1

He paused by the edge of the road until the truck had curved out of sight and the rasp of the motor had died in the cold salt air.

Then he shifted his rubber-tipped cane to his right hand and stooped down with the left to pick up his suitcase, torn at the hinges and lashed with string.

He advanced in spasms down the gravelled side road to the village. His right leg was dead to the hip and swung on the socket of his straining body in a slow arc. The foot, shod in a blunt shoe and raised on a bulky leather heel, slid gratingly with each step. Whereupon the man would again thrust cane and body forward and draw the leg after him.

The twist of effort had hunched his neck and shoulders as if he wore armour, and at every lunge sweat shone at the edge of his fine, reddish hair. Pain and the constant observance of precarious footing fogged his eyes to an uncertain grey. But when he gathered breath, setting his suitcase on the ground and stilting on his cane like a long-legged heron, his eyes resumed their natural colour, a deep harsh blue. The port of his head, with its fine-drawn mouth and delicate bone structure, mocked the gnarled contortion of his gait. The man was handsome in a worn, arresting way.

Ordinarily, trucks did not stop in the highroad but churned by between the dunes and the cliffline, either inland to Rouen, or farther along the coast to Le Havre. Yvebecques lay off the road, on the escarpment of the cliffs and along a half-moon of stone beach. High yellow buses stopped on their way from Honfleur, turning into the market-place. They unloaded under the wide-flung eaves of the Norman market hall. Beyond its pillared arcade ran a street, narrow and high-gabled, and at the end of it the beach, merging into the wavering light of the sea.

On the market-place stood a three-spouted brass fountain. It bore a scroll filled with names and garlanded with ceremonious laurel. Each spout curved like a desolate gargoyle over a date, heavily incised: 1870, 1914, 1939, pro domo.

Hearing the truck stop and shift gears, the men who stood among the market stalls or by the fountain looked up. A coldness and stiffness came over their easy stance. The fishmonger, who was hosing down his marbled stall, let the water race unchecked across his boots.

The traveller was now very near. Once again he rested his suitcase and straightened his back, letting the strain ebb from his shoulders. At the verge of the market-place, where the gravel turns to cobblestones, he paused and looked about. His mouth softened into a smile. He had not heard the brusque silence and made for the fountain. He hastened his step by sheer bent of will.

He brought his face under the live spout. The chill, rusty water spilled over his mouth and throat. Then he pushed himself upwards, pivoting adroitly on his good leg. He limped towards the red-and-yellow awning of the café. But a mass of long, unmoving shadows fell across his way. Three of the men wore the heavy smocks of fishermen; one was round, close-cropped and in a dark suit. The fifth was scarcely more than a boy. He hovered near the edge of the group and chewed his wet lip.

The stranger looked at them with a grave, hesitant courtesy, as if he had known they would be there to bar his way but had hoped for some twist of grace. The round dark one surged forward. He set his lacquered shoe against the man’s cane and thrust his face close. He spoke low, but such was the stillness of the square that his words carried, distinct and raging: “No. No. Not here. Get out. We don’t want you back. Any of you. Now get out.”

And the boy cried, “No,” in a thin, angry whine.

The traveller bent a little to one side, as in a sudden rouse of wind. Close by a voice flat with rage said again: “Get out. We don’t want any part of you. Lucky for you you’re a cripple. Not enough meat for a man on your carcass.”

He squinted against the high sun and remembered his bearings. He veered from the bristling shadows and started towards the street which led from the market square to the apple orchards on the western terrace of the cliffs. But even before he had entered the dark of the Rue de la Poissonière, the boy had leaped past. He whirled, grinning with spite: “I know where you are going. I will tell them. They’ll stone you alive.” He spurted on and turned once more: “Why don’t you catch me, cripple?”

Tight-buttoned, the notary peered after the stranger. Then he spat between his lacquered toes and whistled. A large dog rose from under the meat stalls and ambled over. A leathery cur backed mournfully from a pile of fishgut oozing on the warm stones. Other dogs came off their haunches. The notary scratched his mongrel behind the ears and hissed at it, pointing towards the limping man. Then he flicked the dog across its snout with a lash of the wrist. The animal sprang away snarling. Monsieur Lurôt hissed again and the dog understood. He fanged the fleas from his raw neck and gave a queer yelp, cruel and lost. A retriever, who had been drowsing under the billiard table, tore out of the café. Now other men were flailing and whistling at the dogs and pointing to the Rue de la Poissonière. The pack milled at the fountain snapping at each other, then hurtled towards the narrow street. In the van, Lurôt’s mongrel let out a full-throated cry.

He heard them coming in a loud rush but they were at his heels before he could turn. They flew at him like crazed shadows, slobbering and snapping the air with woken fury. The man swayed off balance as he swung his cane at the bellowing pack. He was able to stem his legs against a wall but the mongrel sprang at him, its eyes flaring with vacant malignity. The rancid scent of the dog enveloped him. He flung the animal from his face but felt a hot scratch raking his shoulder.

Beyond the reek and clamour of the charging dogs, like distant streamers on the wind, the lame man heard laughter from the market-place.

The animals were wearying of their sport. They stood off, baring their teeth. Only the retriever was still at him, circling and darting in, its head low. It evaded the man’s cane with jagged leaps. Suddenly the bitch hurled herself at the stranger’s inert leg. Her teeth locked on the leather heel. The man went down against the side of the house, clawing the air for support. The dog inched back, its tongue red over its bruised mouth. The cane snapped down on it with a single, murderous stroke. The animal subsided into a moaning heap; somewhere a bone had cracked and now its eyes spun.

The suitcase had fallen on the cobblestones. One of the hinges sprung and a small parcel tumbled out. It had shattered against the sharp rim of the pavement. Slivers of blue and ice-white china lay dispersed in the gutter. In the murky street they gathered points of light. The man dragged himself over and picked up what was left of the Meissen figurine. Only the base, with its frieze of pale cornflowers, and the slim, silk-hosed legs of the shepherd dancer were intact. Bereft of the arching body and dreaming visage, these legs, in their plum breeches and black pumps, retained the motion of the dance. The head had smashed into myriad pieces; only the hat could be made out, lying near the middle of the street, three-cornered and with a flash of plume.

The traveller lurched to his feet, picked up his suitcase and tightened the string over the broken corner. The dogs stood wary. Then the mongrel shuffled near and whined softly. The man passed his hand over its mangy ears. Lurôt’s dog looked up with a wide, stupid stare. The pack did not follow the cripple as he moved away.

Before him the houses thinned out and the cliff towered into full view. The sea lay to the right, murmurous and hazy under the white sun. The salt wind dried the sweat from the man’s face and body. But the yelp of the dogs had bitten into his marrow, and dim shocks of fear and tiredness passed through his limbs. In the sudden shade of the apple trees his skin prickled with cold. Now the path lifted again and the sea opened beneath him, glittering in the heat. Only the tideline moved, lapping the beach with a sullen vague rustle.

The way dipped into a hollow. Bees sang between the stubble and the grass had the dry savour of inland. Recollection came upon him vivid and exact. Quis viridi fontes induceret umbra—who shall veil the spring with shadow and leaf?

It was at this spot that the Latin tag had risen out of a school-boy’s harried forgetting. And its music had held through the mad clamour. He had hobbled his dawn round of the fortifications on the rim of the cliffs, inspecting the bunkers sunk into live rock, and peering through the range-finder at the still haze on the Channel. He was returning to his quarters at the farm of La Hurlette. The path was staked between minefields, and high in the booming air he could hear planes moving down the valley of the Seine on their daily, mounting runs. Far away, on the river bluffs above Rouen, anti-aircraft guns were firing short bursts. The detonations thudded as from a distant quarry.

As he had limped into the dell, all sounds had receded. He had sat down to still the rack of his body. His wound was new, and he had suffered hideously in the field hospital near Khar-khov and on the trains that wormed across Europe, furtively, with jolting detours over railbeds and bridges twisted by bombs. He had lain on a siding at the approaches to Breslau watching a bottle of morphine teeter on the shelf out of reach of his fingers. The orderlies were cowering in a ditch.

He had learned to live with his pain as one lives with a familiar yet treacherous animal. He conceived of it as a large cat which honed its claws, drawing them like slow fire from shoulder to heel, and then crouching down again in the dim and middle of his body. He had been posted to the Yvebecques sector of the Channel wall as chief of military intelligence. It was a soft billet accorded in deference to his infirmity. As the pain slunk back to its lair, that line of Virgil had sung in his bruised thoughts. With it the gate of memory swung open and behind it drowsed the rust-green gables and slow canals of the north country.

Later that year the Channel haze had reddened into savage tumult. But through the hell that ensued, he carried the verse with him, and the image of this place, a hand cupped full of silence and water, guarded from the wind.

As he came out of the hollow, still grasping his suitcase, Falk’s eyes lit. La Hurlette lay just beyond the next fold in the down, where the cliff subsided under green ridges and the valley of the Coutance opened out. He could see the stream, quick and chalk-pale between marsh grass. Now the farm was in sight and recognition beat at him like a wing stroke.

The pockmarks made by mortar shells were still visible under the eaves, but rounded by time, as if clams had dug their delicate houses in the stone. The byre shone with a new red roof but the outbuildings and the clumps of lilac and holly were exactly as he had last seen them, hurtling by in a motor-cycle side-car, under wild, acid smoke, five summers ago.

Then he saw the ash tree to the left of the house and his spirit went molten. It stood in leaf, more grey now than silver. Through the foliage he could make out, unmistakable, the stab of the branch on which they had hanged Jean Terrenoire. The night the invasion had begun on the beaches to the west, a patrol had caught the boy perched near the summit of the cliff. He was signalling to the shadows at sea. They had carried him back to La Hurlette, his face beaten livid with their rifle butts. Falk sought to question him but he merely spat out his teeth. So they let the family out of the cellar for a moment to say good-bye and then dragged him to the ash tree. Falk had seen the thing done.

The tree had thickened but the branch retained its dragon motion and Falk could not take his eyes from it. As he started towards the house, he remembered suddenly that the Terrenoires would be waiting. The boy from the market-place had scurried before him to give warning. They would be at his throat before he could cross the threshold. Hatred lay across his path like an unsteady glare. Forcing back his shoulders, Falk glanced at the window of the corner room, his room, and saw the foxglove on the sill, as he had left it. Here had been his island in the ravening sea, here she had brought him the warm, grass-scented milk in a blue pitcher. He pressed on.

The door was loose on the latch and Falk stopped, nakedly afraid. He was momentarily blinded by the dark of the house but knew almost at once that nothing had been altered. The pots and warming-pans glowed on the wall like cuirasses of a ghostly troop. An odour of wax cloth and mouldering cheese hung over the room, and its subtle bite had stayed in his nostrils. The clock which he had bought during his convalescence in Dresden and which the Terrenoires had accepted when first he came, with neither thanks nor refusal, hammered softly on the mantelpiece.

Then he saw Blaise. He stood by the wall and in his fist Falk glimpsed the black fire iron. Blaise stared at him, his tight mouth wrenched with hatred and disbelief: “Mother of God! The half-wit wasn’t lying. It is you. You’ve dared come back. You’ve dared crawl out here. You stinking, murdering pile of shit!” He swayed nearer: “So you’ve come back. Ordure! Salaud!” The mind’s excrement of hate poured out of Blaise. He gasped for air as if rage held him by the windpipe. “I’m going to kill you. You know that, don’t you? I’m going to kill you.”

