Alligator Playground

Battlefields

ATANGLE OF MOTORWAYS around Mulhouse gave way to a winding and narrow ascent. Passing the foresters’ house into a zone of alpine restfulness Hilda recalled that Victor had always gone home further south, through Belfort. He quoted each time from military history to the effect that ‘le trou de Belfort’ was a natural invasion highway into France, and therefore the easiest way for a motorist to go, as if as soon as they were through the ‘trou’ he could smell the Channel.

Victor had died two years ago, however, and these days she found a different way back from their cottage in the Ticino. To keep so rigorously to the habit of one route had proved he was growing old, which she supposed he was at seventy. She was that age now but felt twenty years younger, and plotting alternative routes on the map was a pleasure rather than a problem. With Victor as the driver she’d had little to say in the matter, nor felt the need to.

On looking at the boxy dark green estate car a month after the funeral, she couldn’t imagine driving such distances in Europe, but there were two good reasons why she had to become confident at the wheel. The car had been so much an extension of Victor that it was a way of keeping him close, and the challenge of moving it around London had to be taken up since he was no longer here to insist on driving her. Cold needletips of rain had beat against her glasses as she looked at the large vehicle, door and ignition keys pressed so hard into her palm that she was sure a mark would be left there on loosening her hand. Which would be something else to remember him by, though the hurt soon went.

A green expanse of mountain pastures opened out at the summit of the Ballon d’Alsace, a great statue of Joan of Arc looking across folds of wooded land. The twenty kilometre ascent had been well worth it. Victor used to laugh at her navigation when she got them lost, but these days she almost never went wrong, stopping if in doubt and finding her way with confidence.

A cup of coffee at the hotel, and another ten kilometres of hairpin road, put her on the main track again. She coasted freely till held up by traffic in Épinal. Such congestion tired her, so she stopped in a layby a few miles beyond to eat a lunch of Swiss cheese, bread and an orange.

She decided to bypass a junction of seven roads in the middle of Neufchâteau, going more carefully for fear of missing the fork. Even so, she overshot to a village beyond, and opened the atlas to fix her position. Backing into a lane to turn seemed no problem, but maybe she was more tired than she thought, though it was only three o’clock. Or perhaps she became absent-minded in the hurry to reverse.

A crunch and tinkle of glass from the back of the long car told her that something had gone wrong. Getting out to look, a short post with a bulb on top had been obscured by tall grass, and she had knocked it halfway down, as well as denting the tailgate.

Vile words came, but what the hell? She got into the car and drove away to find the detour. Victor would never have done such a thing, and if he had would have waited an hour to give a full report to the local policeman.

Back at the correct byroad she felt young and irresponsible, heading across country from the scene of her misdemeanour and hoping no one in the village had noted her number. She disliked having any blemish on the car, but the insurance should take care of that. The notion of being a renegade on the run through France excited her. Maybe a gendarme would ask for her passport at a roadblock, or she would be caught at Calais and put into prison. What an extra bonus to her trip!

Following the green banks of the sluggish Meuse brought her to Verdun. The Hotel Bellvue outside the ramparts looked a good old fashioned house, so she carefully parked the car in a space beyond the pavement and went in to ask for a room.

Nine times out of ten, Victor had said more than once, people fall very quickly when they start to go down in life, lose their footing more disastrously than on going up. He also said that youth is but a short time of ten years, whereas age lasts at least thirty, if you were lucky. She recalled how they used to laugh at ‘The Thoughts of Chairman Victor’.

His wisdom was true enough, she told herself, viewing the battlefields and monuments around Verdun next morning. At the sight of so much white stippling on the landscape — hectare after hectare of an unparalleled hecatomb — she felt weary and had to sit down. Gravel underfoot between reafforested trees, she walked to the remains of a concrete fortification, appalled by a unique visitation of death that could not be fought off.

The site had to be seen, but she didn’t know what had drawn her to such a small area in which hundreds of thousands of men had been killed and maimed. Sculpture to the glory of a great nation was the theme, but the butchery of husbands and sons and fathers seemed futile and meaningless so long after the event. Yet she felt closer to France and the French, just as when Victor had taken her to the Somme’s innumerable cemeteries she had been drawn closer to her own country.

