Marking Time (69 page)

The man spun round on his heels, acknowledged her, and took the change from the driver.

‘I’m Polly Cazalet,’ Polly said.

‘Cazalet,’ he repeated, with evident pleasure. He had sparkling black eyes, a charming smile and, surprisingly, a heavy French accent.

‘I come,’ he said, ‘for Madame Cazalet.’

‘Which one?’

He looked confused and said, ‘My English is not good. Do you speak French?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid.’ She remembered Archie. ‘Come with me. I’ll find you someone to talk to.’

She took him up to Archie’s room.

‘Archie. A French person wants a Madam Cazalet. Could you find out what exactly he wants?’ As she said this, she suddenly thought of Uncle Rupert, and her heart dropped like a
stone.

The small man broke into torrents of French, and Archie interrupted him to ask questions, which he answered. Then he drew from his pocket two very small, thin pieces of paper and handed them to
Archie who read them, and then said, ‘Fetch Clary, Poll – now.’

‘I can’t come – my hair’s dripping wet!’

‘Clary, you must. Never mind your hair. Archie wants you.’

‘Oh! All right.’ She lifted her dripping head out of the basin, smoothed some of the water out with her fingers and together they ran to Archie’s room. ‘He’s all
right, isn’t he?’ Clary asked. ‘I mean, nothing awful?’

But not feeling at all sure of this, Polly did not answer. The small man had taken off his greatcoat and was sitting in the visitor’s chair, but he sprang to his feet when they entered the
room.

Archie said, ‘This is Rupert’s daughter. This is Sub-Lieutenant—’

‘O’Neil. Pipette O’Neil. Not real name, you understand – from telephone book I take.’ He smiled at Clary, kissed her hand and said,
‘Mademoiselle
Clarissa. Enchanté de vous voir.’

Clary stood, stock still, staring at him, her eyes, in a face gone very white, had an expression that nobody in the room could bear.

‘I was friend of your father,’ he said.

‘Sit down,’ Archie said gently, patting the bed. ‘It’s a long story,’ and pushing her sleeked-back hair from her face, she did as she was told.

He told her that Lieutenant O’Neil had met her father hiding in an orchard, that a family had kept them for nearly three months in different outbuildings on their farm. O’Neil had
been on leave from the French navy when the Fall of France overtook him, and had been determined not to stay in France but to get to England and to join de Gaulle. But it was too soon for there to
be any established network for escape; he and Rupert had to rely on their own wits, invention and luck. Their plan was to get to the coast, and there try to steal or bribe some fishing boat to take
them across the Channel. The first farmer passed them onto a friend, a man who made cider, but there they got stuck: the cider manufacturer seemed unable or unwilling to find a reliable contact for
them further west. They took turns in the daytime to pick apples for him while the other kept watch for Germans. Pipette tried to persuade the cider maker’s daughter to get them some papers,
but although she agreed to try she was so obviously terrified that they decided it would be foolish to persist. In the end they got her to get prints of snapshots they took of each other, alongside
a lot of other pictures, and she bicycled to the nearest town to get them developed. They borrowed an identity card belonging to the farmer, and Rupert copied the layout and forged papers for them
both that they hoped would pass if they got asked for them. Then he said they hadn’t agreed about the next step. He was in favour of acquiring a couple of bicycles, but Rupert thought they
would be better off on foot which meant that they could abandon the road more easily. They needed a map. Pipette had some money; Rupert had none, and he had given his watch in exchange for civilian
clothes to the first farmer. But now it was winter, not the best time of the year for sleeping rough, but they knew they had already outstayed their welcome at the cider farm. So one morning, armed
with bread, cheese, meat and a bottle of Calvados, they set out. Their plan was to use only small roads or lanes, to walk during the early hours of the morning when it was still dark, to lie up in
the day, and to walk again after four o’clock. And thus they proceeded. There were many, many stories about this time, Archie said. They reached La Fôret – a small place south of
Quimper – last April. Here, he said, they had another argument. Pipette was for them trying to find a boat together; Rupert said they should part and try their luck separately. But he,
Pipette, had been adamant that they should at least try first to see if they could go together. By now their money had long run out and they were reduced to stealing – food, and sometimes
things they could swap for food. They slept in a barn outside La Fôret where a woman found them one morning when she was going to feed the chickens. She was intelligent and quickly understood
they were on the run and she offered to help them. Her fiancé had been shot by Germans when he had tried to stop them taking chickens from their farm and she seemed anxious for any kind of
revenge. They would have to go to Concarneau for any chance of a boat, she said. There were a few fishing boats there but occasionally other boats would put into that port for a day or two and then
leave. She had no idea where they went. She offered to go to Concarneau for them to see what she could find out. After she had gone, they got very anxious, and left the barn in case of betrayal,
but kept it in sight and, sure enough, she came back alone that evening. There was a boat that had arrived that morning – what incredible luck! – and she thought it would be easy to
slip aboard. When they asked her why she thought this, she answered that she herself had done so, had peered down a hatch into the forecastle where two men were snoring, and had then walked along
the deck to the galley where she had taken a knife – and she showed it. It seemed too good to be true, but it
was
true. Their ill luck came from another direction. Their long walk
had made their shoes unwearable. Pipette had come by some boy’s boots that were not too bad, but Michèle had got some shoes for Rupert that proved so large that he could hardly keep
them on his feet. They had to set out for Concarneau in the early afternoon, because Michèle did not know the precise hour that the boat would sail, and they had not gone far before they
heard a lorry approaching which was all too likely to be Germans. To get off the road they had to jump a ditch and then climb a bank to the field. They ran, but when Rupert jumped he landed badly.
The others were ahead and did not realise this until the lorry had almost reached the bit of road they had left. They listened, but it did not stop, and when they emerged, they found Rupert lying
face downwards in the ditch. He had rolled there as the safest cover, as he said he couldn’t walk. Michèle bound up his ankle in one of her stockings soaked in ditch water but although
he could hobble painfully, he could not make any distance.