He reared back, his eyes crazy and hot, and lifted the iron. But old Terrenoire flung a chair at him, across the floor of the kitchen: “Stop it! Merde. Who do you think runs this house?” He had gone grey and sere; age had sanded down his beak nose. But the old, cunning mastery was still there, and Blaise winced as if the whip had caught him on the mouth. “No one’s going to do any killing around here unless I tell them to. Remember what I said. Don’t drive the fox away if you want his pelt. Perhaps Monsieur Falk has something to say to us.” He looked at his guest with heavy, watchful scorn.

A low wail broke from Blaise’s clenched throat: “I don’t care what he says. I’ll flay the hide off the stinking swine.” He crouched near the fireplace like a numbed adder, venomous but unmoving.

As Falk limped towards the bench in the opaque terror of a slow, familiar dream, he saw the woman and the two girls. Madame Terrenoire’s ears stood out from beneath grey, wiry hair. There were tufts of white above her eyes. Nicole had kept her straight carriage but a spinsterish tautness lay about her thin neck. Falk saw that her hands were trembling.

Danielle had turned her back. Falk bore her image with him, inviolate and precise. But it was that of a twelve-year-old. She had large grey eyes and her hair shed the heavy light of hammered gold. She had not been beautiful, having her father’s nose and angular shoulders. But she possessed a darting grace of life. They spoke together often, in a hushed, courtly manner. She brought him breakfast and stole to the corner of the room to watch his orderly wax his boots and mounted heel. She did not sit by him, but stood grave and malicious, as little girls do in front of old, broken men. Every morning Falk took coffee beans and a spoonful of sugar from his rations and set them at the rim of his tray. He knew she would carry these spoils of love to her father, racing noiselessly down the stairs.

On the day of the invasion, against the whine and roar of coastal batteries, Danielle had slipped into his room. Falk was putting on his helmet and greatcoat before going to the command car camouflaged under the oak trees a thousand yards from the house. She watched him warily, the floorboards shaking to the sound of the guns. As he turned to go, easing the strap of the automatic pistol over his shoulder, she touched his sleeve with a furtive, sensuous motion. Before he could say anything she was gone, and he heard the cellar door slam heavily behind her quick steps.

He had seen her once more that night. Through his torn lips Jean Terrenoire said nothing to his family. He merely embraced each in turn while the corporal knotted the rope. Coming to Danielle, Jean knelt down and stroked her cheek. She shivered wildly in his grasp. They hurried him into the garden. As Falk passed, the girl shrank from him and made a low, inhuman sound. It had stuck in his mind like a festering thorn. Now he hardly dared look at her. But he knew at a glance that she had grown tall and that her hair still burned like autumn.

Falk sagged to the low bench. He laid the cane on the floor, under the crook of his dead leg.

“You are right. There is something I want to say to you.” He looked at Blaise, coiled near him, murderous. “I pray God you will give me the time.”

A black stillness was in the room. “When I left you, I had orders to reach Cuverville and re-establish Brigade headquarters. But at daylight American fighters strafed us. They came in so close to the ground that haystacks scattered under their wings. On the second pass they got Bültner, my orderly. You remember Bültner. He was a fat man and ate the green apples where they fell in the orchard. I think he was secretly in love with you, Nicole. Anyway, he was so badly hit that we dared not move him, but left him under the hedgerow propped on a blanket. I hoped the ambulance would find him in time. But some of your people got to him first. Later on we heard that they beat him to death with threshing flails.

“We could not stay in Cuverville and were dispatched to Rouen. I remember the two spires in the red smoke. An hour after we arrived, paratroopers came down in the middle of the city. Each day was the same; we moved east and there were fewer of us. In good weather the planes were at us incessantly, like a pack of wolves. We had respite only when the clouds came low. I grew to hate the sun as if it had the face of death.

“Each man has his own private surrender. At some point he knows inside himself that he is beaten. I knew when I saw what was left of Aachen. But we kept the knowledge from each other as if it was a secret malady. And we fought on. During our counter-attack in the winter I was in sight of Strasbourg. The next day my wound ripped open again. I was no further use to anyone and they shipped me back to a convalescent home, somewhere near Bonn, in a patch of wood. The windows had been blown to bits and we tacked army blankets across the frames to keep out the snow. We sat in that false dark hearing the big guns get closer. Then we heard tank treads on the road. That day the medical staff and the nurses vanished. The old doctor stayed. He said he was tired of running: had run all the way to Moscow and back. He had a bottle of brandy in front of him and would wait. He gave me my discharge papers. Some of our infantry set up a mortar in the courtyard of the house and the Americans had to use flame-throwers to get them out. I do not know what happened to the old man.”

Falk shifted his weight. The sun was moving west and the light slid across the window like a long red fox.

“I had to get to Hamburg. I wanted to see my home. There had been rumours about the fire raids and I was anxious. I hardly remember how I managed to get on to a train, one of the last travelling north from Berlin. I had grown up in Hamburg and knew it like the lineaments of my own hand. What I saw when I crawled across the rubble of the station yard was unimaginable, but also terribly familiar. When I was a small boy, the teacher had tacked a greatly enlarged photograph of the moon on our classroom wall. I used to stare at it interminably, and the craters, striations and seas of dead ash were fixed in my brain. Now they lay before me. The whole city was on fire. There was no sunlight, no sky, only swirls of grey air, so hot it burned one’s lips. The houses had settled into vast craters. They burned day and night homing the planes to their target. But there were no more targets; only a sea of flame spreading windward with each successive raid. And wherever the ruins grew hottest, gusts of air rushed in, poisonous with stench and ash.

“I must have started yelling or running about, for a shadow came at me out of the smoke and shook me hard. It was a one-armed man in a dented helmet. He told me to get down to a shelter before the next wave passed over. The sirens were wailing again but I could barely hear them above the noise of the flames. I did not know until then that fire makes that sound—a queer hideous scratching, as if blood were seething in one’s throat. The man pulled me by the sleeve; he was a warden in the police auxiliary; I was to obey him; he couldn’t waste his time looking after damn fools who didn’t take shelter.

“We scuttled down into a trench lined with sandbags and sheets of corrugated iron. It was full of smoke and rancid smells. I made out grey splotches in the dark. They were human faces. At first I thought they were wearing gas masks or goggles. But it was simply that they were black with soot and that the near flames had left livid streaks on their skin. Only their eyes were alive; they closed suddenly when the bombs fell. There was a small girl crouching near the open end of the trench. She was barefoot and had burn marks on her arms. She asked me for a cigarette, saying she was hungry. I had none but gave her a wafer of Dutch chocolate wrapped in silver foil. She broke it in two, thrusting one piece in her pocket and placing the other in her mouth. She sucked at it cautiously. It was still on her tongue when the all-clear sounded. She heard it before any of us, raced up the steps and disappeared into the stinging smoke. As I clambered from the trench, I saw her running beside a burning wall. She turned back and waved.

“I asked the warden how I might get to the Geiringerstrasse. He gave me a frightened, angry look. ‘Isn’t that where the gas tanks are?’ I remembered the two grimy tanks and the wire fence around them at the upper end of the street where the foundry works began. ‘The tanks are near there, yes.’ ‘That’s what I thought. No use your going. It’s all sealed off. The Amis have been after those gas tanks with incendiaries. They got them two days ago. No one has been allowed near the Geirin-gerstrasse since. Come along. We’ll have a look at your papers and find you a shelter to sleep in.’ But I shook him loose and hastened for home.

“New fires had driven the smoke upwards and guided me like wildly swinging lamps. In the burning craters single houses or parts of houses still stood upright. The passage of flame had traced strange designs on the walls, as if a black ivy had sprung up. Often I had to step across the dead. Some had been burned alive trapped by curtains of fire; others had been blown to pieces or struck by shrapnel. But many lay outwardly unhurt, their mouths wide open. They had died of suffocation when the flames drank the air. I saw a young boy who must have died actually breathing fire; it had singed his mouth and leaped down his throat, blackening the flesh. Scorched into the asphalt next to him was the brown shadow of a cat.

“As I drew near what had been the Löwenplatz and the beginning of the Geiringerstrasse, a cordon of men barred my way. They were Gestapo and police. They had guns and were letting no one pass. Behind them the fires burned white with a fantastic glitter. Even here, at the end of the street, the heat and stench of gas were unbearable. The heat flogged one across the eyes and nose with nauseating strokes. I felt vomit in my mouth and grew hysterical. I pleaded with one of the Gestapo officers. I must get through. My family might be trapped in there. He shook his head and whispered at me; he was too tired to speak; he had had no sleep since three nights; since the gas tanks went up. No one was allowed through. His men were in there now seeing what could be done. At that moment I heard shots being fired somewhere in the street, behind the wall of flame. I began yelling and trying to wrestle my way through the cordon. One of the policemen took me by the collar: ‘Don’t be an idiot. There’s nothing more we can do. We’ve tried everything. We’re putting them out of their misery. They’re begging for a bullet.’ And now the burning wind brought voices, high-pitched, mad voices. The line of policemen flinched. Two Gestapo men shuffled out of the smoke and tore off their masks. They carried guns. One of them went over to a pile of rubble and fainted. The other stood in front of the officer swaying like a drunk: ‘I can’t go on with it, Herr Gruppenführer, I can’t.’ He shambled away in a sleepwalker’s gait, dropping his gun. The officer turned to me with an odd look. ‘You say you have some of your people in there? All right. Take that pistol and come with me. Perhaps you can help.’ His eyes were like two red embers; there was no life in them, only smoke and fear. We put on masks and hunched through the searing wind. The Geiringerstrasse runs alongside a small canal. It was always full of oil and slag. As a boy I used to watch the sunlight break on the oil in blues and bright greens. Now, crawling forward under the blaze of the gas tanks, I saw the canal again. There were human beings in it, standing immersed up to their necks. They saw us coming and began waving their arms. But instantly they plunged their arms back into the water, screaming. The Gestapo officer lifted a corner of his mask and rasped at me: ‘Phosphorus.’ The Americans had dropped incendiaries made of phosphorus. Where it is in contact with air phosphorus burns unquenchably. Their clothes and bodies on fire, the people of the Geiringer-strasse had died like living torches. But a few had managed to leap into the canal. There they stood for three days. Every time they tried to crawl out of the water their clothing flared up in a yellow flame. In the heart of the fire they were dying of cold and hunger. While the freezing water slid over them, their bodies shook with burns and mad spasms. Most had given up and gone under. But a few were still erect, yelling hoarsely for food and help. The Red Cross had fed them from the banks and put blankets around their heads. But on the third day, as the raids started again, everyone had been ordered out. Nothing could be done except to make death quicker and stop the in-human screaming. So the Gestapo went in. Most of the faces were unrecognizable. Hair and eyebrows had been seared away. On the black water I saw a row of living skulls. The Gestapo officer had drawn his pistol and I heard him firing. One of the faces was staring at me. It was a girl, and on her scorched forehead the flames had left a tuft of hair, red like mine. Her lips were baked and swollen but she was trying to form words. I crept over to her and took off my mask. The heat and reek of phosphorus made me gag. But I was able to lean out over the canal and she drifted towards me, her eyes never leaving mine. Her tongue was a charred stump but I understood what she was saying. ‘Quickly. Please. Quickly.’ I slipped my arm behind her head and put my lips to hers. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Then I shot her. I can’t be sure. The faces were too far gone. Yet I am sure it was my sister.”

The room was still as winter. In the gathered shadows the chime of the clock had grown remote and unreal. Suddenly Danielle spoke, without turning around, loud into the dark air: “Good. Good. I am glad.”

