The Warning Bell Read online

  ‘That’s right, it was.’ He seemed to see no contradiction in this. ‘I was in the boat that went out to cut it free and tow it away. It was huge. Like an iron house! All rusty, with weed under it. And it made this horrible ringing! Dong! Dong!’ He made big eyes at me and rocked his head. ‘We couldn’t stop it ringing when we towed it out and sank it in the deep water. I think it didn’t want to go. We could even hear it under the sea for a while as it sank. Dong! Dong!’ He repeated this, making the sound fainter with each repetition. ‘Dong! Dong!’

  ‘Do you remember when that was?’

  ‘Oh! Ages and ages ago. They put in one of those new sirens instead.’

  ‘So I must have heard something else, mustn’t I? An anchor chain, maybe, or some sort of an echo.’

  ‘You know, Iain, it’s a funny thing, but that’s what everyone tells me when I hear it.’ He freed the bass at last and tossed it back into the river, and we both watched while it darted away into the depths.

  I said: ‘Do you hear it often? The warning bell?’

  ‘Of course I do. Whenever something’s wrong in the village.’ He beamed at me. ‘But then, I’m not right in the head, am I?’

  I didn’t ask him any more questions. I was coming to see that Dominic didn’t work to the same logic as other people. Also, and for some reason I couldn’t explain, rational answers didn’t matter quite so much to me when I was around him. The world he occupied did not operate to the usual rules, and when I was in it, neither did I.

  I leaned back against the hatch cover as Dominic, humming to himself, threaded more bait onto the line and cast expertly out into the silky water. It had strengthened into a brilliant spring morning, and the sky above the overarching trees was cornflower blue.

  ‘Iain?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you talk to Father Thomas?’

  ‘Father Thomas wasn’t in a very talkative mood. I spoke to Father Felix.’

  ‘Oh, he’s a great friend of mine, Father Felix! But he wasn’t here in the old days. He didn’t know your papa.’ Dominic started humming softly again, hunched over his hook and line. And then he said, without looking up: ‘They weren’t his fault, you know. The bad things. I know your Papa thought they were his fault, but they weren’t. Not really.’

  I rolled my head to look at him. ‘You mean the bad things that happened to his crew? And to Father Thomas?’

  He lifted his face to me and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean that.’

  I waited, but he didn’t say any more and in a second turned his attention back to his fishing gear and began to hum his tune again.

  ‘I can’t read,’ he said, after a while. ‘But you can, can’t you? If you read Father Thomas’ diaries it would be like talking to Father Thomas himself. And Father Thomas was here in those days, and he did know your Papa. And he put everything in his journal. I used to sit and watch him writing it every night, up at the rectory. Lots of diary books, he had.’

  ‘Father Felix says the diaries are in the library, Dominic. Is that right?’

  He smiled at me. ‘There are some diaries there, yes.’

  Over his shoulder I caught a flash of movement and I saw that the heron had taken a small fish which thrashed in its beak. The bird tossed back its narrow head and gulped down the glittering prize, its white ringed eye glaring straight at me, greedy and triumphant.

  17

  St Cyriac’s tiny local library occupied a glazed annexe next to the Hotel de Ville, facing the church across the square. The librarian at the front desk was an unreasonably pretty woman in her late thirties. She wore jeans, a tight blue tee-shirt and enormous glasses, and introduced herself as Christine Tremblay.

  She listened politely to my story, although I sensed that the St Cyriac bush telegraph had already told her all about me. She seemed genuinely pleased with my visit, although probably in the sunny tedium of St Cyriac’s library she would have been pleased to see anyone.

  She sat me at one of the blond wood tables and in a few moments came out of the archive room with three small journals bound in black leather. They were well handled, and the leather was scuffed and pliant. The books formed a set, and in each case the year was embossed on the spine in gold: 1939, 1940, and 1941. Mademoiselle Tremblay was wearing a pair of white cotton gloves and she brought another pair for me, which she set down on the table beside the journals.

