Soldier No More (26 page)

Roche constructed his own frown carefully, as Raymond Galles had advised him to do. “Against whom Madame?”

“Against those in power. Against the … the brass-hats? The hats of brass, is it?”

Again the strange—funny-strange—pronunciation: it might almost be broad Yorkshire this time.

“The Establishment?”

“The Establishment? That is new to me … But—the Establishment— yes, that has the right sound and the right meaning,” she nodded, mimicking him. “The …
Establishment
—yes!”

She echoed him again exactly. And that, of course, was what she was doing, thought Roche, the mists clearing from his mind. Once upon a time many Allied escapers had passed through this house, and some of them must have stayed for days, until the coast was clear, since it was an emergency hide-out for the times when the normal route was compromised. Australians, Americans, Yorkshiremen—they had all come and gone, leaving nothing behind them but memories and the echoes of their dialects in the vocabulary of this elderly French lady, who had an ear for the music of language!

“Oh … the I see—“ He felt himself warming to her, with her so beautifully and carefully enunciated mongrel English and all the courageous stories behind it which would never be told, of bomber crews from Lancasters and Flying Fortresses, from Bradford and Brisbane and Boise, Idaho. But there was a cold layer beneath the warm one: if she could hear and remember so much, could she hear and distinguish the untruth also— Raymond Galles had warned him that her ear was razor sharp? “Yes—angry, certainly Madame.”

That was the very truth, he was safe there: first the paralysing shock of grief and despair … then—
then
anger and bitterness both, which he had been too cowardly to turn into outright rebellion, which had been in a fair way to turn into the lethargic boredom of serving out his time as a messenger-boy in Japan, hauling brief-cases of decoded intercepts from American to British headquarters in a humiliating one-way traffic—

How he had hated the Americans then
…
hated th
e Americans, and hated the British by simple extension, the servile allies of the hated Americans, who had killed his Julie
—
his American
—
and now received the scraps from their master
’
s table, carried in the brief-case chained to his wrist, the very ball-an
d-chain of servitude
!

—until that evening, that never-to-be-forgotten evening, along the very beach from which Julie had swum out… along which they had walked so many times, to which he had returned…
all you have to do is swim out until the curren
t takes you, and cherishes you
—

“—anger, certainly, Madame.” Pain. “Anger—yes.”

Nod. “Yet you remained in the Army?”

Smile, bitterly but knowingly. “But anger against whom?”

Against whom?

He had felt, even beyond anger and bitterness and grief—he had felt impotence!

He could have ripped open the brief-case, and scattered its contents along the way, or made a bonfire of it. But they had copies of it, and other officers to carry it—the uselessness of the gesture, as well as his own cowardice, had baffled him, even though the thought of going back to teach in England without Julie had filled him with despair.

And then, out of the soft blue of the Japanese evening, had come the offer of revenge, unexpected and unlocked for—revenge, yet at the same time a keeping-faith with Julie and Harry, and a keeping-faith with his own idealism—

Or had it really been idealism?

It was hard to think back now, to remember what he had really thought—
how
he had really thought, and why he had thought as he had done: it was like trying to capture the thoughts of a stranger, to re-capture his own thoughts from time past.

Anger and bitterness and grief and impotence and …

And boredom?

Perhaps if the war had flared up again … but it was clear at British headquarters, even to the errand-boys, that the Americans and the Chinese had both had enough of Korea—

Perhaps if Julie … but without Julie the idea of going back to do what they had planned to do together, always
together
—

Instead, there had been nothing but anger and bitterness and grief and impotence, and boredom and cowardice and irresolution and uncertainty, and maybe plain foolishness too, and maybe also idealism—but at the time he had only recognised the first four of them, and the last one … But they had been enough, all of them together, to open the wound through which the parasite had entered his blood-stream, to take him over—
Christ! Was that how it had really been
?

