His eyes were tired and strained now, but he
was satisfied. I stared at her a moment longer. Then, without knowing why, I stepped
forward, reached up slowly and took his face into my hands so that he had to look at me
again. I held his face inches from my own and I made him keep looking at me, as if I
could somehow absorb what he could see.
I had never wanted intimacy with a man. The
animalistic sounds and cries that had leaked from my parents’
room – usually when my father was drunk – had appalled me, and I had pitied my mother
for her bruised face and her careful walk the following day. But what I felt for
Édouard overwhelmed me. I could not take my eyes from his mouth.
‘Sophie …’
I barely heard him. I drew his face closer
to mine. The world evaporated around us. I felt the rasp of his bristles under my palms,
the warmth of his breath on my skin. His eyes studied my own, so seriously. I swear even
then it was as if he had only just seen me.
I leaned forwards, just a few inches, my
breath stilled, and I placed my lips on his. His hands came to rest on my waist, and
tightened reflexively. His mouth met mine, and I inhaled his breath, its traces of
tobacco, of wine, the warm, wet taste of him.
Oh, God, I wanted him to devour
me.
My eyes closed, my body sparked and stuttered. His hands tangled themselves
in my hair, his mouth dropped to my neck.
The revellers in the street outside burst
into noisy laughter, and as flags flew in the night breeze, something in me was altered
for ever. ‘Oh, Sophie. I could paint you every day of my life,’ he murmured
into my skin. At least I think he said ‘paint’. By that stage it was really
too late to care.
René Grenier’s grandfather clock
had begun to chime. This, it was agreed, was a disaster. For months, the clock had been
buried underneath the vegetable patch that ran alongside his house, along with his
silver teapot, four gold coins and the watch his grandfather had worn on his waistcoat,
to prevent it disappearing into the hands of the Germans.
The plan had worked well – indeed, the town
crunched underfoot with valuables that had been hastily buried under gardens and
pathways – until Madame Poilâne hurried into the bar one brisk November morning and
interrupted his daily game of dominoes with the news that a muffled chime was coming
every quarter of an hour from underneath what remained of his carrots.
‘I can hear it, even with my
ears,’ she whispered. ‘And if I can hear it, you can be sure that they
will.’
‘Are you sure that’s what you
heard?’ I said. ‘It’s so long since it was last wound.’
‘Perhaps it is the sound of Madame
Grenier turning in her grave,’ said Monsieur Lafarge.
‘I would not have buried my wife under
my vegetables,’ René muttered. ‘She would have made them even more
bitter and wizened than they are.’
I stooped to empty the ashtray, lowering my
voice. ‘You will have to dig it up under cover of night, René, and pack
it with sacking. Tonight should be safe – they have delivered extra
food for their meal. With most of them in here, there will be few men on
duty.’
It had been a month since the Germans had
started to eat at Le Coq Rouge, and an uneasy truce had settled over its shared
territory. From ten in the morning until half past five, the bar was French, filled with
its usual mixture of the elderly and lonely. Hélène and I would clear up, then
cook for the Germans, who arrived shortly before seven, expecting their food to be on
the tables almost as they walked through the door. There were benefits: when there were
leftovers, several times a week, we shared them (although now there tended to be the odd
scraps of meat or vegetables, rather than a feast of chicken). As the weather turned
colder, the Germans got hungrier, and Hélène and I were not brave enough to
keep some back for ourselves. Still, even those odd mouthfuls of extra food made a
difference. Jean was ill less often, our skin began to clear, and a couple of times we
managed to sneak a small jar of stock, brewed from the bones, to the mayor’s house
for the ailing Louisa.
There were other advantages. The moment the
Germans left in the evenings, Hélène and I would race to the fire,
extinguishing the logs then leaving them in the cellar to dry out. A few days’
collections of the half-burned oddments could mean a small fire in the daytime when it
was particularly cold. On the days we did that, the bar was often full to bursting, even
if few of our customers bought anything to drink.
