CHARLOTTE REMEMBERS FRANCE

“She had come to see the enemy as not one competing cause whose selfish aims were as defensible as any other’s, but as a plain manifestation of evil.”

Charlotte Gray was drinking tea in the kitchen. In the week she had been in the flat she had pushed back the tide of chaos. Not too much—she didn’t want to seem obtrusive; but there was now a small impetus towards order: at least the bath was clean and the bread was put back in the bin.

She was a dreamy starter of the day, didn’t like to talk for the first hour of wakefulness. Her sleeps were like death. She sunk many levels down below the light of everyday and her waking was like being drawn from the bottom of a fathomless well. The odd thing was that while she found it worked at its fastest, so she could anticipate at once what people meant and was frustrated by their inability to express it.

Her fear that she would have to bright in breakfast conversation had proved groundless. Daisy left the flat by eight to be early at her desk; whatever the excesses of the previous evening, she would be pounding down the stairs, toast in hand, to be at work before the others. The first half-hour could not be fun: Charlotte saw the level of the aspirin bottle in the bathroom, heard the early-hours returns and Daisy’s whispered cautions counterpointed by a deeper voice. But her resilience seemed limitless, and the storm-force of her evening return was anticipated by telephone calls forecasting parties.

Sally departed ten minutes after Daisy, leaving sometimes a grinning Terence to clog the bathroom basin with his sticky shaving soap and his moulting badger brush. Sally was a secretary at the headquarters of a charity who were particular about punctuality.

Dr Wolf did not begin his consultations until ten; he liked Charlotte to be there by nine-thirty so he could go through the post with her and settle her with things to do while he consulted. Even allowing Charlotte’s morning slowness, it was not an early start.

The news in the paper was gloomy. The Russians were in retreat, as the Germans drove them back from town to town; the Japanese were threatening Singapore; the Americans had in theory joined the war, but all the popular belief that this meant the Allies must win, it seemed to Charlotte they had as yet made little difference.

She resented the anguish that reading the newspaper brought and felt the news of deaths keenly; the war had aroused in her a feeling that surprised her. When she was a girl her father had taken the family to France and pointed out the million-acre graveyards of the British dead; Charlotte did not take in all he said about the war, but even at the age of seven understood that such a thing could never be endured again. An unthinking allegiance to a national cause seemed to have been the motive that led ten million men to die, and the danger of such thinking had been alive in the calculations of all the people she had known.

Yet something had changed. She had come to see the enemy as not one competing cause whose selfish aims were as defensible as any other’s, but as a plain manifestation of evil. When she told Cannerley on the train that she was patriotic, she was not saying quite what his easy smile suggested he thought; she was saying that, despite the implicit danger, and against her former judgement, she had come to feel this way. What she meant was that she had unwittingly developed an almost motherly identification with the men being killed. She despised their killers. There was no doubt in her mind; and although she was not particularly pleased to have been driven to this conviction, she saw no possibility of its changing.

There was news from France, a country she saw through the eyes of her sixteen-year-old self. The Loiseau family in their house near Chartres had an innocent severity in their approach to learning. Monsieur Loiseau worked in an engineering business and was patriotic to the point of chauvinism; it seemed natural to him that an English—Scottish, he corrected himself with heavy humour—girl should want to learn the language of Racine and Voltaire. It was natural, too, for him to insist that no English be spoken in his house and that his sons help Mlle Gray in every way they could. An unconcealed horror of ‘English’ customs made both Monsieur Loiseau and his wife anxious that Charlotte should also learn about French manners, wine, restaurants, theatre, the niceties of conversation. They were able to recreate in their ample bourgeois house a placid version of a better age, as though Verdun had never happened and as though the panic-stricken coalitions of the actual government might yet avert disaster. Madame Loiseau took Charlotte to Paris, negotiated a number of green-and-white-flanked buses, and showed her the Sainte Chapelle and the Pantheon. Afterwards Monsieur Loiseau joined them for dinner at a restaurant in the rue de Tournon. It was Charlotte’s first proper dinner, with four courses and wine from Bordeaux, accompanied by a lecture from Monsieur Loiseau on the viticultural regions of France.

Now, at the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Charlotte had walked along the brown paths with their light dusting of gravel, beside those stately railings, the Senate House was draped with an outsize Nazi flag. At the top of rue de Tournon the Luftwaffe had its headquarters: blank-eyed Nazi sentries kept guard in front of white hoardings they had erected against hurled incendiaries of suicidal acts of civilian defiance. They need hardly have bothered. In Paris the worry was about food. The papers talked of the black market and something called the ‘grey’ market, which, from what Charlotte could gather, was no more than a morally acceptable version of the black.

She was not interested in eating; she was thinking of the Jardin du Luxembourg and what it meant. In its shade, behind its small pavilions, she had imagined Gilberte and Madame Swann. Impressed by her progress in his language, Monsieur Loiseau had ceremoniously presented her with a copy of the first volume of Proust’s novel, and in the long, quiet afternoons she had read the whole sequence with incredulous pleasure. Some of it had become a little confused in her mind and, amid the shadow of the young girls among flowers, an amorous wrestle had been transported from the Champs Elysees to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Her teenage years were not so long ago, so there was no forcing of remembrance. She could still taste the red wine from the rue de Tournon, but what she felt about this country was connected to a low responding note that the book had sounded in her. It had fused ideas of love and national honour to the memory of a kind of earthly paradise—a bell ringing on the garden gate, a little phrase in a sonata—that had been betrayed from the inside. And this betrayal was bound to happen, always—in her own life and in the life of a country.

Charlotte found she was close to tears. She gathered herself and tried to smile at her foolishness. The memory of happiness was never lost; the difficulty was to re-establish the connection when the thread appeared to have been broken. France was not quite given up to the destroyers; her own life, too, was not beyond redemption.