The Foundling Boy (43 page)

‘Something of a misjudgement on her part,’ Palfy murmured. ‘A very French error that is the result of your preconceived ideas and lack of curiosity. You’re a whisker away from treating the rest of the world as fools, which is your way of reassuring yourselves about who you are. But what a letdown it will be for you when you lose the war!’

‘Do you think we’re going to lose it?’

‘Who can doubt it?’

Palfy drove slowly back down to Cannes. The cool night air,
the engine turning over in near silence, the Austro-Daimler’s overpowering majesty, produced a heady sense of freedom. It would have been so pleasant just to go on living like this, not to see the clouds massing on the horizon. They stopped outside the building where Madeleine lived. There was no light at her window.

‘She can’t be asleep already,’ Palfy said.

They walked up two floors and rang her bell, but there was no answer. Palfy had a key. The apartment was in disarray, the bed unmade, the cupboards and drawers empty and wide open. A light had been left on in the bathroom. They looked at each other. Did they have to find out what had happened?

‘We risk coming across a truly revolting spectacle,’ Palfy murmured.

He was pale and calm, concentrating on how best to conduct himself, and Jean realised that this time the age of fun, the age of carelessness and excess, was over. A terrible shadow passed over them both, all the more threatening for remaining secret and invisible, for only having been hinted at. They still had time to wipe their fingerprints off everything they had touched and silently tiptoe away.

‘A little courage!’ Palfy said, his voice shaking.

He opened the bathroom door. Empty. The bath still full of water. On the glass shelf above the washbasin some perfume bottles still stood unstoppered.

‘Phew!’ Jean said.

They went back to the bedroom, and on a corner table found a sheet of paper folded in four, in Madeleine’s large round handwriting.

‘They have been quick,’ Palfy said, a trace of admiration in his voice.

The telephone rang. It was a ‘customer’. He sent him packing.

‘The annoying thing,’ he said, as the car wound down towards the port, ‘is that I put money into the idea. The car? I won’t get a penny for it. All those panic-stricken millionaires have gone off and left dozens of unsaleable monsters behind. I settled my bill at the Carlton yesterday. I should be able to stay there another couple of weeks if I leave the weekly bill unpaid for a while, and thenmake myself scarce. A real shame that I couldn’t patent my little invention and sell it to the Americans. More difficult than the last time around. A question of morals. Very punctilious, you know, the Americans, about morality. In ten years’ time you’ll see I was right. One should never be ahead of the morals of one’s time, whether one’s selling toothpaste or pleasure. That will be my consolation: to have been a pioneer. What about you? Are you happy with your job at the agency?’

Jean agreed that it was bearable, that he had known worse and that, going out nearly every day with the tourists he looked after, he was less bored than he would be sitting behind a desk. Even so, the future seemed limited. He had no chance of getting a better job until he had done his military service, and actually the necessity for that seemed to be fast approaching. He was twenty and he could go early, before he was called up.

‘Dammit!’ Palfy said. ‘That could be a way out.’

They stopped beside one of the quays. Both French and foreign yachts were moored there. Crews were sitting drinking and eating in their cockpits, by the light of storm lanterns.

‘Usually there are ten times as many foreigners,’ Jean remarked. ‘Have they all gone? Yesterday I heard a man in the crowd say, “The rats are leaving the sinking ship!”’

‘They’re fools! A lightning war, and Europe will be German, or French. Great business opportunities are coming. It’s a good sign
that the rats are leaving. Let us stay, and swear that if, in two weeks’ time, I have failed to come up with a new scheme, we shall enlist in the French army.’

‘My father won’t be able to bear it.’

‘Oh come on … he’d be ashamed if you wriggled out of it. One military march, and the most hardened onlookers have tears in their eyes.’