But there was, predictably, a negative side.
Mesdames Durant and Louvier had decided that, even if I did not
talk
to the officers, or smile at them, or behave as if they were anything but a gross
imposition in my house, I must be receiving German largesse. I could feel their eyes on
me as I took in the regular supplies of food, wine and fuel. I knew we were the subject
of heated discussion around the square. My one consolation was that the nightly curfew
meant they could not see the glorious food we cooked for the men, or how the hotel
became a place of lively sound and debate during those dark evening hours.
Hélène and I had learned to live
with the sound of foreign accents in our home. We recognized a few of the men – there
was the tall thin one with the huge ears, who always attempted to thank us in our own
language. There was the grumpy one with the salt-and-pepper moustache, who usually
managed to find fault with something, demanding salt, pepper or extra meat. There was
little Holger, who drank too much and stared out of the window as if his mind was only
half on whatever was going on around him. Hélène and I would nod civilly at
their comments, taking care to be polite but not friendly. Some nights, if I’m
honest, there was almost a pleasure in having them there. Not Germans, but human beings.
Men, company, the smell of cooking. We had been starved of male contact, of life, for so
long. But there were other nights when evidently something had gone wrong, when they did
not talk, when faces were tight and severe, and the conversation was conducted in
rapid-fire bursts of whispering. They glanced sideways at us then, as if remembering
that we were the enemy. As if we could understand almost anything they said.
Aurélien was learning. He had taken to
lying on the floor of Room Three, his face pressed to the gap in the floorboards, hoping
that one day he might catch sight of a map or some instruction that would grant us
military advantage. He had become astonishingly proficient at German: when they were
gone he would mimic their accent or say things that made us laugh. Occasionally he even
understood snatches of conversation; which officer was in
der Krankenhaus
(hospital), how many men were
tot
. I worried for him, but I was proud too. It
made me feel that our feeding the Germans might have some hidden purpose yet.
The
Kommandant
, meanwhile, was
unfailingly polite. He greeted me, if not with warmth, then a kind of increasingly
familiar civility. He praised the food, without attempting to flatter, and kept a tight
hand on his men, who were not allowed to drink to excess or to behave in a forward
manner.
Several times he sought me out to discuss
art. I was not quite comfortable with one-to-one conversation, but there was a small
pleasure in being reminded of my husband. The
Kommandant
talked of his
admiration for Purrmann, of the artist’s German roots, of paintings he had seen by
Matisse that had made him long to travel to Moscow and Morocco.
At first I was reluctant to talk, and then I
found I could not stop. It was like being reminded of another life, another world. He
was fascinated by the dynamics of the Académie Matisse, whether there was rivalry
between the artists or genuine love. He had a lawyer’s way of speaking: quick,
intelligent, impatient towards those who could not
immediately grasp
his point. I think he liked to talk to me because I was not discomfited by him. It was
something in my character, I think, that I refused to appear cowed, even if I secretly
felt it. It had stood me in good stead in the haughty environs of the Parisian
department store, and it worked equally well for me now.
He had a particular liking for the portrait
of me in the bar, and would look at it for so long and discuss the technical merits of
Édouard’s use of colour, his brushstroke, that I was briefly able to forget
my awkwardness that I was its subject.
His own parents, he confided, were
‘not cultured’, but had inspired in him a passion for learning. He hoped, he
said, to further his intellectual studies after the war, to travel, to read, to learn.
His wife was called Liesl. He had a child, too, he revealed, one evening. A boy of two
that he had not yet seen. (When I told Hélène this I had expected her face to
cloud with sympathy, but she had said briskly that he should spend less time invading
other people’s countries.)
He told me all this as if in passing,
without attempting to solicit any personal information in return. This did not stem from
egoism; it was more an understanding that in inhabiting my home he had already invaded
my life; to seek anything further would be too much of an imposition. He was, I
realized, something of a gentleman.
