Night Without Stars (24 page)

She said abruptly: “This must be boring to you, Giles.”

“Not at all.”

She toyed with her fork for a minute. “Well, in fairness it can't be left there.”

“Don't spoil the story.”

“When I was nine,” she said, “my mother went off with another man, went to live in Paris. It was a—great shock to my father—naturally. When he realised it was true he went into Dijon and got drunk. It was the first time he'd ever been drunk in his life, and on the way home he—fell and died from exposure. It was—”

Charles said: “The only thing which spoils the memory is that the whole thing was plainly unintentional.”

I didn't say anything. I looked at Alix's long-fingered hands with the fork in them, at the cameo on her breast; it was an old one; I watched it rise and fall.

“And your mother?” I said to Charles.

“My mother was an intelligent woman who found herself at nineteen tied by arrangement to a dull little man of forty. The only grievance I have against her is that she bore and bred us before going off to live a life suitable to her gifts.”

“How would you wish to have been born and bred?” I asked.

Bénat looked at me. The question interested him. “ I think I should like to have been the first experimental ovum split and reared in a test tube. One might have stood a chance of growing up without so many of the usual complexes.”

“I doubt it. You'd have been a mass of clinical frustrations.”

Alix murmured: “The clinical perhaps as well as the cynical.” There was a bubble of amusement in her voice.

Bénat looked slightly irritated, but he didn't reply. “ I haven't to give you a description of the dishes that come on, have I, Gordon? It would be embarrassing explaining the
bouillabaisse
.”

“Thanks. I can see very well.”

“As you could on your last visit.”

“Yes.… I didn't know you so well then.”

“And last year?”

I told them. They listened closely. I couldn't read Bénat at all. He was both polite and off-hand, so that when you seemed about to see behind his courtesy he had turned his mind away and lost interest in you. In his own odd way there was something faintly regal about him. He wasn't putting on a show of not being interested in what I'd found at Villefranche; he really didn't care.

We were about half through dinner before he said: “I suppose you want me to tell you something about Pierre Grognard.”

“If it's agreeable to you.”

“Hardly agreeable.… But I've considered it all round. On certain conditions I should be willing to tell you what I know.”

“The conditions?”

“Some you may find distasteful.”

I looked at Alix. “Well?”
He said: “(A) that you tell no one else what we tell you. (B) that

you stop making tiresome inquiries. (C) that you leave Alix alone.” A nasty little sting in that, coming suddenly at the end. I was

still looking at her, but she kept her eyes away.
“By (A) I suppose you mean, not tell the police?”
“Among others. Yes.”
“Is it Alix's wish that the third condition is put in?”
After a minute she said: “It was Charles's idea to tell you the

truth—Charles makes his own conditions.”
“But do you want me to accept them?”
She met my eyes for a half second over the top of her wine glass.

“Yes.…”
I didn't say any more while the next course was served. Since

the first meeting with her a week ago I'd tried to believe she was

unfriendly because of what I might discover. Now I could cheerfully

have got up from the table and gone.
Charles said: “Well, Giles?”
I said: “(A) I agree to. Fair enough. (B) goes without saying. I'm

bored with them as it is. (C) is …” Stop again and think a minute.

“(C) goes a bit far. I can't tie myself so closely without knowing

what you're going to tell me. If I'm satisfied at the end that Alix doesn't want to see me, I'll drop out quickly enough without invitation.”

Bénat sighed. “ Disagreeable, bargaining with a guest. That's one thing we never did with Pierre.”

She put her hands down on the table suddenly. “ I don't think I can go through with this, Charles.”

“Oh, Giles must have his curiosity satisfied. What do you say? Is it to be left to his decision whether he shall go on pestering you or not?”

“My pestering so far,” I said acidly, “ has consisted of one uninvited visit up here.”

“Yes,” he said casually, “ but it won't be confined to that, will it, unless we take some precautions? Blind tenacity is a sign of the bulldog breed. Let me fill your glass.”

I said: “ D'you insult all your guests so charmingly?”

“Only those who are intelligent enough to understand and conceited enough to care.”

