Madame Barbara. Helen Forrester
her.
He leaned back, still holding her. ‘It’s me – Michel,’ he said, and then his voice faded, as he realised the significance of the haircut and that the body in his arms was curiously clumsy and heavy; it did not have its usual willowy suppleness.
He slowly dropped his arms and stepped back.
‘What happened?’ he asked, though he knew already. ‘Suzanne! Answer me.’
To cover the silence her companion spoke up. She sounded cold and cynical, a woman embittered by war, as she said, ‘Can’t you see?’
He looked at her, appalled. ‘A goddamned Boche – and you got your head shaved for it?’ He exploded with rage. Words of condemnation poured out.
She didn’t say a word to him in her own defence, never pleaded that she had been misunderstood, that it had been indeed rape, nothing that might have excused her behaviour.
Her pregnancy was now obvious. Michel had seen her about four months before; she must have suspected it then. It could not have been rape – the locals would never have touched her if it had been that. To be set upon by a mob, have her head shaved, be stripped to her underwear, and then paraded through the streets, she must have been seen to be fraternising regularly with the enemy.
She now began to giggle at his stupefaction.
He lifted first one hand and then the other, and gave her the hardest slap of which he was capable, one on each cheek. Scarlet patches stained her face. She probably carried the bruises for weeks, he thought maliciously.
‘You dirty bitch!’ he screamed, and the empty walls around them echoed, ‘Bitch! Bitch!’ Then he hissed at her, ‘So that’s why you didn’t write! Well, you can thank God your father and mother are dead – he’d have beaten you to death for this.’
She must have been suddenly afraid for her physical safety because, without a word, she turned and ran clumsily up the steps into the house, and slammed the door. He heard the bolts being shot. The other woman had risen, also suddenly nervous. He turned and spat in her face.
Now, over three years later, seated at the side of the road to the cemetery on a damp, cold April day, Michel looked at a girl whose heart had been broken because a foreign soldier had given his life for the freedom of Caen, and for a bitch who had betrayed them all.
He repeated to Barbara, a trifle depressedly, ‘Caen is still a ruin, Madame.’ He stopped, as if his thoughts had strayed elsewhere, and then said with forced cheerfulness, ‘Nevertheless, when I took the Americans there recently, there was some life. People try to begin again.’
He sighed, and Barbara became aware of his deep fatigue. He suddenly ceased to be the rather quaint taxi diver, and became a fellow human being who looked as exhausted as she herself felt.
He went on, ‘Everybody in Caen lose somebody. Much sorrow.’ With her big eyes puffed from weeping, she herself looked like our Lady of Sorrows, he thought. He repeated tentatively, ‘I take you tomorrow, yes? Americans go to Paris for the weekend. We go to Caen, yes?’
He could barely admit to himself that he was desperately lonely for friendly female company. Not normally communicative about his private affairs, he had, on their way to the cemetery, talked a little to her about his family’s misadventures, and had felt a certain amount of relief.
Since his fiancée’s desertion of him, he had made no effort to find himself another girl; he was acutely aware that he was no hero, that his shoulder was hunched, and that he had no assets to attract a matchmaking father.
Even his engagement to Suzanne had been arranged by their parents, a marriage of convenience which would eventually, with a little luck and much hard saving, make it possible for the young couple to buy out Michel’s mother and his siblings.
Originally faced with this same nationwide problem of the subdivision of land in each generation, Suzanne’s father had already bought out his own brother’s share of the Fortier farm, and Suzanne was his only surviving child; because of the problems of land tenure, peasants tended to keep the number of their children small.
But there had been no romantic love between him and Suzanne, Michel admitted frankly to himself, just affection and an agreeable sexual contentment. It could have been a reasonable marriage.
Now, inside him lay an unhealed wound, as if she had stabbed him. She had deserted him for a German, an enemy, probably some great hulking brute of a Prussian. He felt that he also had thereby been publicly shamed, stripped of his self-respect.
Another Frenchman he might have accepted with better grace. But he had felt sick at the idea of a German, one of Hitler’s cohorts, who had tortured and killed men, like his friend Henri, because they continued to fight them underground.
She had got off more lightly than if she had been a man, Michel thought. Men known to be quislings, collaborators who betrayed the Freedom Fighters to the Germans, had been summarily shot, if they did not commit suicide first.
To a degree, justice had been done, admitted Michel, but it did not mean that he had come to terms with the betrayal.
If she had not had a good woman friend to help her, she would have starved to death, he was sure of that. She would have been an outcast.
The ultimate insult had, however, come only the previous month. He had heard, through one of his mother’s friends, also a refugee in Bayeux, that Suzanne’s German had recently sent for her and his child to join him on his farm, a farm which had apparently escaped the ravages of both the Russian and American advances. He was said to be now sowing his second year of crops. It was quite a story and the news spread fast in the back streets of Bayeux.
It seemed to an outraged Michel very wrong that his own land, and that of his fiancée’s parents, should have been decimated, while one of the enemy’s farms remained inviolate.
And who would ever have expected a German to do the honourable thing, and marry the girl? Enemy soldiers were not expected to do that, particularly a Boche.
Michel asked himself again and again why her father had, in the first place, allowed her to go to work in Caen as a waitress in such troubled times – miles away from parental supervision.
He supposed that the family must have had an urgent need for ready money during a time when farms were being stripped of their produce to be sent to Germany. It seemed the only explanation. He still felt, however, that her father had been most unwise – and so had his unfaithful trollop of a daughter. Though there did not seem much hope of it, Michel wished savagely that she would eventually starve amid the ruin which was Germany.
He had been truly happy and surprised when Anatole had eventually been sent home by train by the American Army in Germany; they had discovered him amongst a group of refugees from Eastern Germany fleeing the Russian Army; he was trying to walk back to France.
At least, Michel agreed with Maman, they could nurse Anatole, make him as comfortable as possible, until he died. And Michel was the first to say that, even confined to bed, his brother had given both their mother and Michel some moral support.
Anatole was allowed by the Government a small regular sum with which to maintain himself, because he was a returned deportee very ill with tuberculosis. He also had free medical care. Because there was nothing much that could be done to help him medically, he had elected to be brought home to his mother rather than be put into an overcrowded hospital.
Michel’s small savings account was emptied in an effort to buy extra comforts for him, such as second-hand pillows to prop him up, and black market milk and eggs to augment his diet.
Madame Benion was almost beside herself as, in addition to losing her home and livelihood, she had to watch her elder, stronger son die. She and Michel tended him far better, however, than he would have been looked after in hospital, and while they did it she leaned, pitifully at times, on her younger boy for comfort.
The lifelong sibling jealousy between the two brothers had melted amid the burning need