Madame Barbara, page 23
Meanwhile, Michel shaved and washed himself as best he could in a small basin of cold water. His mind was clear enough, though he felt dreadfully weak physically. When he thought of Barbara, he wondered, with anguish, what on earth, if anything, he could say to her about the colonel.
He decided that at this early morning hour he would leave her a message, which would seem normal to Reception, to say that he could not drive her at eleven o’clock; he would try to contact her during the evening to arrange another time. It would give him a chance to think what further he could do. Though his hand shook as he took the mug from his mother, he was thankful for the hot drink, even if it did taste awful.
‘Bonne chance!’ Anatole wished him, as he crammed his beret on his head and fled to get the taxi.
He was standing smoking a Player’s while he waited for his fare outside the iron gate of the hotel courtyard when one of the chambermaids came running towards him down the street. As she ran, she was struggling out of the black coat that covered her uniform.
‘Bonjour, Michel!’ she shouted as she ran towards him. ‘Mon Dieu, I’m late if you’re here already.’
He grinned at her. ‘Relax, I’m an hour and a half earlier than usual.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she panted. ‘I saw you from down the street. I thought my clock must be wrong.’ She plonked her handbag on the bonnet of the taxi, and paused to chat. ‘Where are you going today?’
‘Caen. I’m taking Monsieur le Colonel to Caen airport.’
‘Humph.’ She looked roguishly at Michel. ‘I hope he’s enough strength left to cope this morning.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he’s not a young man,’ she giggled. ‘He dined with an English woman who is staying here. I served them, because Jeanne was away sick. And two hours later, when I was going home, I saw them in the lounge having a drink.’ She winked knowingly.
As the chambermaid gossiped on, Michel felt quite ill. The story linked all too neatly with his mother’s remark about the colonel being accompanied by a foreign lady, whom she had presumed to be his wife.
It was one thing to complain to Anatole that Barbara was a frustration to him, quite another to feel he had lost her to a bloody American nearly old enough to be her father. To lose her would be unbearable.
The little tart in front of him must be mistaken. She had to be. He pushed the girl lightly towards the gate. ‘You’d better go. The Americans will be coming any moment.’
She made a vulgar derogatory remark about them, and, because the remark reflected badly on Barbara, Michel wanted to slap her.
Incensed, he quickly turned and climbed into the driver’s seat.
The three undertakers, clad in olive-drab and fine big working boots, emerged, yawning, to climb reluctantly into the cab.
He greeted them politely, but with out his usual enthusiasm. He noted that the colonel did not look particularly haggard this morning.
‘Bonjour, Messieurs. Where do you wish to go today?’
The colonel heaved himself into a more comfortable position, while Wayne pulled down a folding seat facing him and crouched on it. The other assistant, Elmer, sat beside the colonel.
‘First, into Caen itself – to the office of the Mayor. I heard on the phone yesterday that a man brought two American dog tags into City Hall; he found a couple of skeletons in a ditch.’ He turned to his underling sitting opposite him. ‘Sort it out, Wayne. Then the pair of you could walk over to the cemetery we were originally going to look at today. We’ve still to find the Goldberg boy’s grave before we leave Bayeux.’
Wayne agreed, and Elmer maintained his usual silence.
The colonel turned back to Michel, and repeated, ‘City Hall, first. Then Caen airport to meet a senator.’
‘Oui, Monsieur.’ The taxi’s gears ground as Michel shifted them.
The thought that the Americans were nearing the completion of their work added to his depression. While agonising about Barbara, he had, in all honesty, to admit that his time with them had been pleasant, the best thing that had happened to him since the war had begun, long ago in 1939. It would be a miracle if he could find another job in Bayeux that would pay as much.
When the assistants had been put down outside the temporary City Hall, the colonel said more cheerfully, ‘Michel, remember that nice restaurant you recommended to us last time we were here? It was great. Before we go to the airport, let’s book the senator and ourselves into lunch there. We’ve got to make this guy happy.’
‘I’m not sure that the restaurant will be open yet, Monsieur le Colonel, though you should certainly make reservations, if possible – you must have seen, last time, how busy it can become.’ God, how he himself would like a meal at such a restaurant. To fill his stomach entirely with really good food.
As the colonel rapped peremptorily on the glass door of the restaurant, Michel wondered how such beautiful glass had been found to repair it. Caen had been so dreadfully bombarded that he doubted if a single pane of the city’s original glass would have survived. Truly, however, you could get anything in France – if you had enough money – lots and lots of beautiful hard currency, like American dollars or even British pounds.
Influenced by the sight of an American uniform on the other side of the precious glass, a cleaner was reluctantly persuaded to open up.
The colonel demanded a luncheon reservation.
The obsequious domestic scuttled round helplessly, looking for a pencil and something to write on. The fuming colonel provided both. He startled Michel by demanding a table for ten.
‘I need you there to translate what the maître says about wines,’ he explained to Michel with a wink. ‘You might as well get a decent meal on the American Government, for once. Then the senator is likely to have with him at least one security guard and a secretary or similar busybody. And some kind of French official – perhaps his host for tonight – will be tagging along; someone will be there to translate for him. And, for sure, there’ll be somebody from War Graves.’
