Shuttlecock (17 page)

‘You have visited “
le goret
”?’

Again, I followed a slight movement of my companion’s head. Our chubby acquaintance from the room at the end of the cell corridor had emerged into the courtyard and was sauntering up and down. ‘
Goret
’ is French for ‘piglet’. An apt word.

‘Yes.’

‘Too bad,’ he said, without feeling. He was evidently trying to gauge my qualities as a prisoner. I vaguely knew who he was, and he, most likely, had a clearer idea who I was. Many Frenchmen I had met had an ingrained distrust of captured Englishmen. They believed that the Gestapo treated them more leniently.

We spoke no more. My companion’s last remark had been detected. He was seized by the shoulder, knocked with a rifle butt, and when he fell, kicked several times in the ribs. It could just as easily have been me.

After washing, we were made to form into a line again. By this time another ten or so prisoners, with their cans, had been led out from another wing of the Château towards the first pump. So we were not the only ones.

It was clear we were not to be returned to our cells directly. At a command our party was made to parade in single file, several times, round the perimeter of the courtyard. This, perhaps, had the spurious purpose of ‘exercise’, but was really only a sadistic diversion. We were forced to march in mock drill fashion, arms swinging high, at a pace neither too slow nor too fast. One of the guards even stood calling out the time: ‘
Links!
… 
Links!
’ Any failure to keep in step, to maintain the pace or to hold the head up was immediately dealt with by blows and kicks. For some of our number, who were tottering even as they stood by the washing trough, this ‘exercise’ was torture. I wondered how long it would be before I was like them. In such a condition you would not be able to escape.

But, as yet relatively fresh, I was able to take in, during this bizarre ritual, the scene around me. There was something
cruelly incongruous about the Château itself – its solid, creamstuccoed walls, its tall windows capped with rococo scrollwork, its little French corner turrets, its air of tranquillity and gracious, harmonious living. Up above, on the weathered tiles of the roof, which was bathed in sunlight, there were even doves preening and cooing. And, all around, I could sniff (as though I hadn’t been living amidst it for the last four weeks) the tangy, woody, late-summer air of Eastern France. These things seemed impossible. It was the same inside: the carved woodwork, the gilt, the elegant stairways – and, below, the dungeons. As we paraded round, I noticed that four or five officers, one of whom was ‘grey-hair’, had emerged from the portion of the Château which lay opposite the arched gateway. Here there were large glass doors and a series of shallow, wide steps. They stood at the top of the steps or just inside the glass doors, smoking cigarettes and coughing behind raised hand. They looked at the proceedings in the courtyard like inspectors approving some project in hand.

‘
Schauen Sie geradeaus!
’ I was struck sharply on the side of the face.

One section of the courtyard wall, to the right of the gateway, I could not fail to notice. On it there were smears of dried blood, and on the ground beneath, darker, denser blood-stains. The wall itself was pitted with bullet marks.

We were now halted and made ready for being led back to the cells. First, each man had to collect his can from beside the first pump. I acquired one of my own in the following way. Since I was the last in the line and had brought no can with me up to the courtyard, I was empty-handed. One of the guards, however, snatched away the can belonging to the prisoner with the crushed hand and presented it, almost with courtesy, to me. ‘
Prenez!
’ he said. Then added, in German: ‘
Er hat die letzte Scheisse gehabt
.’ Guffaws arose from the other guards. Later that day (if day it still was), shots were heard – the first of several fusillades I was to hear from my cell – and at the next morning’s ‘muster’ the prisoner with the crushed hand was missing.

(I remembered a story Mathieu had once told me about another
Gestapo establishment in Dijon, which I had thought was a joke: ‘They only have so many cans. So when there are not enough to go round they shoot one of the prisoners.’)

We were now marched back to the cells. I was anxious to know if they would return us to the same cells from which we came. They did – now and on subsequent occasions. They made a mistake here.

After only a brief respite in my cell, I was dragged up again by the guards to grey-hair and fat-cheeks; then to ‘
le goret
’s’ room; then back to my cell for another brief period; then to grey-hair and fat-cheeks again. And so on.

At some time later – how long I could not say – I found myself mercifully left to languish. It was then that I heard the shots from the courtyard. I was so numb and fatigued that I heard them almost with indifference. I slept – not the deep, oblivious sleep of exhaustion, but a fitful sleep, broken by the noise of scuffling in the corridor and screams from ‘
le goret
’s’ room. Then – at dawn again, as it turned out: grey-hair and fat-cheeks.

During those twenty-four hours, as my neighbour at the water-trough had predicted, we received no food – at least, I received none. On the second day a bowl of something was shoved into my cell. An unspeakable swill. We were given no drinking-water save what we gulped at the trough.

At the next muster in the courtyard my companion murmured under his breath: ‘They shot Fernand’ (the name, I gathered, of the prisoner with the broken fingers). ‘Now he is out of his misery. Sometimes they shoot you in the courtyard; sometimes they say, “Please, take a walk in the garden.” Among the roses, a machine-gun.…’

I could not help forming a dislike for this friend of mine and his grim brand of phlegm. His remarks did nothing to help morale, and I even suspected him of having some sort of double role. But then I realized that his way of seizing on me like a new boy and attempting to scare me was his means of gaining a little power and authority, and this in turn gave him the will to survive. A brief lesson in prison psychology.

Sometimes during these morning musters we would hear, on the air, the distant sound of shell-fire. Our captors put on unperturbed looks and so betrayed inward unease. The sound gave us all a flutter of hope, but, at the same time, if anything, it loaded the balance of fate against us. The chances of our captors abandoning the Château without first herding us all together and executing us were a thousand to one.

