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 Carlton 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, nothing 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 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.
She came to the hospital twice a week, then every day. Her mother was at work, and I felt the girl had time on her hands and was often lonely. She was with me when they took the last of the mask off. “Well?” I said. “Tell me the worst.
“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how you were before.” She held up a pocket mirror. My nose was broken, all right, and I had thick, bruised cheekbones, like a Cossack. For someone who had never been to war, I was amazingly the image of an old soldier.
I left the hospital on crutches. There was no such thing as therapy — you got going or you did not. The organization found me a room on Baker Street, not far from where Juliette lived with her mother, as it turned out, and they gave me low-grade and harmless work to do. As my instructor had predicted, I was let nowhere near a typewriter, and once, I remember, someone even snatched a pencil sharpener away. Juliette used to come to the office, though she wasn’t supposed to, and sit by my desk as if it were a bed. She had got rid of the uniform, but her new clothes, chosen by her mother, were English and baggy, in the grays and mustards Englishwomen favored. They seemed picked deliberately to make her creamy skin sallow, her slenderness gaunt. The mother was keeping her plain, I thought, perhaps to keep her out of trouble. Why didn’t Juliette rebel? She was eighteen by now, but forty years ago eighteen was young. I wondered why she hung around me, what she wanted. I thought I guessed, but I decided not to know. I didn’t want it said I had destroyed two items of French property — a motorcycle and a colonel’s child. It was here, in London, that I was starting to get the hang of French society. In our reduced world, everyone in it a symbol of native, inborn rank, Juliette stood higher than some random young man who had merely laid his life on the line. She had connections, simply by the nature of how things were ordered.
I asked her once if there was a way of getting a message to my mother, in Paris — just a word to say I was safe. She pretended not to hear but about a month later said, “No, it’s too dangerous. Besides, they don’t trust you.”
“Don’t trust me? Why not?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you?” I said.
“That’s different.”
Her mother was out most evenings. When Juliette was alone, I brought my rations around, and she cooked our supper. We drank — only because everybody did — replacing the whiskey in her mother’s precious Haig bottle with London tap water. Once, Juliette tried restoring the color with cold tea, and there was hell to pay. When the news came from France that her father had been arrested and identified, she came straight to me.
“I’ll never see him again,” she said. “I haven’t even got a decent snapshot of him. My mother has them all. She’s got them in a suitcase. I feel sick. Feel my forehead. Feel my cheeks.” She took my hand. “Feel the back of my neck. Feel my throat,” she said, dragging my hand. We left the office and went to her flat and pulled the blackout curtain. The sun was shining on the other side of the street, where everything was bombed, but she didn’t want to see it.