Soldier No More Page 20

  The realisation of how close he had been to such stupidity cooled him down. The age in which she lived had long passed, but she lived in it still. Also, Madame Goutard would have described to her the sheep’s eyes Lexy had made at him after the episode in the shop.

  Actually, marriage to Lexy wouldn’t be so bad, once he had become accustomed to her cooking. Marriage to Jilly would be even better, and certainly more stimulating … but with a senior peer of the House of Lords for a father-in-law, and an American heiress for a mother-in-law … Champeney-Perowne multiplied by Vanderhorn divided by Roche might still produce a sum total big enough to protect him from the simple addition of all his enemies. It was only a pity that such prospects were altogether Utopian.

  But, more immediately, Madame Peyrony’s technique of thinking aloud was an interesting one.

  “And I’m not suitable, Madame?” His brain shifted into the right gear. “A para, but not suitable?”

  “I did not say that, Captain.”

  “But you implied that.” It was like crossing swords.

  “And you did not answer my question.”

  “It was … an insulting question.” And he would win, because he had more at stake. “If you will permit me to say so.” But as yet he wasn’t sure how he was going to win, that was all.

  She took stock of him. The lightweight suit was right (expensive, but not too expensive; a little rumpled, but he was on leave); and the tie was only his old hockey club’s, but it looked like something better; and the haircut was safely French military, Fontainebleau ‘57. And she already knew that he spoke Parisian French, and an Englishman who didn’t speak the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe couldn’t be all bad, especially an English para.

  “You are not married, that is certain,” she pronounced that judgement with an air of finality, because that was her technique. And although he didn’t know how she had arrived at it he knew instinctively that the answer to his question, how to win? lay within reach.

  “No, I’m not married.” It was a risk, but not a very great risk—certainly not a very great risk for a para accustomed to risks. And, finally, instinct also made him want to talk, and for once not lie while talking.

  “I was engaged once, unofficially, Madame. But never married— definitely not married, Madame.” She didn’t interrupt. Wise woman!

  “She was an American girl. I met her during the Korean War, Madame— while I was in Japan, after I’d been posted out of Korea.”

  Cultural shock: Japan is beautiful, and the people are kind and ordinary … just ordinary people, no better and no worse, in spite of the true stories of Changi and the Siamese railway, and Imphal and Kohima—

  “She was very beautiful, Madame. Beautiful like … the Jewess. And intelligent—like Gillian… and slim like her, too. And as full of life as Lady Alexandra.” Perhaps all that was a bit too good to be true, after six years of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles—maybe not so beautiful, and not so intelligent and not so full of life. Maybe nervous at times, and highly-strung, and full of doubt about America, and where it was going, and what it was doing in the name of Liberty and ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ and ‘the government of the people, by the people, for the people’. But Julie still—Julie always—

  ‘In War it is as it is in Love… Whether she be good or bad, one gives one’s best once, to one only—‘

  True! So Madame Peyrony had nothing to worry about—though this was not quite yet the moment to tell her so.

  “She killed herself.” There was no way of making it other than brutal: it was brutal. “She told me once, the way to go was to swim out—there was a current on the bay where we used to swim, if you went far enough out in the evening it would carry you out to sea, the fishermen said—and swim and swim and swim, until it didn’t matter any more, until the sea and the sky joined. And that’s what she did. Tout simplement!”

  He’d only met Madame Peyrony five minutes before, and never before had he told that to anyone, because there was no one to tell who didn’t have someone else to tell it to.

  But Madame had no one to tell it to, only the resident ghosts, who couldn’t tell it to anyone else, so it was all right to tell it to her.

  And, besides, now was the time to tell it anyway, even if she did pass it on. Because now he was breaking faith with Julie—and because now, in a few days’ time anyway, it wouldn’t matter either way! Tout simplement!

  “Why?”

  He hardly heard the question, it was asked so softly. But he had intended to answer it anyway.

