Assignment in Brittany (5 page)

5

THE FARM

The woman, stooping in front of the enormous stone fireplace, half turned as she heard the footsteps on the path. The man halted in the doorway and leaned against its heavy wooden post. His black hair was dishevelled, falling over his high forehead to shadow the melancholy brown eyes. His high cheek-bones added to the gauntness of his face, grey in the cold early-morning light. A heavy growth of short black hair shaded the outline of his jaw. His blue jacket was faded and torn. His heavy boots were so encrusted with mud that his feet looked swollen.

The woman rose to her feet, clutching the black shawl more closely round her thin shoulders. Her lips remained half open, as if she were frozen into silence. The bright colour drained from her cheeks, leaving only a network of thin red veins.

She was frightened, Hearne realised. Perhaps he looked more like a ghost than he had thought. He advanced slowly into the large room, his feet suddenly dragging on the hard earth floor. She stood motionless, her eyes fixed on his face, her voice still silent. He would have to speak first, after all. He tried to smile that controlled smile which had been Corlay’s.

“Well, Albertine, I’ve got home.” His voice was the voice which had haunted him for three weeks, day and even night. The familiarity of its accent startled him. As he heard it, so strangely translated to this room, he could smell the antiseptic cleanliness of the hospital, he could see the black hair against the white pillow-case. And then Albertine moved, and as she came slowly forward she spoke.

“My God,” she was saying, “my God. It’s himself.”

“Yes, it’s me.” Hearne sat down heavily on the wooden bench at the side of the long narrow table in the middle of the room. He felt suddenly tired, very tired.

Albertine was standing over him, her rough voice hurrying in its emotion, her gnarled hand smoothing the hair tightened under her starched white cap.

“I thought you were a ghost. You were just like one, standing there with the light behind your back, saying never a word.”

Hearne smiled and checked his jaws from yawning. The warmth of the kitchen was having its effect. Albertine touched him suddenly, lightly, on the shoulder, as if she were reassuring herself.

“I’m alive, Albertine. I’m tired and I’m hungry, but I’m alive.”

“You’ve been ill.” Her eyes on his face embarrassed him. He leaned his elbows wearily on the table and rested his forehead on his hands so that they partly covered his face.

“Yes,” he said, with the listlessness of someone who is too tired to think, far less talk. He added, “How is my mother?”

“Just so-so.” Albertine’s voice was normal once more. It was a plain voice, unemotional and heavy. “When she wakens, I’ll tell her. Then you can go upstairs. But first I shall give you something to eat, and then you must clean yourself. Where were you?”

It was as if she were speaking to a small boy. It seemed as if she not only kept the house and the farm in order, but Madame Corlay and her son as well. There was a curious blend of familiarity and deference, a kind of proprietary interest mixed with critical pride. Albertine had turned away as she asked the question. She was now stirring the contents of the large black iron pot suspended from an iron hook over the burning end of the log. It was more a young tree than a log; the shrivelled brown leaves still clung to the end lying over the stone hearth, waiting to be fed on to the flames in its turn. Albertine tasted the soup, and spooned it generously into a thick earthenware bowl.

“Where were you?” she repeated. Hearne started slightly and brought his gaze away from the dancing flames.

“You’re tired,” she said. “You’re half asleep. Eat this and then you’ll feel better. But where have you been?”

“Belgium. Dunkirk,” he said mechanically, and warmed his hands round the bowl of soup. “I got to Brest in a French boat. I was ill. When I recovered there was the armistice, and I began to walk home.”

Albertine had cut him a thick slab of coarse white bread, and watched him critically as he swallowed the soup.

“You’re hungry,” she said, and moved suddenly into another room, with the quick, sure movement of a practical woman who has not time to waste over decisions. She came back with a small piece of cold pork, a still smaller piece of sausage, and a glass of milk. It was good milk, with the yellow cream still there.

“The Germans haven’t been here?” he said suddenly.

Albertine looked at him in astonishment, her almost invisible eyebrows raised. “They came and they went, just six men on motor-bicycles. Why should they stay here? There is nothing for them here.”

