Assignment in Brittany (6 page)

It was cold in this entrance hall, as well as dark, for it lay in the south-west corner of the house. It would be a cheerless
place even when the sun did get round to it: no one used this room. It was just a square-shaped box with more heavy carved furniture, a flagged stone floor, a wooden staircase hidden in the shadows of the central wall, and a front door which was as obviously unused as it was imposing.

He mounted the staircase warily. It was really only a glorified ladder. He could see the stone floor beneath him, between the treads. He began to guess why Madame Corlay kept to her room. This was hardly the kind of staircase for arthritic joints. The landing at the top of the stairs was scarcely bigger than a cupboard. There were two doors. That one on his left would be the large bedroom above the kitchen, so this one must be his. He touched the latch gently and pushed the door slowly open. Inside it was dark, save for a faint blot of light where the window lay on the west wall. There was the same damp smell which he had noticed in the hall downstairs, He walked cautiously across the uneven wooden floor. His feet were beginning to feel the weight of his muddy boots. He pulled back the curtains clumsily and opened the window. There were the clean smell of trees and the nervous twitterings of wakening birds. He leaned heavily on the broad sill, formed by the thickness of the house walls. The fresh air should make him feel less tired. He stretched up his arm to touch the steep, fluting roof which flared out just above his head. Below him was the orchard, with Henri’s pigs already rooting in the grass. Beyond the apple-trees was a small field of grain, and then other small fields, all banked on the gentle slope of the hill. Then the fields ended, and there was a line of trees over-topped by the proud square tower of what had once been the castle of Saint-Déodat. So this is my home, he thought, and somehow the idea no longer felt strange.

He turned away from the window. Albertine would soon be back, and he ought to finish his inspection. There was still the third room on this floor. The door beside the carved wooden bed must lead to it. He started wearily towards the door. He ought to finish his inspection. He ought to...and then, somehow, it didn’t seem so important. Three mattresses, he counted slowly. Three. Somehow it didn’t seem so important.

He stepped heavily on to the chest lying at the side of the bed, and slumped on to the sheet which had protected the mattresses from dust. He just had time to think, as his filthy boots on the white sheet faded from his view, Albertine will give me hell for this, I bet; and then he was suddenly, beautifully, wonderfully asleep.

6

ANNE

When he awakened, the sun had crossed over to the western side of the house. He lay looking at the warm pool of light on the white scrubbed floor, letting himself drift slowly and pleasantly into consciousness. He could feel he had slept his fill: his eyes had lost that glued-up feeling which came with exhaustion. His mind, too, seemed to be wide open. He felt warm and clean and comfortable. Clean? He looked at his hands in amazement. Yes, he had been scrubbed clean. And he was no longer lying on top of a dust sheet. He was between coarse linen sheets, with a broad pillow propping up his shoulders. A quilted mat, its blue pattern bleached with many washings, covered him. He was wearing a loose white shirt, and the filthy rags which had been his clothes had disappeared. He raised himself quickly on one elbow, but the contents of his pockets had been laid neatly on the small writing-table near the window. Papers, clasp-knife, gun. Yes, they were there all right. He relaxed back on his
pillow and looked at his clean hands. Albertine had certainly been busy. He found himself grinning in embarrassment. Well, what of it? She had been midwife to Madame Corlay. It wasn’t the first time she had washed young Bertrand. But it was lucky about that birthmark. He had thought Matthews was being just a touch too realistic there, when he got that chemist fellow to imitate the red blotch on Corlay’s back. Strange that it should have been the first of his faked credentials to stand a real test.

It was warm in the room. Albertine had closed the windows again. He sat up in bed, swinging his legs on to the chest. He rubbed the back of his head, stretching himself, and gave a long satisfied yawn. And then he smothered a laugh. Not one of his better moments, he decided, looking at the dangling legs under the short shirt. He crossed to a mirror, framed in carved wood, which hung against the white wall. The view there pleased him just as little. The tired lines under his eyes had faded but not departed, and he had never admired Corlay’s haircut anyway. Still, he did look less like himself and more like the Frenchman. He gave a wide grin to himself and saw the gap at the side of his teeth. Another of Matthews’ bright ideas. “If,” he had said, “if you were to smile broadly or to laugh, the gap would be seen. You must have a gap.” So he now had a gap. He felt the still tender gum with his tongue. Yes, he had a gap all right. But what Matthews expected him to laugh at on this trip was beyond him.

