He shook his head dumbly.
'I think I will hold you to that promise,' she said.
18.
'Another glass of wine—allow me to fill your glass, Jack,' said Monsieur Boucard politely.
'No, sir—thanking you kindly, sir.' Butler stopped his hand just in time from covering his wineglass.
Such vulgar actions were obviously out of place in this company, and he was as desperately keen not to be caught out by them as he was determined not to be trapped again by the deceptively gentle wine of Touraine.
But there too was a dilemma, for this was not just any old wine, but the produce of Le Chais d'Auray itself, as Audley had carefully explained. So it was essential to qualify his refusal in some way.
'Not that it isn't a beautiful wine—' He caught his tongue before he could add 'sir'; there had been one
'sir' too many in the previous sentence as it was, and that was another thing to watch.
In fact, there were altogether too many things to watch—even though the food had driven back his fatigue and put fresh heart into him— when all he wanted to do was to watch the lamplight on Madeleine Boucard's hair.
Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage
But that also was forbidden—and forbidden not only by the 'don't stare' rule Dad had clouted into him long ago, but also by another of Rifleman Callaghan's sovereign remedies which sprang to mind now as gratuitously as when Callaghan had once offered it to the whole barrack room, flushed with beer and conquest:
He had always despised Callaghan, and now he despised himself and felt ashamed to think of the bugger in the same breath as Madeleine Boucard—Callaghan, whose endless seductions of local girls were the shame and the pride of the platoon.
He thrust the coarse memory out of his mind. Jack Butler was not Pat Callaghan, any more than Madeleine Boucard was any hapless local girl—or the Chateau Le Chais d'Auray was a Lancashire Rifles barrack room.
And yet, for all that, he found himself smiling now at Madame Boucard, and seeing in her features the source and origin of Madeleine's beauty.
And she smiled back at him, and the smile caught his breath in his throat.
The mother, the daughter, the wine and the food, the sparkle of flame reflected on glass and silver and polished mahogany—it was all as unreal as the calm which the books said lay in the centre of a hurricane. It was even more impossible than the other things that had happened to him.
He touched the bandage on his head and let his glance touch the girl, and knew that both of them were real. And he knew that by the same token the promise he had made her was real too, even though he had been out of his depth and out of his class and more than half out of his head when he'd made it—real even though she'd probably only been humouring him, as any nice girl in an awkward spot might do: he couldn't blame her for that, with a crazy foreign soldier on her hands, a soldier who'd just come out of the dark from nowhere, and who was going back into the dark to nowhere soon enough—No, not real for her maybe. But real for him, and so binding on him that it would make him indestructible until he'd discharged it—
Suddenly he was aware that she had said something to him, only he'd been too busy dreaming as he looked at her, and had missed the words.
'Are you all right, Jack?' Her eyes were dark with concern. Butler shook off the dream. Ever since the fight in Sermigny everyone had been asking him if he was all right; it was time to set the record straight once and for all.
'Aye—never better.' He grinned at her and nodded. Then he swung towards Audley, switching off the grin as he turned. “Fit for duty.'
Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage
It somehow didn't sound the way he'd intended it to sound—it came out not so much as a statement, but more something halfway between a question and a challenge. And yet when he thought about it in the silence which followed he wondered if he hadn't meant it to be just that: half a question and half a challenge. Because all they'd had since he'd sat down at the table was the small talk of polite conversation between Audley and the Boucards: small talk in which he couldn't have joined even if it hadn't been layered below his concern for his own behaviour, so that he only half-heard it anyway . . . —
The excellence of Maman's supper—Monsieur Boucard's expressive shrug:
—And with the wine of Le Chais to drive away gloom—
—Not the '44?—
Shrug.
—Old Jean-Pierre! As crusty as ever? And Dominique and Marcel? And Dr. de Courcy?—
(Boucard had cut off there suddenly, as though an alarm bell had sounded inside his head, and had flicked the merest suggestion of a covert glance at Hauptmann Grafenberg.) (Hauptmann Grafenberg sat there between Madeleine Boucard and Sergeant Winston, very stiff and formal, swallowing his soup nervously for all the world as though he was as worried about his manners as was Butler himself.)
(Hauptmann Grafenberg hadn't noticed Boucard's quick glance, he had been staring down at his plate; and when he did finally look up into the silence his eyes had the blank, withdrawn expression of a man who could only see the pictures that were running inside his own head; and, for a bet, those would be desolate pictures, thought Butler sympathetically; because if here at this table the young German was no longer altogether an enemy he was certainly very far from being among friends; his former friends were now his enemies, and his former enemies were not his friends—he had no family and no country and no cause; and none of it was his own fault and his own doing, God help him!)
