Léon now spent every lunch break on his boat in the Arsenal harbour – and sometimes the couple of hours between the end of work and suppertime as well. At lunchtime he would eat a ham sandwich in his cabin, then lie down on one of the bunks for half an hour. He would never have done that in the old days. As a boy he had found it faintly horrific when his father subsided on to the sofa like a dead man after lunch and instantly fell asleep with his mouth open and his eyes tight shut. Now he himself had reached the stage where a little siesta was indispensable. It gave him the energy to return to the laboratory and patiently endure the recurrent humiliations, rituals and spells of inactivity that life demanded of him.
Fleur de Miel remained his secret. He never spoke of it to anyone. No one at home missed him. Yvonne was too busy with the fight for survival and had neither the time nor energy nor desire to concern herself with the meaning of existence, affairs of the heart, or similar minutiae. She had long known about the boat, of course, because it was essential for safety’s sake that she knew whether her husband was doing things on the side that might endanger the family. Because he wasn’t, the boat didn’t bother her. All she expected of Léon was that he help to feed and protect his family, neither more nor less. In return she granted him absolute freedom, demanded no emotional input from him, and refrained from troubling him with any of her own.
Léon appreciated this. A few years ago he had been saddened by Yvonne’s sour, prematurely aged manner and missed the light-footed girl she used to be. He had occasionally longed for the return of the capricious diva, and sometimes even of the housewife tormented by doubts about herself and the meaning of existence; but now he felt only gratitude and respect for the selflessly pugnacious lioness Yvonne had become during the war years. To expect her, in addition, to sing coquettish songs and toy with the top button of her blouse would have been unfair in the extreme.
Yvonne and Léon had demonstrated long ago that they were a good, strong couple who had already weathered many a storm and would jointly confront any future threats as well. Their mutual trust and affection were so profound and strong, they could allow each other to go their own way in peace.
The children were equally uninterested in where Léon spent so many hours on his own. Apart from young Philippe, they were now of an age to be preoccupied with their own battles. All they expected of their father was that he hold the fort and supply the family with affection and money. They were also grateful to him for being a mild-mannered, amiable paterfamilias who seldom asked questions or demanded anything of them.
It should in fairness be said that Léon was able to afford his mildly paternal manner only because Yvonne’s supervision of the four children was all the more rigorous. Not a minute of the day went by without her being apprised of their whereabouts, and she demanded to be fully informed about their doings, state of health and circle of friends.
Far from relaxing when another day fraught with peril had been successfully survived and the children were safely asleep in their beds, Yvonne kept Léon up until late at night. Obsessed with every conceivable form of potential threat, she spoke of fascistic schoolmasters and drunken SS men, of paedophiles on the loose, of car drivers running amuck and highly infectious microbes, of heat, rain and frost, of inflated food prices and the imponderables of the black market. She never tired of discussing possible escape routes through the forests, overland or by water. She even suggested retreating into the catacombs of Paris in the event that the Germans did, after all, unleash an apocalypse.
Yvonne was so taken up with her mission as a guardian angel, there was no room left inside her for anything else. She cultivated no friendships and kept no dream diary, wore no pink sunglasses and sang no more songs. Although still Léon’s faithful companion, she had long ceased to be a wife, and she was so solicitous of her children that she showed them no affection.
The years of exertion and tension were written on her face. Her eyes were lashless and her cheeks gaunt, and the long neck that had once been so graceful was tensed up and threaded with veins and sinews. She had broad shoulders but no breasts, and the stomach below her ribs was hollow.
She offended the neighbours by passing them on the stairs without a word. She no longer wore make-up and was becoming steadily thinner because she forgot to eat. She kept two suitcases lying ready beside the front door at all times. These contained the bare essentials for an escape by the whole family, and she couldn’t help checking, several times a day, to ensure that she really hadn’t forgotten anything. It wasn’t until she refused to take off her shoes so as to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, even in bed at night, that Léon gently called her to order and insisted that a minimum of the proprieties be observed for the children’s sake.
The children themselves took a more realistic view of the dangers they faced every day. Being baptized Christians and the offspring of a police employee, they knew that they weren’t typical German prey, and that the city’s other potential threats tended to be fewer under the occupation than in peacetime. So they all devised their own ways of eluding their mother and taking the first steps along their own road to independence.
