Выбрать главу

of the heavy flags, hauled them to an upright position of salute, and the band

began to play Le Chant des Partisans, the old Resistance anthem. Tears began to

roll down the cheeks of the two men, and old Marie-Louise broke down in sobs so

that her flag wavered and all the children, even the teenagers, looked sobered,

even touched, by this evidence of some great, unknowable trial that these old

people had lived through.

As the music faded away, the flags of the three allies – Soviet, British and

American – were marched forward and raised in salute. Then came the surprise, a

theatrical coup engineered by Bruno that he had arranged with the Mayor. This

was a way for the old English enemy, who had fought France for a thousand years

before being her ally for a brief century, to take her place on the day of

victory.

Bruno watched as Monsieur Jackson’s grandson, a lad of thirteen or so, marched

forward from his place in the town band where he played the trumpet, his hand on

a shiny brass bugle that was slung from a red sash around his shoulders. He

reached the memorial, turned to salute the Mayor and, as the silent crowd

exchanged glances at this novel addition to the ceremony, raised the bugle to

his lips. As Bruno heard the first two long and haunting notes of the Last Post,

tears came to his eyes. Through them he could see the shoulders of Monsieur

Jackson shaking and the British flag trembled in his hands. The Mayor wiped away

a tear as the last pure peals of the bugle died away, and the crowd remained

absolutely silent until the boy put his bugle smartly to his side. Then, they

exploded into applause and, as Karim went up and shook the boy’s hand, his Stars

and Stripes flag swirling briefly to tangle with the British and French flags,

Bruno was aware of a sudden flare of camera flashes.

Mon Dieu, thought Bruno. That Last Post worked so well we’ll have to make it

part of the annual ceremony. He looked around at the crowd, beginning to drift

away, and saw that young Philippe Delaron, who usually wrote the sports report

for the Sud-Ouest newspaper, had his notebook out and was talking to Monsieur

Jackson and his grandson. Well, a small notice in the newspaper about a genuine

British ally taking part in the Victory parade could do no harm now that so many

English were buying homes in the Commune. It might even encourage them to

complain less about their various property taxes and the price of water for

their swimming pools. Then he noticed something rather odd. After every previous

parade, whether it was for the eighth of May, for the eleventh of November when

the Great War ended, on the eighteenth of June when de Gaulle launched Free

France, or the fourteenth of July when France celebrated her Revolution,

Jean-Pierre and Bachelot would turn away from each other without so much as a

nod and walk back separately to the Mairie to store the flags they carried. But

this time they were standing still, staring fixedly at one another. Not talking,

but somehow communicating. Amazing what one bugle call can do, thought Bruno.

Maybe if I can get some Americans into the parade next year they might even

start talking, and leave one another’s wives alone. But now it was thirty

minutes after midday and, like every good Frenchman, Bruno’s thoughts turned to

his lunch.

He walked back across the bridge with Marie-Louise, who was still weeping as he

gently took her flag from her. The Mayor, and Monsieur Jackson and his daughter

and grandson were close behind. Karim and his family walked ahead, and

Jean-Pierre and Bachelot, with their almost identical wives, brought up the

rear, marching in grim silence as the town band, without its best trumpeter,

played another song from the war that had the power to melt Bruno: J’attendrai.

It was the song of the women of France in 1940, as they watched their men march

off to a war that turned into six weeks of disaster and five years of prison

camps. ‘… day and night, I shall wait always, for your return.’ The history of

France was measured out in songs of war, he thought, many sad and some heroic,

but each verse heavy with its weight of loss.

The crowd was thinning as they turned off to lunch, most of the mothers and

children going home, but some families making an event of of the day and turning

into Jeannot’s bistro beyond the Mairie, or the pizza house beyond the bridge.

Bruno would normally have gone with some friends to Ivan’s café for his plat du

jour, usually a steak-frites – except for the time when Ivan fell in love with a

Belgian girl staying at a local camp site and, for three glorious and passionate

months until she packed up and went back to Charleroi, steak-frites became

moules-frites. Then there was no plat du jour at all for weeks until Bruno had

taken the grieving Ivan out and got him heroically drunk.

But today was a special day, and so the Mayor had organised a déjeuner d’honneur

for those who had played a part in the parade. Now they climbed the ancient

stairs, bowed in the middle by centuries of feet, to the top floor of the Mairie

which held the council chamber and, on occasions such as this, doubled as the

banquet room. The town’s treasure was a long and ancient table that served

council and banquet alike, and was said to have been made for the grand hall of

the chateau of the Brillamont family itself in those happier days before their

Seigneur kept getting captured by the English. Bruno began counting; twenty

places were laid for lunch. He scanned the room to see who his fellow diners

might be.

There was the Mayor with his wife, and Jean-Pierre and Bachelot with their

wives, who automatically went to opposite ends of the room. For the first time,

Karim and his wife Rashida had been invited, and stood chatting to Montsouris