Miss Carter's War Page 33

  Then Marguerite saw him. A man wearing a leather sheepskin-lined flying jacket walked unsteadily across the road, weaving between the traffic, and when he got to the island, opened a shooting stick and, sitting with his back to the now unveiled statue, took a swig from a hipflask, before training a pair of binoculars at the porch of Australia House opposite. Two policemen rushed to his side, but hesitated. They chatted briefly and then, following his pointed finger, and using the proffered glasses, looked up at the sculpture of a very explicitly naked man, with four horses curiously lying down with their front hooves waving in the air. Jimmy, his thick hair greying and with a bit of a paunch, but still dashingly handsome, had the policemen roaring with laughter, until a superior officer rushed up to them, and barked an order. The policemen quickly grabbed Jimmy and were frogmarching him away, when Stan broke from the astonished onlookers and, after a brief chat with the constables, led a laughing Jimmy across the road, to cheers from the crowd.

  Marguerite caught up with them, and watched as Stan angrily pushed Jimmy into a doorway.

  ‘You stupid bastard. What did you think you were doing?’

  ‘Well, it’s a more amusing work of art than a statue of Butcher Harris.’

  ‘You were insulting the Queen Mother and all our comrades.’

  Jimmy shouted, ‘No, they were insulting us. By paying tribute to a man who misled and destroyed 50,000 of us, and untold thousands of Germans. If they want to give us a statue, I’d rather it was that bollock-naked man and his daft horses than that bastard.’

  ‘Jimmy, you’re drunk.’

  Jimmy drew back his fist as if to punch Stan, and Marguerite stepped forward.

  ‘Jimmy, don’t.’

  Both men wheeled round. Jimmy, clinging to Stan, turned his head away and muttered, ‘No, no, not you. Go away.’

  Pushing him off, Stan said, ‘Miss Carter—’

  ‘Marguerite, Stan – please.’

  ‘Marguerite, I’m sorry to do this to you, but my wife will kill me if I don’t get back – will you take over here?’

  Jimmy roared with laughter.

  ‘God yes, she’ll have your guts for garters for being with me, the cow.’

  Stan ignored him.

  ‘Will you take care of him, Marguerite? I seem to remember I asked you that once before.’

  He kissed her on the cheek, gave a despairing look to Jimmy, now swaying, moaning, with his face covered by both hands, and rushed off up the Strand.

  ‘There he goes – back to Mummy. He used to be free like me, now he’s a bloody accountant with a detached house in Tunbridge Wells.’

  ‘Right, Jimmy. Let’s get some coffee down you.’

  ‘I’d rather have a drink.’

  ‘I’m sure you would.’

  She found a quiet café in one of the back streets.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘Not today. I don’t do a lot of eating.’

  Marguerite ordered him some fish and chips and a pot of black coffee. After a while, he put down his knife and fork and stared at her. There it was – the crooked smile.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s you. Still as beautiful as ever. Sexy—’ He reached to take her hand. She snatched it away.

  ‘Jimmy, stop it. Don’t be a fool. It’s me, remember.’

  ‘Sorry, old girl. Old habits die hard.’

  Marguerite looked at his shaking hands.

  ‘How are you keeping?’

  ‘Oh I’m fine. Busy – you know.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Oh the usual. Ducking and diving. Make a bit on the horses. Thus the gear.’ He indicated the shooting stick and binoculars.

  ‘Sounds chancy.’

  ‘Oh, some you win, some you lose.’

  She looked at the frayed cuffs on his shirt, which she had first noticed when she took off his flying jacket.

  ‘Yes, sorry about the shirt. I put this old one on because I thought I might be arrested. No point in dressing up for jankers.’

  ‘Why did you do that, Jimmy?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Bit nutty really. It was for my muckers. All the stuff that’s come out since the war. The top brass, the politicians, Churchill, all that “let them reap the whirlwind” stuff. And we believed them. That it was necessary. Then I saw an exhibition of photos of Dresden after the raids. I’d imagined it in my nightmares but it was worse. The total desolation, the burnt bodies, the women, the children. We created hell on earth. I did.’

