Perfectly Ordinary People(62)

Marie commented that someone looked like they needed a doctor and Pierre asked if such a thing was possible.

Marie said of course it was, and she’d be back with one as soon as she could. As she was leaving she told us that he was a friend, but we shouldn’t tell him where we came from.

I asked her why we couldn’t tell him, and she said, ‘Because you should never put a friend in that kind of predicament.’

The doctor, when he arrived, was a pleasant young man with bottle-bottom glasses. He spoke to Pierre discreetly, and then asked us for some privacy so that he could examine him. Marie led me around the back of the farmhouse to her vegetable patch, where we laid the baby in the undergrowth while we picked runner beans for lunch.

While we were doing that, she explained what she’d meant about the French police being bastards, even in Zone Libre. She said Pétain’s France wasn’t as free as the name implied. There were German spies everywhere, she said, and plenty of people helping them out. I must have looked crestfallen, because she added, by way of reassurance, that from the look of Pierre, it was almost certainly less dangerous than where we’d come from. She asked me if we were Jewish, and when I said no, we weren’t, she told me that was lucky for us, because they’d starting registering and rounding up Jews, even in the Free Zone.

I asked her if they were persecuting other groups as well, and she said that yes, they were. Members of the resistance, communists, trade unionists, gypsies . . . anyone the Germans didn’t like. She told me with disgust that Zone Libre was getting more like Germany every day and eventually it would be indistinguishable.

She surprised me then by asking me if I knew why Pierre was bleeding. ‘That was a lot of blood,’ she said.

Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I told her straight up the Germans had raped him, and that didn’t seem to surprise her at all. ‘They’re animals,’ she said. ‘Animals!’

The doctor told Pierre not to eat any solids for a few days, and to move as little as possible. Marie seemed to have no problem with us staying on in her barn – she liked the company, she said. But the not-eating thing was torture for Pierre.

He’d been skinny before the war and seemed to have lost weight during the short time he was being held by the Germans too. Our rations in the carpenter’s shed had been minimal, to say the least, so he hadn’t exactly built up any reserves there either.

But the doctor said he needed to rest what Pierre started to jokingly refer to as his ‘bum hole’. A few days without food, and as little movement as possible, and it would probably heal just fine, he said.

In the end we stayed there for five nights, I think, and all Pierre consumed was milk. Personally, I ate as well as I had in years. Marie had chickens and rabbits, she had beans and potatoes, and she even baked us some bread.

She told me where I could walk and where it was best to avoid, so I’d leave the baby with Pierre and head off for my laps around the fields in the sunshine. After our week in the dark, that felt heavenly.

On the fourth day, I think it was, Pierre ate two eggs and a potato as a sort of test, and we waited nervously to see if he was better. Sorry if this sounds vulgar, but we became very relaxed about discussing Pierre’s ‘bum hole’. We had to. It came up rather a lot.

The next morning, he announced that though going to the toilet had been painful, there had been, for the first time, no blood. This was the sign the doctor had told him to wait for and that meant it was time to move on.

Had you decided where you were heading? Were you going to the Atlantic coast, after all?

No, we decided to head for Cannes in the end. Pierre had a cousin there, and Marie seemed to think that Cannes was reasonably safe. The Italians had only gone as far as Menton by then, so she said there were a few towns they’d have to go through before they reached Cannes. We knew so little ourselves that we were happy to take her advice.

And, I’m just wondering, was she living on that farm by herself?

Yes. It was a big place, too. She had huge fields of wheat behind her house. She’d left her kids with her sister somewhere, I think. She said she wanted them as far away from the Germans as possible. I remember that because I asked her why she’d come back – why she hadn’t stayed with her kids – and she’d said it was because of the animals. She had dogs and cats and horses and goats and she couldn’t just leave them to die.

But no sign of a husband?

No. No, she never mentioned her husband. Not once.

Did you ask where he was?

No! Most of the time a missing husband meant a dead husband or a husband in a prison camp. So no, you learned pretty quickly not to ask women where their husbands were.

Of course. I understand. So what happened next?

Well, the next morning, as Pierre still seemed fine, Marie wrote us a list of detailed directions and sent us on our way.

She wouldn’t accept any money from us, but after much debate with Pierre, I hid a hundred francs in her coffee jar. Pierre was quite concerned that we’d run out of money and starve to death, so a hundred francs was the compromise we agreed on. It wasn’t much.

Weren’t you as worried about money as Pierre?

No, I was. We had just over two thousand francs left. I think – maybe less. Oh, I’m not sure anymore, but it was the equivalent of about a month’s salary, anyway, so it wasn’t a huge amount. I knew it wasn’t going to last for ever, but I suppose I’ve always believed in a sort of what-goes-around-comes-around thing. These days people would call it karma, you know? And after Marie having been so good to us, after she’d taken so many risks to look after us, I just couldn’t bear the idea of appearing ungrateful.