Nine

 

When Woodyatt awoke the following morning, Dominique was lying with her head against his shoulder, her hand on his chest. He knew she was awake, too, warm and drowsy like himself, preferring to forget the horrifying events they had lived through. There had been a hint of terror in her passion, as if she were clinging to a floating spar after a shipwreck. She had been hungry for the tenderness she had constantly denied herself.

She moved and he saw her looking down at him. Her expression was faintly puzzled.

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she said, speaking softly so as not to disturb Montrouge.

Woodyatt smiled and she tried to make a joke of it. ‘I said a prayer,’ she pointed out. ‘I felt God would understand.’

She was silent for a while. ‘I expect you’re disgusted with me,’ she went on, the familiar stiffness returning.

Woodyatt’s eyebrows rose. ‘Am I?’

‘Crying. Doing what I did. Inviting you into my bed. It was wrong. You have a wife.’

‘That’s over.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think anything like that is ever over. There are too many small things you remember, too many words that have been spoken, too many things shared. I still think of my Monsieur Maladroit. I don’t wish to, but I do. Things remind me, and it will go on until someone else comes along to make me forget them.’

What she said was true enough. Woodyatt’s wife had gone but that didn’t stop him remembering – sometimes with bitterness, sometimes with guilt, often with nostalgia and regret. But remembering, nevertheless.

‘Most of the time it was difficult,’ she admitted. ‘His wife was suspicious and we had to make love in his car or in the woods. Often I didn’t enjoy it. I got grit stuck to my bottom.’

He gave a hoot of laughter. She joined in reluctantly and he put his arms round her and pulled her to him. ‘You’re a cynic,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to be a cynic,’ she admitted quietly. ‘But sometimes life takes a hand, doesn’t it? I suppose really the affair was sordid. But to be in love is always to be a little unbalanced. Things appear clearer, different, sometimes more confused.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘The trouble was that I wanted more from my lover than he was prepared to give.’

‘Optimists try again with someone else.’

‘Are you an optimist?’

‘I suppose so. But I wouldn’t start again with the same woman. It would have to be real love.’

‘When you married her, didn’t you think then it was real love?’

It was an awkward point. She had a strange prickly gift of always introducing a jarring note into their conversation and he avoided answering, preferring to think how pleasant it was to be there with her beside him, her flesh warm against his. He turned towards her and kissed her. She responded enthusiastically.

‘Cynicism wastes a lot of valuable time,’ he said.

She smiled and was just lifting her arms to him when a sound from the old man’s room brought them both out of bed at a run. Within two minutes they were looking as if they had been fully dressed and on their feet all night. As they headed for the door, their eyes met and she gave him one of the wonderful grins that made her so unpredictable, like a shaft of light through her stubborn sobriety.

‘How nimble guilt can make one,’ she said.

 

They left as soon as they could and almost immediately found petrol. For a long time they drove in silence. Dominique had hardly spoken and Woodyatt had a feeling she didn’t quite know what to make of what had happened between them. Eventually, with the old man in the wide rear seat enjoying the sunshine that came through the window of the car, she stirred.

‘I’m not really a loose woman.’ She was back in her sober mood and the words came quietly. ‘But so much has happened. It is still happening. Perhaps last night I was just tired.’

She became silent again and he waited, feeling she wanted to talk, as if she’d wanted to talk for years but had never had anyone close enough. Eventually she went on in a wondering voice, as though surprised at herself. ‘Things are moving too swiftly. A lot of people are dying. It makes death seem closer.’

Her hand touched Woodyatt’s and, as he took it, her fingers closed round his, tense as springs.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that at the moment a lot of people are thinking the way you’re thinking. And a lot of people are behaving as we behaved. Because they’re frightened or tired or lost or lonely. Life’s suddenly become a bit difficult and different. Everything’s different. Even morals, I suppose. There are other things that war produces besides death.’

Her head turned as she glanced at him. ‘I don’t know why I did what I did,’ she went on, still speaking in a low voice so that the old man in the back of the car wouldn’t hear. ‘But I’m twenty-six and no longer a school girl and I suppose we’re all a little desperate for warmth these days. There’s so little of it. What we felt was not just passion. It was the comfort of shared sorrows.

