Spearfield's Daughter (15 page)

“
You know what rumours are like in wartime. They're as numerous as bullets.”

“Don't lie to me, Roger.” Since she had become head of the family, Claudine had become more domineering than their mother had ever been. But he tolerated her with good humour, she had relieved him of responsibilities heavier and more boring than the army laid on him. “Did something go wrong out there?”

“No.”

He had been called before the GOC and asked to explain why he had ordered the cleaning out of An Bai—the word “massacre” had not been used.

“You were stupid, Roger,” the GOC had said. “Maybe the village
was
a nest of VCs—”

“That was what Intelligence told us.”

“Okay, so it was. But we don't kill women and kids—”

Contrary to what the briefing officer had been told to tell the press conference, he had not been in An Bai on the day. He wished he had been: he might have been able to prevent what had happened. But it had been no more than a company action, it had not needed the presence of a brigadier-general.

“My orders were misunderstood. The troops, I'm told, were stoned out of their minds. They were meant to eliminate all the men, that was all.”

“You know enough to issue orders that can't be misunderstood. Your officers couldn't have been stoned out of their minds when you gave them the orders. It's a foul-up, Roger, but we'll straighten it out. Just lie low till we get you something Stateside. We don't want the goddam media making anything out of this.”

“What do I do now?”

“We'll move you to a base area. No announcement, but if anyone from the media asks, it'll be for health reasons.”

“I'd rather go back Stateside, if it's going to be like that.”

“That would only raise questions—you haven't been out here long enough to have completed your tour. You'll stay. But the men in the An Bai operation will be split up and posted either Stateside or to Europe. They may talk individually, but it's unlikely. Let's hope to Christ they don't. No soldier would want to boast that he gunned down women and children.”

“
They're not soldiers, they're draftees. Nobody knows what they'll talk about or who to.”

“Well, we'll just have to trust to luck and some good old American decency. I don't want any report written, nothing at all. There was no action at all at An Bai on that day, understand?”

“Yes, sir. How long do you think it will be before I can go back Stateside?”

“I don't know. It could be another year. In the meantime be an inconspicuous base commander. I guess that will be a pain in the ass to a fighting man, but that's the way it's got to be. You made a mistake, Roger. You fought dirty in a dirty war and forgot to camouflage it.”

So he had gone to a base area, had dodged the media correspondents and spent a miserable twelve months. He learned that the Australian girl, Cleo Spearfield, had asked awkward questions at a briefing, but JUSPAO had stalled her; then her newspaper had recalled her and as the months went by he relaxed, felt safer from investigation. The only jarring note had been a visit one day from Major Pierre Cain.

“I thought you might like to know, sir—they are rebuilding An Bai.”

“Oh?” He kept his composure; he had always been a good actor. “I'm glad to hear of any rebuilding that goes on in your country, Major. It's a change from demolition.”

“Yes, isn't it?” Cain, too, was a good actor; and he had inherited a bland, inscrutable look from his Annamese mother. He continued in French, “I must warn you, General. Certain of my countrymen know what happened at An Bai.”

Roger Brisson's French was as fluent as Cain's. “Major, that matter was taken out of my hands. I know nothing about it.”

“Of course not, General. Still, I thought you'd like to know about the rebuilding of An Bai. The problem is, they have to move in a whole new community. There are no survivors of the old one.”

Cain saluted and left. Roger's aide, who spoke only English and that not always well, said, “Was he giving you some shit, sir?”

“No,” said Roger. “He was just recommending a new book by Racine.”

“Never heard of him, sir.”

Roger had felt safe with his tongue-in-cheek joke. Safer than he had felt in his conversation with Major Cain.

Then at long last his transfer came through; not Stateside as he had expected, but command of a
division
in NATO. He was promoted out of the way, a solution not necessarily confined to the army. He applied for two weeks' furlough before taking up his command and now here he was at the Brisson chateau near Souillaç, enjoying the rich life till Claudine had tried to spoil it. He had been surprised and annoyed to find her here when he had arrived.

“I've been promoted to major-general and I'm on my way to my new command—it's as simple as that. I suppose you got your rumour from one of your newspaper friends.”

“I got it from one of your Pentagon friends. He didn't say what it was, just that you had been promoted out of harm's way.”

“Some friend. Who was it?”

“Never mind, we'll forget it.” She did not believe in pressing people, especially blood relatives, who did not want to talk. She was an empress who would never have used the rack: it only distorted the truth as well as the victims on it. She sipped her wine. “They tell me this is going to be an excellent vintage year. Not much quantity, but top quality. A relief, after last year.”

They were lunching on the terrace that looked down the steep hill to the tree-lined Dordogne River in the narrow valley. Down there the campers' tents were huddled together like canvas tenements, everyone having a dogged holiday. August was the month when the French fled the congestion of their cities and towns to crowd together along rivers and down on the Riviera and on the beaches of Brittany and Normandy. A month of it, then they would go home, having proved their individualism. Up here on the terrace the two Americans, proud of their French blood, sat in splendid isolation.

The Brisson estate had been in the family for six centuries, since the reign of the quarrelsome and undistinguished Louis X. Survival had been a Brisson talent and the family had succeeded in choosing the right side, or at least in not antagonizing too much the wrong side in the wars and struggles of the succeeding centuries. Like the present-day French, they had been down south on what passed for a fourteenth-century vacation when the Black Prince of England had massacred the citizens of Limoges. In 1789, hearing rumours from Paris, they had abruptly become the most generous
seigneurs
for miles around, raising wages, kissing workers' babies, cutting down on all ostentation. Then, when they saw from the writing on the chateau's walls, the first samples of
graffiti
they had ever seen, that the peasants were not impressed, they took the hint and set a record time for the coach journey from Souillac to Bordeaux. There
they
had boarded a ship, hiding themselves in wine casks, thinking of themselves as vintage quality, and escaped to England. Unimpressed by the English who were unimpressed by them, they had sailed on from there to Louisiana, where an adventurous member of the family had already established a plantation.

