Silent Parts Read online

  But down below, Colombe goes on with the sordid business of slaughtering geese. He’s conscious of wasted opportunities, of lethargy and self-deceit banking up behind this horrible morning. All along he has clung to the fiction that he would give himself up in his own good time. The opportune moment was what he’d been waiting for, a declaration of peace, a truce, an amnesty, utter victory or utter defeat, anything that he might use to his advantage. Pure evasions. But he had always assumed he would have time to quit her house. If he is found here, she will have no room to argue her innocence. He must get out; hide among the roses until there is an opportunity to see her. It might be just a five-second parting, but he can’t go without it.

  Quickly now, he sets about removing the traces of his stay. He tears his civilian clothes from his body. He throws on his khaki shirt and tunic, wriggles and shoves and drags his booted feet through the legs of his trousers and sits on the floor to wind his puttees up his calves. He strips the bed and remakes it meticulously, hoping to create the impression it hasn’t been slept in for months. Shaving brush and razor disappear into the washstand, clothing into the wardrobe, everything but the trousers Colombe lengthened to fit him. Can’t think where he will get rid of these, somewhere on the road perhaps, though for now they are useful in drying the ewer after he’s emptied the soapy water into the chamber pot. One last look about the room – clean but for a bloom of plaster dust on the dark wainscotting. Satisfied, he tumbles down the stairs and through to the kitchen to dispose of last night’s effluvium. The little red aeroplane above the trough no longer warns; it accuses him of inaction. He clicks open the door. The sun is painfully bright, but the twenty yards to the collapsed fence seem clear. Nevertheless, he waits for his eyes to adjust, until they are sharp enough to discern the slight smoke-residue of last night’s fires over Rouen. Then he goes out briskly past the well and scuttles into the tangle of roses.

  Crouched in the gloom, he listens to the voices from the unseen side of the house. What he hears is a woman’s laughter. It might not be Colombe’s, but he swells with admiration for her. How does she manage it? How does she keep her card-player’s poise, when surely she must feel sick inside?

  Midday comes and goes and still there are regular commotions. He welcomes the intervals of silence then does nothing because he can’t be sure that she is alone. He feels the afternoon stretching on, robbing him of clarity. Through a narrow vista of canes he stares miserably out at the fringed paddocks diminishing like stepping stones away to Maromme. The wind comes in spasmodic puffs, causing a rain of petals. Then all at once he looks up, compelled to listen. The house and yard are quiet. There is only the hiss of insects. Yet he feels called, as if Colombe has shouted. He sniffs at something strange, an aroma like hot butter. Impossible. Colombe buys margarine. Then it’s gone, lost in the orchestral scents of roses, dust and wind-blown dung. But undoubtedly she has slipped inside. She is cooking. A moment later it’s back, surging over the turf, penetrating the garden and rose-plot: fried onions and garlic and thyme, the same piercing blend that lurked in the restaurants of Rouen, but fresher, for the first time delicious and personal. He is astonished that she chooses this moment. In two months she has never prepared anything elaborate, and now, in spite of marauding outsiders and a great rift of hopelessness, she wedges open the kitchen door and cooks a hot meal like a written invitation to his nose and stomach. With this she drives a deliberate hiatus into this ruinous day. She calls him to shake off bad feeling. She calls him to a clean goodbye, such as they should have had if he’d been alert and disciplined. She has an aptness of feeling. They need this, else they belittle everything that has gone before.

  He moves quickly across to the house and stands on the threshold, peering into the diminished light. He discovers her shape, then her face. Her stare is uncertain, holding nothing of her earlier ferocity. He catches at her quick beat of distress, baffled until he guesses that she is disconcerted to see him dressed in khaki. It comes to him that she has not been thinking as he has. The realisation carries a thump of elation: she doesn’t want him to go! Despite everything, she won’t let him go! A bloating heat floods his chest. His throat shudders. In response, her expression is suddenly shy and self-deprecating, as if asking: ‘Am I crazy?’ He is grateful for silence. If he were to attempt to speak, it would be a sort of bleeding. He would bleed joy and bewildered devotion, but also shame – shame because her choice is so stunningly alien to him. No, not her choice. Her instinct. Surely he possesses it too. He must. Yet the initiative is hers. She is the one who fights so rashly, so vainly, for ascendency over events. She won’t let him go! She is prepared to run the risk, to go on dodging suspicious friends and neighbours. She is willing to gamble. And if she can find the courage, so must he!

  He pulls the door shut behind him, watching her bring the hot skillet from the fire to the table. She shakes the coins in her pocket. ‘Musique!’ she says, feigning lightness.