Hearne smiled as he shook his head, and wiped the thick cream off his upper lip. He remembered the truck convoys he had seen last night.

“Have the others in the village got home?” he asked tactfully.

“Picrel’s son. The Picrels always look out for themselves, you may be sure of that. Trouin’s son was killed, and Jean-Marie Guérin has been a prisoner for four months in Germany.” Her voice droned on monotonously. Apart from the family tragedies in the village, all due to the war, life in Saint-Déodat was very much the same as usual. There were the weekly markets, smaller now certainly, but then most of the young men had been away. Even with smaller markets, there had been enough food last winter, and enough fuel, and enough wool. Enough was all Saint-Déodat had ever wanted. Monsieur le Curé had been ill with rheumatism again, and some of the children had had a fever. But that, of course, was what happened when children were all shut up together in a school-house. That young man Kerénor had...and then the church bells rang, and Hearne never learned what had or hadn’t happened to Kerénor.

Albertine looked at him blankly. “I was forgetting,” she began incredulously. Her forehead wrinkled into deep lines so that Hearne knew the colourless eyebrows must again be raised. He looked at the prominent bones of the thin face, the bald brow with the hair combed so severely under the high cap.

“But of course you must go,” he said. “Don’t wait at home for me.” Albertine looked relieved. There might have also been surprise on her face, as she moved towards one of the three beds which lay along the wall, opposite the fireplace. From a chest of richly carved wood, arranged as a kind of step in front of the high bed, she lifted a rosary and another black shawl.

She was at the door now. “Don’t waken Madame,” she said briskly. “Henry is with the animals.” She nodded towards the wooden wall beside the door he had entered. He remembered the outbuilding which joined this corner of the house at right-angles and sheltered both the entrance and the small courtyard from the north-wind. So through that wooden wall was the cow-shed. That accounted for the warm farm smell, not unpleasant, which had filled this room.

“Henri?” he remembered to say in surprise. Henri wasn’t the name he had expected.

“Yes. He came to help me, but he is too old.”

“And Jean?” Jean was Albertine’s nephew who had lived on the farm and done the harder work.

“Missing.” Her face was expressionless, a mask of tightly drawn skin over rugged, strong bones. Then she was gone, pulling the second shawl round her shoulders. Hearne listened to her sabots clattering down the flagged path.

“I’m accepted,” he thought. “I’ve been left in possession.”

Now he would have about three-quarters of an hour before Albertine returned, while Henri was with the cattle and Madame Corlay slept upstairs. He finished the last crumbs of his meal and drained the drops which had gathered at the bottom of the soup-bowl. He was feeling better already.

From Corlay he had gathered only rough details about this house. There were three rooms downstairs: this large room, the smaller room from which Albertine had brought the food, and a front room which was a kind of entrance-hall parlour with its own front door, seldom used. The staircase to the three rooms upstairs led from that entrance-hall place. Overhead was Madame Corlay’s large bedroom, stretching across the full side-length of the house, as this kitchen did. Above the entrance hall was his room, and behind it, over the room where the food seemed to be kept, was another room for storage. Definitely utilitarian architecture, he thought. And then there was that out-house tacked on to the end of the kitchen, separated from it by a wooden partition. There had been openings along that partition at one time, like so many booking-office windows in a railway station, but now they were shuttered and blocked. Under them there still lay a thick tree-trunk, shaped into a shallow trough. Hearne had a sudden vision of five cows shoving their heads through the five openings, their jaws working steadily, their scanty eyelashes unmoved as they watched their master and his large family grouped round the table, eating their meal with similar concentration.

And there must have been a large family at one time, judging from the size of the table with its two long benches and from the three double beds arranged sideways along the wall opposite the fire-place. Each bed had its encircling drapery, suspended from, the wooden ceiling above, so that the men and women and children could sleep in the same room without offending
les convenances.
There were a chair and a chest before each bed: they were so high with piled mattresses that otherwise it would be difficult to climb into them. At either end of the
row of beds were two wardrobes, broad and deep. Like the chests, they were of age-stained wood beautifully fashioned and carved. The two doors flanking them occupied the last available corners of space on that long, well-filled wall. The one beside the backdoor entrance was the one which Albertine had used: downstairs store-room it must be. He moved across to it quickly, and glanced briefly inside. A bicycle, a bowl of milk, some wine-bottles, a cider-keg, some twisted rope, large iron cooking utensils, a few small barrels, a few large earthenware bowls neatly covered, all standing on the stone floor. There were two windows, both of them small and high in the wall and tightly shut. Hellish dark and smells of cheese, Hearne thought. Now for the upstairs part of the house.

