'I am an English scientist from Oxford,' I explained in German. 'Dr Lamartine came to visit me earlier this month. My name is Mr Elgar.'
The dourness in her face disappeared. Lamartine had been talking about me. 'Yes, you went to watch a game-'
'Cricket,' I said in English.
'Henri very much enjoyed his stay.'
'Can I see him, please?'
Her glance wavered. 'He's not here.'
I said resolutely, 'May I come in?'
She had a moment's hesitation. 'All right.'
The flat was small, my mouth watered at the overpowering smell of simmering onions. The living-room was cramped and untidy, the table littered with newspapers and popular magazines, _Le Figaro, Le Temps, Match _and _Marie-Claire._ There were a good many books about in the bright yellow paper French covers. On the wall was a Picasso reproduction-then uncommon-in the corner a treadle-operated sewing machine, against the window a desk with a large typewriter surrounded by sheets of foolscap. I got the impression of an intelligent, independent woman. Of Lamartine there was no trace, not even a hat.
I explained that I had come from the Institut Duhamel, and had urgent business with Dr Lamartine connected with the scientific work we both followed. I wondered how much she knew of this. I suspected from my assessment of her intellect a lot.
'I haven't seen Henri for over a week, I've no idea where he is, none whatever.'
She looked as though telling the truth, though for all I knew he was listening behind the closed door of the bedroom. 'If he should come here, would you ask him to telephone me urgently?'
I wrote down Professor Piйry's address and number. She agreed readily, though I felt only to be rid of me.
'I shall be returning to England within a week or so.'
'To England? I hope that you'll be able to make it.'
'There are plenty of ports besides Calais,' I told her confidently. 'And the front will have to stabilize some time, won't it?'
She made a face as though tasting something disagreeable.
Discouraged by this call, I took the Mйtro in search of Lamartine's family nest in the avenue Pierre Premier de Serbie. It was a tall grey building with well painted black shutters, all folded back except for three pairs on the top floor. These turned out to be the rooms of his flat. After ringing and knocking without avail, I returned to seek the concierge. Madame Lamartine and the children had left for the Dordogne _а cause de la guerre,_ it appeared.
I had not got far after Florey's penicillin. And the Nazis seemed to be bearing down with their usual panache. Truly, he that the devil drives feels no lead at his heels.
25
'One still must eat,' said Professor Piйry gloomily in English. 'It is necessary.'
He was tall, spare, lined, dyspeptic-looking, in his late fifties, with thick grey hair brilliantined and brushed back, a slim grey moustache and a grey suit with a black band across the lapel for a relative recently dead (from peaceful causes, he explained to me). He was a physician, a specialist on the liver. I later discovered all French physicians to be specialists on the liver, an item of the self which the Frenchman is inclined to confuse with the soul.
Despite his lean and sickly appearance Professor Piйry was a hearty and fastidious eater, complemented by the most enthusiastic and finicky of cooks. We sat in the large downstairs dining-room, which was stuffy and full of Second Empire furniture. It was relieved only by a large garish colour photograph in a gilt frame of their only son Jean-Baptiste in khaki. He was a lieutenant in Intelligence liaising with the British Army, and nobody knew if he was captured, in Ramsgate or dead. We started our _potage aux lйgumes._ A Frenchman who cannot start family dinner with soup imagines his world is coming to an end, which indeed that Monday evening of June it was.
The only British troops left in France were mostly prisoners. About ten miles inland from Dunkirk, the Colme Canal flows parallel to the sea. Nearer the beaches, the Moлres Canal forms an arc, with its base a third canal, the Dunkirk-Furnes. To the east lies the River Ijzer, to the west the River Aa. These waterways made a box from which the Germans were fended while 215,000 of 250,000 British soldiers, and 125,000 of 380,000 French, were ferried away in a week by 850 freakishly variegated ships.
It was a box which could have been smashed, had not Hitler himself halted his panzers on May 23. Perhaps he wanted to spare from utter destruction the British Empire he so admired, and which might still be useful for him against the Americans. Perhaps Hermann Gцring boasted he could do the job less costlily with bombs. The notion would have pleased Hitler, because the German Army may have been the royal infant of Frederick the Great, the German Navy the Imperial child of Kaiser Wilhelm, but the Luftwaffe was the young Hercules of National Socialism. Luckily, the crooked shadow of Nelson was cast long in the Empire's sunset. Dunkirk was a British defeat, but it was a defeat which defied disaster, for our modern politicians eternally to invoke with clarion calls on their tin trumpets. It also occurred during the week when Howard Florey found that penicillin kept alive mice infected with the staphylococcus germ, which defied the sulphonamides.
Paris was full of refugees, everywhere in the streets, pathetic and desperate, sitting on their bundles with nowhere to go. The air was flecked with the soot of burning oil tanks, the fashionable area smoky with incinerated Embassy secrets. The air-raid sirens had sounded during the night, with a more tuneful gallic wail than the lugubrious London ones. And there was still no trace of Lamartine.
During the week I had no reply at his mistress's flat-she may have spied my coming-while Champier at the Institut Duhamel was plainly impatient at my adding to his more alarming problems. He gave me half a dozen addresses of Lamartine's friends in Paris, but these achieved nothing but the absorption of my time. I had no justification to call the police, and I am no policeman myself. I might as well have stayed in Oxford. It was harrowing to feel a failure, particularly one which I knew might be held severely against me for the rest of my career.
Yet those days of Dunkirk were the happiest of my life. My desires, my fantasies with Elizabeth were realized. Compatriots in danger, we huddled like two children in a thunderstorm. The defences of steely gossamer which she had wrapped round herself melted to nothing. In a French professor's house with a battle raging a hundred miles away, she gave herself to me. I use the now archaic expression deliberately, because Elizabeth could never be blown by the storm of her emotions from the course set by the compass of her mind. And there was another factor. She retained the tinselled glitter of her conversation, but her determined frivolity had been shrivelled by the war.
In the morning, she was to drive her little official Austin two hundred miles to Cherbourg, where we were assured by the Embassy that a ship of some sort would be ready to take British personnel across to Southampton. I was going with her. I had no official permission, but official permission for anything was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, as Professor Piйry pointed out, it was necessary to eat.
'I suppose Mussolini's going to declare war any minute now,' I observed, hardly lightening the gloom over the vegetable soup. 'The jackal on the heels of the red-mouthed lion.'
'All is not lost,' Professor Piйry declared morosely. 'The British soldiers which you took off the beach can surely remuster in England? They will return to the fight through Brest, or St Nazaire. Remember, the Germans got even nearer to Paris in 1914. We must hope for another miracle of the Marne.'
'I hear that Madame de Portes has already selected her bedroom at the Chвteau Amboise,' remarked Elizabeth rather acidly, referring to Countess Hйlиne de Portes, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud's mistress.
'The Government sees no necessity to take a holiday among the chateaux of Tours,' she was rebuked tartly by Madame Piйry, dark-haired and sharp-nosed, sitting opposite her husband. 'It is our duty to disbelieve pernicious rumours.'
Elizabeth smiled charmingly. 'Like the passengers aboard the
As two red spots appeared on his wife's cheeks, the professor said even more gloomily, 'It is not very pleasant