Here Archie stopped and said, ‘That’s as far as Pipette has got with his story. So from now on, it will have to be me asking questions and translating for you.’

There had been a furious argument. Pipette did not wish to leave Rupert; Rupert said he should go. The woman joined in here. She had not gone to all this trouble, she said, to have it all come
to nothing because of sentiment. At least one of them should get away. She would look after Rupert, and
he
would get away when his ankle was restored. She became quite angry and, in the
end, Pipette gave in. They helped Rupert up to the bank and settled him behind some bushes. Michèle said she would fetch him on her way back.

‘And then,’ Archie said, ‘Clary, he gave Pipette this,’ and he handed her the flimsy piece of paper.

She read it under her breath. ‘Darling Clary, I think of you every day. Love, Dad.’ She read it again to herself and then bent her head over it. Then she looked at the paper again.
‘Oh! my beastly hair’s spoiling the paper!’ Her eyes, that had become like stars, began to stream. ‘The second piece of paper! The second piece of love sent!’

‘The second piece is for Zoë,’ Archie said, not understanding.

‘She means the postcard her mother sent from Cassis with her love on it,’ Polly said.

She was trying to blot the paper with tender, anxious, nail-bitten fingers.

‘It’s in pencil, Clary, it won’t run,’ Archie said.

‘So it is. When did he write it?’

‘In the barn, at La Fôret. He asked me to deliver it if I should get to England. Not to post. To go – to come – myself. That was eight months ago. I do not
know—’

Archie held up his hand, and Pipette fell silent, but a shadow of the old anguish crossed Clary’s face; a momentary darkening of the incandescence in her eyes came – and went. She
read the piece of paper again and when she looked up at Archie he saw that her loving faith had been resolutely resumed.

‘It’s just a question of time,’ she said. ‘That’s all it is. Waiting till he comes back.’

The news about Rupert spread fast. That evening Hugh and Edward carried Archie down for dinner, to drink the champagne that the Brig produced from his cellar. Pipette was to
stay, of
course
, the Duchy said. An atmosphere of determined relief prevailed – if Rupert had been alive eight months ago, then they would find no reason why he might since have met
misfortune. His excellent French, the intelligence of the woman Michèle, his nearness to the coast, the fact that Pipette had made it – all these factors were optimistically discussed,
and more stories of Pipette’s and Rupert’s adventures came to light. Once he felt at ease with the family, Pipette was a wonderful raconteur and sometimes very funny in a manner which
was endearingly like Rupert. On one occasion, he said, when the Germans suddenly turned up at a farm where they were lying up and where there was nowhere safe to hide, Rupert had put Pipette into a
wheelbarrow: he only had time to say ‘You are a complete
idiot
– understand?’, as he began, with a pronounced limp, to wheel him past the German lorries that were
disgorging their occupants. Here Pipette flung his legs over the arm of his chair and lolled in it with a vacant smile and his tongue slipping out of the side of his mouth, then springing to his
feet to become Rupert limping and conducting a monologue of contempt and hatred for this idiot brother, while at the same time managing to imply that he had a screw loose himself. He was taking his
brother to the doctor for his fits, he told the German officer, although a vet would be more suitable since he was hardly more than an animal. The officer had shrugged and turned away; the men had
stared, and one of them had even looked
sorry
for him, Pipette said. The Duchy was crying with laughter and wiping her eyes on her little handkerchief. Pipette said they had to keep it up
for ages, as the road to the farm was long and perfectly straight, and they could not be sure that the farmer would not come out of his house and give the show away. There were many stories, he
ended, turning to Archie, who had interpolated translation where necessary for the non-French speakers of the party.

That evening though, after dinner, they listened to the nine o’clock news and heard that the Japanese had launched a massive surprise attack on the American Fleet in Hawaii at a place
called Pearl Harbor. As this had happened only an hour before, details of damage had not come through but clearly a state of war was imminent, if it did not exist already.

‘How
can
it have happened an hour ago when it’s evening now and they said the attack was seven o’clock in the morning?’

‘It’s the time difference, Poll,’ her father said. ‘What with double summer time and it being the other side of the world, we’re hours and hours ahead. It’s
breakfast time there, and bedtime here – for you.’

Sunday evenings were always early, because the London contingent had to leave so early in the morning, and everybody dispersed soon after that.