"After such a tragedy . . . such a mockery. . . you must have been a very young man—" the hint of a sad smile crossed her mouth "—you are not an old man even now ... I would have expected bitterness, if not anger, Captain."
Roche constructed his own frown carefully, as Raymond Galles had advised him to do. "Against whom Madame?"
"Against those in power. Against the . . . the brass-hats? The hats of brass, is it?"
Again the strange—funny-strange—pronunciation: it might dummy5
almost be broad Yorkshire this time.
"The Establishment?"
"The Establishment? That is new to me ... But—the Establishment— yes, that has the right sound and the right meaning," she nodded, mimicking him. "The . . .
Establishment—yes!"
She echoed him again exactly. And that, of course, was what she was doing, thought Roche, the mists clearing from his mind. Once upon a time many Allied escapers had passed through this house, and some of them must have stayed for days, until the coast was clear, since it was an emergency hide-out for the times when the normal route was compromised. Australians, Americans, Yorkshiremen—they had all come and gone, leaving nothing behind them but memories and the echoes of their dialects in the vocabulary of this elderly French lady, who had an ear for the music of language!
"Oh . . . the I see—" He felt himself warming to her, with her so beautifully and carefully enunciated mongrel English and all the courageous stories behind it which would never be told, of bomber crews from Lancasters and Flying Fortresses, from Bradford and Brisbane and Boise, Idaho. But there was a cold layer beneath the warm one: if she could hear and remember so much, could she hear and distinguish the untruth also— Raymond Galles had warned him that her ear was razor sharp? "Yes—angry, certainly Madame."
That was the very truth, he was safe there: first the dummy5
paralysing shock of grief and despair . . . then— then anger and bitterness both, which he had been too cowardly to turn into outright rebellion, which had been in a fair way to turn into the lethargic boredom of serving out his time as a messenger-boy in Japan, hauling brief-cases of decoded intercepts from American to British headquarters in a humiliating one-way traffic—
How he had hated the Americans then . . . hated the Americans, and hated the British by simple extension, the servile allies of the hated Americans, who had killed his Julie
— his American— and now received the scraps from their master's table, carried in the brief-case chained to his wrist, the very ball-and-chain of servitude!
—until that evening, that never-to-be-forgotten evening, along the very beach from which Julie had swum out. . .
along which they had walked so many times, to which he had returned. . . all you have to do is swim out until the current takes you, and cherishes you—
"—anger, certainly, Madame." Pain. "Anger—yes."
Nod. "Yet you remained in the Army?"
Smile, bitterly but knowingly. "But anger against whom?"
Against whom?
He had felt, even beyond anger and bitterness and grief—he had felt impotence!
dummy5
He could have ripped open the brief-case, and scattered its contents along the way, or made a bonfire of it. But they had copies of it, and other officers to carry it—the uselessness of the gesture, as well as his own cowardice, had baffled him, even though the thought of going back to teach in England without Julie had filled him with despair.
And then, out of the soft blue of the Japanese evening, had come the offer of revenge, unexpected and unlocked for—
revenge, yet at the same time a keeping-faith with Julie and Harry, and a keeping-faith with his own idealism—
Or had it really been idealism?
It was hard to think back now, to remember what he had really thought— how he had really thought, and why he had thought as he had done: it was like trying to capture the thoughts of a stranger, to re-capture his own thoughts from time past.
Anger and bitterness and grief and impotence and . . .
And boredom?
Perhaps if the war had flared up again ... but it was clear at British headquarters, even to the errand-boys, that the Americans and the Chinese had both had enough of Korea—
Perhaps if Julie . . . but without Julie the idea of going back to do what they had planned to do together, always together
—
dummy5
Instead, there had been nothing but anger and bitterness and grief and impotence, and boredom and cowardice and irresolution and uncertainty, and maybe plain foolishness too, and maybe also idealism—but at the time he had only recognised the first four of them, and the last one . . . But they had been enough, all of them together, to open the wound through which the parasite had entered his blood-stream, to take him over— Christ! Was that how it had really been?
"Anger against whom, Captain?" Madame Peyrony prompted him gently, watching him with an intentness entirely devoid of gentleness.
The contrast between the voice and the expression was disconcerting, even almost frightening: that intense stare, half-veiled but not concealed by the wrinkled eyelids, was better suited to Genghis Khan's eyes, or Clinton's, than to those of an old lady in her boudoir—better suited to a small room without windows than to a boudoir.
Anger against whom? He must lie well now, and better than well, his own instinct more than Raymond Galles shouted at him: the past he must remember must be the version which the Comrades had so carefully created for him, not the newer and heretical interpretation which had directed his actions over the past few days.
He sighed. "I had a friend once, Madame ... a brother officer in Tokyo ... he was knocked over and killed by a police car."
dummy5
Pause. "The police car was badly driven." Pause again. "But it was pursuing a bank robber nevertheless."
She continued to stare at him, giving nothing away.
"I suppose I was angry with the police driver . . . even though the road was slippery at the time, I was angry. But not for long." Final pause, longer than the others. "Without the Communists, Madame ... or without the Russians, if you prefer . . . Joseph McCarthy would have been just another stupid politician."
There had been a lot more, to be used as required, according to the depth of the interrogation. The six-year-old lines came back to Roche with mocking clarity, even to the small amendments he had decided to make on his own account (no patriotic young Englishman would have referred to 'Soviet expansionism' in a month of Sundays when he meant simply
'Russian aggression'...).
But this was not the time and place, and not the interrogator, for a lot more. The lie they had given him would stick here, or not at all, Roche judged.
Madame Peyrony subsided slowly into her chair, becoming somehow smaller and more ancient as she did so. "I will have a little wine now, Captain, if you please."
Perhaps it was not the lie which had stuck, but the truth itself. Because somewhere along the years, and particularly since the bloodbath in Hungary last year, he had realised that the lie was the truth indeed—that the false reasons they had dummy5
given him to give to the British ought always to have been his own true reasons for fighting them—that he had deluded himself, and been deluded; and that, worse still, that Julie and Harry had in some sense been deluded too, and had played an innocent part in deluding him.
But he had to pour the wine.
"And for yourself, Captain."
His hand shook. How incredibly sure the Comrades must have been of him, to feed him the truth to use, confident that he would accept it as untruth!