‘Yes, he would.’
‘Daddy thinks we ought to fight with the Germans and not against them.’
‘M’m. But Daddy doesn’t seem to be fighting very much with anybody, or against anybody, or at all, as far as I can see. Now, Moira, before you go I have got two things for you, one is a present and the other is a little talk. The talk is very dull, so we’ll get that over first, shall we?’
‘Yes,’ said Moira, apathetically. She lugged the puppy on to the sofa beside her.
‘I want you to know,’ said Linda, ‘and to remember, please, Moira (stop playing with the puppy a minute and listen carefully to what I am saying) that I don’t at all approve of you running away like this, I think it most dreadfully wrong. When you have a country which has given you as much as England has given all of us, you ought to stick to it, and not go wandering off as soon as it looks like being in trouble.’
‘But it’s not my fault,’ said Moira, her forehead puckering. ‘I’m only a child and Pixie is taking me. I have to do what I’m told, don’t I?’
‘Yes, of course, I know that’s true. But you’d much rather stay, wouldn’t you?’ said Linda, hopefully.
‘Oh no, I don’t think so. There might be air-raids.’
At this Linda gave up. Children might or might not enjoy air-raids actually in progress, but a child who was not thrilled by the idea of them was incomprehensible to her, and she could not imagine having conceived such a being. Useless to waste any more time and breath on this unnatural little girl. She sighed and said:
‘Now wait a moment and I’ll get your present.’
She had in her pocket, in a velvet box, a coral hand holding a diamond arrow, which Fabrice had given her, but she could not bear to waste anything so pretty on this besotted little coward. She went to her bedroom and found a sports wristwatch, one of her wedding presents when she had married Tony and which she had never worn, and gave this to Moira, who seemed quite pleased by it, and left the house as politely and unenthusiastically as she had arrived.
Linda rang me up at Shenley and told me about this interview.
‘I’m in such a temper,’ she said, ‘I must talk to somebody. To think I ruined nine months of my life in order to have that. What do your children think about air-raids, Fanny?’
‘I must say they simply long for them, and I am sorry to say they also long for the Germans to arrive. They spend the whole day making booby-traps for them in the orchard.’
‘Well that’s a relief anyhow – I thought perhaps it was the generation. Actually of course, it’s not Moira’s fault, it’s all that bloody Pixie – I can see the form only too clearly, can’t you? Pixie is frightened to death and she has found out that going to America is like the children’s concert, you can only make it if you have a child in tow. So she’s using Moira – well, it does serve one right for doing wrong.’ Linda was evidently very much put out. ‘And I hear Tony is going too, some Parliamentary mission or something. All I can say is what a set.’
All through those terrible months of May, June, and July, Linda waited for a sign from Fabrice, but no sign came. She did not doubt that he was still alive, it was not in Linda’s nature to imagine that anyone might be dead. She knew that thousands of Frenchmen were in German hands, but felt certain that, had Fabrice been taken prisoner (a thing which she did not at all approve of, incidentally, taking the old-fashioned view that, unless in exceptional circumstances, it is a disgrace), he would undoubtedly manage to escape. She would hear from him before long, and, meanwhile, there was nothing to be done, she must simply wait. All the same, as the days went by with no news, and as all the news there was from France was bad, she did become exceedingly restless. She was really more concerned with his attitude than with his safety – his attitude towards events and his attitude towards her. She felt sure that he would never be associated with the armistice, she felt sure that he would want to communicate with her, but she had no proof, and, in moments of great loneliness and depression, she allowed herself to lose faith. She realized how little she really knew of Fabrice, he had seldom talked seriously to her, their relationship having been primarily physical while their conversations and chat had all been based on jokes.
They had laughed and made love and laughed again, and the months had slipped by with no time for anything but laughter and love. Enough to satisfy her, but what about him? Now that life had become so serious, and, for a Frenchman, so tragic, would he not have forgotten that meal of whipped cream as something so utterly unimportant that it might never have existed? She began to think, more and more, to tell herself over and over again, to force herself to realize, that it was probably all finished, that Fabrice might never be anything for her now but a memory.
At the same time the few people she saw never failed when talking, as everybody talked then, about France, to emphasize that the French ‘one knew’, the families who were ‘bien’, were all behaving very badly, convinced Pétainists. Fabrice was not one of them, she thought, she felt, but she wished she knew, she longed for evidence.
In fact, she alternated between hope and despair, but as the months went by without a word, a word that she was sure he could have sent if he had really wanted to, despair began to prevail.
Then, on
