A Soldier's Tale Part 4

Look, Sir, he said slowly, I'm not clever and I can't beg. I'm sorry about your friend's boy. I don't think she had much choice really. I'm not asking she be let off, only for her to be kept safe till she can be tried properly, according to law.

She 'as been tried, said the priest. The judgement is pa.s.sed.

You're a priest, said Saul, don't you believe in G.o.d's mercy?

I do not speak as a priest, I speak as a soldier. I 'ave orders.

You'll carry the guilt of this all your life, Sir.

You, Monsieur le Caporal, have you not killed?

I have, Sir, but that was fair fighting, against men.

'Ave you not killed young men, boys perhaps, with the gun, with the knife? (He glanced down at the broad knife at Saul's belt. There was a little silence.) You see, to be a soldier, it is to 'ave guilt, to carry guilt for others, all our lives. The guilt is necessary.

He went slowly and turned around to face them in the doorway.

Tu veux faire la confesse, ma pauvre enfant? he asked her.

She glanced up at Saul as if in explanation and shook her head. The doorway was empty and they could hear the officer's sharp footsteps retreating along the cloister.

Come on, girl, said Saul, let's get out. We're wasting our time here.

She got up quietly and obediently-no need to grasp her arm now. The old man came hobbling up and escorted them out; the gate clanged shut with finality behind them. The cloud was broken now with patches of blue, the hedgerows smelt of damp earth and the birds were singing. A flight of Spitfires roared in low and tailed off in the direction of the front.

Belle walked beside him in sullen silence.

Cheer up, girl, he said, I said I'd take care of you, and I will. You shan't be hurt, I promise.

The Church cannot save me, she said, do you think you can?

Yes, he said. It was so absurdly confident that she laughed bitterly, but it changed things, and the warm dank earth smelt of life after the bleak austerities of the abbey. He took her arm comfortably.

As I try to visualize the scene in the bleak visitors' room, to follow it back, track it through his eyes, decode it from his laconic speech, I am baffled. I can still hear the phrases he used-She was very quiet-like, you could see she didn't like it-This priest, I didn't take to him, he looked crafty, sort of. I can reconstruct the surface reality which they represent in a cryptic and oblique way. For example, when he called the soldier-priest 'crafty' he was translating the Frenchman's pain and embarra.s.sment, for which he had no name, into a childhood Protestant stereotype.

I can see the pictures, and up to a point I can perhaps understand what they mean, the woman first sulking, then afraid, humiliated, angry, the priest's horror and revulsion. But both are also baffling-in spite of all, the woman's lack of shame, the priest's lack of compa.s.sion.

As I write this, it is just after eleven o'clock at night, and the transistor on my desk is carrying the BBC news for Monday 19 February 1973. The body of Marshal Petain has been stolen from his felon's grave on the Ile d'Yeu by political resurrection-men, either to be tossed into the sea or to be reburied at Douaumont, in the haunted wasteland of Verdun. Either way it is sinister and strange, conjuring old ghosts, recalling old stories (as in Hans Chlumberg's play, Miracle at Verdun) of the war-dead rising in their thousands and marching back with rolling drums to accuse the living. Either way there will be no rest for the old hero, old traitor, though (my G.o.d) the Occupation of France is thirty years gone. (The Irish have remembered for three hundred years, the Jews for three thousand.) Some bitternesses never die. As she tried to tell him: You do not know, you should be glad you do not know.

As for Saul Scourby himself, perhaps he simply a.s.sumed that, since the woman and the priest were foreigners and Papists, their minds would be unintelligible to him, like their language. He waited patiently, as if in a solitary ambush, for something to move his way.

When they got back to the cottage, Charlie had cleaned up and brightened the fire in the stove, where the blackened kettle was starting to boil. As they entered the door, he had thrown open the grate and was blowing gently on the fire, so that the red-gold light of it lit up his thin pale face and faded blue eyes with a rich glow.

Wotcher, Charlie boy, said Saul.

Hullo, Corp, he said. Hullo, miss. I won't be long, the kettle's singing and I see you got some dry bread in the bin there so I'll make a nice bit of toast.

And he stabbed a slice on to a long kitchen-fork and held it steadily to the flames. Belle sat down slowly at the table and pulled off her head-scarf, letting her thick red hair fall loose around her shoulders. Saul unclipped the magazine from the sten, checked it over and quietly set it down by the dresser. He looked at the woman, who sat silent and still, watching Charlie at his domestic work. The first slice of toast was turned and finished and set down golden-brown on a plate. The kettle boiled and tea was made in the enamel coffee-pot. A second slice began to toast and the kitchen filled with the good dry smell.

Will you be mother, Corp? said Charlie. Sorry we ain't got no fresh milk. 'Ave to use powdered. Don't taste the same without fresh milk. S'pose all the cows must've died round 'ere.

