It was nearly midnight. Duxelles had told him that if he were still in the country after midnight he would be arrested. But he felt too tired to care anymore, his mind lulled into a torpor which was the final antidote to his state of tension.
Most of the people in the hall were asleep, but their breathing was loud and fast and uneasy; and he noticed what he had feared all along — that there were now far less CRS about. Instead, numbers of young men were wandering up and down buying sandwiches and coffee at the brasserie. He closed his eyes again; but no one came near him.
It was after midnight now. He decided he might try to ask the CRS to arrest him; but when he stood up and saw the length of the floor packed with sleeping figures, he felt dangerously conspicuous. They can still get me here, he thought, and he burrowed down again into the wedge of bodies, lying still, heart beating, feeling as he had done as a child when he came out of the freezing night into a large room with people crowded round a fire in one corner. He remembered the terrible urge to get into that crowd, away from the cold darkness; and he crept deeper among the warm breathing bodies.
Then he began to nurse a new fear: that someone would try to talk to him and find out that he was English. Earlier, when he had been drinking with Mallory, it had not seemed to matter. But now, in this sleeping sepulchre, he felt his only salvation was to remain anonymous, buried among the crowds. He lay with his eyes closed, waiting for morning.
He slept badly, waking every few hours, sweating yet cold, his mouth full of fur and his head slamming with a slow deliberate pain.
It was some time in the small hours. He had been dreaming again, fighting to get through the crowds to the smoking Caravelle, weighed down with cardboard boxes and marble clocks, feeling a nudge in his buttocks, somebody shaking him by the arm. He saw two boots with black gaiters in front of his face. A CRS man was standing above him, gun over his shoulder.
‘Papiers!’
Neil sat up and looked round. About a dozen CRS were moving between the rows of refugees, examining papers. He dragged out his passport with the deportation order inside. The CRS man frowned at the document for several seconds, then looked at him: ‘You know you were supposed to be out of the country two hours ago?’
Neil tried to concentrate, to make sense of what was becoming a confused nightmare muddled up with his arrival with Le Hir at the Dorchester. He said, ‘Yes, yes, I know I’m supposed to be out of here. I want to get out of here. I can’t. They blew up the plane.’
‘You’re an English journalist?’ said the CRS man, still frowning.
‘Yes. I’m in danger. They’re going to kill me. Can you arrest me?’
The man shook his head and handed the passport back: ‘You have to stay here. There may be a plane tomorrow. And you’d better be on it!’
Neil lay back and watched the lamps burning above him like red-hot pendulums. The CRS man had moved on to wake someone else. Neil had a fierce thirst; he saw that the bar and brasserie were closed. A couple of men in berets were lounging against the wall near the glass partition of the Garderie d’Enfants. There were now only about a dozen CRS in the hall. He crouched down and closed his eyes again, but he could not sleep.
There was a man’s head lying a few inches from his own. It was bald and creased like putty, the mouth half-open, making no sound. It was like the face of a dead man. He turned the other way and saw a tiny child staring down at him with big round eyes, its lips quivering on the point of tears. It was so young that he could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. It had thick curls, like a print of David Copperfield as a child, and wore a miniature white duffel coat with pegs the size of pretzels.
He looked away and went on trying to sleep. His back ached, and he lay stretching his legs to work out the cramp in his thighs and calves, but each time he moved he only awakened some fresh, overstrained muscle, and the ache began all over again.
Something brushed lightly against his face. It was the hem of the child’s duffel coat. He said in a whisper, not unkindly, ‘Vas-y! Où est ta maman?’
The child goggled at him for a long time, repeating in a murmur, ‘Maman!’ Then slowly, unsteadily, it tottered away among the sleeping bundles, calling ‘Maman!’ — over and over again without anybody taking any notice.
Neil began to crawl away from the putty-faced man, and his fingers touched the edge of a trampled magazine. He opened it up and lay with the pages folded across his face, and at last fell asleep.
He woke suddenly, dazzled. He was looking into the glare of morning sunlight. Somebody had lifted the magazine from his face. He twisted his head round and blinked painfully.
Standing above him, with a heavy black handbag slung over her shoulder, was Anne-Marie.
CHAPTER 7
Anne-Marie said quietly, ‘Get up, Monsieur Ingleby. We’re leaving.’
He lay for a moment staring at her, not quite certain where he was. He had a sore throat and his eyes stung and his hair was itching, rubbed against the grain of his scalp like cat’s fur stroked the wrong way. He sat up, trying to collect his