  ‘I suppose we should observe the proprieties.’ She gave me a look from behind her glasses to show she thought this rather a bore. ‘Though it’s hardly a first edition of Racine.’

  I pulled on the gloves, took the first volume and flicked tentatively through a few pages. The book was about half the size of a regular paperback novel. The pages were lined, and densely covered with fierce angular handwriting in blue ink. I scanned a paragraph at random. It listed attendance at Vespers one evening in December, and went on to wax indignant about the price of fish in Lannion market. I riffled through the pages, releasing a faint and musty odour. I put the book down and took up the second volume, the journal for 1940.

  Sunday, 12 September

  Two Wehrmacht officers came to church this morning. They introduced themselves as Major Leunig and Leutnant Reimann of the Todt Organisation, and asked my permission to bring some of their labourers to mass. I could see these unfortunates gathered near the west door. Most were Polish Catholics, the major told me, and he added (knowing that this would win me over) that these men had not been able to take communion or make confession for over a year, and they earnestly longed to do so. However they could not be allowed to attend without their German escort, so would I permit both soldiers and prisoners to take part in the service? Of course I agreed.

  They were a sorry crew, these forced labourers, twenty or so dissidents and activists, one assumes, and other transgressors against the Reich. A few may have been gipsies. One or two looked half-witted. All were gaunt with hunger. But while I could not withhold my pity for the hardships they must endure, I could not help comparing their cowed demeanour with the evident self respect of the two German officers. These young men were correct in every detail: courteous, dignified, quietly spoken. I could not fault them. Both, they told me, were Bavarian Catholics, and were themselves glad of the opportunity to practise their faith.

  While my pride rankled at seeing the invader in my church, part of me felt that any nation that could call upon such young men to command its armies must at the very least have respect for order and discipline and the rule of law – respect in which our own poor country has been sadly lacking in recent years. One is grateful for solid French families like the Pasquals, who remember the old ways, but there are few enough of them. I found the encounter with these German officers confusing, and I have prayed since for guidance, but as yet without regaining complete spiritual calm as regards this matter.

  I closed the book softly. It was strange to read the words of the little town’s dead martyr, written in his own hand: stranger still to find those words so banal. In my mind’s eye I saw an irascible and pedantic man, a man committed to structure and form. It was pretty clear that Father Thomas admired the immaculate German officers, and that his pity for the slave labourers was tainted with contempt. I wondered how such attitudes had gone on to evolve in the heart of this man, who four years later was to die at the hands of just such soldiers of the Reich, in defence of people who by then were not so very different from the wretched labourers he had allowed into his church that Sunday in 1940.

  ‘It’s not all like that,’ Mlle Tremblay said.

  I wasn’t sure whether she had been there at my shoulder all the time.

  ‘Most of it’s rather boring,’ she said. ‘Mildly scandalous social observation. Who was sleeping with whom. Who came to Church and who didn’t.’

  ‘You’ve read it all?’

  ‘Reverently, if without much joy. Father Thomas was a hero, after all.’ She wrinkled her perfect nose. ‘Personally I’m rather distrustful of heroes in history,
aren’t you? They’re never quite what they seem, when you look closely.’

  ‘Does that include Father Thomas?’

  ‘I’m sure he did everything they say he did. He certainly died heroically enough. Still, for me it’s not the heroes who make history interesting.’

  ‘No? What do you think makes it interesting?’

  ‘The way great events affect little communities. What the ordinary people felt at the time, not the way they think they ought to have felt, when they talk about it afterwards. But that’s not how people want to see the past. Not in France. Perhaps not anywhere.’ She picked up one of the journals and flicked carelessly though the pages. ‘You’ll have noticed that they only go up to 1941, years before your father came here. If you were hoping for some insights into his experiences I’m afraid the journals won’t be much use to you.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing. But Dominic was very keen I should read them.’

  ‘Dear old Dominic! You know he can’t read or write himself? He probably hasn’t a clue what’s in the diaries and what isn’t.’