  Now she took his hand.

  ‘It’s war, Jimmy. It’s filthy.’

  ‘Yes, there’s not many of us left who remember just how filthy. The “We won the war” shit. It started again with the Falklands. “Gotcha”. Obscene. At what cost? Eh, Marguerite, who are the heroes, eh?’

  ‘Jimmy, you have to move on. It’s over.’

  ‘Yes, but they keep trying to mythologise it all with statues and ceremonies. Turning it into a time of glory. The British at their best. “War criminals. Mass murderers”. That’s what those people in the street said. I used to think it was unfair to say that, but not any more. It’s no excuse really, but I was only a lad, doing what I thought was right, but the men in charge, including Harris, were adults and should have known better. Anyway, enough about me. What about you? Tony? Donald?’

  When Marguerite told him about their deaths, Jimmy was aghast.

  ‘How come I’m still living and they’re dead? Natural selection doesn’t seem to be working. I’m afraid I have to have another drink. Can we find a pub? I’m a bit of an alkie, you see.’

  ‘Apart from your betting, how do you pay for your drinks, Jimmy?’

  ‘Oh you know, a bit of this, a bit of that. Bar work.’

  ‘No rich girlfriends?’

  ‘Not rich, no. ’Fraid not. I’ve gone a bit downmarket. I work for an escort agency occasionally. Old girls from the sticks who’ve lost their husbands one way or another and need someone to accompany them to the theatre or a meal. They’re lonely, poor old things. No hanky-panky, I’m afraid. I’m game, but they’re usually not.’

  ‘And where do you live?’

  ‘I’ve got a nice house in – No, shut up, Jim. I don’t have to pretend to you, do I, Skylark? Truth is, I’ve ended up in that bedsit in Pimlico I was so afraid of. Between you and me and the gatepost it’s pretty bloody depressing.’

  ‘Maybe I can help there.’

  Marguerite took the parcel she had been carrying and gave it to Jimmy.

  ‘A present.’

  He put the parcel on the table and undid the brown paper and then the tissue beneath. For a long time he sat completely still, no movement bar a tear that appeared in the corner of his eye and ran down his cheek.

  ‘I don’t understand. Is this for me?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure Donald would rather you had the Palmer than anyone else.’

  Jimmy was now holding his trembling hands above the painting, moving them gently from side to side as if stroking it or casting a spell.

  ‘It’s worth a lot of money, Jimmy. You can sell it and get somewhere decent to live.’

  ‘I don’t need to. With this on the wall, anywhere is paradise. I will never, never, never part with it. I don’t deserve it, but no one in the world, apart from Donald, would cherish it as much as I will. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘That’s a first for you.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘What I’ll give you is to get out of your life again. Oh and maybe this.’ He dug into the pocket of his flying jacket and brought out a battered tobacco tin. ‘I was going to throw it at the bloody statue, then it seemed a futile gesture.’

  Marguerite opened the tin. Inside was his DFC medal.

  ‘It’s a bit grimy and it smells of tobacco but it’s the only thing I’ve ever achieved in my life – even if under false pretences – which is fitting really. I’d like you to have it.’

  ‘Thank you, Jimmy. I’m very honoured.’

  ‘Now, Skylark, please go,
or I’ll start trying to con you into thinking we can start again and, even though I can tell you are lonely, I am a disaster area. Alcoholic. A dedicated failure, a foolish man, I would break your heart all over again.’

  ‘I know you would, Jimmy. Goodbye, my dear.’

  She walked to the door of the café. When she turned back to wave, Jimmy did not notice; he was too engrossed in gazing at his painting with simple, unfeigned wonderment.

  Chapter 48

  Marguerite could scarcely believe that it was fifty years since the end of the war. Her wounds though superficially healed still ran deep. Three years had passed since her farewell to Jimmy but she still thought of him. Not only was she saddened by the husk of the ebullient man she had known, but his abhorrence of his participation in the war had stirred up her own disquiet about hers. Now there was to be a public hullabaloo to mark the anniversary. Since most of the country didn’t even bother to be silent for one minute, let alone the traditional three on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, she was cynical about the value of that.