That first month I found it increasingly
difficult to dismiss Herr Kommandant as a beast, a Boche, as I could with the others. I
suppose I had come to believe all Germans were barbaric so it was hard to picture them
with wives, mothers, babies. There he was, eating in front of
me,
night after night, talking, discussing colour and form and the skills of other artists
as my husband might. Occasionally he smiled, his bright blue eyes suddenly framed by
deep crows’ feet, as if happiness had been a far more familiar emotion to him than
his features let on.
I neither defended nor talked about the
Kommandant
in front of the other townspeople. If someone tried to engage me
in conversation about the travails of having Germans at Le Coq Rouge, I would reply
simply that, God willing, the day would come soon when our husbands returned and all
this could be a distant memory.
And I would pray that nobody had noticed
there had been not a single requisition order on our home since the Germans had moved
in.
Shortly before midday I left the fuggy
interior of the bar and stepped outside on the pretext of beating a rug. A light frost
still lay upon the ground where it stood in shadow, its surface crystalline and
glittering. I shivered as I carried it the few yards down the side street to
René’s garden, and there I heard it: a muffled chime, signalling a quarter to
twelve.
When I returned, a raggle-taggle gathering
of elders were making their way out of the bar. ‘We will sing,’ Madame
Poilâne announced.
‘What?’
‘We will sing. It will drown the
chimes until this evening. We will tell them it is a French custom. Songs from the
Auvergne. Anything we can remember. What do they know?’
‘You are going to sing all
day?’
‘No, no. On the hour. Just if there are
Germans around.’
I looked at her in disbelief.
‘If they dig up René’s
clock, Sophie, they will dig up this whole town. I will not lose my mother’s
pearls to some German
Hausfrau
.’ Her mouth pursed in a
moue
of
disgust.
‘Well, you’d better get going.
When the clock strikes midday half of St Péronne will hear it.’
It was almost funny. I hovered on the front
step as the group of elders gathered at the mouth of the alleyway, facing the Germans,
who were still standing in the square, and began to sing. They sang the nursery rhymes
of my youth, as well as ‘La Pastourelle’, ‘Bailero’,
‘Lorsque J’étais petit’, all in their tuneless rasping voices.
They sang with their heads high, shoulder to shoulder, occasionally glancing sideways at
each other. René looked alternately grumpy and anxious. Madame Poilâne held her
hands in front of her, as pious as a Sunday-school teacher.
As I stood, dishcloth in hand, trying not to
smile, the
Kommandant
crossed the street. ‘What are these people
doing?’
‘Good morning, Herr
Kommandant.’
‘You know there are to be no
gatherings on the street.’
‘They are hardly a gathering.
It’s a festival, Herr Kommandant. A French tradition. On the hour, in November,
the elderly of St Péronne sing folk songs to ward off the approach of
winter.’ I said this with utter conviction. The
Kommandant
frowned, then
peered round me at the old people. Their voices lifted in unison and I guessed that,
behind them, the chiming had begun.
‘But they are terrible,’ he said,
lowering his voice. ‘It is the worst singing I have ever heard.’
‘Please … don’t stop
them. They are innocent peasant songs, as you can hear. It gives the old people a little
pleasure to sing the songs of their homeland, just for one day. Surely you would
understand that.’
‘They are going to sing like this all
day?’
It wasn’t the gathering itself that
troubled him. He was like my husband: physically pained by any art that was not
beautiful. ‘It’s possible.’
The
Kommandant
stood very still,
his senses trained on the sound. I was suddenly anxious: if his ear for music was as
good as his eye for painting, he might yet detect the chiming beneath it.
‘I was wondering what you wanted to
eat tonight,’ I said abruptly.
‘What?’
‘Whether you had any favourites. I
mean, our ingredients are limited, yes, but there are various things I might be able to
make for you.’ I could see Madame Poilâne urging the others to sing louder, her
hands gesturing surreptitiously upwards.
The
Kommandant
seemed briefly
puzzled. I smiled, and for a moment his face softened.
‘That’s very –’ He broke
off.