Tug of War Page 18

  ‘A bit harsh?’ said Joe. ‘The desire to have one’s husband restored can hardly be regarded as abnormal? I have spoken to Aline. She held . . . and still holds . . . Clovis in the deepest affection.’

  Charles took a fortifying sip of coffee and levelled a sharp glance at Joe over his cup. His eyes were shining with cynical amusement. ‘I see she’s got you where she wants you, old man! Oh, don’t be concerned – she captures everyone.’ He stirred uncomfortably. ‘But, look here, the thing is . . . and you won’t believe me . . . I say this unwillingly anyway but . . . quite the reverse. Um. I’d say they positively disliked each other.

  ‘Once he’d got over the initial starry-eyed enchantment, Clovis became over the years, first cool, then irritated and then uncaring. He adored his son, of course. But even so, as soon as war became a possibility he rejoined his regiment. He was a second son. He trained as a soldier at St Cyr. You knew that? And you’re aware, I take it, of the French rules of inheritance? Our crazy Napoleonic law! Everything to be divided equally between the male heirs whether there’s two or twenty. Ridiculous! It’s ruined many a grand – and lowly – estate. And you’d be surprised how many families cease to expand after the birth of the first son. Though, if he dies, a second seems, miraculously, to appear in short order. Clovis’s older brother died and he inherited everything – threw himself into viticulture and was very effective. Then came the war. Brave man, intensely patriotic. I do think his country meant more to him than anything. In short he was gallant, to use an old-fashioned word. He would always put himself in the thick of things. Surprising that he lasted as long as he did.

  ‘But, as I say, I think he was not unhappy to leave his wife behind. From what I gathered from her complaints he rarely, suspiciously rarely, I’d say, came home on leave. Avoiding her. But he needed to see his son so the man must have been torn in two. He wasn’t a cold man, Sandilands, don’t think it. Reserved perhaps but . . .’ He reached forward and picked up the photograph of Clovis holding his son on his knee. ‘That was Clovis. Loving. That’s the man I remember and it’s the man Georges remembers.’

  ‘Well, he seems to have inspired deep emotion. Aline tells me she is motivated by love to pursue her claim on this man,’ said Joe. ‘But if you’re saying – not love on her part or his – then what? She is preparing to go to some lengths, involving experts in the fields of criminology and psychiatry, to make her case.’

  ‘And there’s where my concern lies. I was delighted when we were told they suspected he was English. A jolly good solution all round, I thought. Best possible outcome. And that’s when I contacted Douglas and stirred up the French police. At that stage the forces of law and order were not involved and the whole cat’s cradle was being handled by a sanatorium and the Ministry of Pensions. Hardly adequate, I thought, considering the increasing complexity. I knew I could depend on Douglas to send someone to shine a light on all this. And, Sandilands, I’m very glad you’re here. We need to know the truth – we can all work with that.’

  ‘You don’t think Aline would try to circumvent the truth?’

  ‘She wouldn’t see it like that. She thinks she’s above it. What Aline decides becomes the truth – if you see what I mean. It’s her unwavering sense of purpose that troubles me. She’s up to something we have no idea of. And if she succeeds in her schemes it will bring her into head-on collision with her son. Georges is as convinced as anyone can be that this man is not his father. And I’m not prepared to stand by and see his home and his future put at risk by one of Aline’s delusions.

  ‘I’ve worked – yes, worked – alongside Georges for some years now, taught him all I know that’s worth knowing. I’m proud to say in many ways I’ve stood in for his father. It can never be the same, of course, but, well, I’m not a married man, Sandilands, no children of my own so you can imagine how I feel.’ He gave Joe a manly smile. ‘Don’t go in for self-delusion myself. No time for it. I’ve examined my own motives in denying this man and I have to say that’s all I can come up with. The chance that I’d lose my paternal role in regard to Georges. Sounds feeble perhaps but it’s something I’ve required myself to face. I would be distressed to give all this up . . .’ He glanced around and then looked back directly at Joe. ‘But not so upset it would occur to me to give false statements, to try to effect a wrong outcome. Never!’

