A Good Death Read online

  ‘We used to listen to In Londres. The general speaks very well, better than Mr Churchill, we think.’

  They had had enough of his four years of exile. He was back and life would go on.

  ‘Tell me about your war,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you mine.’ Tell me about Ariane and the German officer.

  ‘What’s war to two old women in the depths of the countryside? We followed everything on the wireless.’

  ‘We had our atlas.’ Aunt Marguerite rose to fetch the large volume kept on the table behind the sofa. It opened where a magnifying glass was wedged into the map of Eastern Europe, marked from Danzig to Galicia, from Leningrad to the Crimea, with lines crossing the continent.

  ‘What with the Balkans and North Africa and Hawaii and Singapore, world war has been good for our geography, hasn’t it, Sabine?’

  ‘It’s shocking to say it, but it didn’t make so much difference to us. We could see life getting harder for Henri and Micheline and Ariane. To run the farm without men or fuel or seeds or fertiliser, wasn’t easy. But for us …’

  ‘Marguerite’s donkeys became useful for the first time in their lives. That was one change.’

  ‘Yes. We go to mass in the donkey cart.’

  ‘But we’d never even seen a German until June when they moved in here.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’ Theo asked.

  ‘About fifty, I think Ariane said. There seemed to be so many of them.’

  ‘The officers took over the house and used the reception rooms as offices; the men used the storerooms down in the field.’

  ‘They were perfectly correct, you know,’ Aunt Odette continued. ‘Look at the house. You wouldn’t believe they had been here, would you? Really no damage at all.’

  ‘So strange that they behaved so well here, when you think how they acted elsewhere. They would kill innocent people in reprisals. Sometimes if they were out hunting the maquisards, they would just shoot a farmer in the fields in passing, for no reason at all. And women too.’

  ‘There was a reason, Odette. If you make violence indiscriminate, no one can ever feel safe. It helped us a lot that Ariane spoke German,’ Marguerite went on.

  He hadn’t known she spoke German. More proof.

  ‘Yes, they didn’t speak French at all, even the officers.’

  ‘She means they weren’t people you’d expect to be officers.’

  ‘But here they behaved correctly,’ Odette repeated. Marguerite de Cazalle was reflecting that feelings are forgotten so quickly. Now that it was over, she could hardly recall the fear of those weeks when the Germans were with them, like living with an ill-trained dog whose reactions could not be predicted. Now they could give them credit for one thing, being correct.

  * * *

  At the moment of their arrival, when the motorcycles had roared into the courtyard, she had had only one thought: that the house would be set on fire and the family summarily shot. She and Odette could not flee, so they remained in their room. Odette even continued with her gros point, but she, Marguerite, moved from window to window, watching what was going on in the courtyard. She studied the Germans’ uniforms as they strode purposefully about. The officers wore black, the jackets buttoned up to the neck, belted, decorated with a number of mysterious insignia, of which she only recognised the swastika and the double lightning bolts: the SS. One had a cross at his neck and four gold studs on either side of his collar. On their caps, she could just make out the blank eyes of the death’s head. The men were wearing the pudding basin helmets that made them so sinister: featureless and inhuman. Their movements were swift and businesslike. They had never been to Bonnemort before, yet they occupied the space immediately.

  ‘Marguerite, come and sit down. It’s undignified to be peering out of the window.’

  ‘I’m not concerned with dignity at the moment. I want to know what they’re doing.’

  ‘They’ll do it whether you’re watching or not.’

  ‘I want to be conscious of what is happening to me.’

  ‘Well, what do you see?’

  The men, who had scattered on their arrival to search the outbuildings, were returning. A non-commissioned officer was shouting new orders, pointing. The trucks reversed through the gates and lumbered into the field; the men unloaded their packs.

  The midsummer sun beat down from a radiantly blue sky. The air in the valley trembled. Marguerite could hear through the open window a high-pitched mewing above the bass notes of the machines, and looking up, she saw a buzzard, circling on the air currents, hanging on its outstretched wings.