My Aunt Muriel, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1987, was then seven years old. She had freckles and wore pale-green ribbons in her chestnut-brown hair, and she liked to spend her Sundays and Wednesday half holidays in the concierge’s lodge with Madame Rossetos, who dandled her on her lap for hours on end, fed her sweets, and told her eye-rollingly horrific tales of love, murder and the torments of hell. Madame Rossetos provided Muriel with the affection she didn’t get from her mother, and the little girl consoled her for the perfidy of her daughters, who hadn’t shown a sign of life since they left. Shortly before five p.m. Madame Rossetos always went to the dresser and poured herself a small glass of advocaat. And because Muriel was such a dear little girl, she got a thimbleful too. She didn’t like it much at first, but she soon learnt to appreciate its effect.
My Uncle Robert, who later worked for a small employment agency in Lille, installed a rabbit hutch in the attic and spent his days gathering greenstuff from mossy gutters and overgrown backyards throughout the Latin Quarter to feed his rapidly multiplying livestock. He handled the slaughtering himself and delivered the carcasses to his customers oven-ready. One rabbit a month he relinquished to his mother; the rest he sold on the black market. Robert died at the wheel of his Renault 16 one rainy morning in September 1992, when he lit a distracting cigarette on the Route Nationale between Chartres and Le Mans and aquaplaned off the road.
Thirteen-year-old Yves, who later became a doctor and still later abandoned medicine for theology, distressed his parents by volunteering for the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, Vichy’s paramilitary youth movement. He was issued with a black uniform, combat boots and white spats, learned the Marshal’s speeches by heart, and spent weeks marching through Fontainebleau Forest with rucksack, forage cap and hunting knife.
Nineteen-year-old Michel, who was to go down in history as the inventor of Renault’s lockable filler cap, was waiting for a place at engineering school. He killed time by taking daylong walks through the city in search of some escape from the prison he felt his life to be. He nursed an unspoken contempt for his father’s self-absorption and his mother’s opportunistic fight for survival. Although he knew he lacked the makings of a martyr for a good cause, he had no wish to be a conformist. He had wanted to leave school a few months before matriculating because all the girls in his class – every last one – had opted to take German, not English, as their first foreign language. To dissuade his eldest son from dropping out, Léon for once brought paternal authority to bear. He initially tried to convince him of the value of a traditional education and pointed out that most of the boys in his class had entered for the English exam, and then, when these arguments failed, simply bribed him with 500 francs.
Born in the second year of the war, Philippe – my father – was still tied to his mother’s apron strings except on Sunday afternoons, when Yvonne slept alone in the darkened bedroom and would tolerate no child near her. Then he went with Muriel to Madame Rossetos, sat on his sister’s lap while she, in turn, sat on the concierge’s, and listened to her gruesome stories. And because he was such a dear little boy and kept so nice and quiet, he was allowed a sip of Madame Rossetos’ advocaat. Sophisticated but unable to cope with life and a lover of women but incapable of being faithful to them, Philippe was sentenced to solitude by his own charm and ultimately condemned to death by alcoholism.
Léon continued to live the life of a hermit. He went to work and fulfilled his paternal responsibilities; that apart, he took refuge in his floating hideaway. As luck would have it, Jules Caron had had a predilection for 19th-century Russian literature, so the bookshelf was filled with works by Tolstoy and Turgenev, Dostoievsky and Lermontov, Chekov, Gogol and Goncharov. Léon read them all while smoking a pipe and drinking red wine, which didn’t stupefy him so much as induce an agreeable state of metaphysical well-being.
He divided his time between reading in a leisurely fashion and looking out of the porthole at the reflections on the surface of the basin, the seasonally changing colours of the plane trees, the passage of the stars, and the succession of rain, sunshine and fog, all of which were equally to his taste. Punctually at seven every evening he turned on the radio, put his ear to the loudspeaker, and, as if the announcer’s voice were a delicacy not to be wasted, absorbed the news on the BBC. That was how he heard about Stalingrad and the landing at Anzio, Operation Overlord and the night raids on Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden.
He was appalled to find that hatred had grown up inside him like a tree during the thousand days the occupation had lasted; now that tree was bearing poisonous fruit. He had never dreamt that he would rub his hands at the news that Charlottenburg had been gutted by fire and had never thought it possible that he would loudly rejoice at the death of 3000 women and children in a single night. It shocked him how ardently he hoped that the bombs would continue to rain down, night after night, until not a single German was left alive on God’s good earth.