You wouldn't chuckle, said Saul, the fields are full of 'em, legs stuck up in the air. You mightn't believe it, but Charlie here is an expert on milk.

As he handed her the tea and toast, Belle broke off her introspective stare at the firelight and asked, Are you a farmer, Charlie?

Charlie laughed, a shy wheezy chuckle, at this small familiar joke.

No, miss, I'm a milkman. Or used to be, in civvy street, like. Back in 'ighgate, that's in London.

Did you have to get up early, she asked, and bring milk for the small breakfast? Such a hard life.

Oh, it's not bad, not bad at all. 'cept in winter perhaps. Dark they are, those winter mornings. More toast now-'ere we are. Mind you, it used to be 'arder. When I was a nipper, I used to go round with my old man, 'e was a milkman too, on the old 'orsedrawn float. Going up the Archway Road in a winter fog, and the trams with their big 'eadlamps coming through the fog. Ladling out the milk from the big churns with the bra.s.s fittings. They stopped all that, said it was un'ygeenic. It's all bottle stuff now.

His pinched pale face became animated as he talked, but suddenly he stopped as if embarra.s.sed and busied himself with the fire and the toast, holding and turning it so that it was an exact golden-brown before slipping it steaming on to Belle's plate, to be eaten with margarine and plum jam from the ration-pack. As he crouched by the fire he glanced across shyly at Belle, at her long delicate fingers busy with knife and cup, at the rich red hair shaken out over her shoulders and catching highlights from the glow of the fire.

Watching them both, Saul realized with amus.e.m.e.nt that the little man was innocently and worshipfully in love with her. The tea and toast was a simple man's offering. He watched her all the time as they had their tea and chatted on about life as they had known it during the last years. British meeting French had this great curiosity for all the missing details, for knitting up the wholeness of ordinary life again. At last, he stood up and said, Well, time to be off, I s'pose. Oh, 'ere, I thought you might like these, I got plenty.

He took out three packets of Gold Flake and a bar of Cadbury's milk chocolate and laid them carefully on the scrubbed table in front of her. She smiled up at him with real enjoyment.

Thank you, Charlie-vous etes bien gentil-you are very kind.

You're very welcome, I'm sure, he said, with a duck of the head, and bustled out of the door.

Saul walked with him up the path to the gate.

See you tomorrow, Corp, he said.

That's right, Charlie boy. And ta very much for every thing.

Saul watched him as he trudged briskly up the hill, waving cheerfully as he pa.s.sed the Brat, who was on watch under the big beech tree.

Some time must have pa.s.sed then. I can guess at some of the many things he didn't tell me, but not all of them. He had a curious trick of saying things like: She often talked about her aunts in the country-or: There was this German airman, another one, who was after her to marry him, but she'd never tell me much about him-or: She used to sing to herself in a little voice, but tuneful, when she thought I wasn't listening-or: Sometimes we'd have terrible arguments over nothing much, like whether we wanted tea or coffee. Sometimes it seemed as if he was talking about a woman he'd lived with for much longer than a weekend. There were those things he didn't elaborate, almost as if they were familiar daily details, acc.u.mulated over a long time. And when did she give him the twelve-franc copy of Baudelaire?

As she cleaned up, he went across the garden to the latrine. He carried his sten well in sight, and left the door of the little outhouse open. There were fighters about somewhere, and a slow-moving spotter-plane coming and going from a neighbouring field, and a ba.s.s engine-sound that sounded more like tanks on the move than trucks. As he walked back up the path quiet-footed, alert to all the sounds around him, perhaps he could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen, in that small voice: Il me dit des mots d'amour Des mots de tous les jours Et ca m'fait quelque chose.

But she stopped when she heard the click and tap of his boot on the path.

That's a nice orchard you got out there, he said. Normandy's famous for apples, isn't it?

Yes, she said, still at the sink, but they are not yet ripe. The harvest will be good at the end of the summer.

Then she stopped, and they both were thinking that there would be time for many things before the apples were heavy on the trees-love, death, even the end of a war.

Come outside for a while, he said.

She turned and looked at him, wary, puzzled.

Come on, he said, the rain's over. Come out and get some air. Nothing's going to hurt you.

She went over to the kitchen dresser and began to tie back her heavy bronze hair with a piece of blue ribbon, watching her reflection in a small mirror propped up on the shelf among the cups. The movement of her raised arms lifted her big b.r.e.a.s.t.s under the thin blouse and this excited him. He stepped up quietly behind her and slid his hands up her sides and across her chest, holding her firmly while he pressed his face against her neck. Her hair fell loose again as she lowered her arms, pulled back against him to ease his grip and twisted around in his arms. She faced him, flushed, flattered, a little angry. He promptly kissed her, close and open-mouthed. She responded to him warmly, but twisted her mouth free.

