The Warning Bell Read online

  I frowned. ‘I don’t understand. This Lucien – this Robert Hamelin - why’s he in the picture with the Rosens?’

  ‘He was virtually part of the family. He was an orphan and they adopted him. I’m not sure if that was official, or if they just took him in and gave him shelter. Anyway, that was before the War.’

  ‘I had no idea there was a connection between him and the Rosens.’

  ‘Oh, yes. It was the fact that he was so close to the family that drove Robert to join the Free French when the Rosens were arrested in 1942. At least, that’s my reading of it. Robert was seventeen or so by that time, but he’d have been a couple of years younger in this photo. Just a child, really.’

  I looked hard at the picture. I could tell that the sculptor of the Rosens’ memorial had used this very print as his model, omitting the boy. Gustave Rosen was plump and pleased with life in his important suit. His wife stood at his side, a slender woman with a dashing black hat, worn at an angle which made her look devil-may-care and feisty. The girl was dark and very pretty and had large lustrous eyes. Christine Tremblay saw the hold the picture had on me and took the print out of its sleeve and slid it over to me.

  She said: ‘I’ll find you a copy before you go, if you’d like one.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. The photo was creased and fading slightly to sepia. ‘This is the original?’

  ‘They say it was found at La Division, after the Rosens were taken away.’

  I had a vivid image of the photo, propped on a table in the kitchen of the farmhouse. I couldn’t take my eyes from those two young faces. A dark boy with his sweetheart’s hand in his. Children, both of them. I remembered how Billy Billington had described the Lucien of just a few years later: dangerous, unstable, the Prince of Darkness. How had this boy become that man?

  ‘Turn it over,’ Christine Tremblay said.

  I did as she told me. On the back of the photograph, written in soft pencil, were the words: Robert, je t’attendrai jusqu’a la fin du temps – Lena.

  The handwriting was firm. I stared at it, perhaps the last surviving fragment of anything written by this long vanished Jewish girl. I will wait for you until the end of time. I felt an obscure sense of shame even to be reading of such desolate longing, knowing it to have been unrequited, as if it were an intimacy I should not have been allowed to see. When had she written it? As a car full of armed men pulled up outside and she knew the moment had come at last? Where was Robert at that moment? Presumably, and mercifully, he had been away from the house. She had scribbled this message and left it for him to find when he returned. Perhaps he had indeed found it, and – in anguish and desperation – had started his own journey at once, leaving everything behind in that desecrated farmhouse: memories, hope, and even some part of his own humanity.

  ‘Robert Hamelin and Lena Rosen,’ Christine Tremblay said, and I saw that her eyes were full of tears. ‘St Cyriac’s own little Romeo and Juliet tragedy.’

  I took a last look at the photograph, and wordlessly slid it back to her.

  A few moments later I left the library and walked across to the churchyard gate. I climbed the path to the RAF graves. I meant to look for Hamelin’s memorial, but it was already past two o’clock and I was tired and I hadn’t eaten. I gave myself a break, and sat on the bench by the graves and watched the sparrows taking dust baths beside the track.

  I could not quite get things ordered in my mind. Why, for instance, had Dominic insisted I read the old priest’s diaries? He had hinted I would learn more about my father’s time here. But how could the diaries help me? They did not extend beyond 1941, more than two years before my father had come to St Cyriac. When I had discussed this with Christine Tremblay it had been tempting to believe the old man knew something. Now it seemed altogether more likely that Dominic was, after all, just a crazy old man who made up stories.

  I gazed up through the branches of the plane tree, hazy with new buds, at the bright sky beyond. The air was rinsed and clean, the village itself washed in pure light, as if nothing dark could ever have touched it.

  It was when I lowered my eyes that, without even looking for it, I saw the obelisk. It was grey granite, about a metre high, tilted into the deep grass near the churchyard wall just beyond the RAF graves. I walked over to it between the mounds. The stone was cracked and weathered, and mallow and dock grew thickly around it. I knelt and brushed at the moss on the plinth, as soft as an animal’s pelt, and scraped it back from the stone.

