The Warning Bell Read online

  I covered my surprise with difficulty. How had he known this? Dr Pasqual seemed to know everything.

  ‘They didn’t like us on their property,’ I said. ‘You did warn me.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s unforgiveable that they should have behaved in that way. And with young Katrine present, too.’ He drew himself up a little. ‘I should like to apologise for the incident.’

  ‘Apologise?’ There was something so wonderfully antique about this that I wanted to smile, and yet I knew the old man was serious. ‘Dr Pasqual, why should you apologise for anything?’

  He seemed about to say more, then he relaxed, and when I gave him my hand he enclosed it in both of his. ‘Goodnight to you, Iain. And God bless you.’

  We didn’t speak on the walk home, Chantal and I arm in arm, and Kate a few paces ahead. At first sight the village square was as empty as an abandoned stage set, the wind rushing through the rose bower over the Rosen’s monument, shaking the heavy blossoms. Glimpsed between the buildings, sodium lights swung on their poles down on the esplanade, and boats in the little harbour rocked on black water.

  We turned the corner into Madame Didier’s side street and at once I saw a motorcycle parked in the shadows by the kerb. A young man was kneeling on the tarmac beside the machine, working on the engine with a spanner in one hand and a pencil torch in the other. Serge. Kat saw him at the same moment and froze like a deer. He got to his feet with elaborate astonishment.

  ‘Mr Madoc! And Katrine. Well, how extraordinary.’ He stepped forward, smiling his dynamite smile. ‘And Mrs Madoc?’

  Chantal disengaged herself from my arm and glanced in amusement from the boy to Kat and back again. She gave the boy her hand in queenly fashion.

  ‘I was heading home,’ Serge explained. ‘Bit of a problem with the fuel line. Fixed now.’

  ‘At five minutes to midnight,’ I said. ‘At the bottom of our street.’

  His smile grew a little fixed. ‘Actually, there was something I wanted to ask Katrine.’

  ‘Imagine my surprise.’

  ‘There’s a dance. In Lannion, tomorrow night. Just a local thing. And - with your permission, of course – I wondered if –’

  ‘Pick me up at seven-thirty.’ Kate said. She strode past him without another word, and let herself in through the front door of the guesthouse.

  ‘Great,’ Serge said to the door, as it swung to behind her. He turned to us and grinned. ‘Great!’ He fumbled his crash helmet on and swung himself into the saddle. ‘Until tomorrow, then.’

  24

  The next morning Chantal and Kate took a trip to St Malo. They asked me if I wanted to go, but they could see I was restless and I guessed that they were trying to stay out of my way. When they’d left I walked to the library, took my seat at one of the blond wood tables, and asked Christine Tremblay if I could see the diaries again.

  Dr Pasqual’s reference to the anti-Jewish laws had sparked my interest in the diaries again, and I flicked through Father Thomas’ entries for autumn 1940 until one caught my attention.

  6 October

  The Government in Vichy has finally found the will to address the problem of the refugees from Eastern Europe who have infested our cities since the debacle of France’s defeat. It’s harsh on the Jews, of course, but it cannot be denied that a great many of these newcomers are of the meaner sort, and a very great strain they place on our poor country, at a time when it should be harbouring all its strength to heal itself.

  Dominic drove me in the trap to market in Lannion, fuel now being too severely rationed even for the local bus to run. It was while haggling over some miserable mackerel with Gaspard that I was told of the Statut des Juifs which was passed by the Vichy Government two or three days ago. As I understand it, the Statut bans Jews from senior positions in government and the law and other professions.

  I am not so foolish as to imagine the Jews are responsible for all our problems, and of course they are part of God’s creation, as are we all, and thus deserving of compassion. But I hardly feel they can be too surprised if some of their advantages are stripped from them. If the Socialist Government of that libertine Leon Blum – a Jew, advised by Jews – had not so weakened the country five years ago, we should not be in these straits now. This is only to be expected if one elects to a position of great authority a person of alien race and culture. How could a man like Blum have had the interests of the true France at heart?

