Tug of War djs-6 Page 15

  ‘All of that in any order,’ said Joe and, sniffing and looking around, ‘What’s that disgusting smell? Smells like wet. . oh, hello, Bruno, old man! I say, is he allowed under the table in his present state?’

  ‘Don’t try to move him! He got a bit wet rolling about in one of the seven springs. Joe, you must go and look at the stables,’ Dorcas said and, turning to Georges, ‘Joe’s a top-hole rider! Why don’t you offer him a ride on Taranis?’ she suggested slyly.

  ‘I think I’d need to know what his name meant first,’ said Joe warily.

  ‘Gaulish God of Thunder, sir,’ said Georges. ‘And your reservations are well founded. We never offer him to guests,’ he added reprovingly with a forgiving grin for Dorcas. ‘But I would like to snatch a few words with you myself, if you wouldn’t mind. . Dorcas thinks I should speak to you, sir. I mean, don’t let me put you off your breakfast or anything and I haven’t much to say, I suppose. .’ He began to run out of steam and shuffled his large feet in embarrassment.

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Dorcas. ‘You’ve got important things to say and Joe’s a good listener. That’s what he’s come all this way for — to listen. Go on, you’re to tell him, Georges!’

  Georges was pleased to be so encouraged but something was still holding him back.

  ‘Not the easiest thing in the world — taking up a stance opposite to that of your mother,’ said Joe. His slight smile and sudden inward focus suggested a personal understanding of Georges’s dilemma. ‘But let me tell you I don’t find it at all unusual or shocking or even disloyal. I’ve met three families in the course of this case and none of them have been in agreement over the identity of the patient in Reims. Everyone involved has his or her own genuinely held opinion or evidence to put forward and I’m working with the French police to collect and evaluate it. It’s important that I hear your views. You are, after all, likely to be significantly affected by the outcome, aren’t you? Pivotal, I’d say.’

  The boy nodded miserably. His good humour had faded and his young face, suddenly serious and drawn, gave a foretaste of the handsome man he would become. Still he debated with himself, unable to speak.

  ‘Look, I’ll come clean,’ said Joe encouraging. ‘I have no authority in France. I’m just here to find out whether the gentleman in question may be English and to help Inspector Bonnefoye where I can in an advisory capacity. Sir Douglas. .’ The boy brightened and nodded at the mention of his name. The Brigadier was obviously a welcome and respected guest. ‘Sir Douglas sent me to offer a hand. We just want to arrive at the truth. If you disagree with your mother’s interpretation of the situation you’re quite entitled to your view. Believe me — I’ve heard many discordant views so far.’

  He spoke at last, slowly. ‘The word “discordant” is hardly up to the job. . say rather, disloyal. . destructive.’ He looked at Joe steadily over the table. ‘What I have to say will destroy for ever my relationship with my mother — whom I love very much — and more than that, it could destroy her. Ruin her life. And what is the evidence of a boy who was seven years old at the time worth? I’ve gone over and over what I saw. Every day I have lived with it. I can’t any longer believe in what I know. In the evidence of my own senses.’

  Joe was becoming alarmed by the boy’s tension, his staring eyes, his hands, clenched and tugging at the tablecloth, and wished he could undo what he’d started. The dog, disturbed, gave a warning growl to the room at large, not quite knowing at whom to direct his unease. But Georges was pressing on, unstoppable now.

  ‘It’s been growing in me like a canker all these years. I don’t think I can pretend any longer that I don’t know. I’ll crack up if I don’t tell someone and yet I know I risk infecting everyone around me with the filth that will burst out. . Sir, will you help me? Will you listen and promise to take no action against anyone I may involve? I could have got this terribly wrong, you see. .’

  Joe opened his mouth to deliver a formal and clear police warning. ‘Anything you say, young man, will be taken down. .’

  But he caught Dorcas’s pleading expression and, bewitched — he could only later excuse himself on grounds of bewitchment — heard himself instead giving the asked-for, impossible and thoroughly unprofessional assurances.