  Ariane had gone out to meet them. She was wearing the breeches and boots that were her everyday clothes. The aunts both felt it was unsuitable to dress in this way, but had to admit that it was practical. Now she looked feminine to the point of caricature alongside the soldiers’ uniforms. She was calling the dogs to her.

  ‘Oh, oh, he’s killed her. He’s hit her.’

  At that even Odette’s composure broke. ‘Ariane?’ she cried.

  ‘No, no, the dog. Oh, the brute.’

  One of the terriers, more persistent than the rest, had continued to yap at the heels of the soldiers. An officer with a peaked cap had turned on it. A casual stamping blow with a rifle butt caught it behind the ears and broke its neck.

  ‘Ariane’s speaking to one of them, now. Or rather, he’s speaking to her. The one that killed the dog. He looks as if he is giving her orders. She’s looking at the ground. She’s shaking her head. Now she’s pointing at the farmyard.’ She suddenly drew back behind the curtains. ‘She’s pointing at the house. What can she be saying?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Now they’ve been joined by another officer. He’s wearing a black patch over his eye.’

  The fear that filled her stomach as she picked up her book was not for herself. When you reached her age, you did not expect to live for ever any more. It was fear of the alien and the unknown: the impossibility of understanding those foreign voices, their indifferent faces, the logic of their actions so far removed from the life of Bonnemort. And fear for the others, for Ariane, of whom she had become truly fond, for the children, for Micheline and Henri who had looked after the family for decades. She noticed with admiration that Odette really was passing the needle through the canvas, leaving a trail of completed stitches behind it as evidence of her concentration. For herself, she had self-control enough not to go downstairs to ask Ariane what was happening, to hold her book in her hand, but she could not make her action real and read the words she was looking at.

  When Ariane opened the door, Marguerite rose at once.

  ‘My dear, what do they want? What are they going to do?’

  ‘Sit down, Marguerite, allow Ariane to speak.’

  ‘This is a security unit,’ Ariane explained. ‘They’re here to deal with gangs and they’ll stay indefinitely.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, they are going to occupy Bonnemort.’

  ‘What do they mean by “gangs”?’

  ‘The Resistance,’ Ariane said briefly. ‘They call them gangs of terrorists. I’ve explained to them who lives here. They’ll check our papers, and I hope we won’t have any problems.’ She drew a hand over her forehead, as if to calm herself. ‘They’re taking over the house. We’ll all move into the tower. The girls will sleep in the dressing room. I thought you wouldn’t mmd taking the second floor. The stairs will be a problem for you, Aunt Odette, I know.’

  Marguerite had noticed that as she became accustomed to their presence her fear died and it was harder to maintain her dislike. When they were wearing their soft caps, she could distinguish their features and begin to tell one from another. They were so young.

  * * *

  ‘They were so young,’ she said aloud. ‘Only a few years older than Suzie and Sabine. They had skin like babies, or those terrible spots on their necks. Just children, yet they were killing people.’

  ‘Or old. There wer
e the older men, who used to stay to guard.’

  ‘Even the officers were young. The major was about thirty, and the lieutenant, the one with the eyepatch, the same.’

  ‘That poor young man who was killed …’

  Theo felt as if he was stalking a butterfly, or a tiger. He had suddenly glimpsed his prey and did not know whether to freeze or to fire. Tell me about my wife’s lover. Who was he?

  ‘Who was he?’ he asked when it was clear that neither of them was going to elaborate.

  ‘Sabine, would you like to wash your hands before dinner.’ The child rose meekly and left the room.

  ‘He was in command of the unit.’ Aunt Marguerite liked clearly defined questions. ‘He was called Major Udo Knecht.’

  ‘Was it ever established what had happened?’

  Their voices fell over one another in their eagerness to talk. ‘We never knew.’

  ‘We could never find out.’

  ‘It was such a terrible time. Henri was killed, so the death of the German, well, no one cared about it.’