  “It was a bad time. The bomb … MacArthur … Senator McCarthy— Senator McCarthy most of all—the senate sub-committee investigation… Julie’s step-father worked for the government, and he’d subscribed to all sorts of causes, from the Spanish Civil War onwards … And she adored him—he was a great chap, a nice man—“

  Julie’s Harry, who knew all about England, as no other American he had ever met knew about the country, from his service there in the war—even knew about the railways there, the very lines over which his own father had driven his engine—the old London North-Eastern—

  “You’ve got a great chance in England, boy, to make real Socialism work—to show the Russians how to do it, so they can get it right… they’re trying to, and they’ll get the hang of it if you can show them the way—“

  He was relieved Harry hadn’t seen Suez. But he was even more glad he’d missed the East German riots and Poland, and above all the Hungarian massacres; they would have done the job just as surely as McCarthy had done, perhaps even more cruelly—

  “He committed suicide. He shot himself with this German pistol he brought back from the war. He wrote a letter—“

  Dearest Julie—

  “—he wrote her a letter, explaining why.”

  She waited until she was sure he wasn’t going on. He wanted her to ask the question.

  “And because of that—because of her step-father—?”

  “Also because of me. She wrote me a letter also—“

  My own David—

  “Because of you?”

  “She’d decided I ought to be a teacher. But I was in the Army then … she got it all mixed up—she thought, if they found out about her, and then about Harry … with the way Senator McCarthy was hunting down people with the wrong connections… she had this crazy idea that they’d throw me out of the Army, and then they wouldn’t let me teach after that. She said I’d be tagged as a ‘subversive’—it’s funny, really.”

  “Funny?”

  “Harry wouldn’t have made that mistake. He would have known that it wouldn’t have made any difference to my becoming a teacher. They don’t work that way in England, he would have known. They couldn’t have cared less—particularly in the sort of school I wanted to teach in … not even if I’d been Stalin’s stepson-in-law—or Krushchev’s … and McCarthy never carried any weight in England—Harry would have known all that. But Julie didn’t, that’s all.”

  She stared at him. “And that is … funny?” She was questioning the word, not the fact.

  “Ironic, is what I mean, Madame.”

  “Ah!” she nodded. “ ‘A funny sort of cobber’ means ‘a strange one’, not a humorist. And ‘funny business’ is not comedy, but the exact opposite—I remember.” Her wrinkled eyelids closed momentarily.

  ‘Cobber’ was purest Australian; and, more than that, she pronounced the word with an authentic Aussie twang. And yet there was no Aussie in her ‘funny business’, it was drawled in what might almost have been American.

  She was staring at him again. “And the army too? They would not have cared?”

  Roche shrugged. “I was only a National Service officer at the time—a conscript. I was due to be demobbed—demobilised—pretty soon, anyway. It might have worried them a bit, in some ways. But it wouldn’t have worried me, anyway.” She frowned suddenly. “That surprises you, Madame?”

  “You did not teach … in this school of yours?”
She nodded, still frowning. “You remained in the army … Yes, that surprises me.”

  Roche relaxed. They had prepared him for this one long ago, if his connection with Julie had ever surfaced. It was another in the long succession of ironies that he had never needed their carefully rehearsed explanation until now, for a purpose and an interrogation very different from the one they had envisaged.

  “In what way, Madame?” But it would do, just the same, their explanation.

  “After such a tragedy … such a mockery… you must have been a very young man—“ the hint of a sad smile crossed her mouth “—you are not an old man even now … I would have expected bitterness, if not anger, Captain.”

  Roche constructed his own frown carefully, as Raymond Galles had advised him to do. “Against whom Madame?”

  “Against those in power. Against the … the brass-hats? The hats of brass, is it?”

  Again the strange—funny-strange—pronunciation: it might almost be broad Yorkshire this time.

  “The Establishment?”

  “The Establishment? That is new to me … But—the Establishment— yes, that has the right sound and the right meaning,” she nodded, mimicking him. “The … Establishment—yes!”