He wished she wouldn’t scourge herself so. But her face remained secret and enigmatic and she persisted with the lecture, as if she were determined he shouldn’t escape.

‘Loving’s sharing,’ she went on. ‘And sharing’s comfort.’

‘Why do you dissect everything so?’

‘Be quiet!’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to tell you something. To me it was a reassurance. It made me feel that to someone I’m important. Because–’ her voice shook ‘–I am lost. I’ve been lost ever since you appeared, James Woodyatt. You took away someone I had begun to cherish. He doesn’t exist any more. He’s become a different man, a stranger, and I’m lonely again. I was lonely for a long time. After my Monsieur Maladroit left and my mother died, I was bitter and I hated being so. Then I acquired a relation, my only relation. He filled a gap and he was all I had. But now he’s gone, too, because you’ve destroyed him.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t blame you. But, you see, I am on my own again. I have no one to take his place. Perhaps it will be easier for me now that we have forgotten our good manners.’

 

Woodyatt, Dominique and their aged companion were silent as they ate at a small hotel. Like so many others, the owners were making money hand over fist from the refugees. They were near their destination now but, with the engine giving trouble, they were obviously not going to make it without another stop. By this time, not only were more cars beginning to run out of petrol, but their owners were also beginning to run out of money. There were constant hold-ups and some vehicles were towing others. A three-wheeled motor-driven cripple’s chair was being pushed by an overloaded two-seater; the owner, a man with paralysed legs, sitting up in front.

They now began to pass through empty countryside devoid of hotels but eventually they found an old chateau, perched high above a river, which had been turned into a hotel. It had obviously been opened hurriedly to make money from the refugees, and the great hall had been made into a dormitory. Beds had been set up beneath the antlers, stag’s heads and hunting horns: all of them black with grime. In the hall was a picture of the Battle of Sedan, showing glassy-eyed French soldiers holding tattered banners, with piles of dead Germans around them.

The owners were aloof and distant, survivors from another age living in a state of feudal splendour and poverty. Though they had been quick to put to good account the misery of the refugees, they obviously had little time for them. Their talk was stilted and reactionary, and they clearly felt France’s troubles were due entirely to the Popular Front and International Jewry.

Woodyatt was able to obtain two rooms, one a small one beyond the other so that no one could reach Montrouge without passing through the larger one.

‘Leave the light on,’ the old man said as he stretched out on the bed. ‘I am like Goethe. I don’t fancy dying in the dark.’

He seemed more tired than usual and complained of being too weary to sleep. Woodyatt distrusted him and suspected him of working up some ruse to escape, but they eventually heard his breath become deep and steady. As they closed the connecting door, Dominique started removing her clothes with a blank face.

‘We know what we are doing,’ she said in a dogged way. ‘We have decided we are neither of us innocents. We never were. And life teaches the impatience of the body and the impulses of the flesh.’

She sounded like a schoolteacher with a difficult pupil again and Woodyatt answered irritably.

‘Dominique, we’re about to go to bed together. We’re not about to start a five-finger exercise on the piano.’

She stood before him, slim and white in the dusk, and he saw her eyes were wet. Her mouth was open, her lips trembling. In them he could see pain and, without saying a word, he gathered her in his arms. She didn’t resist and leaned weakly against him. Then her arms went round him, clinging to him, and he could feel her shuddering in an emotion he couldn’t fathom.

‘Dominique–’

‘Don’t speak,’ she said. ‘It’s best not for you to speak, best not for you to ask questions.’

As they turned the light out he reached for her.

‘I would like us to make love,’ she said. ‘No. I would like you to make love to me.’ She sounded like a sergeant in the WRAF. He felt her lips on his cheek. ‘Good James Woodyatt,’ she whispered. ‘Kind, funny James Woodyatt. I am happier with you than with any man I’ve ever known. I am happy even here with you pawing me like a farm boy.’ She gave a little laugh and moved closer to him. ‘But we are such an ill-assorted couple and it is all so different from what I expected.’

