THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

We sat without speaking for some moments. I could not console him, because consolation is a charity which can outrun the power of words.

'Yes, my son died in action,' Professor Piйry repeated wearily. 'Had that assassin been denounced, do you know what would have happened? All his male relatives-including his brothers-in-law and all his cousins over eighteen- would have been shot. Yes, shot, all of them. Their wives would all have been sent to concentration camps. Their children all taken to a prison-school. This Teutonic thoroughness was made completely clear to us by a proclamation from General Oberg when he took up his job. The General claimed his measures were necessary for the calm and security of the Parisiens. And they say the Nazis had no sense of humour,' he ended bitterly. 'That letter of my son's will be passed down in my family, it shall never be destroyed.'

I was relieved that a knock at the dining-room door broke the tension. The maid appeared, remembering me now and smiling. She left on the table a brass tray with two minute glasses and a bottle of reddish apйritif, which I noticed from its encrusted neck had been in use for some time.

'We are still obliged to be frugal,' Professor Piйry explained, pouring out two drinks. 'But things are naturally better than during the occupation, when we had alternate _fours avec_ and _fours sans_-of wine, you know.'

I asked something which had often been in my mind the past five years. 'What happened in Paris in the days immediately after we left for Tours?'

'Oh, the Germans showed their noses early on June 14. They came along the rue de Flandre from the porte de la Villette, in the north-east. There was nothing in their way except unarmed policemen to direct their traffic. I saw a column of them about six-thirty, driving towards Neuilly from the Invalides. Soon we had posters plastered everywhere, a kindly young fellow in field-grey without his helmet, holding up three French kids who were eating his bread-and-butter ration. _Abandonnйes, faites confiance au soldat allemand!_ Goebbels at his most expert. Goebbels graced us with a visit in July. Hitler appeared at once, of course. Things resumed an appearance of normal. The tide turned, everyone came back from the roads to see if their belongings had been stolen, a consideration hardly in their minds before departure, I assure you. I could never have left Paris, of course, because of my patients. The cinemas and cafйs reopened. So did the _maisons closes._ I remember we had Faust at the Opйra, and the _Folies Bergиre_ started again. We even had _Sainte Jeanne _by your Bernard Shaw that winter. There was a swastika flying from the Eiffel Tower and the Germans took over the Rue de Rivoli completely, from one end to the other. At noon every day they paraded up and down the Champs-Elysйes with a brass band.'

The Professor took a tiny sip of his apйritif. 'We had to settle down to some sort of life. The Germans requisitioned all our cars, we had wooden soles to our shoes, we had nothing to smoke and we went about on bicycles. Everybody kept rabbits, and they dug up the Jardin du Luxembourg to grow vegetables. There was a curfew, and any retardataires who missed the last Mйtro had to spend the night squatting in a police station.'

'Didn't you manage to get any encouragement from the outside world?'

'Listening to foreign broadcasts meant the concentration camp, but of course most of us risked it. The papers all presented the war after 1941 as a struggle between the European Forces and the Bolsheviks. That was the Pйtain line. Laval had the effrontery to make a speech here about the immense German sacrifices to this end on our own behalf. They founded _La Gerbe_-'The Sheaf'-which was supposed to be a balanced intellectual weekly, _pour les hommes de bon volontй de tous les partis._ But it was all Nazi hypocrisy, its disappearance was a minor joy of our Liberation.'

'What about de Gaulle?'

'They called him a tool of the Jews. Whom they collected in the _Vйlodrome d'Hiver-_the indoor cycle race- track-and deported to the concentration camps.'

The door opened. Madame Piйry appeared, dressed in black. She started crying as she greeted me, through association with her son. 'He was not alone,' she said. 'Now that everything has come out, the Germans shot 29,660 French hostages.'