  She echoed him again exactly. And that, of course, was what she was doing, thought Roche, the mists clearing from his mind. Once upon a time many Allied escapers had passed through this house, and some of them must have stayed for days, until the coast was clear, since it was an emergency hide-out for the times when the normal route was compromised. Australians, Americans, Yorkshiremen—they had all come and gone, leaving nothing behind them but memories and the echoes of their dialects in the vocabulary of this elderly French lady, who had an ear for the music of language!

  “Oh … the I see—“ He felt himself warming to her, with her so beautifully and carefully enunciated mongrel English and all the courageous stories behind it which would never be told, of bomber crews from Lancasters and Flying Fortresses, from Bradford and Brisbane and Boise, Idaho. But there was a cold layer beneath the warm one: if she could hear and remember so much, could she hear and distinguish the untruth also— Raymond Galles had warned him that her ear was razor sharp? “Yes—angry, certainly Madame.”

  That was the very truth, he was safe there: first the paralysing shock of grief and despair … then—then anger and bitterness both, which he had been too cowardly to turn into outright rebellion, which had been in a fair way to turn into the lethargic boredom of serving out his time as a messenger-boy in Japan, hauling brief-cases of decoded intercepts from American to British headquarters in a humiliating one-way traffic—

  How he had hated the Americans then … hated the Americans, and hated the British by simple extension, the servile allies of the hated Americans, who had killed his Julie—his American—and now received the scraps from their master’s table, carried in the brief-case chained to his wrist, the very ball-and-chain of servitude!

  —until that evening, that never-to-be-forgotten evening, along the very beach from which Julie had swum out… along which they had walked so many times, to which he had returned… all you have to do is swim out until the current takes you, and cherishes you—

  “—anger, certainly, Madame.” Pain. “Anger—yes.”

  Nod. “Yet you remained in the Army?”

  Smile, bitterly but knowingly. “But anger against whom?”

  Against whom?

  He had felt, even beyond anger and bitterness and grief—he had felt impotence!

  He could have ripped open the brief-case, and scattered its contents along the way, or made a bonfire of it. But they had copies of it, and other officers to carry it—the uselessness of the gesture, as well as his own cowardice, had baffled him, even though the thought of going back to teach in England without Julie had filled him with despair.

  And then, out of the soft blue of the Japanese evening, had come the offer of revenge, unexpected and unlocked for—revenge, yet at the same time a keeping-faith with Julie and Harry, and a keeping-faith with his own idealism—

  Or had it really been idealism?

  It was hard to think back now, to remember what he had really thought— how he had really thought, and why he had thought as he had done: it was like trying to capture the thoughts of a stranger, to re-capture his own thoughts from time past.

  Anger and bitterness and grief and impotence and …

  And boredom?

  Perhaps if the war had flared up again … but it was clear at British headquarters, even to the errand-boys, that the Americans and the Chinese had both had enough of Korea—

  Perhaps if Julie … but without Julie the idea of going back to do what they had planned to do together, always together—

  Instead, there had been nothing but anger and bitterness and grief and impotence, and boredom and cowardice and irresolution and uncertainty, and maybe plain foolishness too, and maybe also idealism—but at the time he had only recognised the first four of them, and the last one … But they had been enough, all of them together, to open the wound through which the parasite had entered his blood-stream, to take him over—Christ! Was that how it had really been?

  “Anger against whom, Captain?” Madame Peyrony prompted him gently, watching him with an intentness entirely devoid of gentleness.

  The contrast between the voice and the expression was disconcerting, even almost frightening: that intense stare, half-veiled but not concealed by the wrinkled eyelids, was better suited to Genghis Khan’s eyes, or Clinton’s, than to those of an old lady in her boudoir—better suited to a small room without windows than to a boudoir.

