At the tables next to ours heads turned. The matron, I just saw, before my sight grew dim with tears, was staring at me as if she would have liked to turn me into a pillar of salt on the spot, and I heard the decided click with which my mother put her cup down — one of the gestures in which she could concentrate her universal disapproval. But before she could say anything the whole episode began again from the beginning. The panes started ticking softly and a few seconds later that long-drawn-out salvo boomed through the whole room, where life again froze.
I saw my mother put her fingertips on the edge of the table, as if to calm the clattering. A second spasm of laughter went up through my intestines, and I heard myself drowning out the noise with my cackling.
I pulled my head into my shoulders, in my coffee the vibrations appeared as circles, but however hard I tried, a new cramp wrested my jaws open, and I myself no longer knew if it was laughing that I was doing, or screeching. It was more like a labour pain that wrenched my mouth open and spewed out something that could be both a cry of fear and a laugh, though I felt neither elated nor fearful.
My mother was pale, she was obviously not happy. And then I saw her look up, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. Someone must have got up from one of the tables next to ours.
“It’s all right, mademoiselle. It’s just the gun, the big gun in Diksmuide. D’you understand? The gun. We’re safe here, perfectly safe…”
The din died away again.
He pushed a handkerchief towards me. Khaki.
“Thank you, sir.”
I accepted the handkerchief, dried my eyes with it and was about to return it to the stranger, but he waved away my gesture. He was twenty-five at most, as big a child as I was, now I look back on it.
When I translated what he had said for my mother—“the cannon, the cannon of Diksmuide, Maman, he says there’s no danger”—he switched effortlessly into a French in which only a slight accent gave him away as British.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Force of habit.” He straightened his back to shake hands formally with my mother and me. “Matthew. Mathew Herbert.”
“Marianne Demont. And this is my daughter Hélène. She’s a serious young lady, Monsieur Heirbeir, but today she seems to find everything très amusant.” She was still upset, like me.
“It’s all right,” he smiled. “They’re aiming for Dunkirk, mademoiselle. They’re trying to hit the harbour.” He looked up for a moment and glanced through the window behind our back, in the direction where the town must be. “People will be having their tea in the cellar today, I fear.”
I could see that my mother wanted to ask him something, but at that moment the panes started vibrating again. The matron grabbed the side of her lectern, almost without thinking. The maid quickly stretched out to push a stack of plates deeper onto the shelf. The waiters sought the proximity of the walls.
“It’s all right…” he repeated, as he came and sat on the chair next to me, and when the ticking of the windows changed to clattering and everything juddered again, he laid his hand on mine, a gesture that did not escape my mother, and gazed into my eyes.
I looked at the raven-black curls on his forehead, the slightly pursed lips, pronounced cheekbones, and his deep-brown, almost anthracite-coloured eyes, which focused steadily on mine.
“It’s all right,” I read on his lips, since the din drowned out his words. And for the third time I heard the iron wings coming down over us, and felt the shivers from the bottom creeping into me, moving from the floorboards into the walls, from the walls into the ceiling, and from the ceiling into the candelabra over our table. And it was as if I too came to a halt. I felt his fingertips pressing so hard on mine that they had white blotches when he withdrew his hand.
“It’s all right,” his lips repeated.
HE CAME TO COLLECT US that evening, a little after dark, after asking us before he took his leave if we would like to accompany him on a little excursion to the roof of the old casino at the top of the hill. “We do it frequently, madame, for special guests. It breaks the routine a bit and I can smuggle you in.”
We were to wait in the drawing room of our boarding house, since civilians were not allowed in the street unaccompanied after sunset. My mother was suspicious, even though he had told her that his intentions were completely honourable. When after eleven a party of ten people, five of whom were civilians, gathered in the square in front of our boarding house, she was reassured.
“As you can see, Madame Demont,” he said, “I have two arms in good health, and two legs. And…” he winked at me, “while my legs are carrying me upward, my arms are available for you and your daughter, to give support, of course, should the walk prove too strenuous. At times it is on the steep side…” He spoke with a hint of his native tongue in his words, and the slight emphasis on all syllables of someone in whose mouth a foreign language does not undergo the wear and tear of daily conversations. He was also shy and tried to hide it.
“You need as many words as my daughter to explain something,” laughed my mother. “And you’re forgetting that I’m from this area. I must have climbed that mountain a hundred times before you were born.”
She pulled her gloves on jauntily and as she descended to the pavement past him she added breezily: “Allons-y, mon enfant.”
“That’s all right, ma’am,” he retorted, clearly charmed.
The party got moving. We walked ahead of my mother, next to each other, and giggled conspiratorially at the conversation that developed between her and one of the soldiers, who had decided to keep her company. He treated her to such platitudes about the “wonderful evening” and the “splendid view” that lay in store for us, without considering that my mother spoke scarcely a word of English.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying, jeune homme,” she replied stoically in French. “But I’m sure we agree.”
The evening could indeed be described as more or less wonderful. The full moon hung above the rooftops and gave the contours of the blacked-out houses the look of massive objects, all equally colourless, bathed in tints of grey and white like us, who seemed to be walking not through a real world, but a world of used-up light that must once have been reflected from things and was now travelling, more and more ethereal, through space and time.
We said little. Sometimes I felt he was looking at me and sometimes I looked at him — the moonlight made his face pale and his eyes even darker. When our eyes happened to meet, we exchanged a shy smile, and we listened to the sound of the footsteps on the cobbles.
Now that the slope was getting steeper and we gradually began to climb above the roofs, the conversations petered out. Only somewhere at the front did an imposing lady, an American who by the sound of it was reporting for some magazine or other, go on indefatigably expanding on the other towns close to the front, which she and a taciturn thin man, who seemed to stand in the same relationship to her as a flagpole to the flag, had obviously previously called at. She regularly voiced exclamations such as “Thrilling, dear captain!” or “Ghastly!”—eruptions at which the two of us giggled every time, more to feed our own silent understanding than out of pleasure.