Читать книгу Madame Barbara - Helen Forrester - Страница 10

When Barbara looked down at the neat white cross which indicated the last resting place of Private George Bishop, 6th Batt., East Lancashire Regiment, died 27 July 1944, aged 28 years, she felt the same stunned emptiness she had endured when she had first heard of his loss through the War Office.

The gardener watched her from a discreet distance. One never knew how these women, whether mothers or wives, might react. He had had some who had flung themselves onto the wet grass and had lain there, crying for hours. Others had had hysterics and screamed so hard you could have heard them in Tessel. Still others came and went without a word, their expressions frozen into grim endurance.

Fathers occasionally came alone, to stand uneasily before a cross, tears running silently down their cheeks. Frequently, they wore their own medals, won in the First World War, as if to identify themselves as sharing the suffering of their boy who lay beneath the sod.

Barbara made no noise, though tears ran down her face.

When she felt steadier, she kneeled down on the damp lawn and carefully laid the flowers in front of the cross, tucking them close round its base, as if tucking a baby up in bed.

She felt she should say a prayer, but if God tolerated the horrors represented by this single white cross, He must be insane and would not understand her prayer or her dire need for comforting. There was no point in praying.

Given different times, she thought with a burst of anger at fools who made war, George could have been watching a football match with the Germans on the other side of this carefully groomed cemetery. What was it about men that allowed them to be led by the nose into ghastly cruelty against each other? It didn’t make sense.

These days, nothing made sense. The war was over, but George would not return; at home on Merseyside, each cold and hungry day seemed worse than the previous one. And this French countryside of shattered, deserted villages and towns had shocked her beyond measure. In the glory of a successful invasion, and the Allies having at last beaten the Germans, she realised that few people in England had given a thought to the suffering French civilians who had been caught in the middle.

She looked again at the cross before her. Is this how her mother had felt when her seaman husband had drowned in the Atlantic in 1941, his freighter sent to perdition by Germans, may they rot in hell? Mam had looked like a ghost for over two years. Even now, she was not the same woman who had kissed him goodbye before his last voyage; she had aged immeasurably.

The hopeless tears increased, running down Barbara’s face to drip onto her flowered scarf.

She had not felt so alone in her entire life.

From his seat on the step of the taxi, the driver observed her a little anxiously. Her face had blenched as if she might faint. Then he saw that Jules was watching her, ready to go to her if needed.

A solitary ray of sunshine lit up her shaking shoulders, her white, set face bent over the flowers, her hands clasped in her lap, as she finally sat back on her heels and bowed her head in helpless submission to forces beyond her control.

Death is truly the end, thought the apprehensive driver. There is nothing you can do to reverse it. As he frequently did, he silently cursed the name of Adolf Hitler and all his German brood.

After about five minutes, Barbara crossed herself mechanically, and then stumbled to her feet. She stood looking down at the flower-bedecked grave for a moment, heaved a mighty sigh, and said to it in a tremulous voice, ‘Goodbye, luvvie. Goodbye, my dearest.’

She raised her eyes and saw Jules staring at her as he stood diffidently by the gate at the edge of the lawn. He smiled gently. Like a priest, he saw daily so much sorrow.

She forced herself to gather her wits together. ‘Thanks, Monsieur Jules,’ she said heavily in faltering French. ‘Thanks for keeping the grave so well.’

She turned slowly back to the taxi. Realising that many of George’s friends must be buried around him, she picked her way carefully between the crosses, anxious not to step on anyone.

Before she reached the taxi, she paused and gave one last, long look back. Then she slowly turned away.

She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and carefully wiped her face clean of tears. With dead eyes, she observed the patient driver hastily rise from his seat on the step of the taxi. She did not say anything as she approached him.

‘Madame wish the hotel?’ he enquired softly. He put his arm lightly round her to guide her to the taxi door.

‘Yes, please.’ Where else to go? What else to do?

She had allowed sixteen days for her visit to Normandy itself. She had planned that, after seeing George’s grave, she would have a walking holiday, exploring Calvados. She had never in her life had a real holiday and she had a vague hope that fresh air and good food would help to restore something of her pre-war energy.