  Together they hover over the food. Having mixed maize-flour batter in a ceramic bowl, she chops bacon, the brown meat seamed with fat as white as quartz. Her coins jingle again as her knife clatters against the board. Eager to contribute, he peels the leathery tops from field mushrooms, and feels the pressure of her hip against his leg. She lumps the fried onions and fresh ingredients into the batter and smears her skillet with fresh margarine. Then, with a brief touch of his arm with her greasy hand, she invites him to the fire to witness the cooking. He follows at once, moved and overwhelmed to find himself so valued, perhaps loved. It doesn’t seem possible. It is a vast inversion, an incalculable miracle. She is willing to gamble for him, to bet blindly as if he contains all the precious qualities of her imagination. He wants to believe her. He is queasy with joy and uncertainty. She has such an inadequate grasp of the odds. If she knew it was the widow’s son who brought him here, would she be so decided?

  twenty-eight

  I remember when it began, when the men went off spoiling for a fight. We were going to teach those Prussians a lesson. We were going to even up for the last time, for Alsace and Lorraine. The pork butcher in Maromme put a sign on his closed-up shop: Gone to Berlin. Back in two weeks. There’s confidence for you. People said we needed a good fight. After forty years it was overdue. You heard them talking in the street, cleverer people than me. War was inevitable. War would bring us together. People looked like they’d seen an angel. There was love in their eyes. We wanted a great misery for everyone to share in.

  Well, we got it. Our prayers were answered.

  I was at that morbid age when you look around and think you know something. I thought: This is a catastrophe and we go to it in our sleep. Don’t mistake me. I was no better than anyone else. I felt it too.

  The best joke I heard was that the Germans were doing our souls a favour. Ordinarily you waste so much energy worrying who is with you and who is against you. When war comes everything is clear. The enemy looks like this, he speaks like this. Now we know who he is we can all hate him together. In our little village it was very emotional. The government didn’t have to preach. Up went the mobilisation poster and that was it. People cried with relief. What could the Boches do to us when all at once you could trust your neighbour? When we were one big family? Love. We did it for love.

  People are stupid. I am stupid. How many bad bargains do we accept with open eyes, hoping for the best? I have no right to turn vicious. I said yes with everyone else. And I’m not the only woman to lose someone. You hear them say, ‘I died with my son, I died with my husband.’ I never had the opportunity to be reborn a martyr. Leon excluded my name from the notice. Every relation was there at the funeral, on his side and mine. I did not exist. It’s not clear how the boy was born. Maybe he came into existence with a puff of smoke, a magician’s trick.

  After that I was like a spat-out pip. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me I was a copy of my mother-in-law. And then a copy of my own mother. Everyone says you becom
e your parents. It’s one of those truths you don’t believe until it happens. You know her insides were eaten out with drink. She died aged forty-nine not recognising any of us. I used to watch her guzzle a bottle in the afternoon, a bottle after dark. And when there was no wine and no money she cried like an imbecile. I myself was in danger, before the Australian arrived. Gabrielle Imbert said I smelled like the inside of a wine cask. She said do I want them to throw me out? The machines were hazardous. We had to be alert. That’s when I started marking my bottles. I got it down to a third an evening. Very disciplined. I had control. One third and no more. You could say I was picking up. I had one little ambition – to put away 5,000 francs so I could rot comfortably in a maison de retraite. I thought I might go to my grave with a better class of person. I was on target. Another year and I’d have got there. But then a big clown fell to earth to torment me. He said he was afraid!

  I remember when Joseph was very young: if something worried or hurt him he cried as if pain was invented by the Almighty for no one but him. It was the same with the Australian. ‘Afraid,’ he said, as if he had the monopoly. As a mother I tried to smooth away my son’s pain, but to achieve this for an adult man – impossible. Or maybe I was successful. A frightened man doesn’t sing from his window. I should have left him his fear. I had enough troubles without my mind leaping and jumping on his behalf. When the house became unsafe, what then? Where would I put him? I kept an eye out for vacant buildings. A barn, a dry spot under a bridge, any possible haven. That’s how it was, always trying to think ahead, poking my nose in here, listening, planning, imagining, dreading the days when he was left alone. When a person can’t speak, you see him as childlike. At least that is my understanding of why I couldn’t trust him to take sensible precautions. I agonised, but to him, not a word. My mistake. I should have snapped him awake. I should have screamed some sense into him. Then he mightn’t have sung from his window.