Her voice sprang at Falk out of an ambush long dreaded but now intolerable. The hatred of it stunned him. It seemed to close over his head in a suffocating tide. The pain that had been lurking in his bent, immobile leg surged to a shrill pitch. It shot into his back and set his neck in a vice. The drag and harshness of the long day racked his will. Only the pain was real, like a red fist before his eyes, and it beat towards the ground. But even at the instant where something inside him, something of the quick of hope and bearing, was about to break, Danielle rose and moved swiftly past him. Her hand brushed against his sleeve in dim remembrance.

Falk raised his head to look after her and the pain grew bearable, ebbing into his hips, where it gnawed in sharp but familiar guise. Terrenoire got up and lit the lamp on the sideboard. It threw the shadow of his hooked nose against the wall like a child’s drawing of a pirate. Madame Terrenoire and Nicole cleared the dishes, stacking the white and blue china. They did not look at the crippled man on the bench.

Blaise came off his haunches, his cat’s eyes livid. He spat at Falk’s clubfoot with derisive loathing and swore under his breath: “Nom de Dieu.” Then he picked up the milk pail in an easy motion and went out the door. Before it swung close, Falk caught a glimpse of the early stars.

He woke with a numb jolt. The sourness of broken sleep lay thick on his tongue. Momentarily he did not know where he was. Night was in the room and the events of the past few hours passed vaguely through his thoughts. Then he saw a shadow looming at him out of the stairwell. On guard, Falk groped for his cane. His fingers tightened on the grip, but nearly at once he recognized a familiar patch of white lace; Madame Terrenoire’s nightcap, and beneath it the flat, coarse features of the ageing woman. She rustled towards him in her frayed houserobe, leaned against the stove and searched him out with her shallow eyes. Her scrutiny slid over him like a blind man’s hand, neutral yet inquisitive.

Then she asked abruptly: “Why have you come back here? Was it to tell us that vile story … cette sale histoire?”

“Yes,” said Falk.

“Is the story true?”

“Yes,” he said again, beyond outrage.

“You are lying,” she said, not in anger, but with malignity. “You are lying. You didn’t come back here just to tell us what happened to you. Why should we care? You’ve come back to take something from us. I know your kind. That’s all you’re good for. To take and take and take.” The hands in her lap opened and closed rapaciously.

“You have so much to give,” said Falk.

She arched like an old cat: “Not any more. You’ve taken it all. You took Jean and hanged him on that cursed tree. You took so many of our young men that Nicole has been left a spinster. Just look at her. She’ll soon be dry wood. Blaise is a ruffian. He was never meant to be an oldest son. When you killed Jean there was no one else for us to lean on. It’s made him a brute. And what about me? I’m an old woman. There’s hardly anyone left around here except the children and the old. You took the rest and hanged them on the trees. No, there’s nothing more to take.” She closed her mouth hard, and to Falk she seemed like an astute fish snapping for air and then diving back into silence.

“Perhaps it’s my turn to give. Giving and taking … c’est parfois la même chose. It’s sometimes the same act.” She brushed the thought aside with a contemptuous flutter of her hand.

But Falk persisted: “It was easy to take. Too easy. We must learn to receive from each other.” She gave no sign of comprehension. “It may be that you are right, that I have come to take again. But what I can take from you this time is not life. It is some part of the death that lies between us. Un peu de cette mort.”

She countered relentlessly: “I don’t understand you. Taking is taking.”

“Even when it is love?” Falk asked awkwardly.

She gave a dry laugh: “Vous êtes de beaux salauds. You’re a fine lot of swine. To speak of love in a house where you’ve murdered a child.”

“But that is exactly the house in which I must speak of it. Don’t you see? After everything that’s happened, where else can it have any meaning?”

Something in his vehemence stung her but she yielded no ground: “You talk like a priest, but I know you for what you are. How could I forget? You killed Jean. Out there, on that ash tree.”

“None of us are what we were. Try me again.”

She shrugged him off: “What for? Leave us alone. There’s no place for your kind among us. We’ve seen you too often. You’ve been at our throats three times. Ça suffit.”

She turned from him with distaste as if she had expended too richly from her small hoard of words. But at the foot of the stairs she paused and after a spell turned with a queer jerk: “That bench can’t be much good for sleeping. You look as stiff as a dead mackerel. God knows why I’m letting you spend the night here.” Yet even as she said it, a note of pleased cunning stole into her hacking voice: “There’s a room at the top of the house, with a bed in it. I don’t have to show you the way.” Madame Terrenoire started up the wooden stairs. Falk hobbled across the kitchen. She waited for him to come near, looked back and said between her teeth: “It was Jean’s bed. See whether you can sleep in it, Captain.”

Having reached the musty room under the gables, Falk looked out the window and saw the moon in the orchard. Beyond the brittle noise of the crickets he caught the grating of the sea. He sat there for a long time, scarcely breathing the stale, warm air. When at last he fell back on the bedspread, the first glint of sunrise was visible on the eastern cliffs like a thread of copper in the morning grass.

The moment of pure, unthinking vengeance had passed. Werner Falk was endured at La Hurlette like one of those masterless dogs who forage at the edge of a farm. Hatred crackled under his feet in vicious spurts. Blaise was dark with outrage and the old woman looked on Falk with a patient contempt more insidious than fury. But they did not touch him when he passed in reach of the scythe or the heavy spade. The hideousness of his tale, the offering of it in exchange of grief, gave him sanctuary. Though they were only obscurely aware of it, the Terrenoires treated Falk as if there was on his skin the white shadow of leprosy.

Terrenoire himself said nothing. He observed Falk with gloomy complaisance; he discerned in his queer, unbidden arrival a hint of vantage. Nicole cast words at Falk now and again, and when they stood near each other a low flame lit in her sallow cheeks. She gazed after him when he trailed off to the steaming fields in the hot of the morning and threw him a nervous, irritated look when he returned at twilight from the cliffs. Only Danielle stayed outside the wary game. When they chanced to meet in the stairwell or across the neutral ground of the kitchen, her eyes narrowed with pain.

In the village voices rose and fell. Everyone knew that the German captain had returned to La Hurlette and that his presence there was being suffered in the very shade of the ash tree. Around Lurôt’s table at the Café du Vieux Port anger and wonderment eddied. But the Terrenoires were regarded as deep ones. Drawing the pale white wine through his lips, Lurôt concluded that there was doubtless something to be reaped from Falk’s visit. The Terrenoires were no fools; ce ne sont pas des poires. Vague, covetous suspicion hardened to belief: Falk had come to pay compensation for Jean’s death. The Germans were rich now, filthy rich. What had he carried in his suitcase? Some of the banknotes and jewellery which the boches had looted from France. There would be a new thresher soon at La Hurlette.

So the villagers waited and pondered, like a herd of cattle, pawing the earth now and again in drowsy malevolence. They bore Falk’s coming and going, though a sullen tremor ran under their skin as he passed. Soon they paid no heed and were hardly aware of the limping figure that emerged from the orchards to sit on the stone beach in the glitter of noon.

After three o’clock the tide receded nearly to the base of the cliff gate, leaving behind a green, shimmering expanse. Women and children swarmed out to harvest shrimp and mussels. Falk delighted in their scurrying progress and the swift fall of the nets. Often he hobbled a short distance into the unsteady ooze of stone and trapped sea.

A week after his arrival at La Hurlette he saw Nicole just ahead of him, her skirts tucked high. She turned and called under her breath: “Venez donc. Come on out.”

He followed precariously. Weed-covered and smoothed by the tides, the rocks were like glass. Between them lay brackish puddles. The afternoon sun played brokenly on the water, and rock and sand flickered like a mosaic. Falk slithered to his knees in the tangle of red weeds. Nicole stayed just in front of him, flinging words over her shoulder so that he had to strain after them.

“The others are wondering why you’ve come back. Blaise wanted to kill you on the spot. He still does. But I won’t let him.” She turned for an instant, her face strangely flushed. “I told maman you had no other place to go. All your people in Hamburg are dead. We’re the closest thing you have to a home.” He caught the abrupt laugh in her voice: “It sounds mad, doesn’t it? But I’m sure it’s true. You were happy at La Hurlette. We knew that. I think that’s why Jean hated you so much. If only you had been unhappy among us or treated us badly, we could have borne it. But to see you come through the door in your grey coat as if it was really home to you, as if you were at peace, that was unendurable. You were terribly good-looking then. Do you know that? It made it worse.”

Falk slid grotesquely into a trough of bubbling sand but her arm swung back and held him. They stood beside each other on a rock at the edge of the flats. Before them the sea heaved in a drowsy swell. All around the herring gulls yawped and scoured for their prey. Nicole lifted her chin into the wind: “We were all afraid of you. We had to be. But Jean hated you. Perhaps because he admired you so much; for being an officer and for the books you brought with you. He used to steal up to your room and read them while you were away. I wonder whether you knew.” Falk did not answer but bent close to catch her words amid the hiss of the returning sea. “He tried to read the books of German poetry. And the thick one in the yellow wrapper. It was by a philosopher, wasn’t it? With a long name. I don’t remember. It drove Jean crazy to think you could have such books and treasure them. He wanted to kill you. It wouldn’t have been so difficult either. The way you used to come down alone from the cliff at nightfall. But they wouldn’t let him.”

“They?”

“The cell he belonged to, the réseau he took orders from in Le Havre. They didn’t believe in acts of individual terrorism. Or so they claimed.”

“Who were they?”

“Surely you knew. Jean was in the Party.”

She faced him, her mouth drawn thin. “He was a rabid communist. We thought you had found out. That’s why you hanged him, wasn’t it?”

Falk shook his head and tried to keep his footing on the wet rock: “No, we had no knowledge of that. We hanged your brother because he was signalling to the Canadian landing barges from the top of the cliff.”

“Ah. Was that the only reason? Qu-importe? He wanted to kill you and you killed him instead. That’s war, isn’t it?” She said it with indifference, as if it was a truth long buried. “Father had no love for Jean. They fought like dogs. When he discovered that Jean was going around with communists, he beat him half to death. But Jean grew to be stronger than papa. He didn’t dare lay a hand on him later on. So they snarled at each other continually.”

“What about you, Nicole? Did you get on with Jean?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not a hypocrite like the others. So I’ll tell you. We never cared much for each other. I was the oldest but he showed me no regard. With his books and glib talk and stupid politics, you would have thought he was some kind of genius. But he wasn’t. I’d say he was an arrogant puppy and that’s the truth. No, there was no love lost between us. He knew I was plain-looking and used to joke about it with the other louts in the village. Said I was tall and bony as an old rake; that’s what they whispered behind my back, vieux râteau. After you came I suddenly realized that Jean was nothing but a little boy, a clever little boy playing at war. I told him how good-looking you were and that you were a real soldier. It made him livid.” Nicole glanced away in vexed remembrance. “When you killed him, I knew that I should feel bitter grief. But I felt nothing. Nothing at all. Danielle howled for days. We couldn’t get her to eat or take her dirty clothes off. She adored Jean. She was the only one of us to whom he was gentle and they had all sorts of secrets. But I felt nothing. When the invasion came that morning, I had only one thought: perhaps I shall survive, perhaps there is going to be an end to this terrible time.”

“So that’s why you’ve forgiven me,” said Falk.

“Forgiven? Il n’est pas question de ça. I’m no priest. I’m not interested in the past. I wish the past had never been. We must start living again. What have we to do with the dead? That’s why you’ve come back, isn’t it? You’ve come back to La Hurlette to show that the past need not matter, that we can salvage from it what was good and leave the rest behind like a bad dream, haven’t you?” She flung the question at him with a sudden imperious surge, as if opening to the wind a hidden banner. Falk was startled by the intensity of life in her sharp features.

