Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

They called on Toinette. She was not at home. She was picking lavender on the mountainside with her young cousins. While Théo was chatting Jean asked to be shown which way they had gone. He found them in the scrub on the side of a hill of wild lavender, each girl carrying a cotton bag, wide-brimmed straw hats on their heads. From the path he would have found it impossible to say which one was Toinette. They wore the same grey smocks and the same aprons, and were singing in Provençal, their piping girlish voices mingling with the sharp call of the cicadas. A face looked up and called to Toinette.

‘ Té , Toinette, he’s here.’

So she had talked about him. He felt intensely proud to have been the subject of a confidence. The girls straightened up, charming figures on the blue-washed hillside dotted with the green of small oaks. He recognised Toinette when she put down her bag and smiled at him under her straw hat. Her lovely tanned face and light eyes were calm. She had pushed up her sleeves, baring her arms, the same golden brown as her legs.

‘I came to say goodbye.’

‘I thought so. You’re leaving then? It’s a shame.’

She smelt naturally of lavender, a fresh smell that would for ever, from that day on, remind Jean of her. Her three cousins kept their distance, consumed with curiosity. Toinette held out her hand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No shaking hands. We kiss our loved ones.’

He kissed her lightly on both cheeks and added, ‘I’ll write to you.’

‘Yes, that’ll be nice … Send me a postcard, to say which countries you’ve been to.’

He knew as well as she did that he would not, that it had been delightful and now it was over, that their feelings would vanish in the infinity of their parting. Whether it was the heat or emotion, fine pearls of sweat were forming on Toinette’s face. Her soft olive skin glistened. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist.

‘It’s hot,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you can wear a jacket. It’s easy to see you’re from the town.’

She picked up her bag. In a moment she would bend over and carry on picking. Jean would have given anything to stop her.

‘Goodbye then,’ she said. ‘And safe journey!’

‘I won’t forget our walk to Antoine’s rock,’ he murmured very quietly.

She shrugged her shoulders modestly, then murmured in turn, ‘You’ll have long forgotten it when I still remember it.’

From the farm came the hoarse bellow of the truck’s horn.

‘Théo’s getting impatient,’ Toinette said. ‘Don’t make him wait. He doesn’t deserve it. He loves driving so much. You know … it makes him different from everyone else.’

She bent down to pick a stalk of lavender and held it out to Jean.

‘Keep it … for a little while.’

She smiled. After he had gone, her cousins would comfort her. He turned to the three girls, three young cooked plums whose eyes shone under the brims of their hats. One of them, at least, looked almost as pretty as Toinette.

Marceline’s message summoned him to Lyon. He spent three weeks there in the company of a short man in glasses, whom he met each day at a different point in town: Place Bellecour, at the Tête-d’Or park, at Perrache station, in obscure bistros — Le Pot, La Baleine — where at the bottom of a few steps you entered a low, dark room. The short man was a wonderful connoisseur of the few places that served the best Beaujolais. It was his only weakness. Actually, to be fair, he had another: he had no sense of humour. When Jean grew tired of his Boy Scout precautions and allowed himself a mildly sarcastic remark, the man looked so hurt that he was filled with remorse. He learnt in dribs and drabs what was expected of him, entering, by small steps, into an unreal, hushed world whose organisational charts reflected an unknown hierachy. He quickly realised that Marceline’s recommendation had been of the highest. He was not considered a run-of-the-mill operative; important things were expected of him. Leaning on a terrace bar at Fourvière with his companion one day, he confessed to him, ‘You must be mistaken. I only joined your organisation because I had nothing better to do.’

It wasn’t the sort of reflection to be made to the man. He did not understand such remarks and was offended by them. He came close to retorting that the devil made work for idle hands, but his pupil interested him; he was a quick learner, almost too quick, as if he might forget the codes and security measures as soon as he had committed them to memory. In mid-August Jean was directed to go to Rouen. He was to spend several hours in Paris between trains. Arriving at Gare de Lyon, he was about to take the Métro for Gare Saint-Lazare when he was suddenly tempted to go to Palais-Royal. He got off there and ran to the Français. The concierge did not want to let him in. There was a rehearsal. Jean asked for Nelly to be given a note. She came running down to see him.

‘I’ve got a break,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to the Régence.’

She was in a sweater and slacks. They ran across the square and found a small table near the window.

‘I didn’t know I loved you,’ she said. ‘I think about you all the time.’

‘What about Jérôme Callot?’

‘Oh darling, you make me so happy! You’re jealous. You stupid idiotic scrumptious darling, your rival didn’t make it past dinner for two. I’m free. Stay.’

It occurred to him that she thought he had left because of the other man.

‘No, Marceline will tell you why I left. Do you see her?’

‘All the time. She has permission from Vaudoyer to watch the rehearsals for Suréna . In the afternoons at home she goes through my lines with me.’

Some German officers sat down at a neighbouring table. They regarded Nelly wolfishly, wondering what she was doing there, in slacks and sweater on an August afternoon. The waiter told them. Nodding, they knowingly pointed out to each other the Théâtre Français, its great grey outline visible through the window.

‘We’ve just got to make love,’ Nelly said. ‘I can’t tell you how much I want it.’

He had an hour till his train. He went back to her dressing room with her and they barricaded the door. The stage manager called her several times, drummed on the door, and went away again, grumbling. Nelly laughed with pleasure.

‘“Love, over my virtue”,’ she said, ‘“hold a little less dominion.”’

He had to admit it: her love was joyful and generous.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ he said.

‘Yes, it’s madness … darling Jules-who. You see how good it is to be together. The truth is that there’s nothing better, and I’m going to cry when you leave me. I adore you, you know … You were so obvious, and now you’re becoming mysterious. It’s magic. Women will love it. I’m going to be cheated on left, right and centre.’

She kissed him on the cheek and vanished down a corridor. He had to ask his way several times before he found the exit. He reached Gare Saint-Lazare on foot. Paris was not a city he could walk around with impunity any longer. In Rouen the following day, having delivered his message, he enquired about the times of trains for Dieppe. As the first one left in the morning, he booked into a hotel and spent the evening reading Lost Illusions .32 Later, when he was asked what he had done during the last two years of the occupation, he always answered with the same sincerity, ‘Nothing. I travelled and I read. Every evening, every night, in trains and cafés during the day. I read and I didn’t think about anything else.’

On 19 August the Dieppe train did not leave Rouen station. The Canadians had landed. We already know how Albert met his end in that bloody adventure and its uncertain lessons. Antoinette told Jean the news by telephone. His last link had been cut. He would have liked to see the abbé Le Couec again, but that saintly man was under house arrest. He could not even go from the rectory to the public telephone at the post office. Jean found that his sadness was leavened by a kind of elation: he was on his own. He weighed no more than his own weight, and he was learning how to be a man by walking on the edge of the chasm, a difficult task that precluded self-questioning. He did not recognise his own reflection: another Jean was being formed in him, a stranger, timid to begin with, then more and more self-confident. The game itself did not bore him, though he brought to it a somewhat limited conviction. He spoke little, kept his doubts to himself, learnt to mistrust everyone and everything. All in all, the short, bespectacled instructor, with his immovable faith and his flow charts, had fashioned a fairly realistic Jules Armand. Jean regretted seeing him only rarely. The rules that governed the network’s security did not allow it, although he stretched them now and then. He likewise met Nelly at the theatre, but their meetings grew more infrequent and Nelly drew away from him, though she was always as tender as before. She explained it to him gently.