Soldier No More (25 page)

Well—he would give her what she wanted, a
para
or a horse-marine, or a Bengal lancer if she wanted it.

“Paratrooper, Madame.” He didn’t dare look at Jilly, he just hoped she wouldn’t give him away, that she would let him
lie carefully
And there was Lexy’s father’s advice on that subject, even on that same lie:
Tell a whopper and make a proper job of it
! “3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment.”

That was a big enough one, anyway: the 3rd had dropped at Suez last year, with Massu’s 2ième RPC.

She looked at him proudly. “My nephew is a
para
, Captain Roche—at this moment in Algiers.”

“With Massu?” Roche didn’t have to pretend to be impressed: the word from Suez had been that Massu and his men had been impressive.

“With Massu, yes.” She inclined her head slightly. “And Bigeard.” Then she shifted her gaze to Jilly. “And now you may leave us, Gillian my dear.”

Jilly blinked at her. “Madame?”

“Sit down, Captain Roche,” commanded Madame Peyrony, pointing to the chair opposite her own, beside the fire.

“But Madame—“ began Jilly huskily. “Madame—“

Madame Peyrony transfixed her with a look, “
I do not need a chaperone, at my age … You
are going to the Tower tonight—is that not correct?”

The orgy!

“Yes, but—“ Jilly tried to look at Roche.

“Very well!” The Orgy in the Tower didn’t appear to worry Madame Peyrony in the least. “Go and superintend Alexandra’s
toilette
, then. Somebody must do it—and the Jewess will not—so it must be you. So … allez-vous en, my dear, and don’t argue the toss with me.”

Roche did a double-take. He had just been watching Jilly’s resistance crumble when
don
’
t argue the toss
was incongruously delivered in a strange nasal tone only a moment after he had puzzled out the
Jewess—
the Jewess was Meriel Stephanides, of course—it had to be … and the nuance of anti-semitism (never far away in this class—shades of Captain Dreyfus!) was really no surprise at all. But
don
’
t argue the toss
—?

“Off you go, then!” Madame Peyrony gestured imperiously to dismiss the super-intelligent female ornament of the British Embassy in Paris.

The super-intelligent ornament went like a lamb, without a second glance at the
ersatz
paratrooper from Fontainebleau, who sat down like another lamb as he had been told to do. “Now, Captain Roche—“ Captain Roche was a little bit too hot already after having been too cold, Captain Roche decided.

“—what exactly is it that you are doing here?” Much too hot—

“Doing, Madame?” Hotter still. “I’m on leave—“

“On leave, naturally. But why here?”

Hot, to be precise, under the collar: she shouldn’t be asking a simple question like that—accusingly, as though she didn’t expect the first answer to be truthful, thereby ruling out any conventional response about the beauty of the countryside and the attraction of foie gras and truffles. So all he was left with was Thompson’s bloody
bastides
—

“I’m by way of being a student of medieval history, Madame.” God! It sounded thin, and how he wished it was Thompson himself who had to spread it! “You have some very fine
bastides
round here—Beaumont and Monpazier and Domme, for example.”

The only thing to say for the
bastides
was they were so unlikely that she might accept them …

“In fact, I was only looking at the church in Neuville this afternoon, with Lady Alexandra—“ He paused as something changed in her expression.

“There is wine on the table beside you. Captain. Please pour yourself a glass. Nothing for me, thank you.”

The decanter weighed a ton and the long-stemmed glasses were as fragile as eggshells.

He turned back to her finally, after having made heavy weather of pouring, like a peasant unused to such artefacts.

The wine was golden-yellow, and much too sweet for him. She sat back in her chair, folding her hands on her lap. “Is it Alexandra, then?”

“Madame?”

“If it had been Gillian she would not have let me send her away.” It was almost as though she was talking to herself. “And you are not a mouse—
paras
are not mice … and it will not be the Jewess.”