She bore in on him: “That’s what I’ve told them at home. Let him be. He’s going to stay with us and make good for the past. Blaise and papa think you’re going to pay them or make some kind of cosy deal. The fools. They must think you sell cider in Germany!” Her gaiety stung. “But let them think that. It will give us time.” Her hand touched his in fierce, shy demand. Falk saw the waters rising and said nothing.

Nicole lashed out at his silence: “Why don’t you say something?” Her lips whitened and she drew nearer to him. “Why don’t you look me in the face?”

Her nakedness appalled him. He spoke her name softly and in fear, as if it was an open wound: “Nicole. You’ve understood many things which I’ve felt. You’ve said the things for which I found no right words. But I don’t think there can be between us …” He stared at the moving sand, “I don’t think you and I, however close we must be to one another.…”

Their faces were only inches apart. “You don’t think that you and I.…” Nicole stared at him bewildered. “Not you and I.… Why then have you come back?” Falk reached towards her but she flinched away. “What are you doing here? What kind of a foul trick are you playing on us?”

“I know,” said Falk, “it doesn’t make sense. I am like a sleep-walker looking for that which kept me alive in the daytime. Looking for the one door that opens out of night. Probably I shan’t be allowed anywhere near it. It’s madness, I know. But you will understand, Nicole. You must understand.”

She had already begun moving away. Her face had gone ashen. Only her eyes were alive and brimming with pain. Falk had once seen a gunner whip a horse across the eyes and he remembered the glare of anguish.

“Listen to me, Nicole, I beg you. I need your help. I need to know that you do not hate me. Without you I shall be hounded away from here. Just listen to me for a moment. Please.”

He called in vain. The girl was racing back towards the beach, skipping with grim agility from rock to rock. She glanced back at him only once, but across the gap of wind and spray he could see the fury in her. When he looked up again, he realized he was alone. The other fishermen were hastening landward. Over the entire flats and in the dark pools the water was seething in annunciation of the returning tide. The gulls were veering towards their nests in the high cliff and the sun glowed red on their wings. Falk saw that the sea was close upon him. He clambered towards the shore. But the tide was quicker. It sent sheets of foam flashing past him and the rocks grew vague under the charge and retreat of the surf. Crabs rose warily out of the quaking mud and scuttled away from his groping steps. He fell and slithered and drew himself up again, but the water sucked at his weight. Despite the chill wind, he was drenched with sweat. Soon his hands, grasping their way along the rock edges, were raw and torn. The salt bit into his broken nails. In the failing light the beach grew distant and the roofs took on a remote, mocking blue. Labouring against the undertow, Falk remembered an ugly moment south of Smolensk. In pursuit of the Russians, his company had tumbled into a marsh. Unable to keep rank in the knife-edged grass, sickened by the flies and the stench of dead water, he and his men had crawled forward on their bellies, looking for steady ground. The enemy had turned on them with mortar fire. Wherever the shells dropped, stinking water sprayed over the wounded and the dead. Clawing his way through the lashing surf, his hands bloodied, Falk remembered the episode. The knowledge that he had got out alive screwed his will to a last, fierce effort. He lunged out of the flailing tide and on to the pebbles. On hands and knees he drew himself to a pile of nets drying in the late sun and looked back. The sea was yelping at the shore like a pack of foxes; its cold tongue darted at him still.

Nicole had raced blindly through the orchards. She met Danielle on the stairs and said in a strangled voice: “It’s you he’s after. It’s you. Make the best of it, petite garçe.” Danielle stared at her in bewildered protest and raised her hand as if to ward off a blow. But all she felt were Nicole’s fingers brushing her forehead as if in dubious benediction.

The next morning Terrenoire broke his silence. Falk had watched him feeding a sow as she hammered her pink snout against the trough. Closing the wire fence behind him, Terrenoire asked, “How long are you planning to stay with us, Monsieur Falk?” And before Falk could reply: “Not that it bothers me. It’s no skin off my back. I told Clotilde you would be paying for your room and board, and paying better than last time. But you seem to be stirring up the girls, just like you did when you first came. They’re running about like crazy hens. Et parbleu, you must admit it’s a strange place for you to choose for a holiday.”

“I’m not here for a holiday,” said Falk; “it’s more serious than that. In fact, it’s the only completely serious thing I’ve ever tried to do.”

Terrenoire blinked peevishly at the implication of obscure, private motive.

“I grew up in a kind of very loud bad dream,” said Falk. “I cannot remember a time when we were not marching or shouting and when there were no flags in the street. When I think of my childhood all I can remember distinctly are the drums and the uniform I wore as a young pioneer. And the great red flags with the white circle and the black hooked cross in the middle. They were constantly draped across our window. It seems to me I always saw the sun through a red curtain. And I remember the torches. One night my father woke me suddenly and tore me to the window. The whole street was full of men marching with torches like a great fiery worm. I must have yelled with fear or sleepiness and my father slapped me across the mouth. I don’t remember much about him but he smelled of leather.

“School was worse. The drums beat louder and there were more flags. On the way home we played rabbit hunt and went after Jews. We made them run in the gutter carrying our books and if they dropped any we held them down and pissed in their faces. In the summer we were taught how to be men. They sat us on a log two by two. Every boy in turn would slap his partner as hard as he could. First one to duck was a coward. I passed out once but did not fall off the log. I never finished school. I suppose my final exam came in Lemberg when they told me to clean out a bunker with a flame-thrower. I had my graduation in Warsaw, marching with the victory parade. Now the drums never stopped. They were always pounding at us: in Norway; outside Utrecht, where I got my first wound; in Salonika, where we hanged the partisans on meat hooks; and at Kharkov, where this happened.” Falk’s hand trailed absently along his leg.

“They never stopped, and in the hospital outside Dresden I thought they would drive me mad. I can’t tell you much about it, Monsieur Terrenoire, because I hardly remember it myself. There were two of me. One night I came hobbling down the ward back from the latrine. There was no bed vacant. I must have hopped from bed to bed looking. Then I remembered that my fever chart had a number. I found it. There was another man in my bed. I saw the stain seeping along his bandaged leg and knew that this man was I. So I jumped on him and tried to get at his throat. After that they kept me under morphine.”

They had strayed into the orchard. Falk went on: “Then I was sent here. How can I explain? In church they tell us that Lazarus rose from his stinking shroud having been four days dead. And they call that a miracle! I had been dead twenty years. I did not really know that there was such a thing as life. No one had told me. I first stumbled on that dangerous secret here, at La Hurlette. You probably don’t even remember the first night I spent with you.”

Terrenoire looked at him guardedly: “I can’t say I do.”

Falk laughed, his voice exultant: “Why should you? It was a night like many others. Officers had been billeted here before I came. To you it meant nothing: just another unwelcome stranger in the house. But for me it was the first hour of grace. I stood up there at the window under the gables, looked across the orchard and caught a flash of the sea. Danielle—do you remember how slight and small she was?—rapped at my door and brought me a pitcher of milk. It was a blue pitcher and the milk was warm. I know these are all perfectly ordinary things, a room with a low ceiling, a row of apple trees and a blue pitcher. But to me, at that moment, they were the gates of life. Lazare, veni foras. But that man had been dead only four days! In this house I rose from a death much longer and worse. That night, when Danielle set the pitcher down on the table, the drums stopped beating for the first time. I never heard them here. Oh, I know the war was everywhere around us, that there were mines at the end of the garden, and barbed wire on the cliffs. But it didn’t seem to matter. I saw life sitting in your kitchen as if it was a brightness. Isn’t that an absurd thought? But those who have grown up dead have such visions. And because the drums had stopped, I began hearing myself. I had never really heard my own voice before. Only other men’s shouts and the echo we had to give. That’s all I had been taught to do, echo shout for shout and hatred for hatred. It sounds fantastic, I know, but watching you and your children, I realized that human beings don’t always shout at each other. The silence in this house was like fresh water, I plunged my hands and face in it. And I discovered that men are not always either one’s friends or one’s enemies, but somewhere in between. They had forgotten to tell us that in the Hitlerjugend and the Wehrmacht.” Falk thrust his hand among the powdery blossoms. “This is where I climbed out of the grave, Monsieur Terrenoire, in your house and among these trees.”

Terrenoire ground a cigarette under his mired boots: “Perhaps you did, monsieur. I don’t know about such things. You say you climbed out of a grave. But, nom de Dieu, it didn’t stay empty. You put my son in it.” He glanced at Falk with a hint of satisfaction, like a player who has landed a difficult shot. He repeated the words savouring their astute propriety: “Non monsieur, it didn’t stay empty very long, that fine grave of yours.”

“I know,” said Falk, “I killed your son in an act of futile reprisal, and in the hour of his victory. I found life in this house and brought death. You are right. Open graves gape until they are filled. That one should have had me in it.” He said it with harsh finality, as if it was a lesson learnt long ago and implacably repeated. “I don’t deny that for a moment. How could I?” Terrenoire watched from under his lids. He had seen larks fling themselves about thus before yielding to the net. “And I can’t make it good to you, ever. There is no price on death.”

“To be sure,” said the old man, “those are the very words I used to Clotilde. He can’t make up for Jean’s death. They’ve paid the Ronquiers for the trees they sawed down, and more than they were worth, believe me. But they don’t pay for the sons they killed. So I said to her: Monsieur Falk must have something else in mind.” And again he blinked with an air of patient complicity.

“When I had to get out of here, the drums began all over again. I’ve told you what happened to me. But though I lived in hell and saw enough of horror each day to drive a man insane, it could no longer destroy me. Even at the worst, in Hamburg, after they dragged me away from the canal, and then in Leipzig when the Russians were on us, I could shut my eyes for an instant and imagine myself back at La Hurlette. I swore that if that blue pitcher went unbroken so would I. Before decamping with my men, I buried it under a mound of hay in your barn. It must be there still. I should know if anything had happened to it; something inside me would have a crack. Because I had lived here, I knew that outside the world of the mad and the dead there was something else, something that might survive the war intact. I swore I would come back one day and hear the silence.”

Terrenoire plucked a wet hair from the corner of his mouth: “That’s very moving, Monsieur Falk, though I don’t pretend to understand all of it. Mais c’est gentil, and I can see that a place like this would seem better than Wehrmacht barracks or the Russian front. But now you’ve come back and had a good look. Just like the Americans who come here every summer to show their families the beaches and the cemeteries. But I don’t see you packing your suitcase. On the contrary, you seem to be settling in. À quoi bon? What do you really want from us?”

“I wasn’t sure until I came back,” said Falk, “I knew inside me all the time, but didn’t dare think it through. Now I know, beyond any doubt. I am in love with Danielle. I have been the whole time. I want to marry her.”

Terrenoire’s face opened, startled and off guard. “You want to marry Danielle?” He was fending for time, like a clam burrowing.

“If she will have me.”

“If she will have you? Parbleu, she’s not the only one concerned. Non, monsieur, things are not that simple around here.” He was on his own terrain now and confident. “You’ve killed my eldest son and want to marry my youngest daughter. Drôle d’idée. You Germans are deep ones, I’ll say that for you.” He laughed drily.

Falk made a tired, submissive gesture: “Five years are gone since that happened. It’s unredeemable, I know. But Danielle and I are alive, and there can be children and new life here.”

“No doubt,” countered Terrenoire, “but there are many things to be thought of.” Falk passed his hand over the bark of a young tree: “You are right, Monsieur Terrenoire. I don’t even know whether Danielle will listen to me. I fear she will laugh in my face.”