  I closed the black-backed journal.

  ‘I hate it when he writes like that,’ Mlle Tremblay said. ‘The way he just refuses to see what Vichy was really doing.’

  ‘Under pressure from the Nazis…’

  ‘Vichy was the legal government of France,’ she said, with a bitterness which made me wary, ‘it wasn’t some puppet regime. The two Statuts des Juifs were more anti-Semitic than anything Berlin came up with.’

  ‘There were plenty of racist pigs in Britain too. There still are.’

  ‘Should that reassure me?’ She caught herself. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m Jewish myself, you see.’

  ‘Ah.’ To change the subject I said: ‘I went to take a look at La Division yesterday. I got a distinctly unfriendly reception from the present owners.’

  She gave a tight little laugh. ‘I wouldn’t take it personally, M’sieur Madoc. The Garnier family don’t need a special reason to be rude to anyone. It comes naturally to them.’

  She moved away to attend to a woman at the front desk but soon she was back.

  ‘I nearly forgot, I came across something that might brighten your day. You were looking for details of the other survivor? The man your father saved?’ She laid a sheet of paper on the table in front of me. ‘It was in my file at home all the time. The RAF must have sent it with the others, but I’d forgotten all about it.’

  The page was similar to the ones I had seen, a photocopy of typewritten personal data on speckled wartime paper, the shadow of a paperclip in the corner.

  ‘M’sieur Madoc?’ Christine Tremblay asked.

  I could not take my eyes off the name on the form. I picked up the paper and peered closely at it, but there was no mistake. The name was Billington. Rodney Billington.

  25

  I folded some clothes into my pack and zipped it.

  ‘I shouldn’t be more than a week,’ I said.

  Chantal came out of the bathroom with my razor. ‘If you’re going, just go. You don’t have to keep apologising about it.’

  I took the razor from her, unzipped my washbag, put the razor inside, put the washbag in my pack. She watched me do this, her arms crossed, but she didn’t speak. She was not happy.

  I faced her.

  ‘I’ve got to run this to earth, Chantal. You’d have to if it was you. You know you would.’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ she retorted. ‘It’s my job, or it was. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘I don’t need an excuse.’ My own fuse was just beginning to smoulder. ‘But I want to know why Billington lied to me. He told me he’d never even been to sea.’

  ‘His face was burned off, you said.’ She opened the pack on the bed, forcefully rearranged something inside, zipped it up again. ‘It could just be he didn’t want to talk about that. Had you thought of that?’

  ‘Then why not say so? Why shoot me some line about car crashes in Weston-super-Mare and his brother’s Hillman, or whatever? Why try and cover up the fact that he was ever even here with my Dad?’

  We stood glaring at one another for a few moments. I hated arguing, especially with Chantal. I suppose she hated it too, but she always seemed better at it, quicker at it. But now she was checkmated: perhaps it was the mention of my father that did it.

  At last she said: ‘You’ve got to be careful, about this sort of thing, Iain.’

  ‘Careful?’

  ‘I learned a few things over the years. One is that people never tell the truth about the past. Another is that there are some stories that don’t have happy endings.’
r />   ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Whatever happened involved this little village. This is France, remember? And you’re English. They won’t like it if you poke around in their past, and especially not if you sit in judgment.’

  ‘Who said anything about sitting in judgment? I just want to find out what happened to my father here, that’s all. It’s my history as well as Billington’s. As well as St Cyriac’s.’ I hefted the bag off the bed and dumped it on the floor at my feet. ‘And you think I should just forget about it?’

  ‘I think you should keep your eye on the main game, that’s all.’