The Souillac branch of the family hated the colony and the constant quarrels amongst the Americans and the British and the Spaniards and had been relieved and delighted when Napoleon invited them back in 1802. Since then the family had chosen the right side to vote for, but its fortunes and numbers had dwindled until finally one of the Louisiana Brissons had come home. Members of the family were still scattered around France, like semi-precious stones, but the one remaining jewel was Claudine, who had inherited the estate from her father. She was la Comtesse, but she never used the title outside the estate. Comtesses were ten centimes a dozen.

“Why are you over here at this time of year?” asked Roger. “You usually don't come till October.”

“I've bought Farquhar Press, the London publishers.”

“Whatever for? You're always buying headaches.”

“I have only two headaches, Roger. You and the
Courier.
” She had a third, her son Alain, but she never confessed to anyone that he troubled her. “Ah, Louise!”

Louise Brisson half ran out on to the terrace; she always seemed to be running, as if chasing invisible buses. Her friends back in New York referred to her as a long-suffering wife, but there was no hint of suffering on her amiable, pretty face. Twenty years ago she had landed the catch of the season; she still enjoyed him, if only seasonally. She had always seen what a vain, philandering man Roger was, but she had thought that all he needed to bring out the hidden character in him was a good discerning woman; the first cave-woman had told herself the same thing as she recovered consciousness after the first blow with a club. As time went by Louise was discerning enough to see that there was no hidden character; it was all there on the handsome glittering surface. She had sensibly settled for less when she told herself there was no more, and never would be.

“I've been over in Brive, ferreting around in a little shop there.”

She was a collector, of anything and everything; it was mostly junk, but she never admitted as much. Her home at Sands Point on Long Island was a museum of trivia and it delighted her; she felt herself
surrounded
by bits of other people's lives and that helped soothe her secret loneliness.
Objets d'art,
antique furniture, paintings: she never felt that
they
were bits of people's lives. She would rather have had a jar of Rembrandt's brushes than one of his paintings. She was the despair of her sister-in-law, but it never worried her. She certainly would not care to be surrounded by any bit of Claudine's life.

“You should never be allowed out of America,” said Claudine. “This foreign air goes to your head.”

Louise had no French blood, but each time she came to France she was more French than the French. She dropped into a chair, spread her legs as if practising for the can-can. “Roger,
chéri,
pour me some wine. Oh, isn't it a marvellous day! On days like this I just want to sing and make love!”

“Don't attempt both at the same time,” said Claudine. “It might produce a hernia.”

Roger smiled indulgently at his wife. He loved her sincerely and always had, but he knew he could not resist the lure of other, younger women. He had never formed any permanent, or even semi-permanent, relationship with the latter: they came and went like recruits in boot camp, and he always enjoyed coming home to Louise. She was a perfect soldier's perfect wife, a solidly established base to fall back on. Strategy and tactics were as important for a good marriage as for a good war.

Louise returned his smile, raised her glass to him. “I'm just glad to have you home from that dreadful war, darling.”

“I understand we have no chance of winning it,” said Claudine.

“That's not true,” said Roger.

But he did not want to talk about the war, not if Claudine had heard rumours from Washington, even if they were stale rumours a year old. He now regretted what had happened and admitted that he had been over-zealous. An Bai had been a festering sore for almost a year before he had ordered the attack on it; it was known that it harboured Viet Cong, though Intelligence had not been able to determine exactly how many. Villagers had been brought in and interrogated, but it had been like asking questions of statues. Frustrated, angered by an ambush that Intelligence thought had originated from VCs working out of the village, he had ordered the cleanout operation. His orders
had
been imprecise: he had meant all adult males to be eliminated, not the whole of the population. Something had got out of hand: maybe his orders had been misunderstood, maybe all the troops had been so stoned that the massacre had become just a party for
them.
He had interviewed the lieutenant in charge of the operation, who had not been on drugs. The lieutenant had been distressed to the point of collapse at what had happened and had insisted he had done everything he could to stop his men in their indiscriminate killing but had been unsuccessful. He, a junior officer who would have received his orders down the chain of command, had not queried those orders at the interview; he seemed more concerned with protecting his men from the consequences of what they had done while under the influence of drugs. If he had later queried the orders, when he had calmed down and was able to look at the whole mess in perspective, it seemed that he had kept his queries to himself. He, unlike the grunts under him, had been a career man; maybe someone higher up had talked him into the proper priorities. Roger did not know and had never gone back to enquire. He had turned his back on what had happened and hoped the lid would never be lifted again on what had been dumped in the latrine.

“I'm on furlough. Let's forget the war,” he said. “How's the
Courier
doing? You said it was a headache.”

“It's not doing well at all, it's lost money for the last five years. I don't know what the solution is, except to turn it into a tabloid and hope for the best. Which I would never do. While I was in London I looked at successful papers there, ones like the
Mirror
and the
Examiner.
I'd never let the
Courier
sink to that level.”

“Personally,” said Louise, “I'm going to miss the
Daily News
while we're here in Europe.”

“Why don't you sell the
Courier
then?”

Roger had never taken much interest in the family fortune. Each year his dividends came to him with a statement of the family holdings' finances; he looked at the figures on the dividend cheque and rarely, if ever, read past the first page of the financial statement. All he knew was that each year the cheque was bigger than the previous year's and that, as far as he was concerned, meant he did not have to worry. He was possibly the richest man in the US armed forces, but to talk about it or even think about it would be shameful. He had his standards. West Point, the home of so many impoverished officers, had taught him those.