“Haven’t you spoken to her yet?” “No,” said Falk. A glint of malice lit in Terrenoire’s pupils: “But you have spoken to Nicole?” Falk was silent. “That was stupid of you, Monsieur Falk. You Germans have no finesse, for all your lofty ideas.” The two men had drifted to the edge of the sown field. The haystacks smoked slightly under the morning sun and to the left the ash tree cast its blue shadow. “But perhaps you were right after all,” said Terrenoire: “This matter really concerns Nicole.” He cracked his knuckles: “Dans mon pays, monsieur, we don’t marry off our younger daughters before their older sisters are settled. Et voilà.”

Both the force and the irrelevance of the argument struck Falk. Even as he answered, pleading that there must be exceptions to such rules, his own words seemed to him feeble and wide of the mark. Terrenoire did not bother to refute him, but pressed forward: “Nicole will make you a good wife. She’s a little dry, un peu sec, like her mother, but a solid girl. She enjoys putting her nose in books, like you do, Monsieur Falk. She won’t give you any trouble.” He warmed to his theme: “You may have got hold of something with all your fine talk. You can’t replace Jean on the farm with that leg of yours, but you can make a proper home for Nicole and help us out a bit. That’s some return for what we had to put up with.”

Falk intruded vehemently. There could be no question of marriage between himself and Mademoiselle Nicole, though he was fond and admiring of her. He was in love with Danielle. That she was the younger sister was awkward, he granted, but it couldn’t be helped. If Danielle would not have him, he would leave at once and the Terrenoires would see no further trace of him. “Merde,” said the old man, “Danielle is much too young for you. I won’t allow it. She’s too young.”

“I am ten years older than she is. But we’re exactly the same age. We’ve seen and endured the same things. Outside Odessa we rounded up a group of partisans and made ready to hang them. Among them there was a Jewish boy. I couldn’t believe that he was a day over fifteen. I asked him. He answered: ‘I am fifteen add a thousand. To get a Jew’s proper age, you should always add a thousand.’ To get a Jew’s proper age, you should always add a thousand.’ It’s like that with the whole lot of us. For those who lived in the war, ten years’ difference hardly matters. We carry the same mark.”

Terrenoire broke off. Words were like pips in his mouth; he spat them out and was done with them. Shuffling back to the farmyard, he kept aloof from Falk’s urgent plea. He stopped for a moment at the pigpen and clucked his tongue, loud as a pistol shot. The sow shifted her haunches in lazy recognition. Nearly at the threshold, Terrenoire turned bitterly: “Get one thing through your head, Monsieur Falk: if you marry Danielle, you won’t get a penny out of me, pas un liard. I’ll put her out like a beggar. With Nicole it might be different. I don’t say I could give you much. You and your friends saw to that. But Nicole is the oldest. She wouldn’t leave my house empty-handed.”

“I don’t expect anything,” said Falk. “That has never entered my mind. On the contrary.” Terrenoire looked up. “I have put some money aside. I am an electrical engineer. I’m partner in a small business in Hanover. We are well on our feet. On the contrary, Monsieur Terrenoire, it is I.…”

They entered the kitchen. Madame Terrenoire was scraping carrots over a cracked bowl. “You’ll never guess,” said Terrenoire with a watery smile, “Monsieur Falk has not come back to buy apples or see the landscape. Il est prétendant, parbleu; he is a suitor.” She said nothing, but her hands ceased from their quick labour.

Falk found no immediate occasion to press his suit. Danielle had left for Harfleur, where her aunt kept a draper’s shop. Falk remembered the little lady, hewn like a benevolent gargoyle out of a pink, brittle stone. Tante Amélie lived in implacable detestation of the English; she regarded them as cunning wolves who had sought to ruin France either by direct incursion or by entangling her in bloody wars for their own secret profit. Forced to leave her home when the old port had been turned into a German bastion, Amélie had gone to live with a bachelor cousin in Angers. She had passed through La Hurlette, giving away bales of cloth and her stock of ribbons lest they fall into English hands. She had welcomed Falk as an ally brought into France by harsh but provident destiny. When she chronicled for him the numerous occasions on which the English had sacked Harfleur, the antique conflagrations seemed to burn in her high cheeks.

Danielle often went over to Harfleur to spend a day in the musty shop, passing her fingers over the raw linen and crépes de chine. Nicole told Falk in a dead voice that her sister was coming home by the late afternoon bus. He went to Yvebecques to meet her.

Watching Danielle step off the bus, Falk experienced a sense of painful unreality. He had rehearsed the scene too often in his imagination, first in the prisoner-of-war camp at Dortmund, and later in Hanover when trying to salvage life out of the rubble. Now the girl came towards him as in a warm, abstract remembrance. Even the excitement that rose in him was stale. And because he was numb and momentarily remote, Falk saw Danielle as she really was, not as he had obstinately dreamt her.

She had grown straight but her body had not filled out. It was full of hollows and awkward movement. Only her face had taken on a broad strength. The large grey eyes and steady mouth gave it an alert, nearly masculine beauty, but one could discern flat bones under the skin. Danielle would take after her mother, and Falk glimpsed, beneath the nearing girl, the later woman, secretive and perhaps a little coarse.

In an instant, however, he could no longer see her as someone apart from himself. Crossing the market-place and entering the Rue de la Poissonnière, she had passed completely into the troubled light of his desire.

Seeing Falk, Danielle gave a small, abrupt nod, as if to say, “I knew you would be here. I have been thinking about it on the bus, all the way from Harfleur”; but neither spoke. She came near and suddenly put her hand out as adversaries do before a match. Unready, Falk did not meet her gesture and their hands fumbled. At this they laughed, the strain holding them close. She began walking beside him, slowing her step to his laboured progress.

They said nothing until the road started climbing away from the village. But Falk could not keep his glance from her hair. The blood ached in his temples. When Danielle spoke, it was as if their thoughts had already conversed in intimate dispute. “Are there no girls left in Germany, Monsieur Falk?” He started. “That’s what I said to Tante Amélie. Poor Monsieur Falk. There are no girls left in Germany. Pas une seule. So he had to pack his suitcase and come all the way to Yvebecques to find one.”

“And what did your aunt say to that?”

“She told me not to worry my head about such matters but to thank la bonne Vierge Marie that you had come back. Tante Amélie is very taken with you, you know. You should visit her in Harfleur.”

“I hope to,” said Falk.

“Yes, she’s still hoping that you will defeat the English. You’ve let her down badly.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to explain to her that it didn’t work out that way.”

“It didn’t, did it?” said Danielle lightly.

“No. But that’s over and done with. It happened a long time ago.”

“A long time?” she echoed him as from a far dimness.

“Yes, longer than we need remember. Believe me, Danielle.”

“I thought so too. Until you walked back into our kitchen the other night. When I saw you again I heard the ash tree creaking. I had not heard it creak that way since the winter after you left. And when I ran past you I went into the garden. The bark is still worn where the rope was.”

“No. That’s not true. The bark has renewed itself and the branch has grown.”

“That would be too simple,” said Danielle.

Falk blazed up as if she had touched the very nerve of him. “Simple? On the contrary. It’s much simpler to stiffen in silence or hate. Hate keeps warm. That’s child’s play. It would have been much simpler for me to die in Hamburg near the canal. Or to stay in Hanover and marry a widow with a pension and cast the image of you out of my mind. Do you think it’s easy to come back here? In Germany we don’t talk about the past. We all have amnesia or perhaps someone put an iron collar around our necks so that we can’t look back. That’s one way of doing it. Then there’s the other, the unrelenting way. Steep yourself in the remembered horrors. Build them around you like a high safe wall. Is that any less easy or dishonest?”

She lashed out: “God knows I wish the past didn’t exist! I didn’t ask for those memories, did I? You forced them down our throats, the whole savage pack of you! And now you come and tell us we should forget and live for the future. You’re spitting on graves. The dead will start howling when you pass.”

She broke off; there were tears of rage in her voice. Had Falk not grasped her arm she would have darted ahead. But he held her rooted. “Try and understand what I’m saying. I’m not asking you to forget anything. I want you to remember your brother, and, if you must, the burn of the rope on the branch. But remember Bültner also. Think of the apples he threw at you and think of him lying alive in the ditch when they came with their flails. And if you think of all the dead, of yours and of ours, it will become more bearable. I don’t want you to forget. The stench of forgetting is so strong in Germany that I came back here to breathe real air. But that’s only the beginning, the easy part, like learning to walk again. They taught me that in the hospital. It hurt so much I kept passing out. But it was really very simple. It’s after you’ve learnt to walk that the terrible part begins. Suddenly you discover that you have to go some place.”

“I don’t want to go. I want to be left alone.” And she drew away into the evening shadows.

When Falk caught up with her, lights were coming on in the village. On the horizon a tanker moved like a black thread across the molten wake of the sun. The air was still with the first touch of night.

Danielle turned to him: “Nicole is in love with you.” She said it with the solemn malice of a child.

“Don’t mock me.”

“No. It’s true. We used to quarrel about you when we were girls. We knew how handsome you were but pretended you wore a mask and vied with one another in describing how fearful you would look without it. She said she couldn’t stand you because you were nasty and conceited and gave yourself airs like an old rooster. I was silly in those days and believed her. But after you left she went grey inside. She never found anyone else. When she turned down Jacques Estève—his people own the dairy on the road to Fécamp—I ran after him and told him to chop off one of his legs. He thought I was mad. If la Sainte Vierge has brought you back here, it’s for Nicole’s sake. She will make you happy. Elle sera bonne pour vous. She’s clever and serious. She knows ever so much more than I do. She can understand your books and the long words you use. And I would be your sister-in-law. Then we could sit by the chimney and talk about your children.”

Involuntarily, Falk took up her tone: “And what about your children, belle-soeur?”

“Mine? Ah, the little horrors! Jean—he’s the oldest one, you know—will always be in trouble. They’ll send him home from school for putting girls’ pigtails in the inkwell and for writing wicked things on the walls. So I shall have to be very angry with him. I shall pack him off to Germany to work in his uncle’s factory. You will have a factory, won’t you? And you will tell me how he’s getting on and see to it that he writes his maman. And when he comes home I shall be proud of him, and he will have learned to be an engineer like you.”

In the pending darkness Danielle seemed to discern the shapes of her invention. She moved after them: “And there will be many daughters. Four at least. They will have long red hair and blue eyes, not grey like mine. I shall have to go to Rouen and Le Havre to find husbands for them. They will be so pert that no one will want them.”

“And what will you do then?”

“I shall send them to you and ask you to put them in a nunnery deep in the Black Forest! Tell me, is it really black?”

“Yes.”

“They won’t like that. They will drape their red hair out the window until someone rescues them and there will be a mighty scandal. So I shall have to bring them home and build them a house up on the grande falaise. There they will sit and stick their tongues out at passers-by and grow into spinsters like four tall candles.”

“Will you visit them?”

“From time to time. When the wind is high. And we will gather at the fire to talk about the past.”

“What will you tell them of the past?”

Danielle wavered and then bent near: “That it was long ago.”

Falk found her clasped hands. He opened them gently. But beneath his soft motion she felt the surge of longing, watchful and implacable. It filled her with strange anguish, as if the entire weight of the night was upon her. She drew back rebellious: “Look,” she cried out, “look!”

Falk turned heavily. Banks of clouds had mounted in the northern sky. But here and there they were thinning out; behind them shimmered a vague white line. “England,” she said, “those are the English cliffs.”

“I don’t think so,” said Falk trying to keep the edge out of his voice, “it’s probably moonlight reflecting on the clouds. You rarely see the English coast from here. Even with our glasses it was difficult to tell whether we were seeing cliffs or a trick of light.”

