"But you implied that." It was like crossing swords.
"And you did not answer my question."
"It was ... an insulting question." And he would win, because he had more at stake. "If you will permit me to say so." But as yet he wasn't sure how he was going to win, that was all.
She took stock of him. The lightweight suit was right (expensive, but not too expensive; a little rumpled, but he was on leave); and the tie was only his old hockey club's, but it looked like something better; and the haircut was safely French military, Fontainebleau '57. And she already knew that he spoke Parisian French, and an Englishman who didn't speak the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe couldn't be all bad, especially an English para.
"You are not married, that is certain," she pronounced that judgement with an air of finality, because that was her technique. And although he didn't know how she had arrived at it he knew instinctively that the answer to his question, how to win? lay within reach.
"No, I'm not married." It was a risk, but not a very great risk
—certainly not a very great risk for a para accustomed to risks. And, finally, instinct also made him want to talk, and for once not lie while talking.
"I was engaged once, unofficially, Madame. But never married— definitely not married, Madame." She didn't dummy5
interrupt. Wise woman!
"She was an American girl. I met her during the Korean War, Madame— while I was in Japan, after I'd been posted out of Korea."
Cultural shock: Japan is beautiful, and the people are kind and ordinary . . . just ordinary people, no better and no worse, in spite of the true stories of Changi and the Siamese railway, and Imphal and Kohima—
"She was very beautiful, Madame. Beautiful like ... the Jewess. And intelligent—like Gillian. . . and slim like her, too.
And as full of life as Lady Alexandra." Perhaps all that was a bit too good to be true, after six years of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles—maybe not so beautiful, and not so intelligent and not so full of life. Maybe nervous at times, and highly-strung, and full of doubt about America, and where it was going, and what it was doing in the name of Liberty and 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' and 'the government of the people, by the people, for the people'. But Julie still—Julie always—
' In War it is as it is in Love. . . Whether she be good or bad, one gives one's best once, to one only—'
True! So Madame Peyrony had nothing to worry about—
though this was not quite yet the moment to tell her so.
"She killed herself." There was no way of making it other than brutaclass="underline" it was brutal. "She told me once, the way to go was to swim out—there was a current on the bay where we dummy5
used to swim, if you went far enough out in the evening it would carry you out to sea, the fishermen said—and swim and swim and swim, until it didn't matter any more, until the sea and the sky joined. And that's what she did. Tout simplement!"
He'd only met Madame Peyrony five minutes before, and never before had he told that to anyone, because there was no one to tell who didn't have someone else to tell it to.
But Madame had no one to tell it to, only the resident ghosts, who couldn't tell it to anyone else, so it was all right to tell it to her.
And, besides, now was the time to tell it anyway, even if she did pass it on. Because now he was breaking faith with Julie—
and because now, in a few days' time anyway, it wouldn't matter either way! Tout simplement!
"Why?"
He hardly heard the question, it was asked so softly. But he had intended to answer it anyway.
"It was a bad time. The bomb . . . MacArthur . . . Senator McCarthy— Senator McCarthy most of all—the senate sub-committee investigation. . . Julie's step-father worked for the government, and he'd subscribed to all sorts of causes, from the Spanish Civil War onwards . . . And she adored him—he was a great chap, a nice man—"
Julie's Harry, who knew all about England, as no other American he had ever met knew about the country, from his dummy5
service there in the war— even knew about the railways there, the very lines over which his own father had driven his engine— the old London North-Eastern—
" You've got a great chance in England, boy, to make real Socialism work— to show the Russians how to do it, so they can get it right. . . they're trying to, and they'll get the hang of it if you can show them the way—"
He was relieved Harry hadn't seen Suez. But he was even more glad he'd missed the East German riots and Poland, and above all the Hungarian massacres; they would have done the job just as surely as McCarthy had done, perhaps even more cruelly—
"He committed suicide. He shot himself with this German pistol he brought back from the war. He wrote a letter—"
Dearest Julie—
"—he wrote her a letter, explaining why."
She waited until she was sure he wasn't going on. He wanted her to ask the question.
"And because of that—because of her step-father—?"
"Also because of me. She wrote me a letter also—"
My own David—
"Because of you?"
"She'd decided I ought to be a teacher. But I was in the Army then . . . she got it all mixed up—she thought, if they found out about her, and then about Harry . . . with the way Senator dummy5
McCarthy was hunting down people with the wrong connections. . . she had this crazy idea that they'd throw me out of the Army, and then they wouldn't let me teach after that. She said I'd be tagged as a 'subversive'—it's funny, really."
"Funny?"
"Harry wouldn't have made that mistake. He would have known that it wouldn't have made any difference to my becoming a teacher. They don't work that way in England, he would have known. They couldn't have cared less—
particularly in the sort of school I wanted to teach in ... not even if I'd been Stalin's stepson-in-law—or Krushchev's . . .
and McCarthy never carried any weight in England—Harry would have known all that. But Julie didn't, that's all."
She stared at him. "And that is ... funny?" She was questioning the word, not the fact.
"Ironic, is what I mean, Madame."
"Ah!" she nodded. " 'A funny sort of cobber' means 'a strange one', not a humorist. And 'funny business' is not comedy, but the exact opposite—I remember." Her wrinkled eyelids closed momentarily.
'Cobber' was purest Australian; and, more than that, she pronounced the word with an authentic Aussie twang. And yet there was no Aussie in her 'funny business', it was drawled in what might almost have been American.
She was staring at him again. "And the army too? They would dummy5
not have cared?"
Roche shrugged. "I was only a National Service officer at the time—a conscript. I was due to be demobbed—demobilised—
pretty soon, anyway. It might have worried them a bit, in some ways. But it wouldn't have worried me, anyway." She frowned suddenly. "That surprises you, Madame?"
"You did not teach ... in this school of yours?" She nodded, still frowning. "You remained in the army . . . Yes, that surprises me."
Roche relaxed. They had prepared him for this one long ago, if his connection with Julie had ever surfaced. It was another in the long succession of ironies that he had never needed their carefully rehearsed explanation until now, for a purpose and an interrogation very different from the one they had envisaged.
"In what way, Madame?" But it would do, just the same, their explanation.