  Lt ROBERT HAMELIN

  Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters: and thy footsteps

  are not known

  I took a moment to recognise it. Psalm 77. My father’s favourite verse.

  18

  The next morning was Tuesday. I was to meet Dr Pasqual in the afternoon, but that gave me six or seven clear hours. Even so, for a few moments over breakfast in Henri’s, I dithered. My search for a place with a jetty - a house which probably didn’t exist any more - was beginning to feel pretty foolish. I didn’t even know for certain that my father had drawn the map: it could be a total blind alley, like the business of Sally Chessall.

  And yet I had come this far. My personal Grail Quest, Felix had said, not altogether cynically.

  I went to the Discovery, drove out of the village and headed south.

  I stopped at St Brieuc and found a bookshop bigger than anything St Cyriac could offer, where I bought a sheaf of local maps covering the coast. A couple of kilometres out of town I parked at a seaside hotel and drank coffee in a dining room overlooking the grey Channel.

  I spread the maps out on the table beside me. I have always loved maps, with their promise of discovery, their thick paper and delicate printing. These were of the largest scale I could find, designed for walkers, and they marked every farm track and stand of timber and house within ten kilometres of St Cyriac. I could see every detail of the village: the bridge upstream from the boatyard, the patchwork of cress beds, and the boat ramp and clustered buildings of the yard itself. I could see the blocks of the houses around the little harbour, the village square and the church on its mound of rising ground.

  I propped my father’s sketch up against the water carafe, folded my new map to a workable size, and studied the rugged shoreline ten kilometres southwest from the Vasse, tracing its folds and turns with a fingertip. I marked every hamlet or coastal farm which boasted what could pass for a pier or a jetty, and I repeated the exercise along the shoreline to the northeast. I settled on ten candidate locations, three to the east direction and seven to the west. When I had made my choices I took my bundle of charts out to the car.

  It was not yet eleven. By a little after midday I was within the search area I had marked on the map. I pulled into a lay-by and checked my position, then turned left onto a narrow side road which wound through steep lanes towards the sea.

  The first place proved to be a brand-new holiday marina, still under construction. I drove down a churned track with the leaves of the hedgerows on either side white with dried mud, and pulled up by a site office. Men in hardhats were using yellow earthmoving equipment to clear scrub from beachfront lots. Beyond half-built chalets I could see a landing stage of steel and timber. It had been there longer than the new development but even so it couldn’t have been more than a few years old. I turned the car around and followed a lurching truck back to the road.

  The second choice looked more promising. I couldn’t get all the way to it by car, and had to park and hike over a low promontory to see it. Below me and a couple of hundred metres away, a derelict wooden pier, half-collapsed, poked out into the surf. It at least looked old.

  I started down the slope, and stopped on the windy hillside to get a better look. Two big tin-roofed sheds stood on open ground nearby, an old rusting crane in front of one of them. My father’s drawing did show buildings of some kind standing back from the shore, but on his sketch there were four of them. The two sheds below me were in the wrong position, and there was no s
ign of any house near the beach. I trudged back up the hill.

  I got as close as I could to the third candidate along a corrugated track through a coastal reserve choked with wind-blown gorse. I left the car and walked for nearly a mile along a deserted beach to get to the jetty shown on my map, but when I got there it turned out to be a storm water outfall of some kind, a rusty pipe carried on trestles out into the sea, where its effluent stained the water brown. Cormorants perched on the pipe, drying black wings in the sea wind. There were no buildings of any kind.

  I plodded back to the car and sat there while the wind threw sand against the bodywork.

  19

  I drove back to St Cyriac, and went straight to Madame Didier’s to change. I had a late lunch at Henri’s and then walked through the village and across the coast road to the Pasqual house.

  It was a cool, damp afternoon, the hedgerows and the fruit trees in the gardens alive with birds and bursting with buds. I walked in between shabby grey gateposts with stone gryphons on them and then followed a driveway for a couple of hundred metres to the front of the house. There were weeds pushing through the cracked tarmac and the lawns to both sides had reverted to meadowland dotted with wildflowers.