  ‘I know that man they’re keeping in Reims is not my father,’ whispered Georges. ‘He can’t be my father because. . my father, Clovis Houdart, is dead. But he wasn’t killed in battle, sir. I was there when he was murdered. Nearly ten years ago.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Joe wondered if, over the hundreds of miles of land and sea that separated them, Brigadier Redmayne on his Scottish grouse moor was troubled by the curse he sent winging his way. That mosquito now settling on his left cheek — would Sir Douglas ever attribute the sharp sting to Joe’s summoning up of a stab of silent invective?

  Dorcas was speechless. Joe guessed that the intimacy of the young pair had not progressed as far as this startling admission and could feel that she too was taken aback.

  Joe replied calmly. ‘Have you never spoken of this to your uncle?’

  Georges shook his head. ‘To no one.’

  ‘What a burden to carry by yourself all these years, my poor old chap!’ said Joe. ‘But, you say it yourself, you were only seven years old at the time of this terrible event — if indeed it ever occurred — and I agree, a seven-year-old is quite likely through simple inexperience to put a wrong interpretation on scenes he’s witnessed. Why don’t we all look at it again with adult eyes and see if we can make sense of it?’

  Georges looked at him more hopefully.

  ‘Tell me some more.’

  Judging by the boy’s silence that he had no idea where best to begin, Joe led him into a conversation, pouring out more coffee all round and trying to avoid anything resembling a police interview of the ‘Where did you last see your father?’ type. He remembered a Victorian painting with that very title. Sentimental, colourful and full of narrative power, it had been his favourite. A Royalist family had been arrested in their own home at the time of the Civil War by a company of Roundheads. The Cavalier father was missing, fled. His young son, a boy of about six, stood proudly, stiffly upright, in his blue satin suit on a stool facing up to interrogation by a squad of frozen-faced, dark-clad and totally menacing Parliamentarians. The boy’s older sister stood behind him in her white satin dress trimmed with pink rosebuds and she wept into her hands. His sister Lydia wouldn’t have wept, Joe always thought. She’d have given them what for. He identified with the boy and sent himself to sleep each night making up stories of increasing complexity with which he might have fooled the chief interrogator. For a change he sometimes played the part of this man who, on closer examination, seemed to have a more kindly face than the other soldiers. He leaned forward over the desk, keen and clever.

  Instinctively, Joe had always understood that it was here the danger lay. They would never have succeeded in beating information out of such a boy but one sympathetic word, one well-placed question politely asked and he would be in the net.

  Very well. Time to play the kindly chief interrogator.

  ‘How often did your father come home during those war years?’ he asked. ‘I know leave was hard to come by. . men went for years sometimes without seeing their families.’

  He was on the right track. Georges replied at once. ‘Hardly ever. That’s the problem. I’m very confused about the times when my father came home. Once, he came home in the night and he’d had to go away again before I woke next morning,’ he said. This had obviously been a sharp cause of distress. ‘He left a toy horse on my pillow. My mother was always waiting. When she wasn’t out in the fields or at the hospital working. . She would sit moping by the window or sometimes on the top step with the dog. . we had a greyhound in those days. And she would talk all the time about what my father would say and do, how proud he would be of me when he came home. And he did come home. Three times in as many years. I marked them down in my day book. But it was always f
or a very short time and he’d have to ride off again. I’m not complaining, sir. It was like that for every child at that time. Millions of us were left fatherless. Some lost both parents. I’ve been lucky.’

  Joe was glad to hear the boy’s refusal to indulge in self-pity.

  ‘Were you not evacuated to a safer place?’ Joe asked. ‘Couldn’t help noticing the bullet holes on the façade.’