He wondered what she meant and she went on slowly. ‘I thought when I was very young that I would grow up and marry a prince. Later when I learned about things, I still thought that when I went to bed with a man it would be very romantic and the man I slept with would be my husband and I would love him very much. It would be beautiful like music and roses and perfume. But it isn’t like that, is it? Monsieur Maladroit was not my husband. And neither are you. And we are in bed together not because I am in love, but because I need comfort and because we are in a war. And when you are in a war you must not waste time.’ He heard her sigh. ‘It’s surprising how normal it becomes when everything else is abnormal.’

She was about to say more but he laid a finger on her lips.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No more.’

She gave a little laugh. ‘I always say too much,’ she agreed. ‘It is the teacher in me coming out. I feel I have to explain everything to myself as if I were my own most stupid pupil. But from now on I’ll be forward and daring, and behave as an ardent lover with no worries about propriety or correctness. I no longer have any qualms of conscience. Perhaps I have no conscience. Certainly I have no fears any more.’ She paused and gave a little laugh. ‘Only that Monsieur Montrouge will wake up and catch us.’

 

The following morning there were no deep silences, no embarrassments, no self-accusations.

From the hotel wireless they learned that Pétain was about to hand France to the Germans on a plate. They’d heard rumours as far back as Fontainebleau that this would happen but had been unable to believe them. Now they seemed to be true. Stories of a terrible bombing of Paris came over but Woodyatt guessed they were all false, put out to salve the nation’s conscience.

A rat of a man in a smart suit and tie had entered the hotel’s breakfast restaurant and was delivering a tirade on the defiant speech Churchill had made when he had promised to continue the struggle. All France wanted was peace, he claimed. ‘Let’s get the war over,’ he suggested loudly. ‘And get back to calm.’

A fat woman kissed him in an excess of enthusiasm. ‘The Armistice’s about to be signed,’ she crowed. ‘France will be saved!’

Woodyatt noticed the look of contempt Dominique gave her.

 

Darby welcomed them with open arms. When they told him of their pursuers and what had happened at Marville, he seemed to consider that was the end of their worries. But he was obviously becoming nervous at the way events were going.

‘Things have changed a bit since you were here last,’ he said. ‘The bloody Germans are going to have the whole Atlantic coast under the terms of the Armistice. The buggers will be able to set up submarine bases all the way from Norway to the Spanish border. We’ll have to get out. St Nazaire and La Rochelle are due to fall anytime but so far there are still ships in Bordeaux. I’ve been down there and seen them. Find Redmond?’

‘He’s in the car. He’s given nothing away. All I’ve been able to establish is that he drinks brandy and soda occasionally.’

‘Well, we’ve got plenty of that.’ Darby peered at the car. ‘Who’s the girl?’

Woodyatt explained and Darby grinned enthusiastically. ‘Better wheel ’em in.’ As his wife appeared, he turned to her. ‘Got company, Daph. Our friend, Redmond. Should be an interesting encounter.’

Dominique was helping the old man out of the car. As he began to move up the path to the house, Darby frowned.

‘He’s changed,’ he muttered.

As the introductions took place, Darby’s frown grew deeper.

‘This is Colonel Darby,’ Woodyatt explained to Montrouge. ‘An old friend of yours, I think.’

He had been hoping to trap the old man into a start of recognition but he ought to have known better. ‘I’ve never met Colonel Darby before,’ Montrouge said briskly.

‘Colonel Darby was an acquaintance of General Redmond in South Africa.’

The old man gave a bark of a laugh. ‘You don’t give up, do you? I assure you – and Colonel Darby – we’ve never met.’ The words were insultingly self-confident.

Darby’s eyes were narrow. ‘Does he know what happened?’

‘He knows pretty well everything. He’ll give an explanation if you care to go into it. But I shouldn’t bother if I were you.’ Woodyatt turned to Mrs Darby who was studying the old man minutely. Montrouge was staring back at her, a half-smile on his lips, the sort of half-smile any French gallant would wear as he rushed back to pick up some woman in whose face he had allowed a swing door to slam. But there was no hint of recognition.

‘This is Mrs Darby,’ Woodyatt said. ‘Mrs Darby knew Redmond, too.’

‘Really?’ Montrouge gave a little bow but Daphne Darby said nothing, merely turning away to show them into the house.

Woodyatt turned to Darby. ‘Well?’

Darby’s face was dark and he was looking baffled. He made a frustrated gesture, like someone cheated of his prey.

‘It’s not him,’ he said.