“I beg your pardon, Madame Peyrony?” It was well enough to relegate the
bastides
to the nearest wastepaper basket, where they belonged, but the repetition of
Jewess
was beginning to set his teeth on edge.

“The question is, if it is Alexandra, is it with her father’s knowledge? The man, David Audley—he would be a mistake, but she is aware of that… but at least he would be suitable.”

He was just about to say ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ suitably bowdlerised for the occasion, when he remembered Raymond Galles’s advice: he knew exactly what she was talking about, and that would be a stupid lie.

The realisation of how close he had been to such stupidity cooled him down. The age in which she lived had long passed, but she lived in it still. Also, Madame Goutard would have described to her the sheep’s eyes Lexy had made at him after the episode in the shop.

Actually, marriage to Lexy wouldn’t be so bad, once he had become accustomed to her cooking. Marriage to Jilly would be even better, and certainly more stimulating … but with a senior peer of the House of Lords for a father-in-law, and an American heiress for a mother-in-law … Champeney-Perowne multiplied by Vanderhorn divided by Roche might still produce a sum total big enough to protect him from the simple addition of all his enemies. It was only a pity that such prospects were altogether Utopian.

But, more immediately, Madame Peyrony’s technique of thinking aloud was an interesting one.

“And I’m not suitable, Madame?” His brain shifted into the right gear. “
A para
, but not suitable?”

“I did not say that, Captain.”

“But you implied that.” It was like crossing swords.

“And you did not answer my question.”

“It was … an insulting question.” And he would win, because he had more at stake. “If you will permit me to say so.” But as yet he wasn’t sure
how
he was going to win, that was all.

She took stock of him. The lightweight suit was right (expensive, but not too expensive; a little rumpled, but he was on leave); and the tie was only his old hockey club’s, but it looked like something better; and the haircut was safely French military, Fontainebleau ‘57. And she already knew that he spoke Parisian French, and an Englishman who didn’t speak the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe couldn’t be all bad, especially an English para.

“You are not married, that is certain,” she pronounced that judgement with an air of finality, because that was her technique. And although he didn’t know how she had arrived at it he knew instinctively that the answer to his question,
how to win
? lay within reach.

“No, I’m not married.” It was a risk, but not a very great risk—certainly not a very great risk
for a
para
accustomed to risks. And, finally, instinct also made him want to talk, and for once not lie while talking.

“I was engaged once, unofficially, Madame. But never married— definitely
not
married, Madame.” She didn’t interrupt. Wise woman!

“She was an American girl. I met her during the Korean War, Madame— while I was in Japan, after I’d been posted out of Korea.”

Cultural shock: Japan is beautiful, and the people are kind and ordinary … just ordinary people, no better and no worse, in spite of the true stories of Changi and the Siamese railway, and Imphal and Kohima—

“She was very beautiful, Madame. Beautiful like … the Jewess. And intelligent—like Gillian… and slim like her, too. And as full of life as Lady Alexandra.” Perhaps all that was a bit too good to be true, after six years of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles—maybe not so beautiful, and not so intelligent and not so full of life. Maybe nervous at times, and highly-strung, and full of doubt about America, and where it was going, and what it was doing in the name of Liberty and ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ and ‘the government of the people, by the people, for the people’. But Julie still—Julie
always
—

‘
In War it is as it is in Love
…
Whether she be good or bad, one gives one
’
s best once, to one only
—‘

True! So Madame Peyrony had nothing to worry about—though this was not quite yet the moment to tell her so.

“She killed herself.” There was no way of making it other than brutal: it
was
brutal. “She told me once, the way to go was to swim out—there was a current on the bay where we used to swim, if you went far enough out in the evening it would carry you out to sea, the fishermen said—and swim and swim and swim, until it didn’t matter any more, until the sea and the sky joined. And that’s what she did.
Tout simplement
!”

He’d only met Madame Peyrony five minutes before, and never before had he told that to anyone, because there was no one to tell who didn’t have someone else to tell it to.