The thought of eating a meal with an American senator made Michel quail. But then, was not America the place where all men were truly equal? It was an interesting thought.
Cheered up, he thanked his kindly employer for including him. He almost forgave him for dining with Barbara. That dirty-minded chambermaid could be wrong. Tonight, he would try to find out.
Chapter Twenty-five
Michel was surprised to see two limousines drawn up at the tiny airport. One of them sported a fluttering Stars and Stripes on the front of the bonnet. He eyed them enviously. Together with the chauffeurs standing near them, they looked as if they had been wrapped in tissue paper for the duration of the war. Where had the cars and the uniforms been hidden from the avaricious Germans?
He parked the battered taxi neatly behind them. The colonel got out stiffly and stared at the tidied up ruins of the airport buildings.
Michel leaned out of the cab and pointed to the shining curve of a Quonset hut. ‘Over there, Monsieur.’
The colonel nodded, and with slow dignified tread, as if he were following a coffin, he went to find his guest. He had never in his life met a senator and looked forward to telling his wife in his next letter home about this present encounter.
As he walked, he comforted himself with the thought that, though the group he was about to cope with might be very élitist, he doubted if they knew as much as he did about corpses and, what was more important, the care of the mourners who usually accompanied them.
Michel watched him go. The colonel walked like an old man, he considered, not at all like a trained military man. It occurred to him correctly that as an undertaker, Colonel Buck might be classed similarly to the priests who served armies, and not as a fighting man.
Except for the two chauffeurs chatting together and the distant sound of heavy machinery, the airport was very quiet. A windsock flipped in the breeze. A control tower, still standing, looked deserted. A small plane landed; another one took off. Michel lit one of his precious Player’s, and awaited events.
A man in a dark suit hurried out of the shed-like office. He came up to the taxi and, in bad French with a strong American accent, asked Michel what he was doing there.
Offended, Michel flicked his cigarette ash at the man’s feet, and asked in carefully pronounced English what business it was of his.
The stranger was obviously nonplussed by the quality of Michel’s English accent. He stared at Michel – a mere peasant. Neither this driver nor his shabby vehicle fitted into the scene. He suspected there was something wrong about the taxi and its driver.
Michel watched the stranger’s whole stance change to real hostility and felt it wise not to provoke the man further. He announced in his best English that he was waiting for Colonel Buck, who had gone into the office to meet an American visitor. Had the gentleman not seen him arrive? He was in American uniform.
‘Humph.’ The man looked again at the decrepit taxi and turned to hasten back to the temporary building into which the colonel had vanished.
Almost immediately, he returned with a gendarme, who followed him leisurely. The gendarme had been sent out that morning to add to the security of the visitor, or more accurately, to add to the visitor’s sense of security. Nobody really liked the damned Yanks, but it was unlikely that, in the present circumstances, anyone would attack a senior member of the US Senate just as every newspaper was announcing that Marshall Aid was beginning to pour into the country – even if France was the last country to be granted this aid. And, anyway, thought the gendarme comfortably, it was probable that not many people even knew the visitor was coming.
So the gendarme did not hurry, particularly as he immediately recognised the taxi; it was often to be seen in Caen, creeping through the shattered streets carrying US soldiers. It was famous as the only surviving taxi in Bayeux.
Nevertheless, watched by the American security officer, he dutifully asked for Michel’s driver’s licence, which was equally dutifully produced by a laconic Michel.
The gendarme asked what he was doing at the airport, and Michel told him that he must have seen the American Army colonel in the airport office. He had brought him in to meet un Américain – une huile! Michel permitted himself a laugh. ‘According to the colonel, he wants to look at cemeteries!’
The gendarme grinned, as he handed back Michel’s licence. ‘The senator hasn’t arrived yet,’ he said.
Michel allowed his eyes to shift slightly towards the impatient civilian standing behind the gendarme. ‘Who’s this type?’ he asked in patois.
The gendarme shrugged. ‘American security. Arrived last night from Paris.’
‘Put him straight about me, will you?’
The gendarme nodded, and turned away. He spoke to the American, and they both went back to the airport office.
Michel took a last pull at the stub of his cigarette. How good it would be, he considered, to be decently enough dressed and of the right nationality so that one was never at the receiving end of suspicion – or bullying. He threw his cigarette butt angrily out of the cab window. The world was mad – beyond doubt mad.
The sound of a plane circling the airport broke into his reverie. He correctly assumed that their visitor was arriving.
A few minutes later, the makeshift office decanted a whole group of civilians, with Michel’s colonel and another American army officer bringing up the rear.
Together with three neatly suited civilians hunched closely round him, a small white-haired man was hustled into the car with the American flag on it.
The senator, decided Michel with a slight grin. Big politicians must get very morbid about safety to put up with such handling.
The Mayor and three other Frenchmen, gravely talking together, got into the second limousine. Michel scrambled out and opened the door of the taxi for the colonel and his fellow officer. Michel did not recognise the rank of the new man, but it was obvious from the deference with which the colonel addressed him that he was the senior rank. Michel presumed that he was the colonel’s boss, a mysterious personage always referred to by the undertakers as ‘the War Graves Commission’.