His hatred helped him to survive, but he also underwent some unsettling experiences. He once witnessed a scene that made him feel profoundly ashamed because it shook his hatred. One afternoon in the Métro he was sitting opposite a Wehrmacht soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder. At Saint-Sulpice a young man with a yellow star on his overcoat got in. The soldier stood up and silently gestured to the Jew, who must have been about his own age, to take his seat. The Jew hesitated and looked round helplessly, then sat down on the vacant seat without a word and, probably in shame and despair, buried his face in his hands. The soldier turned away and stared at the blackness outside the window with a face like stone. Meanwhile, silence had descended on the carriage. The Jew was sitting immediately opposite Léon, so close that their knees were almost touching. Neither the soldier nor the Jew got out at the next station or the one after that. Their journey together seemed interminable. The Jew kept his hands over his face the whole time, the soldier stood stiffly beside him. The train stopped and started, stopped and started. At last came the station where the soldier turned on his heel and made his way out on to the platform. Silence persisted when the doors closed behind him. No one ventured to utter a word. The Jew kept his hands over his face. Léon could see that he was wearing a wedding ring, and that the corners of his eyes, most of which were obscured by his forefingers, were twitching.
Summer 1944 was fine and warm – an invitation to bathe, but the beaches of Normandy and the Côte d’Azur were inaccessible because of the Allied invasion, so the inhabitants of Paris stayed at home and used the Seine as a lido. The fourth of August was the hottest day of the year so far. Asphalt melted, horses hung their heads, and anyone who couldn’t avoid going out kept to the narrow strips of pavement shaded by buildings.
One evening, when Léon was passing the entrance of the Musée Cluny on his way home after spending his usual couple of hours after work on the boat, a man was standing in the shadows beneath the archway with his flat cap pulled down low over his face. Scenting danger, Léon walked on faster and deliberately averted his gaze.
‘Psst!’ said the man.
Léon walked on.
‘Fine evening, isn’t it?’
Léon stepped off the pavement and prepared to turn down the Rue de la Sorbonne.
‘Hey, stop!’
Léon walked on.
‘Hands up! Don’t move!’
Léon halted abruptly and raised his hands.
The man behind him laughed. ‘Relax, Léon, I’m only joking.’
Hesitantly, Léon lowered his hands and turned round, then stepped back on to the pavement and scrutinized the man. He had clean-cut features and piercing eyes, and he looked vaguely familiar.
‘I’m sorry, do we know each other?’
‘I’ve brought your four hundred francs back.’
‘My four hundred francs?’
‘Eight hundred times fifty centimes, don’t you remember? I wanted to get to Jaurès bus station and you helped me.’
‘Martin?’
‘Didn’t recognize me, did you? Yes, I’m your personal tramp, the embodiment of your clear conscience.’
‘How long is it, three years?’
‘We guessed the war would last three or four years. Not bad, eh?’
‘It isn’t over yet.’
‘But it soon will be. Let’s walk on, I’ll keep you company for a little way.’
The man looked ten years younger than he had the last time they met. His eyes were as clear as his complexion, he didn’t smell of red wine, and he seemed to have lost all his body fat. Léon had noticeably aged in comparison, he had to admit, and his hours aboard the boat had probably left him smelling of red wine.
‘How long have you been back in Paris?’
‘A few days. It won’t be long now, as you know.’
‘I don’t know a thing.’
‘Of course you do, every child does. The Americans are already in Rouen, things are brewing up in Corsica, and we ourselves have five thousand men in the city.’
‘Who’s we?’
Martin pulled a piece of white cloth from his jacket pocket and held it up. It was an armband with the letters FFL stencilled on it in black.
‘At last,’ said Léon.
‘The balloon could go up any time, possibly next week.’
‘Just as long as the Germans don’t do what they did in Warsaw.’
‘We’ll take care,’ said Martin. ‘But so should you, Léon.’
‘Why?’
‘The day of reckoning will soon be here. We plan to tweak a few people’s ears.’
‘Good for you.’
‘It’ll be summary justice, and we won’t be squeamish. We won’t be holding any coffee parties or discussion groups beforehand.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m not sure you do,’ said Martin. ‘You really ought to look out for yourself. People are talking about you, did you know?’
‘No.’
‘They’re talking about your handouts of coffee from the SS. They’re talking about your boat and your black market activities.’
‘But I – ’
‘I know, but coffee’s coffee and a boat’s a boat. People are going to get it in the neck for things like that in days to come, and there won’t be time for any fine distinctions. Our comrades’ blood is up, you’ve got to understand that.’