No, she said sulkily.

Why not? he said. You could fancy it, couldn't you?

No, she said. Not like this. I like to be asked.

D'you mean the Jerries asked for it, all polite-like?

Most, she said, they were comme il faut, nice. Not all, but most. Those I liked.

So you don't like me?

Let me choose, Saul, I could like you. Let us walk in the orchard.

She finished tying up her hair. They walked out of the front door; the sky was full of broken cloud, and the light brightened and faded. Up the hill a broad shaft of sunlight spotlit the beech tree and the solitary figure beneath it like a stage set.

See, she said as they stood in the orchard, it will be a good summer for the apples.

The boughs were thick with the small hard green lumps which had once been blossom. After the rain it was dank under the trees, in the long gra.s.s, with a smell of green rawness and rankness. He listened, half expecting a sound of bees; but there was only the small heavy drone of a b.u.mble-bee, drowned in the sound of a convoy of trucks changing gear and grinding up the hill.

Then something happened quite suddenly and unexpectedly, at least by that time in Normandy, when the daytime skies were the unchallenged beat of the Hurricane and the Spitfire. A roar of aircraft suddenly surged up out of the fields and along the line of the road. Saul jerked his head up at the shadowy shapes that flashed by above the orchard trees. At the same time gunfire chattered in the air and scattered, surprised shots answered from the ground.

Saul's reactions were delayed for a few seconds by surprise, before he caught Belle round the waist and flung her to the ground, with his body shielding her. The raiders circled tightly and roared in again, with more gunfire. Splinters buzzed and clipped and whickered through the trees. Then it was all gone.

She was lying close to him, her face pressed against his shoulder. As the noise died away, she raised her head slowly, looking at him and not smiling. He kept holding her close and began to kiss her, she trying to push him away, gently at first. Nothing was said. He shifted himself, holding her down with his heavy body across hers. His hand moved down and lifted her skirt. Silently she fought him, as if they must both make no sound in case they were overheard by some prowling enemy. Silently he pinioned her arms back in a ruthless grip and tugged at her clothing and his own, until he could roll over on top of her. She hissed with rage as he took her quickly, sorrowfully. To dominate her had become the only thing that mattered, and he had little pleasure of it.

When he pulled back from her he was slow and wary, as if expecting her to attack him with fists or nails. Instead, she lay back in the trampled gra.s.s, pulling down her rumpled skirt which had twisted up around her waist and staring up at him in shame and rage. But when she spoke her voice was flat and expressionless.

You dirty English pig, she said, no Boche did that to me.

I bet, he said.

Not like that, she said. That is the first time I have been raped.

I bet, he said.

Yes, you bet, she said with sudden pa.s.sion. I have been bad, yes, I have been a putain, but I make good love and I give pleasure. I can be good to a man. But not to you. You want to do it all for yourself. The woman to you is for nothing.

She scrambled to her feet, still fumbling to put her clothes to rights and with her copper hair hanging loose about her face. He lay sprawled on the gra.s.s and squinted up at her with a shaft of sunlight behind her.

You are just the bull who wants the cow.

She thrust out her clenched right fist and chopped her left hand across her right forearm in a universal and explicit gesture which startled him, for he had the old-fashioned working-cla.s.s puritanism about how a woman should speak and behave, regardless of what else had just happened.

He propped his back against one of the apple trees, smoking and staring out at the shifting sunlight. I knew it wasn't right, he said to me afterwards in his flat understated way, I shouldn't of done it like that, without kindness. But I think it was more than that: in the post-coital sadness he judged himself coldly and saw himself as a fool who had thrown away a chance of true joy. Yet he knew it wasn't intended: sudden closeness had undone him, the desire to protect had turned into the need to possess.

He was feeling sullen and ashamed, unwilling to meet her, and thinking that she would be in the kitchen or the bedroom, he walked slowly to the other entrance at the back of the house, and pushed open the top half of the Dutch door.

What he saw there was surprising and, in a way, beautiful. The back door opened into the scullery and wash-house, floored with flagstones. At one side was a copper, set in a brick frame and chimney. On the other was a wooden washtub on three legs and a barrel which was kept filled with water brought in, bucket by bucket, from the pump in the garden. Water could be dippered from the barrel for the copper or the wooden washtub, and spillage ran out through a drain-hole set in the flagstones.

Belle was standing naked in the middle of the wash-house. She must have pulled off her blue-and-white dress and her underwear and flung it in a heap in the corner. She had soaped herself at the tub, scrubbing fiercely at her body which shone pink and as if varnished with soapsuds. Now she stood there with her back to him and with her arms stretched straight up, holding one of the heavy buckets filled with water above her head. She seemed to be full of fury and sudden strength, so that the smooth womanly muscles of her arms and shoulders, back and b.u.t.tocks, thighs and calves were braced tightly as she balanced the bucket and tipped it. The water, cold from the barrel on the flagstones, cascaded down over her head and body, and poured out down the drain-hole. She cried out, a small gasping scream, at the shock, and the emptied bucket crashed to the flagstones.