“I remember your glasses,” said Danielle quickly, “in their big leather case. Do you still have them?”

“No, I sold them to an American soldier for a tin of coffee. What else do you remember?”

“Everything. The smell of your coat and the loose strap on your helmet and the way you kept forgetting your furred gloves in the kitchen. And I remember the time after you left. I tried to hate you. With every nerve inside me. I kept my eyes tight shut so that I could see before me Jean’s body and the bit of rope your men left on the ash tree. But I didn’t succeed. That was what made me ill. I couldn’t hate you. I didn’t know how.” But even as she said it the weight of his presence enveloped her and she fought against it: “You see, Monsieur Falk, I am a silly girl. I don’t know much about hatred and I don’t know about love. Je suis bonne à rien.” She laughed as if she had sprung free from his reach.

“Have you never been in love, Danielle?”

“Oh, many times!”

“Seriously?”

The hurt in his voice provoked her: “Desperately. With Siccard at the florist’s. With Monsieur Lurôt’s cousin who lives in Rouen and owns two silk waistcoats. With Fridolin. He drives a green truck and takes me for rides in it.”

“And now?”

The lightness drained away; something urgent and wearing rose at her. She sought to force it down. She liked to tear green currants off the bush and put them between her teeth. It was the same bitter, exciting taste. Falk asked again, “And now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

They had not taken the straight way to La Hurlette but had strayed on to a small path which led to the rim of the cliff. There it plunged sharply down the face, ending in a niche dug out of the rock. Just large enough for two men, the hollow had served as a machine-gun nest. Looming from the dirt parapet, the barrel had a cruel sweep of the bay. Below it the cliff fell sheer into the sea. Like a gannet’s eyrie, the narrow platform hung suspended between the dark folds of the rock and the clamour of the water. Falk had often gone there to inspect the watch, to inhale the salt rush of night or peer at the red flashes on the English coast. One had to speak loud to make oneself heard above the seethe and bellow of the waves. During the March storms, spray had been known to leap skyward, sending a plume of cold white mist over the huddled gunners. But on summer nights, at the recession of the tide, there were moments of near silence, with the sea running far below, the foam driven on it like white leaves.

Falk held Danielle close: “I love you, I love you.” The words seemed arrogant and trivial in the indifference of the night. But he went on heedless: “I am not bringing you very much. This carcass of mine and half a wedding present. The other half is lying in the gutter in the Rue de la Poissonnière. Let’s leave it there. Half may be enough. I don’t want to ask for the whole of life any more. Only for you, and for time enough to quarrel and make children and grow old together. If I have to, I’ll even take those four wicked daughters into the bargain. It’s a bad bargain, Danielle, I know that. The merchandise has been damaged in transit. God knows you could do better. There must be fine young men about, with fine legs. Of your own people. Not the enemy, not the sale boche. There may be some around who could love you more blindly than I do. They wouldn’t notice that your nose has grown a little too long. They might even make you happier than I can. But I won’t let them have you. I want you. Utterly for myself. You cannot conceive how selfish I have grown. I believe with all my soul that I will make you happy. But I don’t know whether that counts most. All I do know, all I care for, is that you are life to me, all of it I can grasp or make sense of now. I was a dead man when I first saw you, when you walked into my room that night. I breathed you in like air and began living. The presence of you inside me has kept me alive since. I love you, Danielle, selfishly and desperately. I cannot take no for an answer.”

The vehemence of it held her rigid. But though she was afraid and uncertain, a bright malice flashed through her. “Say it in German,” she demanded, “say it in German.”

“Ich liebe dich, Danielle.”

She shaped the words awkwardly for herself: “Ich liebe dich.” They stuck in her teeth like a bitter rind. “It’s not very beautiful that way. Je vous aime is better.” She felt the tightness and impatience in his grip. “You are hurting me. Let go.”

He did, and she swayed against the sudden gulf of night. “Ich liebe dich.” She tried again and could not suppress an abrupt, unreasoned gaiety. “I would be Madame Falk. How strange. Bonsoir, Madame Falk.”

“Danielle, come back to me. Come into my room, as you always did, with the morning sun. Put your hand on my sleeve. Tell me that you know what I’m asking for. That you love me.”

She turned and took his head between her hands, staring at him for an instant as if he was a stranger; then she drew him down swiftly. They stood gathered to each other. Even now, unsteady with delight and a great tiredness, Falk urged once more: “Tell me.” He heard the words from a sudden closeness: “Je vous aime.”

At the foot of the cliffs the sea was beginning to simmer. They drew in the roused air and the salt lay sharp on their tongues. Holding Danielle fast, Falk told her of the blue pitcher. At first she did not remember. And when he told her of how he had buried it in the barn and of what it signified to him during the last months of war, rebellion stung her. He had planned it all. She had no existence of her own. She was part of a stubborn dream. She swerved back like a small angry flame: “I can’t understand why you make so much of it. It was a cheap little jug. We never used the good china for our guests.” She gave the word a fine edge of scorn.

But he seemed beyond her reach and she followed mutinous yet entranced as they clambered back up the cliff and struck out for La Hurlette.

“We must go to the barn, Danielle, and dig it up. I know we shall find it unbroken. I did not dare look before. Now I know. My love. My love.” And he clasped her tight as they hurried through the trees.

Joined to his lunging step, Danielle felt herself in Falk’s power. It gave her insidious content, as if she had been a swimmer who stops thrashing and yields to the seaward drag of the tide. But she could not let go entirely. The precariousness of their condition was too vivid in her mind. Too much of what lay before them was unanswered.

“Falk.”

“Yes?”

“Even if it’s true what we said back there, even if we are in love.…”

“Yes, Danielle?”

“What can come of it, Falk? They won’t let us marry.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not one of us, and they look on me as a child. And it would do Nicole dreadful hurt.”

“None of that concerns us, Danielle. Not really. I know it’s true, but it can’t be helped, and does it matter?”

“I don’t think I would like to come with you to Germany. No. I don’t think I would want to leave here. You mustn’t ask it of me.”

“Perhaps I will have to. And much more. Love is asking. All the time. For more than anyone ever dreamt of giving.”

“I don’t have that much to give, Falk.”

“What there is I will take! Be warned.”

She caught the lightness in his tone but also the obstinate desire. In the dark of the hedgerows his step seemed surer than hers.

“I’m afraid, Falk. I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Of what they’ll say in the village. Of your German friends. Of Jean. I fear his ghost. It will seek us out. It will harrow our lives. Don’t laugh at me. It’s God’s truth. He will find us and damn us to hell.”

“I am not laughing, Danielle. Perhaps he will come. In some way I wish he would. It would make my happiness more bearable. If we receive him into our lives, he will forgive us. Ghosts are watchdogs and children must learn to live with them in the house. And learn their language. I have heard it. They speak like snow.”

“Father won’t give us anything. If we leave here, I shall have to go as a beggar.” “I know,” said Falk gaily, “Monsieur Terrenoire made that quite plain. And here I came all the way from Hanover just to snatch your dowry. Think of it!” His laughter rang out.

“Be serious, Falk. There is so much against us. We are mad to carry on this way.”

“I love you, Danielle.” His voice left her naked. “Don’t you understand? I love you. Everything you say is true. We are surrounded by absurd and hateful things. It will be even more difficult than you or I can imagine. Perhaps they will want to hang me and shave your head.” She felt his fingers pass through her hair in rough solace. “I don’t know whether I must go back to Hanover or whether we can live in France. But does it matter? I love you. And if I said it over and over all night long you wouldn’t have heard the beginning of it!”

They moved in silence. Then Falk resumed. “You have a beautiful name. I will often call you in our house, not because I shall need anything, but to say it. Danielle. It’s like a cool bright stone that has lain in a mountain stream.”

“Please, stop it, Falk. I can’t bear it. I’m too afraid.”

They were nearly at La Hurlette. Falk entered the barn and advanced through the warm blackness with the surety of a blind man. Danielle saw him kneel in one of the old stalls now empty of horses. He scattered the crackling hay and the trodden dirt. Then he pried loose one of the floorboards and she heard the nails scrape. Suddenly he paused and she caught the tense pleasure in his voice. “Danielle, come here!” Once again she felt as if she had become a shadow to his being. She stepped nearer. “I have it. It’s here. Exactly as I buried it.” The object tinkled faintly as if the lid was loose. Falk brushed the dirt away cradling the little pitcher against his body. Then he rose triumphant. “It’s unbroken, Danielle. It’s been waiting for us all these years. My love, it’s unbroken. Feel the edge. Not a chip. Take it. We shall drink from it in the mornings. Just as we used to.”

He was reaching towards her when the beam of light struck between them. The pitcher shone blue and abrupt shadows sprang up the wall. Blaise was standing in the doorway, the lamp held stiffly before him. Danielle grasped the pitcher and bent away. The cows shifted in the hot still air.

Blaise strode in, breathing heavily. He rapped the girl across the mouth with the back of his hand, not in fury but bewildered scorn: “Petite putain.”

Falk strained towards her but Blaise barred his way. He stood like a circus trainer, his powerful legs straddled: “I’m fed up. J’en ai marre. You’re getting out of here. Tonight. You’ve made enough trouble. You’re going to leave us in peace. We don’t want you around here. Never again. I’m warning you. Get out while you can.”

Falk flung out into the dark: “Danielle, tell him we love each other. Tell him we’re leaving together.”

“If she makes a move,” said Blaise, “I’ll beat the daylights out of her. But she won’t move. She’s just a stupid little goose. You may have turned her head with your fancy speeches. But she’s coming to her senses. Look at her.” He swept the light across her inert face.

“Danielle, tell him the truth. Come with me.” She was staring at Falk but not seeing him. “For God’s sake, Danielle, rouse yourself! Remember all that we’ve said, all that’s happened. If I go now without you, I can never return.” But she lifted her hands to her face and shrank from the light.

“Enough of this farce,” said Blaise. “Get out of here. You can wait in the village. There’s a bus to Rouen at daybreak. Get going, mon capitaine.”

“Let me through to her,” demanded Falk. “She’s frightened of you. You’re an ugly brute. But she loves me. Do you hear? She loves me! And nothing you can do will change that.”

Blaise grinned. He knew his ground. When he turned to Danielle it was as if he had flicked a restive calf across the nose. “Why don’t you say something to the handsome gentleman? He’s waiting.” He kept the lamp on her.

“Please,” she moaned, “leave me alone. It’s no good. They’ll kill you if you stay. I told you it wouldn’t do any good. You must go.”

“Come with me,” cried Falk.

“I can’t. I don’t dare. Perhaps I don’t love you enough. Please let me be. Please.” She kept her hands before her eyes, against Falk’s anguish and the unswerving light.

Falk raised his cane but Blaise tore it from his grasp easily: “I could hammer your brains out right now. No one would care. But why bother? You’re going to leave just like you came. Like a lame dog.” He snapped the cane across his leg and threw the pieces into a mound of hay.

As he hobbled out of the barn, his hands clutching for support, Falk caught a last glimpse of Danielle. She had turned to the wall.

When she set out in pursuit of Falk late the next morning, Danielle was like a creature possessed. Only moments after he had been driven from the barn, a sense of utter desolation assailed her. She had run through the courtyard calling Falk’s name under her breath. But darkness had swallowed him. She knew with the blinding certainty of pain that she could not endure without him. Her love was not the unbewildered glory he had demanded, but though imperfect, it made up the sum of life. Having come moments too late, this knowledge mocked her. The remembrance of her evasion and of Falk’s crippled departure under the derisive flourish of Blaise’s lamp, made her skin tight and cold. It was like a palpable nightmare and she could not shake it off.

