The Warning Bell Read online

  He looked past me at the fire, stooped to move the screen and threw on a log.

  ‘It was at Saumur that I learned my lesson,’ he said. ‘We were just teenagers, most of us. Cadets. We volunteered to hold the bridges over the Loire. No one could order us to, because Petain had already called for an armistice by then and hostilities should have been over. In fact, we’d been ordered to retreat. Why did we agree to stay and fight? I don’t know. We were young and at the time it seemed terribly glorious. We had rifles and a few machineguns from the first war. Our two seventy-fives were so old no one dared fire them. And there were about two thousand of us to face a Panzer Division of 18,000 Germans. We annoyed them for a couple of days and then they brushed us aside. It was all perfectly pointless. The Armistice was signed two days later, on 22nd June.’

  He leaned forward in his chair.

  ‘But Iain, the thing that struck me most forcibly was that everyone except us knew it was pointless. The Loire bridges were crammed with refugees, people on horses, on foot, on bicycles, people pushing their lives on wheelbarrows, some even driving cattle. And among these people – these French people – were some who jeered at us. Can you imagine? They laughed at us for the schoolboys we were. Laughed at us for imagining our sacrifice would make any difference.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I was shot through the thigh towards the end of the first day. Painful, but most convenient. Kept me out of things from then on and probably saved my life. And as I lay there I had plenty of time to think. And I saw that those refugees were right, and we were wrong. If the ship is sinking, there’s no point trying to drag it back out of the depths. The best you can hope for is to try to save yourself, and - if you have the strength - to help a few of those struggling in the sea around you.’

  The fire crackled between us. I looked into the flames and thought of people struggling in the sea.

  ‘I saw Robert Hamelin’s memorial yesterday,’ I said.

  He had been in the act of pouring more Armagnac but he stopped with the decanter tilted over my glass.

  I said: ‘The verse carved on the stone is from Psalm 77. My father’s favourite psalm.’

  ‘Ah.’ He poured my drink, stoppered the decanter and set it down. ‘That solves a little mystery. The obelisk was set up in the 1960s with a donation from someone in England. Felix tells me there’s no clue in the church records as to who sent the money.’

  ‘Did you ever suspect it was my father?’

  ‘I couldn’t be certain. Hamelin was in London for two years with the Free French. Any of his former comrades might have been behind it.’ He sat back and the leather of his chair creaked. ‘It’s satisfying to know the truth.’

  I let a few beats pass.

  ‘I saw something else yesterday,’ I said. ‘A photo of Robert Hamelin as a boy.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Christine Tremblay tells me he lived with the Rosen family.’

  ‘The Rosens were generous people, and he was an orphan. They had a large house - La Division - a few kilometres up the coast. Robert spent most of his time there, I recall, when he wasn’t away at school.’

  ‘And he and Lena Rosen became close?’

  ‘You heard that, did you? You have done your homework.’

  For a moment I thought he might deny the story, or dismiss it as idle gossip, but then he suddenly looked down.

  ‘Tragic,’ he said. ‘Made for one another.’

  ‘You knew them?’

  ‘Not well. Robert Hamelin was younger than I was and something of an outsider. But I have a vivid recollection of him and young Lena sitting arm in arm on the harbour wall one evening, just where the fishing boats tie up now. The most perfect picture of young love you will ever see.’ He hesitated, and went on: ‘And yet more than that. They were so very young, but even then it was impossible to imagine anything ever coming between them.’

  ‘But it did,’ I said, half to myself, and instantly regretted it, for DR Pasqual’s face clouded.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, seeing that I had spotted his reaction. ‘The topic distresses me.’

  I made an attempt to change the subject. ‘Is it still there, the house?’

  ‘La Division? Derelict now. Nothing but a ruin.’

  ‘I’d like to go up there one day. Take a look at it.’

  He glanced quickly at me. ‘Why?’

