I asked, ‘Wait a mo’ – did you see that?’
‘Naw,’ Les said. ‘I’m off duty.’
‘It was a bloody Hun, sitting there.’
‘I’ve seen him before,’ Jimmy told us. ‘There must be a story behind that.’
‘Didn’t either of you ask?’
‘None of our business, old boy.’ He sniffed. He made it plain that it was none of mine either.
It turned out that Les was looking for a cafe where we could eat inside, and as far from the front window as possible. He found a place at the end of a terrace of more or less intact houses. Inside it, the tables were clad in red and white checked oilcloth, and the room was warm. It was dominated by a montage of three large national flags on one wall: American, British and French. The tricolore looked a bit tired and faded, but the other Allied colours were fresh and clean. From the nail marks in the wall behind you could see that the display had recently displaced a predecessor.
Les got us a table by the far wall, near the kitchen door. He sat with his back to the wall, whilst England and I sat at the ends of the small table on either side of him. They asked me to negotiate the eatings, and Les passed me a roll of dollars which made the fat Frog who owned the place’s eyes water. I gave him five eventually. Les said, ‘Jimmy wants to know what we’re going to have.’
‘Rabbit. Stewed with carrots and onions. It’s almost impossible to eat French without onions.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never been here.’
‘I read it in a book. It must be true.’
‘What else?’
‘Blackcurrant puddings. The blackcurrants will be last year’s leavings: pickled.’
‘Didn’t you ask him for a bottle?’
‘I didn’t pay him for the wine. I said that we’d taste it first.’
‘Oh, my lovely boy,’ Les told us. ‘I’m going to like travelling with you.’
I asked Les about sitting so far from the front of the building.
‘The Frogs aren’t as friendly as they’re cracked up to be. Some of the Maquis commandos want us out of their country even before all of the Jerries are gone. There’ve been drive-by shoot-ups at cafes with Allied soldiers in – just to encourage us, if you like. Then there are numerous Frog Pétainists who feel betrayed, and do the same. This is far from a liberated country, Charlie, despite what the nobs say. I like to sit where I can see what’s what.’
‘Wild Bill Hickok used to do that. I saw it in a film. The only time he didn’t sit with his back to the wall someone shot him.’
‘He was bloody right the first time then, wasn’t he?’
The Major regretfully licked his dessert spoon into submission, put it down, and informed us, ‘Nobody called him Wild Bill Hickok when he was alive; that was the invention of a journalist. His peers called him Duck Bill Hickok – because he had an enormous hooter. Not many people know that.’
‘They say that guys with big noses have big pricks. I wonder if women know that?’ That was Les. I couldn’t resist the opening he’d left me; perhaps I wasn’t supposed to.
‘Don’t worry. You’ve a nice, neat, wee nose, Les.’
‘Our boy is getting bold, isn’t he?’ he told our friend Jimmy.
It was that sort of evening.
The heater must have run out sometime in the night. When I awoke my joints were stiff to breaking point, and my blankets hard with frost.
We joined an all-ranks queue for breakfast, which was bangers and mash – although the bangers were only soya links. The tea was good: brown as a Jamaican, and stiff with condensed milk. We visited the Beauvais petrol dump on the way out. Les did the deal with the Redcap guarding the stuff, and I gave him back his roll of dollars to finish it. We toured away with a full tank, two full jerrycans in the boot, and one lashed to each running board. That would turn us into a fireball if anyone shot at us, or get us to the border if need be, Les told us. I asked the silly one.
‘Which border?’
‘Germany, if necessary.’
‘And you’re ditching me in Paris?’
‘We’ll see. The Major’s decided to go wherever you want to go; so long as you’re travelling in the same direction as us.’
I looked away from him, and out of the window. The sun was shining, and Les had got quite a lick on, so the French countryside was dashing past. So England had become the Major again; there was a behavioural code at work here, which I couldn’t read. When I turned to look over my shoulder at the Major he was smiling a secret smile, and scribbling magic formulae into his small notebook again. He looked like a bloody alchemist. He was also whistling a tune under his breath so that you could only just hear it: I’ll swear it was ‘The Galloping Major’.
Six
Why did they call Paris an open city? Because it wasn’t; not if you were looking for somewhere to kip for the night it wasn’t: it was as closed up tight as a nun’s harmonium. Everyone seemed to have a girl and somewhere to stay, except us. England had a prewar Michelin street map. When he started to unfold it and fill the back of the car Les said, ‘Put the bloody thing away, Major. You can’t read it, and thanks to the war half the places marked on it aren’t there any more.’
I asked him, ‘Are you blaming that on my pals too, or is it down to Jerry?’ I noticed I had started referring to the Germans as Jerry, the way the brown jobs did. The odd thing was that there was a sort of grudging respect in the way that they said it. Anyway,
