they told Pierre. ‘There’s no one but you and your missus. We’ve got families to think about.’
Still Pierre would not be shifted. ‘Times’ll get better soon. You’ll see.’
In the meantime, Gaston Bayard, who had caused all the fuss, twiddled his thumbs and directed his attention to other things.
The first time Charlie knew that something was on the go between the stranger and his mother was when she told him that Monsieur Bayard was coming to supper the following evening.
‘I expect you to be on your best behaviour …’
He stared. ‘Bayard? The fish man?’
Sanette was willing to be brisk with a son who was in danger of forgetting his place. ‘Of course the fish man! Who else?’
‘What’s he coming here for?’
‘Because I invited him.’ From her tone she clearly wanted no discussion on the subject.
Charlie shut his mouth on his astonishment: no one had ever come to the house for a meal before, and his mother’s announcement sent waves of shock and — yes — alarm through his life. It was like watching a tidal wave advancing up the beach to swallow them all.
For someone who dealt in fish, Gaston Bayard was extraordinarily dry. His voice rustled like a parched leaf; his hand, when Charlie shook it, was as dry as sand; even his eyes, flat as sun-baked pebbles behind the gold pince-nez perched just so on his long nose, seemed devoid of moisture. His speech, apparently even his thoughts, were as dry as the rest of him; when Sanette introduced him to her son, he stared at Charlie as at one more rock, indistinguishable from the rest, in the desert making up his life.
A sane man does not talk to rocks and Gaston Bayard did not. Throughout the meal he spoke only to Sanette. No pleasantries or small talk; Charlie, watching from the citadel of his own silence, saw that everything in this man’s life had to be precise and to the point. He did not laugh; no doubt laughter was irrelevant. What was relevant was fish, and how to make from fish the fortune he was determined would be his.
Monsieur Bayard’s teeth were sharp and pointed and protruded from his thin lips. They made him look like a dried-up mouse and it was like a mouse that he nibbled on the slice of turbot Sanette had placed before him. Turbot, Charlie thought, that was a plus: they never ate like this when they were alone. It might have been seaweed for all the notice Monsieur Bayard took of it. From time to time he dabbed his lips with his napkin, without commenting or even seeming to be aware what he was eating. His interest might be in fish, but only in certain kinds of fish.
Between nibbles, his mouse voice rustled on about the wisdom and far-sightedness of his plans; about the fishermen and their folly in not at once leaping to accept the proposal that in his considered view would not only offer them the prospect of a worthwhile living once more, to say nothing of hope for their families, but would bring renewed life to the town …
Like a dry wind blowing endlessly over sand dunes, the man went on, while Charlie wriggled his bottom on his chair, ignoring the dagger looks with which his mother sought to impale him, and, bored to despair, entertained rosy dreams of death.
At the same time he was not so bored that he failed to notice how much his mother was making up to this vain and monumentally tedious man. The turbot had been only the start of it; all through the evening she hung, very obviously, on Monsieur Bayard’s every word. Her eyes were round, she spoke only to agree, when Monsieur Bayard graciously permitted her space to do so.
‘So wise …’
‘So true …’
This from a woman who, in the whole of Charlie’s life, had shown no interest or enthusiasm in anything. He hated it but thought he knew why she was doing it, because she had been giving him hints of their situation for some time.
When they had first settled in the town, Sanette had been lucky to get a job in the cashier’s department of the local store, where the change ran on wires. Despite the Depression, she had managed to hang on to it ever since.
Every day she got up and tidied the house, gave Charlie and herself coffee and a slice of bread for breakfast before packing him off to school, then dressed herself in her grey and unnoticeable clothes and went out to the job that was all that kept them going. It was a grey and faceless existence; the only time Charlie could remember her having involved herself in anything out of the ordinary was over the business of Babette Fantine. The way that had worked out, he doubted she would ever do so again.
It seemed to Sanette that all the patient years had been a rehearsal for the moment that was now upon her: the opportunity to entertain at her table, not simply a man whose greyness rivalled her own yet who expected as a matter of course the subservience proper between a woman such as Sanette Mandale and himself, but someone much more important than that. Because Gaston Bayard had, or might have, money.
Even Monsieur Bayard’s monologue ran dry, eventually, like a stream vanishing into sand. He dabbed his lips one last time and buttoned himself meticulously into his dark overcoat. He shook Charlie’s hand without looking at him, bent mouse lips to Sanette’s fingers, coughed in a dry way and walked out into the night.
The essence of the man, dusty yet strangely menacing, remained. Neither Sanette nor Charlie spoke of it, but both knew that the balance of their lives had changed. Even if their visitor vanished tonight, the crack his coming had opened in the previously unbroken shell of their lives would not be repaired. For the first time since Colin Mandale had died under the gas, Sanette had looked out through the shutters of her solitude at another man. After that, things could not possibly go back to the way they had been before. Yet the future depended, at least in part, on the success or failure of Monsieur Bayard’s proposal to the fishermen: I am willing to be patient but not forever, as he had put it to Sanette over the supper table.
If his plans failed, he would move on. Of course: for a dry man, there was no logical alternative.
A month passed while everything hung in the balance. Still nothing had been resolved. Then came a week of storms. Fishing was impossible and the news from Dunkerque was that second-grade fish was no longer being bought at all, while prime mackerel and even sole were fetching no more than a few sous a kilo. At last Pierre Gros, no longer confident of the better times he had always proclaimed, gave way.