  Anger against whom? He must lie well now, and better than well, his own instinct more than Raymond Galles shouted at him: the past he must remember must be the version which the Comrades had so carefully created for him, not the newer and heretical interpretation which had directed his actions over the past few days.

  He sighed. “I had a friend once, Madame … a brother officer in Tokyo … he was knocked over and killed by a police car.” Pause. “The police car was badly driven.” Pause again. “But it was pursuing a bank robber nevertheless.”

  She continued to stare at him, giving nothing away.

  “I suppose I was angry with the police driver … even though the road was slippery at the time, I was angry. But not for long.” Final pause, longer than the others. “Without the Communists, Madame … or without the Russians, if you prefer … Joseph McCarthy would have been just another stupid politician.”

  There had been a lot more, to be used as required, according to the depth of the interrogation. The six-year-old lines came back to Roche with mocking clarity, even to the small amendments he had decided to make on his own account (no patriotic young Englishman would have referred to ‘Soviet expansionism’ in a month of Sundays when he meant simply ‘Russian aggression’…).

  But this was not the time and place, and not the interrogator, for a lot more. The lie they had given him would stick here, or not at all, Roche judged.

  Madame Peyrony subsided slowly into her chair, becoming somehow smaller and more ancient as she did so. “I will have a little wine now, Captain, if you please.”

  Perhaps it was not the lie which had stuck, but the truth itself. Because somewhere along the years, and particularly since the bloodbath in Hungary last year, he had realised that the lie was the truth indeed—that the false reasons they had given him to give to the British ought always to have been his own true reasons for fighting them—that he had deluded himself, and been deluded; and that, worse still, that Julie and Harry had in some sense been deluded too, and had played an innocent part in deluding him.

  But he had to pour the wine.

  “And for yourself, Captain.”

  His hand shook. How incredibly sure the Comrades must have been of him, to feed him the truth to use, confident that he would accept it as untruth!

  “I’m all right, thank you, Madame.” He watched her sip the Monbazillac.


  She inclined her head. “Very well… so I will apologise to you, young man—of course… But not unreservedly.”

  “Not… unreservedly?” He was glad she was forcing him to forget the humiliation of his previous thoughts.

  She nodded. “You have set one of my fears at rest. You must understand that I have certain responsibilities so far as Alexandra is concerned. Alexandra is—shall we say—vulnerable?”

  Roche smiled. “Or susceptible?”

  “Vulnerable, Captain. To be fair to you, since I am apologising for this, I will tell you that last year she formed a liaison with a young man—not such as yourself, but a foreigner, Captain.”

  That was rather hard on Lexy’s CIA boyfriend, thought Roche. And doubly hard, since the CIA man was technically not a foreigner so far as Lexy was concerned, as well as being very much like Captain Roche in another way.

  “Altogether not suitable, in fact?” he said mischievously. “Unlike me?”

  She sipped her wine.

  “But then … I’m not in the least interested in Alexandra, of course,” added Roche.

  She set the glass down carefully. “Just so, Captain. But then what is it that interests you? And I beg you not to tell me anything more about bastides … I am certain that you know all that there is to know about them. But I am equally convinced that you are not in the least interested in them.” She paused momentarily. “Are you acquainted with ‘bum steers’, Captain?” This time the pause was even briefer. “I presume you are, so you will understand me when I say that I believe you are endeavouring to sell such an animal to me, and I am not about to purchase it.”

  Roche managed to close his mouth, but decided that he had better not question this animal’s precise pedigree.

  “I said that you had…allayed—that is the word—allayed…one of my fears. I suppose that an old woman, and a stranger also, might be flattered that you have told me so much … so much of such a very personal nature … in order to reassure me as to Alexandra’s safety. But not this old woman, Captain.” Madame Peyrony paused yet again, this time for effect. “For now this old woman has another fear, which you have not allayed. And I will tell you why, in order to spare us both the waste of time which bastides, and whatever else you have ready, might otherwise … otherwise …” she searched for the appropriate English word, but in vain.