  ‘Chantal, I’m sorry if this delays things for us. I know you had more exciting places than St Cyriac in mind -’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘Iain, for God’s sake. I’m only trying to say that maybe it doesn’t matter a whole lot what these scared kids got up to all those years ago. What does matter is that you and your dad make contact before it’s too late.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Don’t you see that?’ She did not reply, and I picked up the bag and walked to the door. I stopped there, unhappy about leaving things like this. I said: ‘You’ll be all right here for a few days?’

  ‘I survived Baghdad and Kabul,’ she said tartly. ‘I might be able to hack St Cyriac.’

  ‘And Kate?’

  She snorted. ‘Something tells me you don’t need to worry about her. I’m sure that she’ll find something to amuse herself.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that, as she knew I would not. I gave up, and felt for my car keys. ‘Maybe when I get back we can begin the rest of our lives,’ I said.

  ‘Just get back here as soon as you can, Iain, so we can all move on.’

  26

  I spent the night in St Malo and caught the morning ferry. I drove up the ramp at Portsmouth at a little after two the following afternoon and ground through snarled-up traffic to join the A27. Within an hour I was driving down the lane to Tangmere Military Aviation Museum.

  ‘He’s gone,’ the elderly woman at reception announced with grim satisfaction, as soon as I pushed in through the door.

  I stopped dead. ‘What?’

  ‘Billy’s gone. So, no, you can’t see him.’

  I walked up to the desk. The lobby was empty and my footsteps sounded ominous on the lino. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘New Zealand,’ she said. ‘He has family. He won’t be back.’

  ‘That was… sudden.’

  ‘Very. And we’re going to miss him. A great deal.’ Abruptly, tears filled her eyes and she cried out: ‘Why couldn’t you leave him alone?’

  I stood there like a fool, dumbstruck. She reached under the desk and pulled out a white envelope and flipped it across to me, so that it fell on the floor at my feet.

  ‘Now go away. Please. Just go away.’ She swivelled her chair away from me so that I could not see her face.

  I picked up the envelope and retreated through the glass doors into the dull afternoon, shaken by her news and her distress. I walked around the buildings, tapping the letter against my thumbnail. The sea of long grass swayed and rolled where the Spitfires and Hurricanes had once stood. I imagined the sun flashing on their Perspex canopies, and jaunty pilots leaning against the wings.

  I tore open the flap. The single sheet had been typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, three neat paragraphs, with a signature scrawled at the bottom. It was dated two days after my first visit to Tangmere.

  Young Mr Madoc:

  The fearsome Merrill will have told you that I’ve absconded to the colonies. Not quite true, I’m afraid, but she believes it is, so I’d be obliged if you wouldn’t tax her for more precise information. I have, however, gone overseas for a while, perhaps forever. At my age, everything is perhaps forever. Your visit wasn’t the only cause of my departure, but it certainly precipitated it. I expect you could track me down if you tried hard enough; I ask that you do not do so.

  You must know by now something of the tragedy at St Cyriac. If you are reading this, you have returned with more questions, and you must also know that I was less than honest with you during our last meeting. I regret that. I saw much of your father in you, and I would have preferred to have been straightforward. But I still feel that I had no choice. I ask you to remember that all those years ago, your father had no choice either. I am not God and cannot judge. But I do know that a man can do no more than act on his beliefs, and on the information he has available to him at the time. Very often, and especially in wartime, he has only a split second to make his decision. He’s not always right.

  I have no more to add on the subject of St Cyriac. Suffice to say that your father was a good and brave man. I don’t put so much weight behind the ‘brave’, for we are all cowardly and brave by turns, often in the wrong proportions and in the wrong order. But he was a good man, and – however it may have seemed – I am sure he never wished you anything but happiness.

  And there I, Billington, rest my case.

  27

  I drove through narrow lanes of cow parsley and hawthorn blossom. Early moths siphoned into the headlights. Past Exeter I emerged on the moorland road, high above the shore. Seaside towns dazzled in folds of the coast below me. Beyond the frivolous lights glimmered the sea, stretching out to the curve of the earth, black and unknowable.