  ‘Tell me, Houdart – Georges has seen the patient, hasn’t he? I say, can we call the patient by his hospital name of Thibaud? Good Lord, I never thought to ask him. I just assumed that . . .’

  ‘He has seen him. Yes. Once. I took him in one day with his mother.’

  ‘I’d be interested to hear your view of the meeting.’

  ‘Awkward, Embarrassing even. Aline talked to the man . . . Thibaud, you say? . . .as though he were fully compos mentis. “Do you remember, darling, the day when you . . . And I simply can’t leave without telling you that . . . When you come home, of course . . .” There was a lot of that! Thibaud just stared through her. Then they brought a very unwilling Georges into the room. The lad was taken aback. I was sure at first he knew him. He knelt at the man’s feet and took hold of his hands, staring into his face.’

  ‘Did Thibaud respond?’

  ‘Not really. He put out a hand and stroked Georges’s arm once or twice. The doctor got quite excited but it wasn’t much to an onlooker.’

  ‘And Georges’s impression?’

  ‘He was very shaken but when he could get his thoughts together afterwards, he said: “It’s very like him but it’s not my father.” And he repeated it. “It’s not my father.”’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Joe took off his shoes and jacket, loosened his collar and lounged on his bed, eyes closed. A moment later with a sigh of irritation he gave up his attempt at siesta and went to sit at the bureau to make notes on the morning’s events. After lunch Aline had announced that the family generally retired for an hour’s rest in the hottest part of the day in the southern tradition and Joe and Dorcas were invited to do the same.

  A tap on the door had him padding across the room to answer it. ‘Dorcas! Something wrong?’

  She ducked under his arm and slipped into the room. ‘Look! I’ve got Georges’s notebook!’ she said, holding up a school exercise book. ‘You’re not to let anyone know this exists. Not even his mother knows he’s still got it. He thinks she’d have got rid of it long ago.’ She put it down on the desk and pulled up a second chair for herself. ‘Good. I see you’re working. Tell me – how did the lovebirds get on in the dovecote?’ she asked innocently. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again when you disappeared in there with Queen Guinevere. Don’t you think she looks like the grieving Queen in that picture by William Morris?’

  ‘If you’re going to be silly, this conversation ends here,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Sorry, Joe. Let me try again. Did she manage to convince you that Thibaud is her husband?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes, she did present what I would regard as convincing evidence. It is indisputable and therefore I think we have to conclude that Georges is deluded. The victim of a nightmare of some sort? He seems to have led a pretty nightmarish existence in his childhood. It’s possible!’

  He outlined the evidence Aline Houdart had presented, missing out the allegory of the doves so carefully constructed. He didn’t want to see Dorcas’s lip curl.

  ‘Well, I’d call that a bit rum!’ said Dorcas. ‘Wouldn’t you? You realize we’ve got three women who all claim an intimate acquaintance with Thibaud’s bum?’

  ‘Dorcas! You’d do well to leave such language to the Eton boys!’

  ‘Derrière then. Mireille was the first one to report a birthmark on her Dominique. “Conclusive”, you said. Then Madame Tellancourt described in accurate detail her son Thomas’s birthmarks fore and aft. “Decisive”, I remember you saying. And now here’s Madame Houdart making exactly the same claim. “Incontrovertible”, apparently. It must be straining all your powers of detection, J
oe, to work out there’s something fishy going on! Now, Thibaud has got those marks just as described and it’s certain that only the one genuine claimant would have been aware of them so the other two are lying. But where do they get their information? They’re rivals. They’re hardly likely to pass it on.’

  ‘Keep going, Dorcas,’ said Joe. ‘You’re getting there!’

  ‘It was Mireille who brought it up. She gave the information before you asked the doctor to have him checked. Which makes me think . . . Who else knows about the birthmarks? Dr Varimont . . . The two orderlies. They know! And perhaps somehow the information got out of the hospital? Perhaps they sold it? They know how the competition is hotting up. The knowledge had a value.’

  ‘I think the information got out of the hospital down a telephone wire,’ said Joe. ‘Telephone! We need one.’

