‘In what way?’ I ask, not looking at her.
‘Sexually, of course. Lily, have you lost the ability, the desire?’
‘Me? Are you kidding? Hey, listen, my friend, they beat all that sort of thing out of me long ago. I’m so shrivelled up inside, I’m dead.’
‘But … but you can remember it so vividly?’
‘Une sacrée bonne baise, eh? Is that what you mean?’
‘You know it is. You needn’t be embarrassed.’
‘Ah, bon, Mademoiselle la Doctoresse Laurier, what I remember most is his smile, the look in his eyes, their happy, mischievous glint, their warmth for me and my children. These I must never lose. All the rest pales by comparison, though I enjoyed it, of course.’
‘What will you do when you get to the house?’
Have I told them to meet me there? This is written all over her. ‘The house might not even be there anymore. It might have been bombed to pieces or burned to the ground. Me, I don’t know or care. I only know that the forest will be waiting.’
In the morning, after that night of illicit love, two partridges were hanging by their feet against the redbrick wall of the courtyard. My breakfast had been laid out on the kitchen table: coffee with milk, porridge, two eggs, toast, jam, sliced pears, and apples. Enough for ten. Jean-Guy was to be waiter.
I had to laugh, had to kiss and hug them both. Jean-Guy was so excited. ‘Maman, I have hit one! Monsieur Tommy, he has held the gun, but I have pulled the trigger.’
Nothing would suffice but that I be shown the bullet holes. Both partridges had been killed by a single shot to the head. Marie-Christine, still in her nightie and one slipper, looked at me in such a way I had to wonder if she had seen the love in my eyes for Tommy, but will I ever know? This, too, has haunted me day by day for it carries its measure of guilt.
We decided to go for a drive, and I took him first to the Caves of the Brigands. There the hills of the Fontainebleau Forest break into tangled, scrub-clad rocky gorges that slope down to interfinger with the flat farmlands to the northwest. Stubbled grain fields, haycocks, and newly plowed fields are pastoral under a bright autumnal sky across which white clouds lazily drift. A few people were about on the land. Some were harvesting root crops, others onions and cabbages. In one distant field, three women gleaned stubble as women have for hundreds of years.
I lifted my arm and pointed, heard myself saying, ‘Barbizon, as Millet and Sisley would have painted it. The dappled colours, the froth of gold the autumn brings, the touches of green and brown from the branches. Ancient roofs and broken fences. Look how the light plays on them, Tommy. It’s incredibly beautiful, n’est-ce pas?’
My mother’s farm was at a crossroads out on that plain. It’s about two kilometres from the caves. The low, tiled roof of the house is set in the midst of an isolated copse and half-hidden by the hanging branches of a giant willow, now golden. Before the farm, the fields are flat; beyond it, the same, but to the southwest are the first scatterings of the village and the road we took that day.
Barbizon had only one major street, a line of dusty shops, the bakery and pâtisserie, a milliner’s, wine merchant’s, two hotels and restaurants for the tourists and people from Paris, lace curtains in the windows of the houses, sunning cats, and one dog that almost missed us.
We were through the village in an instant and all too soon at the farm. Unbidden, the children noisily got out of that great big car to run and shout to their grandmother … But I can’t go on. Please, it isn’t necessary now. Suffice it to say that mother only confirmed what I wanted to hear her say. That we should go to England with Tommy. Never mind the things that Jules was having sent from the Louvre. Never mind the house. Just go. Leave while you can! Live while you’re in love.
I never questioned anything else. I closed and locked the château, threw the key away. Finished, or so I had thought, but life is not so simple, nor is it so kind.
The wind was raw. It was another morning-later by a fortnight, and all the guilt and agony of that crossing are behind me. The refusal of the military at Le Havre to let us leave the country. The threat of submarines, the endless hours of seasickness cooped up belowdecks with the children, bundled in our life jackets all the time, the stench of stale tobacco smoke and vomit everywhere.
Tommy never took no for an answer, not if he thought the objective necessary. We had driven to Cherbourg. He had paid handsomely, under the table you understand, and we had crossed over from there.
This wind was from off the Bristol Channel, from over the highest peaks of the Quantock Hills, and I was standing beneath the spreading, empty branches of a massive beech in the graveyard that was beside the little stone church at Aisholt, in Somerset. I shut my eyes and ran fingertips over one of the ancient headstones. I felt the damp withdrawing into the pits and hollows of letters that were all but gone.
From Taunton, the road runs east to Curry Rivel, Langport, Somerton, Lyndford-on-Fosse, and Camelot, its castles, knights, and kings, if one believed.
With eyes still shut, I remembered it all, the days, the drives, the man, my father leading Nini and I on a chase through time. How very different he was from Jules, how so like Tommy.
I had come home to a death, to a first hard casualty in what was soon to become my private war, my own little bit of hell. Me, I had thought myself so lucky. Suicide is an unpleasant thing, so hard to accept in one you’ve loved.
Now, of course, I can understand the need for such a thing. But in those days … ah, what can I say? I was simply too naive.
The church, the rectory, the stained-glass windows I had so often viewed from within and without, all drew my attention to a God no different than the one to whom I prayed at Mass in France.
That little church had been built in the fourteenth century. The bell tower had tolled its call to the faithful ever since, its warnings of war as well.
A figure emerged from the manse, bareheaded as usual and wearing the threadbare tweeds and gumboots I will always remember. The hair was wispy-silver and a little too long, the man short, swarthy, and ruddy faced with sincere and honest grey-blue eyes and wire-rimmed spectacles whose lenses were bifocal and octagonal.
He addressed the day with the vigour he always had. He was nearly eighty, or was it eighty-two? George Arthur Martin, our padre, my father’s greatest friend and caretaker.
Would the talk today be of infidelity, the need to forgive, that of a husband for his wife, the children for their father, or of common sense and the war? So far he had said so little of any of these things it made me wonder about him.
‘Lily, you mustn’t dwell on things. Now, you really mustn’t. He’s gone to his Maker and the sound of the guns has been silenced at last.’
No more screams in the night, no more terror. The legacy of that other war that ended such a short time ago. The reason my mother could no longer live with my father. Well, one of them. Perhaps you have noticed that my little sister was typically French, whereas me, I was …
‘Is it time for coffee, do you think?’ he asked.
A wisp of hair fell over the Saxon’s brow. I gave him a smile that pleased him immensely. I said quite gaily, ‘Let’s walk a bit. I want to see the hills once more.’
They were to the west, north, and south of us. By making a circuit of the garden, we could compass some of the finest scenery in England. Arthur let me take him by the arm and gave a contented sigh. ‘You’ve no idea how good that feels to a man of my age. Just because I wear the cloth, doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the company of a beautiful woman. I’ve seen you blossom again, in just these past two weeks. You’ve got rosy cheeks, my girl. You’re beginning to think you can cope with life-no, I don’t want to hear about it unless you want to tell me. It’ll take time for the place to get inside you. It has a way of its own. Do you know, when I first saw you I thought, dear Lord, that girl’s been ill, but now … why now, you’re one of us again. It’s a right proper feed, isn’t it, this place of ours?’