I turned, smiling, to where Juliette should have been. My program came on then, and I watched myself making a few points before I got up and went to find her. She was in the kitchen, standing in the dark, clutching the edge of the sink. She did not move when I turned the light on. I put my arms around her, and we came back to her sitting room and watched the rest of the program together. She was knitting squares of wool to be sewn together to make a blanket; there was always, somewhere, a flood or an earthquake or a flow of refugees, and those who outlasted jeopardy had to be covered.
The Colonel’s Child
I got to London by way of Marseilles and North Africa, having left Paris more than a year before. My aim was to join the Free French and General de Gaulle. I believed the weight of my presence could tip the scales of war, like one vote in a close election. There was no vanity in this. London was the peak of my hopes and desires. I could look back and see a tamed landscape. My past life dwindled and vanished in that long perspective. I was twenty-three.
In my canvas hold-all I carried a tobacco pouch someone had given me, filled with thin reddish soil from Algeria. In those days earth from France and earth from Algeria meant the same thing. Only years later was I able to think, I must have been crazy. When you are young, your patriotism is like metaphysical frenzy. Later, it becomes one more aspect of personal crankiness.
Instead of a hero’s welcome I was given forms to fill out. These questionnaires left no room for postscripts, and so only a skeleton of myself could be drawn. I was Édouard B., born in Paris, father a schoolteacher (so was my mother, but I wasn’t asked), student of literature and philosophy, single, no dependents.
Some definitions seemed incomplete. For instance, I was not entirely single: before leaving Paris I had married a Jewish-born actress, so as to give her the security of my name. As far as I knew, she was now safe and in Cannes. At the same time, I was not a married man. The marriage was an incident, gradually being rubbed out in the long perspective I’ve described. So I saw it; so I would insist. You have to remember the period, and France occupied, to imagine how one could think and behave. We always say this — “Think of the times we had to live in” — when the past is dragged forward, all the life gone out of it, and left unbreathing at our feet.
Instead of sending me off to freeze on a parade ground, the Free French kept me in London. I took it to mean they wanted to school me in sabotage work and drop me into France. I did not know special parachute training might be needed. I thought you held your breath and jumped.
Two months later I lay in a hospital ward with a broken nose, broken left arm, and fractures in both legs. They had been trying to teach me to ride a motorbike, and on my first time out I skidded into a wall. The instructor came and sat by my bedside. He was about twice my age, a former policeman from Rouen. He said the Free French weren’t quite casting me off, but some of them wondered if I was meant for a fighting force in exile. I was a cerebral type, who needed the peace of an office job, with no equipment to smash — not even a typewriter. I asked if General de Gaulle had been informed about my accident.
“Is he a friend of yours?” said the instructor.
“I’ve seen him,” I said. “I saw him in Canton Gardens. He came out the door and down some steps, and got into his car. I was carrying a lot of parcels, so I couldn’t salute. I don’t think he noticed. I hope not.”
There was a silence, during which the instructor stared at his watch. Presently, he inquired what I wanted to do with my life.
“I think I am a poet,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”
After that they sent me a regular hospital visitor, a volunteer. Juliette was her name. She was seventeen, from Bordeaux, the daughter of a colonel who had followed de Gaulle to London. She had a precise, particular way of speaking, with every syllable given full value and the consonants treated like little stones. It was not the native accent of Bordeaux, which anyone can imitate, or the everyday French of Paris I’d grown up with, but the tone, almost undefinable, of the French Protestant upper class. I had not heard it before, not consciously, and for the moment had no means of placing it. I thought she had picked up an affectation of some sort while learning English and had carried it over to French. She had, besides, the habit of thrusting into French conversation brief, joyous, and usually irrelevant remarks in English: “You don’t say!” “Oh, what a shame!” “How glad I am for you!” “How gorgeous!”
From behind a mask of splints and bandages I appraised her face, which was still childlike, rounded as if over a layer of cream. A beret kept slipping and sliding off her dark hair. “Oh, what a pity!” she remarked, pulling it back on. She was dressed in the least becoming clothes I had ever seen on a young woman — a worn and drooping tunic, thick black stockings, and a navy sweater frayed at the cuffs. She had spent five months in an English girls’ school, she told me, and this was the remains of a uniform. She had nothing else to wear, no thing that fitted. Her mother was too busy to shop.
“Can’t you shop for yourself?”
“It’s not done,” she said. “I mean, we don’t do things that way.”
“Who is we?” — for she still puzzled me.
“Besides, I’ve got no money.” This seemed a sensible explanation. I wondered why she had bothered to make another. “My mother teaches English to French recruits. Actually, she doesn’t know much, but she can make them read traffic signs.”
“You mean, ‘Stop’?”
“Well, there are other things — ‘No Entry.’ “ She looked troubled, as if she were not succeeding in the tranquil, sleepy conversation that is supposed to keep a victim’s mind off his wounds.
I had lost six front teeth in the accident. Through the gap, Juliette fed me the mess the English call custard. My right arm was fine, but I let her do it. She was grave, intent — a little girl playing. She might have been poking a spoon into a doll’s porcelain face. When I refused to swallow any more, she got a bottle of eau de cologne and a facecloth out of a satchel and carefully wiped my hands and wrists and around my neck — whatever whatever was bare and visible. I wondered if she would offer to comb my hair and cut my nails, but the nursing part of the game was over. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands clasped, a good girl on a visit, and told me that her father, the colonel, was an outcast with a price on his head. From the care she took not to say where he was, I understood they had sent him to France, on a mission. Forgetting about secrets, she suddenly said she yearned to be smuggled into France, too, so that she could join him and they might blow up bridges together.
“I wanted to do that,” I said. “That’s why I came here. But I’m useless. I may come out of this with a scarred face, or a limp. I’d be at risk.”
“Oh, I know,” said Juliette. “The Germans would catch you and shoot you. They’d look for a secret agent all covered with scars. Oh, what a nuisance!”
Sweet Juliette. Her dark eyes held all the astonished eagerness of a child of twelve. I often think I should want to be back there, with a Juliette still virginal, untouched, saying encouraging things such as “all covered with scars,” but at the age I am now it would bore me.