  As Felix had suggested, the house was smaller than it appeared from the road, but it was still impressive enough, with wide square downstairs windows and turrets on the corner rooms upstairs, their conical roofs clad in grey slate. A stone fountain formed the centrepiece of the carriage turn. Some particularly ugly concrete cherubs clamoured around a naked woman who might have been Venus. The fountain was not working and the statuary was mossy and neglected, but the basin below was luxuriant with lilies, which made it beautiful. I saw a golden carp shimmer beneath the pads.

  ‘M’sieur Madoc?’

  I looked up from the water. The big main door had swung open and a plump and cheerful woman in a grey woollen dress stood in the doorway.

  ‘Come in! Come in! Dr Pasqual’s only just got back, but he’s been looking forward ever so much to your visit.’

  She hurried down the steps and ushered me into the dark hallway, took my jacket and hung it on an old-fashioned coatrack. Around me I glimpsed heavy panelling and a long wooden staircase and subfusc paintings. Far above an art nouveau skylight glowed in coloured glass.

  ‘I’m Jeanne, M’sieur,’ the woman chattered on, fussing so busily around me that she was out of breath. I guessed she was in her sixties, but that didn’t seem to slow her down. ‘I look after Dr Pasqual. Have done for years. You just go on into the study. The Doctor’s in there already.’

  The study was pleasantly dim, and smelled of beeswax and old books. The walls were crowded with trophies of a long life. Some of these seemed so archaic that they were nearly comical – cavalry sabres crossed over the fireplace, a marlin mounted in a mahogany case, stuffed birds of prey perched in aggressive poses on top of the bookcase.

  I liked the room at once for its genteel shabbiness and its unashamed masculinity. I liked the cracked leather armchairs by the hearth, and the photographs in their tarnished silver frames, and the faded Turkish carpets on the floor. It reminded me of a gentlemen’s club which had seen better days. A fire had been laid in the hearth but had evidently remained unlit during Dr Pasqual’s absence, for the room was a degree or two too cold for comfort.

  He was standing by a little rosewood desk on the far side of the hearth. I couldn’t see him clearly in the half-light, but he lifted his head and smiled at me, and first his white hair and then the rest of him materialised like some benign and courtly ghost.

  ‘Iain! I’m so glad you could come.’ He took a step forward to shake my hand. ‘I’ve found at least something that might interest you.’ He turned back to the desk and opened a brown paper envelope which lay there, clicking on the desk lamp as he did so. He shuffled through a sheaf of photographs before handing one to me. ‘Here we are. The Four Musketeers who helped your father and his comrade to escape.’ He snorted. ‘We don’t look so very intrepid, do we?’

  In the snapshot the four men looked as if they had been unwillingly shoved forward from the crowd of revellers. I could see men, women and children behind them, smiling, raising glasses, waving flags, sporting rosettes. Two soldiers in American uniform were flanked by laughing girls with flowers in their hair and their right knees raised in a dance routine.

  ‘That’s Bonnard on the left,’ he said. ‘I’m next to him. The tall willowy one is Le Toque. And here’s Mathieu Garnier. I believe that’s the only photograph that catches us all together. It was taken just after the Liberation.’

  Dr Pasqual was right. He and his little group did not look intrepid in the least. They looked awkward, embarrassed. I studied them in turn under the lamp. Paul-Louis Bonnard had low brows, a broken nose and the powerful physique he had passed on to his grandson, the builder. The young Yves Pasqual, terrier-small beside him, stood to attention as if enduring some ceremony he hoped would soon end. Le Toque was excessively tall, etiolated, his eyes fixed on some distant horizon far above the photographer’s head. Mathieu Garnier was thin-faced, not physically impressive, and no taller than Pasqual. But he had a certain tough presence, and I noticed in particular his very light eyes which glared defiantly, straight into the lens.

  Jeanne came puffing into the room, scolding the old man for standing about in here without lighting the fire. She stooped and lit it herself and bustled around the room snapping on lights, so that in a second the afternoon outside was thrown into evening and flags of yellow light were reflected in blue windows.