On the fourth morning (I believe it was the fourth morning) the Germans adopted a new ruse. In the courtyard, by the washing trough, we were told to strip. Our clothes were put in a heap. We were made to parade in the usual way, unclad, and were led back to our cells naked. From then on, at all times and in all circumstances, we were without clothes. A small matter, on top of so much; but of all the humiliations and cruelties – more intricate, more painful – we had to endure, none, I think, was more demoralizing, more appalling than this nakedness.

This was the pattern – but pattern is hardly the word – of our life at the Château. What remains? What more can be added? Memory provides its own, thankful censorship. If one dominant impression stays with me, it is that – the everyday man in everyday circumstances does not know what it means – of being absolutely in the power of another. This ought to be a condition of the utmost seriousness. But it is not. You feel yourself to be the mere pawn, the mere dehumanized toy that you are. Many times as I huddled naked in the dark in my cell, when even the redeeming will to escape had deserted me, I thought, nothing matters, I am in their hands: all this is a game.…

I look up from the book. Outside, the long June evening has grown dim and I realize that for some time, in my absorption, I have been straining to read without a light. But it is as though I have been straining not so much against the dark but to discern some hidden things behind the words. I switch on the light. From upstairs I can hear the sounds of Marian’s bath running and the
noise of the water in the pipes. What happened in ‘
le goret
’s’ room, and in those interrogation sessions with fat-cheeks and grey-hair? Why do I need to know these things – to eavesdrop on my Dad’s suffering? So as to become like one of his tormentors? To become like Dad? With so much of Dad’s book I have to struggle to make it real, to wrest it out of the story-book realm into the realm of fact. Because I know I could not have done half those things Dad did in France, and so for me it has always seemed not wholly real. And yet in these last chapters there is more of the flavour of reality, because there is also more mystery – and more misery. Why should that be? I can believe in these scenes of cruelty and deprivation. I can believe that they happened. Is that shocking? Sometimes they can actually seem one, that silent dummy in the hospital ward and that figure in his pitch-dark cell. And not only this, but because I believe in these passages, I can put myself into them, I can imagine myself in that dark cell, in those passage-ways, that courtyard. Why does it seem that I
know
that Château? So that sometimes in my mind – it is like this tonight – it almost seems that Dad and I are one too. But I must know everything. I must know every detail. So whatever Dad endured, I will know if I could endure it too; what is expected of me too.

But that is not the only mystery. There is the mystery of X. This only makes things more tangled and obscure. Dad doesn’t mention him. He even says explicitly at one point: ‘French was the only language I heard amongst the prisoners … the only Britisher at the Château.’ Perhaps X was not there, or there but at a different time – or in some part of the Château where Dad would not have seen him. Perhaps it is all the work of my over-ripe imagination: X, ‘Arthur’, the golf course.…

But I have been making notes while I have been reading – just as I would when going through one of Quinn’s files at the office. I have been jotting down those words, those little additional comments, those inconsistencies, which most seem to draw me into the mystery – and closer to Dad:

I close the book and return it to the shelf. I fold up the piece of paper on which I have been writing these notes and slip it into my pocket. I don’t want Marian or the kids to discover it. I go up to the bathroom to get ready for bed.

Marian is lying in a foot or so of soapy water. Her skin is pink with the heat, and globules of sweat cover her face. She says ‘Hello’ uneasily and coyly. This is not because she reacts with modesty at being seen in the bath, but because when she is in the bath she is vaguely conscious of appearing ridiculous. She wears a plastic shower cap with a frill and likes to surround herself with all sorts of oils and lotions. ‘Hello,’ I return, and stand, looking down at her, by the edge of the bath. She peers up at me with the frozen look of someone anticipating some attack and scared to provoke that attack by making a move of defence. She lowers her chin and seems to be trying to draw her whole body beneath the water. In other circumstances and around the house generally she can act with indifference or resentment, but here she is cornered and has no choice but to plead innocence. Her breasts bob and glisten; just beneath the surface is the dark triangle between her legs. But my thoughts are neither aggressive nor lustful. I am thinking of Martin and Peter when they were very young. How I used to bathe them in a plastic baby-bath; how when I sat them
in the water I used to think how tender, how pitiful their pink flesh was – even hot water would make them scream; how they used to look up with the same look as Marian now – uncertain, defenceless, compelled to trust – and how I used to think: ‘Now they are at my mercy.’

‘What are you looking at?’ she says ineptly.

‘You’re all pink,’ I say, equally ineptly.

And I have this sudden urge to wash my wife. To kneel down at the edge of the bath and – with the utmost tenderness – to run the soap and the bath-sponge over her body.

When I first knew Marian I used to meet her sometimes, at the end of the day, at the clinic where she worked as a physiotherapist. There were all these people, recovering from broken bones, with muscle defects and spinal problems, and there was this lovely, healthy girl instructing them. I used to watch them, doing exercises, through the glass doors. Most of the patients were elderly or middle-aged men, some of them solid, self-important types made to look foolish through sudden incapacity. I used to think: now they are having to learn to walk again and use their arms, like children. They used to worry about all sorts of things like bank overdrafts and making sure of their pensions; now they are all occupied with something as simple as getting their bodies to work. I could see their pent-up annoyance and frustration. But they obeyed Marian’s instructions meekly and implicitly and looked at her as if they depended on her completely. I used to be amazed and jealous at Marian’s power over her patients; even a little bit afraid of her because I thought that the power she exercised over them she would also wield over me. But when the time came it was quite different. I was surprised by her passivity and by the way her body became something offered up
completely to me. I suppose that is what happens in love: you bare your breast and say, I am in your hands. And the first time we went to bed together I couldn’t help thinking of those men, behind the glass doors, with their braces and crutches and sticks.