level. That prompted the return to Paris. The house had been rented out for nearly forty years, so it was a real homecoming.
‘And then, just when things got back to where they were before the war, Pascal was taken away
Anselm gleaned this and more from the mumbling old butler who opened the great black front door and took him slowly to a drawing room on the third floor.
Monsieur and Madame Fougeres were subdued elegance itself, sitting apart on either end of a pink chaise longue, their faces darkened by grief. Anselm moved gently over the terrain of sympathy, explaining the predicament faced by the police enquiry. To his surprise, they understood perfectly They made no complaint: no sallies against the Law; no plea for a fairer world. They did not expect the legal system to give them something it was not designed, and could not be designed, to produce: a civic response proportionate to their loss. But while he spoke Anselm observed, painfully the cleft that had opened between mother and father. It was freshly cut.
‘I begged him not to go after that man. Begged him. But he would not listen,’ said Etienne.
Monique Fougeres closed her eyes slowly, her hands cupped upon her lap.
‘I wish he’d left the past alone,’ said Etienne. ‘It’s not a safe place while it touches on the living.’
Madame Fougeres lowered her head, speaking quietly ‘Tell me anything he said, Father, anything at all. I want to imagine his voice.’
‘We only spoke about Schwermann… and someone called Agnes.’
Anselm threw in the last half-truth as the door opened and the butler brought forth tea. Etienne’s facial muscles had seized. The butler poured. Etienne reached for a small cup.
‘Agnes?’ he said, enquiringly
‘Yes. I got the impression she was once known to the family’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
Anselm thought: you’re lying. He said, ‘Apparently she had a child.’
‘Pardon?’ said Etienne, an eyebrow raised, offering milk for the English palate.
‘A child.’
‘I’m sorry, no. As far as I know, Jacques never knew anyone called Agnes.’
Anselm felt the warm trembling of success: we were talking about Pascal, not Jacques…
Monique Fougeres looked at her husband across a void. The butler softly closed the doors and the cleft between mother and father fell open wide.
3
By the great entrance cars chased each other down the Boulevard de Courcelles. The butler stepped outside with Anselm, his eyes towards the ornate gates of Parc Monceau. He said, ‘I knew Agnes Aubret.’
Anselm only just caught the words.
‘I held her child.’
The raucous sound of children spilled out from the park, scattering through the passing cars.
‘Is she alive?’ The butler spoke as though he would die.
‘I’m not sure, but I think so. I’ve met a young woman who knows her.’
The butler pushed his hand deep into his pocket and produced a tattered envelope.
‘Father, please, find out if she’s alive. Give her this. It’s from Jacques. He asked me to get it to her after the war, if he was caught and she survived.’
Anselm took the envelope.
‘Say Mr Snyman has borne it for fifty years.’
The butler stepped back and the door swung shut. Anselm stood still, slightly stunned. He took another walk through the park to calm himself. It was crawling with children on their lunch break, arriving in cohorts from a nearby school. He paused by the gates into Avenue Hoche. A group entered two by two, each child wearing a white sash. And on the sash was the name of the school and a telephone number so that not one of them could be lost.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The stout figure in the witness box was dressed in black and wore round bottle-end glasses. She did not require the interpreter and answered Mr Penshaw’s questions with a disturbingly loud and deep voice.
‘Your name, please, Madame?’ said Mr Penshaw ‘Collette Beaussart.’
‘You were born in Paris on 4th October 1918?’ ‘Yes.’
‘You are now seventy-seven years of age?’ ‘I am.’
‘You are a Knight of the Legion of Honour?’
‘I am.’
‘You were decorated by General de Gaulle at the Invalides in 1946?’
‘I was.’
‘Please confirm the following. You were a journalist and condemned the Nazi leadership prior to the fall of France and afterwards. You were arrested on 18th February 1942. You were deported. You are a survivor of Drancy, Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.’
‘I am.’
Before calling any evidence, Mr Penshaw told the jury he intended to present the first witness, Madame Beaussart, out of chronological order so as to give them a constant reminder of what the case was really about. ‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, in the coming days when you are listening to bare, lifeless facts about train timetables or the method used to fill in a deportation record, remember well what Madame Beaussart will now relate.’
Lucy listened with a sort of proprietorial desperation. She had recognised the name. Collette Beaussart was the political prisoner Agnes had written about. They’d both got typhus and saved one another through talking… about jam. This was the woman who’d claimed Agnes was part of the group to which she belonged, the politicals who were transferred to Ravensbruck. Lucy wanted to stand up, to claim the witness as her friend. But a wall had been built. She would listen, like everyone else; and watch her go, like everyone else.
Madame Beaussart was twenty-four when the gates of Drancy closed behind her. She witnessed the arrival of children taken in the Vel d’Hiv round-up, after separation from their parents. She saw them depart for the East. ‘I saw them come. I saw them go.’
The courtroom was utterly quiet, save for Madame Beaussart and the soft scuffle of pen upon paper. Lucy was on the edge of her seat.
‘They came in boxcars, all of them under thirteen or fourteen years, the youngest just over a year or so. They were filthy their bodies covered with sores. Many had dysentery. Attempts to clean them were futile. Some were seriously ill with diphtheria… scarlet fever. One of them, naked, asked me why her mother had left her behind. I said she’d only gone away for a while…’
Madame Beaussart’s voice, loud, wavering, uncompromising, described the horrors of trying to care for the abandoned.
‘Like the rest of the prisoners, they slept on dirty straw mattresses until their time came to move on. Them their heads were shaved.’
At dawn, Madame Beaussart and other internees brought the children from where they lay to the courtyard. Some didn’t even have shoes. In groups of fifty they were packed on to buses. Each bore the number of a freight carriage. A thousand left at a time for the station at Bourget.
It was Schwermann who, with others, supervised their departure.
‘He paced back and forth, impatiently, lists in hand, his face like stone, barking orders. I can still see the children… and I hear now the engines that took them away.’
Mr Penshaw sat down.