  I handed the photograph back to Dr Pasqual. He slipped it into the envelope and then into a drawer. He waved me towards one of the cracked leather armchairs. The last of the kindling spat and popped and the fire began to draw. Dr Pasqual arranged a screen across the hearth and flame sparkled on brass.

  ‘What were they like, those lads?’ I asked.

  He pursed his lips, looking into the fire. ‘A cross-section of young chaps, might have been from any French village. Bonnard was a born troublemaker, a brawler long before the Germans got here. He was the same with any kind of authority. Poor Le Toque was a teacher, a hopeless romantic.’ He glanced at me. ‘And Mathieu Garnier was a communist.’

  ‘Which you were not.’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ He laughed. ‘My family were the very worst sort of petite noblesse – not really rich, but dreadfully proud of their aristocratic connections. Such awful snobs! It makes me wince to think of it now.’ He laughed again, shaking his head, but then his voice grew serious. ‘Arrogant elitists, anti-Republicans, traditional conservatives. Even anti-Semites, some of them. It’s no wonder Petain appealed to them so strongly. I fell out of love with all that quite early on, Iain, but I won’t attempt to exonerate myself entirely. We all thought Petain was our best hope immediately after the Armistice. To us, de Gaulle was a deserter for fleeing to London.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘And as for French communists, they were the spawn of Satan! They took their orders from Moscow, which is why they only started resisting the Germans when the Nazis attacked Russia in ‘41.’

  ‘I didn’t realise.’

  ‘Oh, indeed. Many thought the real danger was not German Fascism, but Russian Communism. And that wasn’t so crazy, was it? When the War was over, NATO came to the same conclusion.’ He smiled, ruefully. ‘But that’s not the… Authorised Version.’

  ‘But you worked with Garnier, even if he was a communist?’

  ‘He was the undisputed head man when it came to the Resistance in this area. Mathieu was the genuine article, a maquisard. I respected him. Even so, after I became mayor his activities caused me some sleepless nights, I can tell you. He made a speciality of blowing up the power lines to factories working on German contracts, which made us all nervous. I had responsibility for the people of St Cyriac, you see, and the last thing any of us wanted was reprisals. But Mathieu was clever, and kept his activities out of the area. He died at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.’ He looked quizzically at
me. ‘There’s an irony for you. Killed fighting the communists. A mad world, isn’t it?’

  He rose to his feet and fetched a tray with a decanter and a couple of squat glasses on it and set them on a small round table between us. He poured two glasses and invited me to take one. We sat in comfortable silence, sipping our Armagnac.

  ‘You have to understand the way things were back then,’ he said. ‘There weren’t many heroes of the Resistance of the kind one sees at the cinema. Oh, there were some brave and passionate people. Many. People like Garnier. Certainly I don’t claim to have been one of them. Felix might like you to believe otherwise, but the night of your father’s escape was the one time I was actively involved. I had my hands full as mayor, trying to keep trouble away from this place.’

  I drank some more Armagnac. It was as warm as the firelight. I said nothing, but I could feel him watching me over the rim of his glass.

  ‘Confusing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘But then, war is, especially to Anglo-Saxons. The experience of invasion and occupation wounds the national psyche in a way I don’t think the British or the Americans will ever understand.’

  I let him refill my glass. ‘Can you tell me what it was like?’

  He paused. ‘Let me put it this way. Did you know that during the defeat of 1940, sixty or seventy thousand French soldiers were killed, and close to two million taken prisoner? In six weeks. On top of that, perhaps eight million French people left their homes ahead of the German advance and fled south. This is from a population of forty millions. So in the space of forty days or so, a quarter of all French people were dead, displaced, or held captive. That’s more than a defeat: that’s the disintegration of an entire society.

  ‘The focus of people’s allegiance switched from the state to the community, from the city to the village, from la patrie to la petite patrie. And not only literally, but inside their hearts. People turned away from great causes and looked after their own. The household, the family, the village. It was all people had to hang onto in the face of chaos. And in this I was the same as everyone else.’