Cold Winter in Bordeaux Read Free Page B

none of her former confidence.
    ‘It’s because I can’t sleep,’ she said, extending her cheek to him as she had only recently started to do. ‘There’s no word, I suppose.’
    ‘I’m afraid not.’
    ‘It’s terrible that Léon doesn’t even know that his mother is dead. And Alain? You must be as anxious as I am.’
    ‘I’m anxious, yes, but there’s nothing one can do.’
    And really there was nothing to say. This was the terrible thing, that conversations all over France went round in circles, and said nothing. Of course there were those on the other side, as he had come to think of it, for whom that wasn’t true, those who believed – who still believed – in Vichy and its National Revolution. But that ‘other side’ included Dominique and his friend Maurice who was, as it happened, Miriam’s step-grandson and whom she had described to him at their first meeting as ‘a sweet boy’, which indeed he was. Dominique and he were both sweet boys – Alain had once said, ‘Of course I realise that Dominique is nicer than I am which is why Maman loves him more.’ He had denied only the second part of the sentence, and hadn’t replied that it was Alain’s dark side and capacity for discontent and anger that made him his favourite son. This was anyway something no father should admit to.
    ‘And you, Jean?’ Miriam said.
    ‘And me? Crime goes on. And we have to solve crimes which seem petty, indeed unimportant, set against the criminal times we live in. I’d a murder this morning, a nasty murder, a woman, and nasty because she was humiliated in death’ – these knickers wrenched down to her knees, which he wouldn’t mention – ‘and I’ll work on it, of course I will, but … ’
    ‘But?’
    ‘I think of these Jewish women forced into cattle-trucks.’
    ‘Yes, of course,’ Miriam said, ‘and I feel guilty because I have a bed in Henri’s attic even if I can’t sleep.’
    ‘No,’ Lannes said, ‘it’s ridiculous for you to feel guilty because you haven’t been arrested or deported. We are all entitled to do what we can to survive. Sometimes we are required to do things of which we might in other circumstances have reason to feel ashamed. But the circumstances are as they are. We have to live with them as best we can. At least that’s how it seems to me.’
    ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Miriam said. ‘Nevertheless, that’s how I feel.’
    Lannes took a sip of his coffee which was as bad as Henri had said it would be, and lit a cigarette.
    ‘The murdered woman, Gabrielle Peniel. The concierge called her “Madame”, but there’s apparently no sign of a husband. She gave piano lessons, but only to young girls. I don’t know why I don’t like the sound of that, because it doesn’t seem unreasonable, but I don’t. I suppose the name doesn’t mean anything to you?’
    ‘I knew a Peniel once, or rather knew of him,’ Henri said. ‘He was a friend of my father, an acquaintance anyway; they used to play bridge together at the club. There was some scandal, I can’t remember what. He was a doctor, I think. As I remember, Jewish perhaps. Then I don’t know, he dropped out, was required to resign from the club. Perhaps he had been cheating at cards. It’s a long time ago, a few years after the last war. He might be some connection, perhaps the dead woman’s father. Bordeaux, as we know, is a small town where there are so many connections, our Bordeaux, I mean … ’
    By which Lannes understood the Bordeaux of respectable people, the professional classes and perhaps also the Bordeaux of the wine barons, the Chartrons. That was the milieu into which Henri had been born, one which Lannes himself rarely encountered except in the course of duty.
     

IV
    The wet cold was sharper as Lannes limped across the public garden which was all but deserted. A few off-duty German soldiers were taking photographs of each other by the fountain. They would send them home and their parents or wives