But Madame had no one to tell it to, only the resident ghosts, who couldn’t tell it to anyone else, so it was all right to tell it to her.

And, besides, now was the time to tell it anyway, even if she did pass it on. Because now he was breaking faith with Julie—and because now, in a few days’ time anyway, it wouldn’t matter either way!
Tout simplement
!

“Why?”

He hardly heard the question, it was asked so softly. But he had intended to answer it anyway.

“It was a bad time. The bomb … MacArthur … Senator McCarthy— Senator McCarthy most of all—the senate sub-committee investigation… Julie’s step-father worked for the government, and he’d subscribed to all sorts of causes, from the Spanish Civil War onwards … And she adored him—he was a great chap, a nice man—“

Julie
’
s Harry, who knew all about England, as no other American he had ever met knew about the country, from his service there in the war
—
even
knew about the ra
ilways there, the very lines over which his own father had driven his engine
—
the old London North-Eastern
—

“
You
’
ve got a great chance in England, boy, to make real Socialism work
—
to show the Russians
how to do it, so they can get it right
…
they
’
re trying to, and they
’
ll get the hang of it if you can show them the way
—“

He was relieved Harry hadn’t seen Suez. But he was even more glad he’d missed the East German riots and Poland, and above all the Hungarian massacres; they would have done the job just as surely as McCarthy had done, perhaps even more cruelly—

“He committed suicide. He shot himself with this German pistol he brought back from the war. He wrote a letter—“

Dearest Julie
—

“—he wrote her a letter, explaining why.”

She waited until she was sure he wasn’t going on. He wanted her to ask the question.

“And because of that—because of her step-father—?”

“Also because of me. She wrote me a letter also—“

My own David
—

“Because of you?”

“She’d decided I ought to be a teacher. But I was in the Army then … she got it all mixed up—she thought, if they found out about her, and then about Harry … with the way Senator McCarthy was hunting down people with the wrong connections… she had this crazy idea that they’d throw me out of the Army, and then they wouldn’t let me teach after that. She said I’d be tagged as a ‘subversive’—it’s funny, really.”

“Funny?”

“Harry wouldn’t have made that mistake. He would have known that it wouldn’t have made any difference to my becoming a teacher. They don’t work that way in England, he would have known. They couldn’t have cared less—particularly in the sort of school I wanted to teach in … not even if I’d been Stalin’s stepson-in-law—or Krushchev’s … and McCarthy never carried any weight in England—Harry would have known all that. But Julie didn’t, that’s all.”

She stared at him. “And that is … funny?” She was questioning the word, not the fact.

“Ironic, is what I mean, Madame.”

“Ah!” she nodded. “ ‘A funny sort of cobber’ means ‘a strange one’, not a humorist. And ‘funny business’ is not comedy, but the exact opposite—I remember.” Her wrinkled eyelids closed momentarily.

‘Cobber’ was purest Australian; and, more than that, she pronounced the word with an authentic Aussie twang. And yet there was no Aussie in her ‘funny business’, it was drawled in what might almost have been American.

She was staring at him again. “And the army too? They would not have cared?”

Roche shrugged. “I was only a National Service officer at the time—a conscript. I was due to be demobbed—demobilised—pretty soon, anyway. It might have worried them a bit, in some ways. But it wouldn’t have worried me, anyway.” She frowned suddenly. “That surprises you, Madame?”

“You did not teach … in this school of yours?” She nodded, still frowning. “You remained in the army … Yes, that surprises me.”

Roche relaxed. They had prepared him for this one long ago, if his connection with Julie had ever surfaced. It was another in the long succession of ironies that he had never needed their carefully rehearsed explanation until now, for a purpose and an interrogation very different from the one they had envisaged.

“In what way, Madame?” But it would do, just the same, their explanation.

“After such a tragedy … such a mockery… you must have been a very young man—“ the hint of a sad smile crossed her mouth “—you are not an old man even now … I would have expected bitterness, if not anger, Captain.”