The battle had taken place before she was born, but the tombs and sarcophagi made it seem as if it had happened only yesterday. She was saddened to think that all the little agonies of ordinary life were as nothing compared to this awful internecine slaughter.

In spite of it, she ate her bread-and-ham lunch with more appetite than usual, and the coffee from her flask tasted so good that she lit a cigarette, mesmerised by the endlessly wooded view that tried to cover so much of the past.

Naked and exhausted, she got into bed, only waking in time for a bath before dinner. The freedom to stop two nights had been granted by the death of Victor, a thought she didn’t like but had to face and, having digested it, saw no reason not to approve. The only time she felt a whiff of loneliness was when sitting in a hotel dining room and having no one to talk to, but a guidebook to glance at soon brought her back to being a woman traveller who had no problems — except that the picture of her scarred motorcar nagged from time to time.

Two French couples were talking quietly, which again convinced her what a pleasure it was to eat on her own. She loved the food and cleanliness at French hotels, choosing always the cheapest ‘menu’, which was usually sufficient. If there were dishes she hadn’t eaten before, so much the better.

While pouring her first glass of red from the carafe she noticed a couple sitting in the far corner, and thought they might be German or Dutch, till the man said: ‘Spread the napkin properly over your knees, then you won’t make such a terrible mess.’

His tone was acerbic and startling, not brutal to begin with but loud enough to carry. She could only see his back, but his elderly wife placed in her direction had a leathery rather dead face, and straggly grey hair as if she hadn’t been able to comb it properly. A white blouse did not help her pallor when she grimaced and tried to do as her husband commanded.

Steam from the tureen as soup was ladled into her plate made her salivate, hungry after her light lunch. She broke a roll and set it on the cloth. ‘Hold your knife and fork properly, can’t you?’ the man called. ‘Or do you want me to do it for you?’

A squeak of response merged with a placating smile at such hard sarcasm. Hilda thought she would throw her scalding soup over any man who talked to her like that. She supposed them to be forty years married, and he had got into the way of such behaviour through impatience and contempt. The woman smiled again, but as if suffering under his regime. No business of mine, Hilda told herself, trying not to eat more of the bread than she should, though the man’s uncouthness disturbed her. All through the meal his talk was painful to hear, even the French couples glancing in their direction from time to time.

No marriage, she supposed, was free of memories for couples to punish each other with. Victor used to say, when she had caught him out, that she should ignore it, and come to bed each night as if for the first time. He would do the same with her, then there need be no upset about infidelity from either of them.

The man reached over to his wife so aggressively that Hilda imagined he was going to hit her. If he does I’ll tell him to behave, in no uncertain terms. ‘Keep your plate close,’ he ranted, ‘then you won’t spill so much. And get on with it. You’re eating too slowly.’

She shuddered while reading about that sanitised battlefield again in her guidebook. For months the town of Verdun had been bombarded, and she wondered what it was like to have an artillery shell burst in your apartment. All your precious living space of books, pictures, pottery and sentimental gew-gaws would be devastated. The most telling vision was of a bunch of flowers spattered over shredded curtains.

‘Can’t you do anything right?’ he demanded when the woman dropped her fork. On telling the waitress to bring another he spoke in a quiet and polite tone obviously never used with his wife.

Listening to such a boor ruined Hilda’s meal. Men like him turned good wine sour. Who did he think he was, making her ashamed of being English? He didn’t, she laughed, though there was no let up to his high-pitched nag. The disturbance made her eat more slowly so as to avoid indigestion, which meant they left first — but not without a finale from him.

‘Now you’ve dropped your napkin.’ He bullied her into picking it up, making her even more beaten and pathetic on going out.

I must get up at the crack of dawn, Hilda decided, so that I don’t have to listen to that again. Her day touring the battlefields had been so interesting, and now this! The meal had been good, after all, and she would complete it by going to the bar for a Cointreau. Victor had hated sitting at bars, but she liked their air of glamour, and what remarks might come from the barman. In any case Cointreau hadn’t agreed with Victor’s dyspepsia.

