I passed silent, dilapidated farms, with sagging barns and closed windows. I passed grey fields in which cows stood like grubby brown-and-white jigsaws, frozen saliva hanging from their hairy lips. I passed shuttered houses, and slanting fields that went down to the dark winter river. The only sign of life that I saw was a tractor, its wheels so caked with ochre clay that they were twice their normal size, standing by the side of the road with its motor running. There was nobody in it.
Eventually, the winding road took me down between rough stone walls, under a tangled arcade of leafless trees, and over the bridge at Ouilly. I kept a lookout for the tank the old cousins had talked about, but the first time I missed it altogether; and I spent five minutes wrestling the stupid car back around the way it had come, stalling twice and almost getting jammed in a farm gateway. In the greasy farmyard, I saw a stable door open, and an old woman with a grey face and a white lace cap stare out at me with suspicion, but then the door closed again, and I banged the 2CV into something resembling second gear and roared back down the road.
You could have missed the tank in broad daylight, let alone at dusk in the middle of a freezing Norman winter. Just as I came around the curve of the road, I saw it, and I managed to pull up a few yards away, with the Citröen’s suspension complaining and groaning. I stepped out of the car into a cold pile of cow dung, but at least when it’s chilled like that it doesn’t smell. I scraped my shoe on a rock by the side of the road and then walked back to look at the tank.
It was dark and bulky, but surprisingly small. I guess we’re so used to enormous Army tanks these days that we forget how tiny the tanks of World War II actually were. Its surface was black and scaly with rust, and it was so interwoven with the hedge that it looked like something out of Sleeping Beauty, with thorns and brambles twisted around its turret, laced in and out of its tracks, and wound around its stumpy cannon. I didn’t know what kind of a tank it was, but I guessed it was maybe a Sherman or something like that. It was obviously American: there was a faded and rusted white star on its side, and a painting of some kind that time and the weather had just about obliterated. I kicked the tank, and it responded with a dull, empty booming sound.
A woman came walking slowly along the road with an aluminium milk pail. She eyed me cautiously as she approached, but as she drew near she stopped and laid down her pail. She was quite young, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and she wore a red spotted headscarf. She was obviously the farmer’s daughter. Her hands were rough from pulling cows’ udders in cold dawn barns, and her cheeks were bright crimson, like a painted peasant doll’s. I said, “Bonjour, mam’selle,” and she nodded in careful reply.
She said, “You are American?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought so. Only Americans stop and look.”
“You speak good English.”
She didn’t smile. “I was au-pair in England, in Pinner, for three years.”
“But then you came back to the farm?”
“My mother died. My father was all alone.”
I said, “He has a loyal daughter.”
“Yes,” she said, lowering her eyes. “But I expect I will go away again one day. It’s very solitaire out here. Very lonesome.”
I turned back to the grim brooding bulk of the abandoned tank. “I was told this was haunted,” I said. “At night, you can hear the crew talking.”
The girl said nothing.
I waited for a while, and then turned again and looked across the road at her. “Is that true, do you think?” I asked her. “That it’s haunted?”
“You mustn’t speak about it,” she said. “If you speak about it, it turns the milk.”
I glanced down at her aluminium pail. “You’re serious? If you speak about the ghosts in the tank, the milk goes bad?”
She whispered, “Yes.”
I thought I’d heard everything, but this was amazing. Here, in modern France, an intelligent young lady was whispering in the presence of a beaten-up old Sherman tank, in case her fresh milk curdled. I rested my hand on the tank’s cold rusted mudguard, and I felt as though I’d found something quite special. Roger would have adored it.
“Have you heard the ghosts yourself?” I asked her.
She quickly shook her head.
“Do you know anybody who has? Anybody I could speak to?”
She picked up her pail, and started to walk off down the road. But I crossed over and kept pace with her, even though she wouldn’t look at me, and wouldn’t answer.
“I don’t want to be nosey, mam’selle. But we’re getting a book together, all about D-Day and what happened afterwards. And this seems like the kind of story I could really use. I mean it. Surely someone’s heard the voices, if they’re real?”
She stopped walking, and stared at me hard. She was quite pretty for a Norman peasant. She had that straight nose you see on eleventh-century women in the Bayeux tapestry, and opalescent green eyes. Underneath her mud-spattered jerkin and her sensible skirt and her rubber boots, she had quite a noticeable figure, too.
I said, “I don’t know what you’ve got to be so sensitive about. It’s only a story, right? I mean, ghosts don’t exist, right?”
She kept staring. Then she said, “It’s not a ghost, it’s different from that.”
“What do you mean, different?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She started walking again, and this time she walked so quickly I had difficulty keeping up. I guess if you walk three miles to the cowsheds and back twice a day, your leg muscles get themselves built up pretty tough. By the time we’d reached the mossy stone gate where I’d turned my car round, I was wheezing for breath, and my throat was sore from the chill foggy air.
“This is my farm,” she said. “I have to go in now.”
“You won’t tell me any more?”
“There’s nothing to tell. The tank has been there since the war. That’s more than thirty years, isn’t it? How could you hear voices in a tank after thirty years?”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” I told her.
She turned her face away in profile. She had sad, curved lips; and with that straight aristocratic nose, she was almost beautiful. I said, “Will you tell me your name?”
She gave a small, fleeting smile. “Madeleine Passerelle. Et vous?”
“Dan, short for Daniel, McCook.”
The girl extended her hand, and we shook. “I am pleased to have made your acquaintance,” she said. “Now I must go.”
“Can I see you again? I’m up here again tomorrow. I have a map to finish.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not trying to pick you up,” I assured her. “Maybe we could just go for a drink. Do you have a bar around here?”
I looked around at the cold soggy countryside, and the mournful cows gathering at the fence across the road.
“Well, maybe a small hotel?” I corrected myself.
Madeleine swung her pail of milk. “I think I am too busy,” she said. “And besides, my father needs a lot of care.”
“Who’s the old woman?”
“Which old woman?”
“The old woman I saw at the stable door when I turned my car round. She had a white lace cap.”
“Oh… that’s Eloise. She’s lived at the farm all her life. She nursed my mother when she was sick. Now, there’s someone to speak to if you’re interested in stories about the tank. She believes in every superstition.”
I coughed in the cold twilight. “Could I speak to her now?”
Madeleine said: “Not tonight. Perhaps another day.”