A Good Death Read online

  ‘She doesn’t eat …’

  ‘She goes for long walks, or rides alone. It’s not suitable.’

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘She behaves abominably. She answers back and is rude to Micheline.’

  ‘We can do nothing with her.’

  ‘Next it’ll be boys.’

  We need a man’s authority.’

  Theo was aghast. This was not what he had come home for. The door opened and Sabine came back in and sat down again by the fire. ‘I’m sorry, Papa,’ she said.

  ‘Sabine,’ said her father, ‘I don’t want to force you to go anywhere you would be unhappy. If necessary, I shall find another school. Did you not like the convent?’

  Sabine did not reply.

  ‘You liked it once,’ Aunt Marguerite said, encouragingly.

  ‘I hated it. I won’t go back.’

  * * *

  It was a world impossible to describe to anyone who had not lived there. They had lived within an invisible barbed wire fence, so that they could see the outside world, but were never part of it, held captive by the discipline of self-denial and spiritual exaltation. She had been so young when she was sent there that she had thought this was the world outside home, how it had to be. This is what the sisters taught. Others might live otherwise, which would only lead to their damnation, but within the wire, contained by their strict routine, they were leading the good life: obedience to God, to the Reverend Mother and the sisters, to priests, to men, to older people. Since she had left, she had cancelled as much as she could from her memory, and all that was left was sensation:

  Cold: no heating in the dormitories; a single pipe in the classrooms running, against all scientific principles of the conduction of heat, along the ceiling. Throughout the winter they all had running noses, raw upper lips, chilblains swelling their fingers and toes, cracking and suppurating.

  Fear: the rules were tyrannical in their senseless detail and precision. The least infraction (walking on the wrong side of the corridor, inattention during the twice-daily services) was punished by deprivation of food and public humiliation, standing in a reserved spot during mealtimes while the rest ate.

  Hunger: the food was horrible, inedible. She could visualise the dry, gristly slice of grey meat that appeared on their plates twice a week, which she would chew and chew and could never swallow. She used to hide it in her handkerchief, tucked into her sleeve. On Fridays and fast days the glutinous gratin of fish with its seasoning of fine bones made her stomach heave.

  Pain: for the most heinous offences beating was prescribed, and at first, failing to understand the system of deceit for self-protection, she was often caught in some dereliction and beaten on her bare legs.

  At the beginning she could only weep. Her tears, an appeal for help as well as an expression of misery, only aroused impatience in the teachers and mockery from the pupils. Sympathy between the children was suppressed by competition for rare favours; a harsh self-sufficiency was the norm. Anyone who betrayed weakness was derided and ostracised. The admired ones were strong, those who never showed emotion, who were ostentatiously dutiful in their religious observance and their demeanour to the sisters. They ruled their classes as miniature tyrannies, in imitation of the authority above them, taxing their companions for admiration, hair ribbons, or bread saved from their meals.

  Sabine was a victim from the moment they saw her. Every instinctive gesture she made, seeking friends, exposing her weakness, was wrong. In the secret life of the long, vaulted dormitory where twenty girls slept in order of age and status, she was the runt. When the lights were out, they took it in turns to run silently to her bed and tweak her hair, to seize the pillow she had pulled over her head, to take one of her shoes and throw it to the other end of the room, to lift the covers and pour water onto her sheets.