  I thought about this. ‘I’m not sure. It’s just that Lucien – Robert Hamelin – was the reason my father came here. Yet I seem to know so little about him.’

  The old man nodded thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think you can get to the house any more. Marc Garnier has his scrap metal business on the site now.’ He made a disapproving face. ‘Uncouth man. He discourages visitors.’

  I swirled my Armagnac and let my thoughts drift. I said: ‘He must have taken it badly.’

  ’I’m sorry?’

  ‘Robert Hamelin. When the Rosens were arrested.’

  ‘Oh, poor Robert, yes. My word! He disappeared almost at once. I don’t know how he got to England but the next time we heard of him he was with the Free French. That was when your father brought him back to us for that one short month.’ He paused. ‘Though he was a different man by then.’

  I wanted to ask him more, but his face seemed so weary and sad that I could not bring myself to do so. Instead I said: ‘I’m sorry to have stirred all this up.’

  ‘We have to face these things,’ he said, with unexpected firmness. ‘We have to close the circle. That’s what you are helping us to do, Iain, merely by coming here. To close the circle at last.’

  I left Dr Pasqual’s house at around seven-thirty, my blood singing with Armagnac. I called in at Henri’s again and chatted with him and with one or two others over an omelette and a couple of beers. But I could not get the old man out of my mind all evening. I wanted to be back in that warm and fire-lit study, hearing his stories, sharing the privilege of his trust.

  Yet at the same time I knew that there were other questions I might have asked him. I thought of that neglected monument in the churchyard. Robert Hamelin had been one of St Cyriac’s own, but I would have known nothing whatever about him if Christine Tremblay had not shown me that photo. No-one had mentioned him. Even Dr Pasqual had never spoken of him, until I did.

  I ordered a final drink and sat staring into it for a long while.

  20

  The next morning was overcast and chill showers were gusting in from the North Sea. I drove west out of St Cyriac and along the Côte de Granit Rose, heading towards Morlaix.

  My father’s sketch was clipped onto the dashboard in its plastic sleeve and my large scale maps lay on the passenger seat beside me, neat rings of felt-tip marking every jetty or pier I had identified along the coast. The filthy weather didn’t help my mood. I didn’t want to admit it, but I had almost entirely lost faith. I felt a little ridiculous, and I only kept going because of a stubborn sense that I could not leave the search half-finished.

  I parked in a rain-swept layby and for most of the morning I followed endless winding lanes down to the sea, trudging across fields ankle-deep in mud and over wide, windy beaches. I found several houses with jetties but none looked remotely like the one on my father’s sketch map. Three were hotels with private landing stages, all of them comparatively modern. Two more were old enough, but were situated in fishing villages, and the sketch didn’t show a village. Another jetty formed part of a small marine repair facility near Port Blanc. The last, near Tregastel, turned out not to have a jetty at all. What had looked like one on the map proved to be a line of boulders encased in wire netting and dumped in the water to protect the beach.

  I stood on the bluff there for a while, watching the sea burst against this breakwater. I could see the dark mounds of Les Sept Îles far offshore, through the driving rain. I pictured the torn water which stretched beyond, all the way to England. Then I made my way back to the car, knocked the worst of the mud from my boots, and drove b
ack to St Cyriac.

  I pulled up on the quay. Le Toque and his son Guy were working in wet weather gear to unload their boat, the boy swinging plastic trays of fish up onto the dock and the old man stacking them. A third man stood at the wheel, blipping the engine every now and then to keep the boat steady. Le Toque heard the clump of my car door, glanced up and raised a hand to me. I was glad of his friendliness after my dismal day, and I strolled over to where he was working. He dropped the last of the plastic trays onto the stack on the boat’s deck and shouted instructions. Guy nodded to him and in a moment the boat nosed out towards its mooring against the wall near the harbour mouth. I watched it go, remembering suddenly what Dr Pasqual had said. Just where the fishing boats tie up now. That was where he had seen Lena Rosen and Robert one long ago evening, sitting arm-in-arm. There was no-one there now on the cold wet stones.