Alix said: “Oh, what's the use of this, Charles? If you intend to tell Giles about Pierre, then tell him. You can't make conditions.”

“Would you rather I made threats?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then I make conditions.”

“I accept the first two,” I said. “The third I think must wait.”

He broke a piece of biscuit and gave it to Grutli. “Oh, well, perhaps that's for Alix to consider. I leave it to her. Shall we go into the other room?”

He said: “Am I the only one to take cognac? Really all the other wines only set the right note for this.”

His thin sallow face had no flush on it as I felt there was on mine; I glanced at Alix who was standing by the window, one hand on Grutli's shoulder. The rain had stopped; its drumming had been with us nearly all through dinner; now the piled clouds were turning and splitting one over the other so that soon the sky would show.

I said: “ Is your mother still alive?”

Alix half turned but looked away again, waiting for Charles to take it up.

“She's in Barcelona at the moment. She got mixed up with some colonel who had to leave the country when the Germans retreated. She must be forty-nine by now. Getting stout, I expect. She had a few years of freedom before she let this sex business clog her life again.”

Alix said: “You were going to tell Giles about Pierre. I married Jacques Delaisse in 1944. That's how you should begin. Six weeks later he was captured and hanged.”

“He won't understand anything if you tell him that way.”

“Then tell him your own way, but get it over. I think that will cure him of his ambitions to associate with us.”

Bénat said: “Nonsense. There's a glamour about murder. Especially to those who've led sheltered lives.”

I said: “ So it was murder.”

“If you accept the conventional definition.”

“Which you of course don't.”

For once I caught his gaze. He smiled perfunctorily.

“As a matter of principle, no.”

“Do you for loyalty—or any of those things?”

“Well, loyalty is only another name for enlightened self-interest, isn't it?”

“I wonder that you're willing to trust my self-interest.”

“It's an experiment.”

“Rather an expensive one for you if it doesn't come off.”

“Oh,” he said. “You have no proof. And it would be expensive for you too.”

We stared at each other for a bit. “Go on, then.”

“I'm afraid it will take a little time. I must first explain that during the war I controlled this district for the C.A.D.F., which worked in liaison with the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur. Among the two hundred men and women under me were both Pierre Grognard and Jacques Delaisse. I believe they were close friends, but their work for the Resistance was quite different. Pierre was used for contacts and intelligence, Jacques was an active saboteur. Pierre I knew slightly, Jacques not at all. If you're unfamiliar with the way the underground movement worked that may seem strange, but in fact of all the people under me I only knew twenty-eight by name. Knowledge was danger, instruction was by contact, the movement interlocked, but everyone's knowledge stopped short at the first second or third link beyond himself—usually the first. It was the only sure way of cutting ones losses.… My sister began carrying messages when she was eighteen. Sometime after that I heard she was going to marry Jacques.… I couldn't give my consent to the wedding or be present at it because at the time I was living with a goldsmith in Toulon under the name of Flaubert. I made some inquiries about Jacques from a friend who knew him and was told that he was handsome, agreeably reckless, and enthusiastic in his work for the movement. That was all I knew, but my own feeling was that a man like Delaisse could hardly have the character or the breeding for Alix.…”

I tried to tell from the silhouette of Alix's head against the window how much she resented this, but she didn't stir.

“However, in April of that year, 1944, I was arrested in Antibes—and this time identified. A disagreeable experience.” He got up and went to the table. “I didn't suggest a Benedictine. Would you like that?”

After hesitating a second I said I would.

“They didn't give you Benedictine at the Villa Mont Fleur. But they had other means of loosening the tongue. They burned my feet chiefly; thats why I limp. If—”

“Don't say any more about that, Charles.”

“Well, it's an experience not without its own peculiar adventure. There's a point at which pain can do no more—and then you become superior to God and the devil. You're
free
.… Most interesting. Well, I stood it for three days and then feigned madness. A dangerous trick, because at that point there's only a single thin fence of reason between pretence and reality.… On the fifth day I escaped. Two days later Pierre Grognard was arrested and six others. A fortnight after that Jacques Delaisse went and three more. A sweep of our best men.”