In the following silence the door creaked and she looked back over her shoulder and saw him standing there. With a startled movement she grabbed for the crumpled dress and held it up to cover herself.

Go away, she said, do not watch me.

Sorry, he muttered, embarra.s.sed and a little repelled, I didn't mean-Then, taking in the bareness of the room, he said, Where's your towel?

It does not matter, she said crossly.

Wait, he said, and went quickly round the side of the cottage to the front garden. He'd had a good new towel in his pack and had put it out to dry on the hedge, catching the afternoon sunlight. This he brought back for her. She was still standing there half covered with her crumpled dress, so he hung the towel over the half-door.

There you are, he said, you'll need that.

And she thanked him, watching him with an embarra.s.sed smile at the absurdity of it.

He went back again round the outside of the house towards the front door. The rain had blown over, leaving the low sun warm in a clear late-afternoon sky, where a flight of Spitfires was making regular sweeps towards the German lines.

He switched on the radio and went back to sit in the open doorway and smoke. There was a Forces Requests programme on; he found it dull and paid little attention, sitting there brooding and staring out at the landscape. Trees and hedges and low hills were beginning to take on a shadowy impenetrable look against the brightening western sky. He could not quite make out the figure of the watcher under the beech tree until the small flash of sunlight reflected on spectacles showed that it was the old man. He finished his cigarette, flipped the b.u.t.t into the garden and began to dismantle his sten gun and clean its worn immaculate metalwork with an oily rag. He liked to have his gear in perfect working order, and besides, it might help to impress anyone who happened to be watching.

(Of such small actions is war made. And this is the part that most war books get wrong. Trying hard to impress, they multiply the horror and glory, brutality and heroism, boredom and humour of war at the expense of its ordinariness. Most wars are just ordinary. Everyone, even in the worst of wars, must sleep about a third of each day, and eat two or three meals, and c.r.a.p even if it's only in a hole in the ground. Soldiers, like anyone else, catch colds and read the Daily Mirror and fall in love and trim their nails and play pontoon and listen to Frank Sinatra and change their socks. The sadness of wartime death and suffering is that they are embedded in these familiar things.) Presently she came in from the back of the house and began to move about in the kitchen. There was a sc.r.a.pe and rattle at the stove as she opened the grate and stirred the fire. He said nothing, but his hands were busily cleaning and refilling the spare magazines. When he had finished he put the magazines, with the cleaning gear, back in the pouch on his webbing belt and stood up, slinging it loose over his shoulder.

He walked over softly and stopped behind her where she stood at the stove, stooping a little, stirring something in the enamel pot which began to have a savoury meaty smell.

I'm sorry, Belle, he said. Truly, love. You were so close to me, I couldn't stop. I didn't mean to harm you.

She remained with her back to him, stirring angrily at the black pot, saying nothing.

I said I'm sorry, he said, like I told you, I don't take a girl if she don't want it.

How can I choose? she said. Do not worry. I am disposable as you wish. And I will cook your supper.

Be a good girl, he said patting her bottom under the thin green dress.

She wriggled away from him, still angry but willing to be pleased.

He went through the little pa.s.sage into the bedroom, leaving both doors open. His pack stood neat and square against the wall, and he unbuckled it and took out the bottle of Calvados. He shook it and held it up to the light; still half full.

Glancing down, he took in her dressing-table set in front of the window, with its litter of woman's gear-pots and tubes and bottles, dabs of cotton wool, some stained with rouge or mascara, a good pair of silver-backed brushes-he knew the quality-with strands of long red-gold hair caught among the bristles. There was a small stand-mirror and, caught in the frame, a photograph.

He slipped it out and looked at it. It was just a snapshot, but taken with some skill, and it showed the head and shoulders of a middle-aged man. The setting seemed to be a garden-at least, there was a blurred shape of trees in the background. He thought that the man must be quite old because there was grey in the hair and in the thick drooping moustache, but even more because of the suggestion of heaviness in the jowls and in what could be seen of the body. There was character in it, arrogance in the tilt of the thrown-back head and the folded droop of the eyelids-or was it just the glare of the afternoon sun?

Back in the kitchen, he found her sitting at the table, arms folded under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, staring down listlessly at nothing. From the sideboard he took two large wine gla.s.ses and poured a generous tot of Calvados into each one.

Here, he said, try this.

To his astonishment, she took the gla.s.s and immediately raised it to her mouth and knocked the drink straight back in a curiously man-like gesture. She didn't even cough, and went back to staring at the table.