  Over time the tortures evolved, becoming more creative once they were taken in hand by Antoinette, one of the older girls who had been absent for some months, as the result of having had appendicitis. When she returned from hospital and convalescence, all things medical had become her obsession and Sabine was her patient. The sisters esteemed modesty highly and the girls took their weekly baths clad in their voluminous nightgowns. So the fascination for the whole dormitory of Antoinette’s operations was greater than simple defiance of the rules of the night. Over and over again she scored in chalk on Sabine’s skinny abdomen the line of her own scar, while two others, designated as nurses, held the patient’s nightgown over her head as a visual anaesthetic. From this the surgeon progressed to further examinations. Sabine was turned on her face for the administration of injections with needles from the sewing baskets; pencils were inserted into her anus for a length of time carefully monitored by Antoinette, before being removed and read as a thermometer. Sabine’s childish body made the modelling of ribs and spine, the muscles of buttocks and thighs a lesson in anatomy and reaction to pain. The experimentation took a new form in the summer when Antoinette acquired a knife from the dining room to make her work as surgeon more real. Unfortunately, it was not sharp and its effect was little different from that of the chalk, so Antoinette was able to carve and butcher her patient for some weeks, until by sawing too hard, in a cut that was to slice Sabine from the slit between her legs to the breastbone, blood was drawn. The surgical team and its audience fled, expecting to awake to a corpse in Sabine’s bed. However, the patient survived and did not even complain, for she could think of no one among the sisters that she could speak to on such a subject, as the body was an area of the strictest taboo.

  It was perhaps in examining herself for damage after these operations, soothing her own pain, that she discovered the comfort of the lonely in physical pleasure and her night-time tortures were relieved in orgasmic fantasies of revenge. When her enemies had been torn apart in some episode of biblical violence, she would at last fall shudderingly asleep.

  She found protection at last in a new sister, recently arrived from the order’s work in Algeria. Sister Barbe was young, with a low, intense voice and so powerful a personality that her classes, French language and orthography, were among the most dreaded. Whether for faults of behaviour, restlessness or whispering, or of performance, a blot on the page, an ill-spelled word, punishment, in the form of sarcasm and beating, was swift. Sabine, however, felt safer in this regime of terror, which lay on all of them impartially. To Sister Barbe she made her only attempt to tell an adult of her suffering. The response was curious.

  ‘Denunciation,’ she told Sabine, ‘is despicable. Each person must assess her own sins, confess them, make retribution for them. We are not placed on this earth to take the speck from our brother’s eye, but to remove the mote from our own. You will make your confession on Saturday as usual. In the meantime, I must punish you myself.’

  The beating was brief but severe. The surgical experiments ceased. Sabine never discovered how Sister Barbe curbed Antoinette’s medical obsessions, for she saw no sign of sanctions placed on her or on the others. It was enough that she was saved and she was deeply grateful for the protection she had won from the nightly torture. It was worth the price. Sister Barbe’s beatings, although harsh, were infrequent. She willingly bartered the gift of her pain for a sort of safety. She knew Sister Barbe watched over her, was interested in her studies and her devotions. For the first time since her mother’s death she was special to someone, even in a perverse fashion.

  When her stepmother removed her from the convent, without warning, in September 1940 and brought her to Bonnemort, she missed the protection and the pain. She had hated Ariane for it. It was a long time until she found a substitute for what she had lost.

  Chapter Six

  The farmyard was shimmering with frost when Theo left the tower next morning. He could see by the dark footprints in the rime that Micheline and Florence were already at work. In her kitchen Micheline made him a bowl of ersatz coffee with milk and cut him a slice of bread. He took his breakfast to a chair by the fire, its whi
tened ashes rekindled and burning with fresh wood. He dunked the bread into the coffee, to soften one and disguise the taste of the other.

  ‘I should go to see Dr Maniotte this morning,’ he remarked. ‘I’ll take one of the horses. They could do with exercising, I imagine.’

  ‘No need. He’s dead, too.’ Micheline was stirring the pigswill in a battered cauldron. When Theo said nothing, she went on, ‘His wife is still at La Grande Penetie with the younger children.’

  ‘What happened to the doctor?’

  ‘He was arrested a long time ago, September forty-three it would have been. She’ll tell you. She’s found it hard alone.’

  ‘I’ll ride over this morning.’

  His route led him through the forest. On the opposite ridge Lepech Perdrissou sat on its hilltop around its grassy square, gardens and orchards descending the slopes, cut up by neat stone walls, woodsmoke wavering upwards in the silver air of the early morning. It looked like an illustration from Perrault’s Fairy Tales.

