Madame Barbara. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ Americans go to Paris for the weekend. We go to Caen, yes?’

      He could barely admit to himself that he was desperately lonely for friendly female company. Not normally communicative about his private affairs, he had, on their way to the cemetery, talked a little to her about his family’s misadventures, and had felt a certain amount of relief.

      Since his fiancée’s desertion of him, he had made no effort to find himself another girl; he was acutely aware that he was no hero, that his shoulder was hunched, and that he had no assets to attract a matchmaking father.

      Even his engagement to Suzanne had been arranged by their parents, a marriage of convenience which would eventually, with a little luck and much hard saving, make it possible for the young couple to buy out Michel’s mother and his siblings.

      Originally faced with this same nationwide problem of the subdivision of land in each generation, Suzanne’s father had already bought out his own brother’s share of the Fortier farm, and Suzanne was his only surviving child; because of the problems of land tenure, peasants tended to keep the number of their children small.

      But there had been no romantic love between him and Suzanne, Michel admitted frankly to himself, just affection and an agreeable sexual contentment. It could have been a reasonable marriage.

      Now, inside him lay an unhealed wound, as if she had stabbed him. She had deserted him for a German, an enemy, probably some great hulking brute of a Prussian. He felt that he also had thereby been publicly shamed, stripped of his self-respect.

      Another Frenchman he might have accepted with better grace. But he had felt sick at the idea of a German, one of Hitler’s cohorts, who had tortured and killed men, like his friend Henri, because they continued to fight them underground.

      She had got off more lightly than if she had been a man, Michel thought. Men known to be quislings, collaborators who betrayed the Freedom Fighters to the Germans, had been summarily shot, if they did not commit suicide first.

      To a degree, justice had been done, admitted Michel, but it did not mean that he had come to terms with the betrayal.

      If she had not had a good woman friend to help her, she would have starved to death, he was sure of that. She would have been an outcast.

      The ultimate insult had, however, come only the previous month. He had heard, through one of his mother’s friends, also a refugee in Bayeux, that Suzanne’s German had recently sent for her and his child to join him on his farm, a farm which had apparently escaped the ravages of both the Russian and American advances. He was said to be now sowing his second year of crops. It was quite a story and the news spread fast in the back streets of Bayeux.

      It seemed to an outraged Michel very wrong that his own land, and that of his fiancée’s parents, should have been decimated, while one of the enemy’s farms remained inviolate.

      And who would ever have expected a German to do the honourable thing, and marry the girl? Enemy soldiers were not expected to do that, particularly a Boche.

      Michel asked himself again and again why her father had, in the first place, allowed her to go to work in Caen as a waitress in such troubled times – miles away from parental supervision.

      He supposed that the family must have had an urgent need for ready money during a time when farms were being stripped of their produce to be sent to Germany. It seemed the only explanation. He still felt, however, that her father had been most unwise – and so had his unfaithful trollop of a daughter. Though there did not seem much hope of it, Michel wished savagely that she would eventually starve amid the ruin which was Germany.

      He had been truly happy and surprised when Anatole had eventually been sent home by train by the American Army in Germany; they had discovered him amongst a group of refugees from Eastern Germany fleeing the Russian Army; he was trying to walk back to France.

      At least, Michel agreed with Maman, they could nurse Anatole, make him as comfortable as possible, until he died. And Michel was the first to say that, even confined to bed, his brother had given both their mother and Michel some moral support.

      Anatole was allowed by the Government a small regular sum with which to maintain himself, because he was a returned deportee very ill with tuberculosis. He also had free medical care. Because there was nothing much that could be done to help him medically, he had elected to be brought home to his mother rather than be put into an overcrowded hospital.

      Michel’s small savings account was emptied in an effort to buy extra comforts for him, such as second-hand pillows to prop him up, and black market milk and eggs to augment his diet.

      Madame Benion was almost beside herself as, in addition to losing her home and livelihood, she had to watch her elder, stronger son die. She and Michel tended him far better, however, than he would have been looked after in hospital, and while they did it she leaned, pitifully at times, on her younger boy for comfort.

      The lifelong sibling jealousy between the two brothers had melted amid the burning need to cope with disaster; and their mother, who had always had to work to the point of exhaustion and could not, therefore, give much attention to her children, had opened up to show her deep attachment to her sons. Misery, instead of separating them, seemed to fuse the remnants of the family together.

      As Michel arranged to meet Barbara again, he told himself that he was being driven simply by need for a break from a ruthless routine. To break loose just for a few hours would do him good. If he took this unknown English widow to Caen, he had a hazy hunch that he would be setting out on a new path. What kind of a path he could not yet envisage, since, whatever she was, she was certainly not a peasant woman.

      The widow was obviously quite startled at his offer of a trip to Caen and he could see that she instinctively hesitated.

      He understood women well enough to read her mind. ‘I take great care of you, Madame,’ he promised. ‘Have no fear.’

      He lit his last cigarette after first offering it to Barbara, who politely refused it. He carefully compiled another sentence. Finally, he said grandly, ‘I take you a little from your grief, Madame, and also you may see what happen to our cities.’

      While she still hesitated, he added, ‘The Americans produce petrol like a cow make water! Lots of it. They say to me “fill her up”. And I do.’

      She considered this and then unexpectedly chuckled, as she realised how apt his simile was. She decided that she might as well accept his offer. She really did, rather morbidly, want to see Caen.

      ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask the hotel if they can provide a picnic lunch.’

      And I hope I don’t disgrace myself by crying in public again, she thought.

       Chapter Eight

      Barbara spent a sleepless, tear-sodden night. She was, like almost everybody else, so deeply worn out with hard work, poor food and generally doing without that she wondered how she had ever managed to get up the energy to take this trip to France; yet, haunted by the lines of crosses she had seen that day, she could not sleep.

      Why on earth had she come?

      The answer was, she ruminated between sobs, because her mother, Phyllis Williams, and her mother-in-law, Ada Bishop, had been СКАЧАТЬ