A cigarette helped to make the sweet and peppery liqueur delicious. The barman had nothing to say, and then was busy elsewhere, so she sat in peace and silence. She and Victor as a couple had grown to treat each other as if each was a different country bound together by viable diplomacy, who might even quarrel over the most basic issues but never declare war. As such they had survived together.

Her finger end burned on putting the cigarette stub in the ashtray when she saw the man come in who had mercilessly harangued his wife throughout dinner. The counter wasn’t much more than a couple of metres long so of course he had to take the stool next to hers, then asked for a double brandy and began to fill a large curved pipe from a tin of English tobacco.

She wanted to lambast him but first needed to get a better look at him. He was in his late sixties, she supposed, seeing heavy lines of worry on his brow. His face was broad, and a moustache bristled when he brought the glass to his lips with slightly shaking hands. The odour of his pipe reminded her of Victor, which she found to her surprise made her think even less of the man.

He wore old fashioned clothes, a pale green shirt and camel coloured waistcoat, a cravat, hacking jacket, brown twill trousers and highly polished brogues, as if when he was twenty someone had left him in their will half a dozen of long-wearing everything on the assumption that his weight and character would never change. Since it hadn’t, he must have been a man of habit from early on.

She had the dreadful feeling that he wanted to talk. Her Cointreau was only half sipped, but she wouldn’t be driven away. ‘Thank God she got herself into bed,’ he said. ‘Now I can have a quiet smoke and a drink.’

‘She certainly has a great deal to put up with.’.

‘And well you might say so,’ he responded grimly.

She wanted to keep quiet but couldn’t help herself. ‘I would have left you years ago.’

‘Would you?’

She wasn’t deceived by the puzzled tone he put on, certainly not enough to damp her rage at having strayed into conversation. ‘I’ve never heard such dreadful bullying.’

He smiled, seeming almost human, even more so when it was followed by an expression close to pain. ‘I love her, you see…’

‘Well, if you call that love.’

‘I don’t expect you to understand, but I’m trying to get her back into shape.’

Hilda turned away with contempt, yet not liking herself for letting it control her. ‘That’s certainly what it sounded like.’ Such people were unregenerate, so there was no use getting upset. At least he stopped talking, though she feared he was only making up his mind what to say next.

‘You think I’m a villain, and maybe I shouldn’t tell you, but she had a stroke three months ago, and this is the only way to do it. She’s actually improved enormously over the past week. I suppose it does sound dreadfully callous, though.’

Tears on his cheeks seemed as if they had come out of the skin itself. He took a neatly folded handkerchief from his lapel pocket to wipe them. ‘She loved France, and asked me to bring her. She’s done much better on our first week of touring. I’m taking her around the battlefields tomorrow. She used to teach history.’

Hilda’s face burned with contrition. His pain passed to her, and she touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I thought…’

‘Yes, I know.’ He stopped, then: ‘We’ve been happy all our lives. Still are, and she knows what’s going on. I’m determined to get her as near back to normal as I can. I don’t want to lose her, you see.’

Since it was obvious he wanted to go on talking she asked for another Cointreau. ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

The see-saw of euphoria and misery joined them for a few moments. Hope keeps tragedy and loss at bay, she thought, and he was well-qualified to fight. His nightly brandy calmed him. ‘We’re battling every inch of the way.’

By eight o’clock she was paying her bill. The man upstairs had been drilling his wife into her clothes when she passed their door. An impulse to knock and wish them well was quashed, whether from kindness or cowardice she couldn’t decide, thinking them best left alone in their struggle.

She had planned to walk around the town of Verdun but went onto the motorway for Paris. Le Havre was the place to make for, to take a boat from there. Navigation would be simple, no reversing necessary. She would also avoid those other battlefields seen with Victor, memories unwelcome in her sombre mood.

The landscape of France dispelled such feelings, and she pondered on the joys of freedom as the car ran smoothly along the highway, thinking to spend a couple of days in Normandy before taking the boat home.