  In that last week I dreamt the police came while I was away in town. When I returned they said, ‘Do you know this man?’ Then I woke up. It haunted me. I imagined I would behave like Peter. ‘No,’ I would say, ‘I have never seen him before. Where did you find him? In the house! My God!’ I hated myself but was sure I would be sensible. You never know what you’ll do. You look over your shoulder, vigilant and scheming, but really there’s no point looking because you’re as ignorant as those boys who huddle from bombs. Maybe you hear it whistling through the sky, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It still comes.

  twenty-nine

  In the early morning, thirty minutes after she has left for work, he gnaws bread at her kitchen table. He wears his uniform, though he is still unsure whether he will go. He remains soft-centred with the sweetness of her touch. Sometimes he thinks that what they shared in the darkness amounts to a pledge: that he will stay with her, come what may. Sometimes it seems a pitiable act, something clutched at while falling. Rather than reach a conclusion, he bites and sucks his bread. At the same time he examines the child’s toy that Colombe set up as a spur to vigilance. He sees that it is crudely carved from several pieces of fine-grained wood, and held together with glue and tacks. A matchstick gun is mounted on the nose behind the fused propeller. It seems probable that it belongs to the widow’s son. He imagines a father going to considerable trouble to please his child. Yet it strikes him that as a gift, even as a crafted object, it is ugly. Doubtless he’s a poor judge, out of touch, indifferent to the mysterious beauty of machinery. As the peaceable son of a peaceable father in peaceful times he was given books – Malory, Stevenson, Kingsley . . . There was any amount of killing but it took place in a limbo time that preceded the known world. He never felt the least desire to grasp Excalibur in his hands. He feels a certain satisfaction at this, as if it establishes his primal innocence or a secret superiority.

  But his pleasure is shattered by sudden impact. There is a racket at the front door, a determined fist. His impulse is to run, to escape out the kitchen door. But as he begins to move there’s a second barrage and he hesitates. If they’re knocking so insistently at the front, surely they will have covered the back. And if he runs they’ll shoot.

  He decides it would be futile to try to hide within the house. In the end they will find him and he doesn’t want the indignity of being dragged from under a bed. Best if they find him sitting calmly. ‘The prisoner did not resist and was in every way cooperative . . . ’ But how can he let them take him under her roof? Poor woman! What has he done to her? She can expect hard labour.

  The fist falls silent. They will be considering what to do, whether to hail him, whether to wriggle in through the broken side window or push in a door. As the silence becomes hard and crystalline he leaves the kitchen and edges along the passageway. Entering the salon, he’s startled by an abrupt clank – a blow of metal on metal. Not within the house, or even close. Then it hits him: the barn. They’re breaking into the barn. All he can think is that the boy must have seen him there, and told the police that this is where he sleeps. It doesn’t change anything. He remains trapped. At the front door he draws a long breath then speaks loudly through the panels: ‘I’m coming out. I don’t have a weapon. I surrender.’ Temples throbbing, he flicks the latch, turns the handle and eases the door slowly open. The day floods into the dark entrance hall and he steps blindly out into the light with his hands on his head. He flinches in expectation of a blow or at least the force of grappling hands. There is nothing. On the top step he pauses, searching the garden. No one. The gate stands open. Are they inviting him to run? He has heard of British police who would rather shoot a deserter than bring him in alive, especially if the deserter is an Australian and not subject to the death penalty. At the same time there is the lure of complete escape. Of course he’s sceptical, and cautious, keeping his hands up where they can be seen as he moves down onto the pathway. The road beyond the brushwood fence is clear. The yard is deserted. And yet he knows they’re watching.