  When I got to the cottage it was in darkness. My headlights swept across, illuminating it like a plywood stage flat. I saw at once that the front garden was untended, and that there was litter on the step – uncollected papers, a Yellow Pages directory in a shrink-wrap cover, advertising flyers. Loose sheets had blown in among the ragged flowerbeds.

  I got out of the car and stood for a moment, taking a couple of breaths to steady myself, and then walked around the side of the house.

  I could see the glow of a candle at the kitchen table, and the shape of the old man, hunched over the flame. I pushed open the back door and walked in. My father looked up unhurriedly. Twin miniature candle flames burned in his half-moon reading glasses, and amber light shone on the folds of his face and his neck and on the Bible which lay open in front of him. I couldn’t imagine that there was enough light to read by, but somehow he seemed to have been doing so.

  He met my eyes steadily. ‘Hello, Iain boy.’

  I leaned back against the door to close it. The air was musty and smelled faintly of fish. In the garbage bin under the sink I could see two or three empty sardine cans. A solitary plate stood on the surface beside the cooker, and an untouched fruit cake was shrivelling on a breadboard next to it. I guessed it had been donated by Betty Coleridge from the guesthouse. She was the only person who would bother to come here now. It was cold in the house and I tugged my jacket around me. The silent, candlelit face in the darkness unsettled me, and I reached across and flicked on the light switch. Nothing happened. I snapped the switch up and down uselessly several times.

  ‘I had it cut off,’ he said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I had no need of electric.’

  ‘What about heating? What about hot water?’

  I strode noisily around the kitchen without waiting for a reply, opening and slamming cupboard doors. I found a box of candles under the sink, lit three more of them from the stub on the table and set them up on the draining board, on the mantelpiece, on the windowsill. I could see by the way the flames trembled that my hands were shaking. I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  ‘Dad, what are you doing to yourself?’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting no company.’ He took off his reading glasses and set them on the open page of the Bible. ‘It’s not like you to come unannounced. What brings you here?’

  The moment had arrived. I waited a couple of seconds, centring myself, letting the words form in my mind.

  ‘A couple of weeks ago,’ I said, ‘I met a man who wanted to thank you. I should have given you that message before, probably.’

  ‘And yet I know of no one who owes me thanks.’
>
  ‘His name’s Billy. At least that’s what they all call him. Billy Billington.’

  I was aware of a tap dripping into the sink.

  ‘Billy wanted to thank you for being kind to him,’ I said. ‘He wanted to thank you for all the men you saved, too. All the men you never abandoned. What he meant was, that you never abandoned him.’ I paused. ‘I’ve been to St Cyriac. You must have known I’d find my way there.’

  ‘And why was it so needful to do that?’

  ‘Was I supposed to pretend she’d never spoken to me?’

  ‘That would have been a kindness.’

  ‘She did more than speak to me, Dad. She gave me some things. Some things of yours.’ I put my hands on the table and leaned forward on them. ‘Why don’t you tell me the real story?’

  ‘It seems you know enough already.’

  ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know why Billy was so desperate to convince me he was never in St Cyriac. I don’t know why you brought back a map of La Division. And I don’t know why being a hero should have screwed up your life.’

  He looked up quickly at me, and there was a great sadness in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Let’s not pull back now, Dad. Not when we’re so close. I’ve found the boat. I’ve seen the graves. I’ve even met Dr Pasqual – Mayor Pasqual as he was then. He remembers you, just like Billy Billington does. Just like Dominic does.’

  A light leapt in his eyes. ‘Dominic?’

  ‘He says you’re a great patriot, a great hero. They all think that.’

  ‘Did you ask them why?’

  ‘For trying to save Lucien. For justifying the risks they all took. For making Father Thomas’ death worthwhile. For saving Billington. How many more reasons do you need?’ I pushed my face towards his. ‘Isn’t it worth something to be a hero to these people?’