The next fortnight flashed past. The agency closed. Cannes was emptying. The fine summer was dying gently away, indifferent to the preparations for the great upheaval. Jewellers were selling off diamonds, banks dollars. From the horizon in the early morning came the dull, rhythmic
crump
of artillery. The French navy was exercising out at sea. A regiment from Marseille marched through the town. Troops were taking up defensive positions on the Italian frontier. Mules pulling mountain cannons followed. A regiment of Senegalese garrisoned at Fréjus left for the north. At the harbour master’s a queue formed of foreign yacht owners waiting to have their papers stamped to leave for Spain or Gibraltar. Shops began to run out of sugar, coffee, tea and jam. Jean and Palfy went for drives in the country behind Cannes, where a soothing indifference reigned, sampling the last of a summer that had been heartbreakingly tranquil and delightful. In the cafés, between games of cards and boules, people listened to the wireless as it broadcast with undeniable and vindictive skill its news digest preparing the population for war. Jean was tempted several times to go as far as Saint-Tropez to see Théo and Toinette and confirm that the Norman uncle was really the man he thought he was. He made do with calling Théo on the telephone on his last day to tell him that he was enlisting.

‘In the Train des Équipages?’
18
Théo asked with a trace of anxiety.

‘No, no. Infantry.’

‘But you’ll be on foot, and Berlin’s a bit far for marching.’

‘I’ll hitchhike.’

‘All right then. You’re a brave one. I’m just in the GVC.’
19

‘The GVC.?’

‘Guarding the lines of communication. When you’re past forty they don’t let you go to war, especially when you’re a father. Anyhow, it’ll be short, I’m telling you … Théo is telling you. We’ll expect you back at Christmas to slosh down some champagne with us. And come back with a Croix de Guerre. That’ll please Toinette.’

‘Send her a kiss from me.’

‘Send her a kiss!’

Jean felt Théo was taking himself a little too seriously as a father, and being excessively strait-laced. Of course he wished Toinette nothing but well. Come to think of it, why shouldn’t she be his wartime godmother? Théo said he would have to think about it.

‘I don’t want her to get any ideas. At her age, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Ask her uncle Antoine what he thinks. Tell him it’s for Jean Arnaud.’

‘Why? He hasn’t got a clue who you are!’

‘Yes he has, I promise he has. I’m a friend.’

The second week’s bill from the Carlton resembled, as foreseen, one of those ultimatums that had been echoing around Europe for the past three years. It was impossible to misread its tone. Palfy had already safely hidden several suits and some underwear, basic necessities for a future hoax that he was already applying his mind to. In the meantime he needed to disappear as fast as he could. Posters on town-hall doors were inviting him to do just that: ‘Enlist. Re-enlist. Beat the call-up.’ Despite having been discharged at twenty, he requested to take a new medical board. The medical officer noted his hollow chest, but in the face of his intense feigned patriotism passed him ‘fit for active service’. Jean was passed fit without reservation.
A fifty-franc note slipped to the orderly secretary in charge of the allocation of recruits to training depots got them onto the same list. They were each issued with directions, but Palfy tore up their travel warrants. After a final tour of the town’s nightclubs, where age-exempt saxophonists blew up a storm on empty dance floors, they climbed into the Austro-Daimler and headed west and north, towards the Auvergne.

Palfy was in raptures at the thought of the magnificent bill left behind at the hotel. At every stop he took the account out of his wallet and grieved at not having ordered caviar and champagne every night.

‘One day I shall regret it bitterly. But the truth compels me to say that at this moment I am sick of champagne, caviar, lobster
à l’américaine,
and
foie gras.
One must take care of oneself. The MO was right, apart from the fact that he needs new glasses: it’s not my chest that’s hollow, it’s my stomach that’s ballooning.’

Three days later, after numerous stops at restaurants and country hotels, the all-consuming Austro-Daimler pulled up outside high gates at the entrance to a field at Yssingeaux in the upper Loire. On a washed-out banner they read: ‘Military Training Centre. No entry.’ A huge sergeant was on guard duty, his helmet and boots greased, his thumbs tucked into his belt.

‘Move along!’ he shouted mechanically.

It took him some time to realise that the two men alighting from the monstrous dimensions of the vehicle in front of him were recruits. And recruits liable to a week’s confinement to barracks for arriving two hours late.

‘What – what about your car?’ he asked, shocked that they should abandon their fabulous conveyance so blithely, in the middle of nowhere.