  As she watched on television an event taking place on Horse Guards Parade, she yearned for Tony to send it up, to counterbalance her abhorrence of the triumphalism of the marching bands, and swirling bagpipes and the sentimentality of the celestial choirs, interspersed with distinguished thespians giving their all with Kipling and Blake. No Sassoon or Owen, needless to say. She wondered what the 1990s children made of the staged street parties, with their grandparents creakily demonstrating an embarrassing dance called the jitterbug, and crying over an old lady called Vera Lynn, singing an uncool song about Dover, when to them the war was just a boring part of their History syllabus.

  She made up her mind to make an effort to participate out of respect for the dwindling numbers of fellow survivors. She stood in the Mall and watched a curious ramshackle little parade of restored Army vehicles, tanks, Red Cross ambulances, and jeeps carrying Chelsea Pensioners. They were all immaculate; not a sign of mud, bullet holes or blood. A Lancaster bomber flew over and dropped a million poppies, which created a somewhat prettier picture than the one that haunted Jimmy. The event was to raise money for victims of the war. It was a pity Jimmy, Moira, Mrs Schneider, and a generation of damaged wartime children like Elsie and Irene, couldn’t have benefited. But their injuries were not manifest.

  As Marguerite wandered the streets, trying to enter into the party spirit, she felt more and more wretched. She thought there was nowhere lonelier than London when everyone, except you, is enjoying one of its periodic knees-ups. But then her memories of the end of the war were not of the rejoicing taking place in England that she had read about and heard on the radio in France. The final battle to oust the Nazi regime in the Vaucluse was grim but necessary. The aftermath bore no resemblance to these jolly, warm-hearted celebrations.

  For a while the man’s hand tries to catch hold of the lamp-post, but his body swings away and eventually he hangs limp and his screams stop.

  Sitting in her flat on the night of May the 8th, listening to the drunken revelry going on in Tony’s flat above, Marguerite felt enraged that they were using something that they knew nothing about as an excuse for a party. With their cushy lives how could they understand what it had been like? She hated their happiness. She wanted to go up there and tell these carefree youngsters about the images gouged into her brain. About Ruby Eisenberg who, after the liberation of Auschwitz, made her way, with millions of other displaced persons wandering around Europe, to Apt, where she hoped to find her nephew, Jacob, all her other relatives having been killed by the Nazis. It fell to Marguerite to break the news that he was dead too, having sacrificed his life to save hers.

  He writhes in agony, the blood he sheds for her saturates his clothing and the ground where he stumbles, still trying to deflect the bullets from her.

  She would tell these baying members of the consumer society upstairs about her friend Rachel, who ended up in a camp where for days she lay on a wooden bunk next to a rotting corpse so that she could fool the bestial guard into giving her its ration of stale bread. Where the fashion of the day was rags that could be seen to move because of the lice feeding on your body. Where the coiffure was a shaved head and pubic hair, and the only ornamentation a tattoo reducing you to a number rather than a human being with a name. Where the ubiquitous perfume was the stench of putrefying bodies and if, like Rachel, your tenuous luck ran out, Zyclon B gas. Enjoying their nice jobs in an affluent society, did they know, had they been taught, that just over fifty years ago, during this war that the pretty parades and jolly parties were celebrating, a whole army of people were involved in the industry of methodically, effectively, murdering en masse anyone who differed from their twisted ideology?

  Marguerite tried to restrain her frantic rage. Her mind was running out of control. She was pacing dementedly round the room, fists clenched, muttering to herself. Like poor Ethel. What on earth was she thinking? She didn’t know these young people. Was it not good that they had no concept of these horrors? Wasn’t that what she had spent her life doing, trying to build a better world? Trying ‘not to do nothing’?

  You have a mission. A vision of a better world.