“Anger against whom, Captain?” Madame Peyrony prompted him gently, watching him with an intentness entirely devoid of gentleness.

The contrast between the voice and the expression was disconcerting, even almost frightening: that intense stare, half-veiled but not concealed by the wrinkled eyelids, was better suited to Genghis Khan’s eyes, or Clinton’s, than to those of an old lady in her boudoir—better suited to a small room without windows than to a boudoir.

Anger against whom
? He must
lie well
now, and better than well, his own instinct more than Raymond Galles shouted at him: the past he must remember must be the version which the Comrades had so carefully created for him, not the newer and heretical interpretation which had directed his actions over the past few days.

He sighed. “I had a friend once, Madame … a brother officer in Tokyo … he was knocked over and killed by a police car.” Pause. “The police car was badly driven.” Pause again. “But it was pursuing a bank robber nevertheless.”

She continued to stare at him, giving nothing away.

“I suppose I was angry with the police driver … even though the road was slippery at the time, I was angry. But not for long.” Final pause, longer than the others. “Without the Communists, Madame … or without the Russians, if you prefer … Joseph McCarthy would have been just another stupid politician.”

There had been a lot more, to be used as required, according to the depth of the interrogation. The six-year-old lines came back to Roche with mocking clarity, even to the small amendments he had decided to make on his own account (no patriotic young Englishman would have referred to ‘Soviet expansionism’ in a month of Sundays when he meant simply ‘Russian aggression’…).

But this was not the time and place, and not the interrogator, for a lot more. The lie they had given him would stick here, or not at all, Roche judged.

Madame Peyrony subsided slowly into her chair, becoming somehow smaller and more ancient as she did so. “I will have a little wine now, Captain, if you please.”

Perhaps it was not the lie which had stuck, but the truth itself. Because somewhere along the years, and particularly since the bloodbath in Hungary last year, he had realised that the lie was the truth indeed—that the false reasons
they
had given him to give to the British ought always to have been his own true reasons for fighting
them
—that he had deluded himself, and been deluded; and that, worse still, that Julie and Harry had in some sense been deluded too, and had played an innocent part in deluding him.

But he had to pour the wine.

“And for yourself, Captain.”

His hand shook. How incredibly sure the Comrades must have been of him, to feed him the truth to use, confident that he would accept it as untruth!

“I’m all right, thank you, Madame.” He watched her sip the Monbazillac.

She inclined her head. “Very well… so I will apologise to you, young man—of course… But not unreservedly.”

“Not… unreservedly?” He was glad she was forcing him to forget the humiliation of his previous thoughts.

She nodded. “You have set one of my fears at rest. You must understand that I have certain responsibilities so far as Alexandra is concerned. Alexandra is—shall we say—vulnerable?”

Roche smiled. “Or susceptible?”

“Vulnerable, Captain. To be fair to you, since I am apologising for this, I will tell you that last year she formed a liaison with a young man—not such as yourself, but a foreigner, Captain.”

That was rather hard on Lexy’s CIA boyfriend, thought Roche. And doubly hard, since the CIA man was technically not a foreigner so far as Lexy was concerned, as well as being very much like Captain Roche in another way.

“Altogether not suitable, in fact?” he said mischievously. “Unlike me?”

She sipped her wine.

“But then … I’m not in the least interested in Alexandra, of course,” added Roche.

She set the glass down carefully. “Just so, Captain. But then what is it that interests you? And I beg you not to tell me anything more about
bastides
… I am certain that you know all that there is to know about them. But I am equally convinced that you are not in the least interested in them.” She paused momentarily. “Are you acquainted with ‘bum steers’, Captain?” This time the pause was even briefer. “I presume you are, so you will understand me when I say that I believe you are endeavouring to sell such an animal to me, and I am not about to purchase it.”

Roche managed to close his mouth, but decided that he had better not question this animal’s precise pedigree.

