Since the impact of the projectiles, workmen had provisionally closed the hole in the high choir with lengths of wood and dull-green tarpaulin and swept the rubble aside, against the wall of the aisle, perhaps to be able to use a sieve to recover plasterwork or other usable ornaments — for later, when everything was over and we woke up from the impermanence that had all of us in its grip.
Someone had put the saints that had been blown down by the blast and whose stone feet still rested on the plinths, at an angle against the wall, next to the improvised high altar in the transept. The first service that Abbé Foulard had held there had been for the child, five days after her death, on the last day of the summer — the wind turned that morning and all through the Mass made a loose corner of the tarpaulin flap languorously, like a lame green wing. As we sat round the coffin, the planks of which my mother counted, the first rain kept gushing over the floor whenever the wind lifted the tarpaulin.
He was carrying three bags on long straps over his shoulders, and under his arm a small wooden valise, and walked past me up the aisle to the high choir, attracted by the light that slid through the gaps in the roofing of tarpaulin and laths over the walls and fell in shafts onto the cleared rubble and the saints’ statues.
He stood there for a while, laden as he was, looked around, sought a suitable viewpoint for catching that light, then put down the bags on a couple of chairs, just before the high choir, kept an eye on the play of light, bent over one of the bags, opened the wooden valise, and only when he stood up again, with a folding camera in his hand, did he catch sight of me. I was sitting in the shadow. He did not recognize me to begin with, frowned, then smiled: “Mademoiselle Demont… What a pleasant surprise,” and came towards me with his hand outstretched.
After that first meeting and the little incident in the casino at night I wrote him no letters, made no enquires about him, who he was, whether anyone knew him, where he was. If something was to happen the opportunity would present itself. My mother called me hyper-romantic because of that attitude, and perhaps she is right. Love has always made me lame, fatalistic. If it does not have the character equally of fate and of a blessing, it leaves me cold — or rather, it is not love at all.
He took photos for people whom he called with mocking emphasis “my clients”. People associated with the papers across the Channel, who were always short of material, preferably obtained from other sources than the official war photographers. He said that they were crazy about ruins of churches and children—“Works miracles, it seems, a good ruin in the dailies.”
He had to do it secretly and also more or less anonymously; he had no official access but knew the way. He had connections, he said, at the press bureau where he was the errand boy for some big noise or other: “Thanks to Daddy. Friends in high places…” He seemed to regret it. “Not that he’s asked me anything. Wouldn’t want to see his little boy blown to smithereens, somewhere in the mud of Flanders or the…” in irritation his fingers drummed on the camera the rhythm in which he spat out the words, “…bloody fucking Dar-da-nelles…”
When I told him about Amélie, and said he should have come a year earlier, he gave a sarcastic guffaw. “No dead kiddies, Miss. No corpses. Such an inconvenience, to have people actually dying in war… unless of course if they manage to do so gracefully. Saw one of those a couple of weeks ago, near Ypres. Doesn’t happen that often. Such elegance, the fellow looked like bloody Michelangelo’s Adam the way he’d fallen. As naked too, I’m afraid. Another inconvenience. No nudity! If you happen to die in this war, Miss Demont…” He looked straight at me: “Please do keep your frock on…”
“I’ll try my best, monsieur.”
He took a few photos of the interior, the deserted choir with the hole, the temporary high altar in the transept, but he also wanted a couple of me.
“I wouldn’t want to find myself in your newspapers,” I protested, all too coquettishly.
He refused to be discouraged. “It’s for my personal collection…”
I asked him if he kept all his conquests in albums.
“Sure, piles of them.” He winked. “Have stopped counting altogether…”
He took two or three, with the small camera that he would later give me as a present. “You seem quite a pensive person,” he grinned as he pressed the shutter, came closer and made as if to shoot again. “A penny for your thoughts, as we say in England.”
“I was thinking, Mister Herbert, that if you were an onion, I’d like to peel you.”
He paused, waited till I was looking straight into the lens. “Well, I’m relieved you don’t see me as a fruitcake.” He took another photo. “Though if I were an onion, Miss Demont, I’d make you cry.”
We got up. I helped carry a couple of his bags and invited him for coffee. He offered me a ride in the car which he had parked in the church square. While half the village stood gaping he held the door open for me like a good chauffeur, loaded his things and took me home. My mother was glad to see him. She had the coffee table laid outside in the shade of the trees. As she poured I saw how she enjoyed being able to be the worldly-wise bourgeoise again for a moment.
“One advantage of the war, mon cher monsieur,” she chuckled as she offered him the dish of biscuits, “is that I’m no longer afraid of mice. What a triumph!”
My uncle coughed politely and retorted, stirring his cup, that for that reason alone he hoped fervently for a speedy peace. “If it continues for much longer, no elephant will be safe from my sister…”
We laughed. The aunts joined us. After our arrival they had withdrawn into what they called their “boudoir” to be able to dust themselves more liberally than usual. It wasn’t every day, they said, that “un vrai héros” came to visit.
He actually blushed when they said this, and when I recall them now, dressed up and all, with the busy elegance of Chinese earthenware, they move me increasingly often. Whereas I used to make fun of the nest of ribbons and make-up and sentimental magazines that they spun around them, I experienced only much later the doggedness with which they preserved that frilly dream world, their own bastion — with as much assiduousness as a beaver its dam. And I believe also that they offered my uncle a charming kind of consolation: his two child women, about whom everyone speculated whether they took turns in his bed — not least my mother, who just hoped that the uncertainty surrounding that would last for a long time. I think that he saw them as pert exotic birds that from their chosen cage flew circuits through the house and sometimes moved him by landing on his finger in order to please him with their chatter. Now, after all that time, they fill me more and more deeply with melancholy. Sometimes I have to fight back my tears when I remember them as they cut the thick materials that my mother quickly ordered when war broke out, cooing and twittering. Why should the rituals with which they tried to arm themselves against the course of events be any more ridiculous than ours?
“Tell us, Colonel,” they cooed. “How long do you think it will last, the inconvenience?…”
“Impossible to say, mesdames,” he replied. “Everything is stuck, stuck fast. We stare at the military maps and think we have a full overview. But on the ground it is, well…” he shook his head and looked into his coffee.
“Chaos” was perhaps the word that he had wanted to use, or “hell”, or another term that he quickly swallowed, probably because he was thinking of my brother, and my mother’s concern.