He opened the window. Now the fields and trees were bathed in the amber light of early evening. All the smells of grass and leaves and hay and clover and ripening wheat, distilled by the day’s warmth into one sweetness, hung in the air around him. Time seemed suspended in the silence of these fields. “Why
should they stay here?” Albertine had asked in answer to his question about any visiting Germans. Living here, one could become as simple as that: one could believe the delusion that peace was self-perpetuating.

There were footsteps in the room below. They were climbing the staircase, slowly and heavily. He closed the window quickly, and moved silently back to the bed. He was seemingly asleep when the door opened and Albertine entered. There were footsteps following her: heavy, decided footsteps. Hearne stiffened.

“He has been like that since yesterday morning,” Albertine was saying. Not this morning, then; yesterday morning.

The man grunted in reply, and Hearne heard something being set down heavily on the wooden chest beside him. For a moment he felt danger. Albertine had seen through the deception. He was caught not only helpless in bed, but ludicrously in a nightshirt. If he could get the man off-guard, if he could reach the gun on the table...and then four cold fingers were laid gently on his wrist and stopped the wild plans. Albertine had only brought a doctor. He wondered where she had found him, for there was no doctor in Saint-Déodat. Doctors practised by districts, not by villages, in this part of the world. It would be just as well to stop feigning sleep. Doctors were doctors. He groaned slightly and twisted his body as his eyes opened. The doctor was shaking his white head and saying, “Very fast.” Considering the emotions he had caused, it would have been difficult to have found a normal pulse, Hearne thought.

“He is awake,” Albertine said, announcing the obvious.

The doctor grunted again. “How do you feel?”

“Tired.” Hearne’s voice was low.

“He’s been ill,” Albertine said.

“Wounded?” The doctor was looking at him fixedly.

“I forget things sometimes... It was the guns...”

The old man nodded his head sagely. “Ah!” he said.

“Shell-shock. And do you remember things now?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes I forget.” He let his voice trail away in dejection:

“He needs rest, rest and quiet. No one is to worry him. If he has any more attacks, then he must rest here until he recovers. Just rest and quiet.” The doctor was examining his chest, feeling his brow, looking at his tongue. Hearne wondered what all this had to do with loss of memory, and then he noticed Albertine. She was watching every movement intently. She seemed satisfied when the doctor had gone through all the motions: without them, she would have felt cheated, and the old man had known that. For good measure, he produced a box of pills. Albertine nodded sagely as he gave her full directions.

His last words were, “Don’t worry if you find it sometimes hard to remember. Don’t worry, and you’ll be completely cured. Just rest and quiet.” He shook his head sadly, lifted the heavy bag from the chest, and followed Albertine out of the room. He was still talking of rest and quiet as they went slowly downstairs.

When she returned, Albertine found him staring at the window.

“I’d like it open,” he said.

“But you will catch a cold.”

“I’d like it open. I am far too warm. I haven’t slept indoors for almost two months.”

Albertine stared unbelievingly, and then the doctor’s advice must have prompted her. The advice had cost money: it must be good.
Humour him when he seems strange. Rest and quiet.
Her thin lips closed disapprovingly, she shrugged her shoulders impatiently, but she crossed the room and’ opened the window.

“Where are my clothes, Albertine?”

“You are to stay in bed.” She might give in to this madness in opening a window, but as for clothes— Her lips formed a straight line. Her voice was harsh as if she were tired of all this nonsense. And then she was probably angry because he was ill. He didn’t blame her: she had work enough to do without a sick man to add to it.

“But I am not ill, Albertine.” He was reasoning gently as with a child. “My body is well. It is only my mind that is sick. I have slept enough. I need to stretch my legs before I can sleep again.”

Albertine seemed incapable of grasping the fact that the sickness of body and mind could be different. They were all one to her.

“You are to stay in bed.” She was quite decided. Her tone nettled him, unexpectedly. So he was to stay in bed in a short nightshirt, day after day, with a bowl of soup grudgingly but loyally brought upstairs to him. Perhaps you don’t know it, he thought as he stared back at her, but I’ve work to do, and a hell of a lot of it too, my sweet Albertine.

He sat up in bed and swung his bare legs over its tall side. Most women would have retreated, but Albertine stood her ground.