  ‘Georges showed me the office. They have one in there. There’s no one about. Madame Houdart is swooning away in her room and Georges and his uncle have gone to organize the gypsy grape-pickers. They turned up just before lunch about a month before they were expected. Come on!’

  Joe slipped the notebook between the leaves of a Michelin atlas. ‘Good staff work, Joliffe,’ he grinned. ‘Right! To the communications dug-out! Lead on.’

  To his relief, the telephone system worked efficiently and he was soon put through to Varimont in Reims. Amused, Joe heard the doctor reacting in just the same way as Dorcas: ‘Three word-perfect identifications? This is ridiculous! This is not to be believed! They’re making monkeys of us, Commander! Two, at least, possibly all three, are lying. But the question is – where do they come by this information? Ah. Ah,’ he said as he silently answered his own question. ‘An internal malfunction, obviously. Leave this to me, Sandilands. I’ll have your answer in ten minutes. What was that? Ear lobes? Good Lord, never noticed. I’ll check that myself. Ring me back in, say, half an hour and I should have something for you. Wonderful instrument, the telephone.’ And the communication was cut.

  ‘Gosh!’ said Dorcas who’d been listening, ear clamped to the other side of the receiver. ‘I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes! He’ll have them on a charge.’ She turned Joe’s wrist and looked at his watch. ‘Well, while we’re waiting . . .’

  Joe took out the notebook and laid it on the desk. It was a school exercise book, the pages secured with a stout paperclip. A quick check of the dates showed that it had been kept sporadically between the summer of 1914 when Georges was five years old and barely able to write and Christmas 1918. His mother had clearly helped with the earlier entries but her contributions ceased when the writing became confident, the comments individual.

  Pasted inside the front cover was a copy of the photograph of Georges sitting on Clovis’s knee. The entries were for the most part cursory, of the went away on the train to Granny’s kind. The weather was a preoccupation evidently: Late frost . . . heavy snowfall . . . high wind . . . another hot day . . . as were the comings and goings of various elements of the allied armies billeted on the family.

  The situation of the château, in a sheltered position a few miles south of the front, made it a perfect place to station officers recuperating from battle or reservists preparing to go up to the front line. There seemed to have been a constant procession of these from the late summer of 1914 until the Armistice. Their comings and goings had punctuated the boy’s life. Georges had noted their nationality (French and English, usually separately, occasionally messing together) and identified their units. If they were infantry their brigade was noted; if cavalry, their squadron; artillery, their groupe. The excited seven-year-old had given half a page to the arrival of a twenty-strong detachment of chasseurs à pied, mounted on bicycles.

  Some officers were mentioned by name:

  Yves and I caught three rabbits!

  Ten centimetres of snow. Very cold. This was December 1916. Joe shivered at the memory of that winter – the hardest in living memory in Champagne – and read on: Edward brought in a fir tree from the wood and we made decorations. We painted fir cones with white paint and stuck them on. I made an angel for the top. Maman let us use her old necklaces as trimmings and she let us light candles for half an hour. We sang an English song. Edward shot a partridge and we roasted it with some chestnuts over the vine trimmings. Carefully printed out on the page opposite the entry, in an adult hand, were the words to ‘Away in a manger’. The first carol every English child learns to sing.

  ‘Well, good for you, Edward, whoever you are,’ murmured Joe. ‘Never let a little thing like a world war interfere with Christmas.’

  Clovis’s appearances were easily identified. The writing took on a weight and a flourish and the entries were marked in the margin with a star. Just as Georges had told them, they were sparse and short; the last recorded arrival was on 20th July 1917. It was followed on 22nd July by a short entry: Papa gone.

  There was no more until 11th November 1918. It’s finished. I will remember, were Georges’s last words.

  But there were other reminders of the war collected together in a large envelope tucked into the back. Joe tipped them out on to the desk. A boy’s magpie collection of precious mementoes spilled out. Cap badges from English regiments clattered on to the wood and Joe turned them over with keen interest. Dorcas counted out twelve. ‘These are pretty. What’s the galloping white horse?’

  ‘The West Yorkshire Regiment. It’s the White Horse of Hanover.’

  ‘And this creature? A dragon, I think?’

