I turned to Arnaud.
‘Le pilote. Il était là?’ I pointed to the ground beside the plane. ‘Ou plus loin?’
Arnaud shrugged. He didn’t know. There were a lot of German troops hiding in the village from the air attacks. They had seen the plane crash and had come running. He stayed back.
‘Il a été abattu, le pilote. Vous savez?’
‘Yes. He was my brother,’ I said without thinking, then, seeing his uncomprehending face, translated it into French. ‘Il était mon frère.’ It sounded so different in French, so final, somehow, and it proved too much for me. I began to cry and the old man took my hand and led me carefully out of the orchard.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I still think about Xan, all these years later, thirty or so years on, and still curse myself for not having had any film in my camera that day at RAF Cawston. Why does it bother me? I’ve plenty of photographs of Xan — as a boy, as a young man — he’s stopped in time forever. But somehow I feel it would have been good to have snapped him by his plane, his Typhoon that became his coffin. Stupid mistake. Another mistake.
I was thinking about the mistakes we all make — or rather the concept of a ‘mistake’. It’s something that can only be realised in hindsight — big mistake or a small one. It was a mistake to marry him. It was a mistake to go to Brighton on a bank holiday. It was a mistake to write that letter in red ink. It was a mistake to have left home without an umbrella. We don’t sense mistakes coming, there’s this crucial unforeseen factor to them. So I found myself asking the question: what is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn’t a word, in fact, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can’t set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen — there’s nothing we can do about them.
I walked along the beach on my little bay thinking of Xan. He was only twenty-seven. Almost 100,000 RAF airmen died during the Second World War, I read somewhere. The fact that Xan was one unit in that huge number makes it all the more terrible. One butcher’s bill for one family amongst the myriad served up by that conflict.
*
But it was Xan’s death that sent me to Paris. I felt I had to leave London, do something, and after the liberation of Paris in August I sent a teleprint to Cleve saying that we should set up a GPW office in Paris. ‘New York Times and Chicago Tribune have reopened their Paris offices,’ I wrote. ‘We will be left trailing behind.’ A week later the go-ahead came with one caveat: I was to be joined as co-bureau chief by one R. J. Fielding, a seasoned journalist and foreign correspondent who had just been let go by the Washington Post, for some obscure reason, and promptly hired by Cleve. I didn’t mind — I didn’t care — I only had this overwhelming desire to go to France and find out where Xan had died.
R. J. Fielding — ‘Jay’ — was a lean, tall fifty-year-old who had covered the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. He had his grey hair shaved in a severe crew cut and wore rimless spectacles that made him look like a sporty professor. He was a widower and had a wry, unperturbed view of the human predicament. I became very fond of him and I’m sure, following on the death of my father, I saw him as a handy paternal substitute.
Paris in 1944 was a beautiful illusion. If you kept your eyes half open the city seemed unchanged and as perfect as ever, even after four years of war. If you opened your eyes wider the changes forced on it became apparent. Little things: the clatter of wooden-soled shoes, not leather; a very erratic electricity supply; no hot water; a main course of tinned peas and nothing else served without apology at a fancy restaurant. But the mood, despite these privations, was buoyant and intoxicating — liberation was liberating — somehow these minor inconveniences were not going to be allowed to undermine Paris’s spirit of place.
The new GPW office was in the deuxiéme arrondissement — a top-floor flat in an apartment block in the rue Louis-le-Grand, just a couple of blocks away from the Hotel Scribe, the journalistic headquarters for all newspapers, radio stations and press agencies covering the Allies’ push towards the German border. In rue Louis-le-Grand we had converted the sitting room into our office (we had no telephones) with desks for Jay Fielding and myself. One bedroom was for our rather grand secretary, Corisande de Villerville, a pale moon-faced young woman, almost terminally polite, who spoke perfect English and was happy to work all hours for our limited wages. I had a room in the Scribe but I often slept in the apartment’s spare bedroom — something about the crazed bustle of the Scribe put me off — rather too many people playing at being war correspondents, intoxicated and self-important at being in liberated Paris. All communications were at the Scribe and the military censors, also, vetting copy and photographs, and so I was obliged to spend much of the day there. It was a relief to leave and go back to the calm and solitude of the apartment. Jay Fielding had a room at the Lancaster — I suspected he was independently wealthy — and of course I had Charbonneau.
Charbonneau’s small apartment was on boulevard Saint-Germain though he was rarely in it. He gave me a set of keys but I spent only one night there alone as I found the Charbonneau atmosphere — his possessions, his clutter, his smells, his personal spoor, as it were — too unsettling, sans Charbonneau, himself. He was busy travelling through liberated France on Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur business, seeming permanently exhausted, always complaining — but he was glad, nonetheless, to have me in his city and was very keen on me in uniform.
‘You know, American uniforms are so much better than British or French,’ he would say, looking me up and down. ‘More chic. More rugged. Even the shape of the American tin helmet is better. Soigné.’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He was driving me mad with this analysis. Like many French intellectuals of the time Charbonneau had a sophisticated contempt for the USA — crass, vulgar, philistine, no cuisine, money-obsessed, and so on — but was simultaneously passionately Americanophile when it came to cultural matters — films, jazz, literature.
One of his favourite authors, Brandon Ritt, was in Paris working for Time magazine and Charbonneau had contrived to meet him and they had struck up a sort of friendship and he often asked him to dine with us. I’d vaguely heard of Ritt during my New York years. He had written one hugely successful, 600-page novel, The Beautiful Lie, that had been an enormous prewar bestseller and was made into a movie (that flopped), and he had been living off its success now for nearly a decade while working on its long-awaited, much-heralded sequel, The Ugly Truth. He was in his mid-forties and good-looking in a ravaged, dissipated way — he was the heaviest drinker I’d ever met, up until then — and was a strange mixture of occasionally disarming and funny self-deprecation at war with an off-putting, overweening egotism. ‘I may be a shit writer,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I’m richer than any of the good ones.’ Charbonneau was oblivious to this polarity, always ready to exalt Ritt as a genius — something Ritt was happy to hear as often as Charbonneau cared to mention it.
After my trip to Normandy to find Xan’s crash site I tried to concentrate on my work. We were busy, Jay and I: Allied armies were in Italy, and advancing up from the Mediterranean and racing on through France and Belgium on a front that now stretched from the Channel to Switzerland, all readying themselves for the final push into Germany. Apart from GPW business we were still accrediting journalists and photographers from other magazines and newspapers so our days were filled.