‘So is mine, and you of all people should know – ’
‘Yes, but the others don’t. They’ll be deaf to any fine distinctions, as I say. In the days ahead they’ll dispense rough justice and ask questions afterwards. That’s why you must make yourself scarce for a week or two. Right away, until things simmer down. Then you can come back and explain about the coffee.’
‘Where should I go?’
‘South. It’s summertime. Treat your family to a few weeks beside the sea.’
‘The Côte d’Azur, you mean?’
‘Well, no, not there. There’ll be plenty going on down there in the next few days. I’d recommend the Atlantic coast, the Germans have already withdrawn from there. Biarritz or Cap Ferret or Lacanau – it’s a question of taste.’
‘And money.’
‘Here are the four hundred francs you lent me.’ Martin handed Léon a wad of banknotes. ‘And this...’ – he reached into his breast pocket and brought out another, considerably thicker wad – ‘...is what’s left of the money in the drawer at your place of work.’
‘How did you – ’
‘I got someone to fetch it while you were on your boat, I hope you don’t mind. It’d be better if you didn’t have to go back there again.’
‘But – ’
‘Take it. The FFL is officially handing it over – as of now, it isn’t Nazi cash any longer. We’ve put the key back in the bakelite tray. A bloody silly hiding place, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Still, nobody found it.’
Martin smiled. ‘We’ve been checking on the money for the past two years. It’ll count in your favour that you didn’t spend any on yourself.’
‘There’s the boat...’
‘I know, Caron told me the whole story. That’ll help too, but first you must disappear. You won’t get your six thousand back, but you can keep the boat. Caron says he doesn’t want it any more. It’s yours now.’
‘Really?’
‘A boat’s like a dog, he says. It can’t keep changing owners.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Here are some railway tickets to Bordeaux – you must fend for yourselves after that. And here are two travel permits. One is for the Germans, the other for our people. You’d be wise not to get them mixed up.’
‘I understand.’
‘Don’t come back before the twenty-sixth of September. The train to Bordeaux leaves at eight twenty-seven tomorrow morning. Trust me, Léon. Do as I say, and do it tomorrow, not the day after. Now go home and pack your bags.’
So saying, Martin crossed the street and disappeared beneath the trees in the Parc de Cluny. They had exchanged a farewell hug on the last occasion, Léon recalled. He wondered why they hadn’t this time.
On the day when the staff of the French capital’s hospitals, the Banque de France and the Police Judiciaire joined the popular uprising and went on strike, Léon Le Gall, wearing an old-fashioned black bathing costume and shaded by a sailcloth awning, was lying in the sand dunes at Lacanau, 600 kilometres south-west of the Quai des Orfèvres. His wife was sitting beside him, straight as a ramrod, watching her four older children playing in the surf while little Philippe built a sandcastle at her feet.
The beach ran north to south for many kilometres and was deserted for as far as the eye could see. The dunes were surmounted by the bunkers of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Gun barrels pointed ominously out to sea from their loopholes as if the Wehrmacht soldiers had merely gone to fetch some ammunition and would return to their posts at any moment.
Several times a day, Léon and the children walked along the shoreline to see if the waves had washed up any interesting odds and ends. Their finds included a leather ball, an intact kitchen chair, and a sail complete with mast and rigging. This they had converted into the awning at the foot of the sand dunes.
Punctually at midday every day, Yvonne gave the signal to leave. Then they all pulled on light summer clothes over their bathing costumes, trudged back across the dunes to the pine-woods, and rode their rented bicycles along the narrow concrete tracks the Germans had laid for the benefit of their dispatch riders. After lunch and a siesta at the Hôtel de la Cigogne, they returned to the beach. In the evenings an accordionist played for dancing in the village square. Wednesday was market day, and on Saturday night the football ground became an open-air cinema.
Léon found it happily but also bitterly ironical that he should be fated, for the second time in his life, to spend the closing stages of a world war at the seaside. Although he was thankful to have been able to bring his family to such an idyllic place of safety, he gathered from daily newspaper and radio reports that courageous men were making history elsewhere. With masochistic avidity, he registered the fact that at the moment when General Leclerc’s tanks entered the Champs-Élysées he had been sitting at the breakfast table and dunking a second croissant in his café au lait; that he had eaten a spoonful of vanilla ice cream just as an SS detachment gunned down thirty-five young Frenchmen at the Carrefour des Cascades; that, when the FFL hoisted the tricolour on the Eiffel Tower for the first time, he had been busy whittling a miniature sailing boat for young Philippe; that, when General von Choltitz defied Hitler’s express order to destroy Paris and surrendered the city to Leclerc intact and without a fight, he was having his afternoon rest; and that on the night the Luftwaffe launched its last air raid on the French capital and destroyed 600 buildings, he was sitting with Yvonne on the balcony of their hotel room, looking out over the silvery, shimmering sea beneath a star-spangled sky and drinking a bottle of Bordeaux. And after it a cognac. And another cognac. And, to round the evening off, a beer.