“You’ll catch cold,” she said, with her masterly grasp of the obvious. Hearne looked at her incredulously and then he began to laugh, softly at first and then gradually more loudly until he was rocking on the edge of the bed. He suddenly remembered the gap in his teeth, and checked himself in the middle of a laugh. Blast Matthews: that man was always right.

Albertine’s eyes were round circles. “He’s mad,” she said, backing to the door. “He’s mad.”

“I’m
not
mad.” His voice rose. He got off the bed and advanced towards her. “I only want my trousers. Steal a man’s trousers, would you?”

Then the door opened. A white-haired woman stood there, watching him silently.

“He’s mad, Madame. He’s mad.”

“She’s taken my trousers,” Hearne said angrily. He was suddenly aware that his voice was loud, too loud. “She’s taken my clothes. I’m not a child,” he ended lamely.

Madame Corlay, leaning on her stick, looked at him dispassionately. “So you’re back,” she said coldly. And then to Albertine, “Give him his clothes.” And then she was gone, leaving them staring at each other. So that was his mother, Hearne was. thinking. Well, it certainly had been the strangest of meetings; hardly what he had been steeling himself against. Once more he had the feeling of anticlimax. That coldness, that hardly concealed look of bitterness... What kind of mother was this, anyway? What kind of son was he supposed to be?
So you’re back.
Not,
so you’re home.
So you’re back, with the implication that because there had been a scene, then he must be back. Yet, there was a lot to that little word so... Corlay had talked willingly, almost diffusely, about his everyday life: about his education, about the farm, about the village and the people who lived and worked there. It seemed as if he were eager to identify himself. He had said, “So you want to know about me? Why? Do you think I am
not
Bertrand Corlay of Saint-Déodat?” They had both laughed at that, and certainly Corlay had proved his identity by the completeness of his descriptions. But about
his personal life and emotions he had been vague, even bored. He had given a very good impression of a life which was so simple that it was dull and uninteresting. Corlay had been far from cheery: he had been unhappy and moody. But Hearne had thought that could be attributed to the obvious boredom of his past life, to the constant depression about the future of his country. It was enough to depress any man. Staring at the door which Madame Corlay had closed so definitely behind her. Hearne felt the first twinges of a new worry.

Albertine was watching him. He suddenly realised that it wasn’t the fact that his voice had been raised in anger which had seemed so strange to her. It was the fact that he wanted open windows, that he wanted to dress when he should stay in bed. It wasn’t the loud voice which had been mad: the loud voice was something which she thought normal. He sat down on the bed again, but his emotions were less calm than his words.

“Albertine, you know what the doctor said. You know what my mother said. All I want is to be left in peace, and to have my clothes. There is nothing mad about that. You needn’t worry— I’m not going away. I’m going to stay here. Now, where are my trousers?”

“They are washed.”

“Well, what about other ones?”

“I’ve got them all packed away with your things.” She looked towards the door which he had meant to investigate, before the three mattresses had seduced him.

“Good. Shall I get them, or will you?”

She moved so quickly towards the store-room that he was surprised. Her polite grumbling echoed back into his room.

“...you’ll just make a mess of everything,” she was saying.

He waited patiently, reflecting on the charms of home life, as Albertine made her silent journeys between the two rooms bringing with her each time a newspaper bundle smelling of some strange herb. She had obviously decided to be the complete martyr and unpack everything at once. It was just as well, Hearne thought. That made it easier for him to, find his way about another man’s strange wardrobe. He snapped the thin string on the parcels of yellowed paper, and began to shake out the clothes, and then paused as, his eyes read the heavy black print. The clothes must have been packed away in September.
French Successfully Attack Siegfried Line. English Allies Arrive with Full Equipment. Miracle of the Machine in Modern Warfare.
His eyes travelled down the columns of close print. There was a glowing report on the miracle of the Maginot Line, on the modern conveniences which made life so much more pleasant for the troops. As a sour joke, someone had printed a photograph in the very next column showing the English digging in. Or perhaps he never realised it would be sour, or a joke. Only our very best crack troops, thought Hearne, standing waist-deep in mud, digging and draining a French field into a prepared line. No, it was much more pleasant to read of electric light and red wine, of underground movies and chapels, of hot and cold water and heating systems. So much more pleasant, more comfortable—so impregnable.