But she had not allowed for this abject sense of loneliness, of desolation; and now, as far as she could judge, it seemed that most of Normandy had been wrecked – wrecked by armies sent to free it. The suffering it must have caused; it did not bear thinking about. To have visitors like her stare at it all must make the Normans feel that they were being reduced to a tourist attraction.

Now all she wanted to do was to lie down and be very quiet until she gained the strength to face, if she could, the rest of her empty life.

As the taxi driver cautiously shifted gears, she leaned her head back against the upholstery. Helplessly, she began to cry in earnest, deep rending sobs torn from her very heart.

Michel glanced back at her. He was tremendously disturbed by her obvious grief; she was too little, too pretty to suffer like this.

‘Madame, chère Madame, please don’t cry,’ he implored. He was weeping himself, for himself, for all the hurt people he carried in his taxi, and particularly for the nice young woman behind him.

She barely heard his plea, though she did try to muffle the noise she was making.

‘Please, please don’t cry, Madame.’ He paused while he aimed the vehicle carefully through the cemetery gates and onto the lane leading from it. Then he tried again.

‘Believe me, Madame, if I own this taxi, I marry you myself!’ He sighed. ‘Hélas, Monsieur Duval own it.’

There was a sudden cessation of the sobs, as the humour of the practical remark struck Barbara; the hard common sense of a presumably penniless young man anxious to help. She laughed through her tears, but after a second or two, she leaned forward and laid her head on her knee and commenced more quietly to weep again.

The taxi was carefully slowed, as the penniless one found that, with eyes clouded by tears, he could not see the road properly. He felt he too had reason to weep. Was not his own life shattered?

‘I stop,’ he announced. ‘We sit down on grass. We smoke, eh? We are better. Then nobody at the hotel stare at you.’

She did not answer.

He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Then he drew in to the side of the road. A drainage ditch ran alongside the asphalt; beyond it was a grassy bank, shadowed by a huge hedge.

He jumped down and opened the door for Barbara. ‘Come, Madame,’ he urged persuasively. ‘We rest. You become calm before we go to hotel, eh?’

Numbly, she allowed herself to be helped out. She looked uncertainly down at the ditch.

‘Jump,’ Michel instructed, gesturing towards the grass on the other side. He himself cleared the ditch as effortlessly as a circus performer, and held out his hand for her to grasp.

In her flat-heeled shoes, the ditch was no real problem. Barbara held his hand and jumped. As she landed, he put his arm quickly round her waist to steady her. It was instinctive on his part.

To her, it was an unexpected shock, not because he seemed presumptuous but it gave her a sense that somebody cared enough to do so, even if that person was a total stranger.

In and around the docks, where she had toiled through the war and even since peace had been declared, she had often hit out at men who, in her widowhood, felt she was fair game, and had importuned or otherwise harassed her with their coarse familiarity. Now, as she still shuddered with sobs for her husband, she felt the warmth of the slim, tired-looking stranger beside her, smelled the strong tobacco and male sweat of him, and she was honestly grateful for his sober, sensible presence.

He eased her round and sat her down on the grassy bank. Then he sat down cross-legged in front of her, so that he could look straight at her face. He fumbled under his jersey and brought out his precious packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.

‘Smoke?’

There were only three cigarettes left in the packet, and she hesitated; cigarettes were hard to obtain, and like gold in her particular English village.

He smiled and thrust the package closer to her. She heaved a sob, and then helped herself. He struck a match and held the light to her cigarette.

The lines on his face deepened and his brown eyes twinkled as he endeavoured to cheer her. ‘Cigarette good,’ he said firmly, as she inhaled the strong acrid smoke of a Gauloise.

She coughed, and smiled tremulously.

She watched him stick a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and light it. His face shone wet in the light of the tiny flame, and she realised with astonishment that he had really been crying. She wondered, with a feeling of profound compassion, if, in addition to the loss of his farm, he had lost someone in the war. Perhaps his fiancée? He had mentioned a fiancée’s parents on the way to the cemetery. He had not directly mentioned the lady herself.