  Georges smiled. ‘Maman refuses to have them filled in. She says they’re a part of the history of the house and there they’ll stay. And yes, we did go away sometimes to my grandparents in Paris when the war came dangerously close. But mostly we stayed and hoped for the best. We had lots of soldiers through the house, billeted on us. And glad to have them. We always felt safer with men about the place. Maman cheered up when the house was full. She forgot about waiting and moping. And she felt she was doing her bit. She was very good at it. She’d sing and play the piano for them, cook whatever we had. Dress their wounds.’ He grinned at Joe. ‘She may look like a butterfly but she’s actually as tough as old boots. And she expected everyone to pitch in, even me, though I was only small. I remember working in the fields with frozen hands in winter, keeling over in the heat in summer and never daring to complain. I’ve never lost the habit.’ He held out with pride large square hands callused like a coachman’s.

  ‘Maman had a poster fixed up at the gates to encourage us all. A call to action to the women and children of France from the Prefect.’ He smiled and spoke the remembered words with emotion: ‘“Debout femmes françaises, jeunes enfants, filles et fils de la Patrie! Remplacez sur le champ du travail ceux qui sont sur le champ de bataille. Debout! A l’action! Au labeur!” “On your feet! To action! To work!” Hard work though! But we did it. We managed — just about — to take in the fields the places of those who were on the battlefields. We were even used as an overflow for the hospital once and I had to help with the laundry.’ He shuddered and pulled a face to disguise his passing horror. ‘That was a low point.’

  ‘Yes, you did it, old son, you did it!’ murmured Joe. ‘Kept the country going.’ And, after a pause, ‘I’m wondering what nationalities you had here? Actually — you might well have had me! I was based very close by.’

  ‘We did have a few English. Maman liked them the best. So did I. They were my good friends while they were here. Some of them came back several times. And some wrote to me when they got back home after the war. They missed their own sons, I think, or their little brothers, and I got quite spoilt. We still get Christmas cards from one or two. I have a friend called John who never forgets to send me a birthday card even when he’s soldiering abroad. And we had French units of course. Mostly French. There was a day when we almost had Germans!’

  He smiled. ‘They made a terrible mistake. It was at the time when the whole area was swarming with all three armies. No time to get away — we just had to sit it out. We had a squad of English cavalrymen with us at the time when suddenly someone shouted that the Boche were on their way. And a German staff car was spotted coming down the drive. Just driving down as bold as brass! An officer and his driver. They’d taken the wrong turning and thought they were approaching their billet for the night. Sitting ducks for the English marksmen. They fired warning shots over their heads and called to them to surrender. The Germans fired back and those are the holes you see in the front of the house. They were taken alive but wounded and sent off for interrogation.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Joe. ‘I may even have carried out that questioning myself!’ He was reasonably sure that he hadn’t but Georges seemed excited at the coincidence and he decided to spin out the story. ‘I was with Military Intelligence recovering from a shoulder wound. We were brought an officer with a leather bag in his possession. Lots of bloodstained rubbish in there but also a map which quite obviously showed von Kluck’s forward planning. We were delighted to have it. Particularly as it showed he was planning a manoeuvre that played straight into allied hands. We didn’t get an awful lot else out of the officer but his sidekick, a taxi driver from Berlin, sang like a song thrush.’

  His confidence won, Georges listened to a few more extracts from the war diaries of Captain Sandilands. ‘I say, sir, would you like to see my record of the war? My notebook? It’s very. . well. . naïve and badly written but it does give the dates when my father was about the place.’

  ‘I shall probably shed a tear or two but if you wouldn’t mind — that would be a great help. Good to have something concrete to go on in this shifting affair,’ said Joe. ‘No hurry.’

  ‘Well, the last date of interest you’ll find is in the summer of ’17. My father came home for a couple of days. And after that, nothing. No letters. No news. No sightings.’ The words were coming from him in uncontrolled staccato bursts. ‘It was said he’d been killed — disappeared anyway — during the battle of the Chemin des Dames. His body was never found. For good reason. He’s still here. He never left the château again. He was killed here. Buried here. My mother killed him.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Joe fought down his instinctive Englishman’s outburst of incredulity. ‘I say, old chap, hold on. . let’s not be fantastical now. .’ would have been the wrong response. But what could possibly be the right one?

  While he hesitated, Dorcas asked in an interested voice: ‘Can you show us where you think all this happened, Georges? You say it happened here. “Here” would seem to be about a hundred acres of house and grounds. If we could go with you to the scene, it might help.’