He took one last look at the kitchen. He would have to know it backwards. The windows here were also small. Two lay at the other end of the room with a dresser and its rows of dishes between them, while two higher windows flanked the fire-place. Under one of these was another dresser, and more dishes; under the other was a small table. Between them stood the enormous stone fire-place, with proportions and simplicity worthy of a castle hall. From the dark wood rafters overhead were suspended two hams and a long shelf containing a wooden rack. In the rack were numerous thin circular disks.

“Now, what the hell—” began Hearne. Disks... Probably edible; they certainly weren’t ornamental. He strained his eyes, and then something clicked in his memory. Rennes, and a small inn outside the city, and a cheap student meal, and pancakes. That was it. Pancakes.

Then he became aware that someone had entered the room, that someone was standing behind him. There had been no
footsteps on the flagged path outside; he was sure of that. He turned, slowly, casually he hoped. A man was standing in the corner of the kitchen, against the wooden partition which was the dividing line between the animals and the family. Behind him a narrow door was open, a door whose “edges fitted so neatly into the wall that Hearne had been unaware of its existence. Blind oaf, he said to himself in annoyance. He ought to have realised an opening would be there. There were plenty of dirty, wet nights in the winter, and what peasant was going to leave the warmth of his kitchen to visit his animals by way of a cold, dark farm-yard? Certainly not a peasant who had arranged his eating and sleeping so practically.

The man stood silent, impassively, a small thin figure in a faded blue blouse hanging loosely over worn corduroy trousers. Behind him there was only a black smudge, and silence. The animals must have already been turned out into the fields. There was no mistaking the warm smell of straw and cows which filled the kitchen. Cosy little joint, thought Hearne; for those who liked it that way, he added hastily, as the smell strengthened. Well, now, what should he say or shouldn’t he say to Grandpa? He watched three white hens negotiate the old man’s wooden shoes, and jerk their way hesitatingly into the kitchen, picking spasmodically at nonexistent crumbs with a kind of I-really-don’t-have-to-do-this air. But he still hadn’t thought of anything to say. It was the old man who spoke first, as he closed the door carefully behind him and came slowly past the end of the trough into the kitchen.

“She’s gone?” His French was heavy and slow, as if it were almost a foreign language.

Hearne nodded, and said “Yes.” That seemed to be all that was expected of him.

The old man moved more quickly. He picked up a bowl from the small table beside the fire-place and helped himself to some soup. He seated himself at the large table and began eating. He had seemingly identified Hearne in his mind, and, having accepted him, was now concentrating on his breakfast. Hearne stood, feeling rather futile, and watched the soup disappear. The old boy had quite a capacity, considering his dimensions. Then Hearne suddenly realised that he was the master of this house. He’d better stop acting like an unwanted week-end guest. He turned abruptly towards the doorway which he had not yet explored. Henri stopped chewing and watched him.

“I’m going to sleep. I’m tired,” Hearne said.

“Aye, it’ll be wet tomorrow,” Henri replied slowly and amiably. His face was as weathered and as wrinkled as a dried russet apple. He nodded sagely as he spoke. His smile showed no teeth, but the eyes were as blue as his smock. They looked up at Hearne with their strange mixture of ingenuousness and shrewdness. Hearne smiled in turn, and nodded vigorously. As he was shutting the door, he looked back towards the table. Henri was scouring round the emptied bowl with his last crust of bread. Under the table, at his feet, the three white hens had abandoned their condescension and were competing openly for the few crumbs which had escaped.

It was just as well that he was not really a hero returning from the wars, Hearne thought, or he’d be feeling as flat as a punctured tyre after that welcome.