  After ringing and knocking and receiving no reply, he walked around the house to the back door which was opened by a middle-aged woman wearing socks rolled at her ankles, a shapeless cardigan and an apron. In his instant of non-recognition, Theo almost made the unforgivable error, but somewhere in the collapsed face a spark of the appealing Madame Maniotte of five years ago remained and he did not ask for her mistress. He greeted her correctly.

  She was flustered, ashamed of her dress, her house. ‘Oh, Colonel, I didn’t know …’ She blocked his way, hanging onto the door.

  In London they had had no time for pretension under the bombs. Don’t you know there’s a war on? those sarcastic English voices used to demand. He was impatient of the demands of gentility now. ‘I came to offer my condolences, Madame.’

  Her mouth twitched, but she was long past tears.

  ‘May I come in?’ he insisted.

  She submitted. ‘You’ll have to come in here, it’s too cold anywhere else.’

  They sat in the kitchen, amid an intimate domesticity, the children’s shirts hanging on a clothes horse in front of the stove where the iron was heating, the smell of laundry in their nostrils.

  ‘It all began with you, really. He helped you leave for England, and then he just carried on, helping others do the same. There was always someone who needed him, even in 1940 before anyone else was a resistant.’ Her tone told him what she thought of such activity. ‘I never liked it.’

  * * *

  The truth was she’d never liked Colonel de Cazalle, either. She’d been happy enough to have him join their tennis parties on summer weekends. In the segregated worlds of the French provinces, the gentry did not often mix with the doctor and the lawyer and the dentist, the notables of the local towns. But the social achievement was the only advantage of his presence, as far as she was concerned. He had a dry humour, made odd remarks. He was like a rebel within the citadel. Not that he ever discussed politics or religion with her, but she was certain that his views were not what they should be. When he remarried it was even worse. His new wife was rich, arrogant, far grander than he ever was, with her cars and her clothes and her furs. And who was she after all? Just the daughter of a businessman, who was a Protestant, or even a Jew, and probably a freemason into the bargain.

  She might have known it would be Theo de Cazalle who would lead her husband into danger. At that stage Lucien still confided in her, and so she knew all about Cazalle’s supposed death, although she never let on to that b— at Bonnemort. She couldn’t formulate the epithet even in her thoughts, but she meant it all the same. And Cazalle turned him against the Marshal. As far as she was concerned, Marshal Petain was right in every respect. The country had been ruined since 1936 by socialists and radicals, and defeat was the result. The marshal was putting the country back on its feet. She felt safe when she looked at posters of that benevolent face.

  Lucien knew how she felt and although he stopped telling her what he was doing, he could not conceal his odd hours, his comings and goings which had nothing to do with his practice now that he had set up as a general practitioner in Montfefoul. At least he didn’t bring his runaways to the house. These people were wanted by the police. For her, that meant they must be criminals. The Marshal was against communists from the start. Anyone known to have been a party member was rounded up. Jews, foreign ones, immigrants, were put in camps; and Republicans from the war in Spain. All these people were dangerous and needed to be sent back where they belonged, which seemed perfectly reasonable to her.

  But not to Lucien, apparently. He hid them and moved them on to Spain. He worked with the printer, Monsieur Sarrazin in Montfefoul, and forged identity documents, ration cards, demobilisation papers. When she discovered this she almost died of fright. The bundle of food tickets that she had found in one of his suits was, for a joyful moment, like winning the lottery, too good to be true. Then she realised it was indeed not true: they must be false. The shock of his involvement in illegal activity on such a scale was terrible.

  She remonstrated with him, angrily reproaching him with risking his family’s safety. He had sat with his back to her, hunched on the edge of their bed with its wooden headboard carved with true lovers’ knots. He had made no reply, for he knew he was in the wrong. So she tried a new tack. Who else was in it with him? Why couldn’t he just leave it to them? She had wept and pleaded and he had comforted her, while saying, ‘I have to do it. I can’t go back now.’

  So she guessed. It wasn’t difficult. Recently he’d often had ham or butter from Henri Menesplier, whom they’d never really known before. Then she had a flash of real understanding.

  ‘She’s in it too, isn’t she? Madame de Cazalle? That’s why you’re doing it?’