Loathing herself, she stood under the chill heavy rain which began towards midnight as if it could scour her clean. Danielle watched from the arcade of the market hall as the dawn bus left for Rouen, but there was no sign of Falk. She hastened along the top of the cliff and stared vaguely at the woken sea. Then back to La Hurlette. She put on dry clothes and started out again, brushing Nicole aside as if she were an intruder.

As she hurried back to the village, the whole landscape turned into bleak unreality. The thought of not seeing Falk again filled her with wild misery. Yet she was afraid of meeting him. He would not forgive her cowardice and giddiness of mind. He knew her now for a shallow girl. He had said he would never come back.

Danielle began whimpering like a child. When she had been very little, she had been banished to her room for snatching rowdily at a sweet bun. After a time her father had come to the door. She could have her brioche if only she would express remorse for her wicked manners. Fighting back tears, Danielle had refused. On his way downstairs, Terrenoire casually popped the bun into his own mouth. Seeing it vanish, Danielle had felt the world collapse. She had howled with rage and sorrow. Now the same feeling of absurd deprivation engulfed her. She had thrown away her life in frivolous unknowing.

Ferreting about in Yvebecques, she found news. Between gulps of coffee Pervienne told her that when crossing his field, just after daybreak, he had seen a man hobbling down the road. He was leaning on what looked like a large dead branch. After a while the man had flagged down a truck and Pervienne had watched him clamber on to the back amid crates of lettuce and cabbage. Pervienne had an orderly mind. Wiping the last drop of coffee from the rim of the cup, he recalled that the truck bore the blue-and-yellow markings of the Union agricole. Doubtless it was on its way to Le Havre.

Only later, when the bus was actually entering the suburbs, did Danielle realize the futility of her search. The raids had torn great gashes in the city. Blocks of new, raw houses stood between stretches of vacant terrain. On the mounds of rubble the grass had a metallic sheen. The dust and clamour of construction lay thick in the air. As she hurried over upchurned roads, seeking out the garage of the Union, Danielle saw high cranes swing stiffly across the sky.

The garage was a cavernous hangar. Naked light bulbs threw a cold glare. In the far recesses the trucks stood hunched and silent. The dispatcher and the drivers were lounging in a small shed. Danielle rapped several times on the murky panes before they took notice. When they opened the door she smelled kerosene and wet leather. She asked whether any of them had seen a lame man; one of their trucks had given him a lift from Yvebecques. He had been hobbling on a dead branch. Did anyone remember him, and where had they dropped him off in Le Havre?

The drivers looked at her and she drew her raincoat tighter. They told her to come in and get dry. The dispatcher rolled a cigarette and held it out. But she hung at the door asking obstinately. The man was very lame. He had red hair. Did no one remember? The drivers shrugged and glanced at each other. Finally one of them spoke up from the back of the shed. It was against company rules. But merde, the man could hardly walk and was worn out. So he had let him ride on the crates and when the rain had thickened had given him a sheet of burlap to burrow under. The dispatcher remarked sourly that the Union agricole was no bus line. Danielle asked: where had the man been set down? “I told him I could not be seen with a passenger near the garage,” answered the driver, “so I dropped him off Boulevard Galliéni. There’s a bakery on the corner. I saw him enter there.”

A young trucker with blotches on his chin called out to Danielle: “Little lady, is he your lover?” “Yes,” she said and hurried out of the garage.

One of the girls at the bakery remembered Falk. He had eaten several rolls standing at the counter. He had seemed ravenous and his clothes were sodden. He had left a puddle on the floor. The owner looked up from the apricot tarts and gave Danielle a sullen stare. Did anyone notice where he was heading? The girls giggled. Why should they?

During the ensuing hours Danielle wandered the city, now with directed intent, now in random circles, up and down the dust-blown boulevards, through the scarred streets, past the wharfs and corrugated-iron sheds, between warehouses and gantries, pausing in brief stupor on the freshly painted benches in the new playgrounds, and then hurrying on through the blind drifts of the afternoon crowd to the bus terminal and the railway station. She peered into brasseries, empty cafés and restaurants, treading the mill of the long day in a torment of loss and weariness.

A hundred times in the drag of hours Danielle saw Falk just ahead of her and ran towards him only to find a stranger in her path. His face and harried step seemed to leap at her out of the crowd; she saw it mirrored in the glass alembics in apothecary windows. Soon the city flickered in her sore eyes like the reels of a blurred film. Streets, building sites and quays revolved around her in a lazy, jeering motion, always the same, yet malignantly altered so that she could not be sure that she had already searched them out.

Looking up at the cranes, Danielle prayed for the miracle of momentary flight, imagining herself gyrating over the sea of roofs and streets, able to discern Falk and plummet upon him. Instead she plodded interminably and evening crowded at her with its delusive shadows.

She had tried to swallow a sandwich earlier in the day but it had gone stale in her mouth. Now a soft, sour nausea stirred in her throat. She sat on a fallen oil barrel and stared at the greying harbour. The rust flaked between her fingers, but she kept a stubborn grip and fought off dizziness. Suddenly she lowered her head and vomited. A great lightness overcame her and she felt a pang of hope.

Once again Danielle crossed the Boulevard Galliéni and circled the Place de la Libération. Hunger made her alert and quick. It rang in her head like a small chime. She began counting lamp-posts: “At the sixteenth I shall find Falk.” And when the sixteenth had passed, she started over again with the same spurt of hope.

But after a time she stopped counting and began weeping helplessly. Despair stole on her as out of ambush. She had consumed the last of herself. The wine was spilt and she tasted the dregs and lees of her own being.

When she saw Falk she could no longer muster even joy. He was standing on a small wharf looking at the oil-flecked water. He was leaning on an umbrella. Despite its massive old-fashioned handle, it had already bent under his weight. Danielle called to him in a dead voice. It did not carry and she sickened at the thought that he would turn away. She called again and stretched her hands towards him. He looked about and grew white as if he had seen that which was crying out in the midst and secret of his being gather shape in the evening air.

As they left the wharf, neither spoke. Only their fingers touched. They drank coffee in silence and looked in bewilderment at their own image in the misted silver urn. They said nothing to each other as they followed the portier up the stairs of the hotel. Falk’s umbrella tapped on the worn tiles.

The shutters were closed but from the streetlights jagged shapes fell across the brown wallpaper and enamel basin. They sat in the musty quiet hearing the noise of day ebb from the city. At last Falk wrenched open the wooden blinds.

Searchlights were sweeping across the harbour like blue dancers. As Falk stepped back into the room Danielle rose. She guided his hands. Together they undid the buttons on her dress. The siren of a liner was singing westward. At first brazen and clear, then softly as if the sound had run into the sands of night.

The day of the wedding was unusually warm. The stone beach merged into banks of white haze. The first brown spots were appearing in the hedgerows, leaves burnt by the departing summer. The Terrenoires had assembled in the garden. Each had yielded in his own fashion. The old man had voiced muted approval: Ce n’est pas une mauvaise affaire. Madame Terrenoire had scarcely said anything. Events had come to pass as she foretold. She saw in the tumult and brusque conclusion of Falk’s courtship proof of her divining powers. She kept the silence of an oracle and spent more time than she used to with Nicole. There was between them the unspoken discourse of conspirators. Both were old women now, gazing ahead to the bland pleasures of a common winter. To Danielle and Falk, Nicole had come handsomely, wishing them Godspeed and seeking to make her presence no attainder to their joy.

Only Blaise was absent. He had shrugged off Falk’s attempt at conciliation and had thrust his hands in his pocket. The day before the wedding he took his bicycle from the shed and said tersely that he was off to the market at Coutances.

Tante Amélie had come over from Harfleur. She was whirring about like a drunken bee when smoke has routed it from its hive. She scattered loud delight and the hem of her mauve dress billowed along the ground. At every instant she would clasp either bride or bridegroom to the large cameo brooch on her bosom. Her warm cheeks were streaked with tears. The dreary war had not been in vain. All had come well in the end. Tante Amélie had stitched a pale yellow gown for Danielle and presented Falk with a plum-coloured waistcoat. Now she darted about dusting off everyone in a whirl of order. Suddenly she peered at her pendant watch and sang out: “Allons, enfants!”

The party advanced through the orchard. They moved stiffly under the apple boughs, the women ample and flowery, the two men like sable penguins.

A few villagers were waiting in the silent chamber of the mairie. No one had taken the dust-cover from the chandelier. Monsieur Raymond, the mayor, was a spare, sallow man; but even he was perspiring. Having donned his tricolour sash, he read out the marriage service in a low, precise intonation. Danielle strained forward as if the grey words were of passionate interest. Falk’s eyes wandered to the wall. From behind a dusty glass the General looked stonily on the proceedings. For a brief second Falk panicked. He could remember no French. But then he heard his own voice. Danielle assented in a whisper. Her lips were ash-dry, but as she embraced Falk, Tante Amélie vented a loud sob and Danielle began smiling.

Monsieur Raymond took off his glasses, wiped the moisture from the bridge of his nose and addressed the young couple. It was, he felt, an unusual, indeed, a portentous occasion. He would be doing less than his sworn duty if he did not call the attention of the newly-weds, of their family and friends, to the significance of the event. The Terrenoires had lived in Yvebecques longer than records showed. Monsieur Beltran, the clerk—ce véritable savant—affirmed that there were Terrenoires baptized and buried in the village in the seventeenth century. Monsieur Falk belonged to another world. He had come (here the mayor paused) in a manner—how should one say?—not altogether natural or beneficent. But Yvebecques had proved stronger than tragic circumstances. Its style of life, its renowned natural beauties, had entered into Monsieur Falk’s heart. He had come back “over the hidden but unerring road of love”. The mayor allowed the sentence to unfurl in the hushed room and looked at the ceiling. Might there not be in this, he asked, a lesson for the weary and divided nations? Here, in the mairie of Yvebecques, notre petit village, two young people had achieved what the captains of the earth sought vainly. “Yet, would Monsieur Falk forgive me if I add one further thought to this joyous hour? Even now and in this blessed moment, one should not forget the past. Like so many other families in the community, the Terrenoires bear witness in their bone and blood to the sufferings of France. La patrie had not wished for war, but thrice it assailed her. May this marriage be a portent of a more felicitous future. But may it also keep us in solemn remembrance of what has been endured.”

Amélie sobbed again and Monsieur Cavel, the aged clerk, blew his nose. The mayor congratulated the happy couple and everyone filed into the open air. But no breeze stirred. Passing the fountain, Falk shifted his new lacquered cane and dipped his fingers in the water. He touched Danielle’s lips. She nibbled the cold drops and the flush of desire that spread through her limbs was so strong that she leaned heavily against Falk’s arm. The wedding party entered the café.

When they started out again for La Hurlette, the awkward silences had melted. The small glasses of tart red wine and the apéritifs were busy in the blood. Joined by further guests, the procession straggled through the village and towards the cliff. The gentlemen loosened their collars and tilted their straw hats against the veiled, relentless sun. The ladies advanced slowly, prickly and pouting for air. They called to one another; in the heat their voices crackled like dry grass. Danielle and Falk moved a little to one side. She sucked the moisture from her lips and kept her eyes to the ground as if seeking coolness in her own scant shadow. Falk felt sweat pearling down his collar and back; it chilled him. Beating against the chalk cliff, the air simmered. The birds had fallen silent, but among the hedges and wilted stalks wasps sang with a hum of low flame.

“I’ve lived here sixty-four years,” panted Monsieur Cavel, “and never been so hot.”