‘It had better work out, that’s all,’ he said in his surly way. ‘I’ll have a few things to say to you lot if it doesn’t.’
Gaston Bayard went away: rumour said to Paris or Cherbourg, where he was thought to have interests. Within a week he was back with the finance he needed to build the refrigeration sheds and get the cooperative up and running. Word was that he was busy with builders, electrical engineers from down the coast, experts of all kinds. Sanette did not see him and each day passed like every other day: up early, tidy the house, wake Charlie, prepare their breakfast, go to work …
I am sick of it, she thought. Sick of it.
Late at night, she studied Colin’s features in the portrait on the parlour wall, her finger tracing the line of his mouth, his eyes.
You should not have died. You should have lived to be with me. To help me, hug me, bring meaning to my life. I cannot go on as I am.
Who knew what would happen to her if she lost her job? It had happened to so many. She had no money, no prospects. Charlie was growing up; one day he would be gone and she would be alone.
What else can I do? she cried out to the man she still loved. If only you had not gone away from me. If only you had not been killed …
She took her way, grey and slow, to bed. When she woke, her pillow was wet with the tears she had shed in her sleep.
Charlie knew none of these things.
One evening, ten days after Gaston Bayard’s return, Sanette was in the kitchen, skinning a piece of fish she had picked up cheap from one of the boats, when there was a knock on the door.
Sanette stood at the sink, knife poised motionless in her hand. No one ever visited, and Charles, she knew, was in his room. Her heart thudded in her chest. She put down the knife, wiped her hands on her apron and went to the door. As she reached for the catch she saw how red her hands were, but she was beyond caring about that.
Red hands or not, she thought, I am as I am.
She opened the door. Again her heart thumped. Monsieur Bayard stood there, round hat in his hand. She looked at him silently.
‘May I come in?’
No change: the little cough with sand in it, the voice dry as desert dust.
‘Of course.’
She stood back and opened the door wide.
She led the way into the parlour. Saw from the corner of her eye Colin’s portrait; saw, or at least sensed, that Gaston Bayard was aware of it, too.
‘One moment,’ she said.
She went to Charlie’s room. ‘Monsieur Bayard is here,’ she said.
‘What does he want?’
He spoke rudely. He was probably finding it hard to come to terms with the uncertainty Monsieur Bayard had introduced into their lives. She could understand that but would tolerate no rudeness.
‘No doubt he will tell me when he wishes to do so,’ she told him tartly. ‘For the moment, I know no more than you. While he is here, I do not wish to be disturbed. Is that clear?’
And closed the door. She was as she was, but nevertheless found a minute to take off her apron and tidy her hair before going back to the parlour.
‘I am sorry to have kept you.’ She smiled and closed that door, too, behind her.
Charlie told himself he knew very well why Gaston Bayard had come. He thought his mother knew, too, whether she was prepared to say so or not. The businessman was rumoured to be looking for a wife.
He tried to visualise his mother in that role but it was no good, the images would not fit. He had never had to share her with anyone and was not sure how he would feel if he had to do so now. Gaston Bayard, of all people, he thought. That boring man.
He decided he’d go out, then decided he wouldn’t. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, or should do, and had the uneasy feeling that from now on this could be his life: a constant and corrosive uncertainty of where, and who, he was.
He tried to imagine his mother downstairs, now, in the parlour. He sneaked open his door and listened, but could hear nothing. The house creaked, the wind rattled a windowpane. All else was still. Like Charlie and the house itself, the closed door to the parlour, which he could see from where he stood, held its breath.
He remembered the episode with La Belle Babette. She had never come back to the cruel town and her ruined house, but he had not forgotten her. He thought of the bare flesh rosy in the lamplight, the shock of discovery and new awareness, disbelief and awe at what was there in front of him.
He could not imagine his mother — his mother? — in such a situation. Yet had the feeling that what had happened that evening with Babette could be in the process of being re-enacted downstairs now. His mind would not accept it; even to think such things was wrong. Yet the images remained. The lamplight. The rosy, complacent, scented flesh. His mother.
It was unbearable. He clattered down the stairs, making all the noise he could, and was gone, slamming the front door behind him.
He strode through the town, head up, the wind in his face. Beyond the harbour and clustered houses, he came out into open country. On his right were low sand dunes where the marram grass whistled in the sharp-bladed wind. To his left tumbled the grey sea, with gulls crying above the broken water. He knew exactly where he was; he had been here a thousand times. He had never been here; he did not know where he was at all.
On and on he walked, as fast as he could go, using movement to drive out thought. He slowed at last, feeling the sand crunch beneath his feet, thinking of his father’s portrait watching … whatever there was to watch.
No! No!
Wally spoke in his ear. It was like listening to his own father’s voice.
A place he discovered on top of some mountain, up there in the north. He called it the Cloud Forest …
Beyond the wildly breaking seas, the mountain of his imagining stood tall against the sky. It was green and very beautiful, with plants he did not recognise, creatures out of storybooks. He knew it was a place he could go, if things got too much for him. From what Wally had said, his dad had felt much the same about it. The magic place. The only difference was, he’d been there and Charlie hadn’t.
He thought, one of these days …
And walked on, at peace now, the knife-blade wind in his hair.