  ‘You’ve been exploring, M’sieur Madoc,’ Le Toque said, breaking into my thoughts. He jerked his head down at my filthy boots and mud-spattered clothing.

  ‘Yes. I suppose I have.’

  He sat down on one of the iron bollards and took out a tin of cigarettes. He offered one to me, his eyes twinkling. I declined, and he lit one for himself against the rain and wind with the dexterity of long practice.

  When he had the tip glowing like a ruby he said: ‘And what did you hope to find on a day like this?’

  ‘This house, maybe.’ I felt inside my coat and held the sketch out to him. ‘I don’t suppose you recognise it?’

  He squinted at it but did not take it from me. He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  I put the sketch away.

  He took another drag on his cigarette. ‘That’s your dad’s map? Father Felix told me you had a map.’ The wind whipped the smoke in a fine grey line over his shoulder. ‘Maybe it’s not around here at all, this place.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  He lifted up his chin in sympathy. It was raining hard now, the drops rattling against our wet weather clothes, but Le Toque didn’t seem in any hurry to get under cover. I could feel cold water trickling down my back, but I supposed he was used to bad weather. A big flatfish flapped around in one of the trays and then lay still. Le Toque studied his cigarette.

  ‘You want to know how it was for your father,’ he said. ‘How things were in St Cyriac when he was here. That’s natural. A son would want to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised by his sensitivity.

  ‘It wasn’t like you think. The War. The Occupation. It wasn’t like anyone thinks.’

  ‘No? What was it like?’

  ‘I was only eight years old at the Liberation. But I remember bits of it well enough. And I heard stories later from my mum and dad. And from Cousin Guillaume – you know, he was one of the guys who helped your father and his mate that night. About the most unlikely resistant you could hope to meet, I’ll tell you that!’ He laughed. ‘Short-sighted, asthmatic, couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag. He died of yellow fever in the Congo or some place, trying to educate the blacks about the splendours of French civilisation.’ He shook his head and gave a snort of derision. ‘Silly bastard. No offence, but if he’d had any sense he’d have kept his head down and let your dad take his chances.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t feel he had a choice.’

  ‘Oh, he had a choice all right, M’sieur Madoc.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Life went on, even under the Occupation. If you didn’t cause trouble you probably weren’t going to get into any.’ He paused, thinking back. ‘There were soldiers on the streets, guns all over the place, rules and regulations and big penalties for breaking them. This was the Occupied Zone, remember. Even when the Germans were good about it, there was no escaping that we were under guard the whole time. And yet people still got married, had babies, went to work. Kids like me still went to school, took their exams, got jobs. People got by.

  ‘It was much worse in the cities. My mother had family in Nantes, and they were on starvation rations. Nantes and St Nazaire and St Lorient, they were bombed to buggery. St Malo and Brest too. Not by the Boches. By your people. My mother lost her sister and her niece at St Malo, and never did know who she should curse for it, the Germans for being there, or the RAF for dropping bombs on them.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Personally,’ he went on, ‘I didn’t mind the Germans. We had two Wehrmacht lieutenants foisted on us, because we had a spare room, what with my older brother being away on the forced labour. My mum was upset about that, but I didn’t care. I was just a little kid, and it was exciting. One of those officers had a boy about my age back in Leipzig, and I used to sit with this character sometimes and teach him a few words of French. It reminded him of home, I guess, hearing my prattle. He cried once, I remember, when I was reading to him. They weren’t much better off than we were, those guys. Worse, really. They knew they’d be lucky to get through it alive. Sometimes it felt like we were all in it together, just waiting for it all to end.’

  I looked out over the rocking boats. I said: ‘The priest was shot in his own church. That can’t have done much for good relations.’

  ‘True enough, M’sieur Madoc. But then it took a certain sort of man to get himself into the position Father Thomas got into.’

  ‘What sort of man did it take?’