  ‘I gather Father Thomas was like a father to him?’

  ‘That’s the story I heard, too. Dominic was devoted to him, apparently.’

  ‘So there’s no telling what he might have known about the priest and his diaries.’

  Mme Tremblay pursed her lips, unconvinced. ‘Well, perhaps he knows something the rest of us don’t. It just doesn’t seem too likely.’

  I turned back to the books on the desk in front of me. ‘Why do they only go up to 1941?’

  ‘Father Thomas got involved in the Resistance during 1942, and I suppose you don’t put that kind of thing on paper.’ She lifted one eyebrow. ‘Though there’s an alternative version, if you choose to believe it.’

  I opened my hands, inviting her to go on.

  She said: ‘There’s a local folk tale that Father Thomas went on keeping his journals after he joined the Resistance - dishing the dirt on all sorts of people. Who was collaborating, who was profiteering, who joined the Resistance five minutes before Liberation. All that, and maybe some more important things, too.’

  ‘And do you think that story’s true?’

  ‘Well, if any more of Father Thomas’ diaries ever existed, they’ve conveniently disappeared since.’ She shrugged. ‘But I suppose it’s not out of the question, and it is the kind of thing people like to believe. I’d quite like to believe it myself.’

  I opened the journal for 1941 and flicked to the back. The last entry was for the 30th December of that year. The St Cyriac farmers were a bunch of scoundrels, Father Thomas fumed in his cramped, repressed handwriting. The price of cabbages was simply extortionate. How was a poor priest to live?

  Mlle Tremblay said: ‘Last year I put together a local history project. “St Cyriac at War”, it was called. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘Very much.’

  Pleased by my interest, she went back to the archive room, returning in a couple of minutes with folders cradled in her arms. She dumped two box files and a sheaf of photographs on the desk. The files were new, of marbled cardboard, with neat labels. The handwriting on the labels was small and precise.

  ‘I hoped maybe the local schools might use it,’ she said wistfully, ‘but nobody’s really interested in this stuff any more.’

  I opened the first box file and was surprised to find a large colour print of my father’s launch on top of it, the same picture which had appeared in the magazine cutting my mother had left me. The curved hull of 2548 swelled out of the muddy riverbed, while the elderly enthusiasts waved their toy flags in the drizzle.

  ‘Funny old men,’ she smiled fondly. ‘They spoke such awful French! I adored them all.’

  I caught a whiff of her perfume as she bent forward and I allowed myself a moment to imagine what the worthy volunteers from Tangmere Military Aviation Museum must have thought about Christine Tremblay.

  ‘Dominic’s not in the photo,’ I said.

  ‘Dominic doesn’t like cameras. I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible to photograph him. I always have the feeling that he just wouldn’t appear on the print, like Pan or something.’

  She took the second of the box files and helpfully unpacked it on the desk beside me: plastic sleeves holding documents and cuttings, maps, copies of wartime regulations, lists of curfew times, black-out instructions, ration cards.

  ‘St Cyriac had it easier than a lot of villages,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t bombed and it wasn’t directly involved in the fighting. Also its two wartime mayors – first Gustave Rosen, and then Dr Pasqual – both did their best for the local people. But there were the usual hardships. Under the Releve scheme a lot of the young men were sent to Germany to work in exchange for French POWs. Others were just called up for forced labour.

  ‘Then there were the Ravitaillement regulations, where French authorities requisitioned food on behalf of the Germans. They seized all the local horses for the Wehrmacht, and cars and trucks, not that there was much fuel for them in any case. Where people managed to hold onto their vehicles they ran them on gas or charcoal. Mostly they got around on bikes with these funny little twenty-five kilo trailers on the back. By the end of it the Germans were even requisitioning the bikes.’

  She set out some black and white photos on the desktop – a bicycle with a home-made trailer just as she had described, a taxi with a bulging gas bag on the roof, a row of skinny horses lined up beside the road with a German corporal and a French gendarme standing guard. Several of the pictures showed German soldiers in the streets of St Cyriac, on parade in the square, relaxing at pavement cafes, lounging beside a parked armoured car. In one shot three workmen were using crowbars to lever up the plinth of a statue.