  Marcel, Marcel. Her shrivelled, unloved body longed for his arms to enfold it. To hear him laugh at her, to reason, to comfort, to calm, as he had when her skin was firm and aware. How was he feeling on this fiftieth anniversary? Was he celebrating with grandchildren, content, or was the census right and he was alone, like her, wondering where his life had gone? What he had achieved? Whether it had been worth it?

  ‘I will always love you. Till the day I die.’

  As the noise level of the party above rose, she could not be bothered to rap on the ceiling with the broom. She sat remembering the utter silence of the nights in Les Galets once the crickets had stopped and the shutters were closed. Was it still like that? Did she dare to find out?

  What had she to lose? A few years before death, becoming increasingly batty, roaming around the streets of London talking to herself, feeling hatred for young people who had done no harm other than to have a party? The nightmare of the dementia ward lurking.

  ‘Don’t be a coward like me.’

  ‘No, Tony, you weren’t, but I am. I have things to confront and I bloody well will.’

  The next day she went to a travel agent and booked a flight to Marseilles.

  Chapter 49

  Thus it was that Marguerite found herself going through security at Gatwick with nary a glance from the staff towards her or her suitcase. They were too busy searching the nubile girl behind her in the queue to worry about the old crone that she had become. Marguerite stood for a while enjoying the girl’s insouciance. This needless procedure was an insignificant hold-up in the headlong race of her burgeoning life. She did hesitate momentarily when a funny old lady touched her arm and muttered, ‘Carpe diem, carpe diem.’

  Accustomed to compliments, the girl flashed an automatic smile. ‘Thank you so much, that’s very kind,’ and rushed towards her future. Resisting her teacher’s instinct to correct the misinterpretation, Marguerite steeled herself to fly to Marseilles and face her past.

  As she got onto the plane amidst the chattering holidaymakers and was welcomed aboard by a chirpy air hostess Marguerite found herself remembering a very different departure. On the pitch-black airstrip, the Lysander’s propeller whirring, Major Buckmaster awkwardly wished her luck as he gave her the badly wrapped powder compact. She noticed his hand was shaking. Poor man. He had not wanted to recruit her. She was too young, too redheaded, too female. He was of the generation that thought young women should be protected rather than exposed to the danger of possible torture and death. However, she had persuaded him that her skill in getting out of France and making her way to England, plus her profound wish to avenge the deaths of her parents and a schoolfriend at the hands of the Nazis, made her a good candidate. He chose her for an assignment in the Vaucluse area where she explained that she had spent a lot of time a
t her parents’ country residence in Gordes. Thus she became part of Operation Jedburgh, its objective being to unite all the disparate groups of the Maquis into a fighting unit, in preparation for the Allied invasion of the South of France.

  Marguerite sat in her seat and looked around her. She found modern aircraft claustrophobic with their sealed windows and doors. The old Lysander rattled and shook but at least you could jump out in an emergency and float down to terra firma on your parachute.

  Since the war Marguerite had done her best to suppress memories of that time but now, on this journey to confront her disquiet, she made a determined effort to bring them to mind. She recalled how, despite her commando-type training in Scotland for the SOE, she had never mastered the art of an elegant parachute-landing. Her first meeting with Marcel had therefore not been a great way to start their relationship. Grovelling on the ground at his feet she could see in the torchlight that he was appalled that headquarters in Britain had sent him a woman. He was even more appalled when he discovered she had hurt her ankle in her inept touchdown so that she could not ride the bike they had brought for her to get away from the landing field. It was the only available transport other than horses, or noisy cars fuelled by wood-burning stoves towed behind.

  As the plane took off Marguerite looked out of the window at the disappearing runway and forced herself to remember how after her ungainly arrival in a field near the village of Lagarde, three shadows had quickly dowsed the lanterns marking out the runway, burnt and buried her parachute suit, and gathered up the canisters of weapons and ammunition, and an unhappy carrier pigeon. She put on a headscarf to hide her hair and, with as much dignity as she could muster, hitched up her skirt to ride on the handlebars of Marcel’s bike, the pillion having been loaded with supplies. Luckily the safe house where she was to meet some of the other résistants wasn’t far away but it was not an impressive entrance.