  ‘And whom could we ask? Normally Micheline or Florence or Ariane would tell us the news, but they were so distressed by Henri’s death …’

  ‘It was not something we could ask the children about. It was shocking enough that they saw him.’

  ‘We all saw him. He lay there, completely naked.’

  ‘There was a lot of activity in the night. The engines of cars, headlights. We didn’t go out or even open the shutters. We prayed.’

  ‘The Resistance must have caught him.’

  ‘How? Where?’

  ‘We’ll never know.’

  ‘Whoever killed him left him there as a warning to his comrades.’

  ‘But fortunately for us, the Germans had left, because if they had still been here, and they had found the body rather than Micheline …’

  ‘I imagine we would have all been shot.’

  ‘I can’t think that killing individual Germans was a sensible tactic. It led to such terrible repercussions: three for one, or ten for one.’

  ‘That was the communists. They didn’t care about reprisals. They thought it would incite the population to revolt.’

  ‘When he broadcast from London, the general forbade attacks until the liberation.’

  ‘Yes, but Maurice Schumann said on the wireless that the time for the settlement of accounts would come.’

  Aunt Odette struggled out of her chair and found her cane. ‘Theo, you have had a long journey, so we must give you a moment to prepare for dinner. And afterwards we must allow you some time with Sabine.’

  Chapter Five

  Theo went to his room to unpack. He found his wardrobe full of his old clothes and took out a tweed jacket, thick woollen trousers. As he put them on, he felt he was assuming his old life, before Ariane. Sabine was his first responsibility, he told himself. When he was in exile he had had half-formed ideas about the future, when the war was over, of living in Paris with Ariane and Sabine and other possible children, making a new family with a normal life of school holidays and family festivals. Those visions were dead before birth. So Sabine would have to go back to the convent. He wanted her to be like her mother, gentle, domestic, with no conversation or interests outside the family. He had had enough of modern women; he had no wish for her to be highly educated, as Ariane was. The convent would do very well.

  Dinner was served in Micheline’s house, at the table where he and Dorchin had sat that evening at the beginning of September, and they all ate together, the aunts, Sabine, Micheline and Florence. Aunt Odette felt the oddity of dining in the servants’ quarters and said in explanation, as Theo escorted her across the farmyard, ‘Ariane suggested we eat over here, because it made things easier for Micheline.’

  The meal was like a memory of childhood, food that he had dreamed of in Blitz-darkened London. In the centre of the table, covered with a coarse linen cloth, was an ancient tureen, the porcelain scattered with flowers. Micheline lifted its chipped lid and said ceremoniously, ‘Le tourain.’

  The smell of garlic and goose fat that was released as she ladled the soup into their bowls almost brought tears to Theo’s eyes. He and Henri used to have it in the early morning before they left to go shooting, or in the evening on their return from the fields. Micheline and Florence bent low over their bowls. Aunt Odette was eating with aristocratic slowness; Aunt Marguerite pursed her mouth, critically.

  ‘It lacks salt,’ she remarked.

  ‘It would,’ Micheline replied without taking offence. ‘Not enough bacon, so I added salt to compensate. But you’re right. Not enough.’

  Sabine was playing with her soup, lifting a spoonful to her mouth and returning it untouched, to the bowl. She rose quickly to help Micheline, removing her own bowl and surreptitiously tipping the contents into the pig’s pot. The next course, produced to acclamation, was a round of foie gras with a black truffle as its hub.

  ‘Micheline, you’re a creator of miracles. I never thought I would see foie gras again,’ Theo said.

  Micheline looked pleased. ‘I made these foie gras in the autumn of either thirty-eight or thirty-nine, I forget which. You said you must always face war with a full cellar and a full store. So I made foie gras and confits. I bottled vegetables and fruit. I made jam. And I hid a few for when the war was over.’

  ‘You’ve eaten all the rest? You must have had a good war here.’

  The instant the words were spoken, he wished he could have caught them in the air, shot them down and destroyed them. A good war: Henri dead, Georges a forced labourer in Germany, Roger and Claude volunteers in the Alsace-Lorraine brigade, now fighting with the First Army. Fortunately, Micheline’s mind was a literal one; she only thought of her food reserves.