  It occurs to him he should shout his surrender out loud so there can be no misunderstandings, but he’s distracted by a ruckus in the barn – an exasperated male voice and the usual pandemonium of geese. Now that he looks he can see the door is slightly open, the heavy padlock hanging loose on a mutilated loop of iron rod. The light steel hammer that ordinarily hangs in a shroud of spider webs from the eave, a bafflingly specialised tool with a small hexagonal head the size of a thumbnail, lies discarded on the bricks. From inside comes a gravelly gasp and a cough. His chest tightens. The geese trumpet furiously and he peers hard into and beyond the greenhouses. He turns in a circle to check again the gate and hedgerow. Is he so stupid? So ignorant? Since when do military police bother with geese? The anger flickers in his limbs. His hands drift tentatively down from his head and because no one shoots or shouts at him he advances to the part-open door where at the same instant a man emerges, carelessly, then astonished. Not three feet apart they face each other and in the shortest possible time Harry vacillates between recognition and doubt, restrained by a vague uncertainty – until he glances down at the dirty red trousers. He is aware of many things at once: his rage rising like something expelled from his stomach, the white gander hanging dead in the soldier’s hand, the look of hastily banished shock, the quick-witted leap of appraisal and the beginnings of a beguiling smile. But it’s only a beginning. It has no time to blossom. Because Harry has the hammer in his hand. The man parries belatedly with a forearm and a limp bird. He falls gracelessly, all angular joints and sprawled limbs. His skull bounces on the bricks. The geese stampede from the barn. In the midst of the welter Harry stoops or hovers, amazed. Where exactly he struck him is unclear – but somewhere hard, somewhere firm and now staved in below the gore. Even with his anger still humming he gropes after some half-learnt first-aid procedure. Staunch the bleeding. But how? He would have to explore with his bare hands. He doubts he’s capable. And surely there’s little point. The soldier trembles. His eye is distended, weeping blood. Harry
remembers it as a well-proportioned face. In that fleeting moment he’d seen a man confident of his powers. He watches the hand shiver less vigorously; sees it cease and lie still for several seconds before spasming back to life. And though he’s terrified of what he’s done, a part of him drums with righteousness. He’s not ashamed; wouldn’t take back this one winning blow if he could.

  But this passes. And then there is only a dying man and impenetrable consequences. Harry listens to his rough breathing and wishes it would end. Nothing could be worse than seeing him regain consciousness. He would be obliged to go looking for help – as if there was hope. ‘Oh bloody Jesus!’ he bawls, not a prayer, just despair and incomprehension. A man killed. Killed! And out of nothing. He can’t see how it’s possible – the unlucky provocation of the man’s face, Harry’s unaccustomed rage, a single inexpert blow that instead of glancing or sailing aside couldn’t have been more fatally aimed.

  Still, he must do something. At the very least drag him out of sight. He throws the gander through the open doorway, then the fallen hammer, which rings on the stones. And along with his desire for concealment comes a specious concern for the victim’s comfort. If left there in the sun he will certainly dehydrate. Even such a hard death might be made a little softer. He’s surprised at the soldier’s lightness – mere bones and cloth. His head judders. His shirt mops a path through the blood. In the gloom of the barn he quivers less and less. Harry thinks that out of decency he should remain there with him, but he doesn’t feel decent. He feels bloodied, and is conscious of the minutes flying by. He steps out into the light and skirting the smeared bricks, notices something hooked on one of the potted roses: a military cap. Lifting it off, he remembers back several weeks to a bright parrot of a man whose stance was at once lethargic and invincible. He imagines a certain touchiness, a disabled patriot who believed he was owed the world. Such a regular figure on the Rouen road, he must be known. The soldier with the red trousers, he told Colombe, and she placed him at once. Probably knows his village or farm. Probably knows his parents or wife or the circumstances of his discharge from the army. No good supposing he won’t be missed. ‘You’re good and fucked, Harry-lad!’ comes a voice. The accent is unmistakably Suffolk. ‘Good and fucked, you and your desires!’ And because it seems a fair appraisal, and because in any case he has always deferred to the opinions of the old Suffolkers, he lobs the cap into the barn and doesn’t bother to shut the door. The blood remains like a carpet on the bricks, too broad to even begin to scrub away. Disgusted, he jogs along beside the glasshouses then behind the kitchen to the well. He pumps water into the bucket then stands it on the turf. He removes his greatcoat and dunks the sleeve, rubbing and squeezing so the water is soon flushed pink. In exerting himself he relives the charge in his limbs, his unaccustomed fluidity, the impact of metal on bone. The repetition is distressing, in itself and because it can’t be stopped. How can he think with a head full of slaughter? Space. He needs space and the respite of time. Throwing his coat over his shoulder, he strides over the fallen fence and weaves a path through the roses till he has the prospect of open fields. He edges around the dam, treks fifty yards into the adjoining paddock and simply drops to the ground and howls. He curls up and howls under the bright sun and perfectly blue sky of his father’s cherished land; howls for his helplessness and spattered vanity. His chin burrows into the dirt. He inhales dust and surrenders. ‘Nothing from me!’ he blurts. ‘Nothing good!’ A plea or an apology, he has no idea. Nor can he think whom he might be addressing. Certainly not the man in the barn. Yet he finds it strangely consoling. Between eruptions he’s almost silent. And with a quieter body comes a wheedling mind: The man was a thief! Robbing a woman! Who wouldn’t have knocked him down? And that was all he intended, if he intended anything, coming across him without warning – to knock him down, no more.