“I said that you had…allayed—that is the word—
allayed
…
one of my fears. I suppose that an old woman, and a stranger also, might be flattered that you have told me so much … so much of such a very personal nature … in order to reassure me as to Alexandra’s safety. But not this old woman, Captain.” Madame Peyrony paused yet again, this time for effect. “For now this old woman has another fear, which you have
not
allayed. And I will tell you why, in order to spare us both the waste of time which
bastides
, and whatever else you have ready, might otherwise … otherwise …” she searched for the appropriate English word, but in vain.

“ ‘Occasion’?” Roche discovered that his mouth was dry from lack of use.

“ ‘Occasion’?” She filed the verb away for checking, but without accepting it into her vocabulary, as though it might be another ‘bum steer’. “Very well … so you have given me your confidence, which I do not believe a man such as you gives easily, and least of all after you have been insulted to your face … and by ‘an old witch’, which is Alexandra’s favoured word for me, yes?”

But Roche was back to tight-lipped silence. If she knew that then she probably knew the maker’s tag on his underpants, and she certainly knew too much for comfort.

But how? And, just as important—or more important—
why
? “So … there will be a reason for that, because no young man from Fontainebleau, who is interested in
bastides
, but not in Alexandra, wastes his time with ‘an old witch’—to tell her that he is a
para
…
and also in some sort maybe a policeman too—“

She cut off there, at ‘policeman’, quite deliberately, to let him react. But of course she had known that all along, probably even without the scattered groundbait of Fontainebleau and what he had deliberately told her.

“Policeman, Madame?” If she wanted him to react then he would do so. But he kept denial out of his voice.

“Of a particular type. Does it surprise you that an old witch should know about policemen?”

No, it didn’t surprise him—not this old witch … of all old witches. If she had run escaping aircrew through her backyard, the men who had left their vernacular in her vocabulary, and lived to tell the tale, then she would know about policemen indeed; and not just the village gendarme, who was probably in her pocket, but other more particular and deadly types, from Darnand’s original Vichy bully-boys and their
Milice fran
ç
aise
successors to the professionals of the Abwehr and the Gestapo, who had decimated the resistance movement between them.

So—no lies now, except life-and-death ones. Because if she had passed herself off to all those in-some-sort policemen as an innocent old lady, then an innocent old lady she most certainly wasn’t. “No, Madame. It doesn’t surprise me.”

She stared at him in silence for a moment. “But naturally,” she said drily. “I am … like the
bastides
of course.”

Madame?”

“You have done your homework on me.”

Well… here was a necessary lie, if not a life-and-death one: she would surely find the truth of the combined incompetence of the British and the Russians unflattering, if not unbelievable.

“Not quite like the
bastides
, Madame.” Roche decided to outflank the lie with a compliment. “Your defences are in better order.”

She accepted the statement with the ghost of a smile, but in silence. She wanted more than that.

“But I would be fascinated to know …” he let himself trail off deliberately. “That is to say, I’ve never thought that I looked like a policeman— of any type.” He gave her a wry smile, as boyish as he could make it, backing his instinct that if she had a weakness it might be for a young
ex-para
, albeit an English
ex-para
and an
in-some-sort
policeman, who could take defeat like a gentleman, with good grace.

Again, the moment’s stare in silence. “On the face of it you don’t, Captain. But also you remind me of someone, and in part it is because I see him in you, I think.” The ghost-smile remained, but now it haunted a sad memory. “I think also … perhaps I should not tell you.”

“Tell me.” Roche knew, with self-revealing eagerness, that if she told him this then she would withhold nothing. “Please.”

“He was an enemy.” She weakened.

“A Frenchman?”

“No. A German, I think.”

“You … think?”

“He claimed to be a Surf Efrican. Perhaps he was, though he was not the Surf Efrican whose identity discs he had.”

Roche frowned. “A Surf—?”

“From Trekkersburg in the province of Natal. Pete—Pi-et—Prinsloo was his name. Or not his name.”