Michel swung back into his seat, and in his best English, asked where the gentlemen would like to go. He was given the names of two cemeteries. The first was the principal American cemetery between Colleville-sur-Mer and St Laurent.
Michel sighed. This visit would take them back past Bayeux, and westward along the coast. Obviously the senator and his handlers did not know anything of the geography of Normandy.
‘Shall I lead the other cars to it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the colonel. ‘The car with the Mayor in it will lead off, then the senator’s car, and then us. Behind us will be that blue car parked over there – that’s part of his security.’
The limousines took off fast, and Michel realised that his taxi might be unable to keep up with them.
He concentrated his whole attention on keeping the taxi in the centre of the practically deserted narrow winding roads.
In his opinion, the visitors and the Mayor were unwise to allow themselves to be driven so fast on roads which had been heavily mined. Admittedly, they had been cleared and repaired, but every driver should remind himself that deeply buried mines could, even so, work their way to the surface exactly as could stones in a farmer’s field. Or a stray one covered by the bocage near the verge of the roads could be shaken – and boom.
He did not care about the politicians in the limousines, but he did care about himself – and, oddly, about the colonel, whose modest status he had only really understood when he had suddenly seen him in comparison with a bunch of politicians who could command almost new limousines.
Being an honest citizen, Michel regarded politics as something unclean, which decent people did not touch. He had tolerated the Communists, because they had fought the occupying Germans, and he and Henri had sometimes worked in close collusion with them as with other maquisards; but not with politicians who travelled in limousines.
An American newsman, accompanied by a cameraman, and a local reporter wheeling a bicycle, met them at the cemetery. The cameraman took pictures of the senator putting a small wreath of flowers on a grave, and then shaking the hands of the French officials. The newsman asked a few questions of the senator and scribbled in a notebook, while the Frenchman laid his bike down on the grass and got his information from the Mayor.
They were left at the cemetery to find their own way back to wherever they had come from; Michel assumed the Americans must have American cars or motorbikes parked nearby. He wondered, with a quirk of amusement, whether their petrol would have been siphoned off before they got back to their vehicles.
In ten minutes, the little entourage was on its way to the second cemetery. War Graves was, this time, allowed to walk with the senator. Michel gathered, from his later conversation with the colonel in the taxi, that the senator wanted details of a planned memorial to be built in commemoration of American losses.
They then turned deeper into the countryside to see the battleground that had been St Lô. The senator was not allowed to walk into the devastated streets. Security felt that it was too dangerous, it having been such a frightful battle zone. Goodness only knew what awful, still undiscovered boobytrap the Germans might have set there, which nobody had bothered to remove. Foreigners were so lax, the security man explained to the senator.
A few pedestrians watched the operation. Their expressions were sullen, and, as the senator got into the car with the flag on it, a number of pithy French expletives followed him. That area of Normandy was still bleeding, the number of its French graves counted in thousands, and nobody, least of all the Americans, seemed to care.
The long drive back to Caen brought the party thankfully to lunchtime and the restaurant, outside which lounged a couple of gendarmes. They straightened up immediately they saw the approaching limousines.
At the sight of the cars, a prosperous-looking man scanning a newspaper folded it up. Watching a crowd of idlers carefully, he moved closer to the limousine with the flag on its bonnet.
He then nodded to the nervous security guard, who had swung out of the first car immediately it stopped. The door of the beflagged limousine was swiftly opened to disgorge the senator, and three other gentlemen who tightly surrounded him as he was hustled across the pavement and into the restaurant, to be met by a bowing maître d’hôtel.
Michel watched with interest because he had met the man with the newspaper during the war; the man had been a Partisan. Now it looked as if he were a plain-clothes policeman. Someone, he thought, must have telephoned from the airport to arrange additional security for the important visitor. It all seemed like theatre to him.
He wondered why, if they were so afraid for the senator’s safety, they had not put him in the taxi or in the small blue car following after it. Then, as decoys, they could have put the uniformed men, with a civilian, in the limousine with the American flag, couldn’t they?
Recollecting his duties, he quickly got down from the driver’s seat, and opened the taxi door for the morticians.
Remembering his promise, the colonel said to Michel as he got out, ‘Come on in. The cab will be OK with the gendarmes.’
Having been apprised by the police that it was no ordinary colonel with party whom he was expected to feed, the very experienced maître d’hôtel swooped down upon the group which swarmed in.
It was led by the man from the Paris Embassy. While at the airport, he had checked with the Mayor that the choice of this restaurant was suitable, and had then confirmed the reservation by telephone.
Poor Colonel Buck, who had so innocently planned an impressive lunch for the senator, found himself relegated to a secondary table with sundry unknown Frenchmen, while Michel shared a table in a corner near the kitchen with the two chauffeurs.
At first, the chauffeurs did not know what to make of Michel, a man who looked as if he should be driving a lorryload of manure, not two senior American officers in a taxi as old as the Ark.