  ‘Leonie, please don’t make a jealous scene.’

  She knew that she had guessed correctly. ‘You should leave it to her. We’re not like that. We’re respectable, we obey the law, we don’t take risks.’

  ‘Leonie, it’ll be all right, I promise you. It’ll all come right.’ Once she had started to weep, they had both known how it would end. He came round to her side of the bed, to hold her and let her cry and then make love to her. He’d never admitted anything, but she knew, just as if he’d spoken.

  * * *

  And now here was Theo de Cazalle sitting in her kitchen with an assumed face of sorrow listening to her story. Things had come all right for him, as they always did for people like that. She would make good and sure that any glory due to Lucien wasn’t shared with his b— of a wife. She would make Cazalle see that Lucien got his posthumous medals and she got her pension. She would be the widow of an acknowledged Resistance hero. She would play the part and exalt his memory. It was ironic that, if only the Marshal had not been misled by his ministers, like that nasty Laval, then Lucien would still have been the disgraced figure he had been during the year before the liberation.

  He’d certainly been betrayed. In September 1943 they’d been waiting for him in a village thirty kilometres away. A few days later, Henri Menesplier had been picked up too. The French took them, but that didn’t mean anything since the Germans had occupied the southern zone. The police had come to search their house. She was terrified of what they might find, but knew no more than they did where to look in order to destroy whatever it was. Nothing was discovered, thank God. Lucien had at least had that much care for her, keeping nothing incriminating at home. She went to the Prefecture to ask for news. She was told that he would probably have been taken to Paris, or sent to a camp at Fresnes, or Compiegne, or if he had been handed over to the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, he might be sent to a camp in Germany. If he wasn’t shot, of course.

  After the liberation she heard from a fellow prisoner that he had got no further than Bordeaux. Lucien had been flung into his cell there in the early hours of the morning in December ’43, three months after his arrest. His ribs had been crushed and one had pierced a lung; his fingernails had been pulled out; his body was covered in burns. The
following night he was taken away for another session and returned a few hours later, his spine smashed, his legs paralysed. He died there a few hours later.

  He hadn’t talked, the man told her, as if she cared, in spite of the degree of pressure applied.

  * * *

  Theo watched her tell her tale, sitting opposite him, her hands balled in her lap, pressed between her thighs. He listened to what she said in her bare recital, and what she didn’t say, in the tone of her voice and the turn of her head. She had still not forgiven Lucien. For her he was not a hero of his country, but a traitor to her and her children. He knew, too, that she must hold him responsible, and that he had only added to her resentment by arriving unexpectedly, catching her unprepared. He could see no means to put any of it right. He had never bothered to charm Lucien’s boring little wife in the past, and it was too late now.

  ‘You mentioned Henri Menesplier …’

  ‘Yes, well, you know all about it from them in any case. Henri was arrested about the same time, but he was released, I don’t know how. Maybe your wife had something to do with it. She used to dine with the German officers, drink coffee with the chef de brigade of the Gendarmerie in Racines. She had influence.’

  The blow went home. She saw it had and felt the easing of pain transferred to another.

  ‘You were there when Henri was shot?’

  ‘Yes. And we all thought we would be next. Especially when we had to dig graves. You want to know about Henri?’ For a moment her corroding bitterness ceased its work. ‘I don’t think he betrayed Lucien. I never thought that. He was a good man, Henri.’

  * * *

  In the late afternoon of 17 August 1944, everyone remembered that date now, it was etched in the town’s memory, a whole rowdy lot of the Maquis had come into town. She had refused to go out to see them, so she didn’t know what they were up to. They were thugs and hooligans, everyone knew that, the roughest youngsters, the least responsible men, probably foreigners, like that drunken Russian, Mr Nikola from Pechagrier. Then the shooting had started. The Germans or the Milice, the French paramilitaries who served alongside them, must have arrived. All she felt was irritation that there was no one to whom she could say, I told you so. She and the children were safe in the house and after a while things went quiet again. And that was the end of the danger for the day, or so she thought.