  The practical suggestion seemed to stir him from his paralysis.

  ‘It’s not far,’ said Georges. ‘In fact, I’ve been detailed to take you there this morning. It’s on the tour we give every guest.’ His hands began to shake again and he bent to hide them, pushing them deep into Bruno’s fur. ‘Every day for nearly ten years I’ve passed within a foot or two of my father’s body and I’ve never been able to acknowledge him.’ His chin went up in defiance. ‘But today I will.’

  They followed him from the house and across a cobbled courtyard. A single-storey wing in the same classical style to their left Joe guessed to be a run of stables ending in a charming dovecote and, on the right, balancing, but of a later age and of a more simple and workaday appearance, was the cellar. Georges, relieved to be active again, had fallen into his accustomed role of guide around the family winery. His talk rolled on smoothly: ‘Natural caves in the chalk dug out and enlarged, possibly by the Romans. . storage for more than a million bottles. . steady temperature. . ten miles of corridor. . if you get lost, just follow the arrows. .’

  They paused at the oak door at the entrance to the galleries and Georges took a sweater from around his neck and helped Dorcas to pull it on over her head. ‘It’s warm enough out here but down there don’t forget it’s at a constant 11 degrees Centigrade. The wine enjoys it — you won’t.’ He clicked on the electric lighting system, closed the door behind them and led the way down a twisting staircase.

  They started on the tour, Georges full of information and well-rehearsed jokes, and Joe began to wonder if he’d imagined the scene in the kitchen. All was normal if not even slightly boring. The chalk walls hewn out over the centuries were whitewashed. The smell was pleasantly musty and made Joe think of mushrooms, forests and ferns. The storage corridors were lined with wooden triangular racks, double-sided, containing champagne bottles tilted at an angle, dimpled bases outwards. Georges set to, working along the rows, deftly demonstrating with flicks of the wrist the technique used to give the bottles a quarter of a turn each day, a movement which kept the deposit in the bottles on the move down towards the neck of the bottle.

  ‘But why do you want the filthy bit at the top?’ Dorcas asked. ‘In red wine the dregs are always at the bottom and you can easily decant the wine and leave the nasty bits behind.’

  ‘Ah — we do it this way to achieve absolute purity,’ said Georges. ‘At the very end of the maturing process we have skilled workers who release the tempor
ary cork. .’ He took a bottle from a rack and, holding it between his knees, carefully pointing it away from his guests, eased out the cork with two strong thumbs. Joe was prepared for the explosion but the effect was so shattering in that narrow space as to make him jump and thrust his hands into his pockets. Out shot a spray of gas, champagne and a smear of detritus. A split second later, Georges had clamped it shut again.

  ‘A la volée! With an explosion! That’s how they do it. And what you’ve just seen is called dégorgement. Clearing the neck. All the nastiness gone in a second and we’re left with the purest wine.’

  ‘But what is that black stuff?’ Dorcas wanted to know. ‘How did it get in there in the first place?’

  ‘It’s the remains of the dried yeast. Actually it’s been doing a valuable job in the bottle. It plays its part in developing the character of the finished wine. There’d be little aroma or flavour without it. Then after release, we recork, label and sell it!’

  ‘But there’s a space in the bottle now,’ Dorcas said. ‘Look, the bottle’s not full. I don’t know much about wine but I know Granny’s butler would never accept a bottle with a space between the wine and the cork.’

  Georges was pleased with his pupil. ‘Well noticed, Dorcas. We top it up with liqueur de dosage — vintage champagne containing sugar — and this allows us to control the degree of sweetness. Uncle Charles has a good deal of fun with this — he’s discovered that some countries like it sweet, others, like England, prefer it very dry. He always gets it right. And he has sensitive antennae when it comes to tuning in to changing tastes and trends.’ Georges grinned. ‘Sometimes I think it’s Uncle Charles who sets the trends. A word in the right, influential ear, a well-placed advertisement. .’