‘My chauffeur, who is following behind on his bicycle, should be here in a moment. He will drive it to the garage. And if by some chance he should fail to appear, it’s yours. An extraordinary vehicle,
whose like we shall not see again. It was built especially for a Russian grand duke.’

The sergeant judged that this strange recruit was in urgent need of basic discipline and the full rigour of the regulations that constitute the strength of all armies. He sentenced both men to a week’s confinement. Across open fields – they would be given a key when they had earned the colonel’s trust, as the orderly subtly put it – they were led to a barn where several men, all completely drunk, were snoring in the straw. Palfy changed into his silk pyjamas, quite unbothered by the strong smell of rats.

‘You see,’ he said to Jean, who was still angry at their reception, ‘we are about to learn the hard way. They are going to temper us in the steel from which victories are forged.
Vive la France!’

Their neighbour, a hirsute ginger-haired man bristling with stalks of straw, sat up.

‘
Vive la France
? Shut your gob. Demob is all we give a shit about!’

And lay down again. For the record, let us note that this rebel’s name was Boucharon, that, slowed down by his flat feet which prevented him from running, he was, in June 1940, taken prisoner by the enemy and sent to Silesia, where he had to wait another five years to be demobilised. Poor Boucharon, a victim of society, the state and himself. There were hundreds, thousands of Boucharons whose fates were sealed that night of 31 August. The following day, emerging from the aftereffects of their overindulgence in red wine, these warriors took a moderate interest in the news of the day: the Germans were invading Poland. A captain explained to them that the Polish cavalry were accomplishing marvels and that the Nazis’ armoured divisions were staring death in the face. With their lances the Poles were aiming at the firing slits and putting out the eyes of the German tank crews.

The whole troop having been confined to barracks, Palfy and Jean hardly minded their week’s punishment. As the depot lacked new kit, the men were issued with blue-grey uniforms from the last
war. An orderly appeared with clippers. In an excess of enthusiasm that had more than a whiff of insolence to it – the high command did not require such zeal – the friends had their heads shaved. They had to ask for new forage caps which did not slip down to their ears. Throughout the first week the Austro-Daimler remained parked outside the gate where they had left it. The colonel summoned Palfy.

‘Private Palfy,’ he said nervously, ‘I have decided to speak to you myself. You have arrived at this training depot in a car that demands financial resources well beyond the means of a private soldier, second-class. At such a moment as this, that represents something of a scandal. It must cease. Remove that Austro-Daimler, which offends the patriotic gaze of all of us, and let us see it no more. On another matter, having received a report from the officer in charge of mail, I must warn you that you do not have the right to receive letters addressed to you as “Private Baron Palfy, second class, Yssingeaux”. The use of titles, be they real or false, is forbidden in military correspondence below the rank of lieutenant. I could have had the duty sergeant inform you of these matters. I preferred to take them up with you myself. I trust that you understand the seriousness of my warning. You may go …’

Palfy sensed that the colonel had been on the point of saying ‘my dear baron’, but had stopped himself in time. He saluted, replaced his cap and, after a sparkling about-turn, went out. The Austro-Daimler was sold, piece by piece, to Yssingeaux’s three garages. A scrap merchant bought the chassis. Crushed, it would be used to make artillery shells, an excellent way to return the steel to its country of origin. With the rest of the army watching France’s borders, the training of new recruits and reservists continued in the serenity and calm of an imperturbable, determined Auvergne. A warrant officer taught two hundred fighters the unbeatable way to win a battle: as soon as tanks were sighted on the horizon, all they had to do was dig a hole fifty centimetres wide and one and a half metres deep. When the tank reached the infantryman, he crouched down, waited
for it to pass over him, then straightened up and shot the tank from behind. This clever tactic was known as the ‘Gamelin hole’ after the general who, from his operational headquarters at Vincennes, was commanding the Allies. Simple, but someone had to come up with it.

Palfy, with his good humour and sarcastic comments, helped Jean put up with this idiotic life. Their evenings were spent writing enthusiastic letters, hoping that they would be read by the censors. Madeleine was the first to reply to Palfy. Jean received half a page from Albert.