  ‘I lost a whole lot at once. We didn’t realise that the Requisition would take everything. They marked every beast, they counted every chicken. And last summer almost finished us off. We had the Maquis to feed and young men don’t live on nothing, I can tell you. Not that I gave them my foie gras truffe.’

  She was handing round a white platter, on which a pile of bottled green beans was surrounded by the legs of preserved duck in their crusted skins. Sabine took a few beans. Micheline seized her fork and transferred a piece of duck to the child’s plate. Sabine made an expression of distaste, but said nothing.

  * * *

  After dinner the family walked back to the library, leaving Micheline and Florence in their own kitchen. They sat together and listened to the news, which was a sacred part of the aunts’ day.

  ‘Now it is time for you to talk to Sabine.’ Aunt Odette was searching for her cane. Sabine had been sitting on a stool, huddled close to the fire. She had pulled forward a lock of her hair, running it through her fingers abstractedly as she listened to the wireless. It was hard to tell if she had paid any attention.

  ‘Oh no, Aunts, please stay.’

  ‘There’s no need to go.’ Theo was as reluctant as Sabine to be left, for he could think of nothing to say to his daughter. Between his experience and hers was a gulf he had not the imagination to bridge.

  ‘You’ve grown so much,’ he said. ‘I hardly recognise you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What … What …’ He was about to say, What have you been doing, but could see that this had too wide a scope. ‘What are you studying now?’

  There was no reply.

  Aunt Marguerite said, ‘Theo, you always reach the heart of a problem with uncanny understanding.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I am studying English,’ Sabine said. ‘I listen to the BBC and I read Dickens with Aunt Odette.’

  ‘Schooling is a problem, Theo,’ Aunt Marguerite answered him. ‘And we were awaiting your arrival to settle the question of what to do for Sabine’s education now.’

  ‘When she first came here in 1940 she went to the village school, which was very difficult in the winters.’

  ‘When Suzie came to us in forty-two, Ariane rem
oved Sabine from the school, saying that she did not think the teacher, Mr Vernhes, was satisfactory. I think she was right.’

  ‘So what did you do for their education?’

  ‘Ariane taught the girls herself. She has a doctorate, after all.’

  ‘And you did too, Aunts,’ Sabine insisted.

  ‘Yes, even Odette and I took part, if Ariane was busy.’

  ‘You could do everything, Aunts. We really didn’t need her.’

  ‘Very flattering of you to say so, my dear, but not truthful.’

  ‘And since Ariane’s return to Paris,’ he referred to her absence without hesitation, ‘you have continued with her studies?’

  ‘We do mathematics, French, literature, history, geography, Latin, English, philosophy …’ Sabine recited.

  ‘An impressive programme.’

  ‘Less impressive than it sounds, I assure you, and not adequate for Sabine’s needs.’

  ‘The convent …’ Theo began.

  ‘No,’ Sabine shouted, leaping up from her stool. ‘I won’t go back to the convent. I won’t. I’ll run away.’ She suited her actions to her words by covering her face with one hand and rushing out of the room, knocking over a small table on the way.

  ‘You look shocked, Theo,’ Aunt Odette said drily. ‘Marguerite and I have learned about the upbringing of young girls in the last few years.’

  ‘Much more vexatious than boys.’

  ‘The convent?’ Theo repeated.

  He had found the convent boarding school for Sabine when his wife died. He could not care for a child of six himself, so the nuns were the obvious answer.

  ‘You could insist. She may come round to the idea.’

  ‘She misses Suzie and Ariane. She needs companions. She should go back to the sisters.’

  ‘It’s so odd. When she arrived, she was furious at having to leave them.’

  ‘And at the time she did not seem so very fond of her stepmother.’

  ‘It has been particularly hard since Ariane left …’

  ‘We didn’t mean to bring this up as soon as you arrived, but since it has arisen …’