The old man said: 'I am very, very sorry, mademoiselle.' He paused, and then he said, 'I know what that sort of anxiety means... very well. It blackens everything for a long time afterwards.'
She said quietly: 'Yes. Day after day you wait, and wait. And then the letter comes, or it may be the telegram, and you are afraid to open it to see what it says.' She was silent for a minute. 'And then at last you do open it.'
He nodded. He felt very close to her; they had shared the same experience. He had waited and waited just like that when John had been missing. For three days he had waited; then the telegram had come. It became clear to him that she had been through the same trouble; indeed, her mother had told him that she had. He was immensely sorry for her.
Quite suddenly, he felt that he would like to talk to her about John. He had not been able to talk about his son to anybody, not since it happened. He had feared sympathy, and had shunned intrusion. But this girl Nicole had known John. They had been skiing companions - friends, she had said.
He blew out a long cloud of smoke. 'I lost my son, you know,' he said with difficulty, staring straight ahead of him. 'He was killed flying - he was a squadron leader, in our Royal Air Force. He was shot down by three Messerschmitts on his way back from a bombing raid. Over Heligoland.'
There was a pause.
She turned towards him. 'I know that,' she said gently. 'They wrote to me from the squadron.'
Chapter 8
The cinema was half-full of people, moving about and laying down their palliasses for the night. The air was full of the fumes of the cooking-stove at the far end, and the smoke of French cigarettes; in the dim light it seemed thick and heavy.
Howard glanced towards the girl. 'You knew my son as well as that, mademoiselle?' he said. 'I did not know.'
In turn, she felt the urge to talk. 'We used to write,' she said. She went on quickly, 'Ever since Cidoton we used to write, almost each week. And we met once, in Paris - just before the war. In June, that was.' She paused, and then said quietly, 'Almost a year ago today.'
The old man said: 'My dear, I never knew anything about this at all.'
'No,' she said. 'Nor did I tell my parents.' There was a silence while he tried to collect his thoughts' and readjust his outlook. 'You said they wrote to you,' he said at last. 'But how did they know your address?'
She shrugged her shoulders. 'He would have made arrangements,' she said. 'He was very kind, monsieur; very, very kind. And we were great friends...'
He said quietly: 'You must have thought me very different, mademoiselle. Very rude. But I assure you, I knew nothing about this. Nothing at all.'
There was a little pause.
'May I ask one question?' he said presently.
'But yes, Monsieur Howard.'
He stared ahead of him awkwardly. 'Your mother told me that you had had trouble,' he said. 'That there had been a young man - who was dead. No doubt, that was somebody else?'
'There was nobody else,' she said quietly. 'Nobody but John.'
She shook herself and sat up. 'See,' she said, 'one must put down a palliasse, or there will be no room left by the wall.' She got to her feet and stirred him, and began to pull down one of the sacks of straw from the pile. He joined her, reluctant and confused, and for a quarter of an hour they worked, making their beds.
'There,' she said at last, standing back to survey their work. 'It is the best that can be done.' She eyed him diffidently. 'Will it be possible for you to sleep so, Monsieur Howard?'
He said: 'My dear, of course it will.'
She laughed shortly. 'Then, let us try.'
Over the palliasses he stood looking at her, blanket in hand. 'May I ask one more question?'
She faced him: 'Yes, monsieur.'
'You have been very good to me,' he said quietly. 'I think I understand now. That was because of John?'
There was a long silence. She stood looking out across the room, motionless. 'No,' she said at last. 'That was because of the children.'
He said nothing, not quite understanding what she meant.
'One loses faith,' she said quietly. 'One thinks that everything is false and bad.'
He glanced at her, puzzled.
'I did not think there could be anyone so kind and brave as John,' she said. 'But I was wrong, monsieur. There was another one. There was his father.'
She turned away. 'So,' she said, 'we must sleep.' She spoke practically, almost coldly; it seemed to the old man that she had set up a barrier between them. He did not resent that; he understood the reason for her curtness. She did not want to be questioned any more. She did not want to talk.
He lay down on the palliasse, shifted the rough, straw-filled pillow and pulled the blanket round him. The girl settled down on her own bed on the other side of the children.
Howard lay awake, his mind in a tumult. He felt that he had known that there had been something between this girl and John, yet that knowledge had not reached the surface of his mind. But looking back, there had been little hints all the time that he had been with them in the flat. Indeed, she had used John's very words about a cocktail when she had said in English that: 'A little bit of what you fancy does you good.' Thinking back, he remembered the little twinges of pain that he had suffered when she had said that and yet he had not realised.
How close had their friendship been, then? They had written freely to each other; on top of that it seemed that they had met in Paris just before the war. No breath of that had reached him previously. But thinking back, he could remember now that there had been a space of two week-ends in June when he had seen nothing of the boy; he had assumed that duties with the squadron had prevented him from coming over to see him, or even from ringing up. Was that the time? It must have been.
His mind turned to Nicole. He had thought her a very odd young woman previously; he did not think of her in quite the same way now. Dimly he began to realise a little of her difficulties with regard to John, and to himself. It seemed that she had told her mother little about John; she had nursed her grief in silence, dumb and inarticulate. Then he had turned up, quite suddenly, at the door one day. To her secret grief he added an acute embarrassment.
He turned over again. He must let her alone, let her talk if she wanted to, be silent if she chose. If he did that, perhaps she would open out as time went on. It had been of her own volition she had told him about John.
He lay awake for several hours, turning these matters over in his mind. Presently, after a long time, he slept.
He woke in the middle of the night, to the sound of wailing. He opened his eyes; the wailing came from one of the children. He sat up, but Nicole was before him; by the time he was fully awake she was out of her bed, crouching down by a red-faced, mournful little boy sitting up and crying bitterly.
It was Willem, crying as if his heart was going to break. The girl put her arm round him and spoke to him in soft, baby French. The old man rolled out of his blanket, got up stiffly and moved over to them.
'What is it?' he enquired. 'What is the matter?'
The girl said: 'I think he has had a nightmare - that is all. Presently he will sleep again.' She turned again to comfort him.
Howard felt singularly helpless. His way with the children had been to talk to them, to treat them as equals. That simply did not work at all, unless you knew the language, and he knew no word of any language that this little Dutch boy spoke. Left to himself he might have taken him on his knee and talked to him as man to man; he could never have soothed him as this girl was soothing him.