  ‘That caused a bit of a fuss,’ she said. ‘Joan of Arc used to stand in the main square – just outside there, where the war memorial is now. They melted her down for the bronze, along with all the railings in the village and a couple of Crimean War cannon and pretty well everything metal that wasn’t welded into place. There was a lot of resentment about all that.’

  I looked at the photo. I could see now that it had indeed been taken in the village square. I could make out the Hotel de Ville in the background with the swastika draped from the upper balcony.

  ‘Ah. Now take a look at this.’ She lifted out a slim cardboard folder and set it down on the table in front of me. Inside were photocopies of forms with the RAF crest on the letterhead. There were seven of them, listing ranks, military numbers, places and dates of birth.

  ‘Your father’s crew,’ she said. ‘The ones who didn’t get home.’

  I sat up straight. ‘Where did you get this?’

  She smiled at my surprise. ‘From your Royal Air Force archives. I gave them the names and ranks on the gravestones and they sent me these copies.’

  I leafed through the papers, wondering how many people remembered any of these men now. Maybe an ancient lover could summon up from the past the clump of military boots on a stair, the taste of un-tipped Capstan on a man’s lips, a night of passion between coarse boarding house sheets. An elderly lady somewhere might recall that last family Christmas, her big brother wearing a paper hat, drinking pale ale from a dark bottle. Today, these lads survived only in the fading memories of others. Not for much longer. Soon they would be eternally in the shadows, along with everyone who had ever known them.

  A thought struck me. ‘Just seven? There were nine in the crew.’

  ‘I only asked for information on the men buried in the churchyard. They were the only names I had.’

  I spread the photocopies on the desk in front of me and looked through them once again. I re-read the details for MacDonald, the Australian Flight Sergeant. I noticed he was the only NCO listed. I remembered he was the only NCO in the churchyard too, according to the headstones. And yet there had been a corporal in the crew: he was shown in the photograph on my parents’ bookcase. I could picture him clearly - my friend in the front row of that
old picture, sitting next to MacDonald, the two of them making a game of showing off their stripes.

  The missing man was very young, I remembered, and strikingly handsome, with a mop of fair hair. He was the one I used to cast in my imagination in the most dashing roles – the squire to the Flight Sergeant’s knight, or the kid deputy who saves the Sheriff’s life. I used to identify with him. So this must be the man my father had brought back across the Channel. I wondered if he was still alive, and whether I might still be able to trace him.

  Before I could get this idea to settle, Christine Tremblay was pulled a thick plastic ring binder towards me. ‘And here’s something else.’

  In a translucent sleeve, right at the front, was a good quality black-and-white picture of a mother and father and a girl of perhaps twelve, all of them soberly dressed in 1930s style, the parents smiling in the sunshine as they posed at the door of a high street office. Behind them on the wall was a brass plaque which read: Gustave Rosen, Notaire. Standing next to the girl was a dark good-looking boy of fourteen or so with his chin selfconsciously lifted. The girl’s left hand lay in his right and his attitude seemed to defy the viewer to mock this open intimacy.

  I said: ‘These are the people on the war memorial.’

  ‘The Rosens, yes. But look at the boy.’

  I peered at the dark and handsome face. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘That’s Robert Hamelin.’

  ‘Who?’

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘Robert Hamelin, the agent your father brought across the Channel in 1944. Your father was trying to pick him up the night of the wreck. You didn’t know?’

  ‘I only knew him as Lucien. His codename.’

  ‘Well, that’s him. Lt Robert Hamelin of the Free French, as he was to become. There’s a memorial to him in the churchyard, an obelisk near the airmen’s graves.’

  ‘Really? Felix didn’t mention that.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it’s gone now. It was in pretty bad condition when I last saw it, and that was years ago. But there used to be one there.’