  ‘Ah, yes. That’s the emblem of the Buffs – the East Kent Regiment. And this silver bugle? It’s the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.’

  ‘Is there a Royal Fusiliers badge among them? Edward’s listed as a Royal Fusilier.’

  ‘Yes. It’s this one.’

  Dorcas looked puzzled. ‘What on earth is it? It looks like a chrysanthemum.’

  ‘It’s meant to be a grenade. An exploding grenade. It’s a design common to all Fusilier regiments. The round bit at the bottom is the body of the grenade itself and carries the device that distinguishes it from the rest. This one has a tiny white rose in the centre, do you see? And the rose is set within the Garter and ensigned with a crown. The excrescence spouting out at the top, which you took to be petals, represents the flames issuing from the explosion. This is made of bronze so it must have belonged to an officer.’

  Dorcas continued to play with them, turning them this way and that and finally counting them carefully back into their envelope. ‘I can see why he’d want to collect them. They’re very attractive.’

  ‘And have you seen these drawings?’ Joe put them in front of her. One was an accomplished sketch of a trench system with arrows marking out assault and defence manoeuvres, another an affectionate cartoon of Marshal Joffre, easily recognizable by his luxuriant white moustache and his corpulence. And there were cards: birthday cards and Christmas cards from England, some of recent date. There were letters. Some in English, some French, all from officers writing with good humour and happy memories to a child they had grown fond of.

  Reading them, Dorcas looked up to comment on this. ‘They admired him, Joe. You’re right – he was the son they all missed or hoped one day to have.’

  ‘He must have been a great comfort in those terrible times,’ said Joe. ‘And, yes, hope, you say. It was hard enough to think of the world as we’d known it ever continuing. Men got very sentimental – I’ve seen exhausted, hopeless soldiers fall on their knees in the Flanders mud, crying their eyes out at the sight of a clump of snowdrops. The presence of that little boy, clever, hardworking, determined to survive, must have inspired them. He must have represented for them all that they were fighting for.’

  ‘Oh, look, Joe! I think this says it all.’ She passed him a pencil sketch skilfully done, a portrait of Aline sitting holding Georges in her arms, heads together, smiling.

  ‘A modern Madonna and child?’ Joe remarked. ‘It only lacks the haloes.’

  ‘Well, of course they’re id
ealized. Anyone can see that. This artist is drawing a mother and child he is fighting for. They aren’t his wife and child. Look – there’s a signature and it doesn’t say Clovis Houdart. But at the moment he drew it they were his. You can see that. If he and his comrades were to give way, this little family would be overwhelmed, annihilated, and this oasis poisoned. You’d jolly well go out and fight for them, wouldn’t you, Joe?’

  In her emotion she’d forgotten for a moment that he had.

  ‘I know you’re right, Dorcas. It’s a very primitive response. Like the Athenians when they squared up to the Persians on the sea at Salamis. They’d evacuated Athens hours ahead of the Persian advance, fled to the coast and put their wives and children crowded together on a tiny island in the bay of Salamis and there, with their families at their backs and the huge Persian navy blocking the channel, the men of Athens turned and fought. It was death or slavery for those women and children if they failed. And more than that – it was the obliteration of their civilization. No men, I believe, have ever had a heavier load resting on their shoulders. Fathers, sons and brothers hauled on the oars of their galleys, rammed, destroyed, shot and slashed their way to an incredible victory.

  ‘It’s the most powerful motivation of all,’ he finished thoughtfully. ‘Defending your own flesh and blood.’

  He fell into an awkward silence, remembering too late that Dorcas’s father had abandoned her and her brother to the doubtful care of their grandmother when he went off to spend the war years in Switzerland. Should he say anything?

  She patted his hand. ‘It’s all right, Joe. I’d have been there, standing on the shore with the rest of the women and children, and I’d have whacked on the head any Persian who tried to swim on to the island.’

  ‘Ah! You know the story?’

  She nodded. ‘I’d fight like anything if someone provoked me. Perhaps I get that from my mother. But now, Joe, speaking as my father’s daughter, I’ll tell you – I’m very impressed by this sketch. Orlando’s smart friends would sneer and call it sentimental, representational and outdated but I like it.’