“It is unusual,” allowed the mayor, “most unusual.”

“One might as well be in the Sahara,” said Siccard, combing back his flaxen hair, “I’ve been there, and believe me, it was no hotter.”

“Ah, the Sahara,” said Monsieur Cavel.

Estève, who was now married and putting on weight, stopped and stared at the banks of haze drifting along the cliffs and over the soundless sea. “Ça va barder,” he announced, “there’s bound to be one devil of a storm before the day is out.”

“I hope so,” said Nicole, “I’m stifling.”

But Fridolin, who was bringing up the rear in a white linen suit, muttered: “Storms on a wedding night. A bad omen.”

“They won’t hear it,” said Estève, trying to look roguish.

But no one responded or came fully to life until Tante Amélie called out: “Courage, mes enfants, we’re nearly there.”

The orchard was not much cooler, as if the sun had seeped into the shadows. Madame Terrenoire paused to tug at her corset. The men wiped the sweat from their faces and Monsieur Raymond closed his collar button. Nicole bore in on the newly-weds: “You must take the lead now.” The smile on her lips was taut as in a bad photograph. Falk led Danielle to the gate and the mayor began clapping. Others joined, but in the stifling air the sound fell flat.

Everyone hurried under the trees and Amélie came into the garden carrying jugs of cider frosted at the rim. Siccard bellowed with pleasure. He raised his glass to bride and bridegroom, emptying it at one draught; the iced cider stunned him and his eyes blinked stupidly. The ladies drank with quick delicate sips and vanished into the house. Falk and Danielle drifted towards the shade of the barn. “I love you, Danielle.” She did not answer but passed her fingers across his face in strangeness and wonder. They heard the clatter of dishes and the voices now more strident. Slowly they walked back to the long tables.

The food lay in garish heaps: bowls of dark blue mussels, steaming in milk; brick-red lobsters; fried mackerel bedded on ferns; plates of shrimp beside saucers of melted butter; larks, charred and spiky, cracking under one’s teeth with a savour of game; two sides of beef sweating blood; tureens of fluffy white potatoes with warm napkins over them; watery endives; three cavernous bowls of dark green salad, shimmering with oil and nuggets of black pepper. Between the laden galleons, small boats and barks brimmed with spices, shelled walnuts and dried fruit. Long loaves were aligned on the sideboards next to squares of fresh butter, cold from the larder. There were wine and cider glasses before each plate, but soon the guests filled them indiscriminately.

A hot, ruttish wind blew across the tables. Terrenoire had scarcely tied the chequered napkin around his chin before thrusting his knife into a gamy paté and spreading it thick on a slab of bread. Then he drew towards himself a mound of shrimp. What had survived of lust in him was gluttony. Everyone followed suit. Cavel stuffed a lark into his toothless mouth and spat out the fine bones amid a howl of laughter. Madame Estève, a flushed stout woman with yellow eyes, carried the mussels to her lips, sucking them loudly. Melted butter dribbled down the mayor’s chin as he leaned across the table. Fridolin carved the beef with wide flourishes and licked the gravy off his fingers. Monsieur Beltran had followed the main party after setting his wax seal to the marriage certificate; now he shovelled food into his gullet like a squirrel. He was the first to undo his braces. Other gentlemen did likewise and Madame Estève squealed happily as Cavel unhooked her dress. Danielle and Falk ate little.

Legs rubbed drowsily under the table and the wine grew warm in the uncorked bottles. Nicole could hardly keep up with the empty glasses and her skin glistened. Fridolin wavered to his feet; the wine was toiling in his brain and he moved his hands before his face as if he had walked into a cobweb. He ambled to Danielle and bent low, staring down her dress. “Mon poulet, let me tell you a thing or two about marriage. I am an experienced man.” She felt his loud, liquorish breath at her ear. The mayor got slowly to his feet, sought to brush the crumbs and drippings from his rumpled shirt front and proposed the health of Monsieur and Madame Falk.

The day was wilting, early shadows drifted through the vibrant air. Toast followed on toast. The surfeited guests roused themselves as Madame Terrenoire and Tante Amélie brought in platters of pancakes filled with raspberry jam. The black, sweet jam was full of seeds and Siccard spat them through his teeth, now at the mayor, now at Nicole. She set down small glasses on the crowded tables and the calvados went from hand to hand. Under the blazing rush of the liqueur nearly everyone stopped eating. Only Terrenoire persisted, using his fork to snatch cold leavings as Nicole began carrying the plates back to the kitchen. Above the chaos of voices and clinking glass, Monsieur Raymond called for a word from the groom.

Falk pushed the dishes away from in front of him and rose, bracing his arms stiffly on the table. He looked down at Danielle and was startled to see her so withdrawn. He expressed his delight at the festive occasion and thanked all the distinguished guests for their presence. He raised his glass to Madame Terrenoire, to Nicole and to Tante Amélie, who had laboured to provide this noble feast. Cavel fluttered his spoon against a decanter. But Falk could not sustain the mock ceremonious note. He turned to the mayor: “Perhaps it would not be out of place, Monsieur le Maire, if I responded more particularly to your own eloquent words.” Monsieur Raymond, who was trying to scrape a clot of jam from his trousers, looked up bleareyed.

“When I came back to Yvebecques, I was conscious of being a most unwelcome intruder. That is the burden we Germans must carry all over the world just now. And for a long time to come our children will have to carry it, though they had no part in our calamities. I have not tried to shed the load. I do not want to. But henceforth Danielle will help me to carry it and that is a kind of miracle.” His hand rested momentarily on her shoulder. “I do not know yet where we shall make our home. But your village, Monsieur Raymond, will always be as close to me as it is to my wife.”

Ma femme: it was the first time he used the word. It made him light of heart as if in victory. “Here in this garden,” he went on; “here …”

“Under the ash tree, under the ash tree!” The voice stabbed at Falk exact and derisive. Blaise was hovering near the pigsty. With him were Lurôt and a coil of young men and women from the neighbouring farms. The voice sang out again like a javelin: “Under the ash tree. That’s where you want to make your home, isn’t it, Herr Kapitän!”

Falk sat down heavily. But the guests neither understood nor cared. They thumped the tables and called raucously to the new arrivals. Estève staggered over to Blaise with a glass of calvados. He lurched into one of the farm girls and spilled it down her brown neck. The girl bleated like a goat as Estève wiped her off, his fingers inside her blouse. The guests lumbered to their feet and the music began. Blaise had brought the fiddlers and Lurôt blew his bagpipe. The sound skirled naked and hot through the descending twilight.

At first the revellers stomped awkwardly. Some dropped out. Cavel shuffled into the lilac bushes and was sick. Estève drew his wife towards the hayloft, tittering. But soon the music seized the dancers by the nape of the neck and flung them into motion. They moved in a fume of cider and sweat, their hobnailed shoes threshing the ground. Dogs who had been burrowing in the rank garbage turned and scurried between the dancers’ feet. Flies swarmed out of the hedges.

Blaise danced with harsh abandon, lifting his partner from the earth and whirling her in jolting arcs. The girl’s body lashed back and forth yieldingly in his grip and his face was set in cruel spite. The farmhands danced close, grinding their haunches into the flaring skirts. Now and again they strode back to the ravaged tables to pour cider down their parched mouths. Lurôt blew without halt. Driven by the acrid notes, starlings skimmed back and forth across the roof.

Beltran danced alone with the stilted precision of an old man. He brought his knees up sharply and held his hands above his head. The other dancers clapped to the beat of his mincing step. Faster and faster. He closed his eyes dizzily but kept whirling. Suddenly he faltered like a wearying top and stumbled sideways into Blaise. Blaise thrust him back to the hub of the circle. Out of control, the drunken clerk spun from hand to hand. He sagged towards the ground but they heaved him about. His mouth was open and gasping.

“Stop them,” said Danielle, “stop them.”

Falk paid no heed. The scene filled him with loathing. Yet it was unreal, like a clamorous nightmare. He was afraid, but could not comprehend his own fear. A desire to escape from La Hurlette and even from Danielle beat strong inside him. But he sat riveted, leaning on his cane and letting the cold rise in his back.

Amid hoarse outcries the men put the cider on the floor and threw over the tables, clearing a wide space. The steaming air shook with their tread. Amélie’s face appeared at the kitchen window. It was strangely white and she called out in protest, but her words were lost in the tumult.

“Let’s go inside the house,” said Danielle.

“Soon,” said Falk. He scarcely knew what he meant. He was waiting for something to happen, something loathsome but of intimate concern to him. It was a feeling he had had once before, in those marshes near Smolensk. And he could not keep his eyes from the ash tree; its leaves seemed to grow thicker in the waning light.

The bounding couples had torn loose and all the dancers clasped hands in a single round. Glazed with drink and exertion, they swept on in wild orbit. Then the whiplash uncoiled. Before Falk could move, one of the young men had leaped over to Danielle, seized her by the wrist and whirled her into the circle. In the careening wheel her gown flashed like a scorched leaf. The blood ran heavy under Blaise’s eyes and Nicole spun with her mouth agape.

The wind reared up without warning. It raked the farmyard with chill gusts. The haze scattered and the sky came down like lead. Large cold drops of rain splashed against the barn. The dancers wavered and one of the fiddlers began wiping his bow. Monsieur Raymond slipped away hurriedly. Falk rose with a surge of relief.

But Blaise yelled out: “One more dance! A bridal dance for the captain and his lady!” He came to Falk breathing hard: “Join our round. No man should let another dance with his bride. Not on his wedding night.”

Falk stared into his red eyes. “I can’t. You know that.”

“Just once. A man can do anything if he tries hard enough. You’ve killed my brother and now you’re taking my sister to bed. What’s a little dance to a man like you? For old times’ sake!”

Falk called to Danielle: “Let’s go. You’re getting drenched.”

But Nicole barred his way: “Hold my hands. Come dance with me. You can’t deny me that. It’s so little to ask.” She hammered at him like an enraged child. “I shall never beg anything of you again, I promise.”

“Don’t be crazy, Nicole, it’s impossible for me to dance.” But hands tugged at him on every side and a voice shouted: “Bravo la Wehrmacht!”

Nicole dragged him into the circle. Falk looked for Danielle, but those who surrounded him were strangers and had faces like vacant masks. Lurôt had drawn close; he seemed to be blowing a single screeching note. It cut to the bone like the cry of a broken bird.

Falk strove to keep his balance but Nicole pulled him after her and the dancers began treading their mad round. He attempted to lunge out of the circle but it hemmed him in. As it whirled past, Falk saw Danielle fling herself at the barrier of arms and thrashing legs. He laboured towards her and struck wildly with his cane, but the wall of bodies threw him back. He stumbled and Nicole’s hand slid from his grasp. He called desperately: “Help me, Nicole, help me!” But no one listened and Blaise’s face spun around him, contorted with avid fury.

Falk started falling and heard Danielle scream. Her voice was coming closer and closer. He rose to meet it but the shoes kept smashing into his face. A wave gathered before him, higher and swifter than any he had ever imagined. It blacked out the whirling ash tree and Danielle’s cry. Falk knew that the towering crest was about to break and engulf him. But beyond the green howl of water he glimpsed a trough of light. It was dim at first. Then it rushed upon him with a brightness he could not endure.

The dancers melted away under the downpour, bearing Danielle to the house.

After a time, Terrenoire shambled out to look at the dead man. He bent low gazing at his torn features. Blood was clotting in the fine red hair. He knelt as if to guard his guest from the rain, and spoke to him softly: “You came back too soon, Monsieur Falk, too soon.”