  His voice darkened a little. ‘A man who didn’t care about risks. To himself, or to anyone else.’ Le Toque flicked his cigarette butt into the harbour. ‘I’ll tell you something, M’sieur Madoc. There were some real heroes about in those days, and they weren’t always the ones you might expect. For my money it was the quiet guys in small town jobs – the councillors and the village mayors and sub-prefects – the guys who had to wheel and deal between the Germans and the ordinary French people. They didn’t get much thanks for it afterwards, either, a lot of them. If they got too close to the Boches they were accused of collaborating. But if they didn’t, they lost their jobs or wound up in jail and couldn’t help anyone. It was characters like that who kept the worst of the War away from our doors. If I can sit here now and tell you how I hardly noticed anything, it’s thanks to men like that.’

  Le Toque fell silent for a moment, then suddenly grinned and slapped my knee. ‘But still, there’s one thing to thank Cousin Guillaume for, eh?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If he hadn’t played the hero you might not be here now, about to buy me a beer.’

  Inside Henri’s we stripped off our dripping jackets and I left Le Toque at the table and went to the bar. I wanted to prompt the old man to tell me more, but as I came back with our drinks his son Guy and the deckhand came into the café, and by the time I got to the table the conversation had turned to today’s catch and the cost of marine diesel. I joined them and drank my beer and ordered steak frites with them and chatted amiably enough, but no more was said about those far away days.

  At about seven I left the café and walked back across the wet square. Le Toque was certainly right about one thing. The Occupation hadn’t been the way I had imagined it. Of course he was a mere child in those days, shielded from the worst of it, and yet I found his account compelling. What would any sane person do, but keep his head down and get on with life as well as he could? Whatever revisionists said now, I wondered how people had really felt back then about people like Father Thomas Montignac. I remembered what Dr Pasqual had said, that he neither knew nor much cared who had betrayed the priest.

  I turned into the side street and walked down towards the guesthouse. There was a new silver Peugeot 307 parked outside with an Avis sticker in the rear window. I paid no particular attention. I put my key in the lock of Madame Didier’s front door and turned it.

  ‘Hello, big boy,’ Chantal called to me from the driver’s window of the car. ‘On your own?’

  Chantal walked into the Camellia Suite ahead of me and looked around her.

  ‘This place is seriously gross,’ she said.
‘The V&A ought to buy it as a job lot. This is just the Rocky Horror Show of interior design.’

  ‘Think yourself lucky. Kate’s got the Lavender Room.’

  Chantal gave her big laugh, and the family of crystal animals tinkled in sympathy in their cabinet by the door, which made her laugh again. I pushed her back onto the bed and stretched out beside her, and we both lay there, not speaking.

  ‘It’s OK, isn’t it?’ she said finally. ‘Katrine and me turning up like this?’

  I nuzzled her neck. I loved the smell of her hair.

  ‘I didn’t want to crash in on your quest.’ She put it in inverted commas with flicks of her index fingers. ‘Not if you don’t want us around. But we always said we’d start the rest of our lives this Wednesday, and now it is Wednesday, and Katrine and I had a talk about it, and - ’

  I kissed her.

  She put her palm in the middle of my chest. ‘…and we thought, Katrine and I, that we should all start the rest of our lives together, just as we’d planned. Wherever that happened to be. And if that meant a little while in Brittany first – are you listening? – well, that’d be fine; we’d all move on after that, whenever we were ready… Iain? I’m serious.’ She was using her headmistress voice.

  ‘I’m serious too,’ I told her. ‘Very, very serious.’

  ‘Oh! So you are.’

  21

  Sometime during the past hour I had heard Kate open her door and make her way downstairs. Now, as Chantal and I came back to the world we could hear Twenties jazz music from below and Madame Didier’s unexpectedly full-throated laughter.

  ‘We had a look around St Cyriac while we were waiting for you,’ Chantal said. ‘It’s a special place.’

  ‘I thought so too.’