“How long have you been married?”
“A little over a year. Eugène thought that in marriage, after a while, people changed. He thought they grew less fond of one another, and that there was no way of avoiding it. When he saw you and your wife together, the way you are with each other, it made him more hopeful.”
“Where did you meet?” Harold said, to change the subject. He was perfectly willing to discuss most subjects but not this, because of a superstitious fear that his words would come back to him under ironical circumstances.
“When the Germans came,” she said, “my father was in the South, and we were separated from him for some time. We were here with my grandmother. But as soon as we were able, we joined my father in Aix-en-Provence, and it was there that I met Eugène. He was different from the boys I knew. I thought he was very handsome and intelligent, and I enjoyed talking to him. At that time he was thinking of taking holy orders. I felt I could say anything to him—that he was like my brother.”
“That’s what he seems like to me,” Harold said. “Like a wonderful older brother, though actually he is younger than I am.”
“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“One brother,” he said. “When we were growing up, we couldn’t be left together in the back seat of the car, because we always ended up fighting. But now we get along all right.”
“It never occurred to me that Eugène would want me to love him,” she said. “When he asked me to marry him, I was surprised. I was not sure I would marry. I don’t know why, exactly. It just didn’t seem like something that would happen to me.… As a child I always played by myself.”
“So did I,” Harold said.
“I lived in a world of my own imagination.… When I grew older I began to notice the people around me. I saw that there were two kinds—the bright and the stupid—and I decided that I would choose the bright ones for my friends. Later on, I was disappointed in them. Clever people are not always kind. Sometimes they are quite cruel. And the stupid ones very often are kind.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I had to choose my friends all over again.… I have a sister. The two small children we brought with us are hers. She is two years younger than I, and for a long time I was hardly aware of her. One day she asked me who is my best friend, and I named some girl, and she began to cry. She said: ‘You are my best friend.’ I felt very bad. After that we became very close to each other.”
Mme Viénot addressed a question to her, and Alix turned her head to answer. If I only had a tape recording of the way she says “father,” “brother,” and “other,” Harold thought, smiling to himself. When she turned back to him, he said: “It must have been very difficult—the Occupation, I mean.”
“We lived on turnips for weeks at a time. I cannot endure the sight of one now.”
She saw that her grandmother was watching them and said in French: “I have been telling Harold how we lived on turnips during the Occupation.” It was the first time she had used his Christian name, and he was pleased.
Mme Bonenfant had an interesting observation to make: perpetual hunger makes the middle-aged and the elderly grow thinner, as one would expect, but the young become quite plump.
Was that why she thought she would never marry, he wondered.
“The greatest hardship was not being allowed to write letters,” Alix said.
“The Germans didn’t allow it?”
“Only postcards. Printed postcards with blanks that you filled in. Five or six sentences. You could say that so-and-so had died, or was sick. That kind of thing. We used to make up names of people that didn’t exist, and we managed to convey all sorts of information that the Germans didn’t recognize, just by filling in the blanks.”
“Did my niece tell you that during the Occupation she and my sister hid a girl in their apartment in Paris?” Mme Viénot said. “The Gestapo was looking for her.”
“She was a school friend,” Alix explained. “I knew she was in the Résistance, and one day she telephoned me and asked if she could spend the night with me. I told her that it wasn’t convenient—that I had asked another girl to stay with me that night. And after she had hung up, I realized what she was trying to tell me.”
“How did you manage to reach her again?”
“I sent word, through a little boy in the house where she lived. She came the next night, and stayed four months with us.”
“I was in and out of the apartment all the time,” Mme Viénot said, “and never suspected anything. I saw the girl occasionally and thought she had come to see Alix.”
“We didn’t dare tell anyone,” Alix said, “for her sake.”
“After the war was over, my sister told me what had been going on right under my nose,” Mme Viénot said. “But it was very dangerous for them, you know. It might have cost them their lives.”
Mme Cestre raised her hearing aid to her ear, and Alix leaned toward her mother and explained what they were talking about.
“She was rather imprudent,” Mme Cestre said mildly.
“She went out at night sometimes,” Alix said. “And she told several people where she was hiding. She enjoyed the danger of their knowing.”
“Were many people you know involved in the Résistance?” Harold asked.
“In almost every French family something like that was going on,” Mme Viénot said.
A silence fell over the room. When the conversation was resumed, Harold said: “There is something I have been wanting to ask you: when people do something kind, what do you say to them?”
“ ‘Merci,’ ” Alix said.
“I know, but I don’t mean that. I mean when you are really grateful.”
“ ‘Merci beaucoup.’ Or ‘Merci bien.’ ”
“But if it is something really kind, and you want them to know that you—”
“It is the same.”
“There are no other words?”
“No.”
“In English there are different ways of saying that you are deeply grateful.”
“In French we use the same words.”
“How do people know, then, that you appreciate what they have done for you?”
“By the way you say it—by your expression, the intonation of your voice.”
“But that makes it so much more difficult!” he exclaimed.
“It is a question of sincerity,” she said, smiling at him as if she had just offered him the passkey to all those gates he kept trying to see over.
Chapter 10
ON MONDAY MORNING the Bentley appeared in front of the château for the last time. The chauffeur carried the luggage out, and then a huge bouquet of delphiniums wrapped in damp newspaper, which he placed on the floor of the back seat. Mme Viénot, Mme Bonenfant, Harold, Barbara, and Alix accompanied M. and Mme Carrère out to the car. Harold watched carefully while Mme Carrère was thanking Mme Viénot for the flowers and the quart of country cream she held in her hand. They did not embrace each other, but then Mme Carrère was not given to effusiveness. The fact that she didn’t speak of seeing Mme Viénot again in Paris might mean merely that it wasn’t necessary to speak of it. One thing he felt sure of—there was not one stalk of delphinium left in the garden.
The necessary handshaking was accomplished, and Mme Carrère got into the back seat of the car. M. Carrère put his hand in his pocket and drew out his card, which he handed Harold. It was a business card, but on the back he had written the address and telephone number of the apartment in the rue du faubourg St. Honoré. As Harold tucked the card in his wallet, he felt stripped and exposed, a small boy in the presence of his benign, all-knowing father. If they found themselves in any kind of difficulty, M. Carrère said, they were to feel free to call on him for help. What he seemed to be saying (so kind was the expression in the expert old clown’s eyes, so comprehending and tolerant his smile) was that human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all you need in order to read somebody else’s mind is the willingness to read your own. With his legend intact and his lilac-colored shawl around his shoulders, he leaned forward one last time and waved, through the car window.