The news of death never seems to come singly, or perhaps the first blow makes us more sensitive to the others. I reached London the week before Christmas, where I had booked a room at a small hotel in Cavendish Square. Among my waiting letters was a telegram sent the day before from Budleigh Salterton, saying that my mother was 'seriously ill'. By the time I arrived there, she was dead. She had just turned sixty and had suffered a stroke. 'She was so loyal, so devoted and so hardworking,' the old lady kept repeating in a heartbroken voice. 'One simply doesn't find servants like that any more.' My mother left me Ј200, the savings of a lifetime. It was useful to buy a second-hand prewar car. My only emotion was a ghost of the liberation I felt so guiltily on the death of Rosie.

I had a lonely Christmas, but I hate obligatory jollity. In the New Year I won my expected job at Arundel College, Senior Lecturer with the old professor only three years to go. I should be 37 when I succeeded to the chair, exactly the age when Florey had burst into Oxford. I had decided that, like Florey, I should set my staff searching out unfinished lines of research. But for the cure of cancers, not infections. That was the next exploration for man's restive mind.

I never had so much confidence in my science and myself as that New Year of 1946. Perhaps the Millennium being enacted by Mr Attlee's government had something to do with it. But cancer is still uncured. And I ended up as a professor as futile and frustrated as most of the others. My divorce was more permanently rewarding. I consulted a jolly, chubby, bearded solicitor just released from commanding a submarine, who peppered his advice with expressions about surfacing, crash diving and depth charging. 'There are three times the petitions as before the war,' he said with satisfaction. 'Couples who married in the Forces discover a terrible shock, living together for longer than a fortnight's leave at a time. Without the duty-free cigarettes and drinks, too. Got another target in your periscope?'

The following week I opened my Times to find that Sir Edward Tiplady was dead. I telephoned Archie, who seemed insistent that I join Elizabeth and himself at the funeral.

It was a dull and drizzling afternoon at a crematorium on the edge of a vast estate of little red-brick council houses at Shepherd's Bush. I went by Underground in my new utility suit. I arrived as Lady Tip in a mink coat was stepping out of Sir Edward's angular 1935 Rolls Royce. She had spent most of the war living in Claridge's Hotel, with several exiled kings and Alexander Korda.

Archie was looking gaunter and gloomier than ever, Elizabeth lovelier. She wore a smart black costume, the straight skirt reaching half way down calves in black nylon stockings, her dark hair in a small round black hat with a deep frill of stiff black muslin. The Packers were there, but said nothing about Clare, though I saw how they were bursting to. I barely remembered what my first wife looked like, until I found among my mother's effects a small photograph album annotated in her copperplate hand with the dates of unmemorable outings. It struck me how happy I looked, but perhaps I was obliging the camera

Archie offered me a lift in their small car, elaborately excusing his use of official petrol by some imminent meeting in the Ministry. 'I happened to come across one of your reports from Germany on industrial intelligence. Not at all badly done,' he observed to me, I thought most condescendingly. 'Cripps, Dalton and Bevin are very interested in that particular exercise, I hope you realize. I had a special meeting with them at the Board of Trade last August.'

'How are you enjoying revolutionizing the country?'

'I'd be enjoying it much more if my ulcer didn't play me up. It's all tremendously hard work. But tremendously exhilarating. This time we're setting methodically about building a just and equal society in Britain, instead of shouting vaguely about 'A Country Fit For Heroes To Live In', like Lloyd George.'

'You don't seem to have got very far yet,' I told him. There was continued rationing of everything from bacon and butter to soap and shoes, a scarcity of everything else, and nightly gloom from street lights left unlit to save electricity.

'Of course we have. We've already the date for nationalizing the coal mines,' he told me, sounding offended.

He was dropping Elizabeth in Belgrave Square. 'Come in and have a cup of tea,' she invited me. Archie did not seem to object. 'Don't forget we're dining with Mummy at Claridge's,' she instructed him, as he drove off.

The flat was undamaged, and much as I remembered it from the beginning of the war. 'Do you know who poor daddy called in when he had his heart attack?' Elizabeth asked me. She entered the kitchen at the back, still with her frilled hat on. 'Lord Horder. He wouldn't have anyone else.'

'Your father was immeasurably good to me.'