It had been going dark in the room. He switched on a couple of table lamps, and they brought all the colour back: the cinnamon satin curtains, the lace-like shadows of wrought-iron, Alix's hair and skin.

“I think those days and weeks my last ideals were squeezed out. Thinking I was going to die, I forgot my more enlightened views and it seemed worth while to be keeping faith with the men under me. Then I escaped, and most of the men were arrested just the same. I might have told the Germans all I knew and saved myself the heroics. Anti-climaxes can be very salutary.”

He put the drink beside me. As he bent I noticed there were tiny beads of sweat round the roots of his hair. It was the first time I'd seen him so close. His eyelids were very thin, almost transparent. For all his appearance of suavity and balance, there was something here that I wasn't so sure about.

“Of the eleven men arrested five were taken to Cannes for questioning. Two died there and three survived. Jacques Delaisse and two others were hanged in Nice. Grognard was taken to a concentration camp near Toulon where he was kept until released by the Allied landings. Is my telling brief enough for you, Alix?”

“Yes.…”

“The arrests had been very smart—a little too smart. We all felt there had been a deliberate leak. For a time we were all under suspicion, but in the end, by elimination, we came to think of Grognard. He had no witness to his movements—and when he came back he was much better off. He had made money out of the Germans legitimately—we did not begrudge him that—but confidential reports showed him a man of wealth.… There were other little things.

“It was hard to believe the worst. He'd been one of our earliest and most active members. He'd lost his father in the first war and was known to have Communist sympathies. He had proof of his captivity in Toulon. The thing was impossible. Then early last year he began to pay attentions to Alix.”

The great dog shook himself till his collar fairly rattled, came across and put his head on his master's lap. Charles's hand slid over the creased, shiny skin. A hand shaped like Alix's but sinuous instead of smooth.

“Will you go on, Alix?”

“No. You.”

“We—Alix and I—had had our differences of opinion—over her marriage, and some other things, and when peace came she chose to live her own life and earn her own living. She didn't care very much for Pierre; but I felt—and the relatives of those who had been betrayed felt the same—that it was up to her to encourage him for a while to see what came of it. There's nothing like infatuation for unlocking a man's tongue. We didn't, of course, need evidence to satisfy a court of law—only to satisfy ourselves. It was at this stage that Alix took pity on a blind man, and so made things difficult for us all.”

I said: “And incidentally saved the blind man.”

“Quite incidentally. I expect if you know her at all you'll realise that she's a woman given to these sudden impulses.… Tiresome conflict between inclination and duty. Then after some weeks she was silly enough to take you back to her apartment and Pierre surprised you on the stairs. This naturally made things very strained between them. He'd been jealous of you, but now felt himself deceived as well. They might have quarrelled finally, but she was conscience-stricken, felt she had let us down. So she made it up with him, even though his terms had changed. Now you must tell the next part, Alix.”

“I can't.”

“Oh, yes, you can.”

She turned slowly from the window, sat on the arm of a chair, put her hands round her knee.

“Oh, God! … Well, then.… I can't tell it like Charles, detached, amused. Perhaps I have a sense of humour that doesn't work in this. After that meeting on the stairs I was very upset. In those days it seemed to matter.… Both my friendship with you and my loyalty to—them. I thought somehow, in a few days, I can find something out; then be done with it all. I hated it. When I saw him next time his attitude was … if you, why not him. He proposed we should go off for a fortnight, be married while we were away. I knew he didn't mean that but I agreed. I was sure, once we were alone together … in that way. Once or twice he'd begun to say things and had to pull up short … While this was going on Charles was away, but I went to Villefranche, told them. I wrote a note for Charles that he'd get when he came home. The arrangement was to spend a few days in Grasse first—then go on to Grenoble, and perhaps Paris. The evening before we left he took me out to dinner; then he asked me back to his flat. I didn't usually go, but in the circumstances didn't like to say no. When we got there he began to make love to me. I found when it came to that I …” She got up. “It's hot in here, Charles. Can I open a window?”