News of the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal from Paris reached the Le Gall family as they lounged beneath their home-made awning at a quarter past three in the afternoon. A horde of young people irrupted on to the beach from the north. Many were riding bicycles and others running alongside, and two boys on a tandem were towing a trailer containing three girls. All were yelling and waving. Michel went to meet the newcomers. After speaking to them he dived back under the awning and hugged his father and his siblings. Little Philippe and Muriel clamoured for an immediate return to Paris and Madame Rossetos’ advocaat, but Robert wanted to stay in Lacanau until further notice because he had started a rabbit-breeding business in the hotel’s backyard. Léon and Michel, who discussed the possibility of a precipitate return home, came to the conclusion that it would be too risky to go back before the 26th of September without any valid travel permits.
Meanwhile, Yvonne stood on the sidelines, looking out across the sea and rubbing her thin arms as if she were cold. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘I won’t believe it till de Gaulle speaks on the radio.’
‘He was on the radio yesterday.’
‘I want to hear him speaking from Paris, and the bells of Notre Dame must be ringing in the background to prove it. He’ll do that if he’s smart.’
‘De Gaulle is smart,’ said Léon. ‘If you insist on proof, he’ll supply it.’
‘You think he knows me that well? We shall see.’ Yvonne turned round and took her husband by the arm. ‘Know what I want right now, Léon? A steak. A thick, bloody steak au poivre with pommes frites. And some Bordeaux to go with it – the good stuff. And goat’s cheese and Roquefort to follow. And for dessert a crème brûlée.’
The next day General de Gaulle really was smart enough to ensure that his radio address was accompanied by the bells of Notre Dame. When the bells and the general had fallen silent, Yvonne went to the hotel kitchen and informed the chef that she wanted some wild boar pâté right away, followed by a truite au bleu with mushroom risotto and a main course of boudin noir, pommes dauphinoises and red cabbage, and for dessert a crêpe Suzette – oh yes, and a coupe colonel betweentimes. When the chef objected that it was half-past three in the afternoon for one thing, that the kitchen was closed for another, and that, thirdly, he had nothing she’d requested but the potatoes, Yvonne blithely told him, first, not to be a clock-watcher, secondly to open up the kitchen, and thirdly to get hold of all the necessary ingredients. Money was no object.
From that moment on, food was Yvonne’s sole interest. As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning she reached for the oatmeal biscuits of which she always kept a ready supply. At breakfast she drank café au lait by the potful and daubed whole baguettes with thick layers of butter and jam. Feeding the children, which had been her exclusive concern for years, she now left entirely to their father. When they departed for the beach she no longer worried about the dangers of the surf and the currents but casually left her brood to their own devices and took a preliminary walk to the pâtisserie to buy herself some Madeleines and apple turnovers. Soon after that it was time for an apéritif and some form of amuse-bouche before lunch.
Léon looked on in bewilderment as his wife devoted herself to gluttony and turned into a creature he had never, in all their twenty-two years of marriage, dreamt was slumbering inside her. The lizardlike indifference and emotional frigidity Yvonne now displayed was in utter contrast to all she had been hitherto. This gorging, grunting Moloch must have been lying in wait within the stern guardian angel she had been throughout the war years; and the guardian angel, in turn, had previously resided in the sexy diva, and the diva in the tormented housewife, and the housewife in the coquettish bride. Léon wondered what other surprising metamorphoses this woman would undergo.
Because she did nothing but eat and seldom moved, Yvonne quickly put on weight. Her eternally vigilant expression gave way to a look of smug contentment – sometimes, too, of weary satiety. The children eyed her with covert surprise and shunned her even more than usual. Within a few days her neck had filled out, her shoulders and hips lost their angularity, and her fingers and bosom swelled. Her blue eyes, which had always been alert and slightly prominent, sank ever deeper into the cushions of flesh surrounding their sockets. At the end of the first week in September, because her clothes were beginning to burst at the seams, she took the bus to Bordeaux and bought three comfortable, voluminous summer frocks. And on the night of 25 September, when she was packing her bags for the journey home, she left her tight